Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

‘Where are her clothes?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Keep walking,’ said Cooper, without looking round.

Fry wanted to question the little man, but she followed Cooper as he veered off and took a rabbit track across the heather. The rough stems of the plants grabbed at her ankles. At one spot there was an area a few square yards wide which had been burned off, leaving black, brittle stalks that crumbled underfoot and a layer of ash that was gradually being washed into the ground by the rain.

‘Hold on, Ben.’

He stopped impatiently. ‘He’s just one of the local weirdos. You can spot them a mile off. Let the uniforms deal with him.’

‘I can’t believe people like that. They’re sick.’

‘Right. But he’s probably already in a Care in the Community scheme, or something.’

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘Care in the Community? Well, it’s a bit difficult to explain — ’

‘No — that.’

Fry was pointing at a fungus clinging to the bark of an oak tree. It was like nothing she had ever seen before. It was pale and bulbous, like a human organ that had been bleached or left out in the rain. She put her hand to it gingerly. It was firm to the touch at first, but gave under the pressure of her fingers like a fresh bread roll. White, not wholemeal. The fungus was dry on top, but cold and clammy underneath, and it moved slightly under her fingers.

Then she noticed that there were lots more fungi on the ground, all different kinds. Some were dark and coiled like dog turds, but black and ragged at the edges, as if they had been half eaten. Other fungi were like stones, some like cups, some like human ears.

Fry stared at them with revulsion. How anybody could visit this moor for pleasure she could not imagine. There was nothing to recommend it to anyone, except to the weirdos and the ghouls attracted by death and the bizarre.

Ben Cooper set off again and managed to get ahead of Fry to reach the edge of the plateau, where it dropped away into the valley. He stood on the precipice and felt the wind catch his breath and freeze the lobes of his ears. He felt as though he could step off the edge and let the wind carry him away across the patchwork of fields and dry-stone walls.

From his vantage point, Cooper could see the people on the moor winding their way in ones and twos through the heather and bracken. Yet the place still had a feeling of solitude and isolation, somewhere you could just be yourself, free of expectations. He understood what Jenny Weston had seen in the moor.

‘It’s so cold and bleak,’ said Fry, catching up with him. ‘What’s the name of that pub in Ringham where we can get lunch?’

‘The Druid,’ he said, brought suddenly to earth.

‘God, those Victorians. Romantic minds, they had. Anything more than a few years old had to be connected with Ancient Britons and Druids, didn’t it? In actual fact, most of these rocks were just dropped here by glaciers or something, and got worn into these shapes by the appalling weather you get up here.’

‘Well, I suppose so.’

‘You sound disappointed. A bit of a Victorian yourself, aren’t you, Ben? A romantic at heart?’

‘We can get down to the village by cutting through South Quarry.’

‘Fine.’

After Fry had turned away to follow the path, Cooper shook his head in despair. It was such a small mistake for a woman like Jenny Weston to have made. Yet it had been the biggest mistake of her life. Why had she chosen to come up here at the beginning of November? It was one of the quietest times of the year, when even retired couples were putting away their walking boots, turning up the central heating and pulling the sofa closer to the TV to watch their holiday videos. And for some reason, Jenny had let the wrong person get close to her. There were so many mistakes. It seemed as though she had been heading directly on a course towards her own destruction.

A few minutes later, Cooper slid down the last few feet of the slope into South Quarry, as Fry struggled behind him.

‘Hello. What’s this?’ he said.

Unlike Top Quarry, these abandoned workings had been left with a level, sandy bottom, clear of debris. The entrance was open to the road, and sometimes cars parked in the first part of the quarry. The face wasn’t so high there, and it was possible to climb a narrow track up and get straight on to the moor. Visitors normally stopped short of taking their cars on to the steep roadway that dropped into the lower part of the quarry, afraid that they might never get back up again, or that their wheels might slip off the edge.

But on the rock-spattered floor in the deepest part of the quarry stood a van. Whoever had driven it here had managed to find a flat area where the wagons had once been loaded with stone. The angle of the quarry walls hid the spot completely from the road fifty yards away. Unless you were looking, you would never find it.

‘It’s an old VW Transporter,’ said Cooper. ‘Long wheelbase version. And over twenty years old, if you can believe the registration plates. But look at the state of the tyres. This thing hasn’t moved in a good while.’

Fry pulled out her personal radio. ‘I’ll call in and get them to do a check on that number. It’s probably stolen.’

Cooper walked round the van carefully. As well as the back doors, there was a side loading door on the nearside. But the windows at the back had been painted over, in the way that market traders did to screen their goods from prying eyes. Cooper reached the driver’s door and peered into the cab. The seats were worn and split, and a large cobweb glistened across the corner between the sidelight and the dashboard. An old curtain hung behind the seats, concealing the interior.

‘They’re going to call back in a minute,’ said Fry. ‘Is it unlocked?’

‘I haven’t tried yet.’

Cooper took a tissue from his pocket and tried the handle of the driver’s door. The metal was tarnished and beginning to rust through the chrome. The button depressed, but there was no click of the catch, and the door didn’t move. He edged round the bonnet. The manufacturer’s VW badge had gone from the grille. No surprise there — at one time, the badges had been prized by local kids as trophies, as the initials were said to stand for their favourite catch phrase ‘Very Wicked’.

The passenger door was also locked. So was the side door. And so were the rear doors.

‘If this van was abandoned here by a car thief, it was a very security-conscious thief,’ he said.

‘Perhaps it’s not stolen at all, then. Maybe it was somebody who couldn’t be bothered taking it to the scrapyard.’

Fry’s radio crackled. While she listened, Cooper crouched to look underneath the van, noting a missing section of exhaust pipe and a dark patch on the ground that might have been oil. A cover was missing from one of the rear lights, and there were holes in the wheel arches caused by serious corrosion.

‘It’s registered to a Mr Calvin Lawrence of Stockport,’ said Fry. ‘But there’s no report of it being stolen.’

‘Well, it hasn’t been on the road legally since October 1999,’ said Cooper, peering at the licence disc just visible behind the windscreen. ‘Not that it means anything necessarily.’ Discs were colour coded so that the month of expiry could be detected from a distance. But this one was so faded its original colour could have been any selection from the rainbow.

‘So the owner has abandoned it, then. This Calvin Lawrence presumably. Just another MoT failure, that’s all. We’ll get someone to remove it and report the owner for illegal tipping.’

‘It’s odd, though. Why come all the way from Stockport to leave it here? There must be any number of out-of-the-way places on the way between here and Stockport that you could abandon an old van, if you wanted to.’