Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

Cooper watched the young man carefully. It was difficult to tell whether his manner was an act or not. But he had just succeeded in attracting serious attention to himself. Because it was certainly his name that had recently been scratched into the ground in the middle of the Nine Virgins.

Cooper sighed. The smell of chicken curry was making him hungry. But he was going to miss his lunch at the pub in Ringham, after all.

Diane Fry called in to report their whereabouts to the incident room, but finished the call with a thoughtful look.

‘What is it?’ asked Cooper.

‘The team in Totley have been following up on Jenny Weston’s visitors. Do you remember a girl with dreadlocks being mentioned?’

‘Sure. The neighbours seem to have noticed every move she made.’

‘They’re pretty sure now that this girl was more than just a visitor. It seems she was actually living with Jenny Weston at her house for a while.’

‘Have they identified her?’

‘She was introduced to one of Jenny’s work colleagues as Ros Daniels. She was aged about 20, and believed to be from Cheshire.’

‘They’ll be keen to question her, then. She has to know what was going on in Jenny’s life better than anyone does.’

‘Oh, they would question her, if they could find her,’ said Fry. ‘But it seems Ros Daniels is missing.’

Back on the moor, an excuse had finally been found to arrest the little man in the green bubble jacket. He had been discovered lying naked in the heather in the middle of one of the smaller stone circles. He had been dreaming blissfully, apparently oblivious to anyone passing, just as he was unaware of his skin turning blue and his genitals shrivelling to the size of a button mushroom. The police had made him get dressed and charged him with indecent exposure. And PC Wragg had smiled.

In South Quarry later that afternoon, Cal and Stride were sitting on a convenient rock alongside their van. They had two mugs of tea and were rolling tobacco into Rizla papers with practised fingers. Stride’s movements were languid as he stooped over the task, occasionally pushing the hair back from his eyes. He wore what looked like an old greatcoat from an Army surplus store and a pair of combat trousers, with his tin of tobacco balanced on one knee. He was entirely concentrated on rolling his cigarette, his delicate fingers prodding the tobacco neatly into place. Occasionally, he smiled to himself, as if at some private joke.

It seemed to Ben Cooper that the one called Cal was altogether more watchful. Though he didn’t look up, he was certainly aware that he was being observed. His shoulders were tense, and he frowned as he licked the edge of his Rizla before pushing his tobacco tin away in one of the pockets of a camouflage jacket. A stud in his nose glittered briefly as he turned to watch Stride light up. The skin of Cal’s scalp was visible through his dark stubble, hardly any longer than the stubble on his cheeks.

‘What do you make of them?’ asked DCI Tailby.

‘Mostly harmless,’ said DI Hitchens.

Cooper laughed, and Tailby looked at him sharply. ‘Was that a joke?’

‘ The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , sir,’ explained Cooper. ‘It’s how the guide describes the planet Earth. Just those two words: “mostly harmless”.’

The DCI looked at him for a moment. His grey wings of hair lifted in the wind that buffeted the quarry edge, then settled back on his temples like roosting doves.

‘Douglas Adams,’ said DI Hitchens helpfully. ‘I liked Marvin the Paranoid Android, myself.’ The DCI had turned his stare on Hitchens instead. ‘Not that I meant it as a joke, sir. I meant these two — I think they’re mostly harmless. No police records.’

Cal and Stride sat without speaking, smoking their cigarettes, staring into space, apparently at peace with the world. Cooper recalled that there had been cigarette ends in the inventory of items recovered by the scenes of crime team near Jenny Weston’s body. But they had been Marlboro, not handmade roll-ups.

Above the VW van, a birch had rooted itself on a precarious ledge in the quarry side. Its lower branches were hung with small metal objects, bits of tinfoil and sections of baked bean cans tinkling and clanging in the wind.

‘And what’s all that lot supposed to be?’ asked Tailby. ‘Some new way of doing the washing-up?’

‘Tree art,’ said Hitchens. ‘Bevington has written some poems that are stuck to the chimes. They’re meant to create an atmosphere of peace and harmony, he says. Do you want to go and have a closer look?’

‘No, thanks. Too much harmony is bad for me.’

Tailby glared down at the van. To Cooper, it seemed that it was taking a great effort for Cal not to look up and stare back.

‘Can we positively eliminate them as suspects?’ asked Tailby.

‘They have no apparent connection with the victim, and there’s no motive that we know of. There is no witness evidence to tie them in any closer to the scene than this.’

‘What about their shoes?’

‘I got a quick look,’ said Cooper. ‘Calvin Lawrence is wearing trainers, and Bevington has a pair of Doc Martens. Neither would match the partial print we found.’

‘They may have a pair of boots in the van. I know they don’t look as though they have much, but even these two could own more than one pair of shoes.’

‘We’d need a search warrant to look in the van. We don’t have reasonable suspicion.’

Stride lay back on the rock, letting his coat fall open, resting his head back so that he was gazing at the sky. His hands were resting on his face near his eyes, but the fingers were still. The smoke from his roll-up drifted straight up for a few feet, then was caught in the wind and dispersed. Whatever he could see up there in the sky caused him to smile with some deep, inner pleasure. The smile was so sudden that it made the detectives look up as well. But there was nothing to be seen except clouds scudding high across the moor. The clouds were growing darker. There could be rain soon.

‘If you think those wind chimes are strange, Cooper has something else to show us,’ said Hitchens.

They walked round the quarry edge to a sheltered spot enclosed by two rocks. In a shallow basin in one of the rocks were what appeared at first to be a series of giant candles. They were made of wax, a foot tall, and they had been carefully sculpted, each into the same distinctive shape, with a long straight shaft, faintly ribbed with veins, and a swollen, rounded head like a cowl, with a small hole in the very tip. They were all sorts of colours — swirling blues and reds, butter yellow, subtle tints of brown and green, and a pure white one, with delicate streaks of gold in the veins of the shaft. They stood like soldiers on parade, pointing permanently skywards.

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Tailby.

‘They represent the phallus,’ said Hitchens.

‘I can see exactly what they represent,’ said Tailby. ‘And phallus wasn’t the word that sprang to mind.’

‘I think it probably takes quite some doing to get the shape just right, like that. I was thinking of a nomination for the Turner Prize.’

‘And who is the Leonardo da Vinci we have to thank for this lot?’

‘The one called Cal. He’s quite proud of them. He calls this place the phallus farm.’

‘They’re obscene.’

‘I doubt they’re committing an offence,’ said Cooper.

‘I don’t want to look at them. Let’s go back.’

They walked back round the quarry to the path. Cooper noticed a group of women appear on the far side of the quarry. They were wearing cagoules and leggings, bright and chatty. They looked down at Cal and Stride for a while, then walked past the birch tree and studied the wind chimes.