Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

Fry ground to a halt. Cooper realized that he was smiling at her. The expression on his face must look ridiculous and derisive, but it was a natural response that had sprung from deep inside him at seeing Fry suddenly passionate in her defence of someone. He nodded at her, though the gesture barely seemed adequate.

She backed off, baffled. She picked up a waste-paper bin from the floor and put it on the empty desk, then began clearing out drawers. Cooper watched her hurl the leftover possessions of the previous occupant into the bin without looking at them.

‘OK, Diane,’ he said. ‘You were telling me about this little girl who was killed. What happened to her?’

Fry pulled out a 1999 calendar with pictures of naked women draped over bright red sports cars. With a grimace, she tore it in half and thrust it into the bin.

‘Nobody really knows,’ she said. ‘Nobody knows what awful things might have happened to her before she died.’

Owen Fox felt his fingers start to tingle. He thought about finding his gloves in his jacket pocket to protect himself from the cold. But he knew it wasn’t just the cold that he could feel.

There were things that had passed through his hands during the past few years that didn’t bear to be thought about. Most days, he could clear the memories from his head. He got out on the tops of the hills and let the wind blow them out of the corners of his mind. But somehow his hands still felt the memories of their own accord; his fingers still touched the blood and the slack limbs and the cold cheeks. It was as if he was forever holding a dead body, as if he carried that child with him every day, and always would.

Could the hands remember better than the brain? Sometimes it took only the touch of some object, normally familiar — the feel of the sleeve of a well-worn leather jacket, the bulge of fruit in a plastic carrier bag, a sudden spurt of warm vegetable soup from a bowl. And a thing so mundane could bring back an instant recollection that would set him trembling and unable to breathe, his throat twisted and knotted with anguish.

Sometimes a smell or a sound could do the same thing — just the familiar chemical reek of petrol on the forecourt of a filling station, or the tick of a cooling engine. But it was the feel of things that he couldn’t escape; his sense of touch tormented him until he wanted to cut off his hands.

Owen followed the deep crease that ran across his palm from just below the index finger to the outer edge of his hand. He was fascinated by the way the line broke and diverged, forked into two and was crossed by other lines. In palmistry, it was supposed to be the life line, wasn’t it? Or was that the other line, the one that ran across the base of his thumb? It didn’t matter, anyway — both lines ended in a web of tiny creases like a smudge of gauze; there was no sudden stop, just a fading out in a tangle of vagueness and uncertainties.

He forced himself to pull his gaze away. He worried that staring too hard at his hands might make the shape of the child reappear, bright and unforgettable in her torn blue dress; still heavy and limp in his arms. Best to think of something else. Maybe there was something he ought to be doing to help Mark, to make it easier for him to get over the shock.

Mustn’t feel guilty about Mark, thought Owen. He’ll get over it, because he’s only a young lad. Mustn’t take on that burden as well as everything else. No more burdens. Let others take the guilt.

Mark Roper was moving cautiously across the slopes of dying heather, placing his boots on the bare surface of the rabbit tracks to avoid the snap of dead stems. The spring of the peat underfoot felt like a welcoming response from the earth to his presence, the clutch of brittle foliage at his trousers like the touch of a friend. He had already been waiting for an hour. But none of the men Mark had been watching had seen him as he stood above them in the birches up the hill. Mark had left his red jacket at home today, and he had long since learned the art of being inconspicuous. He had also been prepared to wait as long as necessary for the policemen to leave.

He knew the two men were detectives, because he recognized one of them from Sunday, when they had questioned him. It was the one called Cooper. Mark had seen him again, with a woman, when he had talked to Yvonne Leach. This detective was young, and you could tell he was local. He was the one who lacked the hard-eyed aggressiveness that Mark had seen in the other policemen. In fact, he could almost have been a Ranger. This detective, Cooper, was also the one who had made Mark think of what his own brother would have looked like by now — if he had still been alive.

Finally, the two policemen had driven away down the track from Ringham Edge Farm. Perhaps they were heading back to the cycle hire centre, where the car park was full of police vehicles this morning and the first visitors of the day were getting an unpleasant surprise as they unloaded their mountain bikes and strapped on their cycling helmets.

Just over the shoulder of Ringham Moor were the Nine Virgins. And up there, Mark knew there would be more police, keeping the public away from the stone circle, like priests guarding an altar from the profane.

A hundred yards along the slope of the hill, Owen Fox was working on the boundary wall. There was still a lot to be done on the wall, and the Area Ranger would probably work on right through the day until the light started to go.

As Mark watched, Owen pulled on his gloves and picked up the new Pennine walling hammer he had bought only a few weeks before. It was a three-pound hammer with a sharp cutting edge fixed at a right angle to the shaft — a tool designed to slice the corners off the stones, so that only blunt edges protruded from the wall, leaving it solid and safe. Sometimes, Mark wished he could ask Owen to use his hammer and shape the rest of the world like that — with no sharp edges that could pierce the skin of his emotions or rip the protective veneer from his memories.

Owen had a small rucksack on the ground, with his radio aerial protruding from the top. Nearby, his stones were laid out in the order he would need them, leaving a clear work area. The ground was already levelled and the foundation stones blocked together. Now the building stones had to be laid, and co-ordination of hand and eye would be needed to know exactly which stone to choose to plug a gap.

Silently, Mark continued to make progress, until he was standing only a few yards from the wall. For a while, he watched Owen’s hands as he worked. He was shaping the stones, carving them into new forms, until he had made them fit tightly together. When the wall was finished, it would be impossible to move a single stone by hand. Surely a man who could create with such care would never think of destroying anything?

Owen hefted another stone and swung the cutting edge of his hammer, slicing the gritstone into yellow shards that left a dusting of powder on his gloves.

‘Owen?’

The Ranger looked up, surprised. His hammer was poised in the air, its edge catching the light, a little bit of golden stone dust trickling down the shaft on to his red fleece. Mark was shocked by the look that he had caught on Owen’s face. He saw the Ranger start to compose his expression into an air of normality as he mentally rehearsed the lines he would use for a tourist. And then Owen saw who had startled him.

‘What are you doing here, Mark?’ he said. ‘You should be at home.’

‘So should you. It’s your day off.’

Owen shrugged. ‘There are things to do. This wall won’t wait. The boundaries have to be maintained, whatever else goes on. No one will do the job but me. Certainly not Warren Leach.’