Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

The wall formed a boundary where the top fields of Ringham Edge Farm met the woods. Mark had already helped Owen to replace a stile which had collapsed with use over the years. Its original builders had used flat gritstone slabs instead of wooden steps, and the structure hadn’t done too badly — it had survived for the best part of two hundred years. But the weight of walkers’ boots had proved too much, loosening the slabs until they shifted out of balance and became dangerous.

Now Owen had worked up the hill to a stretch of wall that had fallen. Walkers had been crossing here, too — the ones too lazy to walk a few yards to the stile. It was a double wall, but the topping stones had been dislodged one by one, and the weather had got into the centre, washing through the filling until the sides bulged and slipped.

Mark and Owen stood together among the scattered stones for a minute or two. Despite his proximity to Owen, there still seemed to be too much distance between them for Mark’s satisfaction. The greeting he had received was not the one he had expected. It was not the reason he had waited in the trees until the policemen had gone. For Mark, the unfamiliar gulf between them felt like that yawning gap in the wall, waiting to be bridged by a careful hand.

‘Did you talk to the police yesterday, Owen?’ he said.

‘Yes, they’re talking to everybody.’

‘What did you talk about?’

Owen laughed. ‘You’d be surprised.’

He picked up a stone, knocked off some dirt, and held it up to the light to study it, like a diamond dealer examining the facets of a newly polished gem. Mark liked to watch Owen at work. He thought Owen was a completely different man when he was out on the hills. He never seemed at home in the briefing centre, sitting in front of the little electric heater, hunched at the assistant’s desk scattered with paperwork.

‘What was it they wanted to know, Owen?’ Mark insisted.

Owen had been Mark’s friend and mentor throughout his assessment and training as a Ranger and during his first few weeks in the job itself. Mark had become accustomed to the comforting presence of the bearded man in the red jacket; he had glowed with pride as people greeted Owen like an old friend, laughed at all his jokes and bombarded him with questions on every subject — questions he never failed to respond to with courtesy, even when he plainly didn’t know the answer.

‘It was just questions,’ said Owen. ‘They want to make use of my local knowledge. Don’t they all?’

‘The time of the next bus to Buxton, then? Or the nearest all-night chemist’s.’

Owen smiled at Mark’s tentative joke, a reference to a shared memory of an encounter with two elderly women on a remote track by a reservoir on the heights of the Dark Peak. It was enough to provide the surge of reassurance Mark needed, enough to ease the chill he had felt when he had first seen the expression on Owen’s face.

‘I wondered if the police might want to interview me again,’ said Mark.

‘You’ve told them everything, haven’t you?’

‘I think so.’

But Mark knew he hadn’t, not everything. The policemen hadn’t been as easy to talk to as he might have hoped. There were some things you just couldn’t say when they were writing down every word. There were things that sounded too stupid and strange. For a start, he didn’t know how to describe to the police the way that the woman had looked to him as she lay among the stones. The way that she had seemed to dance.

‘Anyway,’ said Owen as he handed Mark a topping stone, ‘it’s all over with now. You can forget about it. Get on with the job. Why would they want to start bothering you again?’

Mark started stacking the stones to one side, lining them up on the grass, ready to be replaced when Owen had rebuilt the lower part of the wall.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mark. ‘I’ve never. . well, I’ve never been involved in anything like this before.’

‘I know, lad. Pass me the line.’

Owen took off his thick cotton work gloves and ran two lines between wooden pins along the damaged section of wall to mark out its alignment.

‘But the police aren’t so bad. They’re just doing their job, like you and me.’

Owen’s voice was slow and steady. Calming. It didn’t really matter what he was saying, because Mark found it reassuring just to listen to the sound. He had never heard Owen raise his voice. There had often been occasions when he might have done — when a mountain biker or a motorcyclist openly defied his friendly warnings that they were breaking the law and risking prosecution; when ill-equipped hikers ignored both his advice and common sense and put their own and others’ lives at risk; when a farmer, now and then, chose to be downright pig-headed. Farmers like Warren Leach at Ringham Edge, maybe. But Owen never got angry.

‘So there’s nothing to worry about. You tell them what you found, Mark, and that’s all they need to know. As long as it’s simple for them, they won’t bother you any more. And if they do, just send them to see me, eh? I’ll give them a flea in their ear.’

Owen smiled, showing his teeth through his grey beard, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Like most Rangers, he never wore a hat, and his hair was permanently windblown and untidy, curling into his ears.

‘Owen,’ said Mark.

‘Yes?’

‘Where were you?’

Owen smacked his gloves together to remove traces of mud and grit. ‘When, Mark?’

‘On Sunday afternoon. You know. .’

Mark watched Owen’s puzzled smile carefully. This time Owen smiled without showing his teeth. His eyes narrowed, but the crinkles were absent.

‘You had a problem with the radio, Mark.’

‘I just thought that maybe you weren’t there. .’

‘But I wouldn’t let you down like that, Mark. Now, would I?’

Mark looked past the wall and down at the farm buildings of Ringham Edge. They were gathered defensively round a crew yard like a medieval settlement, their gritstone walls turned outwards to the rest of the world. The biggest shed was much newer than the rest of the farm. Its green corrugated steel roof was damp from the drizzle earlier in the day, and it gleamed now in the weak sun.

Mark thought for a moment of the woman on Ringham Moor. Her death had at least been sudden; she had been given no time to consider, no time to reflect on what she had done with her life, for good or evil.

Owen had told Mark there were times when it was best to back off, to avoid confrontation, to let something go. He said that a soft word was better than an angry reaction, that a cool head was better than that hot surge of blind rage that was inevitably followed by the realization that you had made a terrible mistake.

Mark passed another stone. It was furred dark green with lichen, so he knew it had come from the north face of the wall. When a wall had been built by Owen, it was solid and reliable, the absolute symbol of stability.

Mark decided he would have to ask Owen again tomorrow about why he hadn’t been able to get hold of him on the radio. And maybe he would ask the day after, too. Just to hear a little bit more reassurance.

The Westons sat together, their faces no longer hopeful. They were losing faith in the investigation, disappointed by their first real contact with the police, dismayed by the realization of their fallibility. And they had noticed that at first they had been talking to a detective chief inspector, then an inspector; now it was a mere acting detective sergeant. The word ‘acting’ seemed to be the biggest insult of all.

‘Don’t take it the wrong way,’ said Eric Weston. ‘We’re sure you’re doing your best.’

‘There are a lot of people working on this enquiry,’ said Diane Fry patiently. ‘There are lots of leads to be followed up. This is just one of them.’