Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

As a result, a bare minimum of maintenance had been done on the buildings in Edendale during the past ten years. There were gaps in the roof and missing sections of corrugated iron in the walls, rusty gates falling off their hinges, and pens whose steel bars had been bent out of shape by vandals. At night, youths rode their motorbikes through the aisles like rodeo cowboys. On the street side, the windows were full of jagged holes where the panes had been used for target practice.

Outside, the open-air pens were surrounded by parked Land Rovers, muddy livestock trailers and transporters slewed on to the pavements. Ben Cooper and Todd Weenink had difficulty finding a space for their car, and ended up parking across the front bumper of a wagon owned by a haulier from Lincolnshire.

The main building held cattle, and two smaller ones across the road were for pigs and sheep. Many of the sheep pens were empty, but there were some Derbyshire Gritstone ewes crammed together between wooden hurdles. A man was trying to drive a group of piglets up a strawed ramp into a lorry with nothing but a wooden board and a mouthful of curses. Once in the lorry, the pigs clattered and squealed hysterically, before emerging back down the ramp as the man dodged and screamed, rapidly losing his temper.

A patrol car was blocking one of the side roads, with its hazard lights on and the stripes on its rear glowing bright red. A uniformed officer ran back to speak to them.

‘It’s bloody chaos here,’ he said. ‘No wonder Traffic have hysterics every time it’s market day.’

‘Where’s the van?’ said Cooper.

‘Over there.’ He pointed to one of the cobbled areas crammed with vehicles of all kinds. ‘It’s right at the back, so I’d say it won’t be leaving for a while.’

‘Have you got the details?’

‘This is the registration.’ The officer passed him a page from his notebook. ‘It’s registered to a Mr Keith Teasdale. An Edendale address, as you can see.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘We’ve been told to hang around for a bit, in case you need us.’

‘OK. But don’t make yourselves too obvious. Hide your baboon’s bum, for a start.’

‘We’ll try. There’s just nowhere to park. The town centre bobby is here, too, by the way. They expect to see him on market day, so he’s no problem.’

Cooper and Weenink wound their way through the parked vehicles. They passed a fifty-foot-long transporter that already had two decks of calves loaded. A lorry that had been washed and scrubbed inside drove off with dirty water pouring out under the hinges of the tailgate. A farmer was trying to negotiate a cattle trailer into a space that was obviously too small.

When they found the Transit van, it was blocked in at the back of the parking area, with its bonnet against the wall and no way of reversing out past the trailer behind it.

‘I suppose it was white once,’ said Cooper, drawing his finger through the grime on the back doors.

Weenink had walked round the front, squeezing his bulk between the van and the wing mirror of a Daihatsu Fourtrak next to it.

‘Has it got a rusty wheel arch?’ asked Cooper.

‘Two of them. Also a rusty passenger door and rusty sills all the way along this side. And look at all this crap hanging out of the side door.’

Cooper peered along the van. Strands of yellow straw stuck out from under the bottom of the side-loading door like a badly trimmed fringe of hair.

‘It reminds me of a particularly hairy blonde I knew once,’ said Weenink. ‘She was a real goer. But stripped down to her knickers, she looked like Wurzel Gummidge.’

‘Let’s go and find Mr Keith Teasdale,’ said Cooper.

A police constable and an RSPCA inspector stood chatting by the door, their uniforms almost identical but for the policeman’s helmet. The RSPCA man looked like a farmer himself and nodded amicably at the customers walking past. Above their heads were posters advertising fertilizers and animal feeds.

Inside the building, market workers were channelling cattle through a complicated network of steel pens towards the sale ring. As Cooper and Weenink entered, a group of bullocks turned on each other and engaged in a shoving match in the passageway. Side by side, two of the animals completely filled the passage, and their flanks were squeezed against the five-foot high steel bars of the pens on either side. Yipping and shouting, the attendants flicked their backs with sticks until they went in the right direction. Then steel gates were shut along the passageways with a series of loud clangs.

At the back was the sale ring itself, surrounded by tiers of wooden benches like a miniature amphitheatre. Rows of farmers lined the benches, while others pressed against the steel tubular sides of the ring, their boots resting on a wooden platform like men propping up the bar at their local pub. Above them, the low girders supporting the roof of the mart were covered with roosting starlings.

In the ring were four men, booted and overalled, with sticks in their hands to keep the beasts moving through. The exits and entrances were just wide enough for men to squeeze through, but too narrow for animals desperate to escape from the claustrophobic confines of the ring and the circles of watching, predatory eyes.

Cooper stopped to examine the next lot coming in. They were store cattle, down from the hill farms, destined to go to arable land in the east for fattening and breeding. Some were spattered with mud and faeces; others had rear hooves that had grown into long, curved toes like Persian slippers, and they hobbled as they moved.

Some of the beasts went to press their faces against the steel sides of the ring to gaze back towards the holding pens until the men drove them away, making them parade for the buyers to see the way they moved. Then the animals would panic and skid on their own excrement on a concrete surface perfunctorily scattered with sawdust. The larger cattle made the men slip behind wooden barriers in front of the auctioneer’s podium to escape injury.

As Cooper watched, one animal refused to be directed to the exit gate, and it ended up in the ring with the next beast. They circled and barged each other in confusion as the men set about them.

‘Jesus, Ben, I think I’m going off beef all of a sudden,’ said Weenink.

Cooper saw one or two farmers he recognized. Bridge End Farm was his brother’s business, but he had been to enough auctions and farm sales with Matt to be familiar with some of the names and faces. There were a few who seemed to turn up wherever farmers got together. These events were their social life, as well as their livelihood.

The first farmer shook his head when asked about Keith Teasdale. The second did the same. Cooper continued to work his way through the crowd, followed by Weenink. The auctioneer was Abel Pilkington himself, and his voice never stopped. He rattled out his litany: ‘Forty, forty, forty. Five. Forty-five, forty-five. Fifty where? Fifty, fifty, fifty. Am I missing anyone?’ It became a continuous, semi-audible stream of figures, amplified and distorted by the microphone. It was impossible to see anyone bidding, but Pilkington had each beast sold in a matter of seconds and the next one on its way in.

‘Aye, that’s Teasdale over there,’ said an old farmer at last. ‘He’s working in the ring, see.’

The man at the entrance gate to the sale ring looked either tired or bored. There were bags under his eyes and he moved with less energy than the others, though he was younger than some. He was a dark, thin man with heavy black stubble and a Mexican-style moustache and a shifty look in his eye. His entire skill lay in the timing of the opening of the gate. He barely used his stick unless an animal threatened to pin him against the side of the ring.