Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

Cooper reassured himself by thinking of his date with Helen Milner later on. Within an hour, he would be out of the rugby club and away. He and Helen hadn’t decided where they would go yet. Probably it would be a walk to get the noise out of his head, then a drink or two at the Light House before a meal somewhere. The Light House was where they had gone the very first time they had gone out together. It was hardly more than two months ago that they had met again at Helen’s grandparents’ house in the village of Moorhay and resumed a relationship that had started when they were schoolfriends. But their new beginning had not been without difficulties. Nothing ever was.

The clubhouse corridor smelled of sweat and mud and disinfectant, with a permanent underlying essence of embrocation. Dave Rennie helped Cooper carry the jugs of beer to the players in the visitors’ changing room. Then the sergeant’s pager began to bleep.

‘Oh, God damn it. What now?’

Cooper watched Rennie go to the phone in the corridor. He looked back over his shoulder at the changing-room door, which swung open with the constant passing to and fro of players and supporters. Todd Weenink was out of the shower, towelling himself in the middle of a raucous mob, his naked bulk perfectly at home in a melee of pink male flesh and echoing laughter.

Weenink already had a beer in front of him. It was amazing that he could keep up the pace. He had arrived for the match only at the very last minute, when everyone else was changed and ready to go out on the pitch, thinking they were going to have to play a man short, and cursing him for letting them down. No doubt Weenink had been out on the booze the night before and had woken up in someone else’s bed many miles away, with rugby the last thing on his mind.

Cooper shook his head at the intrusive thoughts that came to him — the contrast between Weenink’s muscular, hairy nakedness and the picture he carried in his mind of the last colleague he had worked so closely with. Todd’s open, up-front, relaxed maleness was a world away from Detective Constable Diane Fry. Former Detective Constable, he should say. Now Acting Detective Sergeant.

It was a subject Cooper didn’t really want to think about. It brought with it painful memories, some of which he still didn’t understand but suspected might be his own fault.

After a few minutes, he realized Dave Rennie hadn’t come back into the bar. In the steamy atmosphere of the changing room, he couldn’t see Todd either. He had to shout to make himself heard, even when close enough to tap one of the players on the shoulder.

‘Have you seen Todd Weenink?’

‘He’s gone,’ said the player. ‘Control bleeped Dave Rennie, and Todd went off with him. They went off in a hurry, too. Todd hadn’t even managed to put his trousers on.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No, mate. I saw him myself, with his arse hanging out. Should you be with them?’

Cooper stared bleakly at the player. ‘I’m not on call. Control wouldn’t have asked for me.’

‘Right. You’re the lucky one, then. You can have a few beers.’

‘A few beers, yeah. What more could I ask for?’

Suddenly, Cooper’s mood plummeted. He felt as if he had just been jilted by a lover. If there was a job on, he wanted to be there. He wanted to be part of the team. He wondered why loyalty had to be so painful. And when would he learn to give his loyalty in the right direction? He ought to have learned that lesson from Diane Fry — their brief relationship had certainly been difficult enough to drive it home. Cooper shuddered at a premonition. He thought it likely that she could inflict more pain on him yet, given the chance.

The police vehicles cluttering up the roadsides at the bottom of the main track on to Ringham Moor made Diane Fry frown in exasperation. The scene looked chaotic, as cars with beacons flashing arrived one after another in the gathering dusk and slewed across the narrow verge. A minibus carrying the Tactical Support Unit was unable to squeeze through the gap left by the parked cars until a uniformed sergeant yelled at someone to move. Figures in reflective yellow jackets were caught briefly in the headlights as they passed aimlessly backwards and forwards.

Fry itched to take control of the situation, to bring order and a bit of sense to officers so charged with excitement and adrenalin that they were causing more trouble than they were worth. But, in fact, she shouldn’t even be here at all. She had thought she had got away from E Division, that her few weeks in Edendale had been a bad dream she could soon put behind her. But here she still was, answering the call. And before she knew what was happening, she had found herself out in the Peak District countryside again, where civilization seemed like a dim memory and the twenty-first century was reduced to the fantasy of a Victorian novelist.

She stood with Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens on the rocks overlooking the road. A fine drizzle was settling on their clothes and in their hair, and turning the gritstone slab under their feet a shade darker. With Hitchens at her side, Fry felt as though she had taken another step closer in her ambitions. She was already ‘acting up’ as a detective sergeant, with a transfer to a permanent DS’s job in the offing when the imminent re-shuffle took place.

A move couldn’t come too soon for Fry. At all costs, she must avoid the crazy distractions and misjudgements that had plagued her in a spell shortly after her arrival in E Division from West Midlands. The name of her biggest misjudgement was Ben Cooper.

The thought of him immediately sparked the surge of anger that always bubbled somewhere deep in her stomach, churning thick and corrosive like an acid that flowed in her small intestines. It happened every time; it only took the mention of Cooper’s name, or even a burst of the wrong music. There were cassettes that she used to play often in her car which she had been forced to throw away — not just casually chucked on the back seat, but hurled into the nearest wheelie bin, with their spools of magnetic tape ripped out and shredded like the innards of a rat she had once seen killed and torn apart by a police Alsatian in a derelict warehouse back in Birmingham. If there had been an open fire in her flat, she would have burned the tapes; she would have happily watched their plastic cases crack and twist and bubble, as they melted into a greasy smear.

Fry wiped a sheen of drizzle from her face, where it was starting to make her cheeks feel damp and uncomfortable. No, she hadn’t quite managed to erase Ben Cooper from her memory yet. But she was working on it.

‘We’ve arranged for you to see Maggie Crew at six o’clock,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘You’d better get going, as soon as this lot are out of our way.’

‘Was she willing to see me?’

‘Willing isn’t a word I’d use. She’s bloody hard work.’

‘She’s uncooperative? But why?’

‘You’ll see. Form your own impressions of her, Diane, that’s the best way. We want you to get to know her. Get under her skin. Be an irritant, if you like.’

Fry knew she was being presented with a chance to do something different, to escape the routine chores that the Ben Coopers of the world would be allocated during this enquiry.

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said.

Hitchens nodded in approval. ‘When are they going to stop messing about down there?’ he said.

DI Hitchens was dressed casually, in denims and trainers, and he looked like a man who should have been doing something else. His cheeks were dark and unshaven, and there were specks of white paint in his hair.

‘We’ve got to keep the road open,’ said the sergeant importantly as he passed below them.