Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

‘Eat my pants, look at the arse on that,’ said Weenink.

‘Don’t say that. It’s disgusting.’

Over the next beer, Weenink studied Cooper with exaggerated care.

‘You’re a fucking poofter, you are, Ben. Do you know that? A fucking poofter. But I love you. You’re my mate.’

They nodded at each other, bleary-eyed. There was no need for words, really. The beer fumes drew them together in a warm, sentimental embrace.

Weenink took out a packet of cigarettes and offered Cooper one. Cooper took it. He hadn’t smoked since he was sixteen years old. He looked at it for a minute. Weenink tried to give him a light, but Cooper shook his head and laid the cigarette carefully on his beer mat, lining it up alongside his glass. This particular mat had a picture of a female pop singer on it. Cooper laughed and laughed. It looked as though she had a cigarette up her nose.

‘You know, Ben,’ said Weenink after sufficient silence. ‘You and me, we won’t take any shit from any body.’

‘Right.’

‘Am I right?’

‘You’re right, Todd.’

Weenink watched the woman with the leather trousers walk back across the room and took a drag of his cigarette. ‘What was I saying?’

‘Let’s go somewhere else, shall we?’

Cooper and Weenink walked out of the pub, across the street and through Market Square, staggering slightly as their feet slithered on the cobbles.

‘Here, we can play leapfrog on these,’ said Weenink, swinging on the black cast-iron street furniture, not noticing when he banged his shin on the metal. His voice sounded unnaturally loud in the square. A middle-aged couple getting into their car turned to look at them. Cooper could almost hear them tutting. For once, there were no noisy groups of youths in the square to distract attention.

‘Come on,’ he said.

Weenink allowed himself to be led away from the square, down the passage by the Somerfield supermarket. They came out on the riverside walk under the nineteenth-century bridge across the River Eden.

‘Not much life down here,’ said Weenink. ‘Isn’t there a night club open or something?’

‘Night club? On a Thursday?’

‘I need another drink.’

‘It’s closing time.’

‘But we’ve missed some pubs out.’

Weenink slowed down and stared at the river. Dark shadows lurked just below the surface of the slow-moving water. They were only stones, though. The water was too shallow here for them to be anything else. You could walk across and barely get your feet wet.

‘Those ducks are asleep,’ said Weenink. ‘Let’s wake them up.’

‘What for?’

‘It’s too quiet.’

Weenink picked up a handful of gravel and began to throw it at the mallards resting in the reeds with their beaks under their wings. His actions were totally uncoordinated, and the stones fell harmlessly into the water with small plops.

‘I need something bigger.’

Cooper looked round, a vague anxiety creeping through the haze of alcohol. There was little traffic passing over the bridge. The only lights were those that burned in the supermarket. There were probably staff on the night shift in there, stacking shelves and taking deliveries. At any moment, one of them might come outside for a fag break.

‘Let’s move on a bit,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘We have to get home.’

‘I thought we were going to a night club.’

‘No.’

‘That’s what we want. Have another drink, a bit of dancing. Let’s go to Sheffield. We could go to a casino.’

‘You can go on your own.’

‘Oh, Ben.’

Cooper wasn’t impressed by the sudden wheedling tone. But he knew that he wouldn’t be able to leave Todd to go anywhere on his own, all the same. Weenink sat down suddenly on a bench. The wooden slats creaked under his weight.

‘God, I’m knackered,’ he said. ‘Totally knackered. I could just go to sleep right here, Ben.’

‘Come on, Todd. We’ve got to keep going.’

‘Sit down, Ben.’

Cooper sat reluctantly. He was cold, and he could feel the first spots of rain. The insulating alcohol was wearing off already.

‘Ben,’ said Weenink in a suddenly different voice. ‘I’ve done something really stupid.’

Cooper’s heart sank. Not now, please, he thought. Any time except now. He was tired. He had to get home.

‘Really, really stupid,’ said Weenink. ‘And I think I’m going to be found out.’

On the way out of her house in Grosvenor Avenue that night, Fry caught a glimpse of a figure lurking in the shadows under the overgrown hedges near the streetlight across the road. It wasn’t unusual. The female students and nurses staying in her own house and the ones on either side attracted a motley selection of boyfriends, some of whom wouldn’t look out of place in a cell in Derby Prison.

Fry studied the figure carefully. If she hadn’t been alert on a professional level, she wouldn’t have seen him. He was wearing dark clothes, and standing quite still, so that his movement didn’t give him away. Nine out of ten people would have passed by without noticing him at all. Fry shrugged. It was nothing to do with her. When she was off duty, she didn’t feel any obligation to concern herself about the dangerous private lives of her fellow flat-dwellers. She had plenty of concerns of her own to think about.

She fetched her car from behind the house and drove out of Edendale and through Grindleford to get on the A625 into Sheffield. She tried to keep her eyes closed to the scenery until she was into the built-up area near Ecclesall. She might live on the back of the moon, but she didn’t have to admire it. She was a city girl, and always would be.

Fry began to curse Ben Cooper. She cursed him for being the one who had revived memories she had been trying to put behind her. There was only the one reason she had chosen Derbyshire to transfer to, when she ought to have gone south, to London. They always needed officers in the Met; it would have suited her much better in a big anonymous city, where nobody cared who you were or what you did with your life. By now, she would have been well established, instead of dickering about in this tinpot rural force. She had made the decision for her own reasons, and for months now she had been pretending that those reasons didn’t exist. She had tried to let the job take over, and had hoped it would become her number one priority. No — her only priority. But it hadn’t worked. The time for pretending was over.

A couple of hours later, she returned from Sheffield tired and frustrated. Pain was shooting up her leg, and she could feel her ankle had swollen to twice its size where she had twisted it at the cattle market. She had walked the streets of the city centre, hunting out the dark corners and following the sounds of the uneasy silences that lay beyond the bright lights around the pubs and night clubs. She had explored all the subways, lit and unlit, walking in areas most women would have avoided after six o’clock in the evening. She had visited a shelter for the homeless she had located north of the university.

But Sheffield was a big place. She might even have to widen her search to Rotherham and Doncaster. Fry knew it could go on for months or years, without success. But once she’d started, she would never be able to give it up.

When she reached Grosvenor Avenue, she noticed that the same figure was opposite the house again. He seemed to be watching a lighted window on the first floor. A peeping tom, no doubt about it. It was time to give him a nasty surprise.

Fry unlocked the front door and went into the hallway. She waited a minute, then switched off the hall light and took the bulb out of the fitting, in case one of the students came downstairs. Then she walked straight through the house and stepped out of the back door. She clambered over the garden fence and moved silently down the alley between the houses until she could emerge on to the road again.