Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

She could see the man’s back now. His shoulders were hunched in a black or dark blue jacket, his hands in his pockets. He was totally unsuspecting. A pushover.

When she touched him, he jumped like a startled rabbit and tried to turn round.

‘What the — !’

But she already had him in a wrist hold, with her other hand above his elbow and his arm held straight out. From this position, she could force him easily to his knees, cuff him, do what she liked with him. The thought gave her a surge of satisfaction.

‘What’s your business?’ she said.

He kept very still. Now she was close to him, Fry could see he wasn’t a big man, though he was well wrapped up and wore a peaked cap. He said nothing, but kept his mouth tight shut and rolled his eyes towards her. She applied a bit more pressure to her grip.

‘Whatever it is, I suggest you go and do it somewhere else, mate.’

He was so still that she knew he was going to try to take her by surprise and break free. If she had too firm a grip on him when he tried it, one of them would get hurt — and she knew which of them it would be. Fry didn’t want to find herself responsible for a suspect with a broken arm at this time of night; maybe ending up on the wrong end of an ABH charge in the morning when the suspect got to talk to a lawyer.

She increased the distance between them slightly and relaxed her grip just enough so that he would notice. Suddenly, he jerked his arm free, put his head down and legged it as hard as he could for the corner of the road. Probably he had a car parked somewhere out of sight.

Fry let him go. There was no point in chasing him, even if her leg hadn’t been hurting. She had definitely given him a scare, though. That was one weirdo who would think twice about following women in the future.

Ben Cooper managed to get Weenink moving again and they turned left at the top of the path and emerged on to Bargate. There was still some traffic passing across the lights a few yards away, where the pedestrianized area began.

‘Uh-oh, got to have a piss,’ said Weenink.

‘You’ll have to hold on.’

‘Can’t.’

Weenink began to unzip and stumbled into the doorway of Boots the Chemists.

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Cooper stood with his back to the doorway, watching the cars cross the end of Bargate, praying that none of them would turn down the street. The sound of a trickle turned into a steady stream, and a pool of urine began to run past his feet on to the pavement.

‘Hurry up.’

Weenink just grunted. Cooper swore under his breath as a patrol car appeared at the lights and stopped on the red signal. The car had the distinctive green and yellow checkerboard pattern on the side that indicated it belonged to Traffic division. Cooper wasn’t even likely to know the crew. Not that knowing them would help in the least.

He recalled travelling on the M1 one day with his father, back at the time of the year-long miners’ strike — 1984, it must have been. Ben had been fourteen years old, and he had gone with his father and Matt to a football match. Derby County had been playing Aston Villa at Birmingham in the FA Cup. He remembered the match well. But he remembered the incident on the motorway, too.

On the way back, they had come up at the rear of a long convoy of coaches, one behind the other, travelling in the inside lane of the motorway. They all carried the name of a coach operator in London and they were packed with men, like some factory outing. When the Coopers’ car was close behind the last vehicle, every man on the coach stood up on the seats and dropped his trousers. There was a sudden blooming of white buttocks like exotic lilies in a pond as the men mooned through the windows at passing motorists.

Ben and Matt had laughed, until their father became angry, then pulled out and began to overtake the coach. Maybe he had intended to pull the driver over, Ben wasn’t sure. But Sergeant Cooper was off duty, and they weren’t even in Derbyshire. This had been Nottinghamshire, somewhere south of Junction 27.

At some point, Ben had sensed his father change his mind. His foot had slipped off the accelerator. He had fallen back momentarily, then accelerated again and passed the convoy as quickly as possible. The boys said nothing. As they passed, they could see the uniforms. They could see the stickers in the front window of every coach. Ten coaches there were — they counted them as they passed. ‘Metropolitan Police’, the stickers said. They realized that the men were reinforcements arriving to help control the mass pickets of Yorkshire miners then threatening Nottinghamshire pits. Law and order was on the road.

The lights changed and the patrol car had moved on by the time Weenink reappeared.

‘Have you got any beer back at your place?’ he asked.

‘What is it you’ve done, Todd?’

Weenink’s mood was changing again, the cold air sharpening his tone. ‘It happens all the time, Ben. You’re not so innocent as you make out. You must know. I bet you’ve done it yourself.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m talking about a little bit of evidence being improved here and there. It happens. Everybody knows that it happens. Where’s the harm? As long as you don’t get caught.’

‘But — ’ Ben Cooper struggled to capture all the reasons that ran through his mind why this was inconceivable. He thought of words like justice and integrity, like responsibility and honour. He thought of concepts like loyalty to your service, like honesty and truth. And self-respect. And he looked at Todd Weenink and knew that it wasn’t worth mentioning even one of them.

‘I can’t believe that you’re telling me this.’

‘I’m telling you because you asked me. And because I know you won’t shop me.’

‘How do you know I won’t?’

Weenink winked at him. ‘Because you’re so loyal and principled. You won’t betray me, will you, Ben? No, I know you won’t. It’s against your morality. It’s not what they tell you in the Bible of Bullshit, is it?’

‘I’m surprised you’ve even read it.’

Cooper hadn’t read the Police Training Manual much recently, either. Who did, when you had been on the job a while and had learned the realities of the situation? Todd Weenink had certainly been doing the job far too long for that. The Bible of Bullshit was read only by wet trainees and senior managers.

‘You know what’ll happen, Todd. In the public’s eyes, you’ll get lumped in with the worst there are. A copper gone wrong is never forgiven.’

‘But all I did — ’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘You just asked.’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘Fuck you, then.’

Cooper watched Weenink weave away for a few yards along Bargate, then stumble and put out a hand to support himself on a lamp post. He was beyond hope, of course. Breaking the rules was one thing, but breaking the law was another. There was no way that Cooper or anyone else could help Weenink. It didn’t matter how much you owed a colleague out of loyalty, or how close you knew other people were to being in the same situation — or even how close you had come to it yourself, at times. Weenink had made his mistake, and he would have to be abandoned to his fate. The wolves would be circling soon enough.

With a sigh, Cooper propped Weenink up and let him drape his arm round his shoulder. Despite the weight, he managed to make it to the lights at the corner of Bargate. Then he began to look for a taxi to get them out of there. The night threatened to stretch out endlessly ahead of him.

By eight o’clock the next morning, it was already obvious from the sky that it was going to be a good day for a walk on the moors.

The two women had a second cup of coffee together, leaning their elbows comfortably on the kitchen table among the toast crumbs and the cereal bowls. Karen Tavisker’s husband Nick had already gone off to work and left them in their housecoats, still chatting, so absorbed in each other’s company that they had barely noticed him go.