Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

‘Mr Howsley, you’ve told us that on Sunday 2nd November you were at a pub in Matlock. Which pub was it again?’

‘The White Bull.’

‘And what time did you arrive?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘What time did you leave?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘How many drinks did you have? Who were you with? Who did you speak to? Where did you go when you left?’

But Howsley’s answers didn’t vary, no matter how often they asked him. He had clear memories of what he was doing on the days that Jenny Weston and Maggie Crew were attacked, and his statements were consistent. He had been a long way from the area, on his home patch in Greater Manchester.

Only when told about sightings of the stolen car did he seem less confident. He couldn’t be sure where he was when Karen Tavisker was attacked, he said. The interview team had an advantage on this one. The Renault driven by Darren Howsley had been sighted in the Ringham area, and they had two reliable witnesses — the Rangers, Owen Fox and Mark Roper, who had recorded the make, model, colour and false licence plate, as they had been doing with any unfamiliar vehicle near the moor. It was then Howsley asked for his solicitor.

‘I think he wasn’t able to resist falling back into old habits when he read about our two assaults,’ said DCI Tailby afterwards.

‘A copycat,’ said DI Hitchens.

‘In a way. Tavisker was lucky, anyway.’

‘Aren’t we going to try for an identification?’ asked Fry.

‘I don’t think it’s worthwhile. Greater Manchester are keen to get him back. I think we’ll let them have him.’

Owen Fox had completed the first course of stones and had begun sliding the big throughs back into the wall. The throughs would hold the whole structure firmly together. With these and the topping stones in place, the wall would stand for another hundred years or so.

‘Why would a man do that? Attack all those women?’ asked Mark Roper. ‘What would he be thinking of?’

Owen didn’t pause in his work. ‘I don’t suppose thinking came into it,’ he said.

‘What then?’

‘I think it would be a physical thing. An instinct that the mind has no control over.’

Mark considered this, and nodded. ‘I know what you mean.’

It seemed to Mark Roper that Owen was like a stone wall himself, solid and reliable, calm and controlled. He never raised his voice. But then, Mark’s father had never raised his voice, either. He had never smacked, or even criticized — not that Mark could remember. Instead, he had joked all the time, and talked about all sorts of subjects. His father had loved to make things. He collected useful bits of wood which he would never get round to doing anything with. He used to drive his mother mad by stopping the car to pick up a broken piece of pipe or a sheet of corrugated Perspex from the side of the road, or a wooden crate fallen from a lorry.

But his temper had changed after Rick had died. And Mark’s parents had drifted apart instead of supporting each other, until his father had moved out. And then there had been the new man.

Mark could see the stones in the completed length of wall were bonded like brickwork, laid across the joints in the course below. Every stone touched all its neighbours, allowing no room for movement. They were wedged in tight, each with its own role and no possibility of shifting without a danger of bringing down the entire structure. In this part of the world, there were whole villages made like that, thought Mark — not just the houses, but the people too. You weren’t allowed to wander out of line. There was no room for movement, no shifting from your allotted role. Wedged in tight.

Clumsily, Mark tried to express this thought to Owen. The Area Ranger listened to him for a few moments, then rubbed a hand through his beard.

‘You haven’t come across a suicide yet, have you, Mark?’ he said, as if picking up the thread of an entirely different conversation.

‘No.’

‘You will, in this job. I think suicides are the saddest deaths of all. It means someone has decided that life has no part for them to play any more.’

Mark knew what that meant. There were people who had tried to shift from their place in the wall, and whose foundations had collapsed. Mark tilted his head to listen more closely to what Owen was saying. It didn’t sound reassuring. But he always learned things from Owen, and he had to listen in case he missed something.

‘There’s a spot where a lot of people go to do away with themselves,’ said Owen. ‘The car park at the top of the Eden Valley, where you can see Mam Tor. They call it Suicide Corner.’

‘Yes, I know it,’ said Mark.

‘They always seem to go to that one spot. They park up in their cars to enjoy the view for one last time, then write their notes and drink their whisky and connect a hose up to the exhaust. Sometimes they use pills, sometimes a knife or razor blade across the wrists. Occasionally, they change their minds when they see what they’ve done, when the blood begins to flow and the pain they’ve only imagined becomes real.’

Mark nodded. But he wasn’t sure if the Ranger was just talking generally, or whether he was communicating some personal message.

‘There’s a story about a student,’ said Owen. ‘I don’t know if it’s true or not. They say he drove from Suicide Corner to the hospital in Edendale with blood pouring from both his wrists where he had hacked his arteries open with a pair of dressmaker’s scissors. The car was warm, and the blood flowed pretty well from the cuts he made before he panicked. It had run down his arms and on to his trouser legs, soaked into his lap and pooled on the rubber mat. They say the car looked like a slaughterhouse. But it’s over five miles to drive into Edendale, and the student said afterwards that he had stopped at three red lights in the centre of town, waiting for the traffic to pass. By the time he arrived at Accident and Emergency, he was almost unconscious. He sat in the car outside the hospital entrance for ten minutes before an ambulance crew found him. His hands were glued to the steering wheel with congealed blood. The nurses had to prise him free.’

‘It isn’t right,’ said Mark. But he didn’t think Owen had heard him. His eyes were on his hands, though they were hidden by his gloves. He rubbed the palms together, as if irritated by some persistent itch.

‘On balance,’ said Owen, ‘I think carbon monoxide is probably the best. It takes only a few minutes. I’ve seen men still sitting in the driving seats of their cars after the exhaust has done its job. They seem just to have fallen asleep. A paramedic once told me that your blood turns cherry-red from the carbon monoxide, when it works properly,’ said Owen. ‘Your brain swells, and so does your liver and kidneys and spleen. Even the tiny blood vessels in your eyes haemorrhage. But that’s internal damage, the things you can’t see. At Suicide Corner, you always think they’re asleep at first. Until you notice the smell of the urine soaked into the cloth of the driving seat.’

Mark shifted his feet uneasily. Now he wanted Owen to stop talking.

‘This paramedic said the carbon monoxide replaces the oxygen in your blood,’ said Owen. ‘You die of oxygen starvation, a sort of internal suffocation. You can’t smell or taste or see the gas; all that happens is that you begin to feel drowsy. You get a slight headache and a shortness of breath. Then your movements slow down, there’s some nausea and chest pain, perhaps a few hallucinations. We’ve all had hangovers worse than that. But this is the sort of hangover you don’t wake up from.’

‘Owen — ’

‘You wouldn’t believe the mistakes that some of them make, though. They don’t seem to plan their own deaths properly. They come with lengths of hosepipe that are too short to reach through the car window. Or they arrive with nothing to seal the gap where they have to lower the window to get the pipe through. At Suicide Corner, they can sit for a long time with the wind howling through the gap in the window and blowing away the carbon monoxide as fast as it trickles into the car.’