Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

Helen had been talking about school, telling Cooper about the children in her class. Cooper had been content to listen to her talk. He had come intending to make amends for standing her up at the rugby club the previous Sunday. He knew he had been neglecting her. Yet the lack of necessity for a response allowed his thoughts to drift occasionally. His mind kept returning to the reports of the attack on Cal and Stride in the quarry the previous night. The details had been shocking in themselves; but his imagination was able to provide much worse. Cal and Stride were the typical victims — a pair of innocents who had found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had seen what they were, and he had been unable to do anything to protect them.

And now Cooper had something else on his mind. He had to decide what to do about Mark Roper and Owen Fox. Mark’s suspicions were insubstantial, yet Cooper would have to report them. Perversely, he felt he would have liked to be able to discuss the subject with Diane Fry. He would also have liked to have been part of the team that was trying to identify the vigilante group which had attacked her. They had the reports from Fry and PC Taylor, and Cal and Stride themselves were being interviewed. But the scene was a mess — the rain had left it a quagmire. An assault on a police officer had to be treated seriously, but all that had been achieved so far was to spread the division’s resources even thinner. It was enough to make Cooper feel guilty about taking time off. But there was no more money in the budget for overtime.

Helen dipped into her shoulder bag and produced a packet of photos. Cooper looked at them, puzzled.

‘The pictures of the children,’ she said.

‘Oh, right.’

On Sundays, the riverside was always busy with families feeding the ducks. From the river walk, the water seemed to be full of movement. Mallards and coot clustered anxiously round the bankside, darting for the tidbits. Flocks of black-headed gulls wheeled and screamed over the surface, landing and taking off again, noisy and bad-tempered.

They sat down on a bench next to an elderly couple. The photos were all badly composed and had a strange cast over them, a combination of artificial light and direct flash.

‘This is my little favourite, Carly,’ said Helen, pointing to a little girl of about six, with fair hair cut raggedly across her forehead and a selection of teeth and gaps like a half-demolished wall.

‘She’s really sweet. She likes to draw, and she insists on giving me her drawings as presents. Look at this.’

The picture she showed Cooper was crayoned with great care, but little subtlety. There were small children with stick arms and clothes of various colours, and there was a figure with a white beard and a red coat patting them on the head and offering them brightly coloured gifts. It was captioned ‘Fathr Chistmass.’

‘A bit early to be doing Christmas, aren’t you? It’s only just gone Bonfire Night.’

Helen laughed. ‘Yes, they do get confused sometimes.’

But somehow it didn’t look quite right. There was something wrong about Father Christmas’s costume. He looked like one of those cut-price Santas in the shops in Edendale at Christmas, with home-made suits and cotton-wool beards that never fit. Most of them would scare the kids to death, if they got too close. But these days, there was no touching allowed, not even by Santa. No ‘come and sit on my knee, little girl.’

Cooper thought of Warren Leach’s boys, their air of guarded distance, an instinctive wariness of strangers. There had seemed little innocence about the Leach place. He wondered what the two boys had seen or experienced in their lives that made them nervous of visitors.

He looked again at the drawing in his hands. It wasn’t the red jacket that made it look wrong. It was the trousers. Every child knew that Santa’s trousers were red, the same as his jacket. But Carly had changed crayons halfway through drawing her picture of Father Christmas and his presents. She had selected her new colour carefully — and it wasn’t a colour that a child of six would normally choose. It wasn’t bright or dramatic enough; it was too dull and adult somehow.

Yes, everyone knew Santas were dressed all in red. But this Santa had grey trousers.

The house was set deep into the hillside, below the level of the road. Its front door was at the foot of a steep, narrow flight of stone steps lined with wooden tubs and pots of wilted sweet peas, enclosed by a well of sheer walls and blocked-up windows. The remains of dead plants trailed down to the door, leaving patches of dark mould and slime on the steps, treacherous patches that would send an unwary postman hurtling to the bottom. Yet on the window ledge of the room above the road there was a single pelargonium in bloom, its red flowers gleaming against the grey curtain.

When Owen Fox answered the door, he appeared to be standing at the bottom of a deep hole. He looked as though he had been dozing; he was sleepy-eyed and half-dressed, and his beard and hair were tangled. When he saw Diane Fry standing on the steps above him, he pulled his dressing gown around his chest.

‘Do you want some help?’ he said. ‘I suppose you need my local knowledge again?’

Owen began to ease the door closed behind him, trying to shut himself out on the step with the police, as if distancing himself from his own life. He looked faintly ridiculous in his T-shirt, dressing gown and slippers.

‘Is it about Cal and Stride?’ he said. ‘Give me a minute, then I’ll be with you. No problem.’

Then Owen looked up and saw DI Hitchens standing on the roadside, and he read something in his expression. He stared at Hitchens like a man contemplating the final ascent of Mount Everest and knowing he would never make it, because the effort was too great. Owen Fox had become a small man at the bottom of a dark pit. He stood out of the light, away from the world, desolate and alone. The sun that reached his pot plants fell short of crossing his doorstep.

‘Don’t bother shutting the door,’ said Hitchens. ‘We’ve got a search warrant.’

‘That was the river, this is the sea.’

Ben Cooper turned up the volume on his stereo and opened the cover of his Waterboys CD. He was amazed to find it dated from 1985. In fact, most of the music he possessed was the stuff he had liked twelve or fifteen years ago as a teenager. Somehow, his tastes hadn’t changed during the time since he had joined the police service — or maybe he just hadn’t had time to discover any new kinds of music.

Cooper looked at his books. The copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin he had been trying to read was written in 1994. It was about the most recent thing on his shelves, and somebody had given him that. Apart from the job, it seemed his time had been spent drinking beer with other police officers, taking part in individual sports or walking in the countryside. At least he had some friends outside the service. He made a mental note to get in touch with Oscar and Rakki. It had been months since they had gone anywhere together.

One of the CDs in the rack was of a concert by the Derbyshire Constabulary Choir, recorded six years ago. There was a photo of the choir on the cover, and on the back row with the tenors was Ben Cooper himself, then a uniformed PC. Cooper compared the picture with his reflection in the mirror in the wardrobe door. His hair was a bit shorter at the back now, his face a bit fuller. But he looked much the same, didn’t he? So why did he feel so different inside? Was it the police service that had done that to him?

Suddenly, he felt weary. He replaced the CD and lay down on his bed, letting the sound of Mike Scott’s voice roll over him. ‘Once you were tethered, now you are free. That was the river, this is the sea.’