Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

‘When did you give up?’

‘I’ve never smoked,’ said Owen. ‘You’ve asked me this before. What’s the point of this?’

‘All right. Do you recognize these cigarette stubs?’

‘Of course not. You’re joking, aren’t you?’

‘Do they look pretty much the same to you?’

‘Of course they do.’

‘You’re right, they are. Identical. The same brand, the same batch, smoked in just the same way. Look at how exactly the same amount has been left before the filter, how they’ve been pinched between the fingers in precisely the same way. They could almost have come from the same packet, Owen. Except for their age. Do you agree?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘We found one in the bin at your briefing centre.’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t smoke. If you found it there, I don’t know how it got there.’

Hitchens nodded. ‘Do you want to know where we found the other one?’

Owen didn’t respond.

‘I’ll tell you anyway,’ said Hitchens. ‘It was under Rosalind Daniels’ body.’

Ben Cooper looked at the stack of interview reports on his desk. His eyes were going blurred from staring at descriptions and dates, and his mind was starting to drift.

Cooper could see all the people he would have liked to protect becoming victims one after another — Cal and Stride, the Leaches, Owen Fox. Even Todd Weenink was his colleague and was owed some loyalty. So was Cooper himself the Jonah, the curse they had in common?

He searched his heart and instincts for the source of the problem. He knew it must be within himself. Was it a weakness to see people like Warren Leach as victims, just as much as the Jenny Westons and Ros Daniels and Maggie Crews were? And Owen Fox? And Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington? Or had he just not realized who it was he should be protecting these people against? But then Diane Fry had tried, too.

He knew Fry didn’t see things the way he did. There was a clearer perception of black and white in the way she saw the world. It must be a huge advantage not to have the complication of always seeing both sides of the story. But then Fry had tried, too. She had tried to protect Cal and Stride against the vigilantes, and she had failed.

Cooper paused, and went over that again. There was something wrong with his thought processes. He got to the end of the thought, and realized what it was. Diane Fry — failed? This was the woman who didn’t know what failure was. No matter what the circumstances of her life, she had risen above them, consumed by a determination to succeed. And succeed was exactly what she had done, so far. This woman was a fourth dan black belt, as tough as they came, and as ruthless. Surely she was capable of tackling more than one assailant, even in the dark. She could certainly have deterred an untrained and probably thoroughly scared group of amateurs. So would Fry really have failed to prevent the worst of the assault on the two travellers?

He turned over some more reports. Then he put his head in his hands, staring at a photo of Wayne Sugden.

Cooper knew it was his father who had made him try too hard. And he was still doing it, from the grave; Cooper was forever trying to live up to his expectations, and he would be doing it long after everyone else had forgotten him.

But things had changed since his father’s day. These days, things weren’t so clear cut. There no longer seemed to be the villains and the innocent members of the public, the black and the white, the good and the evil, with the police protecting the one against the other. These days there were only shades of grey, when everyone was classed as a victim, and evil no longer officially existed. As often as not, the law seemed to be a weapon to be used against the police, not by them. Was there still something called justice out there? Was it something that Sergeant Joe Cooper would recognize? Would he think that his son was doing his best to pursue justice? Or would he have growled: ‘Do better, lad.’

Cooper heard the door open and a step approached his desk. There was a familiar exasperated sigh close to his left ear.

‘Still tilting at windmills, Sir Galahad?’

‘Don Quixote,’ muttered Cooper without looking up.

‘You read too much,’ said Fry. ‘It’s addled your brains.’

Cooper sat back and looked at her. She seemed as tired as he felt himself. Her face was drawn, and there were blue patches under her eyes.

‘How’s it going down there?’ he said.

‘With your friend the Ranger? Badly. They’ve bailed him.’

‘Really? I thought there was some forensic evidence. Cigarette ends — ’

‘Unfortunately, there are no traces of Fox. The saliva samples from the cigarettes don’t match. And Fox’s colleagues confirm he has never smoked. They weren’t his fag ends.’

Cooper tried not to show how relieved he was. But he suspected Fry knew his thoughts anyway.

‘Anything on Leach?’ he said.

Fry shook her head. ‘Not yet. Maybe it’ll all come down to you and your instincts, and we’ll find that Ben Cooper is right and everybody else is wrong. Because you seem to take the opposite view every time these days. You even want to defend Warren Leach, for God’s sake. How can you do that?’

‘You have to look at what makes people do things. Their actions don’t exist in isolation.’

‘You should have been a social worker, not a copper.’

‘You’ve got more against social workers than most people do, haven’t you?’

Cooper looked up and noticed the expression on her face. Too late, he knew he shouldn’t have said that about social workers. He knew perfectly well that Fry and her sister had been taken into care after allegations of sexual abuse by their parents, and the sister had run away and become a heroin addict. Why Fry had shared those things with him, Cooper didn’t know. There was so much about her that he didn’t understand.

Now, he waited in shame and embarrassment for her to rip into him. But she didn’t do that. Her brief spasm of rage was brought under control.

‘Do you care nothing about your own career any more, Ben? Because the way you’re heading, you’re risking everything. Do you know that?’ She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? You’re never going to forgive or forget that I got the promotion. You thought you had a divine right to it, just because you’ve been in the area for ever and your balls are made of limestone or something. And now you’re going to sacrifice yourself for some self-righteous idea that you’ll probably call justice, just to prove that you don’t care about the job, that you never really had any ambition after all. Well, go on, then — enjoy your martyrdom.’

After she had slammed the door behind her, Cooper read a few of the memos that were in his tray, but without taking in what they said. He made some notes on an assault case that was waiting to go to court. He looked through his drawers and found a half-eaten packet of Polo mints. He ate a mint. Then he ate another. And then he began to wonder what Owen Fox was doing now, back at Cargreave.

Owen was a man whose life and background had not stood up to close investigation. Whose life could? He had heard Owen described as a good man; but what did that mean? Was it a person who had never made a mistake? The papers would call Owen a sex beast, if they got the chance. But he wasn’t an animal, just a man whose circumstances had left him with a weakness. His fallibility had contributed to an evil in the world, it was true. But there were so many evils — too many to count, even in Edendale. And being weak didn’t make Owen Fox a monster; it only made him human.

Cooper knew that he had failed to help Cal and Stride, and he had failed to prevent the tragedy that had destroyed the Leach family. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him to help Owen Fox. But there would be a price to pay, if he tried. He was aware that he was walking a fine line already; his loyalties were under question, and not just by Diane Fry. It was vital that he stayed away from Owen Fox. There would be plenty of people ready to throw stones after all this, and it would be madness for Ben Cooper to put himself deliberately in the line of fire. Absolute madness.