Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

There was no answer at the cottage in Cargreave. Ben Cooper stood on the bottom step, his feet crunching shards of broken clay pot and lumps of soil tangled with roots. All the plant pots on the steps had been smashed and the plants uprooted. Now they lay in a wet mess of soil. The bottom step had also been used as a toilet, almost as if the entire village had stood and urinated on to the doorstep. Urinated and worse. The smell was appalling.

All the curtains were drawn on this side of the house. Cooper walked a few yards along the road until he found a ginnel that ran between the cottages, with steep steps at the bottom where gates led into adjacent gardens. He clambered over a wall into the field and walked along it until he reached the back garden of Owen Fox’s cottage and forced his way through an overgrown hawthorn hedge. A woman stared at him from a first-floor window next door, then turned away.

Cooper peered through the windows, remembering the gloom of the little room at the front of the house where Owen’s computer had stood among the old newspapers and magazines. He banged on the back door, knocked on the windows, watching for a hint of movement inside. Nothing. Feeling foolish, he shouted Owen’s name. There was no reply. So where else could he be? They had taken the Land Rover off him when he was suspended, and Owen wasn’t the type to be drowning his sorrows in the pub. He would want to be somewhere quiet, where he could think about things.

Cooper found himself looking up at the bedroom window. The line of bereavement cards still stood there, mostly white and silver, fading in the sun. They were decorated with all the symbols of religion — crosses and stained glass windows depicting the Virgin Mary. They were the usual things on bereavement cards, often meaning nothing. But, of course, Mrs Fox had believed in religion. Owen had said so himself. He had taken her to the village church until she became bedridden. And the old lady could see the tower of the church from her bedroom window.

The graveyard at Cargreave parish church was full of local names — Gregory, Twigg and Woodward; Pidcock, Rowland and Marsden. There were lots of Shimwells and Bradleys here, and someone called Cornelius Roper — an ancestor of Mark’s, perhaps? One of the most recent headstones was down at the bottom of the graveyard, in one of the last available plots. Annie Fox, aged ninety, beloved mother of Owen.

Even in the dusk and from the far side of the churchyard, Ben Cooper could see the red of the Ranger’s jacket in the porch. He walked up the path. Inside the porch, Owen Fox was dwarfed by a slate slab, eight feet tall, bearing the Ten Commandments. Cooper sat down next to him on a narrow stone seat.

‘It’s locked, Ben,’ said Owen. ‘The church is locked.’

‘Too much trouble with thieves and vandals, I suppose.’

‘After she was gone, I didn’t think I needed the church any more,’ said Owen.

‘Your mother?’

‘We always used to come on a Sunday when she was well enough. After she died, I didn’t think I needed it any more. Then suddenly today I thought I did, after all. But it’s locked.’

Dozens of starlings were flocking in the churchyard, chattering to each other as they rustled from one yew tree to the next, deciding on a place to roost for the night.

‘Look, it might be a good idea if you stayed at home for a while, Owen,’ said Cooper. ‘Watch the telly, read a book, mow the lawn, feed the cats. Anything. Go home.’

‘I can’t.’ Owen scowled across the churchyard at the valley and the opposite hill. ‘Not knowing your lot have been through the house and pawed over my life. It doesn’t feel like my home any more. It’s a place where I’m a pervert, a sicko, the lowest of the low. But not outside the house. Outside, I’m someone else entirely.’

Cooper looked at the notices pinned to a board inside a glass case next to the slate slab.

‘According to this, you can get the key from the churchwarden at 2 Rectory Lane. The white house across the churchyard, it says.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Owen.

‘It’s just over there, look.’

‘Yes, I know.’

Cooper looked at the house, studying its curtained windows and tall chimneys. There was smoke coming from one of the chimneys, and it looked as though there was somebody at home.

‘In this village, the churchwarden is also the chairman of the parish council,’ said Owen. ‘Councillor Salt. She knows me well enough.’

Then Owen changed the subject. It might have been the subject that had been running through his mind all along, whatever the words he had been speaking. It all spilled out as if Cooper had suddenly tuned in halfway through a conversation.

‘I looked after Mum for so many years, you know,’ said Owen. ‘We were more than mother and son. We were a team. Do you know what I mean? It was like a marriage, in a way. I looked after her, and she looked after me — or she liked to think she did. She used to drag herself out of bed to get a meal ready for me when I came home. I would find her sitting on the kitchen floor, with the cutlery tipped out of the drawer and a pile of unwashed potatoes. And she would be apologizing for dinner being late.’

Owen’s voice cracked. Cooper looked away, over his head, to avoid seeing his expression, waiting while he recovered. He felt like a voyeur suddenly faced with something far more personal and intimate than he had expected.

‘Her mind was fine, but her body was long past being able to keep up with her,’ said Owen. ‘I think that’s the saddest thing of all, don’t you? It meant she knew exactly what was happening to her. It was a long drawn-out torture.’

‘How long did you live together, just the two of you?’

‘Thirty years.’

‘Thirty years? Owen, you must have been — ?’

‘Since I was twenty-three.’

‘Well, you’re right about a marriage. Except that not many couples stay together so long these days.’

Owen nodded. ‘We depended on each other. That’s the difference, isn’t it? You stay together when you need each other. Most of the couples I see, they don’t really need each other — not after the sex thing is done with and the kids have grown up. Sixteen years at most, and the reasons for their marriage have gone. There’s no real tie to keep them from drifting apart. No ties like there are with a parent. Real blood ties.’

‘But never to have your own life, Owen. .’

‘You still don’t really understand. Mum was my life. Oh, I had the job. I’ve always loved being a Ranger, and I wouldn’t have done anything else. But I’ve never really had friends — plenty of acquaintances, but no friends. And I was never going anywhere else, because I was needed right here, in Cargreave. I had a purpose. Until she died.’

‘That must have left a big hole in your life,’ said Cooper, aware of how inadequate the words were. He had an inkling of what it must have meant to Owen — not just to lose a part of your life, but to lose its entire purpose. It made him think of Warren Leach, who had come to the same point himself, in his own way, but had chosen a different method of dealing with it. Owen had followed a different path — less violent, perhaps, but just as destructive.

Cooper ran his eye over the ornate writing on the stone slab. The old-fashioned letters were difficult to read, full of curlicues and elegant swirls, not like the nice, plain print of a newspaper headline. The effects of the weather and the rubbing of many hands had worn the inscriptions down so much over the centuries that they had almost been lost entirely. The Commandments were so difficult to see that they were easy to ignore, too empty of significance to draw meaning from any more. Cooper traced the wording of number nine, taking his time, almost reluctant to get to the end of the sentence.