Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

‘“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour,”’ he said.

The Ranger stared at him, puzzled. ‘Just because I had that stuff on the computer, it doesn’t mean I’d do anything to children, you know. I want to tell people that, but they won’t listen. On the way here, I passed a man that I’ve known all my life. He came to Mum’s funeral. Today, he crossed the road to avoid me; when I got past, he spat on the pavement.’

The flock of starlings in the yew trees fell suddenly quiet. Cooper glanced nervously at the churchyard. For the third time in a week, he found himself worrying that someone might see him where he shouldn’t be. There were several routes he could take to get into big trouble, and he was following them all simultaneously.

He couldn’t help wondering what his father would have done. Would he have followed the path he thought to be right, and tried to achieve justice? Or would he have stuck to the rules? Cooper wished he could get a message from him somehow. But he was in the wrong place for that — Joe Cooper had never believed in a God bigger than himself.

‘That woman you were accused of assaulting ten years ago. .’

‘It was different,’ said Owen. ‘Totally different.’

‘You can see why it might look similar.’

‘Not at all. That woman pursued me constantly. It was well known in the village that she wasn’t right in the head. She would never leave me alone. It was terrible. Despite everything I could do to avoid her, she managed to get me on my own one day at home. All I did was push her away to make her leave. But she fell on the steps outside the house and banged her head. That was it. That was all that happened. Of course, her version was quite different. The things she said afterwards. .’

Owen rubbed his fingers through his beard, so that the grey hair stuck out in odd directions. He tried to wipe away a trickle of sweat from his temple and left a dark smear instead.

‘Do people here in the village know about your conviction?’ asked Cooper. ‘You’ve lived here all your life, after all.’

‘Yes, they know. They knew all about it at the time, and they don’t forget.’

‘Yet nobody has said anything to us. Of all the calls that have come in to the incident room, no one from Cargreave has pointed out your history. If it hadn’t been for your name cropping up in the paedophile enquiry, it would never have come to light.’

Owen nodded. ‘It’s because I belong here. Those other people, on the internet, I meant nothing to them. I had no place there. And now look what I’ve done to my life in Cargreave. I’ve been on the parish council for fifteen years. But the chairman left a message on my answerphone last night and said the most appalling things. Mary Salt used to be one of Mum’s patients. Mum delivered both her children. I can never look Mary Salt in the eye again. I’ve just put my resignation through her letter box.’

Cooper began to feel as if he were standing at the front door of someone’s house, searching fruitlessly for the right words to break the bad news when a family had lost a loved one — a father killed in a car crash, a teenager dead of an ecstasy overdose, a young girl snatched and dumped dead by the roadside. After a while, you learned there were no right words. You just did it, got it over with, and tried to keep up the barriers against the emotions you were bombarded with.

People wanted you to play God. They wanted you to bring the husband or daughter back to life somehow. In training, you were told how relatives might react, but not how you were going to react yourself. You weren’t trained in dealing with your own feelings. And those emotions didn’t come from a bottomless well. Every time you drained the emotional reserves, it took a bit longer to refill. Cooper had started to worry that eventually it wouldn’t refill at all. One day that well might prove to be dry, and instead of normal feelings, all he would touch would be a dry, cracked surface, barren and stinking, like the sides of Ladybower Reservoir after a hot summer.

‘I don’t understand, Owen. Did you never have a girlfriend?’ said Cooper.

The Ranger shook his head. ‘It’s old fashioned, I suppose.’

Old fashioned? Cooper didn’t comment on the understatement. Most people these days would find it incomprehensible. Perversely, he knew, this would be another thing that Owen would find held against him.

‘I was always awkward and shy as a teenager,’ said Owen. ‘I never developed the knack of forming relationships.’

‘And when there was just you and your mother? Surely it wasn’t too late?’

For answer, Owen stared at the Ten Commandments. Cooper tried to follow the direction of his gaze. Which commandment riveted his attention, and what thoughts had his question provoked that made Owen look so amazed and appalled at the way his life had turned out?

Cooper looked down the list, until he arrived at the right line. Owen was right to be amazed, if that was what he was thinking. He was looking at number seven: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’

‘I had to do everything for her, in the later stages,’ said Owen. ‘I had to get her up, wash her and dress her, take her to the toilet, wipe her, feed her, clean her teeth, then undress her and put her to bed again. What marriage involves that kind of intimacy between a man and a woman?’

Owen had begun to cry; the tears crawled over his skin like tiny slugs, slow and painful. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m just glad she isn’t here now.’

Cooper looked away. He looked at the headstones in the graveyard, the yew trees and leaf-covered paths; he studied the village street, where a delivery van was parked outside the butcher’s shop, and he looked at the shadowed windows of the white house on the corner.

‘Owen?’ he said. ‘Shall I fetch that key for you?’

The interior of the church smelled of stone flagged floors that had recently been mopped clean. The light came from high in the walls, fragmented by the stained glass windows in a way that reminded Cooper of the cattle market at Edendale. The wooden pews were lined up just like narrow holding pens for worshippers waiting to be herded into the afterlife. He half-expected to see Abel Pilkington up there in the pulpit in his black suit, shouting out the prices, knocking down lost souls to the highest bidder.

‘You have to appreciate they’re treating this child pornography enquiry very seriously,’ said Cooper. ‘There was a little girl who ended up dead at the hands of two of these men. There may have been more we don’t know about.’

Owen nodded. ‘Of course, I regret what I’ve done. Somehow, I didn’t think of it as involving anyone else. I was still in my own private world, where it had always been just me and Mum, but now it was just me. And somehow — it was strange. .’ Owen screwed his face up in an effort to explain the inexplicable. ‘But sometimes those little girls, Ben. . I thought of them as if they were my mother. My own mother, as a child.’

Cooper lowered his eyes. There was nothing he could say, no platitudes that slipped into his mouth to meet the situation. His mind balked at being drawn into the dangerous, aberrant ideas that had appeared suddenly in front of him, like treacherous bogs across his path.

He felt guilty for stopping Owen. Being able to talk to someone would help him. But Cooper shouldn’t be talking to him about it at all. At any moment, Owen might make some damaging admission, and they would both be in an impossible position.

‘The cigarette stubs,’ said Cooper.

‘They’ve already asked me about those. Why do they matter?’

‘They matter because one was found under the body of Ros Daniels, as well as near where Jenny Weston was killed. You know that. We think the killer smoked those cigarettes and dropped them — the one careless thing he did. And the one they found in the bin at Partridge Cross was identical.’