Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

‘I think you’re over-reacting.’

‘No kidding? You were never one for over-reacting, were you, Ben? Take the shit and don’t complain, eh? Well, that’s a good boy. The management will love you. Maybe you’ll still be here putting in your thirty years for your pension when the rest of us have got out to start earning a clean living. Maybe you’ll still be stacking up the paperwork and processing the same old scumbags in and out of the custody suite while we’re all working as security guards in Woolworth’s or as private enquiry agents for that Eden Valley firm, doing nice little divorce cases. That’s if you last that long. But my bet is they’ll get to you in the end, too. Even you, Ben.’

Cooper found himself staring at May’s hair. She smiled, and flushed a deeper pink. Her boyfriend, Frank, stuck his head round the kitchen door and eyed her suspiciously. He was wiry and black-haired, with a moustache and a dark stubble. He looked typically Italian, but he was a scrap merchant from Macclesfield.

‘I know which case it was,’ said Cooper.

‘OK,’ said Weenink. ‘So you figured it out. Go to the top of the class. Yes, it was the break-in at that little retirement cottage at Ashford. The Westons’ place.’

‘Wayne Sugden.’

‘Sorting Sugden out was easy,’ said Weenink. ‘There were some cotton fibres from an armchair that were the clincher. I sat in the chair myself when I went round to the cottage, and I noticed how easy the fibres came off. I had an informant who agreed he might have seen Sugden — and bingo. And he had a handy little motive, too — that business of old Weston’s with the nephew.’

Cooper could hear the tea hissing in the urn and the wet rattle of Frank clearing his throat in the kitchen. May was humming behind the counter, the same snatch of ‘Nessun Dorma’ over and over again. He looked at Todd Weenink, but Weenink stared out of the window, as if his attention had been taken by a passing lorry. Cooper knew that his colleagues weren’t angels. Every one of them was human, prone to emotions and acts of folly. He had known officers driven to the most appalling stupidities by anger or fear, or by some desperation in their lives that undermined their self-control. But this was too cold, too calculated.

‘If they’re guilty, Ben,’ said Weenink, ‘what does it matter?’

Cooper knew why it mattered. It mattered because the likes of Wayne Sugden were likely to focus their grievances not on the police, but on the people who testified against them. In this case, Sugden’s grievance had focused on the key-holder for that cottage at Ashford, who had listed the damage that Wayne said he had never done. If he needed a motive after the death of his nephew, Sugden’s resentment would have had an obvious target.

‘And Jenny Weston?’ he said. ‘How did she come into it?’

‘The fact is, I fancied Jenny something rotten right from the start, as soon as I clapped eyes on her at that cottage. I thought I’d be all right there. But she seemed to need a bit of encouragement, you know. She was a bit uptight about the burglary, about what her parents would say when they got back. She kept on about it ruining their holiday, so I reckoned what she needed was reassurance. A quick arrest.’ Weenink winked. ‘A hero on a white horse. It works a treat.’

‘How long did that last?’

‘Last? It never lasts. We had a few nights, that was all. We used the cottage, so her neighbours at Totley didn’t see me. It was a bit of fun. She wasn’t interested in anything else.’

‘In this day and age, don’t you know any better?’ said Cooper.

Weenink scowled. ‘You’re not going to lecture me about AIDS and all that stuff, are you? You only live once, mate, and you’ve to take it when you can get it. If I die young, so what? Nobody will exactly be breaking their hearts, and at least I’ll have had a good time.’

‘So you didn’t see Jenny Weston after that?’

‘No, I didn’t. Like I said, it was just a quick in and out for her. Scratching an itch. She was quite honest about it. Besides. . well, she wasn’t entirely walking the line, you know.’

‘What?’

‘She wasn’t a hundred per cent kosher. She had a leg either side of the fence. She swung both ways, Ben.’

‘Todd, are you telling me Jenny Weston was bisexual?’

‘That’s what they call it when you’ve been to college, I guess.’

‘Are you absolutely sure?’

Weenink stared at the muddy remains of his coffee. ‘To tell the truth, I reckon she was bored with blokes already by then. Doing it with me, it was kind of a last try sort of thing. “Never done it with a copper before — it might be different.” I was a bit surprised at first; I thought she was good for a few more nights. But then I realized why she had dumped me so quick — it was because she’d already got herself a girlfriend. That was a bit of a blow to the old pride for a while, I must admit.’

Cooper stared at Weenink. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Ben, I made it my business to know.’

‘Do you mean to say that Ros Daniels was Jenny’s lover after all?’

‘I never heard Jenny mention her. But it’s pretty damn certain, I reckon.’

‘Todd, you’ve got to say something.’

‘You must be joking. My mouth is shut tight.’

Weenink turned his stare on Cooper. But for once there was something missing in the stare; there was a shadow in his eyes, a doubt that dissipated the menace and exposed a naked appeal that contradicted the tone of his voice.

‘And what about you, Ben?’ he said. ‘Going to throw me to the lions, or what?’

Cooper’s eyes were drawn back to May. She straightened her dress and patted that strange, pale hair whose colour he couldn’t name. Frank had emerged from the kitchen and was wiping a knife on his apron as he studied the two police officers. Cooper knew he would have to report what had been said. Surely Todd Weenink would understand that. But where did that leave the concept of loyalty to a colleague? Or the reluctance in his heart to see one more person destroyed?

In a flash of insight, he had the answer. May’s hair was the colour of pasta.

Back at the station, Ben Cooper managed to find Diane Fry in the CID room.

‘Some proper arrests at last, then,’ said Fry, rubbing her hands. ‘We should have done it before.’

‘Diane, have you looked at the file on the burglary at the Westons’ cottage?’

‘Of course. It was a fairly routine case.’

Cooper knew she was right. The crime report was adequate, nothing startling, though it had generated the usual morass of paperwork. It wasn’t surprising that senior officers couldn’t be bothered wading through it all. The important thing was that the enquiry had been successful, and a conviction had resulted. Wayne Sugden had a record of similar offences, and even the Edendale magistrates had finally lost patience and given him a twelve-month sentence. The difference was that Sugden had pleaded not guilty to this one.

‘The evidence was fairly conclusive,’ said Fry. ‘Even the CPS were perfectly happy with the case. He had the video recorder in his possession at his flat. That was careless.’

‘He claimed he’d bought it in a pub car park,’ said Cooper, his memory of the details perfectly clear. ‘He seemed to expect a receiving charge. He still insists he didn’t nick the video himself.’

‘Videos are among his favourite items, according to his PNC record. And cotton fibres found on his jacket matched the cover of an armchair in the cottage.’

Cooper noticed that Fry’s recollection of the details was good, too, though it was much longer since she had seen the file.

‘The video was on a stand next to one of the armchairs in the Weston house,’ she said. ‘The evidence indicated that Sugden had sat or kneeled on the chair, presumably while disconnecting the video from the telly.’