Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

But this was the second attack on a woman in a small area, and this victim was dead. Panic would be setting in at higher levels, and those being kicked by the chiefs would soon be kicking the dog.

Though he knew Ringham Moor well, Ben Cooper found the area around the Nine Virgins disturbed him in a way it had never done before. The atmosphere was all wrong. There was nothing dark and claustrophobic about this murder scene, unlike so many others he had come across. Very often a killing occurred within a close relationship, usually within the confines of a family, where emotions ran high and someone was finally driven to extremes. Here, though, the feeling he got was of space and timelessness, a place where everything ran to its natural sequence, just as it had done for thousands of years. Here, the slow dance of the seasons repeated itself endlessly on an almost empty stage as nature rolled from life to death and back to life again.

Cooper had learned to keep quiet about his thoughts at times. Most senior officers, like DCI Tailby, prided themselves on being practical, logical men. Tailby was from Nottingham, raised in suburban streets and comprehensive schools. He preferred to leave it to people like Ben Cooper to be imaginative — he seemed to regard it as some kind of local idiosyncrasy, a queer characteristic inherited from the distant Celtic ancestors of the Derbyshire hill folk.

Cooper watched his fellow officers. Some of them certainly looked as though they felt disorientated and isolated from the realities of the twenty-first century up here. As if to emphasize the point, the sound of a steam train starting up seemed to reach them from the valley below.

‘There’s the train,’ said Cooper.

‘What?’ said Tailby.

‘It’s the Peak Rail line. They run restored steam engines on it. For the tourists, you know.’

A white plume hung across the lights in the bottom of the valley, drifting with the breeze back towards Matlock and vanishing into the darkness as the chug of the engine receded.

Tailby spun on his heel. ‘Time to talk to the Rangers,’ he said.

‘We’ll need to get proper lights set up here, you know,’ said the Senior SOCO, ‘if you really want photos of that inscription.’

‘Believe me,’ said Tailby, ‘I want everything .’

The young Ranger looked vaguely familiar to Ben Cooper. But then, he knew lots of Ropers — one of them had been his Maths teacher at school, another ran the garage on Buxton Road; and he had once arrested a Roper for indecency. They were all certain to be related.

Mark was a tall young man, with wide shoulders that didn’t quite fit the rest of his body. His muscles had some catching up to do, but he was wiry and fit. Cooper noticed he had a small streak of vomit staining the front of his red Peak Park Rangers jacket. Somebody at the Partridge Cross Ranger Centre had made him several cups of tea. The tea had done nothing for his pallor, but at least his kidneys were working at full capacity. He emerged from the loo just as the police arrived.

Mark sat down unsteadily when DCI Tailby introduced himself and opened the questioning.

‘I was patrolling the moor,’ said Mark. ‘Ringham Moor. I was on the path from the east, going towards the Virgins.’

‘That’s the stone circle.’

‘It’s just one of the stone circles. But it’s the one that everybody knows.’

‘All right.’

‘I was near the Virgins when I saw a bike.’

‘Hold on. Before that, did you see anyone else on the moor?’

‘Nobody at all. It was quiet.’

‘Nobody? Think right back to when you first left the centre.’

Mark looked automatically towards the window. Cooper followed his gaze. A silver Land Rover with a thin red stripe was parked outside. Beyond the Ranger Service sign on its roof, the dark hump of the moor was still visible against a pale sky.

‘There was a man working in a field on this side of the moor, mending gates. I’ve seen him before. There was no one else.’

‘OK. Describe this bike,’ said Tailby.

Now Mark seemed to regain a bit more confidence. He produced a small notebook from the pocket of his fleece and turned the pages. But he spoke without looking at his notes. The scene was still fresh enough in his mind.

‘It was a yellow Dawes. I recognized it as one of the hire bikes. It had been chucked into the bottom of a gorse bush, in the middle of some birch trees. One of the wheels was off too. I thought somebody had hired it and had an accident and just left it. They do things like that.’

‘Who do?’

‘Well, you know — the visitors. Tourists. They just leave a bike somewhere and say it’s been stolen or they’ve lost it or something. You wouldn’t believe the lies some of them tell.’

‘Did you touch the bike?’

‘No.’

‘You’re quite sure about that, Mark?’

‘Yeah. I just looked for the number. Because I thought it was one of the hire bikes. And it was, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it was.’ Cooper could hear the gratification in the DCI’s voice. The fact it was a hire bike had made it so much easier to identify the victim. She had been obliged to leave her full name and address and proof of identity at the cycle hire centre when she took the bike out earlier that afternoon. So they had already established that her name was Jenny Weston, that she was thirty years old and divorced. She worked as a customer service manager in a large insurance office in Sheffield, and had taken a week’s holiday because she had several days’ leave to get in before the end of the year. By now, her parents had already been contacted, and her father was on his way to identify the body formally. If only it were always so easy.

‘Then I saw something lying in the middle of the Virgins,’ said Mark. ‘I went to have a look. Although — ’

‘Yes?’

‘Well. . I could already see what it was. I could tell, from a few yards away, from where I found the bike. It was a woman. And she was dead.’

Mark moved his hands restlessly, brushing the front of his fleece. Cooper thought at first that he was trying to rub off the vomit stain, but realized he was wrong. The young Ranger was stroking the badge stitched to the fabric, fondling as if it were the breast of a lover, tracing the silver letters and the stylized millstone symbol of the Peak Park.

‘Did you notice anything about the body?’ asked Tailby.

Mark hesitated. ‘Only that she was, you know. .’ His hands made half-hearted gestures. ‘Her clothes. .’

‘You mean her clothes had been interfered with?’

Mark nodded.

‘And did you notice anything else nearby? Anything unusual or out of place?’

‘No.’

‘So how close did you get to the body, Mark?’

‘I walked as far as the nearest stone. The flat one. I didn’t have to go any closer.’

‘You were quite sure she was dead?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mark. ‘Oh yes.’

Mark suddenly went a shade whiter. His hand went over his mouth, and he made a dash for the loo. A second later, the police officers heard the sound of vomiting.

DCI Tailby sat for a moment longer, as if still listening for elusive bits of information in the Ranger’s retching.

‘Cooper, find that Area Ranger,’ he said. ‘He knows the lie of the land round here, if anybody does. Tell him we need to arrange proper access to the moor. We need the owner of the land or whoever. And we need to get into that quarry, too. Get on to it.’

Ben Cooper found the Area Ranger waiting by his silver Land Rover outside the briefing centre. Owen Fox was in his early fifties, with grey hair and a thick beard that was going the same way. He was a comfortable badger of a man, with an even more comfortable smell of wool and earth.