Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

Cooper looked at Diane Fry. She was too thin, and the wound on her cheek had turned red and did nothing for her looks. She was arrogant and infuriating, too. But sometimes she seemed to know what was right.

‘Maggie Crew left her cigarette ends there,’ he said. ‘But Mark Roper cleared them away.’

‘Another obsessive.’

‘All the time you spent with Maggie Crew, Diane. Did you not realize she smoked Marlboro?’

‘No.’

They began to walk towards the stone circle. Their feet crunched through the leaves as if they were walking through three inches of fresh snow. Cooper walked slowly, to let Fry keep up. But at the edge of the clearing around the Virgins, he stopped.

‘Diane — ’

‘Yes?’

‘The transfer. It’s all fallen through, has it?’

‘Looks like it. But another job will come up.’

‘Sure. Welcome back, anyway.’

‘ What? ’

‘I always thought you were one of the team, that’s all.’

Fry shook her head in total disbelief. ‘Ben, you are such a prat.’

That’s what Helen Milner had said to him too, though in different words. There was an awful lot of work for him to do if he was to stand a chance of rescuing any of his relationships.

Cooper pulled a lump of fungus from the trunk of a birch. It was one of the white, obscenely shaped ones, but now it was starting to darken and decay, releasing tiny, soft spores into the air.

‘Who was it you were looking for, Diane? In Sheffield?’

Fry jerked as if he had kicked her injured leg. ‘How the hell do you know about that? Is my private life public knowledge now? Why do you have to pry into things that don’t concern you?’

‘It’s my nature, I guess. I’m sorry.’

Fry sighed. ‘If you must know, it was my sister,’ she said.

‘Your sister? The heroin addict? But I thought you hadn’t seen her for years.’

‘Sheffield was where her friends said she’d gone when she disappeared.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Why the hell do you think I came here? Did you think I wanted to live in sheep-shagger country? This was the closest posting I could get to Sheffield.’

Cooper nodded, not wanting to argue just now. ‘And have you found her?’

Fry grimaced. ‘I don’t think Angie is there. I’m looking in the wrong places. Angie would never let herself get to the same state as those people I saw. She is my sister, after all.’

The clouds had closed down on the horizon and settled on the high tops to the north, where visibility would be pretty well zero, so close that you would be lucky to get a glimpse of your own boots in the heather. Cooper held the fungus gingerly towards Fry. She barely glanced at it, as if used to his peculiarities now. But she wrinkled her nose and turned her face away. Then he threw the fungus into the heather and wiped his fingers on a tissue. He was right — her sense of smell was perfectly good enough to detect cigarette smoke.

‘Have you heard of Eden Valley Enquiries?’ he said.

‘A firm of second-rate enquiry agents? Divorces and process-serving, that sort of thing. I think they have an office in one of those small business centres on Meadow Road.’

‘That’s right. Discreet confidential enquiries. No questions asked. I rang them the other day.’

‘Yeah? Looking for a new job, are you? Thinking of joining the private detective business?’

Cooper shook his head. ‘No. I was thinking of trying to sell them some soffits.’

Fry stared at him. ‘Ben, have you completely flipped?’

‘It was something we found at Maggie Crew’s place. It had the name “Eve” and a phone number. We thought it was some friend of hers. Only it wasn’t Eve, a person; it was EVE, in capitals. It stands for Eden Valley Enquiries.’

‘Yes? Is there a point?’

‘Well, there were some other details, a sort of journal.’

They had almost reached the Nine Virgins. The tape had gone now, and the public had been allowed back into the stone circle. Someone had laid a bunch of flowers against the base of one of the stones, where Jenny Weston had died.

Cooper took his notebook from his pocket. ‘Do you want to hear it?’ he said.

‘If it will make you feel better.’

‘It says: “Left place of residence in Grosvenor Avenue 21.10, travelled by car to Sheffield. Parked in multistorey car park in The Moor and proceeded on foot to railway arches near junction of Shrewsbury Road and Dixon Street.’ Cooper paused. ‘There’s a lot more. Do you want to hear it?’

‘No.’

‘It goes into quite some detail, on two separate occasions. And it ends with an unfortunate incident involving a confrontation with one of their operatives.’

‘So Maggie had me followed.’

‘The name of the subject isn’t actually mentioned,’ Cooper pointed out.

‘But why would she do that?’

Automatically, Cooper counted the stones. Some legends said that you could never count the Virgins, because they always moved before you got to the last one. But today there were definitely nine. Nine, plus the stone that stood away from the rest, on its own. The Fiddler.

‘It was how she traced Jenny Weston,’ he said. ‘EVE located Jenny’s home in Totley for her. Then they had an operative track Jenny’s movements — he was seen by at least two of the neighbours. He followed her, and recorded her habits. Unfortunately, Jenny made the mistake of going to the same place too often.’

‘Here. Ringham Moor.’

Cooper nodded. ‘So Maggie knew exactly where she would be going that day, and she set off to meet her on the moor.’

‘But surely it must have occurred to Eden Valley Enquiries after Jenny was killed — ’

He shrugged. ‘Discreet and confidential. No questions asked.’

‘Jesus. I’d string them up and break every bone in their bodies.’

‘You did a decent job on one of their operatives, by all accounts. For someone with an injured leg.’

Diane Fry recalled the memories that Maggie Crew had eventually produced for her tape. She had thought at the time they seemed confused, a mingling of more than one memory dredged from the depths of her mind. Now it occurred to her that Maggie might have been producing them solely to please her interviewer. At the next meeting, perhaps, she would have reached the critical moment, a shared trauma that would have bonded them permanently. She would have told of the rape twenty years ago — the rape that had left her pregnant with a female child that she hadn’t wanted. Unlike Fry, Maggie’s beliefs hadn’t allowed her to take the abortion option. But Fry hadn’t let her reach that point. She hadn’t needed Maggie Crew any more, or so she had thought.

‘Diane,’ said Cooper, ‘what’s the secret of keeping your memories buried?’

Fry looked up. ‘Avoiding those triggers, I suppose. The ones that set off the memories. The only way is to avoid them.’

‘Maybe.’

Fry studied at him carefully. ‘Had you something particular in mind, Ben?’

‘I’m going to move out of Bridge End Farm, I think.’

‘Oh.’

‘I need to get away from the place. There are too many reminders of the past for me to be comfortable there any more.’

‘But your family are there.’

‘I can visit them. But there comes a time when you have to be on your own. I think it’s come rather late in my case. Anyway, I don’t think Matt and Kate will be sorry to see me move out. They must think I’m in the way, but they’re too polite to say so.’

‘Where will you go?’

For a fleeting moment, Fry had a picture of Ben Cooper living in one of the little flats in the house on Grosvenor Avenue, a flat next to her own.

‘Oh, I expect I’ll find somewhere.’