Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

Fry nodded. The vision had passed instantly. Cooper just wouldn’t fit in among the peeling wallpaper and the grubby carpets.

At present, there were no cattle in the fields at Ringham Edge Farm. The implement sheds had been emptied, the barns cleared, the milking parlour dismantled. Three days ago, the last traces of the work of generations had been laid out in the paddock behind the house and sold off at knock-down prices to the highest bidder. Farmers had come to pick over the pieces — not to buy anything, necessarily, but to see what fragments of a life were left when a man went the way that Warren Leach had gone, and to wonder whose turn it might be next. The two boys, Will and Dougie, had gone back to their mother, and Social Services had found them a new home in the suburbs of Derby. They might never live in the countryside again.

Ben Cooper sensed Fry’s change of mood with some apprehension. He crouched to examine the flowers, which were covered in cellophane and had been tied to one of the stones with string. The writing on the card was faint, but he could see it was from Jenny Weston’s parents. Fry stood outside the circle and watched him.

‘So, Ben,’ she said, ‘if someone came along here after Maggie Crew and before Simon Bevington, who was it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘We always thought it must have been someone Jenny trusted, didn’t we?’

‘Another woman seemed a possibility.’

‘Or a Ranger.’

‘Yes, Diane. But it wasn’t a Ranger.’

‘Are we quite sure? Jenny let somebody get too close to her. She would recognize the Ranger’s jacket and feel secure. She would trust a Ranger.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘No.’

Fry seemed to have something squeezed up inside her that was causing her discomfort and had to be released.

‘You know when I was here,’ she said, ‘that night in the quarry with Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington? We’ll never be able to prove who all of those people were.’

‘Not a hope.’

‘But one of them was familiar. The one who attacked me. For a moment, I thought I knew who that was. But unlike you, Ben, I don’t believe in relying on feelings, only on hard evidence. It makes life a lot simpler, sometimes.’

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say,’ said Cooper.

Fry hesitated. Then, uncharacteristically, she seemed to wander off at a tangent again ‘The person who approached Jenny Weston might have been a Ranger, because she would trust him. .’

‘But it wasn’t a Ranger,’ repeated Cooper.

‘. . and she would trust a police officer too,’ said Fry.

Cooper stared at her. ‘If the police officer was in uniform, of course,’ he said. But as he said it, he knew it sounded more like a question than a statement.

Fry met his eye for a moment, and he held his breath. He had a sudden fear that he understood her. Was it possible that he and Diane Fry might be close to the same, inevitable conclusion? The thought made Cooper shiver at a premonition of disaster, at a vision of a dark, grinning cloud hovering over his horizon. He could hear the wind in the heather and the rumble of machinery in the limestone quarry outside Cargreave. The sound of the cows munching the grass in the fields below the Virgins seemed very loud.

Uneasily, he watched Fry square her shoulders and push the collar of her jacket further up around her ears. She was staring at the stone circle without seeing it at all — neither the cold reality of its lumps of gritstone, nor the martyred maidens of local folklore.

‘The psychiatric reports said that Maggie Crew would probably never regain her memory for several hours either side of the assault, which is normal in trauma cases,’ she said. ‘Those files were readily available. If you knew that little detail, you might not worry too much about Maggie. Jenny Weston, on the other hand, knew all about Ringham Edge Farm and what went on there. It was Jenny who told the RSPCA what she had seen. Jenny had the photographs, too. She could identify people.’

‘Right.’

‘You’d think Jenny would have told the police, wouldn’t you? Even if it was only to ask advice from an officer she was friendly with.’

‘Maybe,’ said Cooper.

‘And yet there she was that afternoon, back on the moor, in the same vicinity. And she had those photographs with her — the ones she said she was going to hand over as evidence. Why did she have them with her, do you think?’

‘For safety?’

‘Safety? Or was she expecting to meet someone? Someone she could hand the photos to. And might that same someone have decided they couldn’t leave her alive any longer?’

‘But she was only ever a threat to the dog-fighting ring, no one else.’

‘Right. And did you not wonder why they were never raided, Ben?’

‘They stopped meeting at Ringham Edge,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes. Because they knew they were under observation. They knew exactly what was happening, all along.’

‘Did Teasdale say all this, Diane?’

‘Keith Teasdale is saying nothing more than necessary. The only person he’s prepared to implicate is Warren Leach. But we knew Leach was involved, anyway.’ She paused. ‘And, besides, Leach is already dead.’

‘So Teasdale is loyal, then,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes. But it’s a misplaced loyalty.’

Cooper felt Fry’s eyes on him, assessing him, seeing right through him to his innermost thoughts. Suddenly, there was contempt in her face, and her whole body seemed to draw away from him, as if she had seen something she could not bring herself to touch.

‘You’ve always been very big on loyalty yourself, haven’t you, Ben?’ she said.

The accusation made him think of the day of the rugby match, when Todd Weenink had arrived for the match at the last minute. What was it that had made him late the day that Jenny Weston had died?

Then Cooper’s mind slipped back to his room at Bridge End. In a drawer in that room was a vending machine questionnaire form, slipped under some large-scale OS maps and a Peak District caving guide that no one else would ever look at. Todd Weenink hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut about condoms. And he couldn’t spell ‘fruit-flavoured’ either.

But Jenny Weston’s killer was dead.

From South Quarry, the old VW Transporter had finally been winched on to the back of the low loader and delivered to a scrapyard in Edendale, where its radiator, back doors and starter motor had already been removed for spares.

Calvin Lawrence had taken a job as a forecourt attendant at the Fina garage on the Buxton Road, taking people’s money and handing out car-wash tokens. Simon Bevington had discharged himself from hospital and had not been heard of since. He had disappeared into the hills, blown away like a scrap of autumn debris, like another dead leaf hurled into the heather by the gales.

Yet a single wind chime still hung from the branches of the oak tree on the edge of the quarry. It had been left where it was because it was too high for anyone to reach. The chime was cracked and its edges were starting to fray. Its note was a strange, discordant clang. It no longer created peace and harmony. Instead, it tolled for the dead, the damaged, the destroyed and the defeated.

‘Was any of it worth it?’ said Cooper.

Fry laughed. ‘You what?’

‘Did we manage to protect anything that is important to us? Did we achieve justice?’

Fry gave him a cool look. It was the look of a woman who knew that she would forever have a weapon she could use against him, the look of a woman who held him in the palm of her hand.

‘Bear the answer to that in mind when you make your decision, Ben,’ she said.

Then she turned away. Her knowledge gave her power over him now, and there was nothing else she needed to say.