Dancing With the Virgins

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Is everything all right, Mrs Leach? No problems?’

  Yvonne Leach laughed, and then looked at him with astonishment. ‘What is it you want?’ she said.

  ‘We’re trying to trace the movements of the woman who was killed on the moor yesterday. We think she might have come this way.’

  ‘Oh?’ She ran her hand across her mouth again, and kept it there for a moment. To hide an inappropriate smile or some other expression; Cooper couldn’t tell. The woman’s eyes certainly weren’t smiling. He began to describe Jenny Weston. He showed Mrs Leach the photo. She took it in her hand and looked at it for a long time. When she handed it back, there was a smear of lipstick on the edge of the print.

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I never saw her.’

  ‘Did you see anybody else come by this way? Yesterday afternoon?’

  ‘People are always coming by. It’s a right of way, the track there. We take no notice of them, as long as they don’t bother us.’

  ‘It must have been fairly quiet yesterday, I suppose. Not many walkers.’

  ‘Yes. Quiet.’

  ‘I just thought, if it was so quiet, you might have noticed somebody more.’

  Yvonne Leach seemed to be losing interest, or was thinking about something else. ‘There was the other one, too. A few weeks ago.’

  ‘Yes. She was attacked near the Cat Stones, we think. Up by the tower somewhere.’

  ‘It was me that found her, you know. That time.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘She was in a terrible state. Who would do a thing like that?’

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t know.’

  ‘Is it the same man this time?’ she asked. And she covered her lips again. She used both hands this time, as if afraid her mouth was running out of control.

  ‘I’m afraid we just don’t know,’ said Cooper.

  He saw that she had rubbed at her mouth so much that the lipstick had been removed completely, except for a small smudge in one corner of her lip. He turned to walk away. But as he crossed the yard, Cooper looked back and saw Yvonne Leach fold her handkerchief and begin to dab anxiously at her mouth all over again.

  It was obvious the woman was in trouble, but what could he do? When he spoke to Warren Leach next, he could mention his wife’s condition, but he couldn’t hold out much hope that the man would listen. He could talk to the Social Services, and say he was concerned about the welfare of the two boys in the household. But he knew his concerns would be a low priority for them – they were overwhelmed with more urgent calls on their time. They were so stretched that they could only respond when something had already happened, when things had gone too far. They acted when it was already too late.

  But Ben Cooper understood that. It was what the police did, too.

  Diane Fry was relieved that Cooper was quiet for once. Privately, she had no doubt they were wasting their time. The leads would come from elsewhere than from wandering around the landscape. There had to be a link between Jenny Weston’s death and the previous assault – it was no more than half a mile away that Maggie Crew had been attacked among the boulders of the Cat Stones. Maggie and Jenny had been two women alone, unsuspecting. One was unable to describe her assailant; the second was dead. The worst scenario was that the victims had been chosen at random. Stranger murders meant no witness trail, and no motivation. The lack of relationship between victim and killer presented the investigator with a hopeless task.

  That was why they needed Maggie Crew. Some day, in some way, she would provide them with an identification. Her memories had to come back.

  At the top of the farm track, they met up with DCs Toni Gardner and Danny Boyle, who had been working their way backwards from the stone circle, via the Hammond Tower. They shook their heads at each other. A waste of time, they said. Then they walked back towards the Nine Virgins, where the group of uniformed officers guarded the taped-off scene.

  Fry looked at the stones in incomprehension. What was all the fuss about? She could think of lots of better places to come to at night, even if what you wanted to do was take off your clothes and light fires and smoke a bit of cannabis.

  ‘Kind of small for Stonehenge, isn’t it?’ she said. But Cooper didn’t rise to the bait.

  One stone had a flat top, and she found it was big enough to sit on comfortably. But then she remembered some of the traces that the SOCOs had collected from the stones and it occurred to her the flat stone had probably been used for other things than just sitting on. She looked around for Cooper again.

  ‘The Nine Virgins? You people round here really do have active imaginations, don’t you?’

  Still he didn’t respond. After a moment, they headed southwards, to where there was a view down on to Ringham Lees village. Swathes of leaves lined the path, and tiny quartz crystals glittered in the sand like fragments of glass. The birches rattled their dry leaves, and a pair of jays darted at each other among the trees. They could see there were members of the public on the moor now, lots of them. A small, fat man in a green bubble jacket stood by the side of the path and waited for them to draw level. He looked at Fry eagerly.

  ‘Where are her clothes?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Keep walking,’ said Cooper, without looking round.

  Fry wanted to question the little man, but she followed Cooper as he veered off and took a rabbit track across the heather. The rough stems of the plants grabbed at her ankles. At one spot there was an area a few square yards wide which had been burned off, leaving black, brittle stalks that crumbled underfoot and a layer of ash that was gradually being washed into the ground by the rain.

  ‘Hold on, Ben.’

  He stopped impatiently. ‘He’s just one of the local weirdos. You can spot them a mile off. Let the uniforms deal with him.’

  ‘I can’t believe people like that. They’re sick.’

  ‘Right. But he’s probably already in a Care in the Community scheme, or something.’

  ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘Care in the Community? Well, it’s a bit difficult to explain –’

  ‘No – that.’

  Fry was pointing at a fungus clinging to the bark of an oak tree. It was like nothing she had ever seen before. It was pale and bulbous, like a human organ that had been bleached or left out in the rain. She put her hand to it gingerly. It was firm to the touch at first, but gave under the pressure of her fingers like a fresh bread roll. White, not wholemeal. The fungus was dry on top, but cold and clammy underneath, and it moved slightly under her fingers.

  Then she noticed that there were lots more fungi on the ground, all different kinds. Some were dark and coiled like dog turds, but black and ragged at the edges, as if they had been half eaten. Other fungi were like stones, some like cups, some like human ears.

  Fry stared at them with revulsion. How anybody could visit this moor for pleasure she could not imagine. There was nothing to recommend it to anyone, except to the weirdos and the ghouls attracted by death and the bizarre.

  Ben Cooper set off again and managed to get ahead of Fry to reach the edge of the plateau, where it dropped away into the valley. He stood on the precipice and felt the wind catch his breath and freeze the lobes of his ears. He felt as though he could step off the edge and let the wind carry him away across the patchwork of fields and dry-stone walls.

  From his vantage point, Cooper could see the people on the moor winding their way in ones and twos through the heather and bracken. Yet the place still had a feeling of solitude and isolation, somewhere you could just be yourself, free of expectations. He understood what Jenny Weston had seen in the moor.

  ‘It’s so cold and bleak,’ said Fry, catching up with him. ‘What’s the name of that pub in Ringham where we can get lunch?’

  ‘The Druid,’ he said, brought suddenly to earth.

  ‘God, those Victorians. Romantic minds, they had. Anything more than a few years old had to be connected with Ancient Britons and Druids, didn’t i
t? In actual fact, most of these rocks were just dropped here by glaciers or something, and got worn into these shapes by the appalling weather you get up here.’

  ‘Well, I suppose so.’

  ‘You sound disappointed. A bit of a Victorian yourself, aren’t you, Ben? A romantic at heart?’

  ‘We can get down to the village by cutting through South Quarry.’

  ‘Fine.’

  After Fry had turned away to follow the path, Cooper shook his head in despair. It was such a small mistake for a woman like Jenny Weston to have made. Yet it had been the biggest mistake of her life. Why had she chosen to come up here at the beginning of November? It was one of the quietest times of the year, when even retired couples were putting away their walking boots, turning up the central heating and pulling the sofa closer to the TV to watch their holiday videos. And for some reason, Jenny had let the wrong person get close to her. There were so many mistakes. It seemed as though she had been heading directly on a course towards her own destruction.

  A few minutes later, Cooper slid down the last few feet of the slope into South Quarry, as Fry struggled behind him.

  ‘Hello. What’s this?’ he said.

  Unlike Top Quarry, these abandoned workings had been left with a level, sandy bottom, clear of debris. The entrance was open to the road, and sometimes cars parked in the first part of the quarry. The face wasn’t so high there, and it was possible to climb a narrow track up and get straight on to the moor. Visitors normally stopped short of taking their cars on to the steep roadway that dropped into the lower part of the quarry, afraid that they might never get back up again, or that their wheels might slip off the edge.

  But on the rock-spattered floor in the deepest part of the quarry stood a van. Whoever had driven it here had managed to find a flat area where the wagons had once been loaded with stone. The angle of the quarry walls hid the spot completely from the road fifty yards away. Unless you were looking, you would never find it.

  ‘It’s an old VW Transporter,’ said Cooper. ‘Long wheelbase version. And over twenty years old, if you can believe the registration plates. But look at the state of the tyres. This thing hasn’t moved in a good while.’

  Fry pulled out her personal radio. ‘I’ll call in and get them to do a check on that number. It’s probably stolen.’

  Cooper walked round the van carefully. As well as the back doors, there was a side loading door on the nearside. But the windows at the back had been painted over, in the way that market traders did to screen their goods from prying eyes. Cooper reached the driver’s door and peered into the cab. The seats were worn and split, and a large cobweb glistened across the corner between the sidelight and the dashboard. An old curtain hung behind the seats, concealing the interior.

  ‘They’re going to call back in a minute,’ said Fry. ‘Is it unlocked?’

  ‘I haven’t tried yet.’

  Cooper took a tissue from his pocket and tried the handle of the driver’s door. The metal was tarnished and beginning to rust through the chrome. The button depressed, but there was no click of the catch, and the door didn’t move. He edged round the bonnet. The manufacturer’s VW badge had gone from the grille. No surprise there – at one time, the badges had been prized by local kids as trophies, as the initials were said to stand for their favourite catch phrase ‘Very Wicked’.

  The passenger door was also locked. So was the side door. And so were the rear doors.

  ‘If this van was abandoned here by a car thief, it was a very security-conscious thief,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps it’s not stolen at all, then. Maybe it was somebody who couldn’t be bothered taking it to the scrapyard.’

  Fry’s radio crackled. While she listened, Cooper crouched to look underneath the van, noting a missing section of exhaust pipe and a dark patch on the ground that might have been oil. A cover was missing from one of the rear lights, and there were holes in the wheel arches caused by serious corrosion.

  ‘It’s registered to a Mr Calvin Lawrence of Stockport,’ said Fry. ‘But there’s no report of it being stolen.’

  ‘Well, it hasn’t been on the road legally since October 1999,’ said Cooper, peering at the licence disc just visible behind the windscreen. ‘Not that it means anything necessarily.’ Discs were colour coded so that the month of expiry could be detected from a distance. But this one was so faded its original colour could have been any selection from the rainbow.

  ‘So the owner has abandoned it, then. This Calvin Lawrence presumably. Just another MoT failure, that’s all. We’ll get someone to remove it and report the owner for illegal tipping.’

  ‘It’s odd, though. Why come all the way from Stockport to leave it here? There must be any number of out-of-the-way places on the way between here and Stockport that you could abandon an old van, if you wanted to.’

  ‘Not to mention scrapyards,’ said Fry.

  ‘Funny that people never seem to think of that, isn’t it? As if the countryside is here just for them to use as a huge dump-it site.’

  ‘We’re not here to worry about the environment, Ben. Leave that to your friends with the red jackets.’

  But Cooper was still frowning. ‘And if you were going to do that, why leave the plates on? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It isn’t our concern. We’ll pass it on to uniformed section.’

  ‘The funniest thing, though …’ said Cooper, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘Have you noticed? The funniest thing about this van … is the smell.’

  Fry sniffed, but shook her head. ‘Why, what is it? Petrol?’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Well, what then?’

  Cooper stared at the side door of the van, his head cocked on one side as though he was listening to the sounds of its suspension rusting, or its rubber seals slowly rotting in the damp air. He waited until he was absolutely sure of what his senses were telling him.

  ‘Chicken curry,’ he said.

  11

  Mark Roper had watched the police walk away from the farmhouse at Ringham Edge. They hadn’t got into the house, no more than anybody ever did. At first, he had thought the woman with Detective Constable Cooper might have been a social worker. Yvonne Leach had looked nervous when she opened the door, but it had soon become clear they had no knowledge or power that she might be afraid of. They hadn’t even glanced at the big shed behind the farmhouse, either.

  For Mark, the choice was impossible. If he went to the police with his suspicions, it would be obvious where the information had come from. Obvious to Warren Leach, at least. It would be bad for farmers to get the idea that Rangers were spying on them, reporting them to the police, to social workers, or to the RSPCA over things that were none of the Rangers’ business. That would do nothing for relationships with landowners, which Owen said were so important to the Peak District National Park. There was no point in antagonizing Leach any further, so Owen said.

  The source of the information would be obvious to Owen, too. And that would be even worse.

  Mark moved slightly as Yvonne Leach crossed the yard. He knew his outline was camouflaged by the trees behind him on the hillside, and his red jacket was below the level of the stone wall. Mrs Leach wouldn’t see him, anyway. The woman was too absorbed in her own troubles to see what went on around her. Leach himself had gone out an hour before. There had been police parked up the hill under the beeches, but they had ignored the farmer. They had nothing on Warren Leach, then. Not yet. Mark would have to wait a bit longer.

  He wondered what Owen would do in the same situation. Probably he would recommend patience. But how long could you be expected to wait? How long could Mark be patient?

  Cautiously, Ben Cooper put his ear to the cold metal. It felt damp and uncomfortable. Fry looked as though she was about to speak, but he hastily held up a hand to silence her. He could hear vague stirrings from inside the van; he could even feel a slight movement in the side panel as the springs of the suspension shifted.

  He
gestured to Fry, and they both walked away from the van until they were out of earshot.

  ‘There’s definitely somebody in there. What do we do?’

  Fry had no hesitation. ‘We get some back-up before we do anything. No heroics. Not even from you, understand?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Cooper, and held his hands up like a man pleading for a truce.

  Fry called in, and they waited, watching the van. They knew there were officers not far away, up on the moor. They had no more than a few minutes to wait – but it could seem like a long time.

  Finally, a uniformed sergeant and two PCs in stab-proof vests, with their hands on their side-handled batons, walked up to the van. As Cooper and Fry watched, the sergeant banged on the side door.

  ‘Police! Open up!’

  The sergeant had a heavy fist and his pounding made a noise that must have reverberated deafeningly inside the van. There was a sudden scuffling and muffled cursing, a moment of silence, then a clunk as the latch on the side door went down. The door began to move, screeching as its runner stuck, then sliding slowly open. The officers near the van tensed and took a couple of steps backwards.

  ‘What do you want, man? Oh, shit.’

  When the door was open about a foot, a face appeared, masked by a straggly beard and a woollen hat. The face was low down towards the floor of the van, with a bare arm stretched up to the handle. The rest of his body was wrapped up in a sleeping bag. All that was visible was the head and one arm.

  ‘Step out of the van, please,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Step out of the van, please, sir. Let me see your hands as you come out.’

  ‘I’m in fucking bed. What do you want?’

  ‘We need to talk to you. Is there anyone else in there?’