Dancing With the Virgins

by Stephen Booth

  The sergeant ducked his head through the door, well clear of possible contact with the figure on the floor, and quick enough to avoid the door being slammed on his head.

  ‘Right. Let’s have both of you out. Sharp, now.’

  Standing behind the sergeant, Cooper breathed deeply. A whole miasma of smells had been released by the opening of the door – not just the aroma of the chicken curry that had been eaten recently, but a small army of scents that competed with it for attention. Some of the smells were dark and musty, others sharp and metallic. Cooper longed to get inside the van and absorb the sensations. But he stood waiting patiently while the sergeant urged the occupants out into the welcoming arms of his constables.

  ‘Come on, come on. Let’s have you, son.’

  ‘Oh God, hang on then.’

  The face disappeared for a few seconds, and there was a heaving as a body was hauled from a sleeping bag. The sergeant kept a hand causally on the door. Finally, a young man emerged, bundled in clothes and muttering. He sat on the step of the van until one of the PCs helped him up.

  ‘And your girlfriend as well. Out here.’

  A second figure came out of the gloom, a slight, narrow-shouldered figure, moving more slowly, like someone still half-asleep. No – more than half-asleep, an actual sleep walker, with eyes that were barely aware of what was around them, as if they were focused on a dream world that no one else could see. This one said nothing, merely peering from a mass of tangled blond hair at the watching faces with faintly inquisitive eyes. Not angry or nervous, thought Cooper. Not frightened or aggressive. Just slightly puzzled, as if she had noticed an unfamiliar noise or spotted an animal she didn’t recognize. She was clutching a blanket to her chest with thin, pale hands.

  Cooper left Fry’s side and moved a step closer to the van and took another sniff. There was no scent of drugs that he recognized. If they had been smoking cannabis inside the van, it would be detectable to the nose. But that didn’t mean they hadn’t been taking something else. He looked at the sergeant, who nodded in agreement. It might be an excuse for searching the van, if they wanted it. They could get a dog down here and take the vehicle apart in no time.

  ‘Are you the owner of this vehicle?’ the sergeant asked the youth with the straggly beard.

  ‘Yes, it’s mine,’ he said. ‘And it’s not nicked.’

  ‘Right. Let’s have your names.’

  ‘We’re not doing anything wrong.’

  ‘Names. You first.’ The sergeant pointed at the youth.

  ‘Homer Simpson,’ he said.

  Cooper and Fry smiled. At first, the youth might actually have thought they were appreciating the joke. But advance information was very useful.

  ‘Nice try, Calvin,’ said Fry.

  He looked surprised, then deflated.

  ‘It is Calvin Lawrence, isn’t it? Of Benson Street, Stockport?’

  ‘Is it me you’re after?’

  ‘Depends what you’ve done.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything. How did you know my name?’

  ‘Listen, if you want to be anonymous, try taking the plates off the van. It’s still registered in your name. Bit of a giveaway, that.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Not much of a mastermind, are you, Calvin?’

  ‘They call me Cal,’ he said.

  ‘Is Benson Street, Stockport, still your home address?’

  ‘No, that’s my parents’ house.’

  ‘Can we have your current address, please?’

  ‘Number One, Quarry Avenue, Stonesville.’

  The sergeant wrote it down. ‘Where’s that?’

  Cal sneered, and looked at the other officers, inviting them to share his disdain. ‘It’s here, man. I live here.’

  ‘In the van?’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  ‘You’re giving that thing as your permanent residence?’

  ‘It’s as permanent as anything is.’

  ‘That might be debatable. Do the owners of this property know you’re here? Have you got permission for overnight parking?’

  ‘Jesus, are you real?’ said Cal. ‘Or did I just fall into an old Benny Hill Show?’

  ‘No? In that case, you might find your home is more temporary than you think, son.’

  Cal folded his arms across the holes in his sweater. A mulish look came over his face. ‘You’ll have to drag us out of here, if you want to move us.’

  ‘Well, we can arrange that, if necessary.’

  The sergeant looked at the girl. She had said nothing yet. In fact, her attention seemed to have wandered. She gently pushed some of the hair from her eyes as she turned to watch the movement of some home-made wind chimes hanging in a birch tree on the edge of the quarry. Cooper realized that the chimes were providing a constant background tune that made the sergeant’s voice sound curiously discordant and out of place, a meaningless animal growl against the harmonies of a distant choir. The sound of the chimes seemed to mean more to this dreamy young woman than the small army of police officers who had invaded her home.

  ‘And your name, miss?’ said the sergeant.

  She seemed not to have heard him. Her gaze remained directed into space, oblivious to the turn in the conversation, unaware of the attention that was on her.

  ‘You, miss. Can we have your name, please?’

  Then she turned and smiled at him, a whimsical smile, not unfriendly or sullen. She pushed back her hair again and her fingers danced across her face, fluttering on her cheeks in a curious gesture. Then Cooper saw the faint fuzz of hair on the jawline and the top lip, the Adam’s apple and wide forehead under the hair. Not ‘miss’ at all, but another male.

  Cal butted in, moving slightly to impose himself between his friend and the policeman.

  ‘You’ve got it wrong again. We call him Stride,’ he said.

  The sergeant had noticed his mistake, too. ‘OK. But I’m talking to him, not you.’

  ‘Just don’t talk to him like that.’

  The sergeant stared grimly at the second youth. ‘Your name, please, sir.’

  The silence continued. The young man’s eyes began to drift back towards the floor of the quarry, but too slowly for the sergeant. He reached out a hand, ready to grab the youth’s arm. Cal tensed angrily, and the two PCs stepped forward.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  The youth’s voice was soft. His lips barely moved, so that his words were no more than a whisper. But they all heard it clearly. The sergeant’s hand stopped short of touching him, uncertain of what he had been about to do. He looked like a man who found himself with a passing swan in the sights of his twelve-bore, with his finger already on the trigger.

  ‘If we don’t get some identity from you, we’re going to take you down to the station for questioning,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, right, here comes the harassment,’ said Cal. ‘What made you wait so long? Take him down to the station. You are so full of shit. I mean, what does it matter what name his parents gave him? What does it matter where he comes from? It’s who he is, that’s all you need to know. All anyone needs. Jesus.’

  ‘Religious gentleman, are you, sir? They tell me if you call Jesus’s name often enough, the Virgin Mary gets annoyed and tells you he can’t come out to play today.’

  Finally, the one called Stride sighed and shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. Not really. It’s only a name.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to insist, sir. Otherwise, you can come with us.’

  They waited expectantly. Finally, Stride sat down in the doorway of the van and leaned into the interior. The police began to look uneasy again. He pulled a cardboard box towards him and rummaged around inside it, reaching right down to the bottom through heaps of paper and clothes. Some of the contents he pulled out and deposited on the step, examining each one carefully as he handled them.

  Cal watched him, his expression a mixture of concern and affection. Stride looked up at him, and something passed between them when thei
r eyes met. Cooper cocked his head, listening hard for the sound of the message they were communicating, but it was something he couldn’t fathom, maybe something quite beyond his own experience.

  Then Stride suddenly held out his hand with an object that glinted, sharp and metallic. The sergeant already had his baton half out of his service belt by the time Stride opened his hand and showed it to his friend.

  ‘Hey, that’s the can-opener we lost,’ said Cal.

  The sergeant looked embarrassed, then angry. Stride smiled at him. His fingers went to his face again. They flickered against his cheek, like a repeated word in sign language. Did it mean he was laughing?

  Then he produced a small enamel biscuit tin, whipping it in front of them like a conjuror producing a rabbit. The tin was a startling royal blue, with Victorian-style portraits in round, gilt frames on the lid. He popped the lid open, and showed them that the tin was crammed with small items: photographs, letters, postcards, the stub of an airline ticket, a few metal badges, a gold pen, a roll of yellowed newspaper cuttings.

  ‘That’s me,’ he said.

  The sergeant replaced his baton and took a plastic card-holder from him. The edges were cracked and split, and one corner was turned over. Inside was a card headed with the initials NUS over a badly coloured photograph, taken against a curtain in harsh, glaring light.

  ‘This is your Student Union card?’ he said, comparing the face to Stride’s.

  ‘When I was at uni in Sheffield.’

  ‘The hair’s longer now, but I suppose it’s you.’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Simon Bevington.’ The sergeant wrote it down, and noted the membership number. ‘This address. What is it? Is this where your parents live, like your friend? Digs? Or what?’

  ‘A bedsit.’

  ‘I see. When did you last live there?’

  ‘Six months ago. A year. Who knows?’

  ‘This union card is last year’s. When did you leave university?’

  ‘January.’

  ‘And where do your parents live?’

  ‘I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Come off it.’

  ‘My life has nothing to do with them any more.’

  ‘I wonder if they agree with that, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘We can trace them, you know.’

  ‘I wish you joy.’

  The sergeant looked round at the two CID officers, and turned back to the young men. ‘We’ll need statements from you. Then we’ll see whether we have to move you from here.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Cal.

  ‘A statement!’ said Stride. ‘Can it be any statement I like? How about: “Sergeant, I love you”?’

  Cooper watched the young man carefully. It was difficult to tell whether his manner was an act or not. But he had just succeeded in attracting serious attention to himself. Because it was certainly his name that had recently been scratched into the ground in the middle of the Nine Virgins.

  Cooper sighed. The smell of chicken curry was making him hungry. But he was going to miss his lunch at the pub in Ringham, after all.

  Diane Fry called in to report their whereabouts to the incident room, but finished the call with a thoughtful look.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘The team in Totley have been following up on Jenny Weston’s visitors. Do you remember a girl with dreadlocks being mentioned?’

  ‘Sure. The neighbours seem to have noticed every move she made.’

  ‘They’re pretty sure now that this girl was more than just a visitor. It seems she was actually living with Jenny Weston at her house for a while.’

  ‘Have they identified her?’

  ‘She was introduced to one of Jenny’s work colleagues as Ros Daniels. She was aged about 20, and believed to be from Cheshire.’

  ‘They’ll be keen to question her, then. She has to know what was going on in Jenny’s life better than anyone does.’

  ‘Oh, they would question her, if they could find her,’ said Fry. ‘But it seems Ros Daniels is missing.’

  Back on the moor, an excuse had finally been found to arrest the little man in the green bubble jacket. He had been discovered lying naked in the heather in the middle of one of the smaller stone circles. He had been dreaming blissfully, apparently oblivious to anyone passing, just as he was unaware of his skin turning blue and his genitals shrivelling to the size of a button mushroom. The police had made him get dressed and charged him with indecent exposure. And PC Wragg had smiled.

  12

  In South Quarry later that afternoon, Cal and Stride were sitting on a convenient rock alongside their van. They had two mugs of tea and were rolling tobacco into Rizla papers with practised fingers. Stride’s movements were languid as he stooped over the task, occasionally pushing the hair back from his eyes. He wore what looked like an old greatcoat from an Army surplus store and a pair of combat trousers, with his tin of tobacco balanced on one knee. He was entirely concentrated on rolling his cigarette, his delicate fingers prodding the tobacco neatly into place. Occasionally, he smiled to himself, as if at some private joke.

  It seemed to Ben Cooper that the one called Cal was altogether more watchful. Though he didn’t look up, he was certainly aware that he was being observed. His shoulders were tense, and he frowned as he licked the edge of his Rizla before pushing his tobacco tin away in one of the pockets of a camouflage jacket. A stud in his nose glittered briefly as he turned to watch Stride light up. The skin of Cal’s scalp was visible through his dark stubble, hardly any longer than the stubble on his cheeks.

  ‘What do you make of them?’ asked DCI Tailby.

  ‘Mostly harmless,’ said DI Hitchens.

  Cooper laughed, and Tailby looked at him sharply. ‘Was that a joke?’

  ‘The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, sir,’ explained Cooper. ‘It’s how the guide describes the planet Earth. Just those two words: “mostly harmless”.’

  The DCI looked at him for a moment. His grey wings of hair lifted in the wind that buffeted the quarry edge, then settled back on his temples like roosting doves.

  ‘Douglas Adams,’ said DI Hitchens helpfully. ‘I liked Marvin the Paranoid Android, myself.’ The DCI had turned his stare on Hitchens instead. ‘Not that I meant it as a joke, sir. I meant these two – I think they’re mostly harmless. No police records.’

  Cal and Stride sat without speaking, smoking their cigarettes, staring into space, apparently at peace with the world. Cooper recalled that there had been cigarette ends in the inventory of items recovered by the scenes of crime team near Jenny Weston’s body. But they had been Marlboro, not handmade roll-ups.

  Above the VW van, a birch had rooted itself on a precarious ledge in the quarry side. Its lower branches were hung with small metal objects, bits of tinfoil and sections of baked bean cans tinkling and clanging in the wind.

  ‘And what’s all that lot supposed to be?’ asked Tailby. ‘Some new way of doing the washing-up?’

  ‘Tree art,’ said Hitchens. ‘Bevington has written some poems that are stuck to the chimes. They’re meant to create an atmosphere of peace and harmony, he says. Do you want to go and have a closer look?’

  ‘No, thanks. Too much harmony is bad for me.’

  Tailby glared down at the van. To Cooper, it seemed that it was taking a great effort for Cal not to look up and stare back.

  ‘Can we positively eliminate them as suspects?’ asked Tailby.

  ‘They have no apparent connection with the victim, and there’s no motive that we know of. There is no witness evidence to tie them in any closer to the scene than this.’

  ‘What about their shoes?’

  ‘I got a quick look,’ said Cooper. ‘Calvin Lawrence is wearing trainers, and Bevington has a pair of Doc Martens. Neither would match the partial print we found.’

  ‘They may have a pair of boots in the van. I know they don’t look as though they have much, but even these two could own more than one pair of shoes.’

  ‘We�
��d need a search warrant to look in the van. We don’t have reasonable suspicion.’

  Stride lay back on the rock, letting his coat fall open, resting his head back so that he was gazing at the sky. His hands were resting on his face near his eyes, but the fingers were still. The smoke from his roll-up drifted straight up for a few feet, then was caught in the wind and dispersed. Whatever he could see up there in the sky caused him to smile with some deep, inner pleasure. The smile was so sudden that it made the detectives look up as well. But there was nothing to be seen except clouds scudding high across the moor. The clouds were growing darker. There could be rain soon.

  ‘If you think those wind chimes are strange, Cooper has something else to show us,’ said Hitchens.

  They walked round the quarry edge to a sheltered spot enclosed by two rocks. In a shallow basin in one of the rocks were what appeared at first to be a series of giant candles. They were made of wax, a foot tall, and they had been carefully sculpted, each into the same distinctive shape, with a long straight shaft, faintly ribbed with veins, and a swollen, rounded head like a cowl, with a small hole in the very tip. They were all sorts of colours – swirling blues and reds, butter yellow, subtle tints of brown and green, and a pure white one, with delicate streaks of gold in the veins of the shaft. They stood like soldiers on parade, pointing permanently skywards.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ said Tailby.

  ‘They represent the phallus,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘I can see exactly what they represent,’ said Tailby. ‘And phallus wasn’t the word that sprang to mind.’

  ‘I think it probably takes quite some doing to get the shape just right, like that. I was thinking of a nomination for the Turner Prize.’

  ‘And who is the Leonardo da Vinci we have to thank for this lot?’

  ‘The one called Cal. He’s quite proud of them. He calls this place the phallus farm.’

  ‘They’re obscene.’

  ‘I doubt they’re committing an offence,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I don’t want to look at them. Let’s go back.’

  They walked back round the quarry to the path. Cooper noticed a group of women appear on the far side of the quarry. They were wearing cagoules and leggings, bright and chatty. They looked down at Cal and Stride for a while, then walked past the birch tree and studied the wind chimes.