Dancing With the Virgins

by Stephen Booth

  ‘How do you know? I haven’t said what company she worked for.’

  Maggie regarded Fry steadily from the side of her eye. ‘This is getting tiresome. What exactly is it you want from me?’

  ‘I want you to help us find the man who killed Jenny Weston.’

  ‘And why should I do that?’

  She shifted in her seat as she asked the question. Fry prayed she wouldn’t turn towards her completely. She had got so far that she didn’t want her nerve to fail now. She didn’t want her face to show the reaction that made her stomach clench and her fingers tighten into tense fists.

  ‘Because we think he’s the same man who did that to your face, Maggie,’ she said.

  A minimum number of objects were lined up in an orderly line on the desk; no more than a paperweight, an ashtray, a telephone – and a wicked-looking letter opener shaped like a dagger, with a sharp blade and imitation rubies set into its handle. The letter opener was the only item of any ostentation in the room, and it stood out like a beacon, the light from the lamp reflecting in its red stones. In a moment of thought, Maggie toyed with its handle, turning it so that the tip pointed towards Fry, then spinning it away again to line up neatly with the paperweight in a satisfying geometric pattern.

  ‘So tell me one more thing,’ said Maggie. ‘How was this woman killed?’

  ‘She was stabbed to death.’

  Maggie took her hand away from the letter opener quickly, and picked up her pen instead.

  ‘It’s a waste of time, you know. I can’t remember any more than I have already.’

  ‘I don’t believe memories are gone forever, do you? They’ll come back, Maggie. But they’ll come back when you’re least expecting them. You’ll find they surprise you in ordinary things. It will be a face you see on TV that reminds you of someone. An item of clothing that you wore on the day. A glimpse of your own reflection in a window at night.’

  Maggie’s mouth tightened, and the lines round her good eye flattened out in anger.

  ‘They will come back, Maggie,’ said Fry. ‘Better to let them come to the surface when you can deal with them than to allow them to ambush you when you least expect them. Believe me on this.’

  Maggie stared at her. Gradually, her mouth relaxed. ‘Are you talking from experience?’

  Fry barely managed a nod. Ridiculously, the simple question had done exactly what she had been warning Maggie against. The burst of recollection was so strong and so physical that she was quite unprepared for it. She had to look away now, and be damned to her determination to look the woman in the eye. She stared at the drapes over the window, counting the brass rings on the curtain rail while she breathed slowly and steadily, counting to three as she inhaled, holding for another count of three, exhaling and counting; holding again.

  It only took a few seconds before she was fully under control. She knew there was little outward sign. Most people noticed nothing, certainly her male colleagues. But Maggie was watching her fixedly, in absolute silence. When Fry met her stare again, something had changed. There was an indefinable difference in the atmosphere, as if somebody had just turned on the central heating, and a hint of warmth was beginning to creep into the cold walls.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ said Maggie.

  Fry caught a glimpse into a kitchen as Maggie opened the door at the far end of the room. While she waited, Fry looked through her notes, checking the items she had marked for raising in conversation. One thing she hadn’t mentioned yet was Maggie’s family. The closest surviving relative was a sister, who lived somewhere in the west of Ireland.

  She watched Maggie pour the coffee from a cafetiere. She wore no jewellery of any kind on her hands – no rings, no bracelet. There was no make-up on her face, either, though it might have helped to hide the scars. She wore no lipstick. Her only adornment consisted of two tiny gold studs in her ears, like miniature crosses.

  ‘Last time you were interviewed,’ said Fry, ‘you weren’t in a steady relationship, according to the notes. Is that still the case?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maggie smiled, without humour. ‘They do put everything in my file, don’t they? Yes, it makes life difficult when it comes to forming relationships. Nobody wants to have to look at a face that would frighten the horses.’

  ‘Of course, a long-term relationship isn’t to be taken for granted these days. Not everybody wants commitment. I suppose it depends whether you want children or not, and how you want them to grow up.’

  ‘I’ve never wanted children anyway,’ said Maggie. ‘Some people think that’s very strange for a woman.’ She laughed, but it was a nervous laugh, at the thought of a disconcerting prospect. ‘Well, perhaps I’ll change. Perhaps I’ll wake up one day and discover I have a maternal instinct after all. What do you think? We’re all victims of our hormones, aren’t we?’

  Maggie put down the cafetiere. She picked up the pen that had lain by her hand all through the interview. She scrawled some notes on her pad, filling the empty lines for the first time. Fry leaned forward slightly to try to see what she was writing. But she could see that it was some kind of shorthand. Maggie wrote for a couple of minutes, concentrating as if Fry had suddenly ceased to be present. Then she threw down her pen.

  ‘When will you come to see me again?’ she asked.

  ‘Wednesday,’ said Fry promptly.

  ‘Make it in the morning. Nine o’clock. My mind is fresher then.’

  ‘OK.’

  Fry looked at the big sash window and the remnants of the autumn sun forming red streaks and dark shadows on the roofs of Matlock. The sun was setting somewhere behind her. The light must be falling on the front of the building, because it certainly wasn’t reaching the room where they sat. In the morning, it would be different. In the morning, Maggie’s mind might be fresher. But the light would also be in the south-east, shining on this window. Lighting up Maggie’s face.

  Will and Dougie Leach were sitting quietly in the kitchen at Ringham Edge Farm. Their father had brought the portable television set into the kitchen, and they were watching the news, eyes fixed on the face of the newsreader as he spoke about interest rates, trade wars, and disasters in distant parts of the world.

  It was well past the boys’ normal bedtime. Their mother would never have let them stay up so late. She would have hurried them off to bed with warnings about being up early for school in the morning. But their father didn’t seem to care. He forgot about them as long as they were quiet and didn’t get in his way. And Will and Dougie had learned how to be quiet.

  Warren Leach was crouched over the old oak desk in the front room of the farmhouse – the room he called an office. He had a desk lamp with a dim forty-watt bulb held over a scatter of papers. The boys had no real idea what the papers were, except that they were bad news. Every night he got the papers out and looked at them again. But no matter how many times he looked, they only ever seemed to make him more unhappy.

  The news finished and some incomprehensible comedy programme started, with a lot of swearing. The boys shifted uncomfortably, knowing their mother would have been angry to see them watching the programme. But without her to tell them what to do, the boys sat on, their eyes growing tired, reluctant to move or make a noise in case they were noticed.

  Finally, when little Dougie was already asleep with his head on the arm of the chair, Will heard the front door bang. Their father had gone out.

  Will got up to switch off the television. He shook his brother awake, and together they crept up the stairs to their bedrooms. Their beds were unmade, the sheets tangled and uncomfortable. But both of them were so tired that they didn’t notice.

  But Will didn’t go to sleep straight away. For a while, he lay staring at the ceiling and wondering where it was that his father went. He prayed that he hadn’t gone near the shippon, that his father would leave Doll alone. Although people didn’t come at night any more, Will knew there was nothing good about what his father was doing.

  Will had lived all h
is life on the farm. He knew its patterns and routines, he understood the rhythms of its activities. And there was one thing that he knew perfectly well. There was nothing that could possibly need doing around the farm at this time of night.

  14

  ‘All right, what’s the latest weirdo count?’

  To Ben Cooper, Chief Superintendent Jepson looked as though he didn’t really want to know the answer. It was a question that risked spoiling the Tuesday morning meeting almost before it had started. Cooper tried hard to fade into the background of the incident room. He and Todd Weenink would be following up the line of enquiry about a white van reported in the Ringham Edge area, which one witness claimed to have seen before, and which might therefore be local. That was all the excitement he needed for this morning.

  Cooper saw DCI Tailby hesitate at the Chief Super’s question and look sideways at DI Hitchens. But Hitchens looked very cheerful for such an early hour, and he had the answers ready.

  ‘Well, the uniforms on duty up there say they had trouble turning away a bunch of characters in black coats,’ he said. ‘Apparently they were carrying so much metalwork on their bodies they wouldn’t have got through airport security without the help of a surgeon.’

  ‘What did they want?’

  ‘They said blood had been spilled on the Virgins, and that meant the power would manifest some time in the next twenty-four hours, so they had to be there to receive it.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Jepson.

  ‘They were pretty insistent. In the end, they only retreated as far as the pub in Ringham. The inspector is worried that when they come back they’ll be tanked up and more aggressive. Fortunately, I think we’ve managed to keep them out of the way of the other lot so far.’

  ‘What other lot?’

  ‘The other lot who say they have to perform a cleansing ritual dedicated to the Great Goddess, so as to dispel the influence of evil from the stone circle, which is a sacred place. Some of the bobbies were all for letting them go ahead with that one.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Well, they’re all women, and it seems they have to perform this ritual naked.’

  Jepson put his head in his hands and groaned.

  ‘It’s called “sky-clad”,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Having no clothes on. You’re clad in nothing but the sky, so that you’re much closer to nature and the Great Goddess.’

  ‘Hitchens, are you enjoying this?’

  ‘No, sir. I’m just reporting the information that the uniformed section gathered. They spent quite a while talking to this lot, I think. We might have some converts in E Division. They’ll be wanting to form an Edendale chapter of the Order of the Golden Moon.’

  ‘Haven’t we had any plain old psychics and mediums, then?’

  ‘You’re kidding. Twelve at the last count. We’ve also had a dowser offering to locate the knife using nothing but a bent twig; an animal linguist who wants to interrogate the squirrels, because she thinks they could have been eyewitnesses, and a UFO expert who has proof that the victim was abducted by aliens for unspecified experiments which went wrong. Oh, and some preservation experts from that government department, English Heritage.’

  ‘English Heritage? What the hell do they want?’

  ‘They demand the right to inspect the stone circle for damage. They say it’s a priceless piece of our cultural history.’

  Jepson frowned. ‘I’ve heard that phrase before. Is it from a book or something?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Hitchens. ‘It seems to be us that English Heritage suspect of damaging the stones, by the way.’

  ‘They’re nuts. Get rid of them.’

  ‘They’re not half as bad as the press. That lot are all over us like a nasty disease.’

  ‘Was that their chopper over the moor yesterday?’

  ‘Sure. And it was also one of their blokes we pulled down from the top of a tree with his long lens. He’d already been up there a day or so, in camouflage gear. He slept tied to a branch. He said he learned how to do it at an eco-warriors’ protest camp in Berkshire.’

  ‘That’s a neat trick,’ said Jepson, half-admiringly.

  ‘I don’t know about neat. Twenty-four hours is a long time. You should have seen the state of the grass at the bottom of the tree. That’s how we located him. Even our bobbies know human shit when they see it.’

  Jepson pulled a face. Then he looked suspiciously at Tailby, who had been listening silently.

  ‘What have you got to say, Stewart?’

  ‘It’s a pretty depressing story, I’m afraid.’ Tailby sounded resigned. ‘The sixteen fires we found remnants of, they were all set during the last three months. Some of the people who made them built them properly. Others … well, others were lucky not to have set fire to the whole moor. There are the animal bones we found buried nearby, too. First indications suggest a medium-sized dog.’

  Cooper remembered seeing the slides of the animal bones. It hadn’t been immediately obvious what they were. They were just slivers of something pale caught in the dark fibrous peat, like those burnt stems of heather, crumbling and white. Then the slide had suddenly come into focus, and the shapes of the white splinters came together in a vaguely familiar shape. He had thought of the farmyard at home, of rats caught by the sheepdogs, and the discarded evidence of foxes hunting in the fields. But this wasn’t quite the same. This was something much bigger, something with a heavier and wider skull than a rat.

  ‘Do those two gypsies go in for animal sacrifices?’ asked Jepson.

  ‘The youths in the van? They’re not exactly gypsies,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Whatever they are.’

  ‘They’re just travellers, sir,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Travellers, my arse. They’re not going anywhere. What makes them travellers?’

  ‘They’re classed as having no settled home, sir. A Volkswagen van doesn’t count as a home under the law, even if it’s broken down.’

  ‘So what do they live on down there, Cooper? Nuts and berries, or what?’

  ‘Our information is that Calvin Lawrence catches the bus into Bakewell once a week to collect his benefit money.’

  ‘Ah. So he’s a Social Security scrounger. What about the other one?’

  ‘Simon Bevington isn’t even registered for benefits,’ said Cooper. ‘He seems to stay in the vicinity of the quarry or on the moor. He doesn’t claim anything. I suppose they must share what little they’ve got.’

  ‘Oh, love and peace, hallelujah,’ said Jepson.

  ‘It must be enough for both of them – they hardly have an extravagant lifestyle. But they’re not gypsies.’

  ‘They could be circus trapeze artists, for all I care, Cooper. Have we asked them about animal sacrifices?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then ask them. And find this Martin Stafford and the girl, Ros Daniels. We ought to be able to find at least one of them, shouldn’t we? Is there anything else? And don’t make it anything too exciting. I’ve had enough for today.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hitchens, as if suddenly noticing an important item that everyone had forgotten, ‘there is the phallus farm.’

  ‘What kind of farm?’ said Jepson.

  ‘Well, I don’t mean Warren Leach’s kind of farm. There are no EU subsidies for this particular crop …’

  Warren Leach was waiting for the milk tanker. It was one of the few routines that still held his day together. Bringing the cows in, milking, waiting for the tanker. The morning’s yield was taken for Hartington Stilton, the local cheese made at the dairy in Dovedale. It was something most farmers were proud of, that their milk was going for Stilton. It was like still being part of the traditional dairy industry of the dales, not an anonymous unit of production for some huge commercial organization. Leach had once been proud of it himself, and had boasted about the quality of his milk. Now he found he couldn’t care less. He would have been just as happy to pour the stuff down the drain or int
o the nearest ditch.

  The lad who normally came to help him had not turned up yesterday or today, so Leach had done everything himself. Gary was one of the Dawsons, from over the moor at Pilhough. The Dawsons weren’t up to much, but at least they were farming folk. But there had been a blazing row on Sunday afternoon, when Leach had lost his temper and sworn at the lad and accused him of being idle. Gary had threatened he would never come again, and it looked as though he never would.

  In a way, Leach preferred it; he preferred to be left on his own, to have so much to do that it left no time for thinking. Yet it only lasted for a while, only until after the tanker had gone and the rest of the jobs held no urgency. Then, when there were no cows bellowing for attention, no tanker driver sounding his horn in the lane, when his sons had gone off to school in Cargreave on the bus – then he found the rest of the day stretched before him endlessly.

  But this morning a car had arrived. He had been expecting the tanker turning in from the road, but the sound of the engine was wrong. The big diesel always made the glass in the windows of the farmhouse vibrate, and the layer of dust on the window ledge dance and slide before it settled into a new pattern. There had been plenty of police vehicles going by the farm for the past two days, of course – but they went straight up the lane, past the front of the shippon. They didn’t turn into the yard like this car did.

  Leach’s chest grew tight with apprehension. He had known it would only be a matter of time before the men he feared arrived.

  The farmer looked at his hands, astonished at the dirt ingrained in his fingers, as if he hadn’t washed for days. How long had his hands been like that? He glanced at the steel cabinet where his shotgun was locked, and waited for the familiar surge of aggression to come, for the righteous anger to drive strength and heat into his limbs. He was the sort of man who ought to be able to see a bailiff off, no problem. But something was wrong. Somehow the adrenalin failed to flow, the flush of testosterone never came. He felt weak and helpless; he was alone and cornered, yet with no fight left in him. It was the feeling that he had always dreaded would come to him in the end.