Dancing With the Virgins

by Stephen Booth

  Now Owen had worked up the hill to a stretch of wall that had fallen. Walkers had been crossing here, too – the ones too lazy to walk a few yards to the stile. It was a double wall, but the topping stones had been dislodged one by one, and the weather had got into the centre, washing through the filling until the sides bulged and slipped.

  Mark and Owen stood together among the scattered stones for a minute or two. Despite his proximity to Owen, there still seemed to be too much distance between them for Mark’s satisfaction. The greeting he had received was not the one he had expected. It was not the reason he had waited in the trees until the policemen had gone. For Mark, the unfamiliar gulf between them felt like that yawning gap in the wall, waiting to be bridged by a careful hand.

  ‘Did you talk to the police yesterday, Owen?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, they’re talking to everybody.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  Owen laughed. ‘You’d be surprised.’

  He picked up a stone, knocked off some dirt, and held it up to the light to study it, like a diamond dealer examining the facets of a newly polished gem. Mark liked to watch Owen at work. He thought Owen was a completely different man when he was out on the hills. He never seemed at home in the briefing centre, sitting in front of the little electric heater, hunched at the assistant’s desk scattered with paperwork.

  ‘What was it they wanted to know, Owen?’ Mark insisted.

  Owen had been Mark’s friend and mentor throughout his assessment and training as a Ranger and during his first few weeks in the job itself. Mark had become accustomed to the comforting presence of the bearded man in the red jacket; he had glowed with pride as people greeted Owen like an old friend, laughed at all his jokes and bombarded him with questions on every subject – questions he never failed to respond to with courtesy, even when he plainly didn’t know the answer.

  ‘It was just questions,’ said Owen. ‘They want to make use of my local knowledge. Don’t they all?’

  ‘The time of the next bus to Buxton, then? Or the nearest all-night chemist’s.’

  Owen smiled at Mark’s tentative joke, a reference to a shared memory of an encounter with two elderly women on a remote track by a reservoir on the heights of the Dark Peak. It was enough to provide the surge of reassurance Mark needed, enough to ease the chill he had felt when he had first seen the expression on Owen’s face.

  ‘I wondered if the police might want to interview me again,’ said Mark.

  ‘You’ve told them everything, haven’t you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  But Mark knew he hadn’t, not everything. The policemen hadn’t been as easy to talk to as he might have hoped. There were some things you just couldn’t say when they were writing down every word. There were things that sounded too stupid and strange. For a start, he didn’t know how to describe to the police the way that the woman had looked to him as she lay among the stones. The way that she had seemed to dance.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Owen as he handed Mark a topping stone, ‘it’s all over with now. You can forget about it. Get on with the job. Why would they want to start bothering you again?’

  Mark started stacking the stones to one side, lining them up on the grass, ready to be replaced when Owen had rebuilt the lower part of the wall.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mark. ‘I’ve never … well, I’ve never been involved in anything like this before.’

  ‘I know, lad. Pass me the line.’

  Owen took off his thick cotton work gloves and ran two lines between wooden pins along the damaged section of wall to mark out its alignment.

  ‘But the police aren’t so bad. They’re just doing their job, like you and me.’

  Owen’s voice was slow and steady. Calming. It didn’t really matter what he was saying, because Mark found it reassuring just to listen to the sound. He had never heard Owen raise his voice. There had often been occasions when he might have done – when a mountain biker or a motorcyclist openly defied his friendly warnings that they were breaking the law and risking prosecution; when ill-equipped hikers ignored both his advice and common sense and put their own and others’ lives at risk; when a farmer, now and then, chose to be downright pig-headed. Farmers like Warren Leach at Ringham Edge, maybe. But Owen never got angry.

  ‘So there’s nothing to worry about. You tell them what you found, Mark, and that’s all they need to know. As long as it’s simple for them, they won’t bother you any more. And if they do, just send them to see me, eh? I’ll give them a flea in their ear.’

  Owen smiled, showing his teeth through his grey beard, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Like most Rangers, he never wore a hat, and his hair was permanently windblown and untidy, curling into his ears.

  ‘Owen,’ said Mark.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where were you?’

  Owen smacked his gloves together to remove traces of mud and grit. ‘When, Mark?’

  ‘On Sunday afternoon. You know …’

  Mark watched Owen’s puzzled smile carefully. This time Owen smiled without showing his teeth. His eyes narrowed, but the crinkles were absent.

  ‘You had a problem with the radio, Mark.’

  ‘I just thought that maybe you weren’t there …’

  ‘But I wouldn’t let you down like that, Mark. Now, would I?’

  Mark looked past the wall and down at the farm buildings of Ringham Edge. They were gathered defensively round a crew yard like a medieval settlement, their gritstone walls turned outwards to the rest of the world. The biggest shed was much newer than the rest of the farm. Its green corrugated steel roof was damp from the drizzle earlier in the day, and it gleamed now in the weak sun.

  Mark thought for a moment of the woman on Ringham Moor. Her death had at least been sudden; she had been given no time to consider, no time to reflect on what she had done with her life, for good or evil.

  Owen had told Mark there were times when it was best to back off, to avoid confrontation, to let something go. He said that a soft word was better than an angry reaction, that a cool head was better than that hot surge of blind rage that was inevitably followed by the realization that you had made a terrible mistake.

  Mark passed another stone. It was furred dark green with lichen, so he knew it had come from the north face of the wall. When a wall had been built by Owen, it was solid and reliable, the absolute symbol of stability.

  Mark decided he would have to ask Owen again tomorrow about why he hadn’t been able to get hold of him on the radio. And maybe he would ask the day after, too. Just to hear a little bit more reassurance.

  The Westons sat together, their faces no longer hopeful. They were losing faith in the investigation, disappointed by their first real contact with the police, dismayed by the realization of their fallibility. And they had noticed that at first they had been talking to a detective chief inspector, then an inspector; now it was a mere acting detective sergeant. The word ‘acting’ seemed to be the biggest insult of all.

  ‘Don’t take it the wrong way,’ said Eric Weston. ‘We’re sure you’re doing your best.’

  ‘There are a lot of people working on this enquiry,’ said Diane Fry patiently. ‘There are lots of leads to be followed up. This is just one of them.’

  ‘We understand. Really.’

  Mrs Weston had set out teacups on a glass-topped table. She served the tea as a well-rehearsed routine, performed without any hint of welcome. In the same way, she had apologized for the condition of the lounge, explaining that they weren’t bothering to decorate in view of their move, before long, to the retirement cottage at Ashford. New people always redecorated when they bought a house, she said. So why bother? It would only be wasted expense.

  The log basket on the hearth was filled with paper and small sticks, ready to light a fire. A storage heater under the bay window was enough to take the chill off the room. But the decor looked perfectly presentable to Fry. Anything that wasn’t stained by mould or hung with cobwebs
looked fine to her. Back at the flat, anything that didn’t have a layer of dust was meant for sitting on.

  ‘I believe you’ve already been asked about a young woman called Ros Daniels.’

  ‘We have,’ said Mr Weston. ‘We’ve never heard of her. When they told us she’d been staying with Jenny, we thought she was probably one of the girls she worked with, who had nowhere to stay. Jenny would have put her up for a while. She was like that.’

  ‘But Ros Daniels never worked at Global Assurance, as far as we can tell.’

  ‘So we’re told. Jenny must have met her somewhere else.’

  ‘Any idea where that might have been?’

  ‘Sorry, no.’

  ‘The only other people she ever talked about were the ones in the animal welfare groups,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘You could try them.’

  ‘We will.’ Fry stared at her cooling tea. ‘I also want to ask you whether your daughter had mentioned being bothered by anybody. Did she complain about anyone hanging round outside her house or following her? Did she refer to any unwanted or nuisance phone calls?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Like a stalker?’ said Mrs Weston. ‘You mean like a stalker?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’

  ‘She never said anything,’ said Mr Weston.

  ‘There was the phone call,’ said his wife.

  ‘Oh?’

  Mr Weston had retreated further into his armchair and was watching the two women helplessly, as if he was no part of what was going on.

  ‘Jenny mentioned she had been phoned up,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘She didn’t say it was a nuisance call, exactly. She just thought there was something strange about it. But she never took it any further, as far as I know. It just happened to be on her mind when I was speaking to her.’

  ‘Who made this phone call?’

  Mrs Weston stared at her. ‘The police, of course. They said it was to check up on home security. But they asked some funny questions, and she didn’t think it was quite right.’

  ‘Did Jenny give you the name of the officer who phoned?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A man or a woman?’

  ‘A man, I think. Yes, definitely.’

  ‘He didn’t give any identification?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Mrs Weston irritably. She looked at her husband again, and back at Fry. ‘You mean he might not have been from the police at all?’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s possible.’

  The couple shook their heads in unison. ‘Jenny was always too trusting,’ said Mrs Weston. ‘It took her a long time to learn the truth about people. All those terrible men. She was better off with just herself and the cat, if truth be told.’

  ‘Could this phone call have been in connection with the burglary at your cottage in Ashford?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Oh, the burglary,’ said Eric Weston. ‘Why do you want to talk about that?’

  ‘We’re following up everything we can, sir.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You’ve not seen any sign of Wayne Sugden since then? Your daughter didn’t mention him getting in contact?’

  ‘But that man is in prison, isn’t he?’

  ‘Not any more, sir.’

  ‘What?’ Weston seemed roused to emotion at last.

  ‘Do we take it you didn’t know that?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Nobody told us that. Shouldn’t somebody have told us?’

  ‘It isn’t usual,’ she said. ‘Unless there is a particular risk to the victims. In a rape case, for example, or an offence against a child. It can be quite a trauma running into a perpetrator unexpectedly in the street when you thought he was behind bars.’

  ‘But not in this case.’

  ‘It would have been thought unlikely that Sugden would return to burgle the same house.’

  ‘But not impossible that he might return and track down our daughter to take his revenge, presumably.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Because that’s why you’re asking, isn’t it? You must be thinking that it could have been him that killed Jenny.’

  ‘It isn’t as simple as that, sir,’ said Fry.

  ‘No?’

  ‘There are certain aspects to the burglary which interest us, that’s all. Am I right in thinking you were away at the time?’

  ‘Yes, in Cyprus,’ said Weston. ‘We go there when we can during the school holidays.’

  ‘And how long were you away on this occasion?’

  ‘A month. I had to be back to prepare for the new term then. There’s a lot of work to do before we start, you know. People don’t realize that.’

  ‘So you weren’t using the cottage in Ashford at the time of the burglary.’

  ‘No. We’d asked one of the neighbours to call in occasionally to check on things: water the plants, that sort of thing. They deliver free papers and all sorts of junk mail and just leave it sticking out of the letter box, you know. It’s a complete giveaway that the place is unoccupied.’

  Fry studied the log basket in the hearth. She felt the Westons staring at her, trying to divine the direction of her questions.

  ‘And who reported the burglary?’

  ‘The people next door. They heard glass breaking. Later, they noticed the window was broken. That’s how he got in.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘He made a terrible mess of the cottage, you know. He took a video recorder, a bit of cash and some jewellery, that’s all. But it was the damage that was the worst thing. He broke chairs, he smashed pictures, threw Tabasco sauce on the walls and the carpet. Susan wouldn’t use the cottage again until we had it redecorated and changed all the locks.’

  ‘There were no fingerprints,’ said Fry.

  ‘He must have worn gloves. Even young children know to do that these days, don’t they? But he was identified by someone who saw him near the cottage. And they said there were some fibres on his jacket from one of our armchairs. The evidence seemed conclusive.’

  ‘I’m afraid we have to take another look at the question of motive. The Sugden family has reason to feel very bitter towards you.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Weston. ‘You know about my bit of trouble. But it’s not as if it will be in the police records, is it? My name was cleared completely. Still, some people find it difficult to forget.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Mr Weston shrugged apologetically. ‘There was an accident, that’s all. A boy was badly injured.’

  ‘This was on a field trip?’

  ‘Yes. We had taken a party to Losehill Hall. You know the National Park study centre near Castleton?’

  Fry didn’t know it, but she nodded, unwilling to admit the gaps in her local knowledge.

  ‘There was a bit of a fuss about it at the time. Some hysterical reactions. There was a full enquiry by the education department. The police were involved for a while, but of course there were never any charges.’

  ‘I see. You were in charge of the party?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. But there was found to be no negligence on my part. It was an accident, pure and simple. Nobody could have predicted it. The boy slipped away from the party. I had warned them all personally about the danger, and we had the right number of adults supervising the group. All the children had been told to stay on the path. But some of them don’t listen to what you tell them. Some of them have never been taught proper discipline.’

  ‘That’s down to the parents, I suppose.’

  Weston smiled faintly. ‘Try telling that to Gavin Ferrigan’s family. They were most abusive. Aggressive even. We had some very unpleasant scenes, I can tell you. I was forced to take legal advice to protect my position. I couldn’t have my integrity being called into doubt in that way; it was undermining my authority as deputy head.’

  ‘You say the boy was badly hurt?’

  ‘He suffered serious head injuries. I did my best. I pulled him out of the water, tried to keep him warm until the air ambulance arriv
ed. But he’d hit his head on some rocks in the stream. Five days later, they decided to turn off his life-support machine.’

  ‘But it blew over in the end, as far as you were concerned?’

  ‘Eventually. There was a lot of talk – ridiculous, unfounded allegations. It was very embarrassing for a while. It made me feel ashamed, although I knew I had done nothing wrong. Everyone made me feel it was my fault. Everyone.’

  ‘And Gavin Ferrigan’s mother is Wayne Sugden’s sister.’

  ‘Apparently. The father, Ferrigan, was already in prison then for drug dealing. But the rest of the family turned up in force for the inquest. It was most unpleasant.’ Weston shuddered at the memory. ‘I kept being forced to justify myself. But I had nothing to apologize for, did I? I did everything right. I did my best for him.’

  A few minutes later, Eric Weston followed Fry into the hallway to show her out. He hesitated at the foot of the stairs near the heavy oak door, looking back over his shoulder where his wife could be heard piling crockery in the kitchen.

  ‘The accident to Gavin Ferrigan …’ he said. ‘You have to understand it was a very difficult experience for me.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it was.’

  ‘It’s just that … some people never forget. Some people like to make you go on feeling ashamed for ever.’

  The clattering in the kitchen had stopped, and Mr Weston suddenly seemed to notice the silence.

  ‘Well, goodbye, then,’ he said. ‘Sorry we couldn’t help any more. Anything we can do, of course.’

  He ushered Fry outside and stood on the step with the door half-closed behind him.

  ‘The Ferrigan thing – do you really think it’s relevant to … you know?’

  ‘We can’t say at the moment.’

  ‘It would be very bad if it was,’ said Weston. ‘Very bad.’

  He had stepped back inside the house before Fry had reached the gate. Fry heard Mrs Weston’s voice raised querulously, and a subdued murmur in return, followed by the slamming of something against a hard surface.

  She went back to her car and looked at her map. She wanted the quickest way out and back on to the hills.