Dancing With the Virgins

by Stephen Booth

  Fry started laughing. Cooper smiled tolerantly. He knew there had to be more.

  ‘And the bobbies were efficient for once. Thank God they weren’t on their way for a tea break or going off shift, or they’d just have banged a sticker on his car and given him a lift to the bus station.’

  ‘Any evidence on him?’

  ‘A mask and a carving knife in the glove compartment. Will that do? Don’t say it too loudly, Ben, but it looks like we’ve got him.’

  ‘He has family in this area, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He was staying with his aunt at Chelmorton. It seems the old dear was terrified of him. She knew what he was like, but she was scared of telling anybody about him. Howsley had been at her house for two or three days when he turned up with the Renault. She knew it was stolen. I don’t think he bothered to hide anything from her. Also, the carving knife is the one missing from her kitchen. It’s just what we needed – he made a mistake.’

  The next call came through directly to the CID room, because the caller had asked specifically for Diane Fry.

  ‘I thought you might want to talk to me again, Diane.’

  Fry stiffened, surprised by the strength of her own reaction to the voice. ‘Maggie? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes. I hear from the news that there’s been another attack.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Tell me about it, Diane.’

  Fry noted the ‘it’. Maggie didn’t really want to know about the woman who had been attacked; she wasn’t interested in who she was. She wanted to know what had happened, to hear the physical details of the attack. She wanted to know if it was the same as what had happened to her. For reassurance? Or simply for the purpose of inflicting yet more pain on herself?

  Fry could have gone through the litany, as she had done with Jenny Weston. She could have told Maggie all the details she knew about Karen Tavisker. But she kept her mouth shut, waiting to hear the voice at the other end of the line, listening for meaning in it that she knew was never communicated by phone, but only by the expression in the face and the subtleties of body language.

  ‘Tell me. I want to know,’ said Maggie petulantly into the silence.

  ‘It’s not something I can discuss with you,’ said Fry. ‘We’ve made an arrest.’

  ‘An arrest? Who is he? Tell me about him. Does he have a connection to Jenny Weston – the one with the mountain bike and an interest in history and astrology?’

  Fry felt her heart lift for a moment. It was five days since she had told Maggie about Jenny Weston, but Maggie had remembered Jenny’s interest in history and perhaps the idea that she might have visited Hammond Hall. It meant Jenny had become real to her.

  But Fry thought of Darren Howsley, with the mask and the knife in his stolen car, and the independent, credible witness they had to identify him. She thought of the sweat she had shed over Maggie Crew and the strain on her own emotions, and of how little she had achieved. She had not even known that Maggie had a daughter adopted until her sister had mentioned it. And Fry worried about the question that Catherine had asked her – ‘how old are you?’ What did she mean by that?

  She thought of Maggie’s attitude, of how she had cancelled her appointment, stood her up and humiliated her in front of the secretary. There was no way she was going through all that again.

  ‘There’s no point, Maggie,’ she said. ‘Because I don’t need you. You’re no use to me any more.’

  Darren Howsley was an innocuous-looking man. When processed through the detention suite, he measured in at five foot nine inches and ten stone eight pounds. His hair was recorded as ‘light brown’. He had a small moustache, hazel eyes and a discreet tattoo of a tiger on his left forearm.

  He spoke quietly, sometimes hardly at all, his hands clasped apologetically together in his lap. But he had been questioned by Greater Manchester Police on suspicion of multiple stabbings, in which three middle-aged women had died and a seven-year-old girl had lost an eye. Howsley was currently on bail for an assault on a taxi driver who’d had the temerity to demand his fare.

  He was questioned intensively for several hours, allowing for the statutory rest and meals breaks prescribed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. The details of his movements at the times of the attacks on the three local women were gone over again and again, until all involved became tired of hearing the same questions and the same answers, or the lack of them.

  Only when the last dregs of hope had been exhausted and an exercise in futility was staring them in the face did the interviewers falter. They took a break. They consulted with each other, they took advice from upstairs. Then they went back in again.

  ‘Mr Howsley, you’ve told us that on Sunday 2nd November you were at a pub in Matlock. Which pub was it again?’

  ‘The White Bull.’

  ‘And what time did you arrive?’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘What time did you leave?’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘How many drinks did you have? Who were you with? Who did you speak to? Where did you go when you left?’

  But Howsley’s answers didn’t vary, no matter how often they asked him. He had clear memories of what he was doing on the days that Jenny Weston and Maggie Crew were attacked, and his statements were consistent. He had been a long way from the area, on his home patch in Greater Manchester.

  Only when told about sightings of the stolen car did he seem less confident. He couldn’t be sure where he was when Karen Tavisker was attacked, he said. The interview team had an advantage on this one. The Renault driven by Darren Howsley had been sighted in the Ringham area, and they had two reliable witnesses – the Rangers, Owen Fox and Mark Roper, who had recorded the make, model, colour and false licence plate, as they had been doing with any unfamiliar vehicle near the moor. It was then Howsley asked for his solicitor.

  ‘I think he wasn’t able to resist falling back into old habits when he read about our two assaults,’ said DCI Tailby afterwards.

  ‘A copycat,’ said DI Hitchens.

  ‘In a way. Tavisker was lucky, anyway.’

  ‘Aren’t we going to try for an identification?’ asked Fry.

  ‘I don’t think it’s worthwhile. Greater Manchester are keen to get him back. I think we’ll let them have him.’

  Owen Fox had completed the first course of stones and had begun sliding the big throughs back into the wall. The throughs would hold the whole structure firmly together. With these and the topping stones in place, the wall would stand for another hundred years or so.

  ‘Why would a man do that? Attack all those women?’ asked Mark Roper. ‘What would he be thinking of?’

  Owen didn’t pause in his work. ‘I don’t suppose thinking came into it,’ he said.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I think it would be a physical thing. An instinct that the mind has no control over.’

  Mark considered this, and nodded. ‘I know what you mean.’

  It seemed to Mark Roper that Owen was like a stone wall himself, solid and reliable, calm and controlled. He never raised his voice. But then, Mark’s father had never raised his voice, either. He had never smacked, or even criticized – not that Mark could remember. Instead, he had joked all the time, and talked about all sorts of subjects. His father had loved to make things. He collected useful bits of wood which he would never get round to doing anything with. He used to drive his mother mad by stopping the car to pick up a broken piece of pipe or a sheet of corrugated Perspex from the side of the road, or a wooden crate fallen from a lorry.

  But his temper had changed after Rick had died. And Mark’s parents had drifted apart instead of supporting each other, until his father had moved out. And then there had been the new man.

  Mark could see the stones in the completed length of wall were bonded like brickwork, laid across the joints in the course below. Every stone touched all its neighbours, allowing no room for movement. They were wedged in tight, each with its own ro
le and no possibility of shifting without a danger of bringing down the entire structure. In this part of the world, there were whole villages made like that, thought Mark – not just the houses, but the people too. You weren’t allowed to wander out of line. There was no room for movement, no shifting from your allotted role. Wedged in tight.

  Clumsily, Mark tried to express this thought to Owen. The Area Ranger listened to him for a few moments, then rubbed a hand through his beard.

  ‘You haven’t come across a suicide yet, have you, Mark?’ he said, as if picking up the thread of an entirely different conversation.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You will, in this job. I think suicides are the saddest deaths of all. It means someone has decided that life has no part for them to play any more.’

  Mark knew what that meant. There were people who had tried to shift from their place in the wall, and whose foundations had collapsed. Mark tilted his head to listen more closely to what Owen was saying. It didn’t sound reassuring. But he always learned things from Owen, and he had to listen in case he missed something.

  ‘There’s a spot where a lot of people go to do away with themselves,’ said Owen. ‘The car park at the top of the Eden Valley, where you can see Mam Tor. They call it Suicide Corner.’

  ‘Yes, I know it,’ said Mark.

  ‘They always seem to go to that one spot. They park up in their cars to enjoy the view for one last time, then write their notes and drink their whisky and connect a hose up to the exhaust. Sometimes they use pills, sometimes a knife or razor blade across the wrists. Occasionally, they change their minds when they see what they’ve done, when the blood begins to flow and the pain they’ve only imagined becomes real.’

  Mark nodded. But he wasn’t sure if the Ranger was just talking generally, or whether he was communicating some personal message.

  ‘There’s a story about a student,’ said Owen. ‘I don’t know if it’s true or not. They say he drove from Suicide Corner to the hospital in Edendale with blood pouring from both his wrists where he had hacked his arteries open with a pair of dressmaker’s scissors. The car was warm, and the blood flowed pretty well from the cuts he made before he panicked. It had run down his arms and on to his trouser legs, soaked into his lap and pooled on the rubber mat. They say the car looked like a slaughterhouse. But it’s over five miles to drive into Edendale, and the student said afterwards that he had stopped at three red lights in the centre of town, waiting for the traffic to pass. By the time he arrived at Accident and Emergency, he was almost unconscious. He sat in the car outside the hospital entrance for ten minutes before an ambulance crew found him. His hands were glued to the steering wheel with congealed blood. The nurses had to prise him free.’

  ‘It isn’t right,’ said Mark. But he didn’t think Owen had heard him. His eyes were on his hands, though they were hidden by his gloves. He rubbed the palms together, as if irritated by some persistent itch.

  ‘On balance,’ said Owen, ‘I think carbon monoxide is probably the best. It takes only a few minutes. I’ve seen men still sitting in the driving seats of their cars after the exhaust has done its job. They seem just to have fallen asleep. A paramedic once told me that your blood turns cherry-red from the carbon monoxide, when it works properly,’ said Owen. ‘Your brain swells, and so does your liver and kidneys and spleen. Even the tiny blood vessels in your eyes haemorrhage. But that’s internal damage, the things you can’t see. At Suicide Corner, you always think they’re asleep at first. Until you notice the smell of the urine soaked into the cloth of the driving seat.’

  Mark shifted his feet uneasily. Now he wanted Owen to stop talking.

  ‘This paramedic said the carbon monoxide replaces the oxygen in your blood,’ said Owen. ‘You die of oxygen starvation, a sort of internal suffocation. You can’t smell or taste or see the gas; all that happens is that you begin to feel drowsy. You get a slight headache and a shortness of breath. Then your movements slow down, there’s some nausea and chest pain, perhaps a few hallucinations. We’ve all had hangovers worse than that. But this is the sort of hangover you don’t wake up from.’

  ‘Owen –’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the mistakes that some of them make, though. They don’t seem to plan their own deaths properly. They come with lengths of hosepipe that are too short to reach through the car window. Or they arrive with nothing to seal the gap where they have to lower the window to get the pipe through. At Suicide Corner, they can sit for a long time with the wind howling through the gap in the window and blowing away the carbon monoxide as fast as it trickles into the car.’

  Mark thought for a moment of the woman, Jenny Weston, who had died with her own blood choking her heart. Her death had 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 for evil.

  ‘None of it is right,’ said Mark. At least Owen lifted his head now and met his eye. Owen’s face looked tired and drawn. The wind up here was making his eyes water. There was rain coming from the east – fat clouds were bouncing over the hills, and all the weight seemed to be in the sky.

  ‘Owen …’

  ‘Yes, they seem just to have fallen asleep,’ said Owen. ‘But it’s not a sleep that has any comfort in it. Only nightmares.’

  Mark peered at his face, seeking to understand more clearly what he was hearing in the Ranger’s words.

  ‘We’ll not let that happen, Owen,’ he said.

  Owen just stared at him. And then he said something that made Mark wonder whether he had understood any of it at all.

  ‘Let me tell you, Mark,’ he said. ‘It’s always your body that lets you down, in the end.’

  26

  Diane Fry strapped on the scabbard for her extendable baton. Police officers called the baton an ASP, after the name of the manufacturer, Armament Systems and Procedures of Wisconsin, USA. It extended to sixteen inches when fully racked, and the handbook claimed it offered unparalleled psychological deterrence. Even closed, it consisted of six inches of heavy-duty steel. Most CID officers simply carried the weapon in their pocket, but on Fry’s build the bulge of the closed ASP was still noticeable. So she had bought a back pocket scabbard with a Velcro flap which stopped the baton falling out when she ran. On the other hip was the holder for her kwik-cuffs. When she put on her jacket, their outline was barely visible.

  She considered her protective vest. But it was heavy and uncomfortable to wear for any length of time, and it gave her pains in the muscles in her back. She put it back in her locker.

  Ben Cooper had said that they were supposed to protect people like Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington. But it was difficult for Fry to understand why. The two travellers weren’t part of the society that she served; they paid no taxes to help meet her wages. They were never likely to become members of the police liaison committee. Still, there was something about them that she didn’t understand, all the same. Against her own judgement, she was curious what it was that Cooper saw in them. His mind was a puzzle and frustration to her – she never understood what perverse instinct it was that made him believe so strongly in things that she couldn’t even see. Yet the need to understand him was like an irritating itch on her skin, a rash that she had to scratch. In this case, he was way off target. Lawrence and Bevington were on the wrong side of the law. Well, they were – weren’t they?

  When she arrived at the quarry, Fry found a bored constable sitting in his car with half an ear on the radio, a chocolate bar in his mouth and his eyes on a fishing magazine. The windows of his car were streaked with rain on the outside, and steamed up on the inside.

  ‘Anything happening?’

  ‘Nope. Quiet as the grave,’ he said.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Taylor.’

  The rain was getting heavier as Fry banged on the door of the van. The curtain behind the cab was pulled aside and light spilled out on to her face. Then the door slid open, and Cal stood on the step.

>   ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Just a few words.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘There’s something I want to know. I thought you and your friend might be able to help me.’

  Cal eyed her suspiciously. ‘Leave us alone. We’ll be out of here by Monday morning. What’s the point of hassling us now?’

  ‘No hassle. Just a question.’

  ‘One question? OK, go ahead.’

  Fry turned her jacket collar up against the water trickling on to her neck. ‘It’s wet out here,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. It’s the rain that does it.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Is that the question? ’Cos the answer’s “no”.’

  ‘I can’t hear you, because of the rain in my ears.’

  A voice came from inside the van, lazy and amused. ‘Hey, let her in, Cal. She sounds fun.’

  Cal hesitated, but pulled open the door. Inside the van, Fry squeezed into a space next to the chest of drawers, sitting on a cushion that smelled of Indian spices. Stride watched her through the blonde hair that had fallen over his face. He smiled, like an Arab prince welcoming her to his tent.

  ‘Our last visitor. I hope you bring us luck.’

  ‘Yes, they’ll have you out of this quarry tomorrow.’

  ‘We know.’

  ‘If it were me, I’d be glad to leave. There’s nothing here. What sort of life can it be?’

  ‘You want to know what we do all day? Is that the question?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘We talk. We think about things. You could try it. It doesn’t hurt.’

  ‘You’re young. You should be out in the world enjoying life,’ said Fry. ‘This place is so empty and bleak.’

  ‘No. All you see is a landscape of rocks and heather,’ said Stride. ‘But the moor is a living thing. It has moods; it has desires.’ He grinned at Fry, and his voice hushed. ‘It has secrets.’