Dancing With the Virgins (9 page)

*

There was no one waiting at home for Diane Fry when
she pulled on to the drive at Grosvenor Avenue. The
old house was converted into flats and bedsits, and her
neighbours were mostly students that she rarely saw.
They seem to spend most of their time in the pub
.

Her room was cold, with a peculiar damp chill that
seeped from the walls even in summer. She was already
realizing what an uncomfortable, depressing experience
a winter in Edendale was going to be. The three-bar
electric fire barely chased the chill from the room. And
it ate money from the meter at an alarming rate
.

She wound down with a few stretching exercises, until her body tingled comfortably. She couldn't
remember when she had eaten last, and there was no
food in the flat. But fasting was good for the body. It
made her stomach feel tight and her brain active. She
had found that eating meals caused her digestive
system to drain her energy. Fry examined herself in the mirror. There was no injury to be seen on her own face.
But it didn't mean there was no scar. It meant only
that it was the sort of scar that nobody else could
see, that no one else could tell the way she was marked.
That was how she was so much luckier than Maggie Crew. So lucky
.

Like Maggie, unwilling to reveal her disfigurement
to the gaze of a stranger, Fry knew the bitter taste of
resentment against someone who knew your innermost
secrets. She had felt like telling Maggie that she ought
to get out and face people. But surely it was equally futile to try to avoid the person you resented.

‘
What an idiot,' she said, then mentally gave herself a reprimand for talking to herself. But she had meant
it for Ben Cooper really, thinking of him buddying up
so cosily with Todd Weenink. In the end, they were
two of a kind. Besides, she thought, even Ben Cooper
didn't know
all
her secrets
.

*

Fry drove into Sheffield, gradually relaxing as the vast
sprawl of houses and factories closed around her,
shielding her from the dark hills she was leaving behind
in Derbyshire. She had first travelled into the city when
she needed to find a martial arts centre away from Eden-
dale, where the
dojo
used by Ben Cooper had become
a no-go zone. Seeing the city streets then had reminded
her exactly why she had come to this area
.

She went straight into the centre of the city, circled
the ring road and parked in a multi-storey car park near
one of the main shopping streets, The Moor. Then she
walked back towards the transport interchange at the
bottom of the hill and waited for the carriages of a Supertram to pass before crossing the road
.

The old railway arches at this end of the city would
disappear when modernization reached them. But for
now, they were home to a small group of people. No,
not a group — they were a series of individuals. They
lay in sleeping bags, under filthy blankets and cardboard boxes, huddled close together, yet still in their
own completely separate worlds, not speaking to each
other or acknowledging anyone else at all. They had
isolated themselves for their own protection. Fry knew
that the human mind was capable of shutting out many
things when necessary, even the close proximity of other people
.

The canal passed under the railway line here. There
was a lock full of scum-covered water, waiting to lift
boats another ten feet towards the hills around the city.
The spaces under the arches had once been used for
workshops and storage areas. For years now they had
been boarded up, but the boards had been ripped off
the doorways, exposing deep, dank caverns it would be foolish to enter
.

Fry waited by the lock gate. After a few minutes, a figure stepped out of the shadows at the back of the
arch and came towards her. It was a woman, a few years
younger than herself. Her eyes looked simultaneously
beaten and defiant.

‘
I've not seen you around here before. What is it you
want?
’

Fry stared at her hard, but failed to see what she wanted to see. 'I'm just looking,' she said.

‘
Are you after sex? Drugs?'

‘
No.'

‘
You must be the cops, then.'

‘
I'm looking for this woman.
’

Fry took the photograph from her wallet. It was old
and worn, taken at least ten years ago. She knew it was
futile hoping for an identification, but she had to keep
trying. If you gave up trying, you gave up everything.

‘
Never seen her before.'

‘
You haven't looked properly.'

‘
Is she in trouble, then?' The woman looked at the
photo, and pulled a face, curling her lip and wrinkling
her nose. 'Nah. She's too clean, for a start. And what
sort of hairstyle is that, I ask you?'

‘
She may not look like that any more,' said Fry.
'Eh?' She laughed. 'You're wasting your time then,
aren't you, duck?
’

The woman walked away. Just like all the others did.
Fry wanted to get her into a wrist hold, lock the kwik
cuffs, take her back to the station and question her until
she found out what she wanted to know. But she was
out of her territory here, in the position of begging for
information. And she was taking enough risks as it was.
In fact, she was a damned idiot. What had stirred up
her need to follow this quest? It was a need she had
tried to suppress for a long time, so why should it sur
face now? But she knew why. It was another thing that
was the fault of Ben Cooper
.

Fry considered how out of place Cooper would be
here, in the city. He was chained like a prisoner to the
area he came from. He would be completely lost in
these streets; but he was never lost on the moors. Ben
Cooper smelled his way around like a sheepdog – she
had seen him do it, and it drove her mad
.

But even Cooper would be indoors by now, probably
at home among his relatives at that farm on the road
towards Hucklow. He would be comfortably settled in
his nest, just like the cattle lying in their straw in the
sheds she had seen there once
.

For Diane Fry, indoors was always the safest place
to be. No one would choose to be out on the hills at night
.

*

And now it was totally dark on the moor – a world of multiple shades of black that formed imaginary shapes and half-seen
movements on the edge of his vision. The dancers weren't
afraid of the dark, and nor was he. He loved to go wandering
at night above the quarry, his arms outstretched like a blind man, gently feeling his way through the darkness, caressing
the skins of the thin birches, touching the leaves that appeared
in front of his face, letting his feet whisper and sigh in the
heather, navigating by the glint of a star on a fragment of
quartz
.

In the darkness, he was able to sense the world completely.
Not just the little bit around him, but the entire breadth and
stretch of it, the whole roll and curve of its body and the
movement of its breath. He could feel the warmth of the earth
underfoot and touch the great, empty reaches of the sky. With
a still mind and total concentration on the rhythms of his
body, he could lift himself off the ground and soar into the
sky. He had learned to see the darkened landscape flying past
below him, drawing away from him faster and faster, until
he could see the whole of the valley down there, the whole of
the Peak District, the whole of Derbyshire, with its towns
and villages suddenly dwindling into insignificance among
the black hills, and the long strings of streetlights turning
as fragile as the strands of a cobweb
.

It was all so tiny and unimportant down there. It was
nothing but a film of human detritus on the face of the earth.
All it would take was one last heave of the tectonic plates
below the surface, and all those towns and villages would be gone for ever as the landscape rearranged itself, tucking away the evidence of civilization like a chambermaid tidying the
bedclothes, like a housewife shaking out the sheets to toss
away the dead skin and fluff, and straightening out the covers
to hide the stains
.

He liked to imagine this happening; he cherished the image
like a comforting dream. It was not so long ago, after all,
that the last volcano had splashed lava and red-hot ash over
the valley of the Derwent, and the last glaciers had ground
their way through the limestone to carve those scenic gorges.
Five hundred thousand years or so? It was nothing in a
couple of million. And man had been here only a few thousand of those years, electric light a hundred. Nature could shrug
off the infestation of civilization with one gentle spasm, the
irritated twitch of a shoulder to shake off a fly. Then new
valleys and lakes would appear, and entirely different hills
would rise up in between them. And the birches would begin
the task of colonization all over again
.

He had no doubt this would happen one day. But not in
his lifetime. The time of the promised millennial cataclysms
had long since passed, leaving just more of the same petty
human pain and despair
.

No, he didn't fear the darkness; he liked it. But tonight
there were people on the moor, policemen and lights. They
were in the middle of the stone circle, like the occupants
of an alien spacecraft, turning the night into a fairground,
destroying the silence with the thump of their generator and
their bored, meaningless chatter
.

He knew their lights would make the shadows in the trees
seem even darker, so that he was invisible to their unpractised
eyes. It allowed him to get closer, until he was near enough
to hear the Virgins sighing and singing in the wind, near
enough to catch the faint fragments of the Fiddler's tune, its
notes tangling in the tops of the birches and dropping to the
ground with the leaves as they died. There was no dance
tonight, only a dirge. There was no hope in the music that
he heard, no whispers of encouragement from the stones
.

And he knew it wouldn't happen for him now. He had
thought his own world could be changed, that his life could
be stripped and made afresh, the evidence of his past tucked
away, the stains hidden from sight. But he had seen her face.
And now it was too late
.

7

Ben Cooper rubbed a hand across his eyes. There were too many bodies pressed close around him in the darkness. He could feel their heat, smell their
sweat and their cotton shirts, hear their breathing and
the scraping of their boots. But all he could see was a
bright square and a few vague shapes, the outline of
a head or shoulder here and there on the edge of the
light
.

Just before they vanished, the Virgins had seemed to
move. They had shuffled right and left, faded in and
out of focus, come closer and backed away, as if they
had been caught for a moment in a celebratory dance.
Then they had disappeared with a click and the whirr
of a motor, flicking out of sight in a white glare, with
tendrils of smoke left drifting in the beam
.

Cooper shifted uneasily, frustrated by the inactivity.
It was early in the morning, but his mind was already
alert. In fact, his imagination was streaming ahead of the facts, and vivid images were flipping through
his brain. Yesterday, he had stood on Ringham Moor
himself. He had felt the bite of the wind up there, and listened to it hissing through the dying heather as the
birch leaves crackled under his feet. And he had seen
where all this started — with the stones
.

One indistinct shape stood out from the others in the
darkness. From the corner of his eye, a subtle change
in the pattern of the shadows suggested a face had
turned towards him for a second. Cooper felt the brief
glance like a draught of air entering the room and strok
ing its fingers across his face. Suddenly, he felt self-
conscious and conspicuous, afraid to move a muscle for
fear of drawing attention to himself. He knew it was
not in his interest to attract her attention. He wouldn't
know what on earth to say to her if he did
.

A voice came out of the darkness. 'Forty feet across,
on a shallow, sandy floor. Drag marks nearly twenty
feet into the centre. No signs of a struggle. However .
.

The next slide appeared on the screen, bizarre and
meaningless until the projector pulled it into focus. To
Cooper, it looked as if an aerial shot had been taken
from high above the earth, where the hull of an ancient
boat lay half-buried in a desert. There was a ragged elliptical shape, dark red and scattered with black
flecks. It was set in a strange, grainy yellow landscape
like deep sand that blurred the edges of the shape and
rolled away towards distant orange hills that cast no shadows
.

He might have been looking at some kind of Noah's
Ark, stranded on a remote mountainside in Syria,
the subject of endless arguments about its reality. The
jagged black marks in the centre could have been the
remains of a petrified wheelhouse, crumbled masts and
decking, or rigging long since turned to dust. But there
was no natural sunlight in this desert, only artificial colours
.

Then a shadow moved in front of the screen, and a
weary face was caught by the light of the projector.

‘
You can all see what this is. It needs no explanation
from me. Death would have occurred within minutes.
’

Cooper had to shake himself out of his daydream. The police officers around him became solid shapes again, reverting to the familiar faces of a Derbyshire CID team. On the screen, they were being shown an
enhanced postmortem image, a photograph taken on
the mortuary slab. The red ellipse was the entry wound made by a sharp, single-bladed knife an inch below the
bottom rib. A fatal stab wound to the heart. Those pale
orange hills were human flesh — the slope of a woman's
abdomen and the lower edge of her ribcage. The grains of sand were her pores and skin cells, enlarged beyond
recognition, distorted by lighting that drained all rem
nants of humanity from the corpse
.

This yellow desert was the body of Jenny Weston.
And no one was arguing the reality of her death. It was
much too late for that.

‘
And we found so many damn camp fires you'd think
there had been a boy scout jamboree up there,' said DCI
Tailby, as the slide changed to a view of Ringham Moor.
Cooper saw few smiles, and heard no laughter. It was
too early in the morning, the subject was too lacking in the potential for a quick joke. The DCI tried again. 'But
the SOCOs tell us these were no boy scouts. Not unless
they give badges for sex, drugs and animal sacrifice in
the scouts these days.
’

The briefing had been called early, while it was still
dark. Many of the officers looked tired and bleary-eyed.
They had gone to bed late last night and hadn't got
enough sleep. But they would wake up as the day went
on, as the caffeine kicked in and they were forced to concentrate on their tasks
.

The incident room at Edendale Divisional Headquarters was only half full. Ben Cooper had been
expecting there would be hardly anywhere left to sit by
the time he arrived, but he was surprised by the sparse
attendance. Then he discovered that teams were already
out at the scene, up on the moor waiting for first light
to continue the careful sweep for delicate forensic traces that would vanish or be utterly contaminated at the first
sign of heavy rain or the first set of feet to trample over
the site
.

Alongside Tailby sat the Divisional Commander,
Colin Jepson. They had to call him Chief Superintendent
Jepson now. Although the rank was supposed to have
been abolished in the 1980s, Derbyshire Constabulary
had restored the title for its divisional commanders, though without the salary level that went with it
.

No detective superintendent had arrived yet, though
Edendale was still without its own CID chief. For the
time being, Tailby was being allowed to make the run
ning. Cooper thought the DCI looked a little greyer at
the temples than the day before, a little more stooped
at the shoulders
.

The slide show they had begun with was depressing
enough. The photographer had captured a chill bleak
ness in his establishing shots of the moor, and an
impressionistic arrangement of angles and perspective
in his close-ups of the Virgins. The slides of the victim
had silenced the room, except for an increased shuffling
of boots on the floor. They showed in brutal clarity the
curious position of the woman's limbs, the absence of
clothing on the lower half of her body, the red stain on
her T-shirt. After the unsettling realism, the autopsy
shots had concluded on a note of fantasy. As usual,
they seemed divorced from the actual death, too clinical,
and reeking too much of antiseptic to be human
.

The most interesting result from the postmortem was
that there had been no sign of sexual assault on Jenny
Weston. So why had some of the victim's clothes been
removed? There were two main possibilities — either her killer had been interrupted, or the intention had
been to mislead the police
.