Dancing With the Virgins

For a while, he leaned against a rail near the changing rooms, gazing at the empty pitch, watching the starlings that had arrived in the dusk to pick over the divots in the turf, searching for worms exposed by the players’ studs. He became distantly aware of a more aggressive note to the shouting in the bar behind him, but decided it wasn’t his concern.

Cooper continued to believe it was nothing to do with him right up until the moment that a six-foot six-inch student lock forward put a hand like a meat plate on his shoulder.

3

Diane Fry had never seen Detective Chief Inspector Stewart Tailby quite so agitated. The DCI loomed over his group of officers like a head teacher with a class full of pupils in detention, and he was shouting at the Senior SOCO from the Scientific Support Unit. Tailby’s strangely two-tone hair was trembling in the wind as he turned and paced around the crime scene.

‘We’ve got to hit this area fast,’ he said. ‘We can’t possibly seal it off – we’d need every man in E Division. We need to get what we can before the public get up here and trample over everything.’

‘Well, we could do it in a rush, but it won’t be very selective,’ said the SOCO.

‘Sod being selective,’ said Tailby. ‘Take everything. We’ll worry about being selective later.’

A few yards away, DI Hitchens manoeuvred to keep his senior officer within distance. Other officers ebbed and flowed awkwardly around them, like extras in a badly staged Gilbert and Sullivan opera, who had just realized that nobody had told them what to do with their hands.

‘The light’s failing fast,’ said Hitchens, gazing at the sky.

‘Well, thanks for that,’ snapped Tailby. ‘I thought I was going blind.’

The DCI strode over to the side of the stone circle and looked down into the disused quarry beyond it. There was a barbed wire fence, but it was too low to keep anybody out. On the other side could be seen the last few yards of an access road, which ended on the lip of the quarry. Diane Fry stretched her neck to see what Tailby was looking at. Someone had been fly-tipping from the roadway. She could just make out tyre marks, and a heap of bulging black bin liners, some yellow plastic sheeting and a roll of carpet that had been heaved off the edge. The rubbish lay scattered on the slope like the debris of a plane crash.

‘Find out where the entrance to that quarry is,’ said Tailby. ‘And somebody will have to go down there. We need to find the rest of the clothes. Top priority.’

Hitchens had to dodge as Tailby wheeled suddenly and strode back towards the stones, avoiding the lengths of blue tape twisted together between birch trees and metal stakes. In the centre of the circle, the pathologist, Mrs Van Doon, still crouched over the victim under makeshift lighting. Tailby’s face contorted. He seemed to find something outrageous and obscene in the posture of the body.

‘Where’s that tent?’ he called. ‘Get the tent over her before we have an audience.’

He turned his back and walked on a few yards from the circle, where a single stone stood on its own. DI Hitchens trailed after him at a safe distance.

‘There’s an inscription carved on this stone,’ announced Tailby, with the air of Moses coming down from the mountain.

‘Yes. It looks like a name, sir.’

‘We’ll need a photographer over here. I want that name deciphering.’

‘It’s well away from the path,’ said Hitchens. ‘We think the assailant probably brought his victim from the other direction.’

‘So?’

‘The inscription has probably been there for years.’

‘Do you know that? Are you familiar with these stones?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Ever seen them before in your life?’

‘No, sir.’

Tailby turned. ‘No point asking you, Fry, is there?’

Fry shrugged, but the DCI wasn’t waiting for an answer. He looked around to see who else he could find. ‘You lot, there! Anyone seen these stones before? They’re a famous landmark, they tell me. A significant part of our ancient heritage. They’re an attraction. Visitors flock to see them. What about you?’

The officers shook their heads. They were the sort of men who spent their free time in the pub or in front of the telly, doing a bit of DIY or visiting the garden centre. The ones with kids went to Alton Towers and Gulliver’s Kingdom. But this thing in front of them wasn’t a theme park. There were no white-knuckle rides or ice-cream vans. Tailby turned back to Hitchens.

‘OK, see? We know nothing about it. We’re all as ignorant as a lot of monkeys. This stone circle might as well be a Tibetan yak compound, for all we know about the place.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘Just see that it’s done,’ snarled Tailby.

Then the DCI looked back to where Mrs Van Doon was working. Fry could see that more inscriptions had been scratched into the dirt in the centre of the circle, close to the body. The letters were big and bold, and they spelled out ‘STRIDE’. Whoever had made these was less interested in leaving a long-term record of his presence, though. The drizzle was hardly touching the marks, but a couple of heavy showers would wash them clean away.

‘What about those, then?’ said Tailby. ‘You’re not going to tell me those have been there for years?’

‘No,’ admitted Hitchens. ‘They’ve got to be more recent.’

‘When did it rain in this area last? Properly, I mean?’

Tailby stared around him. The officers gathered nearby looked at each other, then up at the sky. Fry sympathized. They were detectives – they spent all their time buried in paperwork or making phone calls in windowless offices; occasionally they drove around in a car, shuttling from pub to crown court and back again. How were they supposed to know when it had rained?

It was well known that DI Hitchens had just bought a new house in Chesterfield. Tailby himself had a ranch-style bungalow in a desirable part of Dronfield. Most of the other officers lived miles away, down in the lower valleys and the dormitory villages. Some of them were from the suburbs of Derby. It could be blowing a blizzard up here on the moor, piling up six-foot drifts of virgin snow, and all these men would see was a faint bit of sleet in the condensation on their kitchen windows.

‘Does it matter?’ said Hitchens.

Tailby smiled like a fox with a rabbit. ‘It matters, Inspector, because we can’t say whether the inscriptions were written in the last twenty-four hours or the last two weeks.’

‘I suppose so, sir.’

Teeth bared, Tailby glared round for another victim. There was a shuffling and looking away, a lot of thoughtful glances at the grey blanket of cloud.

‘You useless set of pillocks! Doesn’t anyone know? Then find me someone who does!’

Mark Roper finally opened his eyes as Owen Fox parked the Land Rover behind the Partridge Cross briefing centre. The cycle hire staff had closed up for the night, but there were still a few visitors’ cars left outside. A couple were securing their bikes to a rack. It occurred to Mark Roper that one of the cars that still stood dark and unattended probably belonged to the woman whose body lay on the moor.

‘Come on, Mark. Let’s get you inside,’ said Owen.

For a moment, Mark didn’t move. Then, slowly, he unfolded his legs and got out. He felt stiff, like an old man with arthritis. His jacket was crumpled, there were grass stains on his knees and black marks on his hands. He couldn’t think where the marks had come from, but his hands felt unpleasant and greasy, as if there was something on his skin that would take a long time to remove.

He swayed and supported himself on the side of the Land Rover. Owen moved nearer, not touching him but hovering anxiously.

‘We have to wait while the police come to speak to you, Mark,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Are you up to it?’

‘I’m all right.’

Owen Fox was a large man, a little ungainly from carrying too much weight around his upper body. His curly hair and wiry beard were going grey, and his face was worn and creased, the sign of a man who spent his life outdoors, regardless of the weather. Mark wanted to draw reassurance from his presence, to lean on his comforting bulk, but an uncertainty held him back.

Owen finally took Mark by the arm. But the reassurance failed to come. The contact was safe and impersonal, Owen’s fingers meeting only the fabric of the young Ranger’s red fleece jacket. Mark shivered violently, as if his only source of warmth had suddenly been withdrawn.

‘Let’s get inside,’ said Owen. ‘It’s cold out here. You look to me as though you need a hot drink. A cup of my tea will bring some colour back to your cheeks, won’t it? Green, maybe – but at least it’ll be colour.’

Mark smiled weakly. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re probably suffering from shock. We ought to get a doctor to look at you.’

‘No. I’ll be all right, Owen.’

The briefing centre was empty, but warm. The blackboard on the far wall contained white chalk scrawl that gleamed in the sudden light. The words meant nothing to Mark now. In the corner, the assistant’s desk was scattered with papers – reports and forms, the encroaching paperwork of the modern Peak Park Ranger. Soon, a computer would arrive, even here.

Mark needed no encouragement to collapse into a chair near the electric heater. Owen watched him, his face creased with concern, then turned to switch on the kettle.

‘Plenty of sugar in your tea, for the shock.’

Sugar, and a reassuring voice, thought Mark. The things that people needed were simple, really – such as stability and their own part to play in life. But it was Owen he had learned to look to for stability. Now he had an inexplicable fear that it would be snatched from his life again.

‘The things people leave on the moor,’ said Owen. ‘Litter and rubbish. You’d think they’d at least take their dead bodies home with them.’

This time Mark couldn’t smile.

Owen looked at him. ‘I did tell you to keep in touch, Mark,’ he said.

‘I tried, Owen. But I couldn’t get an answer.’

Owen grimaced. ‘Those radios.’

I mustn’t make him feel guilty, thought Mark. Don’t make him take this burden on himself as well as everything else. Mark was aware that there were things he didn’t know about Owen, that in their relationship he only saw the surface of the older man. But there was one thing he did know. Owen needed no more burdens.

Ben Cooper jumped at the hand on his shoulder and tensed his body for trouble. He cursed himself for having allowed someone to find him on his own in a vulnerable position.

The hand felt like a great weight. The tall student was massively built, with a red, sweaty face and a squashed nose. He leaned down and spoke into Cooper’s ear with a voice that growled like a boulder in a landslide. At first, Cooper had no idea what he was saying. He thought the noise in the bar must have damaged his hearing permanently. He shook his head. The student leaned closer, breathing beer fumes on his neck.

‘You are Constable Cooper, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I said there’s someone on the phone for you. Some daft bastard who wants to know when it rained last.’

Ten minutes later, Cooper slid into the passenger seat of a Ford Mondeo as it scattered gravel on the sports ground car park.

‘It’s a what, Todd?’

‘A cyclist from Sheffield,’ said Weenink. ‘She was found in the middle of the stones on Ringham Moor.’

‘You mean the Nine Virgins?’

‘That’s the place. You got it in one. I can see why the DCI loves you.’

‘Everybody knows the Nine Virgins,’ said Cooper.

‘I wish you’d introduce me, then. I can’t find even one virgin where I live.’

Cooper could detect the sweet smell of beer in the car. He wondered if Weenink was fit to drive. It would be ironic if they got stopped by a Traffic patrol. Todd could lose his job, if he was breathalysed.

‘Is Mr Tailby in charge up there?’

‘He’s SIO until they manage to pull a superintendent in from somewhere,’ said Weenink. ‘He’s not a happy man. He’s got a wide-open scene, public access, SOCOs scattered over a space as big as four football pitches. Also, he has a temper on him as foul as my breath on a Saturday night. But we have to report to DI Hitchens. And let me tell you, we’re bloody lucky Hitchens arrived.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Earlier on, it was DI Armstrong at the scene. The Wicked Witch of West Street.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘The Bitch of Buxton, then.’

‘Shut up, Todd.’

Weenink stopped at the junction of the A6, and seemed to spend a long time waiting for distant traffic to pass on the main road. Finally, he pulled out behind a tanker carrying milk for Hartington Stilton.

‘You don’t understand, Ben,’ he said. ‘That Kim Armstrong, she’s so scary. I’m frightened she’ll put a spell on me and turn me into a eunuch.’

‘Will you cut it out?’

‘No, seriously, Ben. They reckon she cursed Ossie Clarke in Traffic one day, and his balls shrivelled up like cashew nuts. The doctors are baffled. He’s been off sick for weeks.’

‘Todd –’

‘Well, he has, hasn’t he? Eh?’

‘Ossie Clarke is one of the bad-back brigade. He has a slipped disc.’

‘That’s the official line. Don’t let it lull you into a false sense of security. Anyway, we’re in luck. They couldn’t spare Armstrong from this paedophile enquiry. Apparently it’s warming up for some arrests. There was the little girl that was killed –’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘So Hitchens has had to come in off leave. And you know he’s just moved into a new house with that redheaded nurse? So he’s not happy, either. It’s a barrel of laughs up there, all right. Couldn’t wait to get away for a bit, myself.’

Weenink was taking the back road past the fluorspar works to avoid the bottleneck in Bakewell. He took the bends gently, as if he was just one more pensioner on a Sunday afternoon outing.

‘Todd? Can’t we go a bit faster?’

‘Mmm, the roads are a bit slippery with all these leaves,’ said Weenink. ‘Can’t be too careful.’

The atmosphere on the moor was gloomy. It made Ben Cooper feel almost guilty about the buzz of anticipation that had stayed with him even in the car with Todd Weenink. The entire stone circle had been taped off, and lights were being set up to illuminate a small tent in the centre. More tape created a pathway as far as a gorse bush a few yards away. The tape twisted and rattled in the wind with a noise like a crowd of football supporters half-heartedly encouraging their team.

‘There was an inch or two of rain during Thursday night, but it had dried up by morning,’ said Cooper.

Several faces turned to stare at him. Hitchens raised an eyebrow, but Tailby nodded.

‘Well, the ground was fine for lifting the sugar beet that morning,’ explained Cooper. He drew a finger through a hollow on the top of one of the stones. ‘On the other hand, there hasn’t been enough sun since then to dry the moisture out where it’s sheltered from the wind.’

He became suddenly aware of the nature of the looks he was being given. ‘It’s what you asked me,’ he said.

Hitchens shrugged. He was wearing an old rugby jersey over his jeans, and might once have played for the divisional XV until he became senior enough to be more at risk of injury from his own side than from the opposition.

‘Could Stride be a name?’ he asked.

‘What kind of man would leave his name written in the dirt when he had committed a murder, anyway?’ said Tailby. ‘And these stones …’

‘The Nine Virgins,’ said Cooper.

‘What are they all about?’

‘They’re the remains of a Bronze Age burial chamber. But local people call them the Virgins because of the legends …’

‘How old?’

‘Three and a half thousand years, give or take.’

‘The last virgins in Derbyshire, then,’ said Hitchens.

Cooper kept his mouth shut. He watched a SOCO scoop up a tiny patch of bloodstained earth where the body had lain, while he listened to the faint laughter drop hollowly into the wind and disappear with a scatter of dead leaves.

In a short while, no doubt, a detective superintendent would arrive from another division to take over as senior investigating officer. He would be grumbling about the continuing vacancy in E Division that meant he had to be dragged away from his own patch, where there would be several other major incidents to be dealt with as well.

But this was the second attack on a woman in a small area, and this victim was dead. Panic would be setting in at higher levels, and those being kicked by the chiefs would soon be kicking the dog.

Though he knew Ringham Moor well, Ben Cooper found the area around the Nine Virgins disturbed him in a way it had never done before. The atmosphere was all wrong. There was nothing dark and claustrophobic about this murder scene, unlike so many others he had come across. Very often a killing occurred within a close relationship, usually within the confines of a family, where emotions ran high and someone was finally driven to extremes. Here, though, the feeling he got was of space and timelessness, a place where everything ran to its natural sequence, just as it had done for thousands of years. Here, the slow dance of the seasons repeated itself endlessly on an almost empty stage as nature rolled from life to death and back to life again.

Cooper had learned to keep quiet about his thoughts at times. Most senior officers, like DCI Tailby, prided themselves on being practical, logical men. Tailby was from Nottingham, raised in suburban streets and comprehensive schools. He preferred to leave it to people like Ben Cooper to be imaginative – he seemed to regard it as some kind of local idiosyncrasy, a queer characteristic inherited from the distant Celtic ancestors of the Derbyshire hill folk.

Cooper watched his fellow officers. Some of them certainly looked as though they felt disorientated and isolated from the realities of the twenty-first century up here. As if to emphasize the point, the sound of a steam train starting up seemed to reach them from the valley below.

‘There’s the train,’ said Cooper.

‘What?’ said Tailby.

‘It’s the Peak Rail line. They run restored steam engines on it. For the tourists, you know.’

A white plume hung across the lights in the bottom of the valley, drifting with the breeze back towards Matlock and vanishing into the darkness as the chug of the engine receded.

Tailby spun on his heel. ‘Time to talk to the Rangers,’ he said.

‘We’ll need to get proper lights set up here, you know,’ said the Senior SOCO, ‘if you really want photos of that inscription.’

‘Believe me,’ said Tailby, ‘I want everything.’

4

The young Ranger looked vaguely familiar to Ben Cooper. But then, he knew lots of Ropers – one of them had been his Maths teacher at school, another ran the garage on Buxton Road; and he had once arrested a Roper for indecency. They were all certain to be related.

Mark was a tall young man, with wide shoulders that didn’t quite fit the rest of his body. His muscles had some catching up to do, but he was wiry and fit. Cooper noticed he had a small streak of vomit staining the front of his red Peak Park Rangers jacket. Somebody at the Partridge Cross Ranger Centre had made him several cups of tea. The tea had done nothing for his pallor, but at least his kidneys were working at full capacity. He emerged from the loo just as the police arrived.

Mark sat down unsteadily when DCI Tailby introduced himself and opened the questioning.

‘I was patrolling the moor,’ said Mark. ‘Ringham Moor. I was on the path from the east, going towards the Virgins.’

‘That’s the stone circle.’

‘It’s just one of the stone circles. But it’s the one that everybody knows.’

‘All right.’

‘I was near the Virgins when I saw a bike.’

‘Hold on. Before that, did you see anyone else on the moor?’

‘Nobody at all. It was quiet.’

‘Nobody? Think right back to when you first left the centre.’

Mark looked automatically towards the window. Cooper followed his gaze. A silver Land Rover with a thin red stripe was parked outside. Beyond the Ranger Service sign on its roof, the dark hump of the moor was still visible against a pale sky.

‘There was a man working in a field on this side of the moor, mending gates. I’ve seen him before. There was no one else.’

‘OK. Describe this bike,’ said Tailby.

Now Mark seemed to regain a bit more confidence. He produced a small notebook from the pocket of his fleece and turned the pages. But he spoke without looking at his notes. The scene was still fresh enough in his mind.

‘It was a yellow Dawes. I recognized it as one of the hire bikes. It had been chucked into the bottom of a gorse bush, in the middle of some birch trees. One of the wheels was off too. I thought somebody had hired it and had an accident and just left it. They do things like that.’

‘Who do?’

‘Well, you know – the visitors. Tourists. They just leave a bike somewhere and say it’s been stolen or they’ve lost it or something. You wouldn’t believe the lies some of them tell.’

‘Did you touch the bike?’

‘No.’

‘You’re quite sure about that, Mark?’

‘Yeah. I just looked for the number. Because I thought it was one of the hire bikes. And it was, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it was.’ Cooper could hear the gratification in the DCI’s voice. The fact it was a hire bike had made it so much easier to identify the victim. She had been obliged to leave her full name and address and proof of identity at the cycle hire centre when she took the bike out earlier that afternoon. So they had already established that her name was Jenny Weston, that she was thirty years old and divorced. She worked as a customer service manager in a large insurance office in Sheffield, and had taken a week’s holiday because she had several days’ leave to get in before the end of the year. By now, her parents had already been contacted, and her father was on his way to identify the body formally. If only it were always so easy.

‘Then I saw something lying in the middle of the Virgins,’ said Mark. ‘I went to have a look. Although –’

‘Yes?’

‘Well … I could already see what it was. I could tell, from a few yards away, from where I found the bike. It was a woman. And she was dead.’

Mark moved his hands restlessly, brushing the front of his fleece. Cooper thought at first that he was trying to rub off the vomit stain, but realized he was wrong. The young Ranger was stroking the badge stitched to the fabric, fondling as if it were the breast of a lover, tracing the silver letters and the stylized millstone symbol of the Peak Park.

‘Did you notice anything about the body?’ asked Tailby.

Mark hesitated. ‘Only that she was, you know …’ His hands made half-hearted gestures. ‘Her clothes …’

‘You mean her clothes had been interfered with?’

Mark nodded.

‘And did you notice anything else nearby? Anything unusual or out of place?’

‘No.’

‘So how close did you get to the body, Mark?’

‘I walked as far as the nearest stone. The flat one. I didn’t have to go any closer.’

‘You were quite sure she was dead?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mark. ‘Oh yes.’

Mark suddenly went a shade whiter. His hand went over his mouth, and he made a dash for the loo. A second later, the police officers heard the sound of vomiting.

DCI Tailby sat for a moment longer, as if still listening for elusive bits of information in the Ranger’s retching.

‘Cooper, find that Area Ranger,’ he said. ‘He knows the lie of the land round here, if anybody does. Tell him we need to arrange proper access to the moor. We need the owner of the land or whoever. And we need to get into that quarry, too. Get on to it.’

Ben Cooper found the Area Ranger waiting by his silver Land Rover outside the briefing centre. Owen Fox was in his early fifties, with grey hair and a thick beard that was going the same way. He was a comfortable badger of a man, with an even more comfortable smell of wool and earth.