Dancing With the Virgins

12

In South Quarry later that afternoon, Cal and Stride were sitting on a convenient rock alongside their van. They had two mugs of tea and were rolling tobacco into Rizla papers with practised fingers. Stride’s movements were languid as he stooped over the task, occasionally pushing the hair back from his eyes. He wore what looked like an old greatcoat from an Army surplus store and a pair of combat trousers, with his tin of tobacco balanced on one knee. He was entirely concentrated on rolling his cigarette, his delicate fingers prodding the tobacco neatly into place. Occasionally, he smiled to himself, as if at some private joke.

It seemed to Ben Cooper that the one called Cal was altogether more watchful. Though he didn’t look up, he was certainly aware that he was being observed. His shoulders were tense, and he frowned as he licked the edge of his Rizla before pushing his tobacco tin away in one of the pockets of a camouflage jacket. A stud in his nose glittered briefly as he turned to watch Stride light up. The skin of Cal’s scalp was visible through his dark stubble, hardly any longer than the stubble on his cheeks.

‘What do you make of them?’ asked DCI Tailby.

‘Mostly harmless,’ said DI Hitchens.

Cooper laughed, and Tailby looked at him sharply. ‘Was that a joke?’

‘The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, sir,’ explained Cooper. ‘It’s how the guide describes the planet Earth. Just those two words: “mostly harmless”.’

The DCI looked at him for a moment. His grey wings of hair lifted in the wind that buffeted the quarry edge, then settled back on his temples like roosting doves.

‘Douglas Adams,’ said DI Hitchens helpfully. ‘I liked Marvin the Paranoid Android, myself.’ The DCI had turned his stare on Hitchens instead. ‘Not that I meant it as a joke, sir. I meant these two — I think they’re mostly harmless. No police records.’

Cal and Stride sat without speaking, smoking their cigarettes, staring into space, apparently at peace with the world. Cooper recalled that there had been cigarette ends in the inventory of items recovered by the scenes of crime team near Jenny Weston’s body. But they had been Marlboro, not handmade roll-ups.

Above the VW van, a birch had rooted itself on a precarious ledge in the quarry side. Its lower branches were hung with small metal objects, bits of tinfoil and sections of baked bean cans tinkling and clanging in the wind.

‘And what’s all that lot supposed to be?’ asked Tailby. ‘Some new way of doing the washing-up?’

‘Tree art,’ said Hitchens. ‘Bevington has written some poems that are stuck to the chimes. They’re meant to create an atmosphere of peace and harmony, he says. Do you want to go and have a closer look?’

‘No, thanks. Too much harmony is bad for me.’

Tailby glared down at the van. To Cooper, it seemed that it was taking a great effort for Cal not to look up and stare back.

‘Can we positively eliminate them as suspects?’ asked Tailby.

‘They have no apparent connection with the victim, and there’s no motive that we know of. There is no witness evidence to tie them in any closer to the scene than this.’

‘What about their shoes?’

‘I got a quick look,’ said Cooper. ‘Calvin Lawrence is wearing trainers, and Bevington has a pair of Doc Martens. Neither would match the partial print we found.’

‘They may have a pair of boots in the van. I know they don’t look as though they have much, but even these two could own more than one pair of shoes.’

‘We’d need a search warrant to look in the van. We don’t have reasonable suspicion.’

Stride lay back on the rock, letting his coat fall open, resting his head back so that he was gazing at the sky. His hands were resting on his face near his eyes, but the fingers were still. The smoke from his roll-up drifted straight up for a few feet, then was caught in the wind and dispersed. Whatever he could see up there in the sky caused him to smile with some deep, inner pleasure. The smile was so sudden that it made the detectives look up as well. But there was nothing to be seen except clouds scudding high across the moor. The clouds were growing darker. There could be rain soon.

‘If you think those wind chimes are strange, Cooper has something else to show us,’ said Hitchens.

They walked round the quarry edge to a sheltered spot enclosed by two rocks. In a shallow basin in one of the rocks were what appeared at first to be a series of giant candles. They were made of wax, a foot tall, and they had been carefully sculpted, each into the same distinctive shape, with a long straight shaft, faintly ribbed with veins, and a swollen, rounded head like a cowl, with a small hole in the very tip. They were all sorts of colours — swirling blues and reds, butter yellow, subtle tints of brown and green, and a pure white one, with delicate streaks of gold in the veins of the shaft. They stood like soldiers on parade, pointing permanently skywards.

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Tailby.

‘They represent the phallus,’ said Hitchens.

‘I can see exactly what they represent,’ said Tailby. ‘And phallus wasn’t the word that sprang to mind.’

‘I think it probably takes quite some doing to get the shape just right, like that. I was thinking of a nomination for the Turner Prize.’

‘And who is the Leonardo da Vinci we have to thank for this lot?’

‘The one called Cal. He’s quite proud of them. He calls this place the phallus farm.’

‘They’re obscene.’

‘I doubt they’re committing an offence,’ said Cooper.

‘I don’t want to look at them. Let’s go back.’

They walked back round the quarry to the path. Cooper noticed a group of women appear on the far side of the quarry. They were wearing cagoules and leggings, bright and chatty. They looked down at Cal and Stride for a while, then walked past the birch tree and studied the wind chimes.

‘Where’s Acting DS Fry?’ asked Tailby. ‘Wasn’t she here earlier?’

‘She has one of her sessions with Maggie Crew,’ said Hitchens.

‘Oh, yes.’ The DCI drew the words out like a sigh. He didn’t sound hopeful of Maggie Crew.

Tailby stood quietly for a minute, staring at the van and the two youths. ‘I’ve got a press conference to do in half an hour,’ he said. ‘What am I going to tell the TV and the newspapers?’

‘How about telling them to keep out of our bloody way?’ suggested Hitchens.

‘All right,’ said Tailby. ‘I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.’

The group of women had moved on. They could be heard chatting again for a while. But they fell very silent when they reached the rock that contained the phallus farm.

At the West Street HQ, they had already been making structural alterations to the canteen. They had succeeded in making it both smaller and less welcoming at the same time. Perhaps it was a deliberate ploy to make the introduction of the vending machines seem like an improvement.

But E Division was lucky. Their neighbours in B Division had no canteen at all. A mobile sandwich service called at the front of the building every lunchtime. Beyond that, it was a question of a kettle, a jar of Nescafé and a packet of chocolate biscuits in the corner of every office. There could be no ‘canteen culture’ when there was no canteen. Problem solved.

Ben Cooper carried a cup of coffee to a table where some of his shift were already sitting, and he arrived in the middle of a conversation that immediately made him uneasy.

‘She’s a real hard bitch,’ Todd Weenink was saying.

Opposite Weenink was Toni Gardner, a DC from another shift, who still had her straight blonde hair tied back into a ponytail in the fashion of the uniformed officers. She nodded in agreement. ‘She’s a toughie, all right.’

‘Who are you talking about?’ asked Cooper, though he felt he could have a good guess.

‘That Diane Fry,’ said Weenink.

‘A snotty cow, she is, too,’ said Gardner.

Cooper settled down on a spare chair, concentrating on not spilling his coffee so that he didn’t have to meet anyone’s eye.

‘She’s just trying too hard,’ he said. ‘She’ll settle down after a bit.’

Weenink shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know how you can be so tolerant. I know I wouldn’t be, if it was me.’

Cooper looked at the officers round the table, and he wanted to tell them about the time that Diane Fry had reluctantly confided in him the secrets of her past, the dreadful history of her family, and the heroin-addict sister she hadn’t seen since she was sixteen. But he knew it was impossible to share this knowledge with anyone else.

‘I’d tell her where to stick her stripes,’ said Gardner. She smiled at Todd Weenink, as if willing him to notice that she was agreeing with him. Cooper realized that there was more going on here. Todd had an attraction for some women that he never fully understood. He supposed it was a kind of overt masculinity, the sense of sexual challenge in his dark smirk and the way he held his body. Yet these things were not what women said they looked for in men. Not the women Ben Cooper talked to, anyway.

Gradually, the conversation veered to other topics — grumbles about supervisors, night shifts and salaries. Every man there could have run E Division better than the Divisional Commander. Under their guidance, the clear-up rate would double. But then there were the courts to deal with, of course. Not to mention the CPS. The Criminal Preservation Society, they called it — the body of lawyers given the responsibility of prosecuting the alleged offenders the police produced for them. There was a general shaking of heads.

‘And we’re chasing up white vans tomorrow,’ said Weenink. ‘I can’t wait.’

Finally, the other officers drifted away and left Cooper and Weenink alone.

‘Are you all right, Todd?’

‘Sure. Why?’

‘I just wondered what all that was about earlier on today. What did you get called back for?’

‘Oh, just the usual sort of bollocks,’ said Weenink dismissively. ‘Somebody upstairs with their knickers in a twist.’

On the television screen in the corner of the room, DCI Tailby’s face appeared. It was a clip from the coverage of the press conference. Tailby was trying to look serious and professional, but hopeful.

‘Todd,’ said Cooper, ‘what do you know about Maggie Crew? The victim that Diane Fry is dealing with.’

‘I know she can’t remember much about the attack, that’s all. But I can’t say I’d want to remember much myself, really. It’s tough on a woman, getting her face messed up like that.’

‘Do you know if she’s ever been married or anything?’

‘No. She’s a solicitor, all business suits and fancy briefs. Likes to be called “Ms”, I expect.’

‘Has she got children?’

‘Kids? You’re joking. I bet her womb has cobwebs.’

Cooper ran his mind back over the earlier conversation. He felt dissatisfied with the way it had ended.

‘Look, you have to realize she’s a bit of an outsider,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Diane Fry. Being an outsider can be a difficult thing to deal with. It takes time.’

‘You don’t have to tell me about that,’ said Weenink. ‘I’m an outsider, too. And I always will be. Neither one thing nor the other, that’s me.’

‘You mean because you’re Dutch?’

‘Half-Dutch. My dad’s from Rotterdam. He came over to work in the British shipyards back in the seventies. He ended up in Sheffield.’

‘What shipyards?’

‘Exactly. There are none left. That’s why he ended up in Sheffield. He worked in a steel mill, until that closed too.’

‘I bet you got the piss taken out of your name when you were a kid.’

Weenink scowled. ‘Are you kidding? I cursed my dad as a bastard every day, just because he gave me that name. It’s pronounced like “Vaining” but with a “k” on the end, I’d say. I’d tell them and tell them till I was blue in the face, but do you think they took any notice?’

‘It was a joke,’ said Cooper.

‘What was?’

‘Taking the piss. Like “wee”, you know.’

Weenink flushed. ‘It’s pronounced like “Vaining”. .’

‘. . but with a “k” on the end. Right.’

Cooper began to look around the canteen for an excuse to leave.

‘Anyway,’ said Weenink slowly, ‘when I got bigger than the rest of them, they stopped doing it.’ His face solidified into his notorious stare. ‘Once I’d smashed the first one’s teeth in, anyway.’

‘Sorry, time’s up for the public. Next item on the agenda — minutes of the last meeting.’

The chairman of Cargreave Parish Council wore a white cardigan and a tweed skirt, and she was so short-sighted that she barely seemed able to recognize her colleagues at the far end of the table. Councillor Mary Salt preferred to be known as ‘chair’, but some members of the council refused to be forced into ways that sounded a bit modern. They still called her ‘chairman’, ignoring her angry, myopic glare.

Owen Fox didn’t belong to Councillor Salt’s party. He was an Independent, so his voice carried no weight in the important decisions, like where to spend the parish’s share of the Council Tax. But he and the chairman had known each other for many years.

The parish room was cold and echoey, with a creaky wooden floor and a small stage at one end that had been turned into a Chinese laundry for rehearsals of the village pantomime. From where he sat, Owen could see Councillor Salt’s legs tucked under the table in her flesh-coloured tights. Her legs looked tight and shiny, like sausage skins. His fingers itched for a fork to prick them.

The council meeting started with fifteen minutes of public questions. Usually, there were only one or two familiar faces sitting at the back of the room, sometimes no one at all. But tonight the room was full, and more chairs had been brought in. These people wanted to ask what action was being taken to make the area safe. They wanted a senior police officer to be brought to the next meeting to answer questions, and the clerk was instructed to write to the Chief Constable. Then the chairman moved the agenda on. The public were allowed only fifteen minutes.

The real business of the meeting involved correspondence from the National Park Authority about a visitor questionnaire and a landscape enhancement grant scheme. The county council had replied to a letter about street lamps, and there was another discussion about installing a height barrier at the entrance to the village car park to stop gypsies getting their caravans on. The success of the Millennium tree-planting scheme was reported, and next year’s well-dressing considered. Mobile library visits were changing to alternate Thursdays. The bowls club were having a quiz night. Soon, the dangers of walking on Ringham Moor were long forgotten. The public got only fifteen minutes, after all.

‘Any other business?’ asked the chairman finally.

Councillor Salt looked round the table. Nobody responded, and Owen checked his watch. Not a bad time. Some of the other councillors would head for the Dancing Badger for a ritual exchange of gossip, but for Owen it would be a chance to get back to the house. Socializing in the village had never held any attractions for Owen; even less so now.

‘Meeting closed, then.’

Owen made a dash for the door, trying to get out into the street before any members of the public could corner him and ask about the attacks on Ringham Moor. He didn’t have the answers they wanted, no more than anyone else did. Nobody knew who it was stalking the moor. And nobody knew when he would strike again.

But Owen had his own thoughts. It only needed someone to ask him the right question, and he would no longer be able to keep them to himself.