Dancing With the Virgins

18

In the end, Wednesday morning looked set to be overcast. Diane Fry had come through the Forestry Commission plantations and down past Flash Dam. She was already slightly late, but she sat in her car at the top of Sydnope Hill for a while and looked down on Matlock. She was watching the clouds come closer. They were rolling in from the east, their shadows chasing across the slopes of the hills and into the town.

Fry had worked out where the roof of Derwent Court was, deep among the other roofs. At the moment, its tiles were glittering as the clear November sun fell on the remains of an overnight frost. She was due at Maggie’s at nine. But by the time the clouds had closed in enough for her satisfaction, it was nearly five past. Fry started the car. Maggie would be annoyed that she was late, but that was tough. She didn’t want any distractions today. It was difficult enough as it was.

From here, she could see how damaged the landscape was to the east. Huge sections had been gouged and blasted from the side of Masson Hill, on the opposite side of the town. Bare terraces of exposed rock had been left by the quarrying, flat and unnatural in the slope of the hill. She checked the sky again for clouds. It was safe. There would be no sun on Maggie’s window now.

‘So you did come back,’ said Maggie a few minutes later. ‘I imagined I might have escaped your attentions. I thought you might have forgotten me.’

‘Never, Maggie.’

‘Oh? You remember me for my sparkling personality, do you? My intellect? My savage wit?’

Fry noticed that Maggie had rearranged the lamps in the room. The lighting was softer, less uncompromising, perhaps designed to put her visitor at ease and make her more welcome. A new chair had been placed in front of the desk — this one was upholstered in green satin on the seat and back, and when Fry sat in it she found it remarkably comfortable.

The cafetiere stood ready on the desk with cream and sugar in a ceramic jug and bowl. By such signs, Fry knew she was making progress. But it was a fragile intimacy; it could be broken in a second, by the ringing of a phone or the scrape of a chair leg.

‘I thought we were getting along fine before,’ she said.

‘Did you?’ Maggie fiddled with the lamp, tilting the shade so that the shadows played backwards and forwards across her face. Fry found the effect disconcerting, as Maggie’s good eye came first into the light, startling and white, then vanished again into the shadows of her face.

With the Weston enquiry going nowhere, it seemed to Diane Fry that her interviews with Maggie Crew were a kind of Eastern Front, the one place where the breakthrough might come, if there was going to be one. Maggie was their only real witness. She could identify her assailant. However she did it, Fry would have to drag those memories out kicking and screaming. So she sat here alone with this woman, struggling to get through to her, digging for her memories like a miner hitting rock.

‘Have you thought about what we said last time?’ asked Fry.

But Maggie responded with another question.

‘Do you know how many visitors I get?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know what it’s like sitting here wondering whether anybody will come?’

‘I’m sorry.’

Maggie slammed back the arm of the lamp as far as it would go, throwing the full glare of the bulb into Fry’s face.

‘That’s the one thing I told you I wouldn’t tolerate. Do not feel sorry for me. Understand?’

Fry had to bite back the natural response, reminding herself that this was a woman who was in a psychologically delicate balance. She needed careful handling, not an all-out row. Not the accusation of self-pity and hypocrisy that had sprung to her lips.

‘Let’s start again, shall we?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘What I’d really like to do,’ said Fry, ‘is take you back to when it happened, to jog your memory. I want you to try again, Maggie.’

‘Why should I?’

‘For Jenny Weston’s sake. And to help us stop him from killing any more. Maggie — you can’t refuse.’

Maggie blinked, and hesitated. ‘Your colleagues always used a different approach. They tried to be sympathetic, to put me at my ease — all that sort of thing. I hated it.’

‘I don’t care about that. I’ve got a job to do. I need you to help me.’

Maggie stared at her. ‘Coffee?’ she said, and reached for the cafetiere.

Fry nodded. Her clenched fingers began to relax. She looked around the room while Maggie poured. The place really wasn’t welcoming at all, even with a comfortable chair and the smell of fresh coffee. What would bring Maggie’s memories out into the light again? When you had suffered that sort of trauma, you needed some kind of closure. It was possible that her memories wouldn’t be fully released until they had her attacker behind bars.

On the other hand, there might be something deeper inside that was keeping Maggie’s mind shut down. She had to find a trigger that would release those memories.

Fry had a twin-deck tape recorder set up. She had fully expected Maggie to refuse to be taped, but she had agreed readily; in fact, she had seemed almost relieved. Perhaps the tape machine could be a compromise, an impersonal middle ground. She probably thought a tape couldn’t bring back memories, only capture the ones you already had. But Fry wasn’t sure about that. Today, she meant to take Maggie further.

For a few minutes, they sat comfortably over their coffee. They even made a bit of small talk about the weather and Maggie’s neighbours, just as if Fry were a friend paying a social call. Who knew — there might even be chocolate biscuits with the coffee.

‘I feel as though I’m getting unfit sitting here all day,’ said Maggie. ‘Before I know it, I’ll be putting weight on.’

No chocolate biscuits, then. Fry unwrapped two fresh tapes and inserted them in the machine.

‘You don’t look as though you have any trouble with your weight, Diane,’ said Maggie.

‘I don’t have time to put weight on.’ It was the answer she always gave when people asked her. She tested the tape machine, and both tapes began to turn. ‘Ready?’

‘There’s something I want to tell you first.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve decided to go back to work,’ said Maggie.

‘Is that wise?’ said Fry, immediately thinking of the dangers to Maggie rather than of the psychological advantages of getting her back into the outside world.

‘I’ve got to get out of this apartment some time.’

‘You must take precautions for your own safety. We’ll send someone to your office to check out the security arrangements.’

Maggie sighed. ‘If you insist.’

‘If you’re going back to work, I’ll have to make an appointment, I suppose. Solicitors’ time is expensive, isn’t it?’

Maggie smiled at the comment. Fry liked to see her smile. It almost gave her an appearance of normality. But there was still a pain haunting her eyes, and still a strange physical vulnerability in the glimpse of pink gum.

‘I’ll pencil you in for Friday,’ said Maggie. ‘Two o’clock, at our offices in Mill Street.’

Fry made a show of getting out her diary and writing it down. ‘Fine. At least it will take your mind off things. Do you find your work interesting?’

‘Interesting?’ Maggie considered the word. ‘I suppose some people might think so. But in fact it’s ninety per cent drudgery. Wading through mountains of paperwork until your eyes are sore, filling in reports and applications. Sitting in endless meetings.’

‘Join the club.’

‘And there are the most objectionable of people to deal with. Their concerns are unbelievable. It’s all jealousy and selfishness and greed. Husbands and wives, children and parents, colleagues and business partners — all desperate to know about what someone else is up to. The times they have asked me to employ enquiry agents to look into their sordid little affairs. And not just the clients, either. My partners are just as bad.’

‘You don’t get on with your partners?’

‘We work together satisfactorily. But they’re all the same — complacent, self-centred and obsessed. They’re so single-minded that their lives are empty shells. They’ll discover it one day, but it will be too late.’

Fry nodded. The description Maggie had just given of her partners echoed her own file. Maggie Crew’s history was one of professional achievements, and little else. Maggie talked of empty lives. But it only took a glance round the room to see whose life was the emptiest of all.

Fry watched the way Maggie drank her coffee without turning fully to the desk, then spun her chair back towards the window.

‘Ready now?’

Maggie nodded and closed her eyes.

‘Tell me what happened that day, Maggie.’

Maggie didn’t need to ask what day she meant. ‘I’ve been over it so many times before. I can’t remember.’

‘What would you normally have done that day? It was a Sunday, wasn’t it?’

‘All right, then. On a Sunday, I would have got up later than usual, had a leisurely breakfast. Toast and marmalade and two cups of coffee, probably. I need coffee to get myself ready for the day. I would have switched on the TV to get the morning news. Maybe I looked out of the window and I saw what a nice day it was.’

Fry watched Maggie gradually becoming less tense. She was starting to relax as she focused on the world outside herself. The best way was to ask few questions. Encourage the interviewee to close their eyes and picture the scene, down to even the tiniest details; let them recall smells, noises, their feelings at the time. Officers were no longer trained to take control of an interview. Too many courts had accepted the contention of defendants and lawyers that the police had suggested the answers themselves.

Eventually, this process might be conducted by machine entirely. Two tape decks to record the answers, and a third to repeat the necessary phrases: ‘Now, just close your eyes. .’

‘Is that what made you decide to go to Ringham Moor? That it was a nice day?’

‘I really don’t know,’ said Maggie.

‘It’s OK.’

‘Ringham Moor is not too far away. I’ve walked there lots of times. I used to go there before I became a partner. Afterwards, there never seemed to be time.’

‘All right. Move forward a bit. To when you reached Ringham — ’

Maggie was silent. Fry tried to detect from the expression on just one side of her face whether she was remembering any more. But it was impossible to tell. Finally, Maggie’s eyes came fully open, and her body tensed again.

‘Does it tell you in my file that I’m unable to form relationships?’

Fry could only nod. The moment was lost. No point in trying to recreate it now.

‘Yes, it would. But I was like that before, you know,’ said Maggie. ‘Too busy for relationships. And it’s too late now.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Please don’t try to patronize me on the subject. I’m learning to be a realist. People won’t accept me now. But people have never really accepted me in my entire life.’

Fry frowned. If there was anything in the file to support this perception, she had missed it. Maggie Crew had received a perfectly normal education and upbringing. Her father had been a regional manager for British Rail, and the family had lived in Wingerworth, near Chesterfield. Mrs Crew had died some years ago of cancer, and a sister, Catherine, had married and lived in Ireland. Maggie’s father was still alive, though, and living not so far away.

The two girls, Fry noted, had attended a well-known Catholic girls school in Chesterfield, and both had gone on to university. Maggie had studied for her Law degree in Nottingham. She had been successful in her career, yet had never married or had children.

‘Do you see much of your father?’ asked Fry.

‘He’s rather elderly now,’ said Maggie.

‘Yes?’

‘And. . well, we were never a very close family, really.’

‘Does the same apply to your sister?’

‘Cath? She has her own family. A husband and four children. Why would she bother about me? She’s as content as an old cat in her little town in Ireland.’

‘And did you never want to do the same, Maggie?’

But Maggie smiled. Fry was beginning to recognize that smile as one that signalled a subject she didn’t want to discuss.

‘What about you, Diane?’ said Maggie. ‘Married?’

‘No.’

‘Children?’

‘No.’

‘Ah. It would interfere with the career, perhaps? No crèche at the police station? No husband at home, no mother-in-law to look after them during the day? It’s so difficult for some women, I know. We see them in the legal profession, carrying their babies invisibly on their backs in court, disposable nappies spilling out of their briefcases, baby sick on their clothes, yawning from lack of sleep on the night before an important case. You can’t help but feel sorry for them.’

‘It happens in the police, too.’

‘No broody feelings for you either, Diane? No ticking biological clock?’

‘I don’t believe so.’

‘You’re lucky, then. I find the idea pretty horrific, to be perfectly honest. Awful, puking things, aren’t they? I can understand women who have abortions. It’s a horrible business, but there must be times when it seems vastly preferable to the alternative.’

Fry was conscious of Maggie’s gentle probing. It was well done, the sign of a skilful interviewer. The fact that Fry had allowed herself to be interviewed had encouraged Maggie, of course. At this point, she either went along with the game and told Maggie what she wanted to know, or she closed it down and risked losing the fragile intimacy she had built up.

‘I had an abortion once,’ she said.

Maggie’s voice dropped a shade, sliding a sympathetic note into her next words.

‘They tell me you always wonder what the baby would have been like, what sex it was. You think about what name you would have given it, if it had been allowed to live. Even an abortion doesn’t mean a clean ending, it seems to me.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’

A small silence developed between them. Fry held on to it, valuing the suggestion of understanding. At the same time, she was calculating how she could use it. The time was almost right.

‘But there’s more, isn’t there?’ said Maggie quietly. ‘Something else that you can’t forget.’

‘Yes,’ said Fry. ‘There is.’ She told herself it was for the best. She could work it out of her system later.

Maggie seemed to decide not to push for details.

‘Sometimes there are things you need to remember, no matter how much it hurts,’ she said.

‘A necessary pain?’

‘Maybe. But that necessary pain. . does it always have to be a pain that you inflict on yourself? Because that sort of pain hurts all the more, don’t you find?’

Fry put her finger on the ‘play’ and ‘record’ buttons, and looked at Maggie.

‘Shall we try again?’

Maggie closed her eyes. The tapes whirred quietly.

‘Think about when you reached Ringham. .’

Maggie breathed quietly. ‘I remember the leaves under my feet,’ she said. ‘There were deep piles of them. They crunched when I trod in them. Thousands of dead leaves. I kicked some of them up in the air, like I used to do when I was child. A great heap of them, all brown and gold.’

Fry thought she had stopped there. She waited for a moment, listening to the click of the tape decks. She had just opened her mouth to nudge Maggie with a question, when she began again.

‘The wind blew the leaves about, and I grabbed at them, trying to catch them in my hands. Some of them landed on me; they were on my arms and in my face, touching my skin. They felt cold and clammy, not what I expected at all. They smelled of damp and rottenness. I tried to brush them off my face. There were leaves in my hair as well, sticking there like bats. Then I didn’t think it was funny any more. I brushed at the leaves harder. I had my head down, to get them off.’

The sound of Maggie’s voice had changed. It had a childish intonation that Fry had not heard before. It was slightly shocking coming from the mouth of this woman. It was as if she were recalling a childhood incident, not a trauma from a few weeks ago.

This time the pause was even longer. Fry squeezed her fingers together to stop herself breaking the silence and interrupting. She looked at the tapes to make sure they were both still running. But the silence went on too long.

‘Is there anyone else around?’ asked Fry as gently as she could, though her urge was to push Maggie harder as they reached a critical stage.

‘Anyone else? No, she’s not there.’

Fry shook her head, thinking she had misheard. ‘Who?’

Now Maggie looked confused too, as if two different memories were mingling together.

‘I had my head down, looking at the ground,’ she repeated. ‘I was looking at the ground, where the leaves were. That’s why I didn’t see him.’

Maggie’s voice had become bleak. Her pitch had risen slightly as people’s voices did when they were close to that crack in the facade that let through the tears.

‘If I hadn’t kicked at the leaves, I would have heard him coming. I could have got away.’

‘When did you first become aware of another person, Maggie?’

‘He was already close then.’

‘How did you know? Did you hear him?’

‘The leaves were rustling. They were too loud. I wasn’t paying attention.’

‘All right. You didn’t hear him. Did you smell him, Maggie?’

‘Smell him?’ Maggie frowned. Her nostrils flared as if she was drawing in remembered odours.

Fry knew that smells were powerful aids to memory. If Maggie could recall a single whiff of something — a distinctive deodorant, body odour, cigarette smoke — it would be something to add to the picture.

‘I can’t smell him,’ said Maggie. ‘Only the leaves.’

‘Can you hear him now?’ asked Fry, switching to the present tense that Maggie herself had started using.

Maggie’s eyes were distant. Was she listening? Fry was sure that Maggie could hear something. Some sound was replaying in her mind, but Fry was powerless to know what it was until she felt able to share it.

‘A rustling noise,’ said Maggie hesitantly, at last.

‘The leaves again? He was walking through the leaves. You heard his feet in the leaves.’

‘Yes, there was that too. But something else. A plastic rustling. No, not plastic — nylon. He was wearing a nylon cagoule or anorak.’

Fry felt a little surge of excitement. ‘That’s very good, Maggie. Think carefully now. Can you see it, this cagoule? What colour is it?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Black. Maybe blue.’

‘That’s good. Can you describe it? Does it have buttons or a zip? Has it got a hood?’

‘I can’t tell.’

‘Why not?’

Maggie paused. ‘It’s dark.’

Fry opened her mouth and shut it again. She looked at the tape machine, wondering whether it had heard the same thing that she had. Then she stared at Maggie Crew, resisting an urge to grab the woman by the shoulders and shake her, to force her to answer the biggest question of all.

‘Maggie,’ she said, ‘what were you doing on the moor in the dark?’

But Maggie was silent now. Fry thought she had lost her completely, that she had slipped away into sleep or some other world. But if she had, it was a world where there were only nightmares. Maggie’s body was rigid, her face strained and frightened. Her eyes were screwed tightly shut. She shook her head abruptly, like someone throwing off brambles tangled in her hair. Fry caught a glimpse of red, puckered tissue, glistening as if freshly burned.

Then Maggie put her hands to her face, covering her right eye, her fingers pressed tightly to her forehead for protection. There was only the sound of her breathing in the room, a ragged hiss through her nose that the tapes would fail to catch, though they kept on turning. And there was a high, distant noise, like the wheeze in the chest of an asthmatic, or the faint whimper of a small creature dying at the side of the road.

‘I can’t remember,’ said Maggie. ‘I can’t remember.’

19

‘Golden Virginia,’ said Owen Fox. ‘It’s their favourite.’

Owen had a six-pack of lager in one hand, a tin of tobacco in the other. Ben Cooper followed him uncertainly. He had paid for the lager and tobacco, and he knew perfectly well that he wasn’t going to be able to claim them back on expenses.

‘Are you sure it will work?’ said Cooper. ‘It seems a bit like bribing the natives with glass beads.’

‘It’s the only way to get close to these spiritual types,’ said Owen. ‘You’ve got to appeal to their materialism.’

‘Still — ’

‘Trust me, Ben. I’m a Ranger.’

But Cooper was still doubtful. It was because he knew he shouldn’t be there at all. This wasn’t an official visit — there had been no action form issued for him to conduct another interview with Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington. But he needed to talk to them on his own. There were things he couldn’t concentrate on properly with Diane Fry and a bunch of uniformed officers crowding round the van.

Cooper could smell cigarette smoke on Owen’s jacket. He guessed he had been to see Cal and Stride quite recently, and his red fleece had absorbed the scent of their roll-ups. Owen walked up to the van and stood by the cab. He gestured to Cooper to stand out of sight, and knocked on the side door. It was an unusual knock, a series of short and long raps. After half a minute, the door slid partly open.

‘Cal,’ said Owen. ‘We come in peace.’

‘Bloody hell, it’s Red Rum. What’s up? Got no tourists to piss off?’

‘Yes, but pissing you off is more fun.’

Cal stuck his head out of the door and spotted Cooper. ‘What’s he want?’

‘A bit of your friendly conversation. No hassle. He’s all right, Cal.’

The youth stared at Cooper, then back at Owen. ‘You saying he’s all right? He’s a copper. Coppers is bastards, period.’

‘He’s all right.’

Cal nodded. ‘Give us the cans then, you mean sod.’

Owen winked at Cooper, and they clambered into the back of the VW. Cooper’s senses sprang instantly alive, awakened by the powerful mixture of scents and sensations contained in the van. Cal and Stride had been smoking roll-ups for months in the enclosed space, and their aroma had ingrained itself into the panels of the van and soaked into the blankets and cushions and sleeping bags that lay on the floor. There was the pungent smell of unwashed bodies and dirty clothes. And, overlying it, the odour of cooked food, including a lingering trace of the chicken curry they had eaten at least two days before. There was also a slightly worrying whiff of gas from the two-ring camping stove behind the driver’s seat.

Cooper hesitated when he saw Stride. He was sitting in the back corner, barely visible in the gloom.

‘Don’t worry about Stride,’ said Cal. ‘He’s just doing an auric egg.’

‘OK. That’s fine.’

Cooper eyed Stride cautiously. He didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, really, let alone laying an egg. He was very still, sitting upright, with his eyes closed and his hands in his lap. The expression on his face was concentrated, but calm. Cooper wondered if Stride genuinely hadn’t noticed there was anyone else in the van. It seemed unlikely. It must just be a bit of acting talent, mustn’t it?

‘It’s to protect himself against negative mind energies,’ said Cal.

‘Right.’

‘He puts a shell round his aura.’

‘No problem.’

Owen settled himself on a pillow to one side of an old chest of drawers. Cooper followed suit on the other side. He felt something hard pressing into his hip. He looked down to find the biscuit tin packed with small mementoes that Stride had searched in for his NUS card.

The boy’s entire previous life was crammed into that tin. Maybe he very rarely opened it, but at least he had brought it with him into his new life. It was useless for him to pretend that memories of his past life held no value for him. The evidence said differently.

‘So what are you doing here on your own?’ said Cal. ‘Where’s the heavy mob?’

‘I just wanted to talk. I thought I might be able to help.’

Cal snorted. ‘Bullshit. Since when did the cops help the likes of us? You’re employed by middle-class, middle-aged folk with their property and comfortable lives to protect.’

‘People like your parents, you mean?’

‘Yes, people like them.’

‘Well, we’re here to protect everybody.’

‘Stuff that. I don’t pay your wages. I don’t pay any taxes. So why should you bother about me?’

Cooper hesitated while he considered the answer. Everything depended on saying the right thing.

‘Hey,’ said Owen. ‘I’ve just realized — that means you don’t pay my wages either. Well, what a revelation.’ He started to get up, brushing down his jacket. ‘That’s that, then. I’ll be off. I can’t be wasting my time with a couple of dirty, idle gypsies. I’ve got nice, clean middle-class people to look after.’

‘Yeah. Fuck off, then,’ said Cal, popping the ring-pull off a can of lager.

Owen stood over him. He didn’t say anything. Cal looked at Cooper. ‘I hate this bastard in the red jacket,’ he said. ‘He thinks he’s my dad or something.’

‘We all know you never had a father, Calvin,’ said Owen.

‘And if you call me Calvin again, I’ll set fire to your fuckin’ beard.’

‘Get the matches out then, Calvin.’

Cal’s eyes glittered. He offered a can to Cooper, who shook his head. Then he held it up above his head, and the Ranger took it.

‘We both came for the solstice,’ said Cal. ‘That’s how we ended up in this quarry. There were loads of people parked down here then. It was like a real community. But the van broke down, and I had no dosh to get it repaired. It’s something to do with the drive shaft, they reckon. Coming down that slope knackered it.’

‘And you’ve stayed ever since.’

‘Everybody else drifted off and left us.’

‘Did you and Stride come together?’

‘No, we didn’t know each other until then. He’d been camping over the valley there — the place they call Robin Hood’s Stride. There’s a cave there, some kind of hermit’s place or something, where he was sheltering. He didn’t know anything about the Nine Virgins, but he wandered over to see what was happening. That’s how we met up, and that’s why we called him Stride. We just seemed to hit it off. He had nowhere else to go, you see.’

Cooper realized he was being watched. He had forgotten Stride for a moment. He had been so still and quiet he could have been camouflaged by an entire forest of trees instead of sitting there in full view a few inches away. His eyes were open now and he was looking at Cooper.

‘Nowhere else to go,’ he said.

Stride’s paleness was worrying. Cooper wondered what medical attention the two youths had access to. None, he supposed. In an earlier age, Stride would have been described as sickly and consumptive. Cooper would have liked to find out how he came to be camping in a hermit’s cave in the Peak District in the first place. But it seemed too big a question to ask.

‘You went to university, didn’t you?’ he said.

Stride nodded. Cal passed him the tobacco and the Rizlas, and he began to roll a cigarette.

‘What degree did you get?’

Stride smiled. ‘Did I say I got a degree?’

‘It’s usually the reason for going to university.’

‘Only if you finish the course. Otherwise they get a bit stuffy about giving it to you.’

‘I see. You dropped out.’

Now Stride laughed. ‘You might call it that.’

‘So what were you studying?’

Stride stared at him, a sudden gleam in his eye, his hand fluttering to his mouth in that curious gesture. Energy seemed to visibly flow through him. From an almost catatonic state he was transformed into a ball of vitality.

‘You really want to know?’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

‘What?’

He was excited now, tugging at Cooper’s sleeve like a puppy wanting him to come out and play. Cooper looked at Owen, who just smiled and nodded affectionately at Stride.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You might learn something.’

They jumped out of the van, and Cooper scrambled up the path after Stride to reach the top of the quarry. The chimes were moving slowly in the birch, jingling gently. One of them turned and caught the sunlight, and Cooper could almost make out the words scrawled on the silver foil in felt-tipped pen.

Stride turned to him at the top of the quarry face and held his hand to his ear, like a bad actor miming his reaction to a knock at the door.

‘Can you hear it? We’re right on the edge.’

‘The edge?’

Cooper listened. All he could hear was the wind which caught at him now they were on the plateau. It carried a whispering in the bracken and the jingle of the chimes. He listened more carefully. He heard several types of bird call — finches twittering nearby, a robin singing in the birches, the jackdaws in Top Quarry; and something else further away, possibly rooks and a blackbird. There was nothing more. Cooper looked up. There was a kestrel hovering over the rough grass on the edge of the quarry, but it was absolutely silent.

‘Do you hear it?’ said Stride. ‘That’s great.’

‘The edge of what?’

‘The reality zone. From here on, all that stuff down there disappears.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of Matlock and the A6.

‘Not for me, it doesn’t.’

Suddenly, Stride threw himself full-length into the damp bracken. For a moment, he disappeared completely as the brown leaves closed over him. Only his laugh could be heard from somewhere in the dripping depths.

‘Look at this!’ he said. His head appeared. He wiped a bracken leaf across his face, smearing the rain water on his skin and licking the moisture off his lips, closing his eyes in ecstasy. Bits of foliage and fragments of dead heather were clinging to his hair and shoulders; the sleeves of his jacket were soaked.

‘I suppose you think this is just a weed. Farmers tear it up and burn it, because it’s a pest. But bracken is a miracle. All ferns are a miracle. Look, look.’ He stroked a tiny, furled leaf. It would probably never open now — it was too late in the year. ‘Each of these produces hundreds of spores. They’re spread around by the wind or animals. I’m doing it now. Look!’ He rolled over on the ground, laughing breathlessly. ‘I’m part of the process! I’m part of nature!’

Stride plucked a larger leaf and held it in front of Cooper’s face. ‘Every spore that lands grows into a little disc. And do you know what? It has both male and female sexual organs. It’s a bisexual. Humans will tell you that isn’t natural. But it is!’

He thrust the leaf into Cooper’s hands. It smelled damp and green and broken. Cooper held it lightly, not sure what to do with it, reluctant just to walk away, too intrigued by the performance to stop it.

‘The male organs release sperm. Oh, yes. We know about sperm, don’t we? But ferns. . their sperm use the rain water. See? The leaves are always damp up here, in the autumn, so the sperm can travel through the moisture to reach the female organs and fertilize the eggs. And then a new plant grows. A new fern. More bracken. More and more of it. And you know what else? Ferns have been doing that for three hundred million years.’

Stride stared at Cooper wildly. ‘Pre-historic tree ferns grew to over a hundred feet. They’re way down there now, under the ground, still there. Fossilized tree ferns. We call them coal.’ He snatched the leaf back from Cooper as if he wasn’t worthy to hold it. ‘So which is the most successful species? The cleverest? The most efficient? The most useful? Humans?’ He laughed. ‘I studied botany. They tried to tell me it was a science; they tried to make me study mycology and phytopathology. They wanted me to look at diagrams of a monocotyledon or analyse the process of hydrotropism. They wanted me to see pistils and radicles and calyxes. But all I saw were miracles everywhere. Miracles of life.’

He stepped out of the bracken and bent down to the ground near the path. He picked up a small piece of quartz. He held it with gentleness, handling it as if it were a living thing, sensitive to his touch.

‘Look at the earth. She looks so attractive, you could stroke her. Her fur is like velvet. But she’s a wild creature, she can never be tamed. A huge beast, sleeping. Or maybe only pretending to be asleep. This is her body.’

Cooper was silent, feeling foolish and embarrassed, like a man who had wandered into the wrong church service and didn’t know what to do when everyone else prayed.

‘The dancers know all about it,’ said Stride. ‘The dancers became part of her body.’

A suggestion of movement on the moor made Cooper look up. For a moment, he thought there were people standing in the trees at the scene of Jenny Weston’s murder — grey shapes that passed each other slowly, leaning to whisper to one another across the sandy earth of the clearing. Then he realized that he was seeing the Nine Virgins themselves, the stones momentarily transformed by the intensity of Stride’s conviction.

‘I can understand why our ancestors worshipped trees,’ said Stride. ‘Can’t you? When you hear a chainsaw in the woods, when you see a JCB and smell new tarmac, don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel, deep inside your head, the cry of “murder”? Do you understand?’

Cooper frowned, wanting to see what he meant. ‘I understand that you’ve found some sort of truth for yourself.’

‘Believe those who are seeking the truth,’ said Stride. ‘But doubt those who say they’ve found it.’

When they got back to the van, Stride seemed rapidly to become exhausted. He collapsed on the cushions, stretched out full-length, limp and breathing raggedly. After a few minutes, he spoke, though his voice was barely loud enough for them to hear.

‘I can still see her face,’ he said.

Stride’s own face was hidden by the shadows of the candle, expressionless, moving with the flickering light in unnatural ways. Cooper felt too warm in the claustrophobic interior of the van. He was uncomfortably hemmed in by the rugs and blankets and the smell of unwashed bodies, too tightly embraced by the metal walls. He longed for escape.

‘Whose face?’ he said.

But Stride seemed to have departed. Though his body still sprawled against the cushions, his mind had left, perhaps to drift over the moor with the kestrel. He had sunk into a state of exhaustion, and when he spoke again it was no more than a whisper, addressed only to himself.

‘I can still see her face.’

Owen and Cal seemed at ease with each other. Cooper wondered what they had talked about while he was away, whether they had simply exchanged comfortable insults as they drank their beer. Owen drained his can and they all went outside, leaving Stride alone. Cal was still looking at Cooper suspiciously.

‘Do you really not have a life to go back to, Cal?’ said Cooper.

‘Oh, yeah. If I wanted to. There are the aged parents, if I want to spend the rest of my life being lectured at. There was a girlfriend as well. But, well. . sometimes you’re better off on your own, you know?’

‘But you’re not on your own now.’

‘Me and Stride? Stride says it was karma, us meeting like that. You know, the idea of fate repaying you for what you’ve done in a previous life?’

‘He seems to be quite knowledgeable about esoteric practices.’

‘He knows sod all about it,’ said Cal.

‘Oh?’

‘He’s picked up a few phrases from books here and there, that’s all. But it keeps him content in himself. That’s what religion is for, isn’t it? Whatever he believes in, it works for him.’

‘Like the auric egg.’

‘Yeah, well. If he actually believes it keeps negative mind energies away, then it probably does.’

Cooper considered this. It seemed as useful as any advice a psychiatrist could have given.

‘How well do you really know Stride?’

‘He’s my brother.’

‘You met him only a few months ago, at the summer solstice.’

‘That doesn’t make any difference. He’s my brother.’

‘I bet you don’t know anything about him. Where is he from?’

‘What does it matter? Who cares what he did or where he came from in another life? This is our life. This is what matters now.’

‘Do you go up on the moor sometimes?’ asked Cooper.

‘Of course.’

‘To the stone circle?’

‘Stride likes to talk to the Virgins. Nothing wrong with that. He’s not doing any harm.’

‘Do you go with him? Or does he go on his own?’

Cal clamped his mouth shut. ‘I think I’ve talked to you enough.’

‘Does he go out on his own at night?’

‘You’re like all the others really, aren’t you? You sneak your way into the van, thinking you’ll get something on us. Well, just leave off Stride. He doesn’t do anyone any harm, not now.’

‘Not now?’ said Cooper gently.

But Cal turned on his heel with a scowl and walked back to the van. Cooper looked at his watch. He had spent too long at Ringham Moor already. He had an appointment with another set of stones, and there would be trouble if he was late.

Like most things in Edendale, the cemetery was built halfway up a hill. Over the bottom wall, beech trees ran down Mill Bank to an estate of new housing off Meadow Road, where white semis clustered round the back of the council highways depot. A squirrel foraged among the leaves and dead branches on the floor beneath the beeches.

Sergeant Joe Cooper was buried in the new part of the cemetery, brought into use four or five years ago, when the old one became full. In the new cemetery, there were no visible graves, only rows of headstones, with the grass mowed smooth right up to them. The dead were no longer allowed to be untidy. These headstones would never loosen and tilt and grow moss with age. They were orderly, almost regimented, a picture of civic perfection. Sergeant Cooper was far tidier now than he had been at the moment of his dying, when his blood had run out on to the stone setts in Clappergate, leaving a stain that had taken council workmen weeks to remove. His killing had darkened the reputation of the town for months afterwards. No wonder they wanted to tidy him away.

Occasionally, a jam-jar full of spring flowers or petunias appeared in front of the headstone. The Coopers never knew who they were from.

The brothers had said nothing to each other as they drove to the cemetery. By the time they were out of the car and back in the open air, Ben was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the silence between them.

‘We went to see Warren Leach again yesterday,’ he said as they followed the path towards their father’s grave. ‘I just wondered if you found anything out. .’

Matt didn’t answer. His shoulders stiffened a bit, and his stride quickened.

‘There must be somebody who knows him, Matt.’

‘I dare say.’

But Matt sounded so dismissive that Ben knew not to press it. The silence had grown even deeper by the time they reached the right spot. On every occasion they came, the row of graves had extended a little further, as if their father was somehow physically receding into the past.

Ben and Matt left their flowers and found a bench under the hawthorn hedge, where they could see the headstone. The cemetery grass had been raked clear of leaves. It glittered an unnaturally bright green against the browns and oranges of the hillside behind it, and the grey of the stone houses piled on top of each other on the outskirts of the town.

For a while, the brothers sat and watched each other’s breath drifting in small clouds, cold and formless, vanishing before it had even moved out of reach.

‘Two years, and it doesn’t seem a day,’ said Matt.

His words couldn’t help but sound trite, but Ben was sure they were sincere. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said.

‘I still keep expecting him to appear. I think he’s going to come round the corner and tell me to stop idling around. It’s as if he’s just been on night shift for a while. Remember when we didn’t used to see him for a few days, then he would appear again, looking so tired? He always said it was short turn that was the real killer.’

‘He was already too old for night shifts by then.’

‘But he wouldn’t stop doing it. He always did his stint.’

There was a new National Police Memorial being created in Staffordshire, with a commemorative avenue of trees known as ‘The Beat’ and a daily roll of honour showing details of the officers who had died on duty. The work would take several years to complete, and Ben Cooper had offered to help.

Here in the cemetery, Sergeant Joe Cooper’s name was carved in stone. Eventually, it would be worn away by the rain driven down the Eden Valley, and the February frosts would crumble the surfaces. But now, just two years from his death, the letters were still crisp and clear, with sharply chiselled edges, cold and precise. Life might be brief and transient, scrawled in the sand. But death was written in a much harder alphabet.

Ben had the names of the group of youths who had killed his father imprinted on his mind. Now and then, they cropped up in other enquiries, or in court cases he read about in the Eden Valley Times. Two of them were still serving ten-year sentences for manslaughter, but those who were free seemed to be following predictable careers. It wouldn’t be long before they, too, had a taste of prison. The thought gave Cooper no satisfaction. It would solve nothing.

As always on these occasions, he found his brain spilling out memories like sour wine from an uncorked bottle; deeply stored images of his father that were preserved as if in vinegar. There were glimpses of a tall, strong man with wide shoulders and huge hands tossing bales of hay with a pitchfork, his face flushed and laughing. At other times he was frowning and angry, a terrifying figure in a dark uniform, opening his mouth to bring down the wrath of God on his sons. But among Ben’s memories was also a picture of his father lying dead and bleeding on the stone setts of Clappergate. It was a sight Ben hadn’t even seen, yet it was etched on his mind like a nail embedded in a tree — it was long grown over, but still there, hard and sharp, splitting the flesh that pressed too tightly around it.

But Ben had to close the stopper tight on his thoughts. He couldn’t bear to taste those memories. The pain of them was too thick for him to swallow.

‘He always expected great things of you,’ said Matt.

‘He didn’t just expect great things — he demanded them.’

‘He demanded a lot, that’s true. But he was very proud of you. And you did exactly what he hoped for, always.’

Ben looked at his brother. ‘Matt, he gave me an appalling time. He drove me like a maniac. Nothing I ever did was good enough for him. I always had to do better, to work a bit harder. But you were different. You were the favoured son.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘He never drove you like he did me. He left you alone to do whatever you wanted.’

‘Exactly,’ said Matt.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It shows that it was you that he cared about, Ben. He cared about you more than anything.’

‘It didn’t feel like it at the time.’

‘It was obvious to everybody else. Obvious to me, anyway. It didn’t matter to him what I did. It didn’t matter how hard I worked, how successful I was at what I chose to do. It meant nothing to him. He would just say, “That’s fine,” and he’d turn away to ask how your training was going, or how you’d dealt with an incident, and what your feelings were about it. Every last detail about you was important to him. But me, I could just do what I liked. I might as well not have been there.’

Ben thought he and Matt had little in common physically, except perhaps a look of their father around the eyes and nose. Their mother was blue-eyed, but the eyes of both her sons were brown, their hair dark where she was fair. Though Cooper was five foot eleven, it was Matt who had inherited their father’s size, the wide shoulders, the enormous hands and the uncertain temper.

‘Matt, you’re the one who’s like him. Everyone says that. People always told me I took after Mum. But Dad and me, we were like chalk and cheese. It infuriated him every time he saw me reading a book. He nearly threw me out of the house when I got interested in music and joined the choir. For Heaven’s sake, I barely came up to his shoulder. I was a pigmy in his eyes.’

Matt stood up. When he towered over him, with that exasperated frown, Matt looked more than ever like Sergeant Joe Cooper come back to life.

‘Maybe you never saw the similarity, Ben,’ he said. ‘But everybody else did. I can see him in you now, over this case you’re involved in, this woman who was killed on Ringham Moor.’

‘What on earth has that got to do with it?’

‘You stand here by his grave, today of all days, and you start asking me about this bloody Warren Leach. As if I cared about all that. But Dad would be proud of you, all right. Your head’s full of the same big ideas that his was, like justice and truth. You think you have to put the world right on your own. Just like him. You’re exactly like him.’

Before his brother could reply, Matt walked away to stand over the grave, leaving Ben on the bench. Matt rearranged the flowers at the foot of the headstone and re-read the inscription.

Ben stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Matt,’ he said.

Matt half-turned his head. His eyes glistened, and he wiped the heel of his hand across his face. ‘You can’t help it, Ben,’ he said. ‘Neither of us can help it.’

They walked in silence back through the cemetery, passing a workman sweeping up leaves. When they reached the car, Matt paused and looked back at the cemetery. Their father’s grave was no longer discernible from here. It had merged into anonymous rows of headstones, swallowed up among centuries of Edendale dead.

‘Ben. . this Warren Leach,’ said Matt.

‘What about him?’

‘They say his farm is in big trouble. Creditors are calling the debts in, the usual story. He’s very close to bankruptcy, they reckon, but he won’t admit it. Leach is the type who’ll try to pretend it’s not happening until it’s much too late. It’ll only take one small thing to be the last straw.’

Cooper thought back to the two occasions he had met the farmer. ‘He isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. But it can’t be much of a life up there.’

‘Those hill farmers are proud men. They think they don’t need anyone else; they want to believe they’re self-reliant, like their ancestors always were. It’s hard for men like that to admit any sort of weakness. Losing the farm would be the end of the world for Warren Leach. He must be close to the edge.’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you, Ben? I’m not sure.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I’d watch out for Warren Leach, if I were you. When a man is driven close to the edge, he might do anything. And, unlike you, Ben, some men can completely lose sight of what’s right and what’s wrong.’