Dancing With the Virgins

33

There was no answer at the cottage in Cargreave. Ben Cooper stood on the bottom step, his feet crunching shards of broken clay pot and lumps of soil tangled with roots. All the plant pots on the steps had been smashed and the plants uprooted. Now they lay in a wet mess of soil. The bottom step had also been used as a toilet, almost as if the entire village had stood and urinated on to the doorstep. Urinated and worse. The smell was appalling.

All the curtains were drawn on this side of the house. Cooper walked a few yards along the road until he found a ginnel that ran between the cottages, with steep steps at the bottom where gates led into adjacent gardens. He clambered over a wall into the field and walked along it until he reached the back garden of Owen Fox’s cottage and forced his way through an overgrown hawthorn hedge. A woman stared at him from a first-floor window next door, then turned away.

Cooper peered through the windows, remembering the gloom of the little room at the front of the house where Owen’s computer had stood among the old newspapers and magazines. He banged on the back door, knocked on the windows, watching for a hint of movement inside. Nothing. Feeling foolish, he shouted Owen’s name. There was no reply. So where else could he be? They had taken the Land Rover off him when he was suspended, and Owen wasn’t the type to be drowning his sorrows in the pub. He would want to be somewhere quiet, where he could think about things.

Cooper found himself looking up at the bedroom window. The line of bereavement cards still stood there, mostly white and silver, fading in the sun. They were decorated with all the symbols of religion — crosses and stained glass windows depicting the Virgin Mary. They were the usual things on bereavement cards, often meaning nothing. But, of course, Mrs Fox had believed in religion. Owen had said so himself. He had taken her to the village church until she became bedridden. And the old lady could see the tower of the church from her bedroom window.

The graveyard at Cargreave parish church was full of local names — Gregory, Twigg and Woodward; Pidcock, Rowland and Marsden. There were lots of Shimwells and Bradleys here, and someone called Cornelius Roper — an ancestor of Mark’s, perhaps? One of the most recent headstones was down at the bottom of the graveyard, in one of the last available plots. Annie Fox, aged ninety, beloved mother of Owen.

Even in the dusk and from the far side of the churchyard, Ben Cooper could see the red of the Ranger’s jacket in the porch. He walked up the path. Inside the porch, Owen Fox was dwarfed by a slate slab, eight feet tall, bearing the Ten Commandments. Cooper sat down next to him on a narrow stone seat.

‘It’s locked, Ben,’ said Owen. ‘The church is locked.’

‘Too much trouble with thieves and vandals, I suppose.’

‘After she was gone, I didn’t think I needed the church any more,’ said Owen.

‘Your mother?’

‘We always used to come on a Sunday when she was well enough. After she died, I didn’t think I needed it any more. Then suddenly today I thought I did, after all. But it’s locked.’

Dozens of starlings were flocking in the churchyard, chattering to each other as they rustled from one yew tree to the next, deciding on a place to roost for the night.

‘Look, it might be a good idea if you stayed at home for a while, Owen,’ said Cooper. ‘Watch the telly, read a book, mow the lawn, feed the cats. Anything. Go home.’

‘I can’t.’ Owen scowled across the churchyard at the valley and the opposite hill. ‘Not knowing your lot have been through the house and pawed over my life. It doesn’t feel like my home any more. It’s a place where I’m a pervert, a sicko, the lowest of the low. But not outside the house. Outside, I’m someone else entirely.’

Cooper looked at the notices pinned to a board inside a glass case next to the slate slab.

‘According to this, you can get the key from the churchwarden at 2 Rectory Lane. The white house across the churchyard, it says.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Owen.

‘It’s just over there, look.’

‘Yes, I know.’

Cooper looked at the house, studying its curtained windows and tall chimneys. There was smoke coming from one of the chimneys, and it looked as though there was somebody at home.

‘In this village, the churchwarden is also the chairman of the parish council,’ said Owen. ‘Councillor Salt. She knows me well enough.’

Then Owen changed the subject. It might have been the subject that had been running through his mind all along, whatever the words he had been speaking. It all spilled out as if Cooper had suddenly tuned in halfway through a conversation.

‘I looked after Mum for so many years, you know,’ said Owen. ‘We were more than mother and son. We were a team. Do you know what I mean? It was like a marriage, in a way. I looked after her, and she looked after me — or she liked to think she did. She used to drag herself out of bed to get a meal ready for me when I came home. I would find her sitting on the kitchen floor, with the cutlery tipped out of the drawer and a pile of unwashed potatoes. And she would be apologizing for dinner being late.’

Owen’s voice cracked. Cooper looked away, over his head, to avoid seeing his expression, waiting while he recovered. He felt like a voyeur suddenly faced with something far more personal and intimate than he had expected.

‘Her mind was fine, but her body was long past being able to keep up with her,’ said Owen. ‘I think that’s the saddest thing of all, don’t you? It meant she knew exactly what was happening to her. It was a long drawn-out torture.’

‘How long did you live together, just the two of you?’

‘Thirty years.’

‘Thirty years? Owen, you must have been — ?’

‘Since I was twenty-three.’

‘Well, you’re right about a marriage. Except that not many couples stay together so long these days.’

Owen nodded. ‘We depended on each other. That’s the difference, isn’t it? You stay together when you need each other. Most of the couples I see, they don’t really need each other — not after the sex thing is done with and the kids have grown up. Sixteen years at most, and the reasons for their marriage have gone. There’s no real tie to keep them from drifting apart. No ties like there are with a parent. Real blood ties.’

‘But never to have your own life, Owen. .’

‘You still don’t really understand. Mum was my life. Oh, I had the job. I’ve always loved being a Ranger, and I wouldn’t have done anything else. But I’ve never really had friends — plenty of acquaintances, but no friends. And I was never going anywhere else, because I was needed right here, in Cargreave. I had a purpose. Until she died.’

‘That must have left a big hole in your life,’ said Cooper, aware of how inadequate the words were. He had an inkling of what it must have meant to Owen — not just to lose a part of your life, but to lose its entire purpose. It made him think of Warren Leach, who had come to the same point himself, in his own way, but had chosen a different method of dealing with it. Owen had followed a different path — less violent, perhaps, but just as destructive.

Cooper ran his eye over the ornate writing on the stone slab. The old-fashioned letters were difficult to read, full of curlicues and elegant swirls, not like the nice, plain print of a newspaper headline. The effects of the weather and the rubbing of many hands had worn the inscriptions down so much over the centuries that they had almost been lost entirely. The Commandments were so difficult to see that they were easy to ignore, too empty of significance to draw meaning from any more. Cooper traced the wording of number nine, taking his time, almost reluctant to get to the end of the sentence.

‘“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour,”’ he said.

The Ranger stared at him, puzzled. ‘Just because I had that stuff on the computer, it doesn’t mean I’d do anything to children, you know. I want to tell people that, but they won’t listen. On the way here, I passed a man that I’ve known all my life. He came to Mum’s funeral. Today, he crossed the road to avoid me; when I got past, he spat on the pavement.’

The flock of starlings in the yew trees fell suddenly quiet. Cooper glanced nervously at the churchyard. For the third time in a week, he found himself worrying that someone might see him where he shouldn’t be. There were several routes he could take to get into big trouble, and he was following them all simultaneously.

He couldn’t help wondering what his father would have done. Would he have followed the path he thought to be right, and tried to achieve justice? Or would he have stuck to the rules? Cooper wished he could get a message from him somehow. But he was in the wrong place for that — Joe Cooper had never believed in a God bigger than himself.

‘That woman you were accused of assaulting ten years ago. .’

‘It was different,’ said Owen. ‘Totally different.’

‘You can see why it might look similar.’

‘Not at all. That woman pursued me constantly. It was well known in the village that she wasn’t right in the head. She would never leave me alone. It was terrible. Despite everything I could do to avoid her, she managed to get me on my own one day at home. All I did was push her away to make her leave. But she fell on the steps outside the house and banged her head. That was it. That was all that happened. Of course, her version was quite different. The things she said afterwards. .’

Owen rubbed his fingers through his beard, so that the grey hair stuck out in odd directions. He tried to wipe away a trickle of sweat from his temple and left a dark smear instead.

‘Do people here in the village know about your conviction?’ asked Cooper. ‘You’ve lived here all your life, after all.’

‘Yes, they know. They knew all about it at the time, and they don’t forget.’

‘Yet nobody has said anything to us. Of all the calls that have come in to the incident room, no one from Cargreave has pointed out your history. If it hadn’t been for your name cropping up in the paedophile enquiry, it would never have come to light.’

Owen nodded. ‘It’s because I belong here. Those other people, on the internet, I meant nothing to them. I had no place there. And now look what I’ve done to my life in Cargreave. I’ve been on the parish council for fifteen years. But the chairman left a message on my answerphone last night and said the most appalling things. Mary Salt used to be one of Mum’s patients. Mum delivered both her children. I can never look Mary Salt in the eye again. I’ve just put my resignation through her letter box.’

Cooper began to feel as if he were standing at the front door of someone’s house, searching fruitlessly for the right words to break the bad news when a family had lost a loved one — a father killed in a car crash, a teenager dead of an ecstasy overdose, a young girl snatched and dumped dead by the roadside. After a while, you learned there were no right words. You just did it, got it over with, and tried to keep up the barriers against the emotions you were bombarded with.

People wanted you to play God. They wanted you to bring the husband or daughter back to life somehow. In training, you were told how relatives might react, but not how you were going to react yourself. You weren’t trained in dealing with your own feelings. And those emotions didn’t come from a bottomless well. Every time you drained the emotional reserves, it took a bit longer to refill. Cooper had started to worry that eventually it wouldn’t refill at all. One day that well might prove to be dry, and instead of normal feelings, all he would touch would be a dry, cracked surface, barren and stinking, like the sides of Ladybower Reservoir after a hot summer.

‘I don’t understand, Owen. Did you never have a girlfriend?’ said Cooper.

The Ranger shook his head. ‘It’s old fashioned, I suppose.’

Old fashioned? Cooper didn’t comment on the understatement. Most people these days would find it incomprehensible. Perversely, he knew, this would be another thing that Owen would find held against him.

‘I was always awkward and shy as a teenager,’ said Owen. ‘I never developed the knack of forming relationships.’

‘And when there was just you and your mother? Surely it wasn’t too late?’

For answer, Owen stared at the Ten Commandments. Cooper tried to follow the direction of his gaze. Which commandment riveted his attention, and what thoughts had his question provoked that made Owen look so amazed and appalled at the way his life had turned out?

Cooper looked down the list, until he arrived at the right line. Owen was right to be amazed, if that was what he was thinking. He was looking at number seven: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’

‘I had to do everything for her, in the later stages,’ said Owen. ‘I had to get her up, wash her and dress her, take her to the toilet, wipe her, feed her, clean her teeth, then undress her and put her to bed again. What marriage involves that kind of intimacy between a man and a woman?’

Owen had begun to cry; the tears crawled over his skin like tiny slugs, slow and painful. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m just glad she isn’t here now.’

Cooper looked away. He looked at the headstones in the graveyard, the yew trees and leaf-covered paths; he studied the village street, where a delivery van was parked outside the butcher’s shop, and he looked at the shadowed windows of the white house on the corner.

‘Owen?’ he said. ‘Shall I fetch that key for you?’

The interior of the church smelled of stone flagged floors that had recently been mopped clean. The light came from high in the walls, fragmented by the stained glass windows in a way that reminded Cooper of the cattle market at Edendale. The wooden pews were lined up just like narrow holding pens for worshippers waiting to be herded into the afterlife. He half-expected to see Abel Pilkington up there in the pulpit in his black suit, shouting out the prices, knocking down lost souls to the highest bidder.

‘You have to appreciate they’re treating this child pornography enquiry very seriously,’ said Cooper. ‘There was a little girl who ended up dead at the hands of two of these men. There may have been more we don’t know about.’

Owen nodded. ‘Of course, I regret what I’ve done. Somehow, I didn’t think of it as involving anyone else. I was still in my own private world, where it had always been just me and Mum, but now it was just me. And somehow — it was strange. .’ Owen screwed his face up in an effort to explain the inexplicable. ‘But sometimes those little girls, Ben. . I thought of them as if they were my mother. My own mother, as a child.’

Cooper lowered his eyes. There was nothing he could say, no platitudes that slipped into his mouth to meet the situation. His mind balked at being drawn into the dangerous, aberrant ideas that had appeared suddenly in front of him, like treacherous bogs across his path.

He felt guilty for stopping Owen. Being able to talk to someone would help him. But Cooper shouldn’t be talking to him about it at all. At any moment, Owen might make some damaging admission, and they would both be in an impossible position.

‘The cigarette stubs,’ said Cooper.

‘They’ve already asked me about those. Why do they matter?’

‘They matter because one was found under the body of Ros Daniels, as well as near where Jenny Weston was killed. You know that. We think the killer smoked those cigarettes and dropped them — the one careless thing he did. And the one they found in the bin at Partridge Cross was identical.’

Cooper paused. He wished he could still see the Commandments for inspiration. His lips moved silently. He had been about to ask Owen if he had noticed the cigarette stub in the bin before the police search. If nobody smoked at the Ranger centre, it was something he ought to have noticed.

‘Where did the cigarette in the bin come from, Owen? The bin had been emptied, but the ash was stuck to the bottom. Who uses that bin for their rubbish?’

‘Anybody could.’

‘And the rucksack. I know it’s yours, Owen. But could anybody else have used that rucksack?’

Owen said nothing. He stared at the high windows, as if wondering why the birds perched in the branches of the yew were silent, why the stained glass saints said nothing, why the whole world was waiting for his reply. A realization had come over him like the passing of a cloud.

‘Could anybody else use it?’ repeated Cooper.

And then Owen said: ‘Yes. Mark uses it.’

Owen Fox sat alone in one of the pews when Ben Cooper had gone. His head was down, his hands clenched together until the knuckles whitened. He had his eyes closed, like a man praying. But he wasn’t praying — he was remembering. Remembering the little girl.

She had been about six years old, and she had been alive at first. He had pulled her out of the back seat of the wrecked car, with his lungs full of fumes from the petrol pouring out of the ruptured fuel tank, and his eyes averted from the bloody and shattered bodies of the little girl’s parents, particularly the sight of her mother, with the branch of a tree skewering her cheek to the seat.

Owen had seen the car go out of control and hit the tree, and a second later he had heard screams that had died suddenly in the noise of the impact, lost in the crumpling thud of metal and the splintering of glass. He used his radio as he ran. But by the time he got to the road, he had no doubt the man and woman were dead.

The stench of the petrol panicked him when he saw the child still alive in the back seat. He barely knew what he was doing as he pulled her out, clumsily dragging her by her leg and a fistful of her blue dress, a thin summer dress that tore in his hand.

Then he had backed away to a safe distance and held the child in his arms while he waited for the ambulance to arrive. He seemed to be holding the girl for a long time, and he realized straight away that she was badly injured. He could feel the bones of her pelvis shift and bulge under his hand, and an unnatural swelling in her abdomen that seemed to grow and tighten under his fingers as he waited, not knowing what else to do. The child’s body felt like a flimsy plastic bag that was no longer able to support the weight of its contents. At any moment it was in danger of splitting open and leaking its liquids, spilling soft, glistening objects on the ground.

Owen had held the child gently, willing her to survive, trying to pour his own life into her through his hands to help her fight the shock of her injuries. He found his fingers becoming extraordinarily sensitive, as all his attention concentrated on his sense of touch, on the close physical contact with another human being. He held a small, fragile life in his hands, and the sensations were like nothing he had ever known. He was aware of the faint beating of her heart, the pulsing of her blood, the slow lift and fall of her chest and the living warmth of her skin against his own.

Then Owen had become conscious of other feelings as he held the girl. He had noticed the soft flesh of her upper thighs where her dress was torn and pulled up to her waist. He noticed the white smoothness of her belly; and he saw the shape of her genitals, tiny and clear through the fabric of her knickers.

He stood frozen in confusion at his own reactions, frightened to move, praying for the ambulance to arrive soon and take his burden away. Yet a few minutes later he continued to hold on to the girl, oblivious to the sound of sirens and the voices that followed, clustering around him, asking questions. He held the girl desperately to his chest, feeling her softness in his hands, her weight pulling on his shoulders, conscious of his fingers staining her pale innocence.

Finally, the girl had opened her eyes and focused on his face. In a moment of consciousness, she had seen his red jacket and his Peak Park badge.

‘Oh, you’re a Ranger,’ she said. And Owen remembered even now the rush of senseless, guilty pride he had felt that the girl could recognize who he was, and had felt secure in his arms.

Then the child’s eyes had closed, and a trickle of blood escaped from the corner of her mouth. And a warm flood of urine seeped from her and ran down the front of his red jacket, as she died.