Dancing With the Virgins

37

Derwent Court still had much of its original Victorian guttering. The increasingly blustery winds that battered around Matlock had swirled heaps of wet leaves into the iron channels and downspouts, and now the rain was spilling over and cascading down the front of the building. Ben Cooper had to dodge a waterfall near the front door, wondering whether this was part of the water treatment that the Victorians had once flocked to the hydro to enjoy.

When Cooper joined the team in Maggie Crew’s apartment, they had already emptied her desk, and papers littered the surface. DI Hitchens was working his way through them, and when he saw Cooper he offered him a heap.

‘We found a rucksack back there in one of the bedrooms with Ros Daniels’ clothes and a few belongings in. She was travelling light, by the looks of it.’

Cooper began to look through some of the papers. Many of them were bills, bank statements, insurance policies, all carefully organized and filed. There were law books, a copy of Maggie’s partnership agreement, an address book packed with names. Who were all the people in the address book if Maggie Crew had been so alone? He turned over some leaflets about Hammond Hall, and showed Hitchens what he found underneath.

‘This looks like a diary of some kind,’ he said. ‘Or a journal.’

‘Is it Crew’s diary? We haven’t found one yet.’

‘No. It’s just some times and places, almost an itinerary. It’s from somebody called Eve. Who’s Eve?’

‘I don’t know.’

Cooper stopped and stared at the page. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Grosvenor Avenue, Edendale. But that’s — ’

‘Mm?’

‘So who’s Eve?’ repeated Cooper.

‘No idea. A friend of hers?’

‘There’s a phone number, anyway. It’s a local number.’

‘Try it then,’ said Hitchens.

Cooper looked uncertain. What he had read had thrown him. It wasn’t what he had been expecting. ‘What do I say?’

‘You can think of something, Cooper. Just ask for Eve and play it by ear.’

Still he hesitated, reading and rereading the bit about Grosvenor Avenue. ‘Shall I, sir?’

‘Go ahead.’

Cooper dialled. ‘I’ll tell her I’m selling something. Nobody thinks there’s anything unusual about that.’

‘That’s a good idea. So what are you selling?’ said Hitchens as the phone began to ring.

‘Soffits.’

‘What the hell are soffits?’

‘Exactly. Nobody knows. You can tell them any old rubbish.’

Then the ringing stopped, and a voice answered. But Cooper was speechless. He seemed to have forgotten he was a salesperson. His opening line had gone right out of his head.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Wrong number.’ And he put the phone down.

‘Was it?’ said Hitchens.

‘What?’

‘A wrong number?’

‘Not at all. Very much the right number, I think.’

‘You didn’t try to sell them any soffits.’

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘They didn’t need any.’

Maggie Crew seemed almost at home in the interview room. Its sparseness suited her. She was able to live with her own thoughts, staring at a blank wall as she tried to recapture the elusive memories. Ben Cooper listened, fascinated, as she talked about the triggers that had achieved what nothing else could do.

‘It was the sounds and the smells that suddenly brought it back to me,’ she said. ‘You could have sent people to talk to me endlessly and you would never have achieved that. The voices, the way the men smelled of animals. And there were dogs barking somewhere, but I couldn’t see them. .’ Maggie shuddered. ‘And then somebody screamed. One of the animal rights women.’

‘And you’d just had it confirmed that Rosalind Daniels was dead,’ said DCI Tailby.

She nodded. ‘It was like something physical hitting me. The memories poured over me. It was as if I was existing in two places at once, at two different moments. The sounds and the smells connected them. And I knew what had happened to Ros.’

Maggie put her hands on the table and looked at them. Her long fingers were very still, her nails blunt and pale.

‘Ros had decided to trace me, you know,’ she said. ‘After all that time, my daughter decided to trace me. They allow adopted children to get access to information on their real parents, but not the other way round. It’s one of the provisions of the Adoption Rules. I don’t know what she hoped to achieve by it.’ Maggie paused and let out her breath. ‘Yes, I do. She wanted to get whatever she could from me. Money. A convenient place to stay.’

‘When did she first contact you?’

‘Around the middle of September. She said she was in the area, but she didn’t tell me why or where she was living.’

‘It seems she was staying with Jenny Weston at Totley during that time.’

‘Yes, I found that out later. These animal rights groups have networks they communicate through. And when Ros arrived with nowhere to live, Jenny Weston offered to help. She had a spare bedroom in her house.’

‘You know a bit about Jenny Weston, after all,’ said Cooper, recalling the efforts Diane Fry said she had made to bring Jenny alive in Maggie’s mind.

But Maggie ignored the comment. ‘Ros came on a mission — a mission against dog-fighting. She was following a link from the area she came from, somewhere in Cheshire. When one dog-fighting ring was closed down, some of the men began to travel to Derbyshire, to Ringham Edge Farm. Of course, the dog-fighting was much more important to Ros than finding her mother. I was just a side interest.’

‘That’s not what she told her adopted parents,’ said Tailby.

Maggie shook her head. ‘I expect she resented them, too. No — she came with a purpose in mind; I was merely a useful accessory.’

‘But Jenny didn’t agree with what Ros wanted to do, did she?’

‘Apparently not. Ros was much more radical in her views than Jenny. She believed in direct action. In fact, she believed in violence.’

‘And that’s what led her into trouble in the end,’ said Tailby.

Maggie dropped her head. ‘I suppose it has to be my fault.’

‘Does it? Why?’

‘Because there’s no doubt she would have been raised differently if I had kept her with me when she was a child. Well, that’s obvious,’ said Maggie. ‘She would never have reached that stage if I had brought her up myself.’

‘There’s no reason to believe that,’ said Cooper.

Maggie just stared at them and didn’t trouble to discuss it. ‘Ros had an argument with Jenny Weston when she found out what Ros intended to do. There were angry words. And Ros walked out and came to me.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

‘At first I thought it was the moment I’d always dreamed of,’ said Maggie. ‘My daughter had come back to me. But it wasn’t like that at all.’ She looked from Tailby to Cooper. ‘Nothing ever is how you hope it will be, is it? It’s best not to expect anything. It’s best not to hope for too much. Because the worst thing of all is when you have your hopes raised and then dashed again. That is very painful. That can be devastating.’

They gave her a moment to recover, while the tapes recorded the silence.

‘What did Ros want exactly?’ asked Tailby.

‘My daughter saw that she might be able to make use of me.’

‘But in what way?’

‘She needed somewhere to stay, a handy base. That was the way she put it. And my home was much nearer to where she needed to be. Much nearer to Ringham Moor.’

‘Did she tell you what she planned to do?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And what was your reaction to that?’

‘Ironically, I think I probably reacted the same way that Jenny Weston did, but more so. I told Ros she was mad, that what she planned to do was criminal and dangerous. We argued terribly. Of course, I said all the wrong things. A lot of stupid things. I expect it’s because I’ve never known how a mother is supposed to behave. I’ve never learned by my mistakes how to deal with a daughter — so I made all the mistakes at once, in one blazing row. I told her I wouldn’t allow her to do it.’

‘I expect she didn’t like you telling her what to do.’

Maggie smiled. ‘That’s rather an understatement. It was obvious she was going to go to Ringham Moor, whatever I said. It became very personal, and all her bitterness poured out. Mine as well, I suppose. But Ros believed that I owed her a great deal. And I found I couldn’t argue with her any more. Because she was right, you see. I owed her more than I could say, for having let her down.’

‘So you allowed yourself to be persuaded. .’

‘Yes, from that moment, I was lost. I should have stuck to my guns, locked her in the flat. . anything. I can see that now. But she told me that if I was a real mother I would understand what she was trying to do, that I would support her in the one thing that was most important in her life. That if I was a real mother, I would go with her. She said I was the only one who could help to keep her out of danger. That it was what a mother would do.’

‘And so what did you do?’

‘What could I do?’ Maggie shrugged. ‘I went with her, of course.’

Cooper looked at Tailby, but the DCI just nodded. He was a father himself. Cooper could only imagine how difficult it was to stand by and watch your child walk away from you into danger, when all your instincts were urging you to keep them by you and protect them. How much stronger must the feeling have been in Maggie, who had only just discovered it? She had finally found her child, only to face the prospect of losing her again. There was no way that she could have stood by and watched Ros walk off alone.

‘Yes, I drove her up to Ringham,’ said Maggie. ‘We were both so angry that we didn’t speak a word to each other in the car. I had driven right through Matlock before I even remembered to put the headlights on. When we got to Ringham, we parked above the village and walked up to the tower. Ros told me it was the meeting point, where I had to wait until she came back from the farm. I didn’t want to just sit and wait. Waiting was the worst thing. On the other hand. .’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, there are other instincts, too.’

‘You couldn’t bring yourself to be too closely involved in a criminal act?’ said Tailby. ‘Is that right?’

‘All my training was against it, you see. All my beliefs. How could I? I was taking such a risk already.’ Maggie’s face betrayed a moment of appeal, a deep uncertainty. ‘Do you understand?’

Cooper looked away from the appeal. That was the crucial issue, in the end. Maggie Crew had waited at the Hammond Tower, torn between fear for the safety of her daughter and her horror at what Ros was doing out there on the dark moor. She hadn’t wanted to be there, but she couldn’t leave. Two powerful instincts had been battling inside her, and no doubt she had paced backwards and forwards at the foot of the tower, staring helplessly into the darkness, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Cooper could picture the unfinished butts tossed away, still glowing as they flew into the night. How many might Maggie have smoked during that time? Many of the cigarette ends would have landed among the trees on the slope, in the deep undergrowth. But not all. Some of them had landed on the ledge below the tower.

‘And what exactly was it Ros intended to do? Did she tell you?’

‘Oh, she didn’t just intend to do it. She actually did it,’ said Maggie. ‘She prepared her plan beforehand. She had two home-made petrol bombs hidden behind some loose stones in the wall of the tower. She had even collected some bits of rubbish and shoved them into the hole — empty drinks cans, chocolate wrappers, you know the sort of thing. She said nobody would bother to look in the hole when they saw the rubbish. I suppose she was right.’

‘Well, almost,’ said Cooper, thinking of Mark Roper and his preoccupation with clearing up after other people.

‘That makes me an accomplice,’ said Maggie. ‘I knew what she intended to do, and I helped her to do it. Technically, I’m guilty of conspiracy to cause an explosion.’

Neither of the police officers said anything. At that moment, it seemed the least of her concerns.

‘Ros had put petrol in two Evian water bottles. I don’t know who taught her how to do that. But then, I don’t know how she was brought up. I don’t even know who her adopted parents were. I don’t know anything about her at all, even though she was my daughter. I might have been able to put that right, in time. But they denied me the chance.’

‘Who do you mean by “they”?’

‘The men at the farm. The dog-fighting people. They killed Ros.’

‘Are you sure? Did you see it happen?’

‘I didn’t see it. I heard it.’

‘Tell us.’

‘Something must have gone wrong at the farm. I heard the first fire bomb go off, then the second, though it wasn’t as loud. But for some reason Ros didn’t get away as quickly as she meant to. The men came out of the shed with their dogs and they chased her back up the hill towards the tower. She was coming back to meet me, and I was supposed to keep her safe. But she never stood a chance. Oh, she might have been able to outrun the men, to escape among the trees in the darkness. But there were the dogs.’

‘If Ros never made it to the tower. .’

‘I remember hearing the voices of the men shouting. And the dogs barking and snarling in the dark somewhere. I didn’t know what was happening, and I couldn’t see anything. Then there was a scream — ’ Maggie stumbled to a halt. ‘The only other thing I remember is the man running at me out of the darkness, and then the knife and the pain. .’ She looked at Tailby. ‘What actually happened to her? Can you tell me?’

‘Your daughter fell off Ringham Edge, very near the tower. She ran off the top of one of the Cat Stones trying to escape from the dogs.’

‘I see,’ said Maggie. She took a few seconds to digest the idea, as if trying to fit it in with her mental picture. ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it? It was all because of the dogs. It was the dogs that she was trying to save.’

‘I’m afraid those particular dogs were trained to kill,’ said Tailby. ‘We seized six pit bull terriers from various addresses when we made our arrests. Now they will have to be destroyed anyway.’

‘So it was the fall that killed her.’ Maggie took a deep breath. ‘Will the CPS carry forward a prosecution on a murder charge? Or will the men plead guilty to manslaughter? I’m sorry, that’s a lawyer speaking again.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Tailby slowly, ‘we believe the fall didn’t kill her outright. Your daughter didn’t die straight away. The pathologist thinks she was still alive for a while as she lay on that ledge. She had dragged herself a foot or two. The debris under her fingernails included gritstone sand from where she had been lying.’

Maggie’s face went white, and the confidence in her eyes died. ‘She was still alive, then. And I left her.’

‘You weren’t to know that,’ said Cooper.

‘I left her there to die.’

The DCI looked at Cooper sharply. But Cooper felt he understood Maggie at last. He knew there was nothing to stop you being consumed by guilt when you failed to protect someone who relied on you.

‘There was nothing you could have done,’ he said.

‘I abandoned her again,’ said Maggie. ‘And this time she’ll never come back, will she?’

They allowed Maggie a rest period. They had plenty of time to keep her in custody before she had to appear in court. More evidence was needed yet, before they could decide how many murder charges she would face.

‘Why did you associate yourself with the animal rights group?’ Tailby asked her later.

‘I wanted to find out where Ros had gone, why she hadn’t got in touch. I couldn’t remember clearly enough, and I thought the details had become distorted, as they do in a nightmare. Most of all, I couldn’t believe that she was dead. I thought she had dropped me because I was no use to her any more. And with Jenny Weston dead, those other women were the only connection to Ros I had left. I’m afraid I pestered them until they let me join in their activities.’

‘How did they react to you?’

‘They felt sorry for me, I think. That made me angry. But I needed them — I needed the information I thought they had about Ros. On the other hand, some of them had heard that I was attacked near Ringham Edge Farm. They wondered whether I had been attacked by the dog-fighters. None of them ever dared to ask me outright, but I think it was that which earned me acceptance.’

‘But they didn’t know what had happened to Ros?’

‘No. And if they knew what Ros had planned to do, they wouldn’t have told anybody about it. They have their own loyalty, you see.’

‘Perhaps they just thought she had moved on again somewhere else, to undertake some other mission. She seems to have seen herself as some kind of animal rights commando,’ said Cooper.

‘But they heard about the latest body, and they knew perfectly well who it was. It seems I was the only one in ignorance. I had gone along to the cattle market still hoping. I was so blind — but only because I didn’t want to give up hoping.’

‘Hoping that Ros would turn up?’

‘I thought she might have appeared at the cattle market — it was her sort of thing, direct action. The plan was to slash the tyres on the vehicles of the people that had been targeted. That’s why we were all given knives. They almost didn’t let me have one, you know. It was a kind of sign of acceptance. Ros would have been pleased to see me there.’

‘Even though you were actually committing a crime yourself this time, Maggie.’

She nodded. ‘You see which instinct won? Besides, it was already too late for anything else by then. Too late for the old Maggie Crew. You can’t go backwards. You can’t get parts of your life back, once they’re dead.’

Keith Teasdale and five others had been arrested, despite the distractions at the cattle market. They were all believed to have been involved in the dog-fighting ring at Ringham Edge Farm. Under questioning, Teasdale told the story of the night Ros Daniels had staged her single-handed fire-bomb attack and the chaos that had followed as men and dogs spilled out on to the hill in a mad chase lit by flames from the burning pick-up.

Teasdale had admitted that he and Warren Leach had made a search of the area near the Hammond Tower at first light next morning and had found the body of the young woman on a ledge under the most northerly of the Cat Stones. They had moved it deeper into the cavity to conceal it, he said. At the same time, Yvonne Leach had stumbled across Maggie Crew, injured and incoherent from the hours she had spent on the moor. Ben Cooper wondered if Yvonne had guessed what had happened that night.

After that, Warren Leach had lived for the best part of two months with the fear and expectation that an injured woman’s memories would return. He had tried to live a life under those circumstances, seeing every visitor as an enemy, recognizing the potential for betrayal even in his own wife. Perhaps especially in his own wife. Cooper knew that no one could live with that kind of uncertainty. No wonder Leach could see no point in carrying on.

Maggie Crew had been a serious threat to Leach, that was obvious. Yet there had been someone who had seen Jenny Weston as the main target. Had that been Leach? Or had that been Maggie herself?

‘Teasdale will be charged with manslaughter and a few other things,’ said DCI Tailby. ‘They all admit the assault on Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington at the quarry. They made a good job of drawing our attention there. And, of course, there’s the dog-fighting pit.’

‘There must be more,’ said Chief Superintendent Jepson.

‘We’re quite sure there are others involved. But these people have their own sense of loyalty, too. They won’t implicate anyone else.’

‘I don’t mean more people. I mean Jenny Weston. Please tell me we can connect somebody to Jenny Weston, after all this. .’

But Tailby shook his head.

‘Yes, I lay in wait for Jenny that day,’ Maggie had said. ‘I waited at the tower, because she always came that way. I had met her before, two days earlier, and we had argued. I was angry with her — I didn’t believe her when she said she had no idea where Ros had gone. She was my main hope, because I suspected then that there was more to their relationship. But of course I did it all wrong. I antagonized her.’

‘We don’t believe there was any relationship between them, other than a loose connection through the animal rights group. No sexual relationship. Jenny Weston and your daughter were not lovers.’

‘That’s what Jenny told me, too. As far as she was concerned, Ros was just a silly, hot-headed girl who had passed through her life and was soon forgotten.’

‘But you didn’t believe her.’

And Maggie hesitated. ‘Actually, I suppose I did.’

‘So why did you attack her? Why did you use the knife?’

‘Did I do that? But yesterday, it felt as though I’d never held a knife in my life before. No, I don’t believe I saw Jenny Weston. Either she never came to the tower, or I was too late. I didn’t see her. Not that day.’

‘You expect us to believe that?’

‘You’ll have to,’ she said. ‘I think it’s true.’

Chief Superintendent Jepson scowled angrily at his officers, his blue eyes glittering.

‘Yes, I’m afraid it is true,’ said DCI Tailby.

‘Are we sure?’

‘The shoe print over the bloodstain is much too big to be Maggie Crew’s. Or Simon Bevington’s either, for that matter.’

‘Damn.’

‘Also, some strength was needed to drag the victim into the stone circle,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘We doubt that either of them would be capable of it, or would even attempt it. Besides, there’s the missing camera.’

Jepson frowned. ‘The camera?’

‘Well, Jenny Weston had reported the dog-fights to the RSPCA,’ said Hitchens. ‘We believe she’d taken some photographs, too. She carried an auto-focus camera with her when she was on the moor. Most likely, it was in her pouch.’

‘Which was missing when the body was found.’

‘Yes.’

‘Suggesting that whoever killed her knew what was likely to be on the film. So it has to have been one of the dog-fighters.’

‘Teasdale has told us that she took photographs of him and Warren Leach burying a pitbull terrier that had to be put down because of its injuries. They had taken it well away from the farm — close to the stone circle, in fact, in the trees there. But Jenny saw them. Teasdale says they stood no chance of catching her, because she was on a bike. But she knew they’d seen her.’

‘And Leach was in a good position to spot Jenny when she came back to the moor again.’

‘That’s pretty much what we think. And we found a whole range of knives and other implements in his workshop. Not the knife, though.’

Jepson considered the evidence. ‘So Warren Leach’s associates plan on him taking the blame for Jenny Weston’s murder. How convenient for them.’

‘And clever. They’ve all got their story straight.’

‘Well, let’s face it,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’s convenient all round.’

They all looked at Ben Cooper. But Cooper sat very still, his lips pressed together, saying nothing. Now was the time for saying nothing, if ever it had been the time. They were expecting a comment from him that would never come.

Soon, there would be another police funeral for him to attend, when Todd Weenink was buried with all the honours befitting an officer who had died in the course of duty. But for now there was nothing to be said. Nothing that Cooper could possibly hope to put into words.

Next day, there was a new notice pinned to the board in the corridor. Officers were gathered round to read it.

‘Mr Tailby’s being posted to Ripley,’ one said. ‘And the new DCI’s been named.’

‘Oh? Is it DI Hitchens?’ Ben Cooper elbowed his way closer to the noticeboard. He was aware of an odd mood among the officers around him. A dark, cynical mood.

‘No, mate,’ said someone. ‘We’re getting a new Detective Superintendent from South Yorkshire, and a DCI is transferring from B Division. More foreigners on our patch.’

Cooper read through the praise of Tailby and some indecipherable details of his new headquarters role, then skimmed through the new appointments before reaching the final pay-off line: ‘Detective Inspector K. Armstrong has been appointed Detective Chief Inspector, B Division, to succeed DCI Maddison.’

‘Armstrong’s done well for herself,’ said someone.

‘Right.’

‘Her paedophile operation got a good press. Lots of arrests.’

‘Well, what can you say?’

They looked over their shoulders, watchful for unfriendly ears, afraid of uttering a politically incorrect word.

‘It’s good news for some,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes, if you’re one of the sisters.’

‘Who do you mean?’ It was DC Gardner, trying to force herself into the group. ‘Acting DS Fry is it? Her and Armstrong? There’s more to it than that, from what I’ve heard. Sisters is right.’

‘You listen to the sound of your own voice too much, then,’ said Cooper. Then he turned and saw Diane Fry herself, standing at the corner of the corridor. He wasn’t sure how much she had heard. She was pale and drawn. The wound on her cheekbone was red and angry, the stitches stretching the flesh tight below her eye.

Before anyone else noticed her, she had slipped away, disappearing back into the shadows as if she hadn’t been there at all.

Half an hour later, Diane Fry emerged from DI Armstrong’s office knowing that she had burned her boats. It was a curiously satisfying feeling. Armstrong had not been pleased at her decision not to take the job with her team. But Fry knew it hadn’t been right for her. Not now.

Sisters. It was that one word that had finally repulsed her. She had no sisters here. Not Kim Armstrong, nor any of her associates. Not Maggie Crew, nor any of the other women she was obliged to be polite to during the course of her job. They were not sisters, not even friends — merely acquaintances, or colleagues. It was the claim of sisterhood that she could not stomach, that made the bile rise in her throat.

Fry opened her bag and slipped the creased photograph out of her credit-card holder. She had only one sister, and this was her. This young woman would now be a stranger, as unrecognizable to Fry as the homeless druggies of Sheffield were. Their relationship was a dead thing, a fragment of the past, yet still remembered and treasured.

Carefully, Fry put the photo back. The things that people craved were so strange. The longing for what would do you no good at all was utterly incomprehensible.

Sisters? Like daughters, sisters were something special, not to be taken lightly. No, ma’am. You were not Diane Fry’s sister, and you never would be.