Dancing With the Virgins (12 page)

*

Diane Fry always forgot. It slipped her mind every time how hopeful the family of a victim were when they saw
the police on their doorstep in the early stages of an
enquiry. They had such confidence, so often misplaced.
An early resolution was their main hope, an end to the
nightmare. They believed the police were doing their
best, but rarely was a detective able to bring them hope.
Mr Weston was in the front garden of his house in
Alfreton, raking leaves with an absorbed expression.
He looked up sharply when he heard the police car pull
into the drive. But DI Hitchens simply shook his head, and Weston turned back to his driveway and attacked
the leaves with his rake as if he wanted to stab them
into the ground.

‘
Was there something else you wanted to ask?' he said, when they reached him.

‘
A few things, Mr Weston,' said Hitchens. 'I'm sorry.
’

‘
Can't be helped, I suppose. It'll go on and on, won't
it?
’

The Westons' house was a large semi in a style that
might have been called 1920s mock Tudor, with stucco
above and brick below. The Tudor effect was achieved
by a few stray bits of black wood, which supported nothing, inserted into the walls
.

But the house was substantial and well cared for. The
front door was of some oak-like wood, and through the
bay window Fry caught a glimpse of a lounge with
cast-iron wall lights in the shape of flaming torches, a
wheel-shaped chandelier supporting electric candles
and a log basket on a brick hearth.

‘
I've taken compassionate leave for a few days,' said
Weston. 'I need to look after Susan. The head of my school has been very understanding.
’

Fry became aware of Mrs Weston standing in the
background, listening. She was pale and looked tired.
'Have you found Martin Stafford?' she asked.
'Not yet, Mrs Weston,' said Hitchens.

‘
So he's got away.'

‘
We'll locate him, eventually.'

'He always had a violent tendency.'

‘
We want to eliminate him from the enquiry,
obviously.
’

Mrs Weston stared at him as if she didn't understand
what he was saying.

‘
Susan —' said her husband.

‘
I always said he was no good,' she said. 'I was always
afraid it would come to this.'

‘
I don't think we know any more about Martin Staf
ford than we've told you already,' said Mr Weston. 'There might be something at the house in Totley, I
suppose. I mean Jenny's house. He might have written
to her or something.'

‘
Trying to creep back,' said his wife.

‘
We've already looked there,' said Hitchens. 'We found this —
’

The Westons examined the photocopy that he showed
them. It was a note rather than a letter — just a few lines
about an arrangement to meet somewhere. But it was
addressed to Jenny, and it was written in terms that suggested a close relationship
.

Mrs Weston coloured faintly when she reached the
line about fruit flavours. 'There's no name on it,' she said.

‘
No,' said Fry. 'That's why we're showing it to you. In case you recognize it.'

‘
You think it might be from Stafford?' asked Mr Weston. 'There's no date on it, either.'

‘
Unfortunately not.'

‘
I can't really remember what his writing was like. Susan?'

‘
No,' said Mrs Weston. 'I mean, I don't know. It could
be.'

‘
Did he ever write to you? Might you have something
that we could compare it to?
’

The couple looked at each other. 'Have we still got that postcard?' said Mr Weston
.

His wife went to a mahogany dresser and opened a drawer. It was one of those drawers that were always full of things that you never wanted. But Mrs Weston
soon located a plastic wallet of the kind that usually contained holiday snaps.

‘
I don't know why we kept it,' she said. 'But you can
see what sort of man he is.
’

Fry studied the postcard. It showed a view on one side of a beach lined with tourist hotels.

‘
Hawaii,' she said. 'Very nice.' She turned the card
over. It was addressed to the Westons and signed
'Martin ( your former son-in-law)'. The rest of it seemed
fairly innocuous - a few lines about how hot the weather
was, how luxurious the hotel, how stimulating the
nightlife. 'Spent nearly £2,000 already!', it said, as if it
was a boast.

‘
I'm not sure what it tells me,' said Fry. 'This holiday
was presumably after the divorce.'

‘
Not only after the divorce - paid for by the divorce,'
said Mrs Weston. 'He spent his share of the proceedings
from the sale of their house in Derby. He never seemed
to want for money, I don't know why. While Jenny had
to spend all of her share and borrow more to buy that
little place in Totley, Stafford went on this holiday in
Hawaii. The postcard was to rub it in. No other reason.'

‘
Apart from Martin Stafford, we'd also want to try
to trace any boyfriends that Jenny had recently,' said
Hitchens.

‘
We've been asked that before,' said Mr Weston. 'I gave you some names that we knew. We didn't know of anyone else. Not recently.'

‘
She didn't talk to us about things like that,' said Mrs
Weston. 'Not since Stafford.'

‘
Not even then,' said her husband. 'We had to
work it all out for ourselves, what was going on. She didn't want to say anything against him. Can you believe it?'

‘
She was loyal,' said Mrs Weston. 'I tried to teach
her always to be loyal to her husband. No matter
what.
’

Mr Weston looked down at the teacups. His wife
continued to stare straight ahead, past Fry's shoulder.
It was an aggressive and challenging stare, but it wasn't
directed at Fry at all. It was hitting the wall behind her
and ricocheting with unerring accuracy into the back
of the seat next to her, passing through Eric Weston's
heart on the way.

‘
No matter what,' repeated Mrs Weston
.

Diane Fry was always fascinated by those little secret
means of communication that passed between couples
without the need for explanation. You had to be very
close to someone to be able to do it, very familiar with
each other's thoughts.

‘
But she divorced him, in the end,' said Hitchens.
Mrs Weston nodded. 'Young women are less tolerant.
They have higher expectations of what marriage should
be like. They come to a point where they can't tolerate
it any more. You can't blame them, I suppose. But it
isn't something I could do. My generation was brought
up differently. We always believed that we had to grin
and bear it, to accept our lot in life. To accept life's burdens.
’

Mr Weston was looking more and more uncomfort
able in his seat. He rattled his teacup in its saucer and
cleared his throat.

‘
Can we take this postcard?' asked Fry.

‘
The writing doesn't look anything like the note,' said
Mrs Weston.

‘
No, it doesn't,' admitted Fry.

‘
Well, that's that, then.
’

*

Back in the car, Diane Fry called in for an update on
the other lines of enquiry. The teams canvassing neigh
bours in Totley had found someone who remembered
a man looking for Jenny two weeks' previously, asking
for her by name. The man was described as being of medium height and ordinary. He had been quite
respectably dressed, and had spoken in a local accent.
Very useful
.

A second neighbour, who lived nearly opposite
Jenny's house in The Quadrant, recalled a strange car
parked in the road one night. A man had been sitting
in it, but he had driven off at about the time that Jenny
had left her house
.

A third witness reported a light-coloured van, poss
ibly an old Ford Transit or something similar, which
had passed slowly along the road twice. At the time, the
neighbour had thought it might be gypsies — 'totters', he
called them — looking for scrap, or anything they could
steal
.

Several neighbours recalled female visitors to Jenny's
home, including a girl with dark dreadlocks who had
attracted particular attention in The Quadrant for a while. Dreadlocks were rare in Totley
.

All the fragments of information had been passed to
the officers interviewing Jenny's colleagues at Global
Assurance. But none of the colleagues could remember
Jenny ever complaining of being harassed by a dis
gruntled boyfriend. If it had been her ex-husband trying
to get back in touch, Jenny had not confided the fact to anyone. But the incident room staff would put the
information into the HOLMES system. Correlations might be thrown up. Just one detail could send the whole enquiry in a new direction
.

DI Hitchens had been on the mobile phone to the DCI back at Divisional Headquarters in West Street.
When he finished the call, Hitchens turned to Fry and
told her what they wanted her to do next.

‘
You've got to be joking,' she said. But he wasn't
.

*

Mark Roper rattled a fork against the plastic bowl. Three
cats appeared from the shrubbery at the end of the garden — a grey one and two tabbies. They ran with their tails in the air and brushed themselves against
Mark's legs until he put their bowls on the ground and
they began to gnaw at their chunks of meat
.

While they ate, Mark went to clean out the bedding
for the rabbits and freshen the water in their cages. The
rabbits stared at him through the mesh, twitching their
noses as they sniffed his familiar smell. For a while,
Mark sat on an upturned milk crate to watch the cats
feed
.

Normally, he would have been at work, but he had
been told to take a day off. He couldn't understand what they expected him to do at home, except to sit
and think, to relive the moment he had found the body
of the murdered woman, and to wonder about the events that had led up to her death among the Nine Virgins. Mark would have much preferred to be with
Owen, to be busy with jobs that would take his mind
off things. But he hadn't wanted to argue, in case they
thought his reaction was strange
.

He could think of nothing worse than sitting in the
house all day, as some people did. He soon became
claustrophobic and restless, and angry at the untidiness
— the dirty clothes draped over chairs, the empty beer
cans and overflowing ashtrays left on the floor
.

In any case, the house contained nothing of his father
any more. His clothes had gone, and so had his books,
his walking stick and his stuffed Tawny Owl. The man
who lived with Mark's mother now had removed every
remaining trace of her husband from the house. But
he had never thought to bother with the garden.
Here, Mark recognized every item that his father had
collected over the years — every lump of wood, and every stone. This milk crate was one that his father
had found by the roadside and had thought might be
useful one day. Mark had helped his father make these
rabbit cages; the frames still bore the marks made by
a saw and a plane held in his father's hands. Their
relationship still lived on in these little things. These,
and the nightmares that Mark suffered now and then,
when he would wake up in the night, calling for his dad like a child
.

Mark sat on the crate for a while and thought about the
woman on the moor; and then he thought about Owen
Fox. He had started to get used to relying on Owen for
an element of stability in his life. The fear that the stab
ility might be taken from him once again made Mark swear abruptly, so that the cats were startled and
scuttled away from their bowls. The rabbits lifted their
ears and gazed at him with their strange pink eyes. Like
Mark, they were suddenly terrified of the unknown
things that might lie beyond their cages in the outside
world
.