Dancing With the Virgins (55 page)

*

At present, there were no cattle in the fields at Ringham
Edge Farm. The implement sheds had been emptied,
the barns cleared, the milking parlour dismantled.
Three days ago, the last traces of the work of generations
had been laid out in the paddock behind the house and
sold off at knock-down prices to the highest bidder.
Farmers had come to pick over the pieces — not to buy
anything, necessarily, but to see what fragments of a
life were left when a man went the way that Warren
Leach had gone, and to wonder whose turn it might be next. The two boys, Will and Dougie, had gone back to
their mother, and Social Services had found them a new
home in the suburbs of Derby. They might never live
in the countryside again.

Ben Cooper sensed Fry's change of mood with some
apprehension. He crouched to examine the flowers, which were covered in cellophane and had been tied
to one of the stones with string. The writing on the card
was faint, but he could see it was from Jenny Weston's
parents. Fry stood outside the circle and watched him.

‘
So, Ben,' she said, 'if someone came along here after
Maggie Crew and before Simon Bevington, who was it?'

‘I don't know,' he said.

‘
We always thought it must have been someone Jenny
trusted, didn't we?'

‘
Another woman seemed a possibility.'

‘
Or a Ranger.'

‘Yes, Diane. But it wasn't a Ranger.'

‘
Are we quite sure? Jenny let somebody get too close
to her. She would recognize the Ranger's jacket and feel
secure. She would trust a Ranger.’

Cooper shook his head. 'No.’

Fry seemed to have something squeezed up inside her
that was causing her discomfort and had to be released.

‘
You know when I was here,' she said, 'that night in
the quarry with Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington?
We'll never be able to prove who all of those people were.'

‘Not a hope.'

‘
But one of them was familiar. The one who attacked
me. For a moment, I thought I knew who that was. But
unlike you, Ben, I don't believe in relying on feelings,
only on hard evidence. It makes life a lot simpler, sometimes.'

‘
I don't know what you're trying to say,' said Cooper.

Fry hesitated. Then, uncharacteristically, she seemed
to wander off at a tangent again 'The person who
approached Jenny Weston might have been a Ranger,
because she would trust him . .

‘
But it wasn't a Ranger,' repeated Cooper.

.. and she would trust a police officer too,' said Fry.
Cooper stared at her. 'If the police officer was in uni
form, of course,' he said. But as he said it, he knew it
sounded more like a question than a statement.

Fry met his eye for a moment, and he held his breath.
He had a sudden fear that he understood her. Was it
possible that he and Diane Fry might be close to the
same, inevitable conclusion? The thought made Cooper shiver at a premonition of disaster, at a vision of a dark,
grinning cloud hovering over his horizon. He could
hear the wind in the heather and the rumble of machin
ery in the limestone quarry outside Cargreave. The sound of the cows munching the grass in the fields below the Virgins seemed very loud.

Uneasily, he watched Fry square her shoulders and
push the collar of her jacket further up around her ears.
She was staring at the stone circle without seeing it at
all — neither the cold reality of its lumps of gritstone,
nor the martyred maidens of local folklore.

‘
The psychiatric reports said that Maggie Crew would
probably never regain her memory for several hours
either side of the assault, which is normal in trauma cases,' she said. 'Those files were readily available. If
you knew that little detail, you might not worry too
much about Maggie. Jenny Weston, on the other hand,
knew all about Ringham Edge Farm and what went on
there. It was Jenny who told the RSPCA what she had
seen. Jenny had the photographs, too. She could identify
people.'

‘Right.'

‘You'd think Jenny would have told the police, wouldn't you? Even if it was only to ask advice from an officer she was friendly with.'

‘Maybe,' said Cooper.

‘
And yet there she was that afternoon, back on the
moor, in the same vicinity. And she had those photo
graphs with her — the ones she said she was going to
hand over as evidence. Why did she have them with her, do you think?'

‘
For safety?'

‘Safety? Or was she expecting to meet someone?
Someone she could hand the photos to. And might that
same someone have decided they couldn't leave her alive any longer?'

‘But she was only ever a threat to the dog-fighting ring, no one else.'

‘
Right. And did you not wonder why they were never
raided, Ben?'

‘They stopped meeting at Ringham Edge,' said Cooper.

‘Yes. Because they knew they were under observa
tion. They knew exactly what was happening, all along.
’

‘
Did Teasdale say all this, Diane?'

‘Keith Teasdale is saying nothing more than necessary. The only person he's prepared to implicate is
Warren Leach. But we knew Leach was involved, any
way.' She paused. 'And, besides, Leach is already dead.'

‘
So Teasdale is loyal, then,' said Cooper.

‘Yes. But it's a misplaced loyalty.’

Cooper felt Fry's eyes on him, assessing him, seeing
right through him to his innermost thoughts. Suddenly,
there was contempt in her face, and her whole body seemed to draw away from him, as if she had seen something she could not bring herself to touch.

‘You've always been very big on loyalty yourself, haven't you, Ben?' she said.

The accusation made him think of the day of the
rugby match, when Todd Weenink had arrived for the
match at the last minute. What was it that had made
him late the day that Jenny Weston had died? Then Cooper's mind slipped back to his room at Bridge End. In a drawer in that room was a vending
machine questionnaire form, slipped under some large-
scale OS maps and a Peak District caving guide that no
one else would ever look at. Todd Weenink hadn't been
able to keep his mouth shut about condoms. And he
couldn't spell 'fruit-flavoured' either.

But Jenny Weston's killer was dead.

*

From South Quarry, the old VW Transporter had finally
been winched on to the back of the low loader and
delivered to a scrapyard in Edendale, where its radiator,
back doors and starter motor had already been removed
for spares.

Calvin Lawrence had taken a job as a forecourt
attendant at the Fina garage on the Buxton Road, taking people's money and handing out car-wash tokens.
Simon Bevington had discharged himself from hospital
and had not been heard of since. He had disappeared
into the hills, blown away like a scrap of autumn debris,
like another dead leaf hurled into the heather by the
gales.

Yet a single wind chime still hung from the branches
of the oak tree on the edge of the quarry. It had been
left where it was because it was too high for anyone to
reach. The chime was cracked and its edges were start
ing to fray. Its note was a strange, discordant clang. It
no longer created peace and harmony. Instead, it tolled
for the dead, the damaged, the destroyed and the defeated.

‘
Was any of it worth it?' said Cooper.

Fry laughed. 'You what?'

‘
Did we manage to protect anything that is important
to us? Did we achieve justice?’

Fry gave him a cool look. It was the look of a woman
who knew that she would forever have a weapon she
could use against him, the look of a woman who held
him in the palm of her hand.

‘Bear the answer to that in mind when you make your decision, Ben,' she said.

Then she turned away. Her knowledge gave her power over him now, and there was nothing else she needed to say.

Cooper stroked the top of the nearest stone, drawing
a peculiar comfort in the gritty texture, finding a sur
prising warmth beneath his hand, as if the stones might come back to life at any moment and resume their inter
rupted dance.

In the late afternoon light, the long shadows made the stones seem to tilt more than ever. They leaned inwards or outwards from the centre of the circle, dipping like a ring of dancers at the start of a barn dance or a Greek mazurka. They seemed to move
slowly, almost imperceptibly, in time to the faint stirring of the hair grass and the continuous settling of the dead
leaves.

Of course, it wasn't possible. The stones weren't
moving at all. But if it wasn't the stones, then it must be
the moor itself that was turning around him, wheeling
slowly against the sky.

If you wanted to know about justice, you might as
well ask the Virgins. The stones had seen it all. They
were the only witnesses to the murder of Jenny Weston.
So what would their view of justice have been after
three and a half thousand years? Would they see it
as an irrelevance, a minor casualty of that confusing, pain-filled thing called human life? Had they thought
about it deep and hard over the millennia, and had they
come to any conclusion?
Ben Cooper would have liked to ask the stones. He
wanted to be able to get down on his knees and per
suade them to whisper their secrets. He wanted to tell
them all about the doubts that lay in the bottom of his
heart like a pound of lead shot, like a pocketful of wet
rocks.

He would have liked to tell them everything, but
he knew they wouldn't answer. Because the Virgins
had made their own mistake once. And now they were
punished for ever.