DANCING WITH THE VIRGINS
STEPHEN BOOTH

Contents

Cover

Title Page

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Acknowledgements

About the Author

Author’s Note

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Ancient sites in Derbyshire like the Nine Virgins stone circle are constantly under threat from vandalism, quarrying, erosion and abuse. They are also sacred sites, and are still actively used as places of worship. Please treat them with respect.

1

On the day the first woman died, Mark Roper had radio trouble. At the start of his shift, he had been patrolling in the valley, in the deep dead spot where the gritstone plateau blocked out the signal from the telephone interface point at Bradwell. The silence had been unnerving, even then. It had made him conscious of his isolation in the slowly dying landscape, and it had begun to undermine his confidence and stir up the old uncertainties. But Mark wasn’t frightened then. It was only later he had been frightened.

Normally, this was his favourite time of year – these few weeks of hesitation before the start of winter. He liked to watch the hills changing colour day by day, and the Peak District villages emptying of visitors. But he could tell that today wasn’t quite normal. There was a feeling about this particular Sunday that made him uncomfortable to be alone on Ringham Moor. There was something strained and uneasy in the way the trees stirred in the wind, in the way the dry bracken snapped underfoot and the birds fell silent in the middle of the afternoon.

As Mark climbed out of the dead spot, his horizon widened until he could see across to Hartington and the Staffordshire border. But even on his way back across the moor towards Partridge Cross, he could not raise his Area Ranger. Maybe the radio handset he had picked up from the briefing centre that morning was the one with the faulty battery connection. Little things like that could change your life forever.

‘Peakland Partridge Three to Peakland Zulu. Owen?’

No matter how many times he tried, his call sign went unanswered.

Earlier in the year, they had been burning the heather on this part of Ringham Moor. An acrid charcoal smell still clung to the vegetation, and it mingled with the sweet, fruity scent of the living flowers as it rose from the ground under Mark’s boots. In places, the stems had been left bare and white where the bark had been burned off completely. They showed up in the blackened carpet like tiny bones, like a thousand skeletal fingers poking from the earth.

Mark’s father had helped the gamekeepers many times with the swaling, the annual burning of the heather to encourage the growth of fresh shoots for red grouse to feed on. Conditions for burning had to be just right – the heather dry, but the ground wet enough to prevent the fire spreading down into the peat. You could get so hot controlling the flames that you thought your skin would be burned to a cinder, and if you were standing in the wrong place when the wind blew, you could end up black from head to toe. Sometimes, Mark recalled, his father had smelled like Bonfire Night for days.

The scent of the burned heather brought the presence of his father back to him now. It was a sensation so powerful that the tall figure might have been striding alongside him, swinging his huge, reddened hands, talking of working dogs and trout flies, and promising that he would take Mark and his brother on a shoot one day. But he had never carried out his promise. And he hadn’t walked with Mark again, not for a long time now.

The impression left as quickly as it had come, leaving Mark clutching desperately at a memory, reaching for an image that dissipated like a wisp of smoke in the wind.

Fumbling at the radio, he tried again. ‘Peakland Zulu. Can you hear me, Owen? Owen?’ But still there was nothing.

As he climbed to the plateau, the weight of Mark’s rucksack gradually increased, chafing his skin through the fabric of his red fleece, pulling down his shoulders and pressing on the muscles in his back. Despite the chill, his neck was wet with sweat, and he shivered as he came over a rise and the wind grabbed at him. The shadows of clouds were moving across the landscape below him. Brief patches of sunlight revealed a field dotted with sheep, a narrow stretch of tarmac road, an oak spinney, or the roof of a distant farmhouse. Yet the sight of human habitation only heightened his sense of being alone.

It was the environment, not the welfare of people and property, that had led Mark to volunteer as a Peak Park Ranger in the first place. Once, he had wanted to save the entire world, but in the end he had settled for helping to protect one little bit of it. He had not imagined that he would be called on to tolerate the actions of people who destroyed and defiled the environment, people who had no respect for nature and the lives of animals. It was the most difficult thing he had to learn. Maybe even Owen Fox would never be able to teach him that.

One thing Owen had taught Mark was the importance of good communication; he had told him to stay in touch, always. But this early November day had been the wrong time for Mark to choose for his first solo patrol. Entirely the wrong day to be on his own.

‘This is Peakland Partridge Three. Owen? Owen? Where are you?’

And, of course, it had been the wrong day for Jenny Weston, too.

Jenny had been riding a yellow six-gear Dawes Kokomo. It had one-inch tyres, and a wire basket bolted over the rear wheel. It was hired from the Peak Cycle centre at Partridge Cross on a three-hour ticket, and Jenny had already ridden nearly five miles to reach the plateau of Ringham Moor.

The moor was littered with prehistoric burial mounds, cairns and stone circles, some so small or so ruined and overgrown that they were barely visible in the heather and bracken. It was not as well used as the moors to the south and west, Stanton and Harthill, but its tracks were more accessible to a mountain bike, its open spaces more solitary, its face that bit closer to the sky.

Ringham had become one of Jenny’s favourite places. There were many reasons that brought her back, needs and compulsions that had worn a track for her bike tyres right to the base of the Hammond Tower on Ringham Edge. She carried an impression in her mind of the view down into the valley from the tower – that steep plummet through the trees on to a litter of rocks at the bottom.

It had been a blustery day, with showers that blew across the hills in squalls, bludgeoning the birches and scattering dead leaves into the heather. There seemed to be little life on the moor. But at the bottom of the track, Jenny had passed a youth wearing a red woollen cap pulled low on his forehead, with large ears that stuck out like table-tennis bats. He had been walking very quickly towards the road, and had refused to raise his head to meet her eye as she passed. Jenny had pressed down harder on the pedals, seeking to gain distance from the youth, so that she over-exerted herself on the slope and had to stop further on, gasping from painful lungs as she looked back. The youth had gone, and there was no one else to be seen – only a fistful of jackdaws drifting against the face of one of the abandoned quarries, and a herd of cattle lying restlessly in a field on the slope below the Virgins.

Jenny had always believed she was safer on a bike. Two wheels and the extra speed gave her the confidence that she could get out of trouble, if she needed to. A woman on her own, in a place like Ringham Moor, ought to think about being careful.

To get to the top of the moor, Jenny had to dismount and wheel the Kokomo up the steepest part of the path. She knew she was almost there when she reached the twisted Heart Stone, twelve feet high, with iron hand and foot holds driven into its sides.

At the top, the sandy track was cycleable, as long as you avoided the exposed rocks in the middle. It crossed a plateau of dark heather and whinberry, with patches of rhododendron on the southern slopes. There were old quarries on two sides, and sharp crags and edges on the east and south, where the plateau fell away into the valleys.

The crossing of the main paths was marked by a wooden sign scrawled with the name of the Nine Virgins and a yellow arrow. Around the sign was an area worn by many feet. Someone living in the valley had a peacock; its long drawn-out shriek drifted across the moor before dying away in the wind.

By the time she reached the Virgins, Jenny could feel the perspiration standing out on her forehead. Her Lycra cycling shorts were tighter on her hips and buttocks than they should have been, and the skin of her legs was pink and blotched from the exertion and the chafing of the wind.

She didn’t mind the wind, or the cold, or even the exertion. Up here on the moor they helped to blow away the thoughts that would sit in the corners of her mind all the rest of the week, dark and evil-eyed. Nowhere else could she do that; certainly nowhere in Sheffield, where the crowded streets and the traffic only fed her anxieties.

In early November, the weather kept most people off the moor. But she could see that someone was sitting against the trunk of a tree near the stone circle, playing a few notes on a flute, toying with a tune that was vaguely familiar. She couldn’t see the musician clearly, but she had an impression of long, fair hair and a multi-coloured sweater.

Jenny turned the handlebars of the bike away from the Nine Virgins and headed towards a path that ran down through deep bracken. The path turned into a stream bed later in the winter, and the ground was scoured to its sandy bottom. Tree roots ran close to the surface, bursting through to form ragged steps in the steepest parts. Beechnuts crunched underfoot and the bracken was head high. It pressed close around her, its brown, dead hands brushing against her legs and rattling on the spokes of her wheels.

Beyond the dip, the Hammond Tower stood at the top of the slope. It was prominent on the horizon, tall and built of grey stone, but serving no apparent purpose. A walled-up doorway faced a flight of roughly cut steps and a steep drop off Ringham Edge. Fallen leaves filled a wide hollow between the tower and the rock outcrops they called the Cat Stones.

Jenny sat for a while on a broken ledge at the base of the tower, staring at the view across the dale, waiting for her breathing to slow down, but feeling the chill begin to creep over her skin. She shouldn’t stay long, or her muscles would stiffen.

Down in the valley, she could see the farm, with a field full of cows, a cluster of gritstone buildings and a bigger, newer shed with a dark green steel roof. A track ran past the farm, and she studied it carefully for figures walking by the gate and heading up towards the tower. But there was no one today.

As she stood up to retrieve her bike, she noticed a crevice in the stones of the tower which had been crammed with crumpled drinks cans and cigarette packets. Jenny shook her head in irritation, but did nothing about the litter. It was a job for the Rangers who patrolled the moor.

A few minutes later, she had reached the stone circle again. The Nine Virgins were only about four feet high, and they stood in a clearing of flattened and eroded grass between clumps of birch and oaks. Fifteen yards from the circle was a single stone on its own, an outlier – the stone that they called the Fiddler. According to the legend, nine village maidens had been caught dancing on the Sabbath and had been turned to stone for their sin. The fiddler who played for them had suffered the same fate. Now the single stone looked lonely and isolated, condemned for ever to stand outside the circle.

Jenny stopped the bike and wiped her palms on a tissue. The hills were already misting into grey over the banks of bracken, but the clouds broke and allowed a trickle of sun on to the moor. There was no sound but for the wind whispering across the heather. There was no one to be seen now; she was alone. And it was perfectly safe on a bike – as long as you didn’t get a puncture.

‘Oh, damn!’

She dismounted and struggled to turn her bike upside down to inspect the back tyre. Immediately she saw the glitter of a sliver of glass. It had slit a gaping wound in the rubber tread and gone straight through to puncture the inner tube. She pulled the glass free, flinching at the sharp edges, and listened to the last gasp of escaping air. The tyre looked peculiarly lifeless as it hung from the wheel, the soft grey skin of its collapsed tube protruding under the rim.

Jenny knew what a hassle it was to get the tyre off the back wheel, repair and replace it, and she was already reaching that state of tiredness where everything felt like a major task. But there was nothing else for it. Sighing, she flipped the quick-release lever and dropped the wheel on the ground. The forks of the bike pointed into the air in an undignified posture, like a dead animal on its back.

She was reminded of a photograph that had been taken at the height of the panic over mad cow disease. It had shown a slaughtered British Holstein cow, a huge animal with its stomach bloated, its vast udder shiny and leaking a dribble of milk, and its four stiff legs pointing ludicrously to the sky. The cow had been waiting its turn to be rolled into an incinerator. Its photograph had been on the front of leaflets that Jenny had helped to distribute, and she had seen it so many times that the details had stayed with her ever since, along with other images of things that had been done to animals.

Automatically, she patted the pouch she wore round her waist, to make sure it was still there. Soon, she would have to decide what to do with what it contained.

Jenny shivered. The weather had changed, and the evening would be cold. The feathery stems of cotton grass created patches of golden mist close to the ground. They hovered just above the heather, moving in the wind like live creatures stirring in their nests.

It was the noise of the wind in Jenny’s ears that covered the soft sound of footsteps until the walker was only a few feet behind her.

In half an hour, Mark was due to go off duty. Owen had given him exact instructions for his first solo patrol – a pass across the face of Ringham and a descent into the valley on the far side, where the moor turned into farmland. There he was to take a look at the walls and stiles and signposts for recent damage, and have a scout around for the worst of the litter left by hikers.

On the way back, he should have a glance at the Nine Virgins to see that the ancient monument was no more scarred than usual; have a word, perhaps, with any campers foolhardy enough to have pitched their tents in the woods. Mark couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to camp on the moor at any time of the year, let alone in November. But still they did it. And they were breaking the law when they did.

Near the top of the track he noticed a crumpled Coke can, dropped by some careless visitor. Muttering angrily, he picked it up and slipped it under the flap of his rucksack, where it joined a small pile of chocolate bar wrappers, aluminium ring-pulls and an empty Marlboro packet and some cigarette ends he had found near the Hammond Tower, to be disposed of later. Mark couldn’t tolerate the attitude that made people think it was OK to scatter the environment with litter. They thought their own convenience was more important.

If he had his way, Mark would ban these people completely from the national park. He would put tollgates on all the entrance roads and issue passes for admission. It might come to it one day, too. The park couldn’t cope with the constantly rising numbers.

There were tyre tracks in the sandy soil here. That meant there had been a mountain biker this way recently. Mark knew his by-laws; he had read the regulations carefully, and he knew what was allowed and what wasn’t. The Peak District National Park Authority had prosecuted mountain bikers before.

He smiled in satisfaction, then immediately felt guilty. Owen said the main skills you needed as a Ranger were tact and diplomacy. Why get into an argument when you could achieve more with a friendly word of advice? Mark knew he had a lot to learn. Sometimes he couldn’t find the right things to say to people who appalled him with their stupidity and their disregard for their own safety, the property of others – and, above all, for the environment and its wildlife. That was their greatest crime, these people who desecrated the moors. The last thing they deserved was diplomacy.

Though it was only two o’clock, it would be starting to go dark in a couple of hours’ time. For a few days now, Mark had noticed that peculiar half-light, like full moonlight, that came at five o’clock in the afternoon, when all the colours seemed to change and glow for a few minutes before fading into the darkness. The turning back of the clocks at the end of British Summer Time always worried the Peak Park Rangers. Walkers were liable to miscalculate and still be on the hills when it went dark.

The afternoon was turning cold, but Mark didn’t feel the chill. The red fleece jacket he wore proudly, with its silver Peak Park insignia, kept him warm. It was also a reassuring sight for the visitors a Ranger came across – those who were lost and bewildered, exhausted or injured, or simply inadequately dressed and too poorly equipped for walking the moors. The sight of the red jacket was like a friendly beacon. It meant a Ranger approaching.

Jenny Weston had been in the act of smiling when she died. Her smile had stiffened and shattered, twisting into a grin of fear as the knife slipped under her ribs.

The blade was sharp, tungsten coated, and with a lethal tip. It slit the cotton of her T-shirt and sliced easily through her skin and a layer of subcutaneous fat as it thrust towards her heart. A small patch on the front of her T-shirt turned red and a single spurt of blood splashed on to the handlebars of the Kokomo.

As soon as the knife was withdrawn, the wound closed and ceased to bleed on the outside. Jenny looked down, astonished, and pressed her hand to the red patch. Inside her ribcage, her heart sac was already filling with leaking blood; the pressure of it squeezed her heart and constricted its movement. Then her left lung deflated and a gush of fluids filled the cavity. She began to feel light-headed; her hands and feet turned numb, and her legs lost the strength to hold her body upright.

She made no resistance as she was grasped under the armpits and dragged across the clearing, with her heels leaving trails in the sandy soil. As fresh blood failed to reach her brain and extremities, her skin turned a dirty white; her legs and belly looked like lumps of boiled fish as they were deliberately exposed to the light.

The blade of the knife left a red smear where it was wiped on the grass. From the handlebars of the bike, a small trickle of blood had run down on to the front wheel. It dripped slowly from spoke to spoke, already darkening and thickening in the air, until it was absorbed into the ground.

By the time her attacker had finished, or not long after, Jenny Weston was dead.

Mark knew it happened sometimes, but it was such a pointless thing to do. Mindless and irresponsible. Now and then the Ranger briefings mentioned a bike that had not been returned to the hire centre. Hirers had to give proof of their identity and leave a name and address, as well as a £20 deposit, so it was hardly worth trying to get away with a mountain bike, considering how easily you would get caught. But sometimes there was one who took the bike away with them. Occasionally, they simply abandoned it on one of the tracks, in a car park, or up here on the moor, like this one. None of it ever made sense to Mark.

The sight of the Kokomo under the gorse bush angered him unreasonably. Its presence was like a violation – the evidence of selfish humanity intruding into his world, like children pawing his most precious possessions with grubby fingers. The bike had been treated as just so much rubbish.

Then Mark looked more closely. A streak of red had stained the canary yellow paintwork of the front stem and left rust-like spots on the spokes. He shivered with misgiving and fingered the radio in his pocket. Suddenly he wished he hadn’t come out alone, after all. There was no reassuring presence alongside him, no Owen there to know exactly what to do.

With a shaking hand, Mark made a note of the colour, model and number of the bike, crumpling the pages of his notebook in his haste to get it out of his pocket. The act of writing made him feel better, more in control, as if the ink marks on the page had magically brought a familiar voice from the air: ‘Observe, keep a note, report back.’

‘Yes, Owen,’ whispered Mark.

Feeling the sweat drying on his forehead and the back of his neck, he forced himself to walk past the bike to where the stones were clustered among the spindly birches. Somebody had lit a fire here recently, leaving scorched earth and a pile of white ash. People were always lighting fires near the Virgins, as if they thought the flames might melt their stony hearts. At the midsummer solstice, there were hundreds of folk up here at night, and they did a lot more than light fires.

Mark stopped abruptly as he looked into the circle. The sensations that came reminded him of the terrors of his puberty, the physical sickness and the guilt. He tried to concentrate on studying the ground, to look for evidence of bike tracks or footprints. He tried to think about casting around for telltale objects that might have been dropped by someone who had been in the area. I’m observing, he told himself. I must observe. Be professional and calm, and don’t rush into anything.

But he couldn’t keep up the pretence for long. His eyes just wouldn’t focus on anything else. With shameful fascination, Mark found his attention drawn to the centre of the stone circle, where the white shape lay in such startling, rousing incongruity.

‘Oh, Jesus.’

The body of the woman sprawled obscenely among the stones. Her half-naked torso had been flung on the rough grass, her arms and legs twisted in provocative gestures. Her right knee was lifted high, to the level of her waist, and her left leg was stretched taut, as if she might be about to spring into the air.

Mark could see every detail of the muscles in her legs, the tendons rigid under the skin at the top of her thigh, the faint crinkling of cellulite on her hips. Her pose was a caricature of life, a cruel parody of flamboyance and movement. Her hands were tilted at the wrist, her toes pointed downwards, and her head nodded to silent music. She was spread against the ground in a final arabesque, in a fatal pirouette, or the last fling of an abandoned tango.

Mark wondered whether to write it down. But it sounded too strange, and his hand wouldn’t write any more, anyway. Instead, he repeated it to himself, over and over, in his head. A dead woman dancing. She looked like a dead woman, dancing.

2

Fifteen miles to the north, in the town of Edendale, the battle had been going on for an hour and a quarter already. The police officers in the front line were battered and breathing hard, their faces swollen with exertion, and their hair stuck to their foreheads with sweat. One or two had their shirts ripped. Another had blood trickling from a cut on his eye.

Detective Constable Ben Cooper could see his colleague, Todd Weenink, deep in the thick of it. Weenink had two PCs from the Tactical Support Unit close on either side of him, and there were more men coming in from behind to assist them. They looked exhausted, their expressions grim, but determined. They were struggling against the odds, fighting a battle of containment that they were constantly in danger of losing.

The students were charging forward in a solid mass, forcing the police to give ground under the onslaught. In the melee, close up, anything could be happening – a poke in the eye, a boot in the crutch, teeth sinking into an ear. The police had not been issued with riot shields or helmets today; there was no body armour, no snarling Alsatians or horses to keep the students at bay. There had been no authority given for the use of special weapons, no tear gas canisters held nervously in reserve.

In addition, the police had to face a ceaseless barrage of noise – chanted slogans, shouts of abuse and a constant stream of profanities from a hostile crowd.

Cooper pulled his hands out of his jeans pockets and turned his coat collar up to try to shut out the cacophony. If he could, he would have closed his eyes, too, to avoid seeing the slaughter, to stop himself from imagining the consequences if the police line collapsed. In another moment, the day could end in total humiliation for Derbyshire Constabulary E Division. And not a single arrest made so far.

‘What are we going to do, Sarge?’ he said.

Detective Sergeant Rennie was an old hand. He had seen it all before. He rubbed his jowls, pulled his anorak closer around his shoulders, and winced as a PC went down and was trampled underfoot.

‘Conduct a survey,’ he said. ‘We’ll send out a questionnaire.’

Cooper nodded. ‘I suppose so. But it’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it?’

‘We’ll make sure there are lots of tick boxes to fill in.’

‘Even so …’

Rennie shrugged and sighed. ‘It’s all we can do, Ben. Otherwise, we just have to sit back and let it happen.’

The police formed a wall and turned to face their attackers again. Beyond the opposing lines, Cooper could see the main buildings of the High Peak College campus, set on the lower slopes of the hill. They looked down on Edendale like benign giants, the educational heights of the Eden Valley.

He began to search his pockets for a packet of mints to take the taste of nausea from his mouth. He had a lot of pockets – in his jeans, in his checked shirt, on the inside and the outside of his waxed jacket. But all he found was a scatter of cashpoint receipts, two empty shotgun cartridge cases and half a packet of dog biscuits.

Cooper knew there was more than just education that went on in those college buildings on the hill. He had been there himself, for long enough to collect the A-levels he needed to get into the police service. His fellow students had accused him of being single-minded, as if his determination made them guilty about their own pursuit of parties and casual sex. But there had been a demon driving Ben Cooper that his contemporaries would never have understood – a jealous God who would not have tolerated parties.

Dave Rennie sat back comfortably in his seat and unscrewed the top of a vacuum flask. He offered Cooper a plastic cup, which he refused as soon as he got a whiff of the metallic tang of the coffee. The sergeant’s expression was serious, his forehead creased with anxiety, like a man with a great responsibility on his mind.

‘You see, if they get rid of the kitchen and sack the canteen staff, that means they’ll put vending machines in instead,’ he said. ‘And then what would happen? I mean, would anybody use them? There’s no point in spending money on vending machines if they don’t get used. It would look bad in the budgets, wasting money at a time like this.’

Cooper watched Todd Weenink duck his head and drive his shoulders forward to meet a wiry-haired youth who’d been tormenting him all afternoon. There was a thud as their skulls connected and a scuffing as their feet lashed out.

The crowd behind Cooper began yelling. Then the police back-pedalled. Officers fell and were trampled as they lay on the ground. But Weenink broke away and looked around, bemused. His eyes were dazed, as if he might have taken a knock on the head. Then he looked up and caught sight of a student running past him, and made an instinctive grab. The student’s legs folded beneath him under the impact of Weenink’s sixteen stone, and they both sprawled in the mud, exhausted and gasping.

Cooper smiled. Quite by chance, it had been the right student Weenink had flattened. The High Peak College wing-threequarter happened to be in possession of the ball, and had been racing for the touchline, within seconds of scoring the winning try of the match. Even while the two opposing players were struggling to get up again from the tackle, the referee blew the final whistle. The match had been saved: 12–10 to Edendale Police.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Cooper.

‘Honour preserved, I suppose,’ said Rennie, putting away his flask.

‘I don’t know about that, Sarge. But our lot always trash the bar if they lose.’

Cooper left the touchline and headed for the clubhouse. In his early days in E Division, they had tried to recruit him to the rugby team. They had thought he looked tall and fit enough to be an asset, but had accused him of lacking ruthlessness in the ruck. Now his job was to order the jugs of beer for the changing-room celebrations. Loyalty to your colleagues meant doing such things on a Sunday afternoon, even when you would rather be at home watching videos with your nieces.

After ten years, Cooper was able to look back on his days at High Peak College with some nostalgia. His life had possessed a definite purpose then. Succeeding in his exams had been his role in life, and joining the police his destiny. The feeling had stayed with him through his time as a uniformed constable on the beat; it had followed him as he moved into CID and began to learn a different way of policing. His progress had been watched every inch of the way, and mostly approved of. Mostly. The times when he had made mistakes or expressed doubts were still imprinted in his memory.

Then, two years ago, everything had changed. With the violent death of his father, Police Sergeant Joe Cooper, a prop had been knocked from under him, and a great weight had been lifted from his back. His guiding hand had been taken away, and his life had been given back to him. But it had already been too late for Ben Cooper. He had become what his father made him.

‘So that’s why we have to do this Vending Machine Usage Survey,’ said Rennie, pronouncing the capital letters carefully as he walked at Cooper’s shoulder. ‘To get an idea of the possible take-up on the proposed new refreshment facilities. It’s so that somebody in Admin at HQ can make an informed decision. A decision supported by constructive feedback from the customer base.’

Cooper could practically see the internal memo that Rennie was quoting from. The sergeant had coffee soaking into his moustache. He was wearing knitted woollen gloves, for Heaven’s sake. He looked like somebody’s granddad on an off-season outing to Blackpool.

Cooper was conscious that his own thirtieth birthday was approaching next year. It loomed in the distance like a summer storm cloud, making him feel his youth was nearly over before he had got used to being in his twenties. One day, he could be another Dave Rennie.

‘I think Todd might have got a bit of concussion, Sarge.’

‘He always looks like that,’ said Rennie.

‘He got a knock on the head.’

‘Don’t worry – Weenink doesn’t let anybody mess with him. He always gets his revenge.’

Todd Weenink was different, of course. During the last couple of months Cooper had found himself thrown together with Weenink in the latest round of restructuring in the division. In these circumstances, the relationship became almost like a marriage. The issue of ‘them and us’ became focused on a single individual. But there were times when you needed another officer at your side.

Without the man or woman at your side, you could find yourself looking the wrong way at the wrong time. You had to have a person you could put your trust in. They supported you; and you supported them. Cooper knew it was a law written in invisible ink on the back of the warrant card they gave you when you were sworn in as a constable. It was sewn into your first uniform like an extra seam; it was the page that they always forgot to print in the Police Training Manual.

Only a couple of weeks earlier, Weenink had been the man at his side when they had raided a small-scale drugs factory in a converted warehouse on the outskirts of Edendale. One of the occupants had produced a pickaxe, but he had been too slow, and they had executed a takedown between them, with no one injured.

Cooper reassured himself by thinking of his date with Helen Milner later on. Within an hour, he would be out of the rugby club and away. He and Helen hadn’t decided where they would go yet. Probably it would be a walk to get the noise out of his head, then a drink or two at the Light House before a meal somewhere. The Light House was where they had gone the very first time they had gone out together. It was hardly more than two months ago that they had met again at Helen’s grandparents’ house in the village of Moorhay and resumed a relationship that had started when they were schoolfriends. But their new beginning had not been without difficulties. Nothing ever was.

The clubhouse corridor smelled of sweat and mud and disinfectant, with a permanent underlying essence of embrocation. Dave Rennie helped Cooper carry the jugs of beer to the players in the visitors’ changing room. Then the sergeant’s pager began to bleep.

‘Oh, God damn it. What now?’

Cooper watched Rennie go to the phone in the corridor. He looked back over his shoulder at the changing-room door, which swung open with the constant passing to and fro of players and supporters. Todd Weenink was out of the shower, towelling himself in the middle of a raucous mob, his naked bulk perfectly at home in a melee of pink male flesh and echoing laughter.

Weenink already had a beer in front of him. It was amazing that he could keep up the pace. He had arrived for the match only at the very last minute, when everyone else was changed and ready to go out on the pitch, thinking they were going to have to play a man short, and cursing him for letting them down. No doubt Weenink had been out on the booze the night before and had woken up in someone else’s bed many miles away, with rugby the last thing on his mind.

Cooper shook his head at the intrusive thoughts that came to him – the contrast between Weenink’s muscular, hairy nakedness and the picture he carried in his mind of the last colleague he had worked so closely with. Todd’s open, up-front, relaxed maleness was a world away from Detective Constable Diane Fry. Former Detective Constable, he should say. Now Acting Detective Sergeant.

It was a subject Cooper didn’t really want to think about. It brought with it painful memories, some of which he still didn’t understand but suspected might be his own fault.

After a few minutes, he realized Dave Rennie hadn’t come back into the bar. In the steamy atmosphere of the changing room, he couldn’t see Todd either. He had to shout to make himself heard, even when close enough to tap one of the players on the shoulder.

‘Have you seen Todd Weenink?’

‘He’s gone,’ said the player. ‘Control bleeped Dave Rennie, and Todd went off with him. They went off in a hurry, too. Todd hadn’t even managed to put his trousers on.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No, mate. I saw him myself, with his arse hanging out. Should you be with them?’

Cooper stared bleakly at the player. ‘I’m not on call. Control wouldn’t have asked for me.’

‘Right. You’re the lucky one, then. You can have a few beers.’

‘A few beers, yeah. What more could I ask for?’

Suddenly, Cooper’s mood plummeted. He felt as if he had just been jilted by a lover. If there was a job on, he wanted to be there. He wanted to be part of the team. He wondered why loyalty had to be so painful. And when would he learn to give his loyalty in the right direction? He ought to have learned that lesson from Diane Fry – their brief relationship had certainly been difficult enough to drive it home. Cooper shuddered at a premonition. He thought it likely that she could inflict more pain on him yet, given the chance.

The police vehicles cluttering up the roadsides at the bottom of the main track on to Ringham Moor made Diane Fry frown in exasperation. The scene looked chaotic, as cars with beacons flashing arrived one after another in the gathering dusk and slewed across the narrow verge. A minibus carrying the Tactical Support Unit was unable to squeeze through the gap left by the parked cars until a uniformed sergeant yelled at someone to move. Figures in reflective yellow jackets were caught briefly in the headlights as they passed aimlessly backwards and forwards.

Fry itched to take control of the situation, to bring order and a bit of sense to officers so charged with excitement and adrenalin that they were causing more trouble than they were worth. But, in fact, she shouldn’t even be here at all. She had thought she had got away from E Division, that her few weeks in Edendale had been a bad dream she could soon put behind her. But here she still was, answering the call. And before she knew what was happening, she had found herself out in the Peak District countryside again, where civilization seemed like a dim memory and the twenty-first century was reduced to the fantasy of a Victorian novelist.

She stood with Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens on the rocks overlooking the road. A fine drizzle was settling on their clothes and in their hair, and turning the gritstone slab under their feet a shade darker. With Hitchens at her side, Fry felt as though she had taken another step closer in her ambitions. She was already ‘acting up’ as a detective sergeant, with a transfer to a permanent DS’s job in the offing when the imminent re-shuffle took place.

A move couldn’t come too soon for Fry. At all costs, she must avoid the crazy distractions and misjudgements that had plagued her in a spell shortly after her arrival in E Division from West Midlands. The name of her biggest misjudgement was Ben Cooper.

The thought of him immediately sparked the surge of anger that always bubbled somewhere deep in her stomach, churning thick and corrosive like an acid that flowed in her small intestines. It happened every time; it only took the mention of Cooper’s name, or even a burst of the wrong music. There were cassettes that she used to play often in her car which she had been forced to throw away – not just casually chucked on the back seat, but hurled into the nearest wheelie bin, with their spools of magnetic tape ripped out and shredded like the innards of a rat she had once seen killed and torn apart by a police Alsatian in a derelict warehouse back in Birmingham. If there had been an open fire in her flat, she would have burned the tapes; she would have happily watched their plastic cases crack and twist and bubble, as they melted into a greasy smear.

Fry wiped a sheen of drizzle from her face, where it was starting to make her cheeks feel damp and uncomfortable. No, she hadn’t quite managed to erase Ben Cooper from her memory yet. But she was working on it.

‘We’ve arranged for you to see Maggie Crew at six o’clock,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘You’d better get going, as soon as this lot are out of our way.’

‘Was she willing to see me?’

‘Willing isn’t a word I’d use. She’s bloody hard work.’

‘She’s uncooperative? But why?’

‘You’ll see. Form your own impressions of her, Diane, that’s the best way. We want you to get to know her. Get under her skin. Be an irritant, if you like.’

Fry knew she was being presented with a chance to do something different, to escape the routine chores that the Ben Coopers of the world would be allocated during this enquiry.

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said.

Hitchens nodded in approval. ‘When are they going to stop messing about down there?’ he said.

DI Hitchens was dressed casually, in denims and trainers, and he looked like a man who should have been doing something else. His cheeks were dark and unshaven, and there were specks of white paint in his hair.

‘We’ve got to keep the road open,’ said the sergeant importantly as he passed below them.

‘Yeah. You’re doing a great job. We can see that.’

‘Control reckons the cavalry’s on the way, Inspector. They tracked down a couple of your lot at the rugby match.’

Fry knew exactly what that meant. The rugby match was where Ben Cooper would have been with his friend, Todd Weenink, and no doubt DS Dave Rennie, too. Cooper wasn’t a rugby-playing man himself. From her own experience, Fry reckoned he was more likely to be taking out the half-time oranges and cleaning the players’ boots, generally getting in the way and making helpful suggestions. But he would have been at the match to support his colleagues. Oh yes, Ben Cooper was a great one for supporting his friends.

‘Oh, and you’ll be pleased to know our lads won too!’ called the sergeant.

Fry blew through her teeth and jammed her hands into the pockets of her coat, squaring her shoulders like someone bracing herself for a fight. Rennie, Cooper, and Weenink. The dream team. Just what E Division needed to stamp on a spate of attacks on women.

At last it looked as though someone had located another place to park. Radios crackled, the sergeant shouted, and cars began to move off, flashing their headlights and spinning their wheels dramatically on the grass as they went. But as the patrols and vans made space, another car arrived. It was an unmarked Mondeo – a private car, not a police vehicle. The doors popped open and a warm fug seemed to ooze out into the evening chill. A voice was raised in complaint from the back seat.

‘I can’t believe we left those uniformed bastards with all the beer,’ it said.

Fry recognized DC Weenink immediately. He was damp-haired and pink-faced, and his voice sounded petulant, like an overgrown child. She watched in disgust as he poked bare, muscular legs out of the car door and struggled to pull his trousers on over his jockey shorts. Parts of his anatomy bulged dangerously from his underclothes, and the buttons of his shirt were unfastened over his hairy chest. Even from several yards away, Fry knew that his breath smelled of alcohol.

She watched DS Rennie get out of the driver’s seat. But no Ben Cooper. Suddenly, Fry felt more cheerful. Her shoulders relaxed, her lips formed a contemptuous smile.

‘Well, if that’s the cavalry,’ she said, ‘my money’s on the Indians.’

DI Hitchens laughed. Weenink heard the laugh, and he looked around for its source. He grinned up at Fry, with his zip still open, his hands pressed round his crotch, the position of them emphasizing rather than concealing the bulge in his shorts.

‘Excuse me, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Can you use me at all?’

Fry stared at him, but Weenink’s grin only grew broader, until it became a smirk. She turned to stride away from the road. She had no time to waste on petty irritations – not when a woman’s entire life had already been wasted up there on the moor. She had seen enough wasted lives, and her own had almost been one of them. But not any more.

Ben Cooper took a swig from his bottle, conserving the beer carefully, anxious about drinking too much. He didn’t want to become a solitary drinker, though the temptation was strong.

A few minutes ago, he had rung Control to find out what was happening. They said the body of a woman had been found on Ringham Moor, fifteen miles south of Edendale. A suspected murder. The control room operator didn’t need to mention the other attack that had taken place not a mile away from the same spot six weeks before. In that case, the victim had survived – just about.

Now Cooper’s mind was no longer with him as he sat in the sweaty rugby club bar. It was elsewhere, drifting across the moors towards a flutter of tape and the flashing lights, the sound of urgent voices, and the scents and the electric crackle in the air that never failed to give him a buzz of excitement. That sense of satisfaction from taking his place in the team was a thing that couldn’t be explained to someone who had never experienced it.

Yet tomorrow morning, he knew he would be sitting in the monthly Crime Strategy Meeting for Edendale Section. He would be discussing the section’s annual local objectives, the implementation of liaison policies and the measurement of performance. Occasionally, in these meetings, they talked about crime. But they hardly ever talked about the victims.

Cooper watched the rugby players reach the traditional highlight of the evening, when they began to pour pints of beer over each other’s heads. The bare wooden floor of the bar was already awash and turning sticky underfoot. Some of the students looked irritated at the way their clubhouse was being taken over by the more boisterous and more aggressive celebratory style of the police. Soon it would reach the point when it might be better not to have to witness a colleague committing a breach of the peace.

It was time for Ben Cooper to leave. He needed to be awake and alert for the meeting in the morning, and he had a stack of burglaries to work on, as well as a serious assault on a bouncer at one of Edendale’s night clubs. With officers seconded to the murder enquiry, no doubt there would be someone else’s workload to take over as well. Besides, if he stayed any longer, he would drink too much. It was definitely time to go home.

But home was Bridge End Farm, in the shadow of Camphill. Though he was close to his brother Matt, Matt’s young family were gradually making the house their own, until their video games and guinea pig cages left little room for Ben. So for a while he sat on in the bar, like an old man in the corner watching the youngsters enjoy themselves, and he thought about the body on Ringham Moor.

With a bit of luck, the police team would find some obvious leads and get an early closure. There would be initial witness statements that pointed with clunking obviousness to a boyfriend or a spurned lover. Sometimes it was as if the perpetrator carried a giant, fluorescent arrow round with him and the word ‘guilty’ in bright red letters that were visible five miles away in poor light. All the team would need to do then was make sure they collected the forensic evidence at the scene without either contaminating it, losing it or sticking the wrong label on it so that no one could say afterwards where it had been found. It was amazing what could happen to evidence between the first report of a crime and the day a case came to court.

Cooper fought his way to the bar, shouting to the barman to make himself heard above the din. It seemed as though no one else in here wanted to sit down – they were all up on their feet, shouting at each other. The police were singing triumphal songs, having a great time. The students were starting to look hostile.

The American beer Cooper was drinking came in a brown bottle, with a black label and a faint wisp of vapour from its open neck. It was cold, and he closed both his hands round it, drawing a strange comfort from its chill for a moment before he turned and carried it away from the bar. Instead of returning to his corner, he slipped out of the door into the cooler air outside.

For a while, he leaned against a rail near the changing rooms, gazing at the empty pitch, watching the starlings that had arrived in the dusk to pick over the divots in the turf, searching for worms exposed by the players’ studs. He became distantly aware of a more aggressive note to the shouting in the bar behind him, but decided it wasn’t his concern.

Cooper continued to believe it was nothing to do with him right up until the moment that a six-foot six-inch student lock forward put a hand like a meat plate on his shoulder.

3

Diane Fry had never seen Detective Chief Inspector Stewart Tailby quite so agitated. The DCI loomed over his group of officers like a head teacher with a class full of pupils in detention, and he was shouting at the Senior SOCO from the Scientific Support Unit. Tailby’s strangely two-tone hair was trembling in the wind as he turned and paced around the crime scene.

‘We’ve got to hit this area fast,’ he said. ‘We can’t possibly seal it off – we’d need every man in E Division. We need to get what we can before the public get up here and trample over everything.’

‘Well, we could do it in a rush, but it won’t be very selective,’ said the SOCO.

‘Sod being selective,’ said Tailby. ‘Take everything. We’ll worry about being selective later.’

A few yards away, DI Hitchens manoeuvred to keep his senior officer within distance. Other officers ebbed and flowed awkwardly around them, like extras in a badly staged Gilbert and Sullivan opera, who had just realized that nobody had told them what to do with their hands.

‘The light’s failing fast,’ said Hitchens, gazing at the sky.

‘Well, thanks for that,’ snapped Tailby. ‘I thought I was going blind.’

The DCI strode over to the side of the stone circle and looked down into the disused quarry beyond it. There was a barbed wire fence, but it was too low to keep anybody out. On the other side could be seen the last few yards of an access road, which ended on the lip of the quarry. Diane Fry stretched her neck to see what Tailby was looking at. Someone had been fly-tipping from the roadway. She could just make out tyre marks, and a heap of bulging black bin liners, some yellow plastic sheeting and a roll of carpet that had been heaved off the edge. The rubbish lay scattered on the slope like the debris of a plane crash.

‘Find out where the entrance to that quarry is,’ said Tailby. ‘And somebody will have to go down there. We need to find the rest of the clothes. Top priority.’

Hitchens had to dodge as Tailby wheeled suddenly and strode back towards the stones, avoiding the lengths of blue tape twisted together between birch trees and metal stakes. In the centre of the circle, the pathologist, Mrs Van Doon, still crouched over the victim under makeshift lighting. Tailby’s face contorted. He seemed to find something outrageous and obscene in the posture of the body.

‘Where’s that tent?’ he called. ‘Get the tent over her before we have an audience.’

He turned his back and walked on a few yards from the circle, where a single stone stood on its own. DI Hitchens trailed after him at a safe distance.

‘There’s an inscription carved on this stone,’ announced Tailby, with the air of Moses coming down from the mountain.

‘Yes. It looks like a name, sir.’

‘We’ll need a photographer over here. I want that name deciphering.’

‘It’s well away from the path,’ said Hitchens. ‘We think the assailant probably brought his victim from the other direction.’

‘So?’

‘The inscription has probably been there for years.’

‘Do you know that? Are you familiar with these stones?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Ever seen them before in your life?’

‘No, sir.’

Tailby turned. ‘No point asking you, Fry, is there?’

Fry shrugged, but the DCI wasn’t waiting for an answer. He looked around to see who else he could find. ‘You lot, there! Anyone seen these stones before? They’re a famous landmark, they tell me. A significant part of our ancient heritage. They’re an attraction. Visitors flock to see them. What about you?’

The officers shook their heads. They were the sort of men who spent their free time in the pub or in front of the telly, doing a bit of DIY or visiting the garden centre. The ones with kids went to Alton Towers and Gulliver’s Kingdom. But this thing in front of them wasn’t a theme park. There were no white-knuckle rides or ice-cream vans. Tailby turned back to Hitchens.

‘OK, see? We know nothing about it. We’re all as ignorant as a lot of monkeys. This stone circle might as well be a Tibetan yak compound, for all we know about the place.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘Just see that it’s done,’ snarled Tailby.

Then the DCI looked back to where Mrs Van Doon was working. Fry could see that more inscriptions had been scratched into the dirt in the centre of the circle, close to the body. The letters were big and bold, and they spelled out ‘STRIDE’. Whoever had made these was less interested in leaving a long-term record of his presence, though. The drizzle was hardly touching the marks, but a couple of heavy showers would wash them clean away.

‘What about those, then?’ said Tailby. ‘You’re not going to tell me those have been there for years?’

‘No,’ admitted Hitchens. ‘They’ve got to be more recent.’

‘When did it rain in this area last? Properly, I mean?’

Tailby stared around him. The officers gathered nearby looked at each other, then up at the sky. Fry sympathized. They were detectives – they spent all their time buried in paperwork or making phone calls in windowless offices; occasionally they drove around in a car, shuttling from pub to crown court and back again. How were they supposed to know when it had rained?

It was well known that DI Hitchens had just bought a new house in Chesterfield. Tailby himself had a ranch-style bungalow in a desirable part of Dronfield. Most of the other officers lived miles away, down in the lower valleys and the dormitory villages. Some of them were from the suburbs of Derby. It could be blowing a blizzard up here on the moor, piling up six-foot drifts of virgin snow, and all these men would see was a faint bit of sleet in the condensation on their kitchen windows.

‘Does it matter?’ said Hitchens.

Tailby smiled like a fox with a rabbit. ‘It matters, Inspector, because we can’t say whether the inscriptions were written in the last twenty-four hours or the last two weeks.’

‘I suppose so, sir.’

Teeth bared, Tailby glared round for another victim. There was a shuffling and looking away, a lot of thoughtful glances at the grey blanket of cloud.

‘You useless set of pillocks! Doesn’t anyone know? Then find me someone who does!’

Mark Roper finally opened his eyes as Owen Fox parked the Land Rover behind the Partridge Cross briefing centre. The cycle hire staff had closed up for the night, but there were still a few visitors’ cars left outside. A couple were securing their bikes to a rack. It occurred to Mark Roper that one of the cars that still stood dark and unattended probably belonged to the woman whose body lay on the moor.

‘Come on, Mark. Let’s get you inside,’ said Owen.

For a moment, Mark didn’t move. Then, slowly, he unfolded his legs and got out. He felt stiff, like an old man with arthritis. His jacket was crumpled, there were grass stains on his knees and black marks on his hands. He couldn’t think where the marks had come from, but his hands felt unpleasant and greasy, as if there was something on his skin that would take a long time to remove.

He swayed and supported himself on the side of the Land Rover. Owen moved nearer, not touching him but hovering anxiously.

‘We have to wait while the police come to speak to you, Mark,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Are you up to it?’

‘I’m all right.’

Owen Fox was a large man, a little ungainly from carrying too much weight around his upper body. His curly hair and wiry beard were going grey, and his face was worn and creased, the sign of a man who spent his life outdoors, regardless of the weather. Mark wanted to draw reassurance from his presence, to lean on his comforting bulk, but an uncertainty held him back.

Owen finally took Mark by the arm. But the reassurance failed to come. The contact was safe and impersonal, Owen’s fingers meeting only the fabric of the young Ranger’s red fleece jacket. Mark shivered violently, as if his only source of warmth had suddenly been withdrawn.

‘Let’s get inside,’ said Owen. ‘It’s cold out here. You look to me as though you need a hot drink. A cup of my tea will bring some colour back to your cheeks, won’t it? Green, maybe – but at least it’ll be colour.’

Mark smiled weakly. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re probably suffering from shock. We ought to get a doctor to look at you.’

‘No. I’ll be all right, Owen.’

The briefing centre was empty, but warm. The blackboard on the far wall contained white chalk scrawl that gleamed in the sudden light. The words meant nothing to Mark now. In the corner, the assistant’s desk was scattered with papers – reports and forms, the encroaching paperwork of the modern Peak Park Ranger. Soon, a computer would arrive, even here.

Mark needed no encouragement to collapse into a chair near the electric heater. Owen watched him, his face creased with concern, then turned to switch on the kettle.

‘Plenty of sugar in your tea, for the shock.’

Sugar, and a reassuring voice, thought Mark. The things that people needed were simple, really – such as stability and their own part to play in life. But it was Owen he had learned to look to for stability. Now he had an inexplicable fear that it would be snatched from his life again.

‘The things people leave on the moor,’ said Owen. ‘Litter and rubbish. You’d think they’d at least take their dead bodies home with them.’

This time Mark couldn’t smile.

Owen looked at him. ‘I did tell you to keep in touch, Mark,’ he said.

‘I tried, Owen. But I couldn’t get an answer.’

Owen grimaced. ‘Those radios.’

I mustn’t make him feel guilty, thought Mark. Don’t make him take this burden on himself as well as everything else. Mark was aware that there were things he didn’t know about Owen, that in their relationship he only saw the surface of the older man. But there was one thing he did know. Owen needed no more burdens.

Ben Cooper jumped at the hand on his shoulder and tensed his body for trouble. He cursed himself for having allowed someone to find him on his own in a vulnerable position.

The hand felt like a great weight. The tall student was massively built, with a red, sweaty face and a squashed nose. He leaned down and spoke into Cooper’s ear with a voice that growled like a boulder in a landslide. At first, Cooper had no idea what he was saying. He thought the noise in the bar must have damaged his hearing permanently. He shook his head. The student leaned closer, breathing beer fumes on his neck.

‘You are Constable Cooper, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I said there’s someone on the phone for you. Some daft bastard who wants to know when it rained last.’

Ten minutes later, Cooper slid into the passenger seat of a Ford Mondeo as it scattered gravel on the sports ground car park.

‘It’s a what, Todd?’

‘A cyclist from Sheffield,’ said Weenink. ‘She was found in the middle of the stones on Ringham Moor.’

‘You mean the Nine Virgins?’

‘That’s the place. You got it in one. I can see why the DCI loves you.’

‘Everybody knows the Nine Virgins,’ said Cooper.

‘I wish you’d introduce me, then. I can’t find even one virgin where I live.’

Cooper could detect the sweet smell of beer in the car. He wondered if Weenink was fit to drive. It would be ironic if they got stopped by a Traffic patrol. Todd could lose his job, if he was breathalysed.

‘Is Mr Tailby in charge up there?’

‘He’s SIO until they manage to pull a superintendent in from somewhere,’ said Weenink. ‘He’s not a happy man. He’s got a wide-open scene, public access, SOCOs scattered over a space as big as four football pitches. Also, he has a temper on him as foul as my breath on a Saturday night. But we have to report to DI Hitchens. And let me tell you, we’re bloody lucky Hitchens arrived.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Earlier on, it was DI Armstrong at the scene. The Wicked Witch of West Street.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘The Bitch of Buxton, then.’

‘Shut up, Todd.’

Weenink stopped at the junction of the A6, and seemed to spend a long time waiting for distant traffic to pass on the main road. Finally, he pulled out behind a tanker carrying milk for Hartington Stilton.

‘You don’t understand, Ben,’ he said. ‘That Kim Armstrong, she’s so scary. I’m frightened she’ll put a spell on me and turn me into a eunuch.’

‘Will you cut it out?’

‘No, seriously, Ben. They reckon she cursed Ossie Clarke in Traffic one day, and his balls shrivelled up like cashew nuts. The doctors are baffled. He’s been off sick for weeks.’

‘Todd –’

‘Well, he has, hasn’t he? Eh?’

‘Ossie Clarke is one of the bad-back brigade. He has a slipped disc.’

‘That’s the official line. Don’t let it lull you into a false sense of security. Anyway, we’re in luck. They couldn’t spare Armstrong from this paedophile enquiry. Apparently it’s warming up for some arrests. There was the little girl that was killed –’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘So Hitchens has had to come in off leave. And you know he’s just moved into a new house with that redheaded nurse? So he’s not happy, either. It’s a barrel of laughs up there, all right. Couldn’t wait to get away for a bit, myself.’

Weenink was taking the back road past the fluorspar works to avoid the bottleneck in Bakewell. He took the bends gently, as if he was just one more pensioner on a Sunday afternoon outing.

‘Todd? Can’t we go a bit faster?’

‘Mmm, the roads are a bit slippery with all these leaves,’ said Weenink. ‘Can’t be too careful.’

The atmosphere on the moor was gloomy. It made Ben Cooper feel almost guilty about the buzz of anticipation that had stayed with him even in the car with Todd Weenink. The entire stone circle had been taped off, and lights were being set up to illuminate a small tent in the centre. More tape created a pathway as far as a gorse bush a few yards away. The tape twisted and rattled in the wind with a noise like a crowd of football supporters half-heartedly encouraging their team.

‘There was an inch or two of rain during Thursday night, but it had dried up by morning,’ said Cooper.

Several faces turned to stare at him. Hitchens raised an eyebrow, but Tailby nodded.

‘Well, the ground was fine for lifting the sugar beet that morning,’ explained Cooper. He drew a finger through a hollow on the top of one of the stones. ‘On the other hand, there hasn’t been enough sun since then to dry the moisture out where it’s sheltered from the wind.’

He became suddenly aware of the nature of the looks he was being given. ‘It’s what you asked me,’ he said.

Hitchens shrugged. He was wearing an old rugby jersey over his jeans, and might once have played for the divisional XV until he became senior enough to be more at risk of injury from his own side than from the opposition.

‘Could Stride be a name?’ he asked.

‘What kind of man would leave his name written in the dirt when he had committed a murder, anyway?’ said Tailby. ‘And these stones …’

‘The Nine Virgins,’ said Cooper.

‘What are they all about?’

‘They’re the remains of a Bronze Age burial chamber. But local people call them the Virgins because of the legends …’

‘How old?’

‘Three and a half thousand years, give or take.’

‘The last virgins in Derbyshire, then,’ said Hitchens.

Cooper kept his mouth shut. He watched a SOCO scoop up a tiny patch of bloodstained earth where the body had lain, while he listened to the faint laughter drop hollowly into the wind and disappear with a scatter of dead leaves.

In a short while, no doubt, a detective superintendent would arrive from another division to take over as senior investigating officer. He would be grumbling about the continuing vacancy in E Division that meant he had to be dragged away from his own patch, where there would be several other major incidents to be dealt with as well.

But this was the second attack on a woman in a small area, and this victim was dead. Panic would be setting in at higher levels, and those being kicked by the chiefs would soon be kicking the dog.

Though he knew Ringham Moor well, Ben Cooper found the area around the Nine Virgins disturbed him in a way it had never done before. The atmosphere was all wrong. There was nothing dark and claustrophobic about this murder scene, unlike so many others he had come across. Very often a killing occurred within a close relationship, usually within the confines of a family, where emotions ran high and someone was finally driven to extremes. Here, though, the feeling he got was of space and timelessness, a place where everything ran to its natural sequence, just as it had done for thousands of years. Here, the slow dance of the seasons repeated itself endlessly on an almost empty stage as nature rolled from life to death and back to life again.

Cooper had learned to keep quiet about his thoughts at times. Most senior officers, like DCI Tailby, prided themselves on being practical, logical men. Tailby was from Nottingham, raised in suburban streets and comprehensive schools. He preferred to leave it to people like Ben Cooper to be imaginative – he seemed to regard it as some kind of local idiosyncrasy, a queer characteristic inherited from the distant Celtic ancestors of the Derbyshire hill folk.

Cooper watched his fellow officers. Some of them certainly looked as though they felt disorientated and isolated from the realities of the twenty-first century up here. As if to emphasize the point, the sound of a steam train starting up seemed to reach them from the valley below.

‘There’s the train,’ said Cooper.

‘What?’ said Tailby.

‘It’s the Peak Rail line. They run restored steam engines on it. For the tourists, you know.’

A white plume hung across the lights in the bottom of the valley, drifting with the breeze back towards Matlock and vanishing into the darkness as the chug of the engine receded.

Tailby spun on his heel. ‘Time to talk to the Rangers,’ he said.

‘We’ll need to get proper lights set up here, you know,’ said the Senior SOCO, ‘if you really want photos of that inscription.’

‘Believe me,’ said Tailby, ‘I want everything.’

4

The young Ranger looked vaguely familiar to Ben Cooper. But then, he knew lots of Ropers – one of them had been his Maths teacher at school, another ran the garage on Buxton Road; and he had once arrested a Roper for indecency. They were all certain to be related.

Mark was a tall young man, with wide shoulders that didn’t quite fit the rest of his body. His muscles had some catching up to do, but he was wiry and fit. Cooper noticed he had a small streak of vomit staining the front of his red Peak Park Rangers jacket. Somebody at the Partridge Cross Ranger Centre had made him several cups of tea. The tea had done nothing for his pallor, but at least his kidneys were working at full capacity. He emerged from the loo just as the police arrived.

Mark sat down unsteadily when DCI Tailby introduced himself and opened the questioning.

‘I was patrolling the moor,’ said Mark. ‘Ringham Moor. I was on the path from the east, going towards the Virgins.’

‘That’s the stone circle.’

‘It’s just one of the stone circles. But it’s the one that everybody knows.’

‘All right.’

‘I was near the Virgins when I saw a bike.’

‘Hold on. Before that, did you see anyone else on the moor?’

‘Nobody at all. It was quiet.’

‘Nobody? Think right back to when you first left the centre.’

Mark looked automatically towards the window. Cooper followed his gaze. A silver Land Rover with a thin red stripe was parked outside. Beyond the Ranger Service sign on its roof, the dark hump of the moor was still visible against a pale sky.

‘There was a man working in a field on this side of the moor, mending gates. I’ve seen him before. There was no one else.’

‘OK. Describe this bike,’ said Tailby.

Now Mark seemed to regain a bit more confidence. He produced a small notebook from the pocket of his fleece and turned the pages. But he spoke without looking at his notes. The scene was still fresh enough in his mind.

‘It was a yellow Dawes. I recognized it as one of the hire bikes. It had been chucked into the bottom of a gorse bush, in the middle of some birch trees. One of the wheels was off too. I thought somebody had hired it and had an accident and just left it. They do things like that.’

‘Who do?’

‘Well, you know – the visitors. Tourists. They just leave a bike somewhere and say it’s been stolen or they’ve lost it or something. You wouldn’t believe the lies some of them tell.’

‘Did you touch the bike?’

‘No.’

‘You’re quite sure about that, Mark?’

‘Yeah. I just looked for the number. Because I thought it was one of the hire bikes. And it was, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it was.’ Cooper could hear the gratification in the DCI’s voice. The fact it was a hire bike had made it so much easier to identify the victim. She had been obliged to leave her full name and address and proof of identity at the cycle hire centre when she took the bike out earlier that afternoon. So they had already established that her name was Jenny Weston, that she was thirty years old and divorced. She worked as a customer service manager in a large insurance office in Sheffield, and had taken a week’s holiday because she had several days’ leave to get in before the end of the year. By now, her parents had already been contacted, and her father was on his way to identify the body formally. If only it were always so easy.

‘Then I saw something lying in the middle of the Virgins,’ said Mark. ‘I went to have a look. Although –’

‘Yes?’

‘Well … I could already see what it was. I could tell, from a few yards away, from where I found the bike. It was a woman. And she was dead.’

Mark moved his hands restlessly, brushing the front of his fleece. Cooper thought at first that he was trying to rub off the vomit stain, but realized he was wrong. The young Ranger was stroking the badge stitched to the fabric, fondling as if it were the breast of a lover, tracing the silver letters and the stylized millstone symbol of the Peak Park.

‘Did you notice anything about the body?’ asked Tailby.

Mark hesitated. ‘Only that she was, you know …’ His hands made half-hearted gestures. ‘Her clothes …’

‘You mean her clothes had been interfered with?’

Mark nodded.

‘And did you notice anything else nearby? Anything unusual or out of place?’

‘No.’

‘So how close did you get to the body, Mark?’

‘I walked as far as the nearest stone. The flat one. I didn’t have to go any closer.’

‘You were quite sure she was dead?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mark. ‘Oh yes.’

Mark suddenly went a shade whiter. His hand went over his mouth, and he made a dash for the loo. A second later, the police officers heard the sound of vomiting.

DCI Tailby sat for a moment longer, as if still listening for elusive bits of information in the Ranger’s retching.

‘Cooper, find that Area Ranger,’ he said. ‘He knows the lie of the land round here, if anybody does. Tell him we need to arrange proper access to the moor. We need the owner of the land or whoever. And we need to get into that quarry, too. Get on to it.’

Ben Cooper found the Area Ranger waiting by his silver Land Rover outside the briefing centre. Owen Fox was in his early fifties, with grey hair and a thick beard that was going the same way. He was a comfortable badger of a man, with an even more comfortable smell of wool and earth.

‘Mr Fox?’

The Ranger turned, with a distracted air. Though Cooper was wearing his dark green waxed jacket over civilian clothes, he thought Owen would recognize him as a policeman. People always seemed able to tell. They said it was something to do with the look in your eyes.

‘Can I help?’

‘I’m Detective Constable Cooper. If you’ve got time, I’d like to call on your local knowledge.’

Cooper explained that he had been given the job of opening up access to the disused quarry and of securing the route for vehicles to get to the crime scene.

‘We need to see Warren Leach then,’ said Owen.

‘And he is …?’

‘Ringham Edge Farm. He owns most of the moor. The old quarry road runs across his land. We can go in the Land Rover, if you like.’

The farm was reached by a back road out of the village of Ringham Lees, an almost invisible turning by the corner of the Druid pub. A group of a dozen or so youngsters were hanging around in a bus shelter near the pub. When they saw the lights of the Land Rover coming, two teenage boys ran across the road directly in front of its bonnet and stood laughing and waving from the opposite pavement.

‘Some of these young people,’ said Owen. ‘Their common sense has left home before them. And it didn’t give a forwarding address.’

‘We get a lot like them in Edendale,’ said Cooper.

‘I bet you do.’

The Ranger had four radio sets in the cab of the Land Rover. The wide-band set under the dashboard was constantly scanning the channels for the Ranger Service and other local organizations. Another set was for the Mountain Rescue team. Behind the seats, fixed to a wire grille, were two battery-operated handsets on permanent charge for when they were needed. Cooper saw that there was also a satellite positioning device in a leather case. But the best-used piece of equipment seemed to be the vacuum flask. It was battered, but no doubt a welcome sight on a freezing day on the moors.

‘Some of this technology is all right,’ said Owen. ‘But we’ll be completely computerized one day. I only hope it’s after my time. I was brought up to think “online” meant your mum had just put the washing out.’

Cooper laughed. ‘Did you say this Leach owns the moor?’

‘Part of it. It’s all privately owned, one way or another. The PDNPA doesn’t own any land, you know. Being a national park doesn’t mean what people think it means.’

‘No, I know.’

‘But Ringham Moor is one of those places where the landowners have an access agreement with the national park, so Rangers are involved a lot. Especially with the attention the Nine Virgins get. They seem to have a special significance at the summer solstice – a bit like Stonehenge, you know? There can be two hundred or so people gathered up there – illegally, I might add, under the access agreement; not to mention the by-laws covering ancient monuments.’

‘But what do they get up to exactly?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t believe it. Music, jugglers, camp fires. Children and dogs running round. It’s a bit like a medieval fair. One year we had to call in a mountain rescue team to carry off a young lady who’d been dancing from stone to stone, but fell off and broke her leg. Every year I pray it will rain – it keeps things quiet for a change.’

‘So much for the peace and quiet of the Peak District.’

‘Peace and quiet? One of our biggest jobs is looking after the safety of visitors. None of them have any common sense. If we left the fences off the old mine shafts, half of them would throw themselves in, thinking it was a new visitor experience.’

Owen Fox had a direct gaze and a sly smile in his eyes when he made a joke, though his face hardly moved. It took a bit of careful listening to understand when he was joking.

‘I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else, though,’ said Owen. ‘I’ve even picked the exact stone where I want my ashes to be scattered.’

They passed a large field containing a herd of black and white cattle and approached Ringham Edge Farm down a steep, narrow lane constricted between stone walls. The farm buildings were built mostly of the dark local gritstone, and the house itself had small, deeply-set windows that must let in little light. An extra shadow was thrown on the house by a large modern shed some distance from the track. Close to the shed stood the burnt-out shell of what looked like a Mitsubishi pick-up, the paint stripped from its bodywork and the interior of the cab blackened. Many farmers had the habit of letting all sorts of junk accumulate around their farm buildings.

Owen glanced at Cooper. ‘Would it be best if I talked to him?’

‘Leach? Is he likely to be difficult?’

‘He can be. He needs handling right. Sometimes you have to let people think they’re getting their own way.’

‘Even when they aren’t?’

‘Well. Sometimes. You do know, don’t you …’

‘What?’

‘It was Warren Leach’s wife Yvonne who found that other woman a few weeks ago.’

‘Of course – Maggie Crew.’

‘She got as far as one of the fields at Ringham Edge. Yvonne Leach came across her lying unconscious under a wall. Leach himself just reckoned it was a nuisance, I think. It kept him away from his work for a bit. But this old quarry road is mainly used as a footpath now. It’s a public right of way, and it runs right through the farm. When you have strangers walking past your door all the time, you can soon get to see them as an irritation. Some visitors think farmers are there as a public service, for providing toilets and telephones, or for pulling their cars out of ditches with their tractors. I can’t blame Warren – not really.’

When Owen Fox and Ben Cooper pulled up in the Land Rover, they found two boys in a brightly lit byre. They were fussing over a Jersey heifer calf with huge eyes and long black lashes. The animal stood patiently, twitching her damp nostrils with pleasure as she was brushed on each flank until her red coat gleamed. One of the boys reached out to stroke the calf’s muzzle, and she responded with a rasp of a plump tongue across his hand which made the boy smile with pleasure. Behind them, a wooden board was decorated with red and blue rosettes with long ribbons.

‘Is this the calf that won at Bakewell Show?’ asked Owen.

The boys looked uncertain what to say. Maybe they had been told not to talk to strangers, thought Cooper. But the Ranger wasn’t really a stranger, was he? He had been to the farm before; he knew Warren Leach. It was part of the Area Ranger’s job to maintain good relations with the farmers and landowners on his patch.

‘Yeah, this is her. She’s called Doll,’ said the older boy.

‘You’re Will, aren’t you?’ said Owen. ‘I can’t remember your brother’s name.’

‘He’s Dougie.’

Owen walked slowly towards the calf, hushing her quietly as she shied away and rolled her eyes at him. The boys held on to the halter nervously. But the animal calmed down when Owen began to talk to her, stroking her nose, gently following the lie of her coat along the side of her muzzle. He rubbed her shoulder to feel the firmness of the muscle and ran his hand down her spine. The calf relaxed under his touch.

‘She’s a beauty, lads. In superb condition. She’s a real credit to you.’

‘Thanks,’ said Will. Dougie appeared to be about to add something, but changed his mind.

Both boys seemed shy, but the younger one was particularly uncommunicative. Cooper wasn’t used to silent children. There were several kids of Will and Dougie’s age in his own family – nephews and nieces and second cousins. But none of them was so quiet. They were too noisy, if anything. These days, children were no longer seen and not heard. It was when you could neither see nor hear them that you began to worry, if you were a parent. That was when they were at risk.

But these two were different. They had a reticence about them, a watchfulness that bordered on hostility, as if they had learned to be afraid of visitors.

‘Will you be showing her again next year?’ asked Owen.

That seemed to have been the wrong thing to say. The boys’ faces fell, and Dougie looked as though he might cry.

‘Your dad will take you to the show, won’t he?’

Will shook his head. Now Cooper started to feel uncomfortable. ‘Where is your dad?’ he said.

‘Up at the workshop.’ Will pointed to the back of the house. The two boys looked relieved when they walked away and followed the roadway to a yard, where a metallic clanging came from a shed. Owen stuck his head through the doorway.

‘Warren? Good evening.’

Warren Leach looked up from a bench lit by a dim work-lamp. He was a man with almost no neck. His torso, thick and solid, without a single curve, erupted into bulging shoulders with trapezius muscles that almost reached the line of his jaw. He was wearing blue overalls, with a wide leather belt strapped round his waist.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said gruffly. ‘It never rains but it pours round here, does it? What do you want?’

‘Well, it might have been a friendly social call,’ said Owen.

Leach snorted. ‘Oh aye. Did you come past the shippon?’

‘We did.’

‘I suppose you saw those lads of mine. Are they still messing with that bloody animal?’

‘They look as though they’re doing a grand job with her, Warren. She’s in fine condition.’

‘Oh aye. Fine. And so she should be. The animal gets spoiled rotten. She’s fed better than any of us.’

The farmer was fiddling with a steel coupling pin from a trailer’s towing bracket. The pin trailed a short length of chain, which he swung irritably between his fingers.

‘What’s up now then, Ranger?’

‘Warren, the police need to get access for their vehicles up through here for a while.’

‘Oh?’

‘On account of the woman killed up there. You know about that.’

Leach shrugged. ‘It’s no business of mine.’

‘It’s your land, Warren,’ said Fox patiently.

‘Is it part of the access agreement then? Some tourist gets herself done in and I have to put up with this lot roaring backwards and forwards over my land like maniacs?’ Leach jabbed a finger in Cooper’s direction, effortlessly identifying him as what he was. ‘Well, it must have been in the small print, Ranger, because I missed it.’

‘Can you leave that top gate open for the police vehicles to get on to the moor, please?’

‘Leave it open? Why? They can open and close a gate like anyone else, can’t they? Or have coppers lost the use of their hands as well as their feet these days?’

‘It doesn’t do to make the police think you’re being obstructive,’ said Owen.

‘They can think what the hell they like.’

Cooper stayed silent, ignoring the aggressive glare. He was well used to it from the yobbos of Edendale. The only surprise was to see it in a middle-aged Dales farmer. But it was best to let Owen Fox deal with it – it was a chance for him to use his Ranger diplomacy.

‘I suppose I might just have a word with Yvonne then, before I go,’ said Owen.

‘What for? She’s got nothing to say to you.’

‘Just being polite.’

Leach grunted, and the chain tightened in his thick hands until the steel links squealed against each other.

‘It’ll mean I’ll have to move the cows down to the next field,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s no problem, is it?’

‘No problem? The grass is nearly finished in there. My milk yields’ll be gone to hell. They’re down already with all this disturbance.’

‘It’ll only be for a day or two, Warren.’

‘Would there be compensation, maybe? The police have got money. My money, from the Council Tax.’

‘I can’t imagine so. Think of it as a public service.’

Owen looked at Cooper, but Cooper just smiled.

‘Balls to that,’ said Leach.

‘Come on, Warren.’

Leach tossed the coupling pin into his other hand, slapping it against his palm. On a plastic drum, he had a square leather-bound case with steel clasps. Cooper wondered what it was. Somehow it didn’t look like a piece of farming equipment, more the sort of thing a doctor might carry his kit in for testing a patient’s blood pressure.

‘Only for a day or two, and that’s it,’ said Leach. ‘Tell your police friends they’ll have to get a move on. Let ’em work the same hours that I have to work to keep this farm going, instead of knocking off for tea every five minutes. I’ve seen it going on. I’m not stupid.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Cooper politely. But the farmer only glowered. ‘When would be convenient for an officer to come and talk to you?’

‘What?’

‘We need to take a statement from you. You’re well positioned here to be a witness.’

‘A witness to what? I went through all this with that other bloody woman that ended up on my land. I never saw this one either.’

‘Do you know who she was?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then how do you know you didn’t see her?’ Cooper smiled. ‘Somebody will probably call tomorrow to see you.’

The two men began to walk back towards the Ranger’s Land Rover.

‘I’ll be back to see you soon, Warren,’ said Owen.

‘Don’t bother, Ranger. As soon as I see that red jacket of yours, I’ll be halfway to Bakewell.’

They almost ran right into Yvonne Leach in the gateway as they drove out of the yard. She was a small woman, with wide hips and strands of light brown hair tied loosely back from her face. Owen stopped the Land Rover, and the woman shied away, as nervous as a sheep, rolling her eyes at the vehicle. But she couldn’t slip past quickly enough.

Owen wound down the window. ‘Yvonne – all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ve just had a word with Warren. I wanted to tell you not to worry about what happened up there. There are plenty of police about here. You’ll be OK.’

‘I’m not worried,’ said Yvonne, though to Cooper’s eye she looked as scared as any woman he had ever seen.

Warren Leach’s angry bellow came from the yard. ‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing? Get in the house.’ They looked round and saw him glaring at Yvonne. She took the chance of sliding along the side of the Land Rover and scuttling round the corner.

Owen drove on up the track. They had to open two gates to get any further, and the Ranger took it slowly to avoid alarming the cows.

‘Marriage,’ he said, after a minute.

‘What about it?’ said Cooper.

‘The most bizarre thing ever invented, in my opinion. You must see what I mean, in your job. Couples tied together for no apparent reason, making each other’s lives a misery. Isn’t marriage one of the major factors in crime? Domestics, you call them. Aren’t ninety per cent of murders committed by the spouse?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well, I rest my case. Weddings ought to be banned, along with other blood sports.’

‘I thought the police were cynical, but I don’t think I’ve reached your stage, yet,’ said Cooper.

Then Owen looked at Cooper sideways and waggled his eyebrows. ‘I can see you’re not married yourself. You don’t have that harassed look. You weren’t thinking about it, by any chance, were you?’

‘Well …’ Cooper considered the answer for a moment. ‘I suppose it’s kind of the way I see my life going, some day.’

‘Mmm. Well, close your eyes or look the other way, then.’

The Ranger pulled the Land Rover on to a flat area of bare earth under a stand of beech trees. They were about two hundred feet further up towards the moor, looking down on the farm buildings and the fields around them. Beyond the farm was the village of Ringham Lees, its lights just visible in the trees in the valley bottom; and further away in the darkness, almost hidden by a spur of hill, were the spires of the two churches in the bigger village of Cargreave.

‘Tell your lot they can park here,’ said Owen. ‘The Virgins are just over the rise. That way to the right leads into Top Quarry. Just ask if you want anything else. They say I’m the man who knows these parts.’

Cooper found the cab of the Land Rover was comfortable and warm, full of things that had a practical use, yet without the slightest conscious attempt at imposing the driver’s personality.

‘Do you live locally, Owen?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got a house over there in Cargreave.’

‘I take it you’re not married either?’

‘Me? You must be joking. I may not be Einstein, but I’m not that stupid.’

‘A bad experience?’

‘Other people’s experiences are enough for me, mate. I’ve watched them all go the same way. Those young lads that you meet, full of enthusiasm and vitality, all their lives in front of them. And what happens? A wife and a mortgage. Before you know it, they’re coming into work half-asleep because the new baby’s kept them awake all night, and then they’re moving house to make room for all the family. In the end, they have to get a new job that they hate, just so that they can pay for it all. It’s like getting a life sentence without having the pleasure of committing the crime, the poor sods. Not for me. There’s just me and the cats, since Mother died.’

‘Was that recently?’ asked Cooper. The loss of his own father was recent enough to make him curious about someone else’s experience of the death of a parent.

‘It was a year ago. She was very old, of course. And she never feared death, that was a consolation. I used to take her to church until she couldn’t get there any more. But she could see the church tower from her bedroom, and that seemed to be enough at the end.’

‘And your father?’

‘Oh, he’s been gone a long time.’

‘Don’t you find that losing a parent makes the one that’s left seem very precious?’ said Cooper.

Owen looked at him cautiously. ‘Yes, you’re right. Actually, I think I might have worked with your father a time or two.’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘I’m sure you did.’

After a moment’s silence, Owen chuckled into his beard. ‘No, I’m on my own. I’m a happy bachelor. Young, free and single, that’s me. Well … two out of three’s not bad. Nobody’s really free.’

Cooper nodded. But he wasn’t thinking about Owen Fox. He was thinking of Yvonne Leach and the two boys he had seen at Ringham Edge Farm. It was one thing to live a life restricted by obligations, in the way that Owen described. But it was another thing altogether when it was fear that ruled your life.

And Cooper’s instincts told him that what he had seen at the farm was exactly that. It might be superficially concealed from the outside world, but it was bubbling very close to the surface. The Leaches were people whose lives were ruled by fear.

5

Since Diane Fry had arrived, the woman had kept her face turned away towards the window. The light from the desk lamp fell only on her left side, outlining her profile, delineating a high cheekbone and a straight nose. It highlighted the gold in a strand of hair tucked behind her ear, and it threw unmerciful shadows on the fine lines etched into the skin of her neck.

The apartment she lived in was austere, with minimal modern furniture, scrupulously clean, and cold, harsh lighting that created stark lines between light and shade. It was as if the rooms had been designed so that someone moving around in their cool spaces could know precisely where the shadows fell, where details were distinct and where they were not. Fry pictured the woman rehearsing her positioning in these rooms like an actress walking about a stage, seeking the best angle, presenting her most favourable side to the audience. On the other hand, perhaps she moved through the shadows by instinct alone – the instinct of a wounded animal. Because there was no mirror in this room to examine the effect in. No mirror, but a pale patch on the wall where one had once hung.

Maggie Crew sat behind a desk, as if conducting a formal interview with a client. On the desk, there were only a few items – a telephone, an ashtray, a paper knife. Along the side wall were a couple of shelves of law books and journals and a stereo system, finished in matt black, with neat racks of CD cases, their titles too small for Fry to make out.

Behind Maggie was a big sash window looking out over the roofs of Matlock. It had a view down the Derwent Valley to the point where it narrowed into a high gorge, with a hill above it that had been hacked and blasted into pieces by quarrying. Heavy green drapes hung from a brass rail over the window, capable of shutting out the natural light entirely during the day. Apart from that, there was little ornamentation in the room. The furnishings spoke to Fry of pretension without showiness, a subtle statement of the owner’s disregard for the comfort of her surroundings. According to the reports, Crew spent all her time in this apartment now, shut away from the world. It wasn’t difficult to understand why. She had been an attractive woman once.

‘My name is Diane Fry, Maggie.’

Maggie nodded. She wore a man’s Calvin Klein cube-design watch, all minimalist straight lines. A pad of A4 ruled paper lay near her hand, with a silver ballpoint pen. But she made no move to write down Fry’s name.

‘I’ve been asked to work with you for a while, Maggie. If that’s all right with you, of course.’

‘You know I’ve already agreed to this. Although I don’t know what good it will do.’

‘I want to go through with you again anything you can remember. Any little detail may help us.’

Where you might have expected Maggie Crew to have let her hair grow long to cover the disfigurement, it was cut short, trimmed clear of her forehead. The left side of her face was smooth and white, her cheeks like the skin of someone who had spent too long in the dark. Her hands, too, were pale, the backs of them flat and shapeless. Fry wondered if Maggie was a woman who struggled against gaining weight. But she was not fat now. Her cheekbones were visible in her face, her shoulders were prominent under the fabric of a black jacket. Fry herself liked to wear black. But on Maggie it seemed to be more than practicality or an attempt to make herself look slimmer; more, even, than a fashion statement. There was an emotion in the blackness, a dark outer show to match her feelings, to fit the atmosphere of the room. It was a sort of mourning.

‘What happened to the last one?’ said Maggie.

‘We just thought a change of personnel might help. A new approach …’

‘A fresh face.’ Maggie smiled. She had small, white teeth, but her upper lip drew back a fraction too far, exposing a strip of pink gum and removing the humour from her smile.

‘So.’ She stared at Fry, measuring her like a potential employee, a candidate for a domestic’s job. ‘Diane Fry. What is different about you, then?’

‘There’s nothing different about me. I’m just here to talk to you.’

‘Do you know how many people have said that?’

‘It’s all in your file,’ said Fry. ‘I know your history.’

‘Ah, yes. You’ve read my file. So you have the advantage of coming here knowing absolutely everything about me. How helpful that must be. Perhaps you think you know more about me than I do myself. Perhaps you think you know how my mind is working, exactly how you might manipulate my subconscious?’

‘Nobody wants to manipulate you, Maggie.’

‘Then what do you want? What is it you all want with me? Don’t you know by now that I can’t give it to you? Isn’t that in my file?’

‘If we keep trying –’

‘You think you might be able to make me remember. Then what? My memories might be able to help you, yes. But what will they do to me? What if I don’t want to remember? What if my subconscious has wiped out the memories?’

‘Do you think that’s the case?’

‘The doctors say there is no physiological reason for the memory loss. There is no damage to my brain. They tell me it’s probably shock; they call it trauma. They say it’s a safety device, which shuts down memories that the brain doesn’t want. Wipes them out.’

Fry watched her, trying to hide the scepticism in her face. She heard the words, and recognized some of the phrases from the medical reports. But she didn’t believe that you could wipe out memories completely, no matter how unpleasant. They left their traces everywhere, in the overlooked corners of your mind, and in the sensations of your body – the touch of your skin against your clothes, the sudden devastating echo in a sound, or the malignant resonance of a smell. Memories were cancerous growths, secretive and spiteful; sometimes you didn’t know they were there until it was too late. Diane Fry knew all about memories.

‘This is just an introductory meeting,’ she said. ‘I’ll come back to talk to you again tomorrow, Maggie. If that’s all right with you.’

‘If you must.’

‘It’s very important now.’

‘Ah.’ Maggie hesitated. ‘Does that mean you have another victim?’

‘Yes, Maggie. And it’s vital we catch this man before he kills again.’

Maggie stared at Diane Fry out of her good eye, assessing her sharply, staring with the unblinking curiosity of someone who rarely saw a new visitor.

‘Kills?’

‘Yes, it’s murder this time. This victim died.’

Fry watched for a reaction. The trembling in Maggie’s hands and the draining of the colour from her face gave Fry a small measure of satisfaction.

‘We also want to put you on a witness protection programme. You know what that means?’

‘Of course. Remember I’m a lawyer.’

‘We’ll ask you to consider finding somewhere else to stay, if possible, Maggie, until we think it’s safe. In the meantime, a technician will call to install alarms in your apartment. You’ll be given a phone number you can call at any time.’

Maggie took a moment to recover her composure. ‘Is all that necessary?’

‘Maggie, we’re looking for a killer now. And you’re the only person who can identify him.’

‘I won’t go away. I’m staying here.’

‘But the other precautions …’ said Fry.

‘All right. But there’s one condition.’

‘Yes?’

‘If you’re going to visit me, do not feel sorry for me. I won’t talk to anyone who shows even the slightest sign of feeling sorry for me. Do you understand?’

‘Of course.’

Diane Fry was glad when Maggie Crew turned away. Since she had met Maggie at the door of her apartment, it had taken her several minutes to settle down, to recover from the initial shock. The sight of her had made Fry’s stomach muscles clench with vicarious pain as she tried to control her expression. But this woman must be used to such reactions by now.

Maggie Crew’s face would never be the same again. The knife had sliced her apart. No plastic surgery could ever completely hide the long, ragged scar that mutilated her cheekbone, splitting her face into two halves like a zip, its raised lips still red and angry, the flesh stretched painfully tight. No surgeon would ever entirely smooth out the ridges of shredded and bruised skin that puckered the corner of her right eye, pulling down her bottom lid to expose the pink veins, and twisting the whole side of her face into a leer.

But there was more even than that. There was the psychological damage that had been done to Maggie Crew. Even to Diane Fry the damage was obvious, though she had never met the woman before. Maggie was a partner in a firm of solicitors in Matlock. She was a successful professional woman, used to feeling self-confident and sure of her own worth. But now she had lost that confidence; her image of herself had been ravaged, slashed to pieces by the knife that had torn her face.

Fry knew that the attack on Maggie had happened six weeks ago. As far as they could ascertain, she had been attacked somewhere near the Cat Stones, the line of rocks below the Hammond Tower, not half a mile from where Jenny Weston’s body had been found. Maggie had been the lucky one. She had managed to stagger halfway off the moor before she collapsed from shock and loss of blood in the shelter of a wall, where she had been found by a farmer’s wife next morning. The doctors said Maggie had been lucky, in that the knife had narrowly missed removing an eye. Fry hoped that nobody had tried telling Maggie herself that she was lucky.

Now Maggie was recovering at home. And that meant she had been sitting here, in this sparse room, hiding from the light.

‘I suppose I should be frightened,’ said Maggie.

‘We’re just taking precautions. No need to be frightened.’

‘It would make a change – a change from finding people are frightened of me. They don’t know how to react, most of them. They don’t know what to say. They don’t want to talk about my face. Do you want to talk about it? About what my injury means to me.’

Fry shrugged. ‘Not particularly.’

Maggie looked surprised. Disappointed?

‘They say plastic surgery might help. But not yet. The injury is too recent.’

‘Yes, it takes time.’

‘Oh, the body heals itself to a certain extent, in time. The blood clots, the wounds close over, fresh skin grows. They can do wonders with surgery, they keep telling me. But it’s never quite the same, is it? You can’t rebuild the original tissue, and your body remembers the injury. You’re always marked in some way.’

The file said that Maggie Crew had received the appropriate counselling. She had gone through all the consultations with a psychiatrist. She had been encouraged to write down her feelings, to talk to Victim Support. The police had treated her with kid gloves for a time. But at the end of the day, they weren’t getting what they wanted. Maggie Crew knew far more than she had told them. She had seen her assailant and survived. He was the same man, they now suspected, who had killed Jenny Weston. It was at this moment, more than ever, that they needed the information locked in Maggie’s head.

Fry wondered how secure the apartment was. It occupied part of the second floor of Derwent Court, a converted spa hotel, a relic of the town’s Victorian past as a health resort. The building had stood derelict for years before an influx of county council office workers had boosted the demand for housing in Matlock. Now comfortably-off residents lived at the end of its marble corridors and stared all day at an expensive view over the Derwent Valley, counting the cable cars as they ferried tourists to the Heights of Abraham.

At least there was a concierge in the lobby downstairs. She would have to have a word with him before she left – he would be able to keep an extra careful eye out for visitors to Derwent Court.

She stared out of the window into the darkness. The quarry-blasted hillside stood out white and stark on the skyline to the south. No attempt had been made to repair or disguise the damage that had been done to the landscape by the mineral companies. The scars had been left as a symbolic reminder, a legacy of the past. And perhaps as a warning too. A warning of what might easily happen again one day – if no one did anything to prevent it.

‘Yes, some things take time,’ said Maggie. ‘Other things take a miracle.’

Ben Cooper had already formed a clear idea in his mind of what Jenny Weston had been like. There had been no shortage of details there, for once. The entry in the log at the cycle hire centre had given them the basics. Not only that, but the cycle hire manager knew which car was hers. Once they had got access to it, they had found her handbag in the glove compartment, with her diary and all the information they could possibly want, written on the front page in her own hand. It listed not only the name, address and phone number of her next of kin, but also Jenny’s date of birth, her National Insurance number, the numbers of her bank account and her mobile phone, the names of her doctor, dentist and vet, her religion, the address of her insurance company, her National Trust membership number, her height and weight, and her shoe size. And her blood group.

And then her father, Eric Weston, had lost no time arriving from his home at Alfreton as soon as they contacted him. Cooper had arrived back at Partridge Cross from Ringham Edge Farm just in time to sit in on the interview with DCI Tailby. Mr Weston had been all too willing to tell them about his daughter. He recited the details eagerly, as if he needed to remind himself, too, of who Jenny was. Of who she had been.

Jenny had been married at twenty-one. Her husband, Martin Stafford, had not been liked by her parents. Police officers heard that one often, of course. Very few parents thought the men their daughters chose were good enough. But in this case, Stafford had lasted about three and a half years before his violent nature became obvious. Jenny had stayed with him another two years before they had finally parted.

The story was a familiar one. A woman abused, yet reluctant to believe that there wasn’t something worth preserving in her marriage; convinced, somehow, that her man did what he did because he loved her. It seemed incredible to Cooper that some women continued to expect far too much of marriage. Their beliefs died hard.

Mr Weston was deputy head teacher of one of the Eden Valley secondary schools. He had that rather weary and worn look that identified middle-aged teachers. His hair was mostly on the back of his head, curly and untidy, and not trimmed on his neck for a long time. He wore a grey suit, but there were shiny patches on the trousers and an indefinable scent that reminded Cooper of his own school days. Chalk and musty text books, school dinners and badly washed schoolboys.

It seemed that Mr Weston was inclined to blame Martin Stafford for Jenny’s death. This was despite the fact that, as far as he was aware, the two of them hadn’t seen each other for three years.

‘It would be just like him to have got in touch again, and for Jenny to agree to meet him, without telling us,’ he said.

‘Do you know where Mr Stafford lives now?’ asked Tailby.

‘No, I don’t. I think Jenny knew. But she never told us that, either.’

‘Why?’

‘She thought we would interfere. We were so worried about her. She never seemed to see sense where that man was concerned.’

‘There are no children from the marriage?’

‘No.’

‘That’s fortunate, I suppose?’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ said Mr Weston.

Jenny had met Stafford while she was a student at the University of Derby. He had been a journalist then, working at the city’s Evening Telegraph – a senior reporter with a flair for off-beat features, or so he had said. According to Mr Weston, Stafford had cultivated a knowing, cynical image, had drunk too much and had cared about little except himself and his career.

‘Jenny was studying to be a radiologist,’ he said. ‘She was already in the third year of her course, and doing really well. She could have had a good career ahead of her, if it hadn’t been for Stafford. She met him in a pub in Derby, and he made a beeline for her. She was an attractive girl. And far too trusting.’

‘What happened?’

‘She became completely besotted with him. She wouldn’t listen to us when we told her to put her studies first, that her own career was more important. In the end, she gave up her studies to marry Stafford when he asked her to. She said she wanted to start a family with him. We had to accept it.’

‘But you said there were no children?’

‘No children. Only divorce.’

Even the divorce had come only after a series of short-lived reconciliations which were, according to Jenny’s father, simply Martin Stafford’s demonstrations of his ability to manipulate their daughter. He had some inexplicable power over her, and he was reluctant to give it up. The situation dragged on for a long time, painfully and unsatisfactorily.

‘When it was all over, Jenny managed to get a job with Global Assurance in Derby,’ said Mr Weston. ‘But then she had to move to their new call centre when it was built in Sheffield. We didn’t like it. It meant she was away from us, away from her family. She went to live alone in that little terraced house off the Ecclesall Road. It was too far away. All she had with her was her blessed cat, not even a dog. Her mother was very upset. She worried about what might happen to her. We both did.’

‘You were worried that Mr Stafford might try to get back in touch with her?’

‘Yes, of course. And that we wouldn’t know about it. Anything could have happened.’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘Well … not so far as we know.’

Mr Weston tried to recall a quick succession of boyfriends after Jenny had moved to Sheffield. All of them, he was sure, were men who were completely wrong for her. To Ben Cooper, Jenny sounded as though she had gone through those men like a woman looking for something she would never find, a woman whose better judgement had been cast aside. For what? A kind of penance? At one point, there had been an abortion. Jenny had not told her father at the time. His wife had told him about it, much later.

‘That was something I could never understand,’ he said. He shook his head, and Cooper saw the glitter of tears in the teacher’s eyes. ‘I never will understand it. Jenny always wanted children.’

And Jenny had hated her job, too. She had been good at it, had been promoted to supervisor, with twenty-five girls working for her. She had responsibilities and a better salary; she was well regarded by her employers and liked by her colleagues. But she had hated it.

‘She said it was a sweatshop. She really disliked that. She kept talking about the pressure, unattainable targets, the constant surveillance by managers to make sure you were always working, the tedium, the repetitiveness, the strain of being polite all the time to customers who didn’t want to speak to you. Oh, and the posters round the walls. They all said: “Smile”.’

Jenny had also been depressed by the rate of burn-out among her staff – even the best of them lasting little more than twelve months in the job. Many sacrificed themselves, as Jenny saw it, to marriage and to raising a family, purely as a means of escape.

‘She didn’t even manage to make any proper friends. She said animals were preferable to people. It might have helped a lot if she could have made friends. But Jenny said she barely had a chance to get to know any of her colleagues before they were gone. All the new recruits to these call centres now are youngsters, straight from school into their induction training, pulling on their telephone headsets and believing that’s what work is all about. In my position, I see them leaving school, full of hope, and I know what will happen to them. We do our best with them, you know, but that’s how a lot of them end up. Very sad.’

‘Did Jenny talk of escaping from the job?’ asked Tailby.

‘Oh yes. All the time.’

Of course she had talked of escaping; everyone did. She talked of working with animals, of being a veterinary nurse or running a wildlife sanctuary. But there was nothing she was qualified to do, and nowhere else she could go. Now and then she thought about her lost career as a radiologist. And those were the worst times, said Eric Weston. It was knowing it was too late that depressed her the most.

‘The one thing that Jenny really loved was the Peak District,’ said Mr Weston. ‘We used to bring her here as a child at weekends and in the summer holidays. Days out in Dovedale and at Castleton. When she went to university she joined a student walking club and they hiked over all the hills in the area. They did the whole of the Pennine Way one summer, staying at youth hostels. It was where she always came back to.’

Later, after her divorce, Jenny had again spent as much time as she could in the Peak District, walking, but often alone, since friends didn’t seem to last long. She had tried pony trekking a few times, said Mr Weston. But recently she had taken to mountain biking. She had her own bike at home, but had preferred to hire a bike from Peak Cycle Hire or from one of the Derbyshire County Council hire centres. Often she rode the trails created from the old railway lines. But at times, when she felt the need, she would leave the trails and set off on to the moors.

‘Yes, Ringham Moor was one of her favourite places,’ said Mr Weston. ‘We went there once as a family, many years ago. Jenny and John – that’s her brother – and Susan and me, a happy family together.’

And Mr Weston added that he thought, perhaps, Jenny might have been trying to recapture happy memories, a happiness that had escaped her in other ways. He didn’t know what had prompted her to take to the moors on that particular day. He didn’t know why she had headed for Ringham. He had no more answers to give.

Ben Cooper had walked away from the interview dissatisfied. Jenny Weston had not been anyone out of the ordinary. She had achieved nothing exceptional, and nothing extraordinary had happened to her during her lifetime. Could she really just have been another woman who had made all the wrong choices? If so, Jenny had been making the wrong choices right up until the moment she died. And one of those choices had been fatal.

6

The kitchen was the room the Coopers used most at Bridge End Farm. It had that familiar lived-in look which was inevitable with six people in the house, two of them children. Though Ben Cooper still lived at the farm, he had begun to find himself spending less and less time in the company of his brother and his family. He wasn’t sure why this was, when his mother was still upstairs and in need of his support.

Matt had already been driven indoors by the darkness that was steadily drawing in now. He sat at the kitchen table with Farmers Weekly, reading articles predicting more gloom for the farming industry. In the sitting room, Matt’s wife Kate and their daughters were watching cartoons on the TV.

‘We’ll be visiting Dad’s grave next week,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s the anniversary.’

‘As if I would forget,’ said Matt.

Matt turned the page of his magazine, but he no longer seemed to be focusing on the words. ‘Don’t say anything to Mum,’ he said. ‘You know it only upsets her. Now she’s stable, it would be nice if we could keep it like that for a while, rather than causing another episode like the last one. It’s not fair on the girls.’

‘We can’t just say nothing,’ said Cooper. ‘She’d be devastated if she knew we’d been to the cemetery without her.’

‘But if she really hasn’t remembered? Do we risk starting her off again? She’s been doing so well recently. It could set her back months, going over it all again, just because it’s the anniversary. It would be a kindness to let her forget.’

‘I don’t think it’s honest,’ said Cooper.

‘Some things are best not remembered. With luck, her memory will let her down.’

‘So schizophrenia can be a blessing. That’s nice to know.’

‘I didn’t mean that, and you know it.’ Matt put down the Farmers Weekly wearily and rubbed his face. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just –’ He shrugged. ‘There’s no end to it, is there?’

The brothers didn’t need to say any more to each other. It had all been said before, many times.

Kate looked in from the sitting room, releasing a burst of cartoon noise as she opened the door. Matt picked up his magazine again. Cooper had a book on the shelf that he was halfway through reading – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. He always seemed to be years behind what everybody else was talking about. There was so little time to read. And often, like now, he couldn’t concentrate on what was in front of him.

‘Matt, do you know a farmer called Warren Leach?’

‘Leach? Leach … Where does he farm?’

‘Ringham Edge.’

Matt frowned over his pages. ‘I’ve heard of him. I don’t think I’ve ever met him to speak to. Dark-haired bloke, miserable sort?’

‘That sounds like him.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Nothing that I know of. I just came across him on an enquiry.’

‘Ringham Edge. Small dairy herd, is it? And a lot of marginal land?’

‘Yes.’

Matt nodded and went back to his magazine. He turned a page, but found nothing he liked any better.

‘You know, some of them are in deep trouble,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Farmers like Leach at Ringham Edge. Small-scale livestock farmers, with no chance of diversification. But he’s only one of many, of course.’

‘Things looked pretty depressing up there, I must admit.’

‘It’s all pretty depressing. All of it.’

‘Come on, Matt. It’s not that bad.’

‘Yes, it is. It’s all gone to hell. I can’t see the time when farming will ever be the same again. Not around here, anyway. All the small farmers are going out of business. It’s too much for them. Far too much.’

‘Have you heard anything specific about Leach?’

Matt shook his head firmly. ‘I said I’ve seen him, that’s all. I don’t actually know him.’

‘But I expect you might know people who do.’

‘I expect I might,’ said Matt.

‘There could be rumours about him. Farmers talk to each other, don’t they? Down at the mart.’

Matt’s face set into stubborn lines. ‘Are you asking me to find out things about this bloke Leach?’

‘Just … I wondered if you might hear anything, you know. If you did …’

‘Sorry, Ben.’

‘What?’

‘I mean, no, I won’t do it. I don’t much like being asked to be some sort of secret policeman. I don’t like being asked to be a policeman at all, come to that. You’re welcome to that job.’

Kate stood in the doorway. She frowned at Ben and shook her head, scenting an argument between the brothers. She said arguments upset the children. And she was right to be protective – there had been enough disruption in their young lives.

So Ben Cooper said nothing, just nursed his thoughts to himself. He and Matt had never talked about their father properly. Not ever, in the whole of their lives. And when he died, it was too late to start. Yet Cooper longed to know what his brother felt; he wanted to be able to tell him what his own feelings were, how much he had come to resent the memory of their father, and how much that resentment hurt because it was such a contradiction to the way he had viewed him when he was alive. He felt as though he was trampling a fallen idol.

But he suspected that their father still was an idol, of a kind, for Matt. And it was the police that Matt blamed for their father’s death.

Matt could have found out about Warren Leach, if he wanted to. He was right, of course – there were many farmers in trouble. There were farms left standing empty all around the Peak District now. At first, they had been snapped up by wealthy incomers, people who boasted of having ‘a country house with a big garden’, and thought it was a huge joke. Worst of all were the people who played at farming, filling a paddock with rare breeds of sheep, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, a donkey and a goat. They drove the real farmers to apoplexy.

And already buyers were getting choosier. Some of the older, more run-down farms that were coming on the market stayed unsold for many months. New owners could no longer rely on selling the land that went with them to provide the capital for work on the house. Neighbouring farmers didn’t want the land – they couldn’t afford it. And if it was difficult land, the high hill land, it was useless to them anyway. All they could keep on it were a few sheep, which themselves were worth next to nothing.

Cooper went upstairs and looked in at his mother’s bedroom. She was sleeping, and her face was peaceful. He could always tell from her face the state of her mind; the turmoil in her brain was reflected in the contortions of her expression, even in her sleep.

Satisfied, he got washed and changed and went back down to the kitchen. The girls, Amy and Josie, had joined their parents at the table, and the room was full of noise and life. Cooper waved goodbye and walked down the passage to the back door.

For a moment, he stood and looked at the farm. The outline of the buildings became clear as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He could hear the cattle moving quietly, one of the dogs snuffling in the yard, a pheasant cackling, startled by some predator perhaps. Beyond the barn, the dark bulk of the hill came slowly into focus, its crown bare against the sky, but its middle faintly ragged, where the tree line followed the contours of the valley.

Most of the fields down here at Bridge End were good, rich land. They had inherited the farm from their maternal grandfather, who had died at some vast age, still tottering about the place in his ancient shiny black suit and his army boots, with baling twine tied round his trouser bottoms. Officially, the farm had passed to their mother, and still belonged to her. But Matt had been the one to run it, right from the beginning, when he was barely a year or two out of agricultural college and working as a cowman on a big tenanted farm at Rowsley.

Their father, Joe Cooper, had never been interested in the farm. He had been happy to let Matt take charge, though occasionally rolling up his sleeves on his off-duty days to help stack bales of hay or round up the sheep. Joe had been a big, powerful man. It ought to have been Ben Cooper’s abiding memory of him – tall and strong, with heavily muscled forearms and his huge hands wielding a pitchfork, his shirt open at his neck instead of buttoned up with a service tie at his throat, maybe laughing and at ease with his sons. But that wasn’t Ben’s lasting memory. Nothing like it.

Cooper wondered what the future of the farm would be. So many farmers were getting out – going bankrupt or just clearing out of the industry while they could. Pastures had been left to grow weeds and bracken encroached rapidly on to the higher fields, until some farms were like sores on the Peak. It was the farmers, after all, who had looked after the landscape of the national park. Within a generation or two, their absence would change the appearance of the countryside altogether.

A family that lost their farm would join the drift away from the Peak District into the soulless housing estates of the big cities, signing on to the list of unemployed in Sheffield or Manchester while their old homes were taken over by affluent city dwellers, their farmland converted into golf courses or pony trekking centres. To Ben Cooper, it was a neglected tragedy, a kind of surreptitious ethnic cleansing that would never trouble the United Nations.

He felt a familiar object bump his foot by the door. This strangely shaped lump of stone had stood by the back door of the farmhouse for decades, maybe for centuries. It was roughly rounded, with a broader base and a hollow in the middle, with a hole hacked through the bottom.

Everyone had used the stone as a boot scraper or a container for loose screws, until Cooper had seen a photograph in a local history book of an identical object. It was described in the caption as an Iron Age quern, used for grinding corn. It was two thousand years old.

The quern still stood by the back door of Bridge End Farm, unaltered from the last day it had been used for grinding corn. It had been emptied of screws and cleaned up. No boots were scraped on it now. The quern had always stood where it was, as far as anybody knew, so there was no suggestion of moving it. It was preserved for posterity. But nobody used it any more.

Before Cooper could get out of the house, Kate called to him from the passageway.

‘Ben, Helen Milner rang earlier this evening. She sounded a bit upset. She said you were supposed to be meeting her. I told her you were probably working.’

Cooper winced. Helen would have turned up at the rugby club looking for him – they’d had a date tonight. They’d been going out together for only two months. He knew all too well how she would interpret the way he had stood her up.

‘I meant to phone her, but I completely forgot.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Kate. ‘And Helen didn’t sound too surprised, either.’

There was no one waiting at home for Diane Fry when she pulled on to the drive at Grosvenor Avenue. The old house was converted into flats and bedsits, and her neighbours were mostly students that she rarely saw. They seem to spend most of their time in the pub.

Her room was cold, with a peculiar damp chill that seeped from the walls even in summer. She was already realizing what an uncomfortable, depressing experience a winter in Edendale was going to be. The three-bar electric fire barely chased the chill from the room. And it ate money from the meter at an alarming rate.

She wound down with a few stretching exercises, until her body tingled comfortably. She couldn’t remember when she had eaten last, and there was no food in the flat. But fasting was good for the body. It made her stomach feel tight and her brain active. She had found that eating meals caused her digestive system to drain her energy. Fry examined herself in the mirror. There was no injury to be seen on her own face. But it didn’t mean there was no scar. It meant only that it was the sort of scar that nobody else could see, that no one else could tell the way she was marked. That was how she was so much luckier than Maggie Crew. So lucky.

Like Maggie, unwilling to reveal her disfigurement to the gaze of a stranger, Fry knew the bitter taste of resentment against someone who knew your innermost secrets. She had felt like telling Maggie that she ought to get out and face people. But surely it was equally futile to try to avoid the person you resented.

‘What an idiot,’ she said, then mentally gave herself a reprimand for talking to herself. But she had meant it for Ben Cooper really, thinking of him buddying up so cosily with Todd Weenink. In the end, they were two of a kind. Besides, she thought, even Ben Cooper didn’t know all her secrets.

Fry drove into Sheffield, gradually relaxing as the vast sprawl of houses and factories closed around her, shielding her from the dark hills she was leaving behind in Derbyshire. She had first travelled into the city when she needed to find a martial arts centre away from Edendale, where the dojo used by Ben Cooper had become a no-go zone. Seeing the city streets then had reminded her exactly why she had come to this area.

She went straight into the centre of the city, circled the ring road and parked in a multi-storey car park near one of the main shopping streets, The Moor. Then she walked back towards the transport interchange at the bottom of the hill and waited for the carriages of a Supertram to pass before crossing the road.

The old railway arches at this end of the city would disappear when modernization reached them. But for now, they were home to a small group of people. No, not a group – they were a series of individuals. They lay in sleeping bags, under filthy blankets and cardboard boxes, huddled close together, yet still in their own completely separate worlds, not speaking to each other or acknowledging anyone else at all. They had isolated themselves for their own protection. Fry knew that the human mind was capable of shutting out many things when necessary, even the close proximity of other people.

The canal passed under the railway line here. There was a lock full of scum-covered water, waiting to lift boats another ten feet towards the hills around the city. The spaces under the arches had once been used for workshops and storage areas. For years now they had been boarded up, but the boards had been ripped off the doorways, exposing deep, dank caverns it would be foolish to enter.

Fry waited by the lock gate. After a few minutes, a figure stepped out of the shadows at the back of the arch and came towards her. It was a woman, a few years younger than herself. Her eyes looked simultaneously beaten and defiant.

‘I’ve not seen you around here before. What is it you want?’

Fry stared at her hard, but failed to see what she wanted to see. ‘I’m just looking,’ she said.

‘Are you after sex? Drugs?’

‘No.’

‘You must be the cops, then.’

‘I’m looking for this woman.’

Fry took the photograph from her wallet. It was old and worn, taken at least ten years ago. She knew it was futile hoping for an identification, but she had to keep trying. If you gave up trying, you gave up everything.

‘Never seen her before.’

‘You haven’t looked properly.’

‘Is she in trouble, then?’ The woman looked at the photo, and pulled a face, curling her lip and wrinkling her nose. ‘Nah. She’s too clean, for a start. And what sort of hairstyle is that, I ask you?’

‘She may not look like that any more,’ said Fry.

‘Eh?’ She laughed. ‘You’re wasting your time then, aren’t you, duck?’

The woman walked away. Just like all the others did. Fry wanted to get her into a wrist hold, lock the kwik-cuffs, take her back to the station and question her until she found out what she wanted to know. But she was out of her territory here, in the position of begging for information. And she was taking enough risks as it was. In fact, she was a damned idiot. What had stirred up her need to follow this quest? It was a need she had tried to suppress for a long time, so why should it surface now? But she knew why. It was another thing that was the fault of Ben Cooper.

Fry considered how out of place Cooper would be here, in the city. He was chained like a prisoner to the area he came from. He would be completely lost in these streets; but he was never lost on the moors. Ben Cooper smelled his way around like a sheepdog – she had seen him do it, and it drove her mad.

But even Cooper would be indoors by now, probably at home among his relatives at that farm on the road towards Hucklow. He would be comfortably settled in his nest, just like the cattle lying in their straw in the sheds she had seen there once.

For Diane Fry, indoors was always the safest place to be. No one would choose to be out on the hills at night.

And now it was totally dark on the moor – a world of multiple shades of black that formed imaginary shapes and half-seen movements on the edge of his vision. The dancers weren’t afraid of the dark, and nor was he. He loved to go wandering at night above the quarry, his arms outstretched like a blind man, gently feeling his way through the darkness, caressing the skins of the thin birches, touching the leaves that appeared in front of his face, letting his feet whisper and sigh in the heather, navigating by the glint of a star on a fragment of quartz.

In the darkness, he was able to sense the world completely. Not just the little bit around him, but the entire breadth and stretch of it, the whole roll and curve of its body and the movement of its breath. He could feel the warmth of the earth underfoot and touch the great, empty reaches of the sky. With a still mind and total concentration on the rhythms of his body, he could lift himself off the ground and soar into the sky. He had learned to see the darkened landscape flying past below him, drawing away from him faster and faster, until he could see the whole of the valley down there, the whole of the Peak District, the whole of Derbyshire, with its towns and villages suddenly dwindling into insignificance among the black hills, and the long strings of streetlights turning as fragile as the strands of a cobweb.

It was all so tiny and unimportant down there. It was nothing but a film of human detritus on the face of the earth. All it would take was one last heave of the tectonic plates below the surface, and all those towns and villages would be gone for ever as the landscape rearranged itself, tucking away the evidence of civilization like a chambermaid tidying the bedclothes, like a housewife shaking out the sheets to toss away the dead skin and fluff, and straightening out the covers to hide the stains.

He liked to imagine this happening; he cherished the image like a comforting dream. It was not so long ago, after all, that the last volcano had splashed lava and red-hot ash over the valley of the Derwent, and the last glaciers had ground their way through the limestone to carve those scenic gorges. Five hundred thousand years or so? It was nothing in a couple of million. And man had been here only a few thousand of those years, electric light a hundred. Nature could shrug off the infestation of civilization with one gentle spasm, the irritated twitch of a shoulder to shake off a fly. Then new valleys and lakes would appear, and entirely different hills would rise up in between them. And the birches would begin the task of colonization all over again.

He had no doubt this would happen one day. But not in his lifetime. The time of the promised millennial cataclysms had long since passed, leaving just more of the same petty human pain and despair.

No, he didn’t fear the darkness; he liked it. But tonight there were people on the moor, policemen and lights. They were in the middle of the stone circle, like the occupants of an alien spacecraft, turning the night into a fairground, destroying the silence with the thump of their generator and their bored, meaningless chatter.

He knew their lights would make the shadows in the trees seem even darker, so that he was invisible to their unpractised eyes. It allowed him to get closer, until he was near enough to hear the Virgins sighing and singing in the wind, near enough to catch the faint fragments of the Fiddler’s tune, its notes tangling in the tops of the birches and dropping to the ground with the leaves as they died. There was no dance tonight, only a dirge. There was no hope in the music that he heard, no whispers of encouragement from the stones.

And he knew it wouldn’t happen for him now. He had thought his own world could be changed, that his life could be stripped and made afresh, the evidence of his past tucked away, the stains hidden from sight. But he had seen her face. And now it was too late.

7

Ben Cooper rubbed a hand across his eyes. There were too many bodies pressed close around him in the darkness. He could feel their heat, smell their sweat and their cotton shirts, hear their breathing and the scraping of their boots. But all he could see was a bright square and a few vague shapes, the outline of a head or shoulder here and there on the edge of the light.

Just before they vanished, the Virgins had seemed to move. They had shuffled right and left, faded in and out of focus, come closer and backed away, as if they had been caught for a moment in a celebratory dance. Then they had disappeared with a click and the whirr of a motor, flicking out of sight in a white glare, with tendrils of smoke left drifting in the beam.

Cooper shifted uneasily, frustrated by the inactivity. It was early in the morning, but his mind was already alert. In fact, his imagination was streaming ahead of the facts, and vivid images were flipping through his brain. Yesterday, he had stood on Ringham Moor himself. He had felt the bite of the wind up there, and listened to it hissing through the dying heather as the birch leaves crackled under his feet. And he had seen where all this started – with the stones.

One indistinct shape stood out from the others in the darkness. From the corner of his eye, a subtle change in the pattern of the shadows suggested a face had turned towards him for a second. Cooper felt the brief glance like a draught of air entering the room and stroking its fingers across his face. Suddenly, he felt self-conscious and conspicuous, afraid to move a muscle for fear of drawing attention to himself. He knew it was not in his interest to attract her attention. He wouldn’t know what on earth to say to her if he did.

A voice came out of the darkness. ‘Forty feet across, on a shallow, sandy floor. Drag marks nearly twenty feet into the centre. No signs of a struggle. However …’

The next slide appeared on the screen, bizarre and meaningless until the projector pulled it into focus. To Cooper, it looked as if an aerial shot had been taken from high above the earth, where the hull of an ancient boat lay half-buried in a desert. There was a ragged elliptical shape, dark red and scattered with black flecks. It was set in a strange, grainy yellow landscape like deep sand that blurred the edges of the shape and rolled away towards distant orange hills that cast no shadows.

He might have been looking at some kind of Noah’s Ark, stranded on a remote mountainside in Syria, the subject of endless arguments about its reality. The jagged black marks in the centre could have been the remains of a petrified wheelhouse, crumbled masts and decking, or rigging long since turned to dust. But there was no natural sunlight in this desert, only artificial colours.

Then a shadow moved in front of the screen, and a weary face was caught by the light of the projector.

‘You can all see what this is. It needs no explanation from me. Death would have occurred within minutes.’

Cooper had to shake himself out of his daydream. The police officers around him became solid shapes again, reverting to the familiar faces of a Derbyshire CID team. On the screen, they were being shown an enhanced postmortem image, a photograph taken on the mortuary slab. The red ellipse was the entry wound made by a sharp, single-bladed knife an inch below the bottom rib. A fatal stab wound to the heart. Those pale orange hills were human flesh – the slope of a woman’s abdomen and the lower edge of her ribcage. The grains of sand were her pores and skin cells, enlarged beyond recognition, distorted by lighting that drained all remnants of humanity from the corpse.

This yellow desert was the body of Jenny Weston. And no one was arguing the reality of her death. It was much too late for that.

‘And we found so many damn camp fires you’d think there had been a boy scout jamboree up there,’ said DCI Tailby, as the slide changed to a view of Ringham Moor. Cooper saw few smiles, and heard no laughter. It was too early in the morning, the subject was too lacking in the potential for a quick joke. The DCI tried again. ‘But the SOCOs tell us these were no boy scouts. Not unless they give badges for sex, drugs and animal sacrifice in the scouts these days.’

The briefing had been called early, while it was still dark. Many of the officers looked tired and bleary-eyed. They had gone to bed late last night and hadn’t got enough sleep. But they would wake up as the day went on, as the caffeine kicked in and they were forced to concentrate on their tasks.

The incident room at Edendale Divisional Headquarters was only half full. Ben Cooper had been expecting there would be hardly anywhere left to sit by the time he arrived, but he was surprised by the sparse attendance. Then he discovered that teams were already out at the scene, up on the moor waiting for first light to continue the careful sweep for delicate forensic traces that would vanish or be utterly contaminated at the first sign of heavy rain or the first set of feet to trample over the site.

Alongside Tailby sat the Divisional Commander, Colin Jepson. They had to call him Chief Superintendent Jepson now. Although the rank was supposed to have been abolished in the 1980s, Derbyshire Constabulary had restored the title for its divisional commanders, though without the salary level that went with it.

No detective superintendent had arrived yet, though Edendale was still without its own CID chief. For the time being, Tailby was being allowed to make the running. Cooper thought the DCI looked a little greyer at the temples than the day before, a little more stooped at the shoulders.

The slide show they had begun with was depressing enough. The photographer had captured a chill bleakness in his establishing shots of the moor, and an impressionistic arrangement of angles and perspective in his close-ups of the Virgins. The slides of the victim had silenced the room, except for an increased shuffling of boots on the floor. They showed in brutal clarity the curious position of the woman’s limbs, the absence of clothing on the lower half of her body, the red stain on her T-shirt. After the unsettling realism, the autopsy shots had concluded on a note of fantasy. As usual, they seemed divorced from the actual death, too clinical, and reeking too much of antiseptic to be human.

The most interesting result from the postmortem was that there had been no sign of sexual assault on Jenny Weston. So why had some of the victim’s clothes been removed? There were two main possibilities – either her killer had been interrupted, or the intention had been to mislead the police.

Now, with the lights on again, Tailby was forced to admit that all they knew so far about the circumstances of Jenny Weston’s death was the situation they had found on Ringham Moor, and a bewildering array of items recovered by the SOCOs.

‘These camp fires – are they recent, sir?’ asked someone.

‘Some are clearly quite old,’ said Tailby. ‘A couple of months anyway, dating from the summer, when there is most activity up there. But others are more recent, with ash still present – we would expect it to be washed away into the ground after a few spells of rainfall. But the Peak Park Rangers for that area tell us there are often people camping on Ringham Moor, even in September and October. Right through the middle of winter sometimes. Even in the snow.’

‘We’ve got some right little Sir Edmund Hillarys, haven’t we?’

It had to be Todd Weenink who couldn’t resist. He looked as crumpled as the rest, perhaps even more so. He had almost certainly had more to drink the night before than the average man could take. Casual flippancy seemed to seep out of him like sweat from a ripe Stilton. Cooper watched Tailby’s grey eyes warm as he glanced at Weenink, grateful for the response.

‘Of course, there’s no indication so far that anybody camping out on the moor is necessarily a suspect for the attack on our latest victim, or even a witness. However …’ Tailby pinned a photograph to a big cork board. ‘By a stroke of luck, we also have this.’

The photo showed a patch of grey ash, with a few black sticks of charred wood poking through it. The ash looked as though it had been roughly brushed over. And there, to one side, was the partial imprint of the sole of a boot or shoe.

‘It’s early days, yet,’ said the DCI. ‘But we’re hopeful of an identification on the footwear. There’s sufficient impression from the sole to get a match, we think.’

‘But was it made at the time, sir?’

‘Ah.’ Tailby pointed to a small, dark smudge on the photograph. ‘This is a trace of the victim’s blood. The significant thing about it is that the print was made on top of the blood stain while it was still fresh.’

He nodded with some degree of satisfaction. Early forensic evidence was exactly what everyone prayed for. A boot print that would connect its wearer to the scene at the time of the offence – what better could they ask for at such an early stage? Well, a suspect with footwear to compare the boot print to, that’s what.

‘Read the preliminary crime scene report,’ said Tailby.

There was another shuffling of papers. Cooper looked down at his file. There was a computer-printed list of items retrieved from the area around the Virgins, but it was a long one, difficult to take in. The SOCOs had taken samples of vegetation, including heather, whinberry, gorse and three types of grass. They had taken sections of bark from the trunks of the birches where they had been cut by a knife or splashed with an unknown substance. They had brought in stones, half-bricks, bags of ash and cinders, sheets of corrugated iron, a small metal grille like a fire grate, a burnt corner of the Sheffield Star where half a dozen screwed-up pages had been used to help light a fire, a British Midland Airways refresher tissue wrapper, a whole pile of aluminium ring-pulls, several cigarette butts, a Findus crispy pancake packet, and a selection of used condoms.

The forensic team had covered a wide area – all of the clearing around the stones, right into the birches and as far as the fence around the edge of the quarry. The SOCOs must have balked at the view to the east, towards the edge of the plateau. Cooper could remember a sea of bracken – damp, endless acres of it, stretching to the Hammond Tower and beyond, flowing over the edge of the cliff, dense and almost impenetrable. Beyond the bracken was a low wire fence with wooden posts, then beyond it a precipitous drop. From there, an object would plummet a thousand feet into the trees that grew at acute angles on the lower edges of the slope into the dale.

Scrapings had been taken from a pool of white wax that had solidified in the hollow of a rotten tree, while digging in what at first appeared to be a rubbish hole turned up the bones of an animal. There were latent prints collected from the handlebars, saddle, front wheel and crossbar of the Dawes Kokomo Jenny Weston had been riding, and more samples of blood had been scraped from the frame of the bike.

‘We think the names on the stones are just old graffiti. The inscription scraped on the ground is more recent. It looks like “STRIDE”. If it means anything at all to anybody, speak up.’

Nobody spoke. They were looking at two more photographs on the board behind Tailby. There were two women, alive and smiling at the camera, though the one on the left looked guarded, maybe a little bit haughty, as if the photographer were taking a liberty getting her in the shot.

‘Are we looking at the same assailant in both cases?’ said Tailby. ‘Someone who was practising, as it were, on the earlier victim, Maggie Crew? Are we looking at someone who has succeeded in perfecting his technique with Jenny Weston?’

It was a very strange idea of perfection. Ben Cooper looked to see whether the other officers were reacting the same way. But most of them showed no surprise at the irony of the thought. Then something made him glance towards the far side of the room. Leaning casually against a desk was Diane Fry. She’d had her fair hair cut even shorter, and it gave an angular look to her lean face. He was sure she had lost weight, too. She had been slim before, but now there was a suggestion of something taut and thinly-stretched.

‘Don’t let ideas like that distract you,’ said Tailby. ‘We are treating this incident as an entirely separate enquiry, until the evidence proves otherwise. At this stage, we’re concentrating on collecting information. All right?’

His audience seemed to take this as a cue to start shuffling their papers again, looking for what information there already was. Cooper dragged his eyes away from Fry and did the same. At this stage, the information was pretty thin. Forensics results were awaited. Initial witness reports were sparse. True, they had details of Jenny Weston – who she was, where she lived, what she had done for a living. The minute details of her life were starting to emerge. But there was nothing to show what had made her go cycling on Ringham Moor on an early November afternoon, and why she had ended up dead among the Nine Virgins.

‘Somebody must have seen Jenny before she was killed. Maybe, just maybe, somebody also saw her killer. So have we got any leads so far? Paul?’

DI Hitchens stood up, straightening his jacket, looking much smarter this morning in his dark grey suit.

‘We’re looking at the likelihood that the killer arrived at Ringham Moor by car,’ he said. ‘We’ve already visited the houses close to the parking places on the edges of the moor, and we’ve collected a list of vehicles that were noticed around the time of the incident. It goes without saying that the vast majority of those vehicles will be totally impossible to trace. We’re lucky, though. If it had been the height of summer, it would be a lot worse.’

There were sighs and nods. It was a problem nobody in E Division needed telling about. The number of cars from out of the area greatly outnumbered the locally registered ones, especially in summer. Many of the Peak District’s twenty-five million visitors a year drove through Edendale and its surrounding villages at some time. Most were just passing through and were no different from a million other tourist cars. Nobody took any notice of them individually – they were just an anonymous mass, a crawling stream of red and blue insects covering the roads and car parks like insects swarming in the August heat. They were a naturally occurring phenomenon, like greenfly.

Visitors and their cars brought their own kind of problems for crime management. The mention of them reminded Ben Cooper that, right now, he should have been in the Crime Strategy Meeting.

‘We need to trace Jenny Weston’s movements exactly, particularly in the last couple of hours before she died. DCs Cooper and Weenink will start with the cycle hire centre at Partridge Cross this morning,’ said Tailby.

Weenink sat just behind Cooper in the incident room. He had a seat against the wall, his shoulders almost making a dent in the plaster. He looked as though he wanted to put his feet up on the table, but was resisting the temptation. There were only five officers in the Edendale section CID now, a closer-knit grouping since the recent reorganization. Cooper hadn’t known Weenink so well before. He had the sneaking feeling that there was no one in the division who envied him.

For a while, Cooper had been convinced that his fall from popularity had only one cause – the arrival in E Division of Diane Fry, on a transfer from West Midlands. She was ambitious; some might say ruthless. Her arrival had coincided with the moment things had started to go wrong for Cooper, when his hopes of promotion had been set back in favour of hers. Fry seemed not to have put a foot wrong so far. There were people who made all the right moves without trying; and there were others who followed their own instinct wherever it might take them, and ended up in the mire. Cooper blamed himself for being naive with Diane Fry. It took time to earn trust.

Probably his father would have been able to tell him that. His father had seen everything there was to be known about office politics and in-fighting inside the police service. He had managed to steer clear of all that; he had never fallen victim to backstabbing from his colleagues. It had been the street that had killed him, in the end.

‘There are a number of names and addresses on the list for interview this morning,’ said Hitchens. ‘Colleagues, friends, neighbours. We expect the list to increase as the day goes on. There have been several boyfriends, according to the father. They all have to be traced. Fortunately, we have the victim’s own address book from her house. And, of course, there is the ex-husband. We need to dig out the details of Jenny Weston’s life. Narrow those names down. Give us something to go on.’

‘Hey, Ben,’ said Weenink when the meeting broke up. ‘This tracing her route business – are they saying we’ve got to go by bike?’

‘Of course not,’ said Cooper.

‘Thank God for that.’

‘We’ll walk.’

DI Hitchens touched Diane Fry’s arm and kept her back while the others left the incident room. DCI Tailby looked at them both thoughtfully. Fry knew she must have had his backing to get the move up to Acting Detective Sergeant, but she wasn’t quite sure how to read him yet. She was more comfortable working with either Hitchens or DI Armstrong, both of whom she felt she understood.

‘The ex-husband, Martin Stafford …’ said Tailby.

‘Do we have an address?’ asked Fry.

‘No, but we should be able to track him down through his employment record. He was a journalist, at least while he was married to Jenny Weston. I’ve asked for somebody to visit his old employers in Derby to look at his personnel records. With luck, they should have a note of any reference they gave him when he moved on. He may be completely out of the area by now, of course. Journalists move around quite a bit.’

‘What about a current boyfriend?’

‘Nobody seems sure who the latest one was, Diane,’ said Hitchens. ‘There are one or two of the girls at the call centre that she talked to about boyfriends sometimes. But they were very vague. Obviously, we’re going through the address book. But she used phone numbers, not addresses. Results might take a little time.’

‘I see.’

‘We do have this note.’ Hitchens held up an evidence bag. ‘One of the team found it in the back of her diary.’

‘What is it?’ said Tailby. ‘A love letter?’

‘Hardly a letter. It’s only two lines. And there’s no evidence love was involved either. The note reads: “Nine o’clock Friday at the cottage. Buy some fruit-flavoured ones.”’

Tailby stared at him. Fry remembered that the DCI was a lay preacher at a United Reformed Church in Dronfield.

‘We believe it’s a reference to contraceptives, sir,’ said Hitchens.

‘Yes?’

‘Condoms. We think it’s a fair assumption that the note is from a boyfriend. There’s no date, and it’s unsigned. But it looks fairly recent. Otherwise, why would it still be in her diary?’

‘Good point.’ Tailby put down the reports and took off his glasses.

‘I take it you are to remain as SIO, sir?’ asked Hitchens.

‘Detective Superintendent Prince is tied up with this case in Derby, the double shooting,’ said Tailby. ‘A drugs territory dispute. We’re getting some stick about it down there, apparently.’

‘Yes.’

‘It means Mr Prince can only keep a watching brief on this case, I’m afraid. But he thinks we’ve got a good start.’

‘Possibly,’ said Hitchens. ‘But there is speculation about the other attack.’

Tailby shook his head. ‘They smell different to me. This Jenny Weston sounds like a woman who got involved with the wrong sort of chap. It’s an old story. You’ll see.’

8

The Partridge Cross cycle hire centre was in a converted railway station. Past it ran what had once been the Cromford & High Peak rail line, now the High Peak Trail, a smoothly tarmacked stretch of track perfect for walkers and cyclists.

There was still a morning mist lingering in places, and the old railway cuttings seemed to have drawn it down on to the trail. It gave a damp nip to the air that hit Ben Cooper and Todd Weenink as soon as they got out of the car. But there were already vehicles in the car park. Some had cycle racks on their tailgates and mountain bikes hoisted high in the air. A family with three small children were strapping on their safety helmets ready to hit the trail. There were no traces of Jenny Weston left here now.

The day’s weather forecast from the Met Office was posted on a board outside the hire centre, next to a notice warning hirers that bikes had to be returned by 6 p.m. in the summer, or by dusk in the winter. At the other end of the building a counter concession was selling ice cream, sweets and canned drinks. In a compound, they saw at least one Dawes Kokomo among the tandems and trailer cycles. Before they went into the hire centre, they stopped and looked at the bikes.

‘You wouldn’t get me on one of these,’ said Weenink, immediately sitting astride a tandem and looking like a cowboy trying to mount a donkey. ‘Unless it was with the right bird on the back, of course. Preferably the local bike, up for a quick pedal in the woods.’

Across the car park was the Ranger centre, a two-storey converted barn. They had passed it on the way in, and Cooper had noticed Owen Fox’s silver Land Rover parked in the yard.

They found Don Marsden, the cycle hire manager, leaning against a wooden counter, wiping his hands on a cloth. He had been tinkering with one of the hire bikes, checking the tightness of the forks on the wheels, testing the brakes and adjusting the saddle. Now he was waiting for his first customer of the morning, a blank page of the log book in front of him.

Marsden wore a red sweater like a Ranger, but with a different logo on the breast pocket. He didn’t look like a cyclist himself – he had a heavy paunch pushing out the front of his sweater and a goatee beard covering part of his double chin. Behind the counter, the office he worked in was crowded. It contained everything from a microwave oven and a personal computer with drifting parabolic shapes filling its screen, to displays of maps and route guides. It was just gone nine thirty and the centre had been open only a few minutes. Marsden gave them a cheerful greeting, and his cheerfulness didn’t falter even when he discovered they were police officers.

‘I was told you’d be back,’ he said, offering his hand.

‘We’ve got your earlier statement,’ said Cooper. ‘We’re just trying to establish the victim’s exact movements yesterday.’

‘Fair enough.’ Don leaned on the counter with an expectant smile.

‘Is this the woman you remember seeing?’ Cooper produced a copy of the photograph provided by Eric Weston, a picture of Jenny at her cousin’s wedding two years before. Jenny was dressed in a dove grey suit. Unlike the others in the wedding group, she was not wearing a hat, and her dark hair curled round her face, the strands of it echoing the curve of her smile. She looked as though she had been enjoying herself for once.

‘Oh, yes. I don’t need to see the photo either,’ said Don. ‘I remember her. Weston, that’s right. She’s here in the book. She took out a mountain bike at twelve forty-five. It was what she always had. She was a regular, you see.’

‘A regular? How often did she come?’

‘About once every two weeks in the summer. I think she probably went to some of the other hire centres on the weekends in between. Winter, it depended on the weather. But we’re open every day of the year here, except Christmas Day.’

‘So you knew who she was.’

‘I recognized her, of course. And you get to know the names of the regulars, after a bit. You have to enter it in the book, see, and on the computer. They have to show me some ID and put a deposit down on the bike. Twenty quid, it is. She gave me cash. Do you know …?’

‘Somebody else will sort that out, I expect,’ said Cooper.

‘Right. Only it’s not something that’s happened to me before, the customer dying before they can reclaim their deposit. It’s not in the regulations.’

Weenink had been flicking through leaflets advertising the local attractions of Lathkill Dale and Carsington Water. Now he seemed to take notice for the first time of what Marsden was saying.

‘Did she chat to you, then?’ he asked. ‘I mean, did she just come in, pay the money and take the bike, or did she pass the time of day a bit?’

‘She didn’t say much really,’ admitted Don. ‘She was pleasant, you know. But I wouldn’t have said she was the chatty type. Not with me, anyway. Women on their own are a bit distant these days. They learn not to be too friendly.’

He sounded regretful. Cooper wondered what his prospects were as an interviewee when the reporters and TV crews arrived, as they surely would. It was lucky they had got to Don Marsden before the cameras. He had a feeling the story might get embellished along the way later on.

‘So what else do you know about her?’ suggested Weenink.

Don shook his head. ‘Just where she came from. I’ve got her address, look. The Quadrant, Totley, Sheffield. I’ve been through it once or twice, I think. She normally showed me her driving licence for ID. We have to go through the procedure every time. Can’t make exceptions. But as for knowing anything about her – not really. Except I don’t think she was married.’

‘Oh? What makes you say that?’

‘Dunno really. Just the way she was. Friendly, yeah. But it was more like she seemed to be able to please herself what she did. I had the impression there probably wasn’t a husband and kids at home waiting for her to get back. Do you know what I mean?’

Weenink simply stared at the cycle hire man. This was his principal interrogation technique, the intimidatory stare. He had perfected the art of silent disbelief.

‘You’re quite observant really, Don,’ said Cooper.

‘I think so. You see all sorts here, you know. You get to recognize the types.’

‘It was a quarter to one when she came in, you said.’

‘That’s right. It’s in the book.’

‘You saw her arrive, did you?’

‘Yeah. I was standing in the doorway there, as it happens. It was quiet, like now. Maybe not so quiet as this, but quiet anyway. I saw her car pull up. A Fiat, right? So I came back in, and I had a bike ready for her. I knew what she’d want.’

‘Where did she park?’ asked Weenink, though he knew exactly where the Fiat had been found.

‘Just over there, the first bay on the left.’

‘Were there any other cars here?’

‘One or two. Three or four, maybe. I didn’t really count them.’

‘Anybody else that you knew? Any other regulars?’

‘No. But the ones who hired bikes are in the book here. The other policemen took their names and addresses. Of course, there are some folk who bring their own bikes. They don’t come in here at all unless they want a map or something, or they want to ask directions. Some walk or go jogging. Them I don’t notice so much.’

Cooper turned the book round to look at it. The next bike hire recorded after Jenny Weston’s entry was nearly half an hour later, when a tandem had been signed out to a couple called Sharman, from Matlock. Other hirers weren’t his concern, for now. Checking them out was somebody else’s job.

‘Did Jenny Weston ever tell you where she was heading?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Don. ‘But she usually set off eastwards, down the trail towards Ashbourne.’

‘Is that what she did yesterday?’

‘That’s right. It’s sensible for somebody on their own to tell me where they’re going. In case they have an accident or something, you know. There are times when people get lost and are really late back with the bikes. You start to wonder whether something’s happened to them. But there’s not much you can do, if you’ve no idea where they’ve set off to.’

‘Jenny’s bike was overdue for being returned, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah, it was. She had a three-hour ticket. It should have been back here by a quarter to four, by rights. You have to pay extra if you go over – two pounds more. Or you can lose your twenty quid altogether. We’re supposed to close at dusk anyway.’

‘Did you worry about the fact she wasn’t back?’

‘I thought it was unusual, that’s all. There’s plenty of folk late back. But it was odd for her. She’d never been late before, so I did wonder. But when it came time to close, I would have been reporting in. Head office would have made a decision whether to call you lot. But, of course, young Mark Roper found her before that, didn’t he?’

Cooper pricked up his ears. ‘How did you hear that?’

‘Owen Fox told me. He came through from the Ranger centre when he heard. It’s practically next door, see.’

‘Do you work closely with the Rangers?’

‘We help each other out a bit. I’ve known Owen Fox for years. Good bloke, Owen.’

Weenink had wandered past the wooden barrier and was examining the bikes stacked in the back of the building.

‘Hey, look at this.’ He had found a machine that looked like a wheelchair with a unicycle welded on to the front. It had no pedals, but there were two handles in front of the rider, attached to a gear wheel. Weenink squeezed himself into the seat and waggled the steering from side to side.

‘They’re hand-cranked,’ said Don, watching him cautiously. ‘For disabled people, you know.’

‘Brilliant.’

Cooper felt Weenink was starting to become an embarrassment. It always happened when he got bored.

‘Well, thanks for your time, Don.’

‘No problem. As you can see, I’ve got no customers.’

‘You might find it gets busier later on.’

‘Doubt it. Not at this time of the year, on a Monday. And half-term isn’t until next week.’

‘No, you don’t understand. Once people see the news about the murder, it’ll be crowded down here.’

Don looked shocked. ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? Why should people want to come here?’

Cooper shrugged. ‘I can’t explain it. But they will.’

‘Oh, they’ll be running coach trips,’ said Weenink, grinning from the doorway. ‘Tours for Ghouls Limited.’

‘Not to mention the newspapers and the TV cameras.’

‘Blimey.’ Don looked nervously out of the doorway at the bike compound. ‘I didn’t expect that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect people would be like that. Perhaps I’d better ring the boss and ask if I can close up for the day.’

‘Close? Why would you want to do that? You could be a TV star, mate,’ said Weenink.

Don smiled uncertainly. As they walked away, he was watching the car park entrance. He still wasn’t sure whether they were joking.

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 Stafford 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 uncomfortable 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 neighbours 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, possibly 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 disgruntled 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 stability 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.

Todd Weenink looked up towards the road at the sound of a car approaching the cycle hire centre. Ben Cooper saw his partner stiffen, and heard him start to curse, low but vehemently. Spurts of Weenink’s breath were hitting the air, swirling ominously. Cooper could almost see the curses forming into dark, solid lumps in the mist.

‘Don’t look now, Ben, but the weather just got a few degrees colder round here,’ said Weenink.

The car that splashed through the puddles and pulled up in front of the hire centre was a black Peugeot. When it stopped, the headlights were turned down to sidelights, but its doors remained closed and no one got out. It sat there with traces of steam rising from its bonnet and mingling with the mist. And with each tick of its cooling engine, Cooper felt his heart chill a little more.

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