Dancing With the Virgins (15 page)

*

Diane Fry was relieved that Cooper was quiet for once.
Privately, she had no doubt they were wasting their
time. The leads would come from elsewhere than from
wandering around the landscape. There had to be a link between Jenny Weston's death and the previous assault
— it was no more than half a mile away that Maggie
Crew had been attacked among the boulders of the Cat
Stones. Maggie and Jenny had been two women alone,
unsuspecting. One was unable to describe her assailant;
the second was dead. The worst scenario was that the
victims had been chosen at random. Stranger murders
meant no witness trail, and no motivation. The lack of
relationship between victim and killer presented the investigator with a hopeless task
.

That was why they needed Maggie Crew. Some day, in some way, she would provide them with an identifi
cation. Her memories had to come back
.

At the top of the farm track, they met up with DCs
Toni Gardner and Danny Boyle, who had been working
their way backwards from the stone circle, via the
Hammond Tower. They shook their heads at each other.
A waste of time, they said. Then they walked back towards the Nine Virgins, where the group of uniformed officers guarded the taped-off scene
.

Fry looked at the stones in incomprehension. What
was all the fuss about? She could think of lots of better
places to come to at night, even if what you wanted to do was take off your clothes and light fires and smoke
a bit of cannabis.

‘
Kind of small for Stonehenge, isn't it?' she said. But
Cooper didn't rise to the bait
.

One stone had a flat top, and she found it was big
enough to sit on comfortably. But then she remembered
some of the traces that the SOCOs had collected from
the stones and it occurred to her the flat stone had
probably been used for other things than just sitting on.
She looked around for Cooper again.

‘
The Nine Virgins? You people round here really do
have active imaginations, don't you?
’

Still he didn't respond. After a moment, they headed
southwards, to where there was a view down on to
Ringham Lees village. Swathes of leaves lined the path,
and tiny quartz crystals glittered in the sand like frag
ments of glass. The birches rattled their dry leaves, and
a pair of jays darted at each other among the trees. They could see there were members of the public on the moor
now, lots of them. A small, fat man in a green bubble
jacket stood by the side of the path and waited for them
to draw level. He looked at Fry eagerly.
'Where are her clothes?' he said.

‘
What?'

‘
Keep walking,' said Cooper, without looking round.
Fry wanted to question the little man, but she fol
lowed Cooper as he veered off and took a rabbit track
across the heather. The rough stems of the plants
grabbed at her ankles. At one spot there was an area a few square yards wide which had been burned off, leaving black, brittle stalks that crumbled underfoot and a
layer of ash that was gradually being washed into the
ground by the rain.

‘
Hold on, Ben.
’

He stopped impatiently. 'He's just one of the local
weirdos. You can spot them a mile off. Let the uniforms
deal with him.'

‘
I can't believe people like that. They're sick.
’

‘
Right. But he's probably already in a Care in the Community scheme, or something.'

‘
What the hell's that?'

‘
Care in the Community? Well, it's a bit difficult to explain —'

‘
No — that.
’

Fry was pointing at a fungus clinging to the bark of
an oak tree. It was like nothing she had ever seen before.
It was pale and bulbous, like a human organ that had
been bleached or left out in the rain. She put her hand
to it gingerly. It was firm to the touch at first, but gave
under the pressure of her fingers like a fresh bread roll.
White, not wholemeal. The fungus was dry on top, but
cold and clammy underneath, and it moved slightly under her fingers
.

Then she noticed that there were lots more fungi on
the ground, all different kinds. Some were dark and
coiled like dog turds, but black and ragged at the edges,
as if they had been half eaten. Other fungi were like stones, some like cups, some like human ears
.

Fry stared at them with revulsion. How anybody
could visit this moor for pleasure she could not imagine.
There was nothing to recommend it to anyone, except
to the weirdos and the ghouls attracted by death and
the bizarre
.

*

Ben Cooper set off again and managed to get ahead of Fry to reach the edge of the plateau, where it dropped
away into the valley. He stood on the precipice and felt
the wind catch his breath and freeze the lobes of his
ears. He felt as though he could step off the edge and
let the wind carry him away across the patchwork of
fields and dry-stone walls
.

From his vantage point, Cooper could see the people
on the moor winding their way in ones and twos
through the heather and bracken. Yet the place still had
a feeling of solitude and isolation, somewhere you could
just be yourself, free of expectations. He understood what Jenny Weston had seen in the moor.

‘
It's so cold and bleak,' said Fry, catching up with
him. 'What's the name of that pub in Ringham where
we can get lunch?'

‘
The Druid,' he said, brought suddenly to earth.

‘
God, those Victorians. Romantic minds, they had.
Anything more than a few years old had to be connected
with Ancient Britons and Druids, didn't it? In actual
fact, most of these rocks were just dropped here by
glaciers or something, and got worn into these shapes
by the appalling weather you get up here.'

‘
Well, I suppose so.'

‘
You sound disappointed. A bit of a Victorian yourself, aren't you, Ben? A romantic at heart?'

‘
We can get down to the village by cutting through South Quarry.'

‘
Fine.
’

After Fry had turned away to follow the path, Cooper shook his head in despair. It was such a small mistake
for a woman like Jenny Weston to have made. Yet it
had been the biggest mistake of her life. Why had she
chosen to come up here at the beginning of November?
It was one of the quietest times of the year, when even retired couples were putting away their walking boots,
turning up the central heating and pulling the sofa
closer to the TV to watch their holiday videos. And for
some reason, Jenny had let the wrong person get close
to her. There were so many mistakes. It seemed as though she had been heading directly on a course towards her own destruction
.

*

A few minutes later, Cooper slid down the last few feet
of the slope into South Quarry, as Fry struggled behind
him.

‘
Hello. What's this?' he said
.

Unlike Top Quarry, these abandoned workings had
been left with a level, sandy bottom, clear of debris.
The entrance was open to the road, and sometimes cars
parked in the first part of the quarry. The face wasn't
so high there, and it was possible to climb a narrow track up and get straight on to the moor. Visitors
normally stopped short of taking their cars on to the
steep roadway that dropped into the lower part of the
quarry, afraid that they might never get back up again,
or that their wheels might slip off the edge
.

But on the rock-spattered floor in the deepest part
of the quarry stood a van. Whoever had driven it here
had managed to find a flat area where the wagons
had once been loaded with stone. The angle of the
quarry walls hid the spot completely from the road fifty
yards away. Unless you were looking, you would never
find it.

‘
It's an old VW Transporter,' said Cooper. 'Long wheelbase version. And over twenty years old, if you can believe the registration plates. But look at the state of the tyres. This thing hasn't moved in a good while.
’

Fry pulled out her personal radio. 'I'll call in and get
them to do a check on that number. It's probably stolen.
’

Cooper walked round the van carefully. As well as
the back doors, there was a side loading door on the
nearside. But the windows at the back had been painted
over, in the way that market traders did to screen their
goods from prying eyes. Cooper reached the driver's
door and peered into the cab. The seats were worn and
split, and a large cobweb glistened across the corner
between the sidelight and the dashboard. An old curtain
hung behind the seats, concealing the interior.

‘
They're going to call back in a minute,' said Fry. 'Is
it unlocked?
’

‘
I haven't tried yet.
’

Cooper took a tissue from his pocket and tried the handle of the driver's door. The metal was tarnished
and beginning to rust through the chrome. The button
depressed, but there was no click of the catch, and
the door didn't move. He edged round the bonnet. The
manufacturer's VW badge had gone from the grille.
No surprise there — at one time, the badges had been
prized by local kids as trophies, as the initials were said to stand for their favourite catch phrase 'Very Wicked'
.

The passenger door was also locked. So was the side
door. And so were the rear doors.

‘
If this van was abandoned here by a car thief, it was
a very security-conscious thief,' he said.

‘
Perhaps it's not stolen at all, then. Maybe it was somebody who couldn't be bothered taking it to the scrapyard.
’

Fry's radio crackled. While she listened, Cooper
crouched to look underneath the van, noting a missing
section of exhaust pipe and a dark patch on the ground that might have been oil. A cover was missing from one
of the rear lights, and there were holes in the wheel arches caused by serious corrosion.

‘
It's registered to a Mr Calvin Lawrence of Stockport,'
said Fry. 'But there's no report of it being stolen.
’

‘
Well, it hasn't been on the road legally since October
1999,' said Cooper, peering at the licence disc just visible
behind the windscreen. 'Not that it means anything
necessarily.' Discs were colour coded so that the month
of expiry could be detected from a distance. But this
one was so faded its original colour could have been any selection from the rainbow.

‘
So the owner has abandoned it, then. This Calvin
Lawrence presumably. Just another MoT failure, that's
all. We'll get someone to remove it and report the owner
for illegal tipping.'

‘
It's odd, though. Why come all the way from Stock
port to leave it here? There must be any number of out-of-the-way places on the way between here and Stockport that you could abandon an old van, if you wanted to.'

‘
Not to mention scrapyards,' said Fry.

‘
Funny that people never seem to think of that, isn't
it? As if the countryside is here just for them to use as
a huge dump-it site.'

‘
We're not here to worry about the environment, Ben.
Leave that to your friends with the red jackets.
’

But Cooper was still frowning. 'And if you were going to do that, why leave the plates on? It doesn't make sense.'

‘
It isn't our concern. We'll pass it on to uniformed section.'

‘
The funniest thing, though . . .' said Cooper, as if she
hadn't spoken. 'Have you noticed? The funniest thing
about this van . . . is the smell.
’

Fry sniffed, but shook her head. 'Why, what is it? Petrol?'

‘
No,' said Cooper.

‘
Well, what then?
’

Cooper stared at the side door of the van, his head cocked on one side as though he was listening to the
sounds of its suspension rusting, or its rubber seals
slowly rotting in the damp air. He waited until he was
absolutely sure of what his senses were telling him.

‘
Chicken curry,' he said
.