Dancing With the Virgins (45 page)

*

Ben Cooper's neck was starting to get stiff from staring up at the moor. The overcast sky made the slopes look
dark and ominous. But it was like that in the Peak -
the landscape could change its mood from one moment
to the next as the weather shifted and the clouds blew
over the tops.

‘It's a pretty bleak place to die, really,' he said. 'I never saw it like that before.'

‘It wouldn't be my choice, either,' said Weenink. 'I
reckon I'd like to die in bed, preferably on the job with
a blonde with big tits. That'd be the way to go.'

‘
It would suit Jenny Weston, though,' said Cooper,
as if Weenink hadn't spoken. 'From what her father
says, it sounds as though she had a pretty difficult life.
It would be no wonder that she was depressed.'

‘Is that them?' said Weenink.

Diane Fry and Maggie Crew were halfway down the
path, walking close together as if supporting each other.
Weenink did a double-take when Maggie Crew got close enough for him to see her face.

‘Shit.'

‘
I know it's a bit nasty,' said Cooper. 'But you've seen
worse things than that, surely? Don't let her see how
you react.'

‘OK, don't tell me. I'll fetch the car.’

Cooper shrugged. 'If you like.’

Fry put Maggie straight into her car. Maggie kept her
head down, like a defendant being led into court. She
looked as though she ought to have been wearing a
blanket over her head. Except that Maggie Crew was
the victim, not the accused.

‘
Ben, I'm not sure we have the right location for the
assault on Maggie,' said Fry.

‘Oh?'

‘
Her statement doesn't tally with the memories she's
getting now. She told me the other day that she remem
bered piles of leaves underfoot. But there are no leaves
at the Cat Stones. I know it sounds like a small thing,
but if we've missed examining the proper scene . .

‘I'll take a look,' said Cooper.

‘We ought to get Forensics —'

‘I'll take a look first, and see if I can narrow down the possibilities before we do that.'

‘Of course, her memories may be distorted. They seem to be coming back, but who can say whether they're accurate or not?'

‘
It would take a psychiatrist to do that. If her evidence ever comes to court, we'll need to back it up with expert
opinion.’

Fry sighed. 'She's really going to love that.'

‘
If only we could produce a case without her. But we
can't.'

‘
Another thing. She says she thinks she was just in
the way.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘
That she wasn't the intended victim, I think. She says
her attacker was breathless and running, not lying in
wait for her.'

‘That doesn't make sense.'

‘
I'm not responsible for whether it makes sense,' said
Fry. 'I'm just sharing information, right?'

‘Fine.’

Cooper watched them drive off, then waited for Weenink to come back with their own car.

‘Where to now, Ben?' he said.

‘Up there.'

‘
What? Ben, do you know it's Monday? I'll be missing
drinking time soon.'

‘Are you coming, or what?’

Weenink locked the car again. 'Yes. But only because
you're not safe on your own.’

When they reached the Cat Stones, Cooper instinc
tively followed Diane Fry's footsteps to the place where
the attack on Maggie Crew was supposed to have taken
place. He could see straight away what she meant about
the leaves. No trees grew on the exposed gritstone edge.

‘
Why shouldn't it be here?' said Weenink. 'She might
have been walking through the leaves earlier. She could
have gone through them on the way up.'

‘Possibly.’

Weenink began to get impatient. 'Ben, there are things
to do.'

‘Let's try this way a bit.'

‘But bloody hell —’

Cooper turned angrily. 'Todd — just keep out of it!'
His face felt flushed. It was only a moment's loss of control, but nagging doubts had made him irritable, and exasperation with himself was eating at him.

He worked his way north, as Fry had done. Weenink
sat on a rock and watched him, like a tolerant parent.

After a minute or two, Cooper reached the spot where
the rocks parted, and he could see down to Rowsley and the railway line. The last train had gone, but he
could see where the line ran. Which way had Maggie's
attacker come from? Not from the other side of the
rocks, that was sure - not unless he was Spiderman.
The slope behind him was steep, too, and covered in
loose stones that would be noisy and difficult to negoti
ate. If you were going to run at someone at speed and
take them by surprise, there was only one way to do it
- downhill. People had known that ever since violence
had been invented. That was why Iron Age forts were
built on the summits of steep hills.

There was more dead foliage on the ground near the
Hammond Tower, certainly. But how much would there
have been seven weeks ago?
Then, in front of the tower, Cooper suddenly stepped
into a hidden hollow filled with wet drifts of leaves. They lay in layers, where they had collected over the
years. Below the surface, the older material was black
and slimy and decaying into mould. You could wade
through this lot, if you wanted to, and be very vulner
able to someone approaching from above.

Skirting the edge of the hollow to reach the base of
the tower, he wrinkled his nose as a trace of something
acrid and familiar reached his nostrils. Could he be
mistaken? Were his senses playing tricks on him again?
No, the smell was quite distinct and recognizable. Cal
and Stride's van had smelled of chicken curry. Yet the
Hammond Tower smelled of petrol.

From the tower, a steep track ran down to a ledge
below the Cat Stones. Cooper scrambled down the
track, puzzled at the origin of the petrol smell. But as
he moved away from the tower, the smell dissipated. It was lingering around the wall of the tower itself.

He looked at the outcrop of rocks above him. They
formed one of the biggest of the cat shapes - a pile of wind-sculpted blocks of gritstone perched on a softer
layer that had been worn almost completely away by wind and water. A yawning gap had been left under
neath on this side - a great empty gash that made you
wonder how the cat-shaped blocks stayed hanging in
that precarious position. One day, the cat's legs would
give way under the weight of rock and it would topple
into the dale, forfeiting all of its nine lives in one go.

Cooper peered under the overhang. The cavity went
deep under the rocks, six feet in, the height getting less
as it receded to the back, a very shallow cave formed by the weathering of the stone. On the outer edge lay
a handful of damp, grey feathers, where some predator
had stopped long enough to dismember a wood pigeon.
Cooper's nose twitched. There was something else here.
Not petrol now, but something that smelled stale and
unpleasant.

He crouched and ducked his head below the rock,
then waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The
smell was more powerful and unmistakable. At these
moments, he always remembered his first shift sergeant
telling him to learn to breathe through his mouth at a
death scene. If you were going to deal with dead bodies
often, he said, it helped if you had a sinus problem, or
chronic nasal congestion.

Cooper saw a hand, then an arm. Where the body touched the rock, the surface was stained dark with leaking fluids. The muscles and tissues had shrunk
-inwards away from the skin, leaving it hanging loose,
like the flesh of an old, old woman. On one edge of the
forearm, the skin had burst open, exposing the layers
of muscle and fat underneath. Next, he noticed the dark
snakes of hair that lay around the head. Although the ledge was dry, enough moisture had been supplied by
the body's own fluids to support the process of putre
faction. By now, decomposition was well advanced,
despite the cool air of the White Peak autumn. The body
had been lying here a few weeks.

Cooper knew exactly what to do. It was as if the past
few days had drawn him inexorably to this point, as if
he had reached an inevitable conclusion without know
ing any of the steps he had taken along the way.

He looked at the decomposed arm for a while, without surprise. There didn't seem to be any hurry to do
the next thing. In a dying landscape, one more death
seemed completely natural.

32

With the forensics team already fully occupied at
Ringham Edge Farm, the news of another body moul
dering away among the rocks just over the hill set up
a howl of complaint about the shortage of resources.
Little could be done until the next morning. By then,
the lock on the big shed at the farm had been cut and
the doors had finally been opened to let in the light.
Leach's chaotic kitchen was being sifted through, and
it looked like a long job.

Ben Cooper was helping the SOCOs to reconstruct
the dog-fighting pit. They had found a heavily blood
stained area of floor and were placing straw bales from
a stack in the shed around it on the assumption the
bales might have been used for spectators' seating. They
discovered that some of the straw was itself splashed
with animal blood. And the trousers of the people who had sat on it must have been marked, too — here and
there, you could make out the outline of their legs
against the straw. It was obvious that efforts had been
made to clean the place up, but the distinctive smell
of blood still filled the shed, undisguised by the disin
fectant.

‘
It's positively medieval,' said Diane Fry, appearing
in the doorway behind him.

‘
It's fairly nasty,' said Cooper.

‘The RSPCA have drawn us up a list of names —suspects they think may have been involved in this
dog-fighting business. There could be some action at
last.'

‘
Fine. But what about Ros Daniels? Did she come here
before she died?’

A few yards away from the shed, police tape had
been used to cordon off the burnt-out pick-up. Traces
of petrol found on the decomposed hands of the corpse
under the Cat Stones suggested one possible connection
to the farm, at least. But with the scenes of crime staff
already at full stretch, it was anybody's guess when they would get round to examining the vehicle and making comparisons.

Even the identification of the body was only tentative.
The victim was the right age and the right general
appearance to be Ros Daniels, though the injuries to the
head and the process of decomposition made it difficult
to be precise about facial features. She had been dressed
all in black — jeans and a sweater, with a nylon cap
lying nearby. And she had been wearing a silver disc
on a chain round her neck, like a military dog-tag, with
a stylized symbol engraved on it of an animal behind
prison bars. The body also bore tattoos that would
help identification, and the dreadlocked hairstyle was
unusual.

There had once been debris under her fingernails,
which might have been traces from an attacker. But as
the skin of her fingers had shrunk away from her nails,
the debris had loosened and fallen away. Although it
reacted to tests for human blood, the sample was too small to hold any prospect of obtaining a grouping or
DNA profile.

To Cooper, it seemed that the investigation constantly took one step forward and another one back.
They had already been looking for anything that might
connect Warren Leach directly with Jenny Weston, or
with Maggie Crew. Now they were faced with the task
of establishing what had happened to Daniels, and
when. Because there was one thing that was obvious
even from a cursory examination of the body that Cooper had found. Ros Daniels had been dead for weeks.

‘What is it with you people in this area?' said Fry.
'Don't you know how to adapt to civilization? I mean,
dog-fighting, for God's sake. Hasn't the world moved
on from the Middle Ages? What do people like Warren
Leach get out of it?'

‘Maybe we should be asking what drove him to it,' said Cooper. 'Maybe it was people like you.’