Dancing With the Virgins. Stephen Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ