Dancing With the Virgins. Stephen Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ 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,’ СКАЧАТЬ