Dancing With the Virgins

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Scared to Live

The Dead Place

One Last Breath

Blind to the Bones

Blood on the Tongue

Black Dog

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2007
13

First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 2001

Copyright © Stephen Booth 2001

Stephen Booth asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work

ISBN-13: 978 0 00 651433 6
ISBN-10: 0 00 651433 2

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.

So many people have made contributions to the story
that this is a real team effort. But in particular I owe
thanks to my agent, Teresa Chris, without whom none
of it would have happened.

Lines from 'This is the Sea' by The Waterboys

reproduced by permission of Mike Scott and

Edel Music.

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 un
nerving, 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 help
ing 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 import
ance 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 aban
doned 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 but
tocks 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 noth
ing 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 suf
fered 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 punc
ture the inner tube. She pulled the glass free, flinching
at the sharp edges, and listened to the last gasp of escap
ing 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 every
thing 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 wait
ing its turn to be rolled into an incinerator. Its photo
graph 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
.