Dancing With the Virgins (28 page)

20

Each time Diane Fry emerged from Maggie Crew's apartment, the rest of the world looked garish and unreal. It was like coming out of the cinema after a
horror matinee. One minute it was all nightmare figures
leaping out of the dark and blood splattering against the camera lens, and suddenly you found yourself
standing at the traffic lights outside Mothercare with
the sun in your eyes and an ice-cream van playing 'Greensleeves'
.

Today, Matlock looked like a badly designed Disney-
World set. There were the mock turrets of Riber Castle
on one side of the valley and the Heights of Abraham
and Gulliver's Kingdom on the other, with the River
Derwent in the bottom and the old locomotives getting
up steam at Matlock Bridge station. But in between, the
design had gone wrong, with crowds wandering about
searching in vain for Mickey Mouse and Pluto, and
endless traffic choking the central square, where there
ought to have been fountains and open-air restaurants,
and children demanding Big Macs. And this was one of the quietest times of the year. During the summer,
the chaos was mindless. Where were they all going?
What were they looking for? What were they trying to
escape?
Fry had yet to understand what made twenty-five million people a year visit the Peak District. There were no shopping centres, no big sports arenas, no
exhibition centres or concert halls, not even a decent football ground. All these people did was cause prob
lems and pollution, going nowhere and doing nothing.
So pointless
.

Today, though, Fry was glad of the crowds. Their aimless swarming was an antidote to the obsessive
isolation of the apartment at Derwent Court. Maggie's
solitary martyrdom was too reminiscent of periods of
her own life — so painful and bitter, yet somehow horribly alluring, like the temptation to give yourself
up
_,
to drowning when you were too exhausted to swim
any more
.

Fry knew how easy it was to reach that stage. She knew you could find yourself in a situation where a
greeting from a stranger was a torture, and the words
'good morning' from the postman were as welcome as
the plague. When somebody rang the door bell, you not only refused to answer it, you wanted to hide in
another room, in case they saw you through the window
and knew you were there
.

Once you allowed yourself to become a recluse, then
the world began to seem a long way off, beyond your
reach. It became a place where you would be an alien,
if you ever found yourself there. And you knew the
people from that world would see you as an alien, too.
You were not like them. You were different. Disfigured
.

Fry supported herself against the side of her car and
shuddered. Memory was such a physical thing. It was
more physical than her own skin, than the clothes she
wore, or the ground she stood on. A terrible, physical
thing. And some memories never seemed to lose their
power to hurt. They never weakened with age, nor dimmed as the years went by. They simply slipped behind a cloud of everyday concerns and trivial pre
occupations, waiting until the right moment to emerge,
more powerful than ever. And memories still hit hardest
when they were most unexpected
.

There was no doubt Maggie Crew was a damaged
woman. Fry had begun to dread going to see her. While
she was there, in Maggie's house, she felt somehow at home. Yet afterwards, within a few minutes of leaving,
when she was sitting in the car with her hand on the ignition key, she would suddenly begin to shake. She
realized now that she was sweating, her hands were
trembling, and her legs felt weak, as if she hadn't eaten
for days. She had to wind down the window and let in
the cold air to shock herself back into alertness
.

She wasn't used to feeling so drained of energy as
she was now. She was usually able to direct energy into
her body at a moment's notice. She had trained for years
to feel it flow and channel it where it was needed. But
an hour with Maggie Crew had sapped that vitality. So
what was going wrong?
There were things for her to do back at HQ, but noth
ing urgent — she had been given a free hand to spend as long as she needed to with Maggie. That meant she
had time to call at her own flat in Edendale on the way
.

She decided a shower would help wash away the cold
stickiness that was clinging to her skin
.

Yet Fry drove round town for a while, turning
through the steep streets aimlessly, unwilling to arrive
home until her energy had returned and her mood had
dissipated
.

Of course, there was a physical reason for her frame
of mind, too. Her body craved action, something to focus the pent-up tension, some target to hit out at. Her old
shotokan
master in Warley had taught her to
recognize the feeling and use it. Very soon, she would
have to find time to visit her new
dojo
in Sheffield to get that release, or the dark well of anger would boil over and the wrong target would be in the way
.

For Fry, each time she found herself back with Maggie
Crew in that soulless apartment now it was like leaving
the light to enter a tunnel. She recalled the tunnel on
the High Peak Trail, with its dripping water and land
slides of rock barely held back by the wooden roof. But
she had been with Ben Cooper then, and that made a
difference
.

Gradually, she felt her normal equilibrium coming
back, and she turned the wheel towards Edendale. Her
flat in Grosvenor Avenue was depressing enough, but
in a tangible sort of way. It was simply dismal and
uncomfortable, not laden with painful emotions. That
was what she had liked about the place when she had
rented it — it held no memories, no associations, not
even any significant possessions from her old life. She
had thrown them all away, given them to charity shops
or dumped them in recycling bins — books, clothes, the
lot. So the flat was empty of feeling. A cold kind of comfort
.

Fry waited outside the flat until she was sure that the
mood had gone. But even then, when she got inside
and stared with glad contempt at the filthy walls, there
was a niggle at the back of her mind, a lingering sus
picion that she had brought something of Maggie Crew with her into the room. She cursed. She had learned to
recognize emotional entanglement the moment it began
to infect her. The first twinge of it indicated a lowering
of her defences, a weakness in her immune system that
had to be tackled. A course of antibiotics was what she
needed, a period of isolation, perhaps
.

She looked at her diary. She had made an appointment with Maggie Crew for Friday. She would phone
to cancel it in the morning. She took out her pen and
put a thick, black line through the date. She immediately
felt better
.

*

Stride had started measuring the days. When each one
arrived, it was shorter than the last. And the moor was
changing as he watched; it was dying slowly on itself, folding and shrivelling, transforming like a chameleon to adapt itself
to the new season. As the days shortened, the green chloro
phyll broke down in the leaves. Its gradual ebbing away
revealed the underlying colours — the yellows, oranges and
reds that had been masked all summer. Toxic waste products
excreted into the dying leaves made the trees shrink away from their own foliage. They were rejecting parts of them
selves as superfluous, recoiling as if from something alien
and repulsive, so that their stems dried and loosened on
the branch and the wind carried the unwanted leaves away
.

But Stride knew this wasn't really death he was seeing. It
wasn't an ending, only the preparation for another beginning. The leaves that drifted to the ground in their millions would
slowly decay and disintegrate, returning nutrients to the soil
and into the tree roots, ready for growth to begin again next
spring. The great recycling system had started up. Millions
of organic systems would break down and be renewed on a
scale far beyond anything that Derbyshire Dales District
Council could dream of
.

In some places, though, he had found the foliage of the
mountain ash and of more exotic, imported species, like the
Russian vines that climbed the walls of roadside cottages.
These leaves were red. And they made Stride think of death
– of real death. He tried to avoid them, drawing back the toes
of his Doc Martens as if touching the dead leaves would
contaminate him. He hated the way they spread in soft, wet
layers on the ground. He hated their colour and their slithery consistency. They looked to him like ever-widening pools of congealing blood.

21

By Thursday, four days after Jenny Weston's body had been found, the enquiry team were starting to dissipate
their energies fruitlessly, like men urinating into a
strong wind. There were no answers to be obtained any
more. The morning briefing seemed to consist entirely
of questions.

‘
This young woman, Ros Daniels. Are there no indi
cations to her whereabouts at all?' said DCI Tailby.

‘
We've got a decent description, but matching it to
missing persons is hoping for a lot,' said DI Hitchens.
'Most of these young people who leave home are never
reported missing in the first place. But Cheshire Police are still working on it. And we do have a couple of lorry
drivers who saw a girl hitch-hiking out of Macclesfield
towards Buxton on the A537.'

‘
That's the Macclesfield Forest road,' said Ben Cooper.
'It's a bit isolated up there. She was taking a risk hitch
ing, a girl like that on her own.'

‘
That's why the truckers remember her particularly,
Cooper. But one of them said she looked as though she
wouldn't be frightened of much. He said she looked like Tank Girl.'

‘
I don't know who Tank Girl is,' said Tailby, 'but I dare say I can imagine it.
’

Hitchens smiled. 'It was the combat trousers and the
hairstyle, I suppose. And a certain aggressiveness of
manner, too. Sounds like our girl, all right. In any case, she was staying at Jenny Weston's house, at least up to
six weeks before Jenny was killed. Forensics found plenty of traces in the house that didn't belong to Weston.'

‘
There are other possibilities. What about Warren Leach, sir?' asked Cooper.

‘
He was certainly in the area,' said Hitchens. 'He has
to be eliminated. And he has a connection to Maggie Crew — his wife was the finder on that one.'

‘
Mmm. I don't like coincidences,' said Tailby. 'And
is there some significance in the way that the vic
tim's body was arranged? Anybody had any ideas on
that?
’

No one answered. Cooper wondered whether they had all shared the same thought when they saw the
position of Jenny Weston's body. He had put his own
reaction down to another burst of imagination, the idea
that Jenny had been made to dance at the moment of her death. It was certainly too strange a thought to be
contributed to the morning briefing.

‘
And how do we find out more about Leach?' said Tailby, almost to himself
.

Then suddenly there were voices chiming in from all
round the room.

‘
Talk to his neighbours?' suggested someone.

‘
He hasn't
got
any neighbours,' said another officer.
'Friends, then.'

‘
Like who?'

‘
There's Keith Teasdale. The rat man.'

‘
Is he a friend?'

‘
The nearest thing he's got, probably.
’

Tailby raised a hand, half-heartedly.

‘
OK, we'll talk to Teasdale again. Is there anything else?
’

Cooper took a breath. 'Yes,' he said
.

There was something about the way he said it that
quietened the laughter.

‘
Cooper?'

‘
I checked the firearms register for Warren Leach.
’

‘
Firearms?' said Tailby. Heads were raised, and ears
pricked up. 'Leach has a shotgun, I suppose? Most farmers have them.'

‘
Yes, there's a shotgun. But when I was there the
other day with Owen Fox, Leach also had a captive bolt
pistol.'

‘
A what?'

‘
A humane killer. It's used for putting animals down.
It fires a steel bolt directly into the brain.'

‘
Do you need an FAC for that, Cooper?'

‘
Well, not if you're a licensed slaughterman. But
Warren Leach has no licence. Farmers can get them, if
they can show that they need one. But there's no record
of Leach ever even applying for one.'

‘
So he's in illegal possession,' said Tailby. 'OK, let's
interview him again. Teasdale first, then Leach. Let's do it.
’

Somebody patted Cooper on the shoulder. And
Tailby hurried to close the meeting before anybody asked any more questions
.

DI Hitchens walked over to Ben Cooper. 'I want Diane
Fry to go to the cattle market with you, not Todd Weenink,' he said. 'You're too close to some of these people. That's your problem, Ben. Diane sees things that you don't.
’

Across the room, Fry was watching him already. Cooper couldn't read the expression in her eyes, but
then he never had been able to read her. Maybe she did
see things he didn't
₇
but from the look on her face
these days, they were things that he didn't
want
to
see
.