Dancing With the Virgins. Stephen Booth

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 manoeuvred to keep his senior officer within distance. Other officers ebbed and flowed awkwardly around them, like extras in a badly staged Gilbert and Sullivan opera, who had just realized that nobody had told them what to do with their hands.

      ‘The light’s failing fast,’ said Hitchens, gazing at the sky.

      ‘Well, thanks for that,’ snapped Tailby. ‘I thought I was going blind.’

      The DCI strode over to the side of the stone circle and looked down into the disused quarry beyond it. There was a barbed wire fence, but it was too low to keep anybody out. On the other side could be seen the last few yards of an access road, which ended on the lip of the quarry. Diane Fry stretched her neck to see what Tailby was looking at. Someone had been fly-tipping from the roadway. She could just make out tyre marks, and a heap of bulging black bin liners, some yellow plastic sheeting and a roll of carpet that had been heaved off the edge. The rubbish lay scattered on the slope like the debris of a plane crash.

      ‘Find out where the entrance to that quarry is,’ said Tailby. ‘And somebody will have to go down there. We need to find the rest of the clothes. Top priority.’

      Hitchens had to dodge as Tailby wheeled suddenly and strode back towards the stones, avoiding the lengths of blue tape twisted together between birch trees and metal stakes. In the centre of the circle, the pathologist, Mrs Van Doon, still crouched over the victim under makeshift lighting. Tailby’s face contorted. He seemed to find something outrageous and obscene in the posture of the body.

      ‘Where’s that tent?’ he called. ‘Get the tent over her before we have an audience.’

      He turned his back and walked on a few yards from the circle, where a single stone stood on its own. DI Hitchens trailed after him at a safe distance.

      ‘There’s an inscription carved on this stone,’ announced Tailby, with the air of Moses coming down from the mountain.

      ‘Yes. It looks like a name, sir.’

      ‘We’ll need a photographer over here. I want that name deciphering.’

      ‘It’s well away from the path,’ said Hitchens. ‘We think the assailant probably brought his victim from the other direction.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘The inscription has probably been there for years.’

      ‘Do you know that? Are you familiar with these stones?’

      ‘No, sir.’

      ‘Ever seen them before in your life?’

      ‘No, sir.’

      Tailby turned. ‘No point asking you, Fry, is there?’

      Fry shrugged, but the DCI wasn’t waiting for an answer. He looked around to see who else he could find. ‘You lot, there! Anyone seen these stones before? They’re a famous landmark, they tell me. A significant part of our ancient heritage. They’re an attraction. Visitors flock to see them. What about you?’

      The officers shook their heads. They were the sort of men who spent their free time in the pub or in front of the telly, doing a bit of DIY or visiting the garden centre. The ones with kids went to Alton Towers and Gulliver’s Kingdom. But this thing in front of them wasn’t a theme park. There were no white-knuckle rides or ice-cream vans. Tailby turned back to Hitchens.

      ‘OK, see? We know nothing about it. We’re all as ignorant as a lot of monkeys. This stone circle might as well be a Tibetan yak compound, for all we know about the place.’

      ‘Yes, but –’

      ‘Just see that it’s done,’ snarled Tailby.

      Then the DCI looked back to where Mrs Van Doon was working. Fry could see that more inscriptions had been scratched into the dirt in the centre of the circle, close to the body. The letters were big and bold, and they spelled out ‘STRIDE’. Whoever had made these was less interested in leaving a long-term record of his presence, though. The drizzle was hardly touching the marks, but a couple of heavy showers would wash them clean away.

      ‘What about those, then?’ said Tailby. ‘You’re not going to tell me those have been there for years?’

      ‘No,’ admitted Hitchens. ‘They’ve got to be more recent.’

      ‘When did it rain in this area last? Properly, I mean?’

      Tailby stared around him. The officers gathered nearby looked at each other, then up at the sky. Fry sympathized. They were detectives – they spent all their time buried in paperwork or making phone calls in windowless offices; occasionally they drove around in a car, shuttling from pub to crown court and