Dancing With the Virgins. Stephen Booth

she’s so scary. I’m frightened she’ll put a spell on me and turn me into a eunuch.’

      ‘Will you cut it out?’

      ‘No, seriously, Ben. They reckon she cursed Ossie Clarke in Traffic one day, and his balls shrivelled up like cashew nuts. The doctors are baffled. He’s been off sick for weeks.’

      ‘Todd –’

      ‘Well, he has, hasn’t he? Eh?’

      ‘Ossie Clarke is one of the bad-back brigade. He has a slipped disc.’

      ‘That’s the official line. Don’t let it lull you into a false sense of security. Anyway, we’re in luck. They couldn’t spare Armstrong from this paedophile enquiry. Apparently it’s warming up for some arrests. There was the little girl that was killed –’

      ‘Yes, I know.’

      ‘So Hitchens has had to come in off leave. And you know he’s just moved into a new house with that redheaded nurse? So he’s not happy, either. It’s a barrel of laughs up there, all right. Couldn’t wait to get away for a bit, myself.’

      Weenink was taking the back road past the fluorspar works to avoid the bottleneck in Bakewell. He took the bends gently, as if he was just one more pensioner on a Sunday afternoon outing.

      ‘Todd? Can’t we go a bit faster?’

      ‘Mmm, the roads are a bit slippery with all these leaves,’ said Weenink. ‘Can’t be too careful.’

      The atmosphere on the moor was gloomy. It made Ben Cooper feel almost guilty about the buzz of anticipation that had stayed with him even in the car with Todd Weenink. The entire stone circle had been taped off, and lights were being set up to illuminate a small tent in the centre. More tape created a pathway as far as a gorse bush a few yards away. The tape twisted and rattled in the wind with a noise like a crowd of football supporters half-heartedly encouraging their team.

      ‘There was an inch or two of rain during Thursday night, but it had dried up by morning,’ said Cooper.

      Several faces turned to stare at him. Hitchens raised an eyebrow, but Tailby nodded.

      ‘Well, the ground was fine for lifting the sugar beet that morning,’ explained Cooper. He drew a finger through a hollow on the top of one of the stones. ‘On the other hand, there hasn’t been enough sun since then to dry the moisture out where it’s sheltered from the wind.’

      He became suddenly aware of the nature of the looks he was being given. ‘It’s what you asked me,’ he said.

      Hitchens shrugged. He was wearing an old rugby jersey over his jeans, and might once have played for the divisional XV until he became senior enough to be more at risk of injury from his own side than from the opposition.

      ‘Could Stride be a name?’ he asked.

      ‘What kind of man would leave his name written in the dirt when he had committed a murder, anyway?’ said Tailby. ‘And these stones …’

      ‘The Nine Virgins,’ said Cooper.

      ‘What are they all about?’

      ‘They’re the remains of a Bronze Age burial chamber. But local people call them the Virgins because of the legends …’

      ‘How old?’

      ‘Three and a half thousand years, give or take.’

      ‘The last virgins in Derbyshire, then,’ said Hitchens.

      Cooper kept his mouth shut. He watched a SOCO scoop up a tiny patch of bloodstained earth where the body had lain, while he listened to the faint laughter drop hollowly into the wind and disappear with a scatter of dead leaves.

      In a short while, no doubt, a detective superintendent would arrive from another division to take over as senior investigating officer. He would be grumbling about the continuing vacancy in E Division that meant he had to be dragged away from his own patch, where there would be several other major incidents to be dealt with as well.

      But this was the second attack on a woman in a small area, and this victim was dead. Panic would be setting in at higher levels, and those being kicked by the chiefs would soon be kicking the dog.

      Though he knew Ringham Moor well, Ben Cooper found the area around the Nine Virgins disturbed him in a way it had never done before. The atmosphere was all wrong. There was nothing dark and claustrophobic about this murder scene, unlike so many others he had come across. Very often a killing occurred within a close relationship, usually within the confines of a family, where emotions ran high and someone was finally driven to extremes. Here, though, the feeling he got was of space and timelessness, a place where everything ran to its natural sequence, just as it had done for thousands of years. Here, the slow dance of the seasons repeated itself endlessly on an almost empty stage as nature rolled from life to death and back to life again.

      Cooper had learned to keep quiet about his thoughts at times. Most senior officers, like DCI Tailby, prided themselves on being practical, logical men. Tailby was from Nottingham, raised in suburban streets and comprehensive schools. He preferred to leave it to people like Ben Cooper to be imaginative – he seemed to regard it as some kind of local idiosyncrasy, a queer characteristic inherited from the distant Celtic ancestors of the Derbyshire hill folk.

      Cooper watched his fellow officers. Some of them certainly looked as though they felt disorientated and isolated from the realities of the twenty-first century up here. As if to emphasize the point, the sound of a steam train starting up seemed to reach them from the valley below.

      ‘There’s the train,’ said Cooper.

      ‘What?’ said Tailby.

      ‘It’s the Peak Rail line. They run restored steam engines on it. For the tourists, you know.’

      A white plume hung across the lights in the bottom of the valley, drifting with the breeze back towards Matlock and vanishing into the darkness as the chug of the engine receded.

      Tailby spun on his heel. ‘Time to talk to the Rangers,’ he said.

      ‘We’ll need to get proper lights set up here, you know,’ said the Senior SOCO, ‘if you really want photos of that inscription.’

      ‘Believe me,’ said Tailby, ‘I want everything.’

       4

      The young Ranger looked vaguely familiar to Ben Cooper. But then, he knew lots of Ropers – one of them had been his Maths teacher at school, another ran the garage on Buxton Road; and he had once arrested a Roper for indecency. They were all certain to be related.

      Mark was a tall young man, with wide shoulders that didn’t quite fit the rest of his body. His muscles had some catching up to do, but he was wiry and fit. Cooper noticed he had a small streak of vomit staining the front of his red Peak Park Rangers jacket. Somebody at the Partridge Cross Ranger Centre had made him several cups of tea. The tea had done nothing for his pallor, but at least his kidneys were working at full capacity. He emerged from the loo just as the police arrived.

      Mark sat down unsteadily when DCI Tailby introduced himself and opened the questioning.

      ‘I was patrolling the moor,’ said Mark. ‘Ringham Moor. I was on the path from the east, going towards the Virgins.’

      ‘That’s the stone circle.’

      ‘It’s just one of the stone circles. But it’s the one that everybody knows.’

      ‘All right.’

      ‘I was near the Virgins when I saw a bike.’

      ‘Hold on. Before that, did you see anyone else on the moor?’

      ‘Nobody at all. It was quiet.’

      ‘Nobody?