Dancing With The Virgins by Stephen Booth
In a remote part of the Peak District stand the Nine Virgins, a ring of stones overshadowed by a dark legend. Now, as winter closes in, a tenth figure is added to the circle - the body of Jenny Weston is discovered, her limbs arranged so she appears to be dancing. This might only be the beginning.
Stephen Booth was born in the Lancashire mill town of Burnley, and has remained rooted to the Pennines during his career as a newspaper journalist. He is well known as a breeder of Toggenburg goats and includes among his other interests folklore, the Internet - and walking in the hills of the Peak District, in which his crime novels are set. He lives with his wife Lesley in a former Georgian dower house in Nottinghamshire. Dancing with the Virgins is the sequel to his stunning debut, Black Dog, and was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award for fiction. Praise for Dancing with the Virgins
‘The plotting is strong and confident … on this form, Booth could soon be up there with the likes of Reginald Hill. If you read only one new crime writer this year, he’s your man’ JANICE YOUNG, Yorkshire Post Praise for Black Dog
‘An exceedingly good first novel: wholly engrossing, it has well-drawn characters and a real sense of place … one looks forward to his next book’ T. J. BINYON, Evening Standard ‘In this atmospheric debut, Stephen Booth makes high summer in Derbyshire as dark and terrifying as midwinter’ VAL MCDERMID
BY THE SAME AUTHOR Black Dog STEPHEN BOOTH DANCING WITH THE VIRGINS
HarperCollinsPublishers
This novel is 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.
HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
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This Paperback edition 2002
57986
First published in Great Britain by Collins Crime 2001
Copyright S Stephen Booth 2001
Stephen Booth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 00 651433 2
Typeset in Palatino by
Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
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.
I am grateful to Derbyshire Constabulary and the Peak Park Ranger Service for their willing help in the writing of this book. However, the characters portrayed in its pages are entirely imaginary, and their activities bear no relation to those of any members of the real organizations. I know that many Derbyshire police officers and rangers are heroes in their own way.
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.
and are still actively used as places of worship. Please treat
them with respect.
Lines from ‘This is the Sea’ by The Waterboys Ancient sites in Derbyshire like the Nine Virgins stone
reproduced by permission of Mike Scott and circle are constantly under threat from vandalism,
Edel Music. I quarrying, erosion and abuse. They are also sacred sites,
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 unnerving, 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
1
0
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
