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Fry met his eye for a moment, and he held his breath. He had a sudden fear that he understood her. Was it possible that he and Diane Fry might be close to the same, inevitable conclusion? The thought made Cooper shiver at a premonition of disaster, at a vision of a dark, grinning cloud hovering over his horizon. He could hear the wind in the heather and the rumble of machinery in the limestone quarry outside Cargreave. The sound of the cows munching the grass in the fields below the Virgins seemed very loud. Uneasily, he watched Fry square her shoulders and push the collar of her jacket further up around her ears. She was staring at the stone circle without seeing it at all - neither the cold reality of its lumps of gritstone, nor the martyred maidens of local folklore. ‘The psychiatric reports said that Maggie Crew would probably never regain her memory for several hours either side of the assault, which is normal in trauma cases,’ she said. ‘Those files were readily available. If you knew that little detail, you might not worry too much about Maggie. Jenny Weston, on the other hand, knew all about Ringham Edge Farm and what went on there. It was Jenny who told the RSPCA what she had seen. Jenny had the photographs, too. She could identify people.’ ‘Right.’ ‘You’d think Jenny would have told the police, wouldn’t you? Even if it was only to ask advice from an officer she was friendly with.’ ‘Maybe,’ said Cooper. ‘And yet there she was that afternoon, back on the
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moor, in the same vicinity. And she had those photographs with her - the ones she said she was going to hand over as evidence. Why did she have them with her, do you think?’ ‘For safety?’ ‘Safety? Or was she expecting to meet someone? Someone she could hand the photos to. And might that same someone have decided they couldn’t leave her alive any longer?’ ‘But she was only ever a threat to the dogfighting ring, no one else.’ ‘Right. And did you not wonder why they were never raided, Ben?’ ‘They stopped meeting at Ringham Edge,’ said Cooper. ‘Yes. Because they knew they were under observation. They knew exactly what was happening, all along.’ ‘Did Teasdale say all this, Diane?’ ‘Keith Teasdale is saying nothing more than necessary. The only person he’s prepared to implicate is Warren Leach. But we knew Leach was involved, anyway.’ She paused. ‘And, besides, Leach is already dead.’ ‘So Teasdale is loyal, then,’ said Cooper. ‘Yes. But it’s a misplaced loyalty.’ Cooper felt Fry’s eyes on him, assessing him, seeing right through him to his innermost thoughts. Suddenly, there was contempt in her face, and her whole body seemed to draw away from him, as if she had seen something she could not bring herself to touch. ‘You’ve always been very big on loyalty yourself, haven’t you, Ben?’ she said.
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The accusation made him think of the day of the rugby match, when Todd Weenink had arrived for the match at the last minute. What was it that had made him late the day that Jenny Weston had died?
Then Cooper’s mind slipped back to his room at Bridge End. In a drawer in that room was a vending machine questionnaire form, slipped under some largescale OS maps and a Peak District caving guide that no one else would ever look at. Todd Weenink hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut about condoms. And he couldn’t spell ‘fruitflavoured’ either.
But Jenny Weston’s killer was dead.
From South Quarry, the old VW Transporter had finally been winched on to the back of the low loader and delivered to a scrapyard in Edendale, where its radiator, back doors and starter motor had already been removed for spares.
Calvin Lawrence had taken a job as a forecourt attendant at the Fina garage on the Buxton Road, taking people’s money and handing out car-wash tokens. Simon Bevington had discharged himself from hospital and had not been heard of since. He had disappeared into the hills, blown away like a scrap of autumn debris, like another dead leaf hurled into the heather by the gales.
Yet a single wind chime still hung from the branches of the oak tree on the edge of the quarry. It had been left where it was because it was too high for anyone to reach. The chime was cracked and its edges were starting to fray. Its note was a strange, discordant clang. It
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no longer created peace and harmony. Instead, it tolled for the dead, the damaged, the destroyed and the defeated.
‘Was any of it worth it?’ said Cooper. Fry laughed. ‘You what?’
‘Did we manage to protect anything that is important to us? Did we achieve justice?’
Fry gave him a cool look. It was the look of a woman who knew that she would forever have a weapon she could use against him, the look of a woman who held him in the palm of her hand.
‘Bear the answer to that in mind when you make your decision, Ben,’ she said.
Then she turned away. Her knowledge gave her power over him now, and there was nothing else she needed to say.
Cooper stroked the top of the nearest stone, drawing a peculiar comfort in the gritty texture, finding a surprising warmth beneath his hand, as if the stones might come back to life at any moment and resume their interrupted dance.
In the late afternoon light, the long shadows made the stones seem to tilt more than ever. They leaned inwards or outwards from the centre of the circle, dipping like a ring of dancers at the start of a barn dance or a Greek mazurka. They seemed to move slowly, almost imperceptibly, in time to the faint stirring of the hair grass and the continuous settling of the dead leaves.
Of course, it wasn’t possible. The stones weren’t moving at all. But if it wasn’t the stones, then it must be
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the moor itself that was turning around him, wheeling slowly against the sky.
If you wanted to know about justice, you might as well ask the Virgins. The stones had seen it all. They were the only witnesses to the murder of Jenny Weston. So what would their view of justice have been after three and a half thousand years? Would they see it as an irrelevance, a minor casualty of that confusing, pain-filled thing called human life? Had they thought about it deep and hard over the millennia, and had they come to any conclusion?
Ben Cooper would have liked to ask the stones. He wanted to be able to get down on his knees and persuade them to whisper their secrets. He wanted to tell them all about the doubts that lay in the bottom of his heart like a pound of lead shot, like a pocketful of wet rocks.
He would have liked to tell them everything, but he knew they wouldn’t answer. Because the Virgins had made their own mistake once. And now they were punished for ever.
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I Black Dog Stephen Booth
