‘It was me that found her, you know. That time.’ ‘Yes, of course.’
‘She was in a terrible state. Who would do a thing like that?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t know.’
‘Is it the same man this time?’ she asked. And she covered her lips again. She used both hands this time, as!if afraid her mouth was running out of control.
‘I’m afraid we just don’t know,’ said Cooper.
He saw that she had rubbed at her mouth so much that the lipstick had been removed completely, except for a small smudge in one corner of her lip. He turned to walk away. But as he crossed the yard, Cooper looked back and saw Yvonne Leach fold her handkerchief and begin to dab anxiously at her mouth all over again.
It was obvious the woman was in trouble, but what
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could he do? When he spoke to Warren Leach next, he could mention his wife’s condition, but he couldn’t hold out much hope that the man would listen. He could talk to the Social Services, and say he was concerned about the welfare of the two boys in the household. But he knew his concerns would be a low priority for them - they were overwhelmed with more urgent calls on their time. They were so stretched that they could only respond when something had already happened, when things had gone too far. They acted when it was already too late.
But Ben Cooper understood that. It was what the police did, too.
Diane Fry was relieved that Cooper was quiet for once. Privately, she had no doubt they were wasting their time. The leads would come from elsewhere than from wandering around the landscape. There had to be a link between Jenny Weston’s death and the previous assault - it was no more than half a mile away that Maggie Crew had been attacked among the boulders of the Cat Stones. Maggie and Jenny had been two women alone, unsuspecting. One was unable to describe her assailant; the second was dead. The worst scenario was that the victims had been chosen at random. Stranger murders meant no witness trail, and no motivation. The lack of relationship between victim and killer presented the investigator with a hopeless task.
That was why they needed Maggie Crew. Some day, in some way, she would provide them with an identification. Her memories had to come back.
At the top of the farm track, they met up with DCs
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Toni Gardner and Danny Boyle, who had been working their way backwards from the stone circle, via the Hammond Tower. They shook their heads at each other. A waste of time, they said. Then they walked back towards the Nine Virgins, where the group of uniformed officers guarded the taped-off scene. Fry looked at the stones in incomprehension. What was all the fuss about? She could think of lots of better places to come to at night, even if what you wanted to do was take off your clothes and light fires and smoke a bit of cannabis. ‘Kind of small for Stonehenge, isn’t it?’ she said. But Cooper didn’t rise to the bait. One stone had a flat top, and she found it was big enough to sit on comfortably. But then she remembered some of the traces that the SOCOs had collected from the stones and it occurred to her the flat stone had probably been used for other things than just sitting on. She looked around for Cooper again. ‘The Nine Virgins? You people round here really do have active imaginations, don’t you?’ Still he didn’t respond. After a moment, they headed southwards, to where there was a view down on to Ringham Lees village. Swathes of leaves lined the path, and tiny quartz crystals glittered in the sand like fragments of glass. The birches rattled their dry leaves, and a pair of jays darted at each other among the trees. They could see there were members of the public on the moor now, lots of them. A small, fat man in a green bubble jacket stood by the side of the path and waited for them to draw level. He looked at Fry eagerly.
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‘Where are her clothes?’ he said. ‘What?’ ‘Keep walking,’ said Cooper, without looking round. Fry wanted to question the little man, but she followed Cooper as he veered off and took a rabbit track across the heather. The rough stems of the plants grabbed at her ankles. At one spot there was an area a few square yards wide which had been burned off, leaving black, brittle stalks that crumbled underfoot and a layer of ash that was gradually being washed into the ground by the rain. ‘Hold on, Ben.’ He stopped impatiently. ‘He’s just one of the local weirdos. You can spot them a mile off. Let the uniforms deal with him.’ ‘I can’t believe people like that. They’re sick.’ ‘Right. But he’s probably already in a Care in the Community scheme, or something.’ ‘What the hell’s that?’ ‘Care in the Community? Well, it’s a bit difficult to explain ‘ ‘No - that.’ Fry was pointing at a fungus clinging to the bark of an oak tree. It was like nothing she had ever seen before. It was pale and bulbous, like a human organ that had been bleached or left out in the rain. She put her hand to it gingerly. It was firm to the touch at first, but gave under the pressure of her fingers like a fresh bread roll. White, not wholemeal. The fungus was dry on top, but cold and clammy underneath, and it moved slightly under her fingers.
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Then she noticed that there were lots more fungi on the ground, all different kinds. Some were dark and coiled like dog turds, but black and ragged at the edges, as if they had been half eaten. Other fungi were like stones, some like cups, some like human ears. Fry stared at them with revulsion. How anybody could visit this moor for pleasure she could not imagine. There was nothing to recommend it to anyone, except to the weirdos and the ghouls attracted by death and the bizarre. Ben Cooper set off again and managed to get ahead of Fry to reach the edge of the plateau, where it dropped away into the valley. He stood on the precipice and felt the wind catch his breath and freeze the lobes of his ears. He felt as though he could step off the edge and let the wind carry him away across the patchwork of fields and dry-stone walls. From his vantage point, Cooper could see the people on the moor winding their way in ones and twos through the heather and bracken. Yet the place still had a feeling of solitude and isolation, somewhere you could just be yourself, free of expectations. He understood what Jenny Weston had seen in the moor. ‘It’s so cold and bleak,’ said Fry, catching up with him. ‘What’s the name of that pub in Ringham where we can get lunch?’ ‘The Druid,’ he said, brought suddenly to earth. ‘God, those Victorians. Romantic minds, they had. Anything more than a few years old had to be connected with Ancient Britons and Druids, didn’t it? In actual
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I
I fact, most of these rocks were just dropped here by glaciers or something, and got worn into these shapes by the appalling weather you get up here.’ ‘Well, I suppose so.’ ‘You sound disappointed. A bit of a Victorian yourself, aren’t you, Ben? A romantic at heart?’ ‘We can get down to the village by cutting through South Quarry.’ ‘Fine.’ After Fry had turned away to follow the path, Cooper shook his head in despair. It was such a small mistake for a woman like Jenny Weston to have made. Yet it had been the biggest mistake of her life. Why had she chosen to come up here at the beginning of November? It was one of the quietest times of the year, when even retired couples were putting away their walking boots, turning up the central heating and pulling the sofa closer to the TV to watch their holiday videos. And for some reason, Jenny had let the wrong person get close to her. There were so many mistakes. It seemed as though she had been heading directly on a course towards her own destruction. A few minutes later, Cooper slid down the last few feet of the slope into South Quarry, as Fry struggled behind him. ‘Hello. What’s this?’ he said. Unlike Top Quarry, these abandoned workings had been left with a level, sandy bottom, clear of debris. The entrance was open to the road, and sometimes cars parked in the first part of the quarry. The face wasn’t
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so high there, and it was possible to climb a narrow track up and get straight on to the moor. Visitors normally stopped short of taking their cars on to the steep roadway that dropped into the lower
