‘What about their shoes?’
‘I got a quick look,’ said Cooper. ‘Calvin Lawrence is wearing trainers, and Bevington has a pair of Doc Martens. Neither would match the partial print we found.’
‘They may have a pair of boots in the van. I know they don’t look as though they have much, but even these two could own more than one pair of shoes.’
‘We’d need a search warrant to look in the van. We don’t have reasonable suspicion.’
Stride lay back on the rock, letting his coat fall open, resting his head back so that he was gazing at the sky. His hands were resting on his face near his eyes, but the fingers were still. The smoke from his roll-up drifted straight up for a few feet, then was caught in the wind and dispersed. Whatever he could see up there in the sky caused him to smile with some deep, inner pleasure. The smile was so sudden that it made the detectives look up as well. But there was nothing to be seen except
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clouds scudding high across the moor. The clouds were growing darker. There could be rain soon.
‘If you think those wind chimes are strange, Cooper has something else to show us,’ said Hitchens.
They walked round the quarry edge to a sheltered spot enclosed by two rocks. In a shallow basin in one of the rocks were what appeared at first to be a series of giant candles. They were made of wax, a foot tall, and they had been carefully sculpted, each into the same distinctive shape, with a long straight shaft, faintly ribbed with veins, and a swollen, rounded head like a cowl, with a small hole in the very tip. They were all sorts of colours - swirling blues and reds, butter yellow, subtle tints of brown and green, and a pure white one, with delicate streaks of gold in the veins of the shaft. They stood like soldiers on parade, pointing permanently skywards.
‘That’s disgusting,’ said Tailby.
‘They represent the phallus,’ said Hitchens.
‘I can see exactly what they represent,’ said Tailby. ‘And phallus wasn’t the word that sprang to mind.’
‘I think it probably takes quite some doing to get the shape just right, like that. I was thinking of a nomination for the Turner Prize.’
‘And who is the Leonardo da Vinci we have to thank for this lot?’
‘The one called Cal. He’s quite proud of them. He calls this place the phallus farm.’
‘They’re obscene.’
‘I doubt they’re committing an offence,’ said Cooper. ‘I don’t want to look at them. Let’s go back.’
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They walked back round the quarry to the path. Cooper noticed a group of women appear on the far side of the quarry. They were wearing cagoules and leggings, bright and chatty. They looked down at Cal and Stride for a while, then walked past the birch tree and studied the wind chimes.
‘Where’s Acting DS Fry?’ asked Tailby. ‘Wasn’t she here earlier?’
‘She has one of her sessions with Maggie Crew,’ said Hitchens.
‘Oh, yes.’ The DCI drew the words out like a sigh. He didn’t sound hopeful of Maggie Crew.
Tailby stood quietly for a minute, staring at the van and the two youths. ‘I’ve got a press conference to do in half an hour,’ he said. ‘What am I going to tell the TV and the newspapers?’
‘How about telling them to keep out of our bloody way?’ suggested Hitchens.
‘All right,’ said Tailby. ‘I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.’ The group of women had moved on. They could be heard chatting again for a while. But they fell very silent when they reached the rock that contained the phallus farm.
At the West Street HQ, they had already been making structural alterations to the canteen. They had succeeded in making it both smaller and less welcoming at the same time. Perhaps it was a deliberate ploy to make the introduction of the vending machines seem like an improvement.
But E Division was lucky. Their neighbours in B
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Division had no canteen at all. A mobile sandwich service called at the front of the building every lunchtime. Beyond that, it was a question of a kettle, a jar of Nescafe and a packet of chocolate biscuits in the corner of every office. There could be no ‘canteen culture’ when there was no canteen. Problem solved.
Ben Cooper carried a cup of coffee to a table where some of his shift were already sitting, and he arrived in the middle of a conversation that immediately made him uneasy.
‘She’s a real hard bitch,’ Todd Weenink was saying. Opposite Weenink was Toni Gardner, a DC from another shift, who still had her straight blonde hair tied back into a ponytail in the fashion of the uniformed officers. She nodded in agreement. ‘She’s a toughie, all right.’
‘Who are you talking about?’ asked Cooper, though he felt he could have a good guess.
‘That Diane Fry,’ said Weenink.
‘A snotty cow, she is, too,’ said Gardner.
Cooper settled down on a spare chair, concentrating on not spilling his coffee so that he didn’t have to meet anyone’s eye.
‘She’s just trying too hard,’ he said. ‘She’ll settle down after a bit.’
Weenink shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know how you can be so tolerant. I know I wouldn’t be, if it was me.’ Cooper looked at the officers round the table, and he
wanted to tell them about the time that Diane Fry had reluctantly confided in him the secrets of her past, the dreadful history of her family, and the heroin-addict
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sister she hadn’t seen since she was sixteen. But he knew it was impossible to share this knowledge with anyone else. ‘I’d tell her where to stick her stripes,’ said Gardner. She smiled at Todd Weenink, as if willing him to notice that she was agreeing with him. Cooper realized that there was more going on here. Todd had an attraction for some women that he never fully understood. He supposed it was a kind of overt masculinity, the sense of sexual challenge in his
