the knife left a red smear where it was wiped on the grass. From the handlebars of the bike, a small trickle of blood had run down on to the front wheel. It dripped slowly from spoke to spoke, already darkening and thickening in the air, until it was absorbed into the ground. By the time her attacker had finished, or not long after, Jenny Weston was dead. Mark knew it happened sometimes, but it was such a pointless thing to do. Mindless and irresponsible. Now and then the Ranger briefings mentioned a bike that had not been returned to the hire centre. Hirers had to give proof of their identity and leave a name and address, as well as a L20 deposit, so it was hardly worth trying to get away with a mountain bike, considering how easily you would get caught. But sometimes there was one who took the bike away with them. Occasionally, they simply abandoned it on one of the tracks, in a car park, or up here on the moor, like this one. None of it ever made sense to Mark.
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The sight of the Kokomo under the gorse bush angered him unreasonably. Its presence w t like a violation - the evidence of selfish humanity ing into his world, like children pawing his most precious possessions with grubby fingers. The bike had been treated as just so much rubbish. Then Mark looked more closely. A streak of red had stained the canary yellow paintwork of the front stem and left rust-like spots on the spokes. He shivd with misgiving and fingered the radio in his pocket* Suddenly he wished he adn’t come out alone, after all. alongside him, no There was no reassuring p
Owen there to know exactly Wa shaking hand, Mark made a note of the colour, With it the pages of model and number of the bike, crumpling his notebook in his haste to get it out of his pocket. The act of writing made him feel better, more in control, as if the ink marks on the page had magically brought a air: ‘Observe, keep a note, report familiar voice from the
back.’ ‘Yes, Owen,’ whispered Mark. dng on his forehead and the back Feelingthesweat ryi bike of his neck, he forced himself to walk past the to where the stones were clustered among the spa ilg birches. Somebody had lit a fire here recently, scorched earth and a pile of white ash. People were always lighting fires near the Virgins, as if they thought the flames might melt their stony hearts. At the midsummer solstice, there were hundreds of folk up here at night, and they did a lot more than light fires. Mark stopped abruptly as he looked into the circle.
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The sensations that came reminded him of the terrors of his puberty, the physical sickness and the guilt. He tried to concentrate on studying the ground, to look for evidence of bike tracks or footprints. He tried to think about casting around for telltale objects that might have been dropped by someone who had been in the area. I’m observing, he told himself. I must observe. Be professional and calm, and don’t rush into anything. But he couldn’t keep up the pretence for long. His eyes just wouldn’t focus on anything else. With shameful fascination, Mark found his attention drawn to the centre of the stone circle, where the white shape lay in such startling, rousing incongruity. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ The body of the woman sprawled obscenely among the stones. Her half-naked torso had been flung on the rough grass, her arms and legs twisted in provocative gestures. Her right knee was lifted high, to the level of her waist, and her left leg was stretched taut, as if she might be about to spring into the air. Mark could see every detail of the muscles in her legs, the tendons rigid under the skin at the top of her thigh, the faint crinkling of cellulite on her hips. Her pose was a caricature of life, a cruel parody of flamboyance and movement. Her hands were tilted at the wrist, her toes pointed downwards, and her head nodded to silent music. She was spread against the ground in a final arabesque, in a fatal pirouette, or the last fling of an abandoned tango. Mark wondered whether to write it down. But it sounded too strange, and his hand wouldn’t write any
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more, anyway. Instead, he repeated it to himself, over and over, in his head. A dead woman dancing. She looked like a dead woman, dancing. Fifteen miles to the north, in the town of Edendale, the battle had been going on for an hour and a quarter already. The police officers in the front line were battered and breathing hard, their faces swollen with exertion, and their hair stuck to their foreheads with sweat. One or two had their shirts ripped. Another had blood trickling from a cut on his eye. Detective Constable Ben Cooper could see his colleague, Todd Weenink, deep in the thick of it. Weenink had two PCs from the Tactical Support Unit close on either side of him, and there were more men coming in from behind to assist them. They looked exhausted, their expressions grim, but determined. They were struggling against the odds, fighting a battle of containment that they were constantly in danger of losing. The students were charging forward in a solid mass, forcing the police to give ground under the onslaught. In the melee, close up, anything could be happening a poke in the eye, a boot in the crutch, teeth sinking into an ear. The police had not been issued with riot shields or helmets today; there was no body armour, ^ no snarling Alsatians or horses to keep the students at
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bay. There had been no authority given for the use of special weapons, no tear gas canisters held nervously in reserve. In addition, the police had to face a ceaseless barrage of noise - chanted slogans, shouts of abuse and a constant stream of profanities from a hostile crowd. Cooper pulled his hands out of his jeans pockets and turned his coat collar up to try to shut out the cacophony. If he could, he would have closed his eyes, too, to avoid seeing the slaughter, to stop himself from imagining the consequences if the police line collapsed. In
Division. humiliatinoton a another moment, t Cont Constabulary end in
for Derbyshire single arrest made so far. ‘What are we going to do, Sarge?’ he said. Detective Sergeant Rennie was an old a his had seen it all before. He rubbed his jowls, pulled closer around his shoulders, and winced as a PC went and was trampled underfoot. he said. ‘We’ll send out a quesdown Conduct a survey; ‘ tionnaire. ‘I suppose so. But it’s a bit pathetic, Cooper nodded.
isn’t it?’ ‘We’ll make sure there are lots of tick boxes to fill in.’ ‘Even so … d sighed. ‘It’s all we can do, Ben. Rennie shrugged an Otherwise, we just have to sit back and let it happen.’ The police formed a wall and turned ltoeface Cooper attackers again. Beyond the opposing of the High could see the
the lower slopes of the hill. They looked cammpus, set
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down on Edendale like benign giants, the educational heights of the Eden Valley. He began to search his pockets for a packet of mints to take the taste of nausea from his mouth. He had a lot of pockets - in his jeans, in his checked shirt, on the inside and the outside of his waxed jacket. But all he found was a scatter of cashpoint receipts, two empty shotgun cartridge cases and half a packet of dog biscuits. Cooper knew there was more than just education that went on in those college buildings on the hill. He had been there himself, for long enough to collect the A-levels he needed to get into the police service. His fellow students had accused him of being singleminded, as if his determination made them guilty about their own pursuit of parties and casual sex. But there had been a demon driving Ben Cooper that his contemporaries would never have understood - a jealous God who would not have tolerated parties. Dave Rennie sat back comfortably in his seat and unscrewed the top of a vacuum flask. He offered Cooper a plastic cup, which he refused as soon as he got a whiff of the metallic tang of the coffee. The sergeant’s expression was serious, his forehead creased with anxiety, like a man with a great responsibility on his mind.
‘You see, if they get rid of the kitchen and sack the canteen staff, that means they’ll put vending machines in instead,’ he said. ‘And then what would happen? I mean, would anybody use them? There’s no point in spending money on vending machines if they don’t get
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