Dancing With the Virgins. Stephen Booth
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slide show they had begun with was depressing enough. The photographer had captured a chill bleakness in his establishing shots of the moor, and an impressionistic arrangement of angles and perspective in his close-ups of the Virgins. The slides of the victim had silenced the room, except for an increased shuffling of boots on the floor. They showed in brutal clarity the curious position of the woman’s limbs, the absence of clothing on the lower half of her body, the red stain on her T-shirt. After the unsettling realism, the autopsy shots had concluded on a note of fantasy. As usual, they seemed divorced from the actual death, too clinical, and reeking too much of antiseptic to be human.
The most interesting result from the postmortem was that there had been no sign of sexual assault on Jenny Weston. So why had some of the victim’s clothes been removed? There were two main possibilities – either her killer had been interrupted, or the intention had been to mislead the police.
Now, with the lights on again, Tailby was forced to admit that all they knew so far about the circumstances of Jenny Weston’s death was the situation they had found on Ringham Moor, and a bewildering array of items recovered by the SOCOs.
‘These camp fires – are they recent, sir?’ asked someone.
‘Some are clearly quite old,’ said Tailby. ‘A couple of months anyway, dating from the summer, when there is most activity up there. But others are more recent, with ash still present – we would expect it to be washed away into the ground after a few spells of rainfall. But the Peak Park Rangers for that area tell us there are often people camping on Ringham Moor, even in September and October. Right through the middle of winter sometimes. Even in the snow.’
‘We’ve got some right little Sir Edmund Hillarys, haven’t we?’
It had to be Todd Weenink who couldn’t resist. He looked as crumpled as the rest, perhaps even more so. He had almost certainly had more to drink the night before than the average man could take. Casual flippancy seemed to seep out of him like sweat from a ripe Stilton. Cooper watched Tailby’s grey eyes warm as he glanced at Weenink, grateful for the response.
‘Of course, there’s no indication so far that anybody camping out on the moor is necessarily a suspect for the attack on our latest victim, or even a witness. However …’ Tailby pinned a photograph to a big cork board. ‘By a stroke of luck, we also have this.’
The photo showed a patch of grey ash, with a few black sticks of charred wood poking through it. The ash looked as though it had been roughly brushed over. And there, to one side, was the partial imprint of the sole of a boot or shoe.
‘It’s early days, yet,’ said the DCI. ‘But we’re hopeful of an identification on the footwear. There’s sufficient impression from the sole to get a match, we think.’
‘But was it made at the time, sir?’
‘Ah.’ Tailby pointed to a small, dark smudge on the photograph. ‘This is a trace of the victim’s blood. The significant thing about it is that the print was made on top of the blood stain while it was still fresh.’
He nodded with some degree of satisfaction. Early forensic evidence was exactly what everyone prayed for. A boot print that would connect its wearer to the scene at the time of the offence – what better could they ask for at such an early stage? Well, a suspect with footwear to compare the boot print to, that’s what.
‘Read the preliminary crime scene report,’ said Tailby.
There was another shuffling of papers. Cooper looked down at his file. There was a computer-printed list of items retrieved from the area around the Virgins, but it was a long one, difficult to take in. The SOCOs had taken samples of vegetation, including heather, whinberry, gorse and three types of grass. They had taken sections of bark from the trunks of the birches where they had been cut by a knife or splashed with an unknown substance. They had brought in stones, half-bricks, bags of ash and cinders, sheets of corrugated iron, a small metal grille like a fire grate, a burnt corner of the Sheffield Star where half a dozen screwed-up pages had been used to help light a fire, a British Midland Airways refresher tissue wrapper, a whole pile of aluminium ring-pulls, several cigarette butts, a Findus crispy pancake packet, and a selection of used condoms.
The forensic team had covered a wide area – all of the clearing around the stones, right into the birches and as far as the fence around the edge of the quarry. The SOCOs must have balked at the view to the east, towards the edge of the plateau. Cooper could remember a sea of bracken – damp, endless acres of it, stretching to the Hammond Tower and beyond, flowing over the edge of the cliff, dense and almost impenetrable. Beyond the bracken was a low wire fence with wooden posts, then beyond it a precipitous drop. From there, an object would plummet a thousand feet into the trees that grew at acute angles on the lower edges of the slope into the dale.
Scrapings had been taken from a pool of white wax that had solidified in the hollow of a rotten tree, while digging in what at first appeared to be a rubbish hole turned up the bones of an animal. There were latent prints collected from the handlebars, saddle, front wheel and crossbar of the Dawes Kokomo Jenny Weston had been riding, and more samples of blood had been scraped from the frame of the bike.
‘We think the names on the stones are just old graffiti. The inscription scraped on the ground is more recent. It looks like “STRIDE”. If it means anything at all to anybody, speak up.’
Nobody spoke. They were looking at two more photographs on the board behind Tailby. There were two women, alive and smiling at the camera, though the one on the left looked guarded, maybe a little bit haughty, as if the photographer were taking a liberty getting her in the shot.
‘Are we looking at the same assailant in both cases?’ said Tailby. ‘Someone who was practising, as it were, on the earlier victim, Maggie Crew? Are we looking at someone who has succeeded in perfecting his technique with Jenny Weston?’
It was a very strange idea of perfection. Ben Cooper looked to see whether the other officers were reacting the same way. But most of them showed no surprise at the irony of the thought. Then something made him glance towards the far side of the room. Leaning casually against a desk was Diane Fry. She’d had her fair hair cut even shorter, and it gave an angular look to her lean face. He was sure she had lost weight, too. She had been slim before, but now there was a suggestion of something taut and thinly-stretched.
‘Don’t let ideas like that distract you,’ said Tailby. ‘We are treating this incident as an entirely separate enquiry, until the evidence proves otherwise. At this stage, we’re concentrating on collecting information. All right?’
His audience seemed to take this as a cue to start shuffling their papers again, looking for what information there already was. Cooper dragged his eyes away from Fry and did the same. At this stage, the information was pretty thin. Forensics results were awaited. Initial witness reports were sparse. True, they had details of Jenny Weston – who she was, where she lived, what she had done for a living. The minute details of her life were starting to emerge. But there was nothing to show what had made her go cycling on Ringham Moor on an early November afternoon, and why she had ended up dead among the Nine Virgins.
‘Somebody must have seen Jenny before she was killed. Maybe, just maybe, somebody also saw her killer. So have we got any leads so far? Paul?’
DI Hitchens stood up, straightening his jacket, looking much smarter this morning in his dark grey suit.
‘We’re looking at the likelihood that the killer arrived at Ringham Moor by car,’ he said. ‘We’ve already visited the houses close to the parking places on the edges of the moor, and we’ve collected a list of vehicles that were noticed around the time of the incident. It goes without saying that the vast majority of those vehicles will be totally impossible to trace. We’re lucky, though. If it had been the height of summer, it would be a lot worse.’
There were sighs and nods. It was a problem nobody in E Division needed telling about. The number of cars from out of the area greatly outnumbered the locally registered ones, especially in summer. Many of the Peak District’s twenty-five million visitors a year drove through Edendale and its surrounding