Dancing With the Virgins Read Online Free PDF

place in the team was a thing that couldn't be explained to someone who had never experienced it .
    Yet tomorrow morning, he knew he would be sitting in the monthly Crime Strategy Meeting for Edendale Section. He would be discussing the section's annual local objectives, the implementation of liaison policies and the measurement of performance. Occasionally, in these meetings, they talked about crime. But they hardly ever talked about the victims .
    Cooper watched the rugby players reach the traditional highlight of the evening, when they began to pour pints of beer over each other's heads. The bare wooden floor of the bar was already awash and turning sticky underfoot. Some of the students looked irritated at the way their clubhouse was being taken over by the more boisterous and more aggressive celebratory style of the police. Soon it would reach the point when it might be better not to have to witness a colleague com mitting a breach of the peace .
    It was time for Ben Cooper to leave. He needed to be awake and alert for the meeting in the morning, and he had a stack of burglaries to work on, as well as a serious assault on a bouncer at one of Edendale's night clubs. With officers seconded to the murder enquiry, no doubt there would be someone else's workload to take over as well. Besides, if he stayed any longer, he would drink too much. It was definitely time to go home .
    But home was Bridge End Farm, in the shadow of Camphill. Though he was close to his brother Matt, Matt's young family were gradually making the house their own, until their video games and guinea pig cages left little room for Ben. So for a while he sat on in the bar, like an old man in the corner watching the youngsters enjoy themselves, and he thought about the body on Ringham Moor .
    With a bit of luck, the police team would find some obvious leads and get an early closure. There would be initial witness statements that pointed with clunk ing obviousness to a boyfriend or a spurned lover. Sometimes it was as if the perpetrator carried a giant, fluorescent arrow round with him and the word 'guilty' in bright red letters that were visible five miles away in poor light. All the team would need to do then was make sure they collected the forensic evidence at the scene without either contaminating it, losing it or sticking the wrong label on it so that no one could say after wards where it had been found. It was amazing what could happen to evidence between the first report of a crime and the day a case came to court .
    Cooper fought his way to the bar, shouting to the barman to make himself heard above the din. It seemed as though no one else in here wanted to sit down — they were all up on their feet, shouting at each other. The police were singing triumphal songs, having a great time. The students were starting to look hostile .
    The American beer Cooper was drinking came in a brown bottle, with a black label and a faint wisp of vapour from its open neck. It was cold, and he closed both his hands round it, drawing a strange comfort from its chill for a moment before he turned and carried it away from the bar. Instead of returning to his corner, he slipped out of the door into the cooler air outside .
    For a while, he leaned against a rail near the changing rooms, gazing at the empty pitch, watching the starlings that had arrived in the dusk to pick over the divots in the turf, searching for worms exposed by the players' studs. He became distantly aware of a more aggressive note to the shouting in the bar behind him, but decided it wasn't his concern .
    Cooper continued to believe it was nothing to do with him right up until the moment that a six-foot six-inch student lock forward put a hand like a meat plate on his shoulder .
     

 

     
     

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    Diane Fry had never seen Detective Chief Inspector Stewart Tailby quite so agitated. The DCI loomed over his group of officers like a head teacher with a class full of pupils in detention, and he was