Free Dancing With the Virgins by Stephen Booth Page B

would never find, a woman whose better judgement had been cast aside. For what? A kind of penance? At one point, there had been an abortion. Jenny had not told her father at the time. His wife had told him about it, much later.
    ‘ That was something I could never understand,' he said. He shook his head, and Cooper saw the glitter of tears in the teacher's eyes. 'I never will understand it. Jenny always wanted children. ’
    And Jenny had hated her job, too. She had been good at it, had been promoted to supervisor, with twenty- five girls working for her. She had responsibilities and a better salary; she was well regarded by her employers and liked by her colleagues. But she had hated it.
    ‘ She said it was a sweatshop. She really disliked that. She kept talking about the pressure, unattainable targets, the constant surveillance by managers to make sure you were always working, the tedium, the repeti tiveness, the strain of being polite all the time to customers who didn't want to speak to you. Oh, and the posters round the walls. They all said: "Smile".' Jenny had also been depressed by the rate of burn-out among her staff – even the best of them lasting little more than twelve months in the job. Many sacrificed themselves, as Jenny saw it, to marriage and to raising a family, purely as a means of escape.
    ‘ She didn't even manage to make any proper friends. She said animals were preferable to people. It might have helped a lot if she could have made friends. But Jenny said she barely had a chance to get to know any of her colleagues before they were gone. All the new recruits to these call centres now are youngsters, straight from school into their induction training, pull ing on their telephone headsets and believing that's what work is all about. In my position, I see them leav ing school, full of hope, and I know what will happen to them. We do our best with them, you know, but that's how a lot of them end up. Very sad.'
    ‘ Did Jenny talk of escaping from the job?' asked Tailby.
    ‘ Oh yes. All the time. ’
    Of course she had talked of escaping; everyone did. She talked of working with animals, of being a veterin ary nurse or running a wildlife sanctuary. But there was nothing she was qualified to do, and nowhere else she could go. Now and then she thought about her lost career as a radiologist. And those were the worst times, said Eric Weston. It was knowing it was too late that depressed her the most.
    ‘ The one thing that Jenny really loved was the Peak District,' said Mr Weston. 'We used to bring her here as a child at weekends and in the summer holidays. Days out in Dovedale and at Castleton. When she went to university she joined a student walking club and they hiked over all the hills in the area. They did the whole of the Pennine Way one summer, staying at youth hostels. It was where she always came back to. ’
    Later, after her divorce, Jenny had again spent as much time as she could in the Peak District, walking, but often alone, since friends didn't seem to last long. She had tried pony trekking a few times, said Mr Weston. But recently she had taken to mountain biking. She had her own bike at home, but had preferred to hire a bike from Peak Cycle Hire or from one of the Derbyshire County Council hire centres. Often she rode the trails created from the old railway lines. But at times, when she felt the need, she would leave the trails and set off on to the moors.
    ‘ Yes, Ringham Moor was one of her favourite places,' said Mr Weston. 'We went there once as a family, many years ago. Jenny and John — that's her brother — and Susan and me, a happy family together. ’
    And Mr Weston added that he thought, perhaps, Jenny might have been trying to recapture happy memories, a happiness that had escaped her in other ways. He didn't know what had prompted her to take to the moors on that particular day. He didn't know why she had headed for Ringham. He had no more answers to give .
    Ben Cooper had