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One Last Breath
Stephen Booth
Major new psychological Peak District thriller from the acclaimed author of Blood on the Tongue and Blind to the Bones.The vast labyrinth of caverns, passages and subterranean rivers beneath the Peak District are a major tourist attraction. But this summer not all the darkness is underground, and not all the devils are folk legends. Mingling with the holidaymakers is a convicted killer, bent on revenge.Fourteen years ago Mansell Quinn was sentenced to life imprisonment for stabbing his lover to death. Now he's out and within a matter of hours his ex-wife is found dead – a new identity and a new home no safeguard against murder.Looking to the original case files for clues to the fugitive’s wherabouts, detectives Diane Fry and Ben Cooper discover there may be other potential victims out there. And as the son of the officer responsible for putting Quinn behind bars, Ben realizes that his own name could be high on the list.

STEPHEN BOOTH

One Last Breath


Dedicated to the men and womenwho explore the scariest place there is– the world beneath our feet
No book would reach this stage without the efforts of a whole team of people, and I particularly owe a debt on this occasion to my editor Julia Wisdom and the team at HarperCollins for their support. As usual, any mistakes are entirely my own.








Castleton, Derbyshire, 9 October 1990
And then she was gone. He heard the final scrape of air as it caught in her throat, and felt her last breath brush his cheek, as if a wisp of smoke had passed through the room. For a moment, she had taken his life in her mouth like a bubble of soap, swollen to bursting and smeared with light. And she’d punctured it with a sigh, that dying whisper. With one last breath, she had blown his life away.
Mansell Quinn knew he’d heard her die. He pulled his hands away from her body, and stared at the blood staining his fingers and pooling in his palms. He turned them from side to side, and watched the blood slide over a coating of white dust on his skin. It ran across his wrists and trickled into the soft flesh of his forearms, teasing the fine hairs like the caress of a fingertip.
He shook his head, trying to clear away the thoughts that buzzed in his brain like flies. He knew there were things he should do. Things he should do now. But he couldn’t remember what they were. Quinn’s mind was whirling and the room had begun to swing around him in dizzying arcs. Painful surges of adrenalin twitched in his veins, churning through his body as if poison had been pumped into his bloodstream.
The words running through his head were no help at all. Murder. The children. The knife. He knew what the words were, but couldn’t get them in the right order.
For some reason, she was wearing the lime-green sweater. A moment ago, the fabric had been stretching and twisting in his hands where it hung open over her breast. The colour of it looked garish next to the blood. But if someone had asked him what else she was wearing, he wouldn’t have been able to say. The sweater and the blood were all he saw.
Quinn sank to the floor and knelt by the body. He could feel sweat soaking from his pores and running down his face like tears. Gas bubbled in his stomach until he thought he’d be sick. He reached to pick up the knife, thinking he should put it out of her reach, hide it, throw it away, keep it safe. He had no idea which. He took her wrist between his fingers to feel her pulse, though he’d heard her die and he knew she was dead. He flinched at the touch of her skin and the slackness of her joints, and he dropped her hand back on the floor, where it landed with a thud. Then he noticed the bloody smears he’d left on her arm; they formed a pattern of red blotches and streaks, like a mark branded on an animal.
He looked up and squinted at the room, trying to place where he was. Her death had changed the world completely, so that nothing was familiar any more. Small impressions jostled his senses, like fragments of a broken picture. Music was playing somewhere, but he didn’t recognize it. A door facing him was open, but he couldn’t remember where it led. There was light coming through the doorway, yet it ought to be dark. A sweet scent hung on the air that he should know, but he couldn’t name it. It was his own house, yet it had become a place he’d never seen before. It was an alien landscape, painted in blood.
Quinn looked down at her face, and the shock hit him a second time. He felt a desperate rush of hope that it might be possible to undo everything and turn the clock back, so that nothing had happened at all. What if he’d come home a bit earlier, or later? Or if he hadn’t been held up by the roadworks on Back Street? What if he’d left his tools in the car, instead of taking his time getting the bag out and bringing it into the house, worrying about thieves going by on the road in the night, instead of what might happen in the next few minutes?
If he could take just one step back in time, her body might not be lying on the sitting-room floor, and the blood might magically fade from the carpet, like an advert for a miracle cleaner. She might stand up and laugh, and explain why she’d pretended to be dead. And life would go back to the way it had been before.
But Quinn had heard her die. The sound of her last breath had convinced him, not the sight of the blood or the slackness of her joints. And he knew his mistake had been made much earlier – years before, when he’d first met her and the whole thing had started. And now his life would never be normal again.
In a moment of silence, Quinn became aware of his own breathing. The sound of it seemed to fill the room, harsh and rapid, like the panting of a hunted animal, a rabbit in the jaws of the dog. He had never listened to his breathing before. He had never felt his lungs struggling to find air, or heard the shallow gasp that rushed across the roof of his mouth, like a cold wind inside his head. He didn’t like the noise, and he was glad when the music started again to fill the silence in the house.
What was that music? Why was it playing? Quinn nodded at someone, though there was no one else in the room. He remembered that he hadn’t found what he was looking for. The words had replaced the others in his head. He still hadn’tfound what he was looking for. But he hadn’t been looking for the lime-green sweater. That shouldn’t be here at all.
Then he noticed the wetness soaking through his jeans to his knees. He stood up, staring at the purple stains on the denim, and at the blood spreading from the soles of his boots. It was so deep that it welled up from the carpet when he moved his feet.
Unsteadily, he walked round the body, praying it might look different from another angle. But all he saw now were his footprints in the blood. The carpet had been gold once – a gold shadow pattern, one of the first things he and Rebecca had chosen when they were decorating the house. She’d be upset that the carpet was ruined.
Quinn looked at his hands again, and the blood reminded him of something he should do. The phone stood on a table by the door. He dialled 999, and somehow remembered his address.
‘Yes, 82 Pindale Road. An ambulance, please.’
He tried hard to listen to the voice of the operator, though he was distracted by the metallic smell of the blood on his hand and the slippery feel of the phone in his fingers.
‘Police? Yes, probably.’
When that was done, he felt as though his legs wouldn’t support him any longer. He made it back across the carpet and collapsed into an armchair. His eyes were drawn to the clock on the wall over the mantelpiece. He knew the clock was important for some reason. He listened to its ticking, waiting for it to penetrate the fog in his brain and tell him what else to do.
Finally, Quinn remembered the most important thing of all. The children. And he should have hidden the knife. The knife was dangerous.
But then exhaustion overwhelmed him, and his head fell back against the chair. When the first police officers arrived at the house, they found Mansell Quinn asleep. He was dreaming that the whole world could hear him breathing.
1
Monday, 12 July 2004
Today was the day Detective Constable Ben Cooper was supposed to have died. For practical purposes, he was already dead. His feet and hands felt icily cold, as if death might be creeping up on him slowly, claiming his body inch by inch.
For the past half hour, Cooper had been unable to move his arms or his legs, or even his head. Mud-stained rock filled his vision, every crack and protrusion glistening with dampness in the beams of light that swung across the passage. He could smell the mud and sweat around him, and hear the splashing of water as it echoed in the confined space. The rock was so close to his face that his breath condensed on it and fell back on him as mist. It filled his mouth with its taste. The sharp taste of stone.
Cooper had never imagined that he’d feel so helpless. The roof seemed to be sinking closer towards him, pressing down to crush his skull. He could sense the mass of the hill poised overhead. One tiny movement of the earth’s crust over Derbyshire, and millions of tons of rock would flatten him where he lay. He’d be squeezed to a juice, reduced to an inexplicable red smear for future geologists to find.
‘Only a few more minutes,’ said a voice in the darkness, ‘and we’ll reach the Devil’s Staircase.’
Then the light went off the roof, and Cooper could see nothing at all. For a moment, he thought the rock had already crushed him, and he began to panic. His lungs spasmed as if there were no oxygen left for him to breathe.
Cooper felt himself tilted violently backwards, but he was strapped in too tightly to move. Looking up from this angle, he saw a cluster of yellow PVC oversuits glowing in the sporadic light. Lamps created pools of luminescence around them and distorted their shadows on the roofs and walls. But there were no faces visible in darkness.
He was jolted again. He was sure the stretcher would turn over and tip him on to the floor of the passage, where he’d drown lying helpless in two feet of muddy water. And that would be the end of his career in Derbyshire CID. He’d never expected it to be like this.
‘I want to die in the daylight,’ he said.
But no one was listening to him. As far as they were concerned, he was already dead.
* * *
Detective Sergeant Diane Fry stumbled in the middle of the floor and kicked out in irritation. She’d never thought of herself as a tidy person – there were too many messy loose ends in her life for that. And God knew, her flat was a tip; she might have been competing with the students across the landing for the pigsty-of-the-year competition. But the intrusion of someone else’s untidiness was a different thing altogether. It made her grit her teeth every time she came home from a shift. She’d barely noticed the mess when it was her own clothes thrown on the bathroom floor, but finding a pair of black jeans halfway across the room from the laundry basket reminded her that she was no longer alone.
Fry’s pager was bleeping. She checked the number, scooped up her phone from the edge of the bath and dialled.
‘DS Fry here. Yes, sir?’
Her boss at E Division, Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens, was at his desk early this morning. Yet he sounded far from alert.
‘Oh, Fry. Are you on your way in?’
‘Very shortly.’
‘OK.’
Fry waited expectantly, but heard nothing except a metallic whirring in the background, as if Hitchens were having some construction work done on his office.
‘Was there something, sir?’
‘Oh, just … Does the name Quinn mean anything to you, Fry?’
‘Quinn?’
‘Mansell Quinn.’
‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t.’
‘No. No, it wouldn’t do.’
Hitchens sounded as though his mind was on something else entirely. Fry pulled a face and gestured impatiently at the phone, as if she’d been reduced to using sign language to an idiot.
‘Well, make sure you come and see me before you do anything else, will you, Fry?’
‘Certainly, sir.’
Fry shrugged as she ended the call. It was probably nothing. Hitchens was just losing his grip, like everyone else around E Division. But she’d better not be late. There was no time for clearing up someone else’s clothes.
Hold on, though. She looked more closely at the jeans on the floor. These weren’t someone else’s clothes – they were hers, bought only a couple of weeks ago during a shopping trip to the Meadowhall Centre in Sheffield. Worse, they’d been a comfort purchase on a day when she’d been feeling particularly down. She hadn’t even found a chance to wear them yet.
‘Angie!’
There was no reply from the sitting room, where her sister lay wrapped in a duvet on the sofa. The flat was so small that the distance between the rooms was only a few feet. The fact that her sister was asleep irritated Fry even more.
‘Angie!’
She heard a grunt, and a creaking of springs as her sister stirred and turned over. Fry looked at her watch: quarter past eight. She’d better pray the traffic wasn’t too bad getting to West Street, or she’d be late.
She called again, more loudly, then picked up the jeans and tried to fold them back into their proper shape before laying them on top of the overflowing laundry basket. They were creased and scuffed across the knees, as if Angie had been crawling around the floor in them. They were hardly worth wearing now, despite the money she’d splashed out for the sake of the designer label stitched to the back pocket.
Cursing, Fry began to fuss about the bathroom, picking up more items of clothing and shoving them into the basket. She rescued a towel from the bottom of the bath and hung it on the rail. She straightened the curtains, swept up an empty toothpaste tube and a Tampax wrapper and threw them into the pedal bin. She dampened a cloth and began wiping splashes of soap off the mirror. Then she caught sight of her own reflection, and stopped. She didn’t like what she saw.
‘What’s all the noise about?’
Angie stood in the doorway wearing only a long T-shirt, scratching herself and peering at her sister through half-open eyes. Fry felt a rush of guilt at the sight of her sister’s bare, thin legs.
‘Nothing.’
‘What are you doing? I thought there must be a fire, or a burglar or something.’
‘No. I’m sorry. You can go back to sleep, if you want.’
Angie coughed. ‘I’m awake now, I suppose. Are you going out, Sis?’
‘I’m on shift this morning.’
‘Yeah. Well, I’ll get myself a coffee. Do you want anything?’
‘I don’t have time.’
Angie looked around the bathroom. ‘Tidying up? Just before you go to work? You want to slow down, Di. You’ll be giving yourself a heart attack if you get so stressed.’
‘Yeah, right.’
Angie looked at her, puzzled. ‘You were shouting me though, weren’t you? I’m sure you were. What did you want?’
‘Nothing,’ said Fry. ‘It doesn’t matter. You go and get yourself that coffee.’
Angie turned away. ‘I’m sure I heard you shouting me,’ she said. ‘You sounded just like Ma.’
Fry dropped the damp cloth and leaned on the washbasin for a moment. She listened to Angie shuffling away, her bare feet slapping on the worn tiles in the passage. Fry kept her head lowered. The one thing she didn’t want to do was see herself in the mirror again. She didn’t want the memories that had been visible for a brief moment in the reflection of her own eyes, in the hard line of her mouth and the frown marks etched into her forehead.
Reluctantly, she looked at her watch. She had to go or she’d be late, and she couldn’t afford to be late when she had to set an example for the likes of Ben Cooper and Gavin Murfin, who would go wandering off in their own directions in a second if she didn’t keep an eye on them. – Fry walked into her bedroom to fetch her jacket from behind the door. She was annoyed to see that her hand was shaking as she entered the kitchen. Angie was sitting at the table, staring at her fingernails.
‘Angie, just now, what did you mean … ?’
‘What?’
‘When you mentioned Ma. What did you mean?’
Angie shrugged. ‘Nothing really.’
‘But …’ Fry stopped, defeated. ‘I’ve got to go.’
She went down the wide flight of stairs with its threadbare treads, and left the house by the back door. Number 12 Grosvenor Avenue was one of a series of detached Victorian villas in a tree-lined street, its front door nestling between mock porticos. It had space at the back for Fry to park her Peugeot, and she was glad to be able to get the car off the street, especially when she lay in bed at night listening to the passing drunks.
Fry wound the windows down to let some air into the car. It might turn out to be one of the few days in the year when she wished she had air conditioning. She plugged her mobile phone into the cigarette lighter to make sure it would be fully charged by the time she got to West Street. Then she drove up to the corner of Castleton Road and waited for the traffic to clear. She looked at her watch again. Almost eight thirty. She might not be too late, after all.
At this point, her mind was trained to switch off anything else and start to think about work. There was plenty to do, as usual. Today’s diary included a meeting to plan an operation against Class A drug misuse and a review of a long-running rape enquiry, as well as prioritizing whatever had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
Then Fry frowned. She hated starting the day with irritations that she couldn’t classify. And she had one already this morning, thanks to the call from her DI. What was the name he mentioned? Quinn? It still meant nothing to her. But she would have to know – who the hell was Mansell Quinn?
She looked at her phone. There was one person who was sure to know. She didn’t really want to talk to him if she could avoid it, but it might be preferable to walking into the DI’s office ignorant, and therefore in a position of weakness. Ben Cooper’s number was stored in her phone’s memory, one of a hundred invisible squiggles on its smart card, so that she carried his presence with her permanently, like a scar.
From the moment she’d arrived at E Division, Cooper had been in her hair, probing into her past, turning over all the memories she’d left the West Midlands to escape. And then this business with her sister. Why had he got himself involved in that? The one thing she wasn’t going to do was give Cooper the satisfaction of asking him. It seemed impossible to Fry that there could be any acceptable explanation.
She pulled his number up out of her phone’s memory and dialled, ready to pull over to the side of the road if he answered. But the number was unobtainable. Fry grimaced in frustration. Of course, Cooper was on a rest day today. Why shouldn’t he turn off his phone and enjoy himself?
Water was pouring through the roof. Splashes of it landed on his face, making him blink. Ben Cooper tried to move a hand to wipe it away, but his arms were held too tightly. Then he felt himself travelling up a slope and saw a larger chamber, lit by artificial lights. At last there was a change in air temperature and a glimpse of daylight as the mouth of the cavern opened above him, then he heard the high-pitched cries of jackdaws.
Giving an exhausted cheer, the six men in yellow oversuits dropped the stretcher with a thump. Cooper’s head banged on the plastic cover.
‘Hey, I’m a casualty, you know. Where’s the ambulance? Don’t I get an ambulance?’
After a moment, one of the men came back to the stretcher.
‘Sorry, Ben. But you are dead, you know.’
‘My God, if I’d known it’d be like that, Alistair, I wouldn’t have volunteered. In fact, I didn’t volunteer – I was talked into it.’
Alistair Page took off his gloves and leaned over to unfasten the buckles on the straps. He was still covered in the smelly silt that coated the caves and had been stirred up from the flooded passages by the rescue party. Like the rest of the team taking part in the exercise, he was protected by elbow and kneepads, and had a heavy tackle bag slung from his belt.
Cooper tried to remember which of his friends had introduced him to Page. Whoever it was, he had a score to settle.
‘You’re not telling me you’re claustrophobic,’ said Page. ‘It’s a bit late for that.’
‘I didn’t think I was, until an hour ago. But I’ve changed my mind. I feel quite sick.’
‘You’ll be all right in a minute.’
At last, Cooper was free of the stretcher. His legs felt numb, and he had to walk up and down and shake them a bit before the painful tingling started, a sign that the blood was flowing back into his limbs. Glad to be using his muscles again, he helped Page to lift a bundle of ropes and slide them into the cave rescue vehicle, an old Bedford van that was kept in the police compound in Edendale. The van was well overdue for replacement, but the Derbyshire Cave Rescue was a voluntary group and relied entirely on donations. They’d have to raise tens of thousands of pounds before they could buy a new vehicle.
The chattering of the jackdaws made Cooper look up. The birds were circling the roofless keep of the castle on the eastern rim of the Peak Cavern gorge, hopping restlessly from tree to tree, or flapping on to the cliff ledges.
‘Do they nest on those ledges?’
‘Yes. And so do mallard ducks sometimes,’ said Page. ‘But their ducklings have a habit of falling off. Visitors don’t like that very much.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Cooper, still craning his neck. It was a relief just to be able to move his head and see the sky.
‘You did a good job of being dead, by the way. Don’t forget – you get a free tour through the show cave for doing this.’
‘I’m coming down with my two nieces tomorrow afternoon. They’ve just broken up for the summer holidays, and I promised them a day out.’
‘You can cope with that, can you?’
‘At least you don’t get many real deaths here.’
‘There’s only ever been one in Peak Cavern. That was a long time ago. And, well …’ Page hesitated, looking back anxiously over his shoulder at the mouth of the cavern, as if he heard noises in the darkness but couldn’t see what was there. ‘Well, that was different,’ he said. ‘It was unique. And a long time ago.’
Some of the rescue team were carrying their gear back to the cavers’ clubhouse in Castleton. But Page lived only a couple of hundred yards away, in one of the cottages climbing the hillside on a narrow lane called Lunnen’s Back.
‘I’ll be here between ten and five tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Just ask for me if I’m not around.’
Since it was impossible to get a car anywhere near the cavern approach, Cooper had left his Toyota in the main car park, near the new visitor centre. From there, he could see a long line of people winding their way up to Peveril Castle. The climb was gruelling, and some of the older visitors stopped to rest at every chance, pretending to admire the view while they eased the pain in their knees. As a child, Cooper had himself visited Castleton on a school outing. In term time, the streets of the town were full of children with worksheets.
In the car park, he turned his face to the sun and breathed deeply. Right now, he couldn’t imagine who or what was going to ruin his rest day.
Diane Fry knocked on the door of the DI’s office at West Street, and walked straight in. Paul Hitchens was leaning back in his chair, gazing out over the roof of the east stand at Edendale Football Club. He barely moved when she entered.
‘Sir? You said you wanted to see me.’
Hitchens was silent for a moment, lost in some thoughts of his own that he wasn’t going to let Fry interrupt. So she waited until he was ready. She watched the sunlight from his window cast shadows on his face, making him look older than the DI she’d met when she first transferred to Derbyshire Constabulary, not all that long ago. Since setting up home with a nurse in Chesterfield he’d become middle-aged almost overnight, preoccupied with finding the right wallpaper for the bathroom and tending his lawn at weekends. Hitchens himself had seemed to sense the difference, too. He was a man settling into his position in life.
But now Fry noticed him fingering the scar across the middle knuckles of his left hand, as if remembering an old injury.
‘I hear Mansell Quinn is due out today,’ said Hitchens finally.
Fry felt a surge of irritation and fought to contain it. ‘Who,’ she said, ‘is Mansell Quinn?’
The DI spun a little on his chair, glanced at Fry as if checking who she was. She had a feeling that he’d have said the same thing no matter who had walked into his office. He might have been having this conversation with the cleaner.
‘You won’t remember him, DS Fry,’ he said. ‘Quinn got a life sentence for murder some years ago. He lived in Castleton, a few miles up the road from here, in the Hope Valley. Do you know it?’
‘A tourist honeypot, isn’t it?’
‘Interesting place, actually. I went there as a kid. I remember being particularly impressed by the sheep – they came right down into the centre of the town. I suppose they must have been looking for food. I hadn’t seen one up close before.’
‘Sir?’ said Fry. ‘You were talking about somebody called Quinn …’
‘Yes, Mansell Quinn.’ Hitchens swung his chair back again and gazed out of the window. His eyes seemed to go out of focus, as if he were staring beyond Edendale to the country further north – towards Hope Valley, on the fringes of the Dark Peak. ‘Well, Castleton’s quiet most of the year, when the tourists aren’t there. People know each other very well. Quinn’s case caused quite a stir. It was a pretty violent killing – blood on the sitting-room carpet, and all that.’
Fry hadn’t been asked to sit down, so she leaned against the wall by the door instead.
‘A domestic?’
‘Well, sort of,’ said Hitchens. ‘The thing was, Quinn denied the charge at first, but entered a guilty plea at trial. Then he changed his mind again when he’d been inside for a while. He said he didn’t do it after all.’
‘A bit perverse. Did he get parole?’
‘No.’
‘He ruined his own case, then. The parole board would have thought he was in denial.’
‘It doesn’t work like that any more. Early release depends on an assessment of any future risk you might pose, not on whether you’ve accepted the court’s verdict. The Home Office makes an issue of it in its policy for lifers these days.’
‘They were forced into that, weren’t they?’
‘That’s a sore point around here, Fry.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Risk assessment,’ said Hitchens. ‘That’s what it comes down to. We know about risk assessment, don’t we?’
Fry nodded. Too often, it meant covering your back, a means of avoiding litigation or compensation payouts. But that was one thought she didn’t articulate. It might not have been what the DI meant.
‘Mansell Quinn had behaviour issues,’ said Hitchens. ‘He had to undertake anger-management training in prison.’
‘And he still didn’t get parole?’
‘No. Quinn served thirteen years and four months, until he reached his automatic release date.’ Hitchens turned round fully in his chair and leaned forward on his desk. ‘And that date is today. Mansell Quinn was due to collect his belongings and walk out of HMP Sudbury at half past eight this morning.’ Hitchens looked at his watch. ‘Half an hour ago, in fact.’
‘So?’
‘Quinn will be on licence. He’s supposed to move into temporary hostel accommodation in Burton on Trent, and he has an appointment with his probation officer this afternoon. One of the conditions of his licence is that he stays away from this area. We’ve been asked to keep an eye out for him, in case he breaches his conditions.’
Fry shrugged. ‘So what if he does turn up here? Sometimes prisoners get a bit over-excited about being out and decide to celebrate. We might find him in a pub somewhere, but it will mean nothing.’
‘Probably.’
She straightened up to leave the DI’s office. But then Fry hesitated, feeling there might be something more that he hadn’t told her.
‘Anger management? So Quinn is a violent man, would you say, sir?’
‘No doubt about it,’ said Hitchens. ‘He has a long history of violent incidents in his past. In fact, he got knockback early in his sentence because he assaulted a fellow prisoner. He broke the man’s arm and removed a couple of his teeth. And he couldn’t explain why he did it. Or wouldn’t.’
‘And what about the original murder?’
‘Well, there was certainly enough blood at the scene. The place was like an abattoir. Not what you’d want your sitting room to look like – especially in your nice new three-bedroom detached house in Castleton. Pindale Road, that was the place.’
Fry settled back against the wall with a sigh. ‘What happened exactly?’
‘Well, it seems that Quinn had made his way home from the pub, where he’d been drinking with his mates all afternoon. There was a row; he lost his temper, grabbed a handy kitchen knife … And bingo – a body on the floor, blood on the shag-pile, and the suspect still on the premises when a patrol responds to the 999 call. Terrible scenes with the kids arriving home. The whole street hanging out of their doors to see what was going on and generally getting in the way. All the usual mess. The victim was dead at the scene. She had multiple stab wounds to her body.’
‘An ordinary domestic, then,’ said Fry, irrationally disappointed. ‘One like thousands of others. I suppose the reasons for the argument might vary a bit, but the choice of household object doesn’t usually show much imagination. And it’s always the wife who ends up dead on the floor.’
‘Except there was one big difference in the Quinn case.’
Fry lifted her head.
‘What?’
‘The body on Quinn’s sitting-room floor,’ said Hitchens. ‘It wasn’t his wife’s.’
2
Sudbury Prison, Derbyshire
There used to be poppies in every cornfield once – they were bright red, like splashes of fresh blood. Mansell Quinn was sure he’d seen them all through the summer. As soon as the sun came out, they were everywhere in little clusters, peering from among the yellow stalks, nodding their bloodied heads in the sun, waiting for the combine to scythe them down. For a few hot days each year, a field in the bottom of the valley would be filled with entire red rivers of poppies, pooling and streaming, moving slowly in the breeze.
This morning, he noticed for the first time that there was a cornfield right across the road, its acres of brown stalks just starting to seed. The fences around it were strung barbed wire. Quinn looked for poppies in the corn, needing that glimpse of red. But there were no poppies.
As he walked towards the outer gate clutching a plastic carrier bag and his travel warrant, Quinn began to realize that even his liberty clothing was too big for him, and too stiff to be comfortable. He’d lost weight during the last fourteen years, and his body had hardened, as if a callus had grown over his skin, the way it had grown over his heart.
Past the gatehouse, he turned to look back for the last time. Above a bank of flowers was the white sign with its slogan Custodywith Care and a mission statement: committed to rehabilitation andresettlement of prisoners.
Eight thirty was time for the morning collection. Right now, a court van was turning in through the gate and slowing for the speed hump, its steel grilles and reinforced doors making it look like an armoured personnel carrier. As Quinn stepped on to the grass to let it pass, the driver gave him a cautious glance, though the van would be empty yet this morning, its cage still smelling of too much disinfectant.
‘I’ll be home in an hour or so. And I can’t bloody wait. What about you?’
The man who fell into step alongside him was at least twenty years younger than Quinn, somewhere in his mid-twenties. He had short, gelled hair and a tattoo on the side of his neck, and he looked freshly shaved and scrubbed. He could have mingled with any bunch of lads in town on a Saturday night – which was just what he’d be doing by tonight, no doubt.
‘It’ll take me a bit longer than that,’ said Quinn.
‘Eh?’
‘A bit longer to get home.’
‘Oh? You sound like a Derbyshire bloke, though.’
‘That’s exactly what I am.’
‘Right.’
But Quinn had been born in the Welsh borders. It was there that the poppies had filled his summers. He supposed they must have found their way into the seed that the farmers sowed, or lay hidden in the ground until disturbed by the plough. Then they would flower before the wheat ripened, flourishing secretly between sowing and harvest. For the young Mansell Quinn, those poppies had been like a glimpse of wicked things existing where they shouldn’t be.
But when his father had got himself a new job as a forester on a country estate near Hathersage, his family had moved north to the Hope Valley. There were no cornfields among the gritstone hills and shale valleys of the Dark Peak.
The young man laughed. ‘You mean you’re getting right away from the old place? I don’t blame you, mate. Not for a minute.’
Quinn had no idea who the lad was. Yet in a way, they were as close as brothers. There were things that created a bond, ties that didn’t need to be talked about in these few minutes between the prison gate and the outside world.
‘Have you got somebody waiting at home for you?’ said Quinn.
‘Bloody right. I told her we’d get married when I came out. It’s only right, for the sake of the kids. We’ve got a council house and everything.’
‘Lucky.’
‘Yeah. I won’t be going back, that’s for sure.’
Quinn had stopped listening. His mind was on another house and another family.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you have to go back.’
‘You what? What are you saying? You know nothing about me, mate.’
‘No,’ said Quinn. ‘Nothing.’
The young man’s edginess subsided. It was only tension born of a fear of the unknown.
‘I’m Rick. You?’
‘Quinn.’
‘I’ve seen you around, I think. But I’ve not spoken to you before.’
‘Make the most of it.’
They walked across the road from the gate. This road was a dead end, created to serve the prison when the Sudbury bypass had been built. Ahead of them was the entrance to a concrete underpass.
‘So where are you heading?’ said Rick.
‘Burton on Trent. Some hostel my probation officer fixed up.’
The underpass was damp and smelly, a dim tunnel leading towards a patch of light. Their voices echoed from the walls, but the sound of their footsteps was muffled by the dirt floor.
‘First thing tomorrow,’ said Rick, ‘I’ll be off to Meadowhall to get myself a load of new gear. Well, after I’ve slept off the hangover from tonight, anyway. Getting pissed is the first priority.’ He laughed. ‘You too, I bet.’
‘Me too what?’
‘You’ll be getting some new clothes.’
Quinn looked down at what he was wearing. One of the first things he should do was find one of those charity shops where they sold secondhand stuff for a couple of pounds – the places he’d seen on his escorted absences: Oxfam, Cancer Research, Help the Aged. In one of those shops, he could pick up some jeans and a couple of shirts, maybe an old jacket that smelled of fag smoke, and a pair of boots. Dead men’s clothes probably, but who cared? They’d make him less noticeable. He had his discharge grant in his pocket, but there were other things he might need money for. Dead men could provide his clothes for now. It would be appropriate, in a way.
‘I’ve even got a job lined up,’ said Rick. ‘What a stroke of luck, eh? My probation officer helped me. He’s a decent enough bloke. A bit of money in your pocket, that makes all the difference, doesn’t it? A home to go to and your family around you. I’m going to get my life sorted out, just you watch.’
‘Good for you.’
‘I mean, I’m only twenty-five – I’ve got my whole future ahead of me. Besides, you can’t waste your life away when you’re a dad. I want my two to be proud of me some day. I don’t want them to think they’ve got a dad who’s a waster because he’s spent most of his life in the nick, do I?’
‘No.’
‘Have you got kids yourself, then?’
Mansell Quinn grimaced, and his jaw tightened. He said nothing. But the young man hadn’t really been interested in an answer.
‘I want them to do better for themselves than I’ve done,’ said Rick. ‘I want them to work hard and get on in the world. So I’m going to set them an example from now on. I promised Sharon I would. My lad wants to be a doctor, and I’m going to help him do that.’
The A50 was dusty, and the passing traffic stank of petrol and hot metal. Quinn had inhaled more fumes in the past five minutes than in the last fourteen years. He wished there had been poppies in the field. They would have been a good omen – blood in the fields matching the blood in his mind. But their absence made him uneasy. For the first time it occurred to him that life in the outside world might have changed in too many ways while he’d been gone.
These days, he supposed farmers treated their seed with chemicals to kill the poppies, to make every crop they planted perfectly pure and golden, totally sterile and dull. There was no more scarlet among the yellow, no more blood in the cornfields. Now, the blood moved only in his memory.
Rick looked at Quinn, leaving his own fantasy world for a moment.
‘Have you been inside for a while, like?’
‘Thirteen years and four months.’
‘Thirteen years? That’s tough.’
Quinn could see him working it out. You learned to do that in prison – to calculate parole and automatic release dates, all the stuff that the system hid with acronyms, as if they were no more than letters on the page of a report, rather than the days of a man’s freedom. Rick could work it out for himself. Thirteen years and four months meant his sentence must have been at least twenty years, even without parole.
‘A lifer, then?’
They had emerged from the underpass, back into the light. Quinn turned slowly, trying to orientate himself. The busy stretch of trunk road above him was new, and he didn’t know which direction anything was from the underpass. It was almost as if the prison existed in a strange little universe of its own, created to keep it away from the rest of the world.
‘Yes, a lifer.’
He knew that Rick wanted to ask the next question, but something was stopping him – maybe he was distracted by the slight stirring of the air between them, a draught blowing up from the underpass, causing a swirl of dust at their feet. Rick opened his mouth to speak, but a look of doubt clouded his eyes and he didn’t ask.
‘Who did you kill?’ he wanted to say. But he didn’t.
And that was a good thing. Because Mansell Quinn might not have been able to tell him.
There must be a way for the buses to come down off the A50, because there was a stop right here near the underpass and another across the road. In fact, there was a bus coming now, on his side of the road, heading for Burton upon Trent.
‘Here we go, then. Here we go.’
Rick took a firmer grip on his carrier bag. He spat into the gutter and watched his saliva seep into the dust.
‘Good luck, mate,’ said Quinn.
His companion looked at him oddly, but his attention was diverted by the approach of the bus. As soon as it pulled up to the stop and the doors folded open, he jumped on board.
Suddenly, Quinn took a step back from the bus stop. He gave the driver a blank stare as the man met his eye expectantly. Rick turned to watch him, not understanding what was happening, perhaps even a bit hurt. Then the doors closed, and the driver accelerated away from the stop.
Quinn watched the bus until it was out of sight. Despite the noise of traffic, all the cars were passing above him, on the main road. He looked for a moment at the exit from the concrete underpass, at the barbed-wire fences and the pale, bland acres of corn. Then he crouched, picked up a lump of stone that had fallen from the banking, and hurled it at the bus shelter. A glass panel shattered and crazed, its broken fragments showering on to the tarmac like crushed ice.
For a moment, Quinn smiled at the noise that exploded into the silence. And then he began to walk. Behind him, four words still seemed to echo amid the sound of shattering glass: Who did youkill?
3
Rebecca Lowe’s new house in Aston had been built to be almost airtight. The insulation created a difference in the internal air pressure from the outside world, so that the back door opened with a soft little cough as it parted from its draught-proof lining. The air was sticky outside, and the thunder flies were swarming. The tiny black insects covered everything when she wasn’t looking, and even the thought of them made her skin prickle, so that she constantly wanted to wash her face.
Inside the house, she had air conditioning. It had been one of the things Rebecca had insisted on after the discomfort of the previous summer and its record high temperatures. She couldn’t bear the humidity, which made her head ache, her temples throb and her hands slippery with perspiration. She’d slept badly for weeks, and changed her bedclothes every morning. The rumble of the washing machine had become a permanent background accompaniment to the long summer days.
In the new house, she could be cool. Parson’s Croft had been built of breeze-block on the inside, but with local gritstone on the outside, so that it blended in with the older houses and the landscape, as well as meeting the national park planning regulations. The site had a belt of mature sycamores and chestnut trees to screen the house and provide shade when the sun was in the west. But the air conditioning only worked properly if she kept all the doors and windows closed. Sometimes, the atmosphere in the house tasted stale, as if she were breathing the same air over and over again. It created its own kind of oppressiveness, a feeling that was almost as bad as the humidity outside.
Her dog Milly felt it, too. She lay in her basket all day, dozing restlessly, until it was time for her evening walk. And even when she got outside, she was bad tempered. She would yap at strangers, or worry obsessively at a stick or a piece of stone lying on the grass verge.
Today, Rebecca felt she would even welcome rain to bring a bit of freshness. As she finished washing up and wiped her hands, she walked into the lounge to look out through the double-glazed picture window. She examined the view down into the Hope Valley and up the slopes of Bradwell Moor and Abney Moor, her gaze skirting quickly past the tall chimney of the cement works in Pindale. Grey clouds were gathering over the moors, with darker patches among them, like blue bruises in the sky. There might be a shower later, with a bit of luck.
The phone rang in the still air. Rebecca put her towel down on the window ledge before she answered it, immediately identifying a familiar voice.
‘Mum, you know what day it is today?’
‘Monday,’ said Rebecca. ‘There, you see – I’m not entirely ga-ga yet. Try me with another one.’
She heard her daughter sigh at the other end of the line. She could picture Andrea sitting in a coffee bar somewhere, or striding along a London street with her mobile phone clamped to her ear. Living independently in the city and being good at her job as a buyer for a big retail chain had turned her into a formidable young woman.
‘Today’s the day he’s coming out, Mum,’ she said.
‘Yes, they told me.’
‘Aren’t you worried?’
‘No.’
‘You’re not? But, Mum, what if he comes out there?’
Rebecca was still looking out of the lounge window. She could see nothing but the flowering cherry tree and buddleias at the bottom of her garden, and a pair of mature lime trees. Red-and-black butterflies fluttered around the buddleias, bright and gaudy in the sun. A flycatcher dipped from his perch on the telephone wire, caught a mouthful of food on the wing, and landed back on the wire in one graceful movement.
‘I don’t think he’ll come here,’ she said.
‘A change of name isn’t going to fool him, you know.’
‘Of course not, Andrea.’
‘So what will you do, Mum? What precautions are you taking?’
‘Well, I haven’t fed Milly for days,’ said Rebecca lightly.
‘Mum, a geriatric Shih Tzu isn’t going to do much to protect you from an intruder, no matter how hungry she is.’
‘I was joking, dear.’
Rebecca moved a little to the right and lifted the curtain aside. Beyond the lime trees, she could see part of the field that backed on to the garden of Parson’s Croft. The field sloped away towards a stone barn where the farmer kept hay as winter fodder for his sheep.
‘This is nothing to joke about, Mum. You’re remembering to set the burglar alarms, aren’t you?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Rebecca.
‘Mum, if you’re not taking any precautions, I’m going to have to come up there and make sure you do.’
‘No. I don’t want you to.’ But then Rebecca heard her daughter’s intake of breath, and realized she might have sounded rude and ungrateful. ‘Not that I wouldn’t be pleased to see you. I always am, dear, any time. But I’m all right. Really.’
‘What about Simon? He’ll come and stay with you for a while. You know he will.’
‘Yes, he offered, but I told him not to. He’s not very far away, and I can always phone him. But I don’t want you or your brother to think you have to drop what you’re doing. You’re both much too busy.’
She heard her daughter sigh. ‘But, Mum –’
‘Look, I’m sure he won’t come here.’
‘Mum, remember what happened. You do remember what happened?’
‘Of course, dear. I was involved at the time. You weren’t.’
‘Not involved? I was twelve years old. You may not have been paying much attention to me, but I knew exctly what was going on.’
‘Not exactly,’ said Rebecca. ‘I don’t think you can have known exactly what was going on, can you?’
‘Well, OK. Just don’t tell me I wasn’t involved, Mum.’
Rebecca leaned to the left and let her forehead touch the glass of the window. This way, she could just make out the gable end of her neighbours’ roof. It was another new house, but much bigger than hers, with a fishpond, stone terraces, and a vast billiard-table lawn with sprinklers that ran eighteen hours a day in the hot weather. She rarely spoke to them, but they would occasionally smile and wave if they passed her in their Jaguar as she walked Milly on the lane.
‘I’m sorry, Andrea,’ she said. ‘You’re right. It must have been very traumatic for you.’
Her daughter went away from her phone for a couple of seconds. Rebecca could hear background chatter, and wondered if Andrea was mouthing a commentary at somebody sitting with her, wherever she was, exclaiming in exasperation at the impossible eccentricity of her mother back home in Derbyshire.
‘Well, anyway,’ said Andrea when she came back to the phone, ‘what on earth could you have to talk to him about now, Mum?’
‘There are things,’ said Rebecca, ‘that you might say were still unresolved.’
‘Oh God, Mum. I despair of you.’
Rebecca smiled. Her daughter really didn’t know everything.
‘But, in any case,’ Rebecca said, ‘he won’t come here.’
With an effort, Raymond Proctor smiled and nodded, forcing himself to be pleasant despite the anxiety in his stomach. These people were customers, after all. And customers were too few these days at Wingate Lees. They were a family from Hertfordshire – mum, dad and two kids. Their car stood near the roadway in front of one of the static caravans, ready to go.
‘Where are you off to today, then? Somewhere nice? The weather should be all right for you, I reckon.’
The woman stopped for a moment, ushering her children ahead of her to the car. ‘The kids want to go to one of the caverns,’ she said. ‘We thought we’d visit the one you suggested to us yesterday, Peak Cavern.’
‘Ah. The Devil’s Arse,’ said Proctor, grinning.
‘Pardon?’
‘That’s what they call it these days. I suppose they thought it would be more marketable.’ Then Proctor saw she wasn’t smiling. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s not the sort of language we think suitable for the children to hear.’
Proctor shrugged. ‘I’m afraid you’ll see it on the signs.’
‘Perhaps we’ll go somewhere else, then. There’s Speedwell.’
‘Well, that’s interesting, too. But Peak Cavern’s best. Let me know what you think of it when you get back. Say hello to the guide for me while you’re there. And don’t forget to ask him –’
‘Yes, thank you.’ The woman turned to go.
‘It’s a pleasure,’ said Proctor, maintaining his smile. ‘Of course, if you’re going underground, it won’t matter what the weather’s like, will it? I said, it won’t matter …’
But the woman didn’t answer him. She fussed over the children’s seat belts and snapped something at her husband as she got into the passenger seat next to him.
‘Unless it rains really, really hard,’ said Proctor through gritted teeth, after they’d started the engine. ‘And then the caves might flood, and you could all drown.’
He kicked the head off a wallflower growing in a bed near the phone box, and winced at a twinge of pain in his leg. His arthritis was troubling him this morning, which meant it probably would rain later, after all. Slowly he walked past the shop and the TV lounge, irritated as always by their log-effect façades. The design had been Connie’s idea – she said it would go with the style of the cabins and give the site a theme. But Proctor thought it made the place look like a Wild West frontier town. Just too bloody tacky for the sort of guest he was trying to attract to Wingate Lees.
There was a lot of competition from other caravan parks in the Hope Valley, and Wingate Lees was a bit off the main road for passing trade. People had to turn off the A625 for half a mile, then drive over Killhill Bridge and under the railway line to find his little site tucked into the edge of Win Hill. The nearest village was Aston, but there was no way of getting there from the site except by walking – and nothing to do if you went there, anyway.
The reputation of Wingate Lees was important if it was going to survive. He didn’t have endless amounts of money to spend on marketing, so he relied on word of mouth to get him business. He needed his guests to be happy. Though, God knew, it was difficult to be polite to some of them when what they really deserved was a kick up the backside. A lot of the time, he hardly felt like bothering.
Proctor supposed he might feel differently about the business if Alan were here to run it with him. Having somebody to pass it on to – that was what mattered. But all he had was Connie and her kids, and it wasn’t the same at all. Nothing was the same as your own son.
He stopped to check on the girl who helped in the shop and looked after the coin-op laundry. Then he glared across the grass to where Henry, the maintenance man, was raking the gravel around the hardstandings. He couldn’t find fault with either of them, so he kept on walking, passing along the lines of mobile homes to the touring caravan pitches, and past them to the pond, which his promotional leaflets called a water amenity. A copse of trees lay across the pond, and an area of grass where visitors could walk their dogs. Convenient exercise facilities available for the use of pet owners.
Four old caravans were pitched here, well away from the rest of the site and in the shadow of the railway embankment. He only let these out to visitors when the rest of the place was full – which was a rare occurrence these days – or if he had a bunch of students on the site he didn’t like the look of. If they wrecked an old ’van, it would be a lot cheaper to replace than one of the family units, which had to be in good condition or he’d lose his customers.
This was where Proctor came to get away from the family. He could see the house from here, allowing him advance warning if Connie was on the prowl.
Because there was no demand, he hadn’t maintained the old ’vans properly, and now some of the joints in the shells had developed leaks. The lad who came in to wash the caravans must have noticed, because he hadn’t bothered to clean these two. Moss had started to grow on their surfaces, staining the paintwork green. The heavy rain in the last few days had streaked the dirt, making their deteriorating condition even more obvious.
Proctor was breathing heavily by the time he reached this part of the site. He’d been getting overweight ever since he married Connie. She fed him junk food every day, then told him he ought to get more exercise.
He’d come this far feeling calm enough, but now he felt uneasy as he reached out to try the handle on the door of the first caravan. He rattled it quickly, withdrawing his fingers as if he might get burned. He peered through the orange curtains, using his hands to cut out reflections from the window. Then he moved on to the next caravan and did the same.
‘What are you doing, Ray?’
Proctor jumped guiltily. His wife was standing on the other side of the pond. She was wearing a baggy white sweatshirt and yellow pedal pushers that emphasized the muscles of her thighs. And her feet were shoved into those ridiculous trainers with enormous tongues and lights in the heels. That was why he hadn’t heard her coming.
‘Just checking the old ’vans,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘In case we need them.’
‘Ray, take a look around you – half the site is empty.’
‘You never know.’
Connie stared at him in open disbelief. ‘Really.’
‘I’m making sure everything is OK down here, that’s all. We mustn’t let them get too neglected.’
She looked at the mould and streaks of dirt on the nearest caravan. ‘Neglected? You should have got rid of them years ago. If you want something useful to do, there’s still that leak in cabin six that needs fixing.’
‘I know, I know. I’ll see to it in a minute.’
But Connie stood watching him until he sighed, moved away, and went back through the trees. She would have put her hands on her hips like an old schoolmistress – if she had any hips.
A cement train ran southwards across the bridge, with a long line of Blue Circle tankers coming away full from the Hope works. As they rattled over the stone arch, their wheels rumbled like approaching thunder. The sound went on for so long that Raymond Proctor found it hard to resist breaking into a run.
Down at the cement works, Will Thorpe had watched the line of tankers leave. Now, an excavator was trundling along the skyline, a black outline against the afternoon sun as it worked its way along the edge of the quarry. Beneath Thorpe’s feet, dead bracken branches snapped, releasing puffs of cement dust. Decaying leaves still lay on the ground from the previous autumn, but now they were white, as if they’d been covered in frost.
Thorpe licked his lips. They were dry and cracked from the sun and dust. He knew he should stay away from the Hope works. His lungs hurt badly enough without the abrasive powder that hung in the air. But at night, it was irresistible. Here, the night-time world was a window on to another reality. The works was lit up like a city in a science fiction film, full of glittering towers and glaring lights, with drifting spurts of steam and mysterious rumbles and screeches from hidden machinery.
When he spread his hand flat against the ground, Thorpe could feel the vibration that went with the noise. It reminded him of the movement of a column of armoured vehicles on a desert road, their steel tracks grinding the surface into dust, and their gun barrels swollen and heavy, like ripe fruit. The recollection was so clear that he could almost taste the sand in his mouth and feel the sun on his neck below the band of his beret.
Thorpe would have liked to be able to step into another reality. If ever it was possible, it ought to be possible now. He’d checked the date when he was in Castleton earlier in the day, and he knew it was 12 July. Somehow, he’d convinced himself that the day would never arrive, but here it was.
Will Thorpe had seen enough death to believe that he could sense it in the air when it was coming. Not slow, drawn-out death, drugged against the pain and hooked up to drips in a hospital bed. But sudden, violent death that fell out of the sky or burst from the ground, killing in an explosion of blood. The sort of death that he’d prefer for himself, given the choice.
Thorpe closed his eyes against the pain in his chest, against the sights that he saw in the deep shadows among the trees and the tumbled rocks on the slopes of the quarry.
‘Oh shit, oh shit,’ he said.
He wished he could spit out the permanent bitter taste at the back of his mouth as easily as he could spit out the cement dust. But the taste of violence had soaked into his glands, and now it seeped into his mouth with every trickle of saliva.
Thorpe’s hands were trembling. He knew the trembling was caused by hunger, not fear. In fact, he had never been afraid, not even in the worst times, when his mates had been blasted to bits alongside him, when the blood had splattered his face mask so thickly that he could no longer see the enemy. He knew that other men were afraid when they went into action, but somehow it had never bothered him, the knowledge that he might die at any moment. In fact, he wasn’t afraid of death at all. It was living that caused him pain.
Thorpe smiled, feeling several days’ stubble move on his face. You learned to develop the right instincts, because they might be all that kept your mates and yourself alive. Your senses evolved so that you knew precisely where the members of your own unit were positioned and could see an area of ground as if it were magnified on a TV screen, with any movement immediately apparent. That was what he sensed now – a movement somewhere in the hills. Something coming this way.
There was no sense in giving away his own position. He’d seen men who’d made stupid mistakes and given themselves away. Those men didn’t survive long. Worse, they put their mates at risk.
The loud squealing of the vehicle working high on the quarry edge echoed over the cement works like the voice of a desert demon. A huge dumper truck had come over the ridge and was descending the banking. Thorpe couldn’t see it yet, but he could feel the vibration in the ground long before it reached him.
4
DI Hitchens poked a strip of paper into his desk fan. The whirling blades chewed it with a noise like a high-speed power drill.
‘Her name was Carol Proctor,’ he said. ‘Quite a good-looking woman when she was alive.’
Diane Fry stared out of the window of the DI’s office, wondering what her sister Angie was doing now. Probably she’d gone back to bed, and was rolled up tight in her duvet with a mug of coffee going cold on the floor by the settee. Or maybe she was in the bedroom, trying on her sister’s clothes. With a bit of luck, none of them would fit her. But that was ungracious. And unlikely.
‘I hope that was noted in her file,’ said Fry. ‘It would make her relatives feel so much better.’
Hitchens looked up at her sharply from his fan, but she kept her back turned. She didn’t really want to get into an argument with her boss about detectives whose first response at a murder scene was to comment on the sexual attractiveness of the victim. Not just now, anyway.
‘This was in 1990,’ said Hitchens.
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Carol Proctor was married to one of Mansell Quinn’s closest friends. But Quinn had been knocking her off for years.’
‘He was married himself?’
‘Oh, yes. The Quinns were doing quite well for themselves, and had bought a nice little detached house in Castleton. He was in the building trade – but he was bright, you know, not some dim brickie with a sunburnt arse. In fact, he’d recently started his own contracting business, if I remember rightly. Small-scale, but doing OK, by all accounts. There’s always plenty of work in that area – extensions and modernizations, you know the sort of thing.’
‘You said they bought the house in Castleton, though,’ said Fry. ‘He didn’t build it himself.’
‘No, the cobbler’s wife and all that. This place was new, and nicely done out. I wouldn’t have minded somewhere like that myself, but you can’t get houses in Castleton these days.’
Fry turned away from the window, irritated by the sound of another strip of paper being fed into the fan. The grinding was making her think of her last visit to the dentist’s.
‘Were there any children, sir?’
‘The Quinns had two, one of each. Sounds like the perfect happy family, doesn’t it?’
‘But this Carol Proctor … ?’
‘Yes, that’s where the pretty picture falls apart. The other woman.’
‘It sounds rather predictable.’
‘Maybe. Unfortunately, we were never able to establish why Carol Proctor had gone to the Quinn house that day. She only lived down the road, so maybe it was just an impulse, or she had something to say to Quinn that wouldn’t wait. We couldn’t find out why they’d argued, either. Quinn himself was notably unhelpful.’
‘And his affair had been going on for some time, regardless of the nice new house, two children and a dog?’
‘There wasn’t a dog,’ said Hitchens.
‘I meant it figuratively.’
Hitchens watched her as she moved away from the window and found a chair.
‘Are you all right, Fry?’ he said. ‘You seem to be in a strange mood this morning.’
Fry gave herself a mental shake. ‘I’m fine. Sorry.’
‘Good. Anyway, yes. Quinn’s affair was long standing. I was amazed at the time. I mean, how do you keep up a lie to a person you’ve lived with for so long, and not get caught out? You’d be bound to slip up in some way, wouldn’t you?’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir,’ said Fry.
‘No?’
‘I’ve lived alone, mostly.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Fry had lived alone for a long time, as the DI knew perfectly well. But she’d become hardened to it. She’d been able to hold back the tide of loneliness, until now. Having someone else around made it difficult to deal with things in her own way.
Since the middle of June, she’d been constantly aware that there was another person in the flat. She’d started to notice the grubbiness of the carpets and the damp stains on the walls, as if she were ashamed of the way she lived.
‘I think being single can be an advantage sometimes,’ said Hitchens thoughtfully. ‘I mean, for the job. You’re ambitious, aren’t you, Fry? Want to get promoted further?’
‘Of course.’
‘With fast-track procedures, you can rise to superintendent in seven years now. The pressure’s immense, and the chances of failure are enormous. But it’s possible. That’s what I wanted to do, you know. But life gets in the way.’
‘Yes, sir.’
If he was appealing for her sympathy, he was wasting his time. Fry remembered the way she’d been thinking when she first transferred to Derbyshire Constabulary. There had been very little on her mind except how quickly she could progress up the promotion ladder, the best way to make an impression on her senior officers, and who among her new colleagues might be of most use in her ambitions. But at this distance, she could see that she’d been trying hard to fill her mind with work, to keep out the things she didn’t want to think about.
There had been only one exception to her self-imposed rule then, just one subject that had occupied her thoughts when she was away from the office: her sister.
Yet that first time Angie had visited Grosvenor Avenue, when Diane had driven her back from the Dark Peak village of Withens in a daze, her sister had barely glanced at the flat, commenting: ‘This place is OK, I suppose.’ She’d shown no interest in seeing the kitchen or the bedroom, let alone any inclination to disapprove of the clutter, or the dirty clothes left on the bathroom floor. So why should her presence have made Fry feel suddenly so defensive about the mess?
‘It suits me,’ she’d heard herself say.
And it was true, of course. She had no need of a home any more, no desire for a place that she might learn to care about.
‘Who are the people in the other flats?’ Angie had asked.
‘Students.’
‘God, students. They’re a pain in the arse.’
And the conversation had stumbled into one of those awkward pauses again, as if Angie were some total stranger she had nothing in common with, instead of being her sister.
Diane had found herself standing like an idiot in the middle of the sitting-room carpet, shuffling from one foot to the other while she tried to think of something else to say.
Angie had flopped down on the old settee and stretched her legs with a sigh, staring at the toes of her trainers, which were still damp from the rain in Withens.
‘Well, aren’t you going to offer me a coffee or something, Sis? Even Ben offered me a coffee, when I was at his place.’
Fry didn’t move. Even her shuffling stopped. She waited for her sister to meet her eye, but Angie wouldn’t look up.
‘You went to Ben Cooper’s house?’
Angie smiled at her toes in a conspiratorial way, as if they’d done something quite clever.
‘I only stayed there the one night,’ she said.
Fry clenched her fingers until her nails dug into her palms. ‘I don’t think I want to know this.’
Angie shrugged. ‘It’s not important. Ask me about it when you feel a bit more interested.’
Fry opened her mouth, shifted her feet again, and noticed the pain in the palms of her hands.
‘How do you take your coffee?’ she said.
For some reason, Angie was still smiling. But now she looked up at her younger sister with a knowing look in her eyes.
‘We’ve got a lot to learn about each other,’ she said. ‘Haven’t we, Sis?’
Diane Fry left the DI’s office aware that she’d absorbed only part of what he’d been telling her. And that wasn’t like her at all. She prided herself on a good memory for details when she was on the job. At home, life might pass in a haze some of the time, but not when she was at work. She was sharp, on the ball, a cut above the rest of them in CID. Well, usually she was. Maybe she was sickening for something.
It was remembering that day in Withens that had distracted her. She still felt the shock of the moment that she’d turned to see Ben Cooper walking away and her sister standing there in the road instead, as if fifteen years had vanished in a blink of an eye. Since that day, she hadn’t been able to think of her sister without thinking of Cooper, too. The bastard had intruded himself into her private life like a splinter under her fingernail. She would have to find out the truth from him one day. Until she had an explanation of his involvement, there was a missing connection. And without it, the presence of her sister in her life again just didn’t add up.
Pausing in the corridor, Fry pulled out her phone and dialled Cooper’s number again before she could stop to reconsider. But all she got was the recorded voice telling her his number was still unobtainable.
She thrust the phone back into her pocket and kept walking. That was the problem with feelings – they could be so ambiguous. It didn’t make any sense at all to feel disappointed and relieved at the same time.
* * *
‘The Devil’s Arse,’ said the older of the two girls, with conviction. ‘We want to go up the Devil’s Arse.’
Ben Cooper smiled at an old lady who turned to stare at them. He tried to get a sort of tolerant amusement into the smile, mingled with embarrassed apology. The old lady lowered her head and leaned to whisper something to a friend supporting herself on a walking frame. Cooper flushed, imagining the worst possible thing she could be saying.
They’re not mine, he’d wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t.
Although it was a Monday, the streets of Edendale were packed. The summer holiday season had started in the Peak District. It was sunny enough for the old ladies to stroll from their excursion coach to the tea rooms, as well as for younger visitors to shed some of their clothes and sprawl on the grass near the river. Cooper found it too humid in town when the weather was warm. He preferred to be on higher ground, where he could feel a bit of cool breeze coming over the moors.
In the pedestrianized area of Clappergate, they weaved their way between the benches and stone flowerbeds, wrought-iron lampposts and bicycle racks. A little way ahead was the Vine Inn and the brass plaque outside it that he knew so well: In memory of Sergeant Joseph Cooper of the DerbyshireConstabulary, who died in the course of his duty nearhere.
Cooper tried walking a bit more quickly. Perhaps if he could get away from the crowds, he’d feel a bit easier.
‘That’s rude,’ said Josie. ‘I don’t say rude words.’
‘“The Devil’s Arse” is what they call it,’ said Amy. ‘So it can’t be rude.’
‘It is.’
‘It’s not. Just you ask Uncle Ben.’
Cooper stopped. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said brightly.
‘Why can’t we ask you now?’ said Amy.
‘No, I mean we’re going there tomorrow.’
‘Peak Cavern,’ said Josie. ‘That’s what it’s called properly. We’ll go to Peak Cavern.’
Cooper was sweating. And it wasn’t just the humidity either. Talking to his nieces was like walking through a minefield these days. He didn’t want Matt and Kate accusing him of teaching the girls to say ‘arse’. But he could already hear them saying it when they went home to the farm tonight. Uncle Ben says we can say ‘arse’, Dad. Just great.
‘It’s your day off today,’ said Amy, who was the older of the two and knew CID shift patterns and duty rosters better than he did himself.
‘I’ve got two days off this time,’ he said. ‘So we can go tomorrow.’
‘But …’
‘Yes?’
‘But what if you get phoned up?’
Cooper sighed. He felt a surge of sympathy for all the family men on E Division. This must be what it was like for them all the time. The constant cries of: ‘Why weren’t you there, Dad?’, ‘It’s supposed to be your day off,’ and ‘What if you get phoned up?’
‘If I get phoned up,’ said Cooper, ‘we’ll go some other time. I promise.’
He could almost hear the girls weighing up the value of his promise, and judging its reliability. They were far too wise to trust any promise that an adult made, but they wanted to believe him. He opened his mouth to add: I’ve never let you down before, have I? But he knew it wouldn’t be true.
A party of hikers went by. Their clothes were dazzling, and their walking poles the latest anti-shock design. Getting kitted up for a day on the Derbyshire hills was becoming an exercise in fashion awareness, and all the accessories had to be exactly right. Soon, people would be choosing their rucksacks to match the colour of their eyes.
A white-haired man walked towards them on the pedestrianized area. The first thing Cooper noticed was his comb-over. Every time he saw one, Ben prayed that he’d have enough sense not to do it himself when he was losing his hair. Be bald, wear a hat – anything but a comb-over.
The man was wearing a silver-grey sports jacket and a blue silk shirt that hung outside his trousers. He had dazzling white trainers and a white toothbrush moustache that was probably the height of fashion when it had been black. His hair was long, too, even allowing for the requirements of his comb-over. He looked like an ageing British character actor playing the role of a faded gigolo.
Cooper was so distracted by the shopper that at first he didn’t notice a man in a security company uniform gesturing to him from the doorway of W.H. Smith’s. He was a retired police officer who had moved into the expanding private security business, so now he got a better uniform to wear.
‘I think there’s a couple of those Hanson brothers just been in here,’ he said. ‘Right toe-rags, they are. There’s a warrant out for both of them. I don’t know them myself, but it looked like them from the pictures.’
Cooper stopped. ‘I know them, but …’
‘You might want to keep an eye out for them. They’re probably somewhere down near the High Street.’
Amy and Josie were looking at the man and listening with interest.
‘Look, I’m off duty,’ said Cooper.
The security man noticed the girls for the first time. ‘Oh, right. You’ve got your kids with you.’
‘They’re not mine, actually.’
‘I see.’
‘They’re my nieces. My brother’s children.’
Cooper had realized before he even stopped to speak to him that the ex-bobby was just the right age to have worked with his father. He found himself fidgeting immediately, anxious to move on before the reminiscences began, the stories of late turns together as young PCs. Because they would be followed very quickly by the assurances of how much everyone had respected and loved Sergeant Joe Cooper, and how devastated they’d all been when it happened.
It wasn’t so much of a problem at the West Street station in Edendale these days, but the retired coppers were the worst. These were the blokes who had been counting the days and hours until they could collect their full pensions after thirty years’ service. Yet now you would think they’d been forced to leave behind the happiest days of their lives.
‘Must get on,’ said Cooper. ‘Nice to see you.’
‘Hey, these must be Joe Cooper’s grandchildren, then.’
But Cooper just waved and smiled as he put distance between himself and the doorway of Smith’s. Josie had to run to catch up with him.
Cooper thought occasionally of his own old age, though it was usually a brief speculation about whether he would live longer than his father had. He didn’t feel any great desire to be a dad himself. Not just yet, anyway. But when he was old, when he was as helpless as his own mother was now, who would be there to look after him? At the present rate, there would be no one.
But that day was decades away; not something to worry about now. It was only the approach of his birthday that was making him think about ageing. And it wasn’t just any birthday this time, either.
Joe Cooper’s birthday had been in July, too. That meant they shared the star sign of Cancer, the crab in its shell. An astrologer would probably have been delighted that it had taken Cooper so long to move out of Bridge End Farm for a place of his own. A reluctance to leave the family home, a need to cling on to his shell. He would be thirty years old on Saturday, for heaven’s sake.
As for his job, Cooper was sure he’d be asked one day soon to undergo a bit of lateral development and say goodbye to CID for a while. Somebody was going to turn up with a sharp knife to prise him out of his shell.
‘You should have introduced us to that man,’ said Amy. ‘He knew Granddad.’
‘I thought you wanted your lunch?’
‘It wasn’t very polite.’
‘You’re not polite either,’ said Josie to her sister. ‘You say “arse”.’
Cooper wondered for a moment if he was being selfish. He hadn’t wanted to hear a retired bobby’s stories about his father. In fact, he’d been worried that this ex-copper might have been one of those called to the scene of Sergeant Joe Cooper’s death, and would therefore be carrying a picture in his head of the body lying in its pool of blood. He definitely didn’t want to go there.
But Amy and Josie might want to talk about their grandfather with someone who’d known him, someone other than a member of their own family. It might help them understand what had happened.
Cooper shook his head. That was something else he wasn’t going to take responsibility for. Matt could negotiate that minefield himself.
At the corner of High Street and Clappergate, a few yards short of McDonald’s, Cooper saw two of the Hanson brothers across the road. He recognized them without any problem. He’d arrested them himself before now, and in fact had been to school with their oldest brother. These two had failed to answer to bail given them by a lenient magistrates’ bench and had been rumoured to have left Derbyshire altogether, for fear of ending up back inside. Cooper reached automatically for his mobile phone, only now realizing that he had forgotten to switch it back on after the cave rescue exercise.
Then he noticed Amy watching him with the sort of expression that only a child could manage, an expression that came from her natural occupation of the moral high ground when dealing with adults.
‘You’re off duty,’ she said. ‘You’re not supposed to be finding criminals today.’
Cooper looked at her, pausing with his finger on the first button. He was supposed to take the girls to McDonald’s and buy them a Happy Meal before he took them home to Bridge End Farm, preferably safe and uncorrupted.
‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘But sometimes they seem to find me. That’s just the way it is.’ And he continued to dial.
5
The bus from Ashbourne to Edendale was almost empty. Mansell Quinn took a seat near a back window, where other passengers couldn’t see him. He watched the scenery gradually change to the familiar White Peak pattern of fields and drystone walls, until a rash of limestone quarries erupted from the landscape near the A6. They were so noticeable on the edge of the national park that Quinn was surprised they were still working.
In Edendale, he went to find the well in Spa Lane. The water still ran from its brass pipe, and people were queuing with plastic containers. A man with a tray of two-litre bottles was collecting gallons of it. Quinn waited until they’d all gone, then bent to take a drink in his cupped hands. He’d expected the water to be cold, like a natural stream. But it was strangely tepid and had a faint mineral tang – not as he’d remembered it at all.
All the way from Sudbury, he’d been building up courage to enter a shop. He’d passed several charity shops on the way to the well, and had noticed that all the assistants were women. As were most of the customers. He was worried that women tended to notice too much.
Then he saw a couple heading towards the door of the Oxfam shop in Clappergate, and he walked in behind them, almost hanging on to their coattails to help him over the threshold. He bought a faded check shirt for two pounds fifty. Encouraged, he moved on, and found a pair of jeans the right size for him in Scope a few doors away.
But he had to choose a coat carefully. He wanted something that was light but rainproof, one with a hood. He’d be outdoors a lot, but he didn’t want to be weighed down by anything too heavy in the hot weather. Quinn had a momentary panic when he realized that the same women he’d followed into Oxfam were also in Help the Aged. But they took no notice of him, and he guessed there must be some kind of circuit that people did of the charity shops. Everyone liked a routine.
In Cancer Research, by the delivery entrance to the Clappergate shopping centre, he found exactly the right thing. It was a black Wynnster stowaway smock, waterproof and breathable, but light enough to roll up and carry. It had a peaked hood and a velcro fastening at the back, a storm flap that buttoned up to his face and a drawstring to pull the hood tight. It must have cost about thirty or forty pounds new. This one had a slight rip down one side and the lining was worn inside the collar, but that wouldn’t bother him. It smelled faintly of oil, as if someone had worn it while working on a car engine. That didn’t worry him either.
And then, at the back of the shop, he came across a small rucksack. It was a dark khaki, not the useless garish colours that he’d seen in the shop windows. This one might have been army surplus stock at some time. It looked as though it dated from the 1950s, but it was well made, sound enough for the use he had in mind.
‘It’s a bit warm for hiking, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
Quinn had his cash ready in his hand, having worked out the total amount before he went to the till. He expected to be able to hand over the money, take his purchases and go, without giving the woman behind the counter anything to remember him by.
‘Hiking,’ she said. ‘Your rucksack and waterproof – I assume you’re going hiking?’
The woman was folding the smock and finding a plastic bag to put it in. She was only making small talk, and Quinn knew there ought to be an answer he could give that she’d think was normal.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But not here.’
She looked up at him then, and smiled. Quinn felt she was forcing him to fill the silence.
‘Wales,’ he said.
It was the first place that had come into his head. But he knew immediately it had been the wrong thing to say. If there were reports about him in the newspapers, they might mention he was from Wales.
‘We went there last year,’ said the woman. ‘Aberystwyth. I wouldn’t go hiking in Wales, though. There are far too many mountains for my liking. I’m getting too old for all that.’
She gave him a quizzical look. Quinn knew she was trying to assess his age, and soon she’d be wondering why he was going hiking on his own with an ancient rucksack and a ripped waterproof.
He could feel himself getting angry. The tremors were starting in his hands, his temples throbbed, and he could hear the hissing inside his head – the sound of blood rushing to his brain.
‘Are you going to take the money?’ he said.
He put his notes on the counter and picked up the carrier bag.
‘Wait. You need some change,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Quinn paused outside the shop to check his purchases, afraid that he might have left something behind. Instinct made him look back through the plate-glass window, where the woman who’d served him was standing at her counter. She was watching him. Her look made him feel as if someone had seen straight through him and knew exactly what he was planning to do.
He walked quickly away from the shop. She probably wasn’t even looking at him at all – she was more than likely staring at something behind him across the street, or admiring her own reflection in the window. Then Quinn remembered that it didn’t really matter anyway. By the time he was a hundred yards away, he had calmed down; he began to walk more slowly.
The Vine Inn was still here, anyway. He’d drunk in the pub a time or two, but it was done up now to attract a better class of customer. It had been re-painted, and the chalk boards outside offered specials from a food menu.
Then Quinn noticed the brass plaque fixed to one of the stone flowerbeds outside the pub, and the lettering caught his eye. In memory of SergeantJoseph Cooper. He stared at the wording, reading it over to himself several times before he looked up and remembered where he was. In memory ofSergeant Joseph Cooper.
At least he could get out of the town now. The last few items on his list wouldn’t be found in any charity shop, so he’d have to go elsewhere. But he had to move on. There were things he had to do. And there wasn’t much time.
On the last leg of his journey, Quinn closed his eyes and tried to rest. By the time he looked out of the window again, he was already in the Hope Valley. The familiar hills gathered close around him, welcoming, drawing him in.
The familiarity of it caught at Quinn’s throat as he got off the bus and walked through a field towards a line of trees. Tiny flies rose from the seedheads of the long grass as he brushed through it. He broke off one of the heads and put it in his mouth to chew. It tasted nutty, but reminded him of oats, too. He thought of a bowl of muesli, and then of sitting at the kitchen table in the morning, pouring milk, smelling coffee, listening to the children getting ready for school.
And then somewhere he heard a gate creak. He was supposed to have fixed the gate. More than fourteen years ago, he’d promised to oil the hinges. That sound alone was enough to take him back to 1990, to wipe away the intervening years as if they’d never existed. The side gate creaked, and here was Mansell Quinn standing listening to it, expecting at any moment to hear his wife’s voice reminding him that he’d promised to attend to it.
Quinn experienced a moment of confusion. He could see himself opening the door of the garage, sighing with exasperation because he’d been distracted from doing something more important. He could picture lifting a can of WD40 from the shelf, coughing at the dust as he moved a box of tools, brushing off an old spider’s web, and noticing the spare set of spark plugs he’d been looking for. He could even remember the texture of the breeze-block wall behind the shelf, and see its colour – pale blue, because they had some paint left over when the kitchen was decorated. He recalled spraying WD40 on the hinges of the gate, and watching the rusted metal darken as the liquid soaked in and began to run. He could smell the alcohol fumes as the spray drifted back into his face.
He’d fixed the gate. Yet still he could hear the creak. It was as if his life had re-started – not from the moment the police came to the house and arrested him, on his last day of freedom, but earlier than that. It was as though he’d walked back into his own life at a point before everything had started to go wrong.
After a few minutes, Quinn straightened up. It wasn’t the same house, or the same gate. His memories had confused him about what was in the past and what was right here in the present.
But there was one memory he knew was real – the one that hadn’t left his mind for the past fourteen years. This one was no mere trick of déjà vu. It was the memory of blood – blood pooling and streaming on a golden field.
It had begun to rain. He hadn’t noticed the clouds gathering, hadn’t even thought to look at the sky. He put on the smock and pulled up the hood. But his face was already wet, and more water dripped on him from the trees.
Quinn had started making his plans two years ago – on the day they told him he’d be making his final move. It had been a morning in early April, a day when the beech trees visible from the exercise yard at Gartree were starting to change their shape and colour, the outline of their naked branches blurring with the suggestion of spring.
‘You’re being transferred to an open prison,’ his wing governor had told him. ‘HMP Sudbury. It’s in Derbyshire. That will be a lot closer to your home, Quinn. It will make it much easier for your family to visit you.’
Quinn had stared at the man as if he were speaking a foreign language. He might as well have been, for all the sense he was making. Quinn waited for the translation, but none came. The governor looked at the file on his desk, but failed to see that Quinn had never received any family visits at Gartree, not once in eight years.
‘Well, aren’t you pleased, Quinn?’
‘Oh. Yes, sir.’
‘You’ll be glad to be out of this place. I know things haven’t always been easy for you here. You went through a bit of a rough patch, didn’t you?’ The governor flicked over a page of the file in front of him. He wasn’t attempting to read it. Not even pretending to. He was just flicking it with his long, white fingers, as if he could consign Quinn’s memories to the past by turning a page, closing a file, sliding it into a drawer of a cabinet. Was it all there, on that one page of his file, summed up in a few paragraphs typed by a Prison Service secretary?
‘A bit of a rough patch. Yes, sir.’
The governor looked at Quinn doubtfully, but relaxed when he saw the prisoner’s calmness.
‘You’ll find life an awful lot easier at HMP Sudbury. And, of course, it’s a step closer to your release.’
He smiled hopefully. But something was happening inside Quinn. His body seemed to be filling with a cloud of poisonous gas that rose from somewhere deep in his guts and coiled through his intestines. It flooded his lungs and seeped into his brain. He waited, terrified, for the cloud to dissipate before he could speak.
‘Thank you, sir.’
Another smile now, different. An ironic smile. ‘That’s provided you’re on your best behaviour, Quinn. You don’t want to end up back here, do you?’
The governor waited a few seconds for a response, then began to get uncomfortable. He closed the file with a little swish and a click. ‘Perhaps it’s something that will take a while to sink in. I understand that, Quinn. If you want to talk to anybody about it, just let Mr Jeavons know, and it can be arranged. You know there are counsellors available. A chaplain, perhaps …’
Quinn tried to shake his head, but the muscles in his neck would hardly move. He felt as though his face had swollen to a monstrous size and was swinging from side to side against the walls of the office, like a hot-air balloon. His skin was on fire and a curtain had dropped in front of his eyes, preventing him from seeing the governor clearly. Yet Quinn remained motionless in his chair, his hands resting on his thighs, as he listened to the sound of the man’s voice.
‘Well, your transfer is set for next week. You can let your family know where you’ll be, so they can visit.’
The voice was distant, like a voice in one of his dreams, the words muffled but menacing.
‘Are you all right, Quinn?’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘That’s it, then. You can go now.’
And Quinn had walked back to his cell, hardly aware of the prison officer at his elbow and the doors that closed behind him, or the familiar noises of his block and the voices of prisoners echoing on the landings, like the calls of animals in a distant jungle.
He heard none of them, because his mind was too fully occupied. Quinn had been thinking of all the people who were connected to that time in his past, the people who’d inhabited his dreams for so many years. And he had already been deciding which of them should die.
Rebecca Lowe had taken a breath to scream, but it was too late. The air had been punched from her lungs. She felt as if massive fists were squeezing her chest and emptying her of air like a disused plastic bag.
For a few moments, the shock froze Rebecca’s muscles. Deep in her belly, she could feel her diaphragm twitching helplessly, like a part of her body that had been amputated but refused to die until its nerve endings stopped spasming. The interruption to her oxygen supply made her start to feel light-headed, and she tried to blink away the dark shadows that formed in front of her eyes. A sound came from the back of her throat – a moan that rolled inside her head but failed to reach the air.
Then suddenly she felt her diaphragm muscles spring back into place. They loosened their grip on her lungs, and a draught of air rushed into her chest. The sound it made was like a death rattle, that one last breath before you died. But you never heard your own last breath.
Rebecca Lowe opened her eyes. She realized she was lying on the floor of her kitchen. She could feel the tiles under her back and the dampness soaking through her clothes. She’d washed the floor only an hour before, and the smell of detergent was overpowering. Tentatively, she moved a hand and heard one of her rings click against the tiles. But her hand seemed to be a long way from her face, and she couldn’t understand why her arm should be thrown out at such an awkward angle.
Then she became aware of how much her head hurt. It was as though the oxygen drawn into her lungs had finally reached her head and activated the pain switch, alerting the nerve cells to the message of the impact on the floor, and now they were shrilling like fire alarms. Waves of agony rolled from the back of her head to the front and burst inside her eyes, forcing her to squeeze her eyelids shut against the light.
Rebecca knew that moving her head would only make the pain worse. So she tried to move a leg instead. It seemed to be the furthest and safest part of her body. At first, she couldn’t tell which leg she was moving, because they both were tangled together. But then one leg fell away from the other, flopping on to the floor. It was only when she felt the dampness on her foot that she realized she’d lost one of her shoes. She’d been wearing her flip-flops – a mistake on a damp floor, because their soles were too smooth and slippery.
Automatically, Rebecca began to lift her head to look for the flip-flop. She screamed, and continued to scream as the pain smashed into her brain, bouncing off her skull and surging along her body, ripping through every muscle and nerve. Her head fell back on to the floor, setting off the tide of agony all over again. Her fingers clawed and scrabbled on the tiles, making random patterns in the damp surface. Her stomach heaved and sent streams of bile into her throat. Tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
Rebecca found that her breathing was ragged and gasping, and she tried to steady it. Somehow, she had to work out what to do. She knew she was badly hurt, and alone in the house. She could call for help, but no louder than she’d already screamed from the pain. She could hear her own scream still echoing in her ears.
The house was nearly airtight and well insulated. No one would hear her unless they were standing right outside her double-glazed window. And the nearest neighbours were three hundred yards away. Rebecca listened for a car on the road, but the only sounds she heard were the wind and the rain.
She knew her one chance was to make it to a phone. But the mere thought of it made her wince in agony. She had no hope of reaching the next room without passing out from the pain and perhaps doing herself more damage. If only she had her mobile phone in her pocket. But she knew it was where she’d left it earlier – in her handbag, on the dining-room table.
Just trying to think made her head hurt. Her tears flowed faster as she realized she might have to wait until somebody came to the house and found her. But she expected to be alone all night, and all day tomorrow.
Slowly, Rebecca became aware that something else was wrong. She thought about her dog, Milly, who had been asleep in the utility room. Milly ought to have woken or reacted in some way to her scream. If she could just have touched the dog, felt her presence nearby, it would have provided a small scrap of reassurance, the company of another living creature.
But there was a silence in the house that didn’t feel right. In the midst of her pain, Rebecca felt that silence nudging her towards some small thing that had been dislodged from her memory by her fall – something she couldn’t quite grasp, because her mind would no longer concentrate properly.
Then she remembered the sound she’d heard just before she fell. It had been the soft cough of the back door opening.
6
There were no lights on at Parson’s Croft when Dawn Cottrill drove up to the house. Not even the security lights, which should have come on when the sensors caught the movement of her car on the drive. That alone was enough to tell her that something was wrong.
Dawn had been trying to phone her sister for the past hour, ever since Andrea had called from London, already in a panic and imagining the worst. Rebecca wasn’t answering either the house number or her mobile. Of course, Andrea had wanted to contact the police straight away, but Dawn had managed to talk her out of it. And now she was regretting it. It was a little too dark up here in Aston, where there was no street lighting and all the houses were screened from the neighbours by trees. Rebecca never forgot to switch on the outside lights at night.
Dawn was well prepared, though. She fumbled in her glove compartment for the torch she always kept in case of breakdowns. It was a pity Jeff was at that conference in Birmingham tonight, because she would have preferred him to be with her. But she ought to be able to do some things on her own, and checking on her sister was one.
Carefully locking the car, she went to the back door of the house. It was the door she always used when she visited her sister, and besides she had a spare key so she could water the plants or feed the dog when Rebecca was away.
Dawn could think of only two possibilities. Most likely, her sister had gone out somewhere and forgotten to take her mobile phone. The garage door was closed, so she couldn’t tell whether Rebecca’s car was there or not. Everyone forgot their mobile now and then. It was even possible to forget your mobile and not remember to switch on the outside lights when you left the house.
There was also a chance that Rebecca was ill. She suffered from migraines sometimes, and she might have taken her tablets and gone to bed to sleep it off. Probably she wouldn’t have heard the phone that way. Dawn imagined her sister lying in her bedroom upstairs, and felt slightly reassured. It was something that could be dealt with.
Even as she tried the key in the lock, Dawn knocked on the back door, knowing it was a useless thing to do. Obviously, Rebecca wouldn’t be sitting in the house with all the lights out.
But the key wouldn’t turn. Dawn pulled it out, looked at it with the torch to make sure she had the right one, and tried again. She rattled it backwards and forwards, and found it turned to the left quite easily, then back again. The door hadn’t been locked.
With a sense of dread, Dawn turned the handle and pushed the door, jumping a little at the soft tearing sound as the seal parted. It was only then that it occurred to her she ought to have gone in through the front door, where the controls for the burglar alarm were located. But she knew with a cold certainty by now that the alarm wouldn’t go off.
Sure enough, the house was completely silent. Dawn called her sister’s name, listening to the waver in her own voice. She called again, a bit louder, trying to sound confident.
‘Rebecca? Are you home?’
Rebecca could have forgotten to lock the back door too, she thought. If she was in a bad state with one of her migraines, all that sort of thing could have gone out of her head. Andrea would be very cross with her mum when she found out.
But Andrea’s worries kept going through Dawn’s mind. Though she knew there was no logic to it, she had to pluck up courage to switch on the light inside the house. She had come into the utility room, and the fluorescent light flickered and gleamed suddenly on the innocuous shapes of a couple of chest freezers, an automatic washing machine and a tumble drier. Through the door at the far end was the kitchen, still in darkness, and past that the hallway and the stairs. She could hear one of the freezers humming, perhaps a faint trickle of fluid. The house was very warm and airless, warmer than Dawn would choose to have her own home.
She crossed the utility room to the kitchen doorway and reached for the light switch. But she stopped. The hum of the freezer wasn’t all she could hear. There was another sound, quite close by. It was just a slight movement, nothing but the tiniest scratch of something hard against the tiles.
‘Rebecca? Are you there?’
She was answered by a noise that chilled her skin, despite the warmth of the central heating. It was a whimper. A small, pitiful whimper, so quiet that if she hadn’t been standing still she might not have heard it at all. It was no more than a tiny sob, an involuntary release of sound into the silence of the house. Even now, Dawn might have convinced herself that she’d imagined it. But then it came again. And the noise wasn’t ahead of her, in the darkened kitchen. It was behind her.
Dawn spun round, staring at the bright, white surfaces of the utility room and at the back door, which she now realized she had left open.
‘Who’s there?’ she said, finding a strength and authority she hadn’t known she possessed.
She shone her torch at the back door, but it made no impression on the darkness outside. She listened carefully, holding her breath. And gradually, her attention focused on one of the freezers.
The unit stood a few inches away from the wall. Dawn thought it had always been like that, but she wasn’t absolutely sure. It was quite a large one, too, because Rebecca liked to buy organic meat in bulk from a local farm shop. It would take some strength to move it when it was full. So probably there had always been that slight gap between the freezer and the wall.
Dawn looked at the back door and decided to leave it open. She glanced around for a weapon, but could see nothing. Instead, she took a firmer grip on her torch and walked towards the freezer. She was about to open the lid when she heard the noise again. A soft brush against the wall, a scratch on the tiles. Something was behind the freezer.
She leaned over and shone her torch into the gap. Dust had gathered on the back of the freezer, although it hadn’t been in place all that long. In among the pipes and cables she saw what at first appeared to be an old-fashioned fur muff jammed into the narrow space. It was brown and white, it smelled of urine, and it trembled when the light hit it.
‘Oh, my God. Milly.’
It took Dawn a couple of minutes to prise the elderly Shih Tzu from behind the freezer, where she had crammed herself into an impossibly tiny ball. The dog’s claws scratched frantically on the tiles and wall in an effort to prevent herself from being dragged into the light.
‘Milly, you poor old thing. What happened to you?’
As far as she could tell, the dog seemed physically unharmed. But when she saw how terrified the animal was, Dawn hardly needed to look any further. She knew without a doubt that her sister must be dead.
On the way back from Castleton, Ben Cooper drove past the Hope cement works and over Pindale to reach the Eden Valley. A tiny hamlet lay at the foot of Pindale, with a restored mine building and a camp site. But few people took this route – the road was single track, and too steep and narrow to make for comfortable driving if you didn’t know it well.
Further on, he crossed the Roman road, Batham Gate, and joined the B6049 south of Bradwell. After a few more miles, he crested the final hill and looked down on Edendale.
The Eden Valley lay at a sort of geological collision point where the two halves of the Peak District met. On one side were the limestone plateaux and wooded gorges of the White Peak, with its patchwork of fields and quiet villages. Enclosing them on three sides like the fingers of a hand were the higher slopes of the Dark Peak. Its barren peat moors were scattered with gritstone outcrops, eroded into the grotesque and sinister shapes that had created so many folk legends.
For Cooper, the White Peak and Dark Peak carried an irresistible symbolism – they represented light and dark, good and evil. Because of Edendale’s location, he sometimes got the idea that he was literally walking the line between good and evil as he moved about the landscape. But the line wasn’t so clear-cut as it might at first appear. Those dark outcrops of twisted rock had a tendency to erupt in places you didn’t expect them. There was always a kind of darkness lurking just below the surface, ready to thrust its way into the daylight.
Cooper drove into the centre of town and reached his flat in Welbeck Street. He could see thunder clouds approaching in the west. They seemed to hang on the horizon for a while until they amassed a large enough bulk, and then they moved to blot out the sky. When he got out of the car, he could feel the air already becoming heavier and more humid. People would be going around saying ‘It’s going to break’ with a note of relief in their voices.
With no tenant upstairs since the departure of his American neighbour, the house was strangely silent. Cooper still hadn’t got used to coming home every night to an empty flat, with the post still lying on the doormat and an unwashed coffee mug standing in the sink from breakfast. He hadn’t brought much with him from Bridge End Farm either, only his PC and a few prints, and of course the framed photograph over the fireplace – the one showing rows of police officers lined up in their uniforms, with Sergeant Joe Cooper standing in the second row. It had been taken at some formal occasion a few years before his father’s death.
Living alone had many advantages. On his days off, it hardly seemed necessary to Cooper to get dressed or have a shave. He could slop around in an old T-shirt and a pair of tracksuit bottoms for as long as he liked. He could sit at the kitchen table and drink coffee and eat toast all morning, if he wanted to. And living on your own was nothing unusual these days. Soon, nearly half the country would be living alone.
Still, he couldn’t help the rush of pleasure when the first thing he saw as he entered the flat was a black cat coming towards him from the kitchen, its fur warm and its yellow eyes gleaming expectantly. Randy had changed into his summer coat, and now he was sleek and dark, and obviously not as big a cat as he’d have everyone believe.
The rumbles Cooper could hear now weren’t really a storm, more of a warning that the rain was coming. And come it did, within a few seconds. Instantly, the downpour was so heavy that it sounded as if the river had burst its banks and was surging across the gardens, threatening to flood the houses at the bottom end of the road.
In the kitchen, the noise of the rain was deafening as it fell on the glass roof of the conservatory. Above the sound, he heard the wooden frames of the windows cracking as they cooled and contracted. Cooper fed Randy and walked back into the sitting room. After the cat, the second thing he saw in his flat that night was the green light flashing on his answering machine. It was blinking at him in a way that could mean only one thing. Yet again, a small piece of darkness was about to thrust its way into the daylight.
Raymond Proctor arrived home late that night. Before he locked up the house, he took a look around the caravan park. He prayed there wouldn’t be any last-minute arrivals tonight. Or if there were, that they’d find a temporary pitch without bothering him, and without making too much noise about it either. Let the buggers sort themselves out for once.
Proctor wanted to walk down to the pond and check the area round the old ’vans again. But not in the dark. The main lights only covered the central area of the site, around the office and shop. They made the log-cabin effect look grotesque and crumbling, like the set of a cheap horror film. Outside that pool of light, he could see only the glowing rectangles of curtained windows, where families were shut up in their little boxes for the night.
A car had come in through the main gate. It looked like the white Audi that belonged to the young family occupying one of the lodges. As it turned on to the gravel road, the car’s headlights caught the outline of a figure moving across the grass near the water taps. Proctor squinted at the figure, but the headlights had passed long before he could make out who it was. Male, he was sure. Probably one of the group of French teachers who were staying on the site for a couple of nights on their way to Scotland. On the other hand, it could have been anybody.
Proctor limped into the house and checked all the bolts on the doors and windows. He left a light on in the hallway and the outside light over the back door. Connie was in the sitting room watching TV. He could hear the noise of gunfire and screeching tyres as soon as he entered the house.
‘Turn it down,’ he called from the hallway.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Nothing. Just turn it down.’
Connie came out into the hall, which wasn’t what he’d intended. She was ready for bed, in her dressing gown and the slippers with blue fur round the edges. She stared at him and sniffed suspiciously.
‘Who have you been drinking with?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘I only had a couple.’
‘You’re sweating, Ray. You can hardly keep still. I know when you’ve had too much to drink.’
‘For God’s sake, get back to your telly. I’m sick of your yacking.’ A crashing noise made him jump. It was like a door being broken down, kicked in by boots. ‘And turn that TV down, will you?’
She pointed a finger at him, jabbing it towards his face. ‘If you speak to me like that again, Raymond Proctor, you’ll regret it. You know I wanted us all to be together for dinner tonight, but you had to go out boozing. Then Jason started playing me up again and now he’s sulking in his room.’
Proctor thought the idea of having family meals together was lunacy. He remembered that Alan had behaved exactly the same when he was about Jason’s age. Funnily enough, it had been harder to tolerate from his own son. It must have been something to do with the guilt.
‘I just want us to be a real family,’ said Connie. ‘Doing things together, getting on with each other.’
‘I’ve got news for you, Connie. Real families don’t get on with each other.’
She glared at him with sudden venom. ‘And you should know. You’ve already lost one family. A wife and son – that was careless, wasn’t it, Ray?’
‘Leave me alone,’ said Proctor.
She was right that he was sweating. The house felt ridiculously hot, but there was no way he was going outside again tonight.
‘And take my advice,’ said Connie as she turned to go back to her film. ‘Be more careful who you drink with. You’ve never had a head for beer. It always gets you into trouble.’
Raymond Proctor stood in the hallway of his house for a few minutes longer. He was watching the play of light and shadow on the glass panels of the front door. He was familiar with the effect, which was caused by the movement of trees in front of the lights on the main drive. But tonight, there seemed to be more shadow than light on Wingate Lees.
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese stood on the main street in Castleton, close to the Peak Hotel. It was late when Mansell Quinn arrived there, not much more than an hour before closing time. But he managed to get a room overlooking the street, with a view into the car park – though he wasn’t worried about anyone coming to find him tonight.
Quinn felt so confident that he sat in the bar for a while and bought a tonic water. It was the first non-alcoholic drink that came into his mind, and he wanted to keep a clear head. The sweet smell of the beer was tempting, though.
‘On holiday, are you?’ the barman said, putting his drink down on the counter.
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Doing a bit of walking?’
‘Yes.’
The barman was middle-aged – about the same age as himself, Quinn realized. He stared at the man for a minute, experiencing a sudden, terrifying urge to talk to him, to tell him everything that was in his mind. He threw some money on the counter, leaving the barman to gather the coins together, and retreated to a corner of the bar.
Quinn hid his hands under the table until they’d stopped shaking. He was angry again, but angry with himself. He looked around the bar, seeking something to distract him. There were so many things he didn’t remember. He wasn’t sure whether the place had changed or if it was just his memory at fault, a failure to reach back into the world he’d left behind fourteen years ago.
For a start, he couldn’t recall seeing the prints of ancient photographs on the wall, showing that the Cheshire Cheese had once been a busy coaching inn. But in the days of horse-drawn coaches the sign had just read Cheshire Cheese’. So ‘Ye Olde’ must have been a twentieth-century addition.
Over there, at the back of the room, was where he’d often sat with Ray Proctor and Will Thorpe. They’d been sitting there on that day nearly fourteen years ago, though the table and chairs had surely been replaced by now. Had there been four places at the table then? Quinn was amazed how hazy his memory was of that time. The events ought to be imprinted on his mind, but even now there were gaps in his recollection that he couldn’t fill. Some of it had come back to him almost randomly in the days and weeks following his arrest, with a sudden, sharp detail hacked out of his memory by a question from the police or a snatch of music in the next room. But not everything. A few of the triggers he needed were still missing, and he didn’t know where to find them.
Quinn eyed the barman to see if he was watching and took a drink of his tonic water, which tasted sharp and bitter, like acid. After a while, he regained his composure and noticed the smells of food drifting from the kitchen. He’d eaten nothing since breakfast at the prison that morning, before his eight thirty release. He found a menu on the table, and ordered scampi and chips.
‘Don’t panic,’ said the barman, when he brought the food. ‘But do you want tartare sauce?’
As closing time approached at eleven o’clock, Quinn finished his drink and went to his room. He paused in the passage to listen to the sound of staff chatting and clattering their cooking equipment in the kitchen, wondering if they were talking about him. On the landing, he walked under the lens of a security camera that pointed towards his room. He would pass it again tomorrow on the way out.
He’d started thinking about cameras in Edendale, when he noticed the CCTV system covering the shopping area. He had watched the cameras swivelling on their tall poles, and had pictured the operators in a room somewhere – a bit like the control room at Gartree, where they’d watched every move he made when he was out of his cell. But in Edendale they were watching everyone. And nobody seemed to mind.
Quinn counted the number of licence conditions he’d already broken. He hadn’t kept his appointment at the probation office, he wasn’t living where he was supposed to, and he hadn’t told his probation officer where he was going. There were people he wasn’t supposed to get in contact with, too. But what was the saying about a sheep and a lamb?
All the money he had was a bit of cash he’d earned working on the farm unit and his discharge grant. The grant was equivalent to a week’s benefit, and was supposed to cover him until he received Income Support or Jobseeker’s Allowance. At least he didn’t have to worry about gate arrest, as so many prisoners did when they were due for release. The police had shown no interest in him.
His room at the Cheshire Cheese was almost filled by a double bed. A shower cubicle stood in one corner, and a couple of steps led down to an alcove containing a toilet and washbasin. A small TV screen perched high up on a bracket near the ceiling. Quinn paced the room for a while. It was dark outside by now, so he drew the curtains. On the window ledge he found a small teddy bear sitting in a spindle chair with a black-and-white cat on its knee.
He played with a touch lamp on the bedside table, then he lay on the bed and pressed buttons on the TV remote. A game show appeared and he left it on, not listening to the voices but watching the faces of the contestants. They seemed to be family groups – mother, father, a couple of teenage kids. They smiled and laughed at the compere’s jokes. But Quinn knew there would be arguments in the car on the way home. Tears, accusations, the old resentments and insults dragged out and rehearsed all over again.
Soon, he began to feel tired. Anger tended to drain all the energy from him. He peeled off his charity-shop clothes and took a shower, knowing it might be the last he’d have for a while. The hot water felt good on his skin.
When Quinn got into bed, he could still taste the bitterness of the tonic water in his mouth, and the spiciness of the tartare sauce. The two flavours mingled in his thoughts as he drifted into sleep. Spice and bitterness, bitterness and spice. The taste of blood and kisses.
7
Tuesday, 13 July
No matter how many dead bodies he’d seen, Ben Cooper would never forget the first. He’d been thirteen years old at the time, a pubescent youth in baggy jeans. Until then, he’d been protected from most of the unpleasantness of the world. He was oblivious to the grubby human realities that were waiting to jostle him with their sharp elbows and breathe their stale breath into his face. He’d thought he was immortal then. He’d thought that everyone around him would live forever, too. But most of the things he’d believed were wrong.
It was shortly before Christmas, and the pavements in Edendale had been cold and wet. Ben and his mother had been shopping for last-minute presents and the vast amount of food involved in celebrating a family Christmas at Bridge End Farm. The young Ben had been tired and bad tempered, and he was sulking about being dragged round the shops. It was already dark by late afternoon and illuminated Santas hung from the lamp posts, while plastic trees twinkled in every shop window.
‘Mum, can we go home yet?’ he’d been saying, without any hope.
And then they had turned the corner of Bargate and walked into a small crowd of people on the pavement between the Unicorn pub and Marks and Spencers. They were arguing with a policeman and each other as they waited for an ambulance to arrive.
In the middle of the crowd, a man had been lying on the floor, covered with a sheet that someone had brought out from the pub. Only the soles of his boots were showing, tilted at an unnatural angle. The wet pavement around him had reflected the Christmas lights, breaking up their colours into fragments of rainbow, as if the man had been lying in the middle of an oil slick.
That was all Ben could take in before his mother hurried him away. There had been no blood to see, no injuries, no staring eyes or offensive bodily fluids. It had been the boots and the angle of them, impossible in life, which had told him the man was dead.
And now, in Rebecca Lowe’s home, it was the small things again that conveyed the story of violent death. Not the blood or the stains on the kitchen floor, or even the distinctive smell. It was the way her head had tipped too far back and lay at an angle that would make it difficult for her to breathe if she were alive. It was the position of her right hand, still curled in a spasm as it clutched at the floor, the fingers digging so hard into the tiles that her nails had splintered and broken, and the pale varnish lay around them in flakes of glittering dust. And it was the single blue sandal, turned the wrong way up, lying on the floor a few inches from the victim’s foot. Her toes were pointing towards it, as if she had been reaching to retrieve her sandal in her last moments, but had failed.
Some of the team had been allowed into the house, entering via the integral garage into a passage where they could access the lounge and dining room, and reach the stairs. Cooper had been waiting in the garage for ten minutes with other officers until the door had been opened, and there hadn’t been enough oxygen in there for them to share. He’d have given anything for a bit of fresh air right now.
Inside the house, Cooper paused in the hallway and looked into the lounge. Fitted carpet lapped from wall to wall, and from doorway to doorway, flowing out into the hall in an unbroken sea of Wilton. Thick curtains covered the windows – in fact, not just the windows, but the whole wall from floor to ceiling, a great blanket of brown velvet designed to shut off the room from the outside, as if the double glazing wasn’t enough to do the job on its own.
He imagined that everything in the house had been sealed: the fireplace would have no chimney, the doors would be insulated, and no doubt the roof space was layered with fibreglass. Parson’s Croft felt like a warm cocoon.
To Cooper, it seemed unnatural to think about hiding away from the outside world to such an extent. If you were going to cut yourself off from the sun and fresh air like this, you might as well be in prison. And in any case, when a killer had come looking for Rebecca Lowe, her house had given her no protection at all.
An hour earlier, Cooper had found Diane Fry at the rendezvous point on the outer cordon, outside the front gate of Parson’s Croft.
‘Ah, Ben,’ she’d said. ‘How nice to see you. Well, this is what is technically known as a crime scene. There’s usually at least one involved in a major enquiry, such as the murder case we’re currently investigating.’
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’
‘I tried to call you this morning. Your phone was off.’
‘This morning? I was in a cave,’ protested Cooper.
‘Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?’
Cooper looked at the house. All the windows on the ground floor were lit, and the front door stood open. A safe pathway had been marked out by the scenes of crime officers, who he could see moving around inside the house in their white, hooded scene suits.
‘The body is in the kitchen, at the back of the house,’ said Fry.
‘Do we have an ID?’
Fry checked her notebook. ‘The victim’s name is Rebecca Lowe, aged forty-nine. She lived alone. Her assailant seems to have gained access to the house via the back door, which leads into the utility room, next to the kitchen.’
‘An intruder? Was it a burglary gone wrong?’
‘We can’t tell at the moment. There’s no sign of a forced entry. The back door was unlocked when the victim’s sister arrived at the house.’
‘Who’s SIO?’
‘Mr Kessen, of course.’
Cooper could see Detective Chief Inspector Oliver Kessen sitting in the back of the scenes of crime van, studying a video. Some senior investigating officers would want a clean sweep at this stage. In fact, one or two SIOs would pack up the entire room where the victim had died and send it back to the lab. They had a nagging fear that something would be missed at the crime scene. But DCI Kessen was said to be more focused. By watching the initial video of the scene, he’d be hoping to build up an early hypothesis, so that the number of forensic tests could be limited.
They stood aside to let a group of officers go past, including a SOCO in a scene suit carrying an aluminium step ladder.
‘What’s the ladder for?’ asked Cooper.
‘To reach the kitchen ceiling.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The ceiling,’ said Fry. ‘Blood splatter on the ceiling. Wake up, Ben.’
‘Right.’
A flutter of tape by the open front door marked the inner cordon preserving the scene itself. Contamination was the big fear, so everyone was being kept at arm’s length for now, including surplus detectives.
‘Blood splatter,’ said Cooper. ‘So what are we looking at as a weapon?’
‘Kitchen knife, probably.’
‘They’re much too handy.’
‘Apparently, Mrs Lowe had an entire block full of them,’ said Fry. ‘But now they’re scattered all over her kitchen floor.’
Cooper watched the Crime Scene Manager enter the van to talk to Mr Kessen. As far as the forensic team were concerned, contamination was something that occurred only after the scene had been preserved. Before that, anything else that went on should have been ‘normal procedures’ – the desperate attempts to save an injured person’s life, the anxious search for the body of another victim or for a violent assailant who might still be on the premises. Normal procedures.
He turned to Fry again.
‘When did we get the call-out?’
‘Eleven thirty-eight.’
‘I was long since out of Peak Cavern by then. You should have got through to me.’
‘No, it was earlier that I tried to phone you.’
‘Earlier? But –’
‘Not now, Ben.’
And then she was away, striding across the edge of the garden towards a bustle of activity around the crime scene van. Cooper watched her, puzzled. But then, he was always puzzled by Diane Fry.
DC Gavin Murfin appeared at Cooper’s elbow. A faint aroma of warm pastry drifted from Murfin’s clothes, and Cooper imagined the pockets of his coat stuffed with pies. Or perhaps the smell was simply impregnated into the fabric by now. No wonder Murfin was hungry all the time. There was no scent better guaranteed to make the saliva run.
Murfin nudged Cooper and nodded his head at Fry as she reached the van and was immediately in conference with some of the senior officers.
‘Hey, Ben, is it true what they’re saying – her sister’s moved in with her?’
‘Who’s saying that, Gavin?’
Murfin shrugged. ‘Everybody. You know what it’s like.’
‘I don’t understand how anyone can possibly know that. Diane doesn’t talk about her private life at all.’
‘Except to you, maybe,’ said Murfin, raising an eyebrow. ‘Or so they say.’
Cooper shuffled uneasily but said nothing.
‘In fact, I heard that the sister turning up was no coincidence,’ said Murfin. ‘They say you had a bit of a hand in it – arranged the meeting and everything, behind Miss’s back. Can’t be true, can it?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. It’s a bit of a long story, though. And a bit, well … complicated.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you any more, Gavin. It’s personal. For Diane, I mean.’
‘No, no. Do spare me the sordid details. But what I don’t understand, Ben, is why you got involved in the first place. I mean, it’s a bit like poking a bad-tempered grizzly bear with a sharp stick, if you ask me.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘It seemed the right thing to do at the time.’
‘Famous last words, mate. You’ll be uttering them as they cart your body away to the mortuary.’
‘It’s too late now, anyway.’
‘Mmm? If it were me, I’d be making sure I got a transfer damn quick, before Miss decides how she’s going to get her revenge. Preferably somewhere far away. I believe the Shetland Islands can be nice. They even get a bit of daylight at this time of year.’
Cooper sighed. Why had he got involved? It was the question he’d been asking himself for weeks. But if he could go back and have the time again, would he do things differently? He supposed he ought to have turned Angie Fry away the night she turned up on his doorstep. But Diane had wanted to find her sister, hadn’t she? How could he have sent Angie away, knowing that? Somewhere along the route he’d followed, there might have been a moment when he could have found a better, more sensible thing to do. But there was no guarantee he’d have taken the chance just because it was the sensible thing.
‘Anyway, what do you reckon about this job?’ said Murfin, indicating Parson’s Croft with a more vigorous nod of his head. ‘Any overtime in it for us? Only, my credit-card bill is up to its limit this month. I’ll be paying off that holiday in Turkey for the next ten years.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘We’ll have to wait and see what they come up with from the video recording.’
‘No doubt Miss will have her own ideas.’
‘She’s right a lot of the time,’ said Cooper.
Murfin looked at him suspiciously.
‘Ben, you don’t actually like her, do you?’
‘Well … no.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘I knew it! What on earth do you find to like about her?’
‘Gavin, I haven’t said that I do.’
‘I can tell when somebody is avoiding the question, you know. I’ve watched Jeremy Paxman in action. So, answer the question, Minister. What do you like about her?’
‘Look, I just think Diane Fry is a bit misunderstood by most people around here.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Murfin raised his eyes to the sky in horror. ‘You’re not going to make her into one of your causes? You’re going to start a “Let’s All Love DS Fry” campaign, aren’t you?’
‘Give over, Gavin.’
‘Well, she’s not my cup of poison. And I know about poisons. You’ve met my wife, have you?’
Diane Fry had seen DI Hitchens arriving at the scene. He had to park his car outside in the lane because the driveway was already full of vehicles. As Hitchens headed towards the crime scene van, he looked worried. But he noticed Fry and signalled her over. Then Mr Kessen climbed stiffly out of the van.
‘What is it, Paul?’
‘I think we have a suspect, sir,’ said Hitchens.
‘Already? How come?’
Fry watched the DI run a hand across his face. Tonight he was looking tired, even before the enquiry had got properly under way.
‘You know Mansell Quinn is out,’ said Hitchens. ‘He was serving a life sentence for a murder in Castleton back in 1990, but he reached his automatic release date and left Sudbury Prison this morning.’
‘Yes. So?’ said Kessen.
‘He hasn’t turned up at his accommodation, and he missed an appointment with his local probation officer this morning.’
‘So he’s broken his licence,’ said Kessen. ‘It’s a stupid thing to do, but so what? A domestic killing fourteen years ago doesn’t put him in the frame for anything that’s going off in a fifty-mile radius.’
‘No. That’s not it, exactly.’
‘You’d better explain.’
Hitchens took a deep breath and looked at the house across the garden. The helicopter support unit were just beginning a sweep to the north, their thirty-million candlepower searchlight probing the open ground behind Aston. It wouldn’t achieve much, except to annoy the residents.
‘The victim here – Rebecca Lowe,’ said Hitchens. ‘She’s the former Rebecca Quinn. At the time of the Proctor killing in 1990, she was married to Mansell Quinn.’
8
In Hathersage, it was Gala Week. The village’s main street was decorated with bunting, and a caravan parked on the pavement had been covered in posters advertising the week’s events. Cooper quite liked village galas. He saw that they’d missed the brass band concert, but if they waited until Saturday they could go to a ceilidh and watch the fell racing.
‘We’re looking for Moorland Avenue,’ said Diane Fry from the back seat of the car. ‘I thought you knew your way around every town and village in this area, Ben.’
‘If we can pull in somewhere, I’ll check the map.’
For some reason, Gavin Murfin was driving this morning. He wasn’t the best driver in the world, having a tendency to brake suddenly whenever he saw a chip shop. But maybe it was Fry’s strategy to stop him eating in the car while they travelled.
Murfin drew the car into the kerb. A few yards away, dozens of white-haired ladies were getting off a coach opposite the George Hotel. Hathersage was mostly a tourist stop on the way up the Hope Valley these days, and the village centre seemed to consist mostly of outdoor sports specialists, tea rooms and craft shops. Cooper wound down the window to get some air, only to let in the scent of candles and aromatherapy oils. And, strangely, the smell of fish.
‘Remember, when we see old Mrs Quinn, she’ll probably need sensitive handling,’ said Fry. ‘Every mother thinks her beloved son can do no wrong.’
‘In this case, her beloved son is a convicted killer,’ said Murfin, tilting his head to see her in the rear-view mirror.
‘It makes no difference, Gavin. She’ll be the only person in the world who thinks the bastard’s innocent.’
Looking around for the road they needed, Cooper noticed various forms of what he supposed would be called community art. A bus shelter had been converted into the ‘Hathersage Travel Machine’, decorated with wheels and photographs of exotic locations. Across the road, cut-out figures had been lined up against a garden wall. They made him think of targets at the police shooting range. Then he saw that some of the people near the bus shelter were actually queuing at a fish van. A bowl under its tailgate was catching the run-off from thawing ice that had kept the fish fresh on its way from the East Coast docks at Grimsby.
‘Wind up the window, Ben,’ said Fry. ‘There’s a stink of haddock.’
‘Sorry. I’ve got it now.’
Food was a dangerous topic with Gavin Murfin around. Cooper had already noticed the balti restaurant across the road. He fancied a Chicken Dhansah, but he kept the idea to himself.
‘OK, I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to turn round, Gavin.’
Enid Quinn lived in a small estate off Mill Lane. The old mill itself was still largely intact, though elder saplings were growing out of its chimney. Cooper recalled that Hathersage had once been a centre for the needle-and-pin industry, with local people working at grindstones that filled their lungs with steel dust. The industry was remembered now only because conditions in the mills had led to legislation against children being employed as grinders.
The original Mill Cottage stood among stone troughs full of geraniums, with climbing roses hanging from its walls, and pink and yellow petals drifting on to a stone-flagged path. Ash trees swayed and creaked in the breeze as a string of cement tankers rumbled over a nineteenth-century railway bridge.
And then there was the Moorland estate. The houses weren’t particularly new – not built in the last couple of decades, anyway. So the estate had been there most of Cooper’s lifetime, without him suspecting its existence. He’d only ever seen what the tourists saw of Hathersage – the historic buildings, the spire of the church, the gritstone edges in the distance.
‘It looks as though we’re in right-to-buy country,’ said Murfin.
‘How can you tell?’
‘Those first two places had dormer windows. You wouldn’t do that in a council house.’
A man in blue overalls was smoking a cigarette in the cab of a pick-up truck with the name of a property management company painted on its cab door. Murfin was right – this must be only partly a council estate these days, if at all. Many of the tenants would have bought their cement-rendered semis when the right-to-buy policy came in during the 1980s.
They parked near a patch of grass on Moorland Avenue, and Murfin stayed by the car as Fry and Cooper walked up the path to number 14. While Cooper rang the bell, Fry looked with amazement at an ornamental pig squatting by the doorstep. She gave it a tentative kick to see what it was made of. It didn’t budge.
‘Cement,’ said Cooper.
Getting no answer to the bell, he knocked. His knock created a hollow sound that echoed through the house.
‘It doesn’t look as though she’s in,’ called Murfin, who had been watching the windows.
‘Thanks a lot, Gavin,’ said Fry. ‘We’ll take a look round while we’re here. Ben, why don’t you check out that alley by the side of the house?’
Cooper looked where she was pointing. ‘A gennel, we call it.’
The gennel ran alongside the garden of number 14 and past a row of houses set at right angles to it. Money had been spent on some of these properties: porches had been added, and driveways opened up. Satellite dishes sat under the eaves. Over here was an imitation wishing well, and there a few square yards of paving for a caravan to stand on.
Cooper could see into Mrs Quinn’s garden from here. The flowerbeds contained more ornamental concrete figures: squirrels, rabbits, a badger, an otter and a giant frog. At the end of the path he came out almost opposite the railway station. He could see Hathersage Booths and Throstle Nest on the long incline towards Surprise View in the east.
He turned to walk back and saw Fry beckoning to him. A patrol car had pulled up and two uniformed officers had stationed themselves outside number 14. They’d be attracting plenty of attention soon.
‘Gavin found a neighbour,’ said Fry. ‘She says Mrs Quinn tends her husband’s grave on Tuesday mornings. You two can go up the church to find her. I’m going to talk to the neighbours. I’m presuming you know the way, Ben.’
* * *
With Cooper and Murfin out of her hair, Diane Fry left the two PCs at the gate of number 14 and spent some time talking to anyone she could find at home in Moorland Avenue, using her custody suite mugshot of Mansell Quinn to prompt memories.
She found two residents who remembered Quinn because of the 1990 murder case, but both of them assured her confidently that he was in prison and would be there for the rest of his life. It was curious how convinced the law-abiding public were that a life sentence actually meant life. After all these years of double-speak, they still believed that the meaning of a word was the same as what it said in the dictionary. But Fry knew better. In the police service, they’d been living in Orwell’s 1984 since … well, the 1990s, at least.
Suddenly, she felt a strong urge to know what Angie was doing. She’d left her sister in the flat this morning, talking about going for a walk or catching a bus into town to have a look round. But she’d only been talking about it. Angie had been half-dressed, curled up in an armchair with her knees in the air, painting her toenails. She’d looked drowsy, even content. Of course, that was only because she hadn’t been awake very long.
Angie had insisted from the beginning that she’d been through rehab in Sheffield and was clean now. But suspicion was a difficult habit to break. Fry felt guilty every time she caught herself assessing her sister’s behaviour for signs of euphoria or drowsiness, slurred speech or inattention, or when she found she couldn’t look Angie in the eyes without checking for constricted pupils.
Though she despised the weakness of addiction, Fry was terrified at the thought of seeing her sister suffer the agonies of withdrawal if she missed a fix. The fact that Angie was her own flesh and blood made a difference that defied logic. In a way, Fry would prefer to see the signs of continued use rather than witness her sister in the condition she’d known addicts reduced to. She had seen plenty of them back in Birmingham, and even in the custody suite at West Street. Within a few hours of their arrest, they would decline from restlessness to depression, and the vomiting, diarrhoea and muscle cramps would set in, or the shivering and the sweating. And then they’d begin screaming for the methadone. The relief of the pain without the high.
Fry tried to dial her home number, but eventually her own voice cut in on the answering machine. That didn’t mean Angie wasn’t there, just that she wasn’t bothering to answer the phone. She ought to have a mobile of her own. For a moment, Fry thought of buying her one – she had a feeling she could add an extra handset to her account quite easily. But that would be like treating her sister as a child.
Like a neurotic mother, Fry found herself imagining the worst: Angie still sitting in the armchair at Grosvenor Avenue, heating white powder on a piece of tin foil and inhaling the fumes through a tube. Chasing the dragon – was that still what they called it? Heroin dealers existed in Edendale, of course, as they did in every market town in England, cutting their product for sale on the street with glucose, flour, chalk or even talcum powder. But in E Division they weren’t quite such big business or so well organized as the city operations, where Asian gangs had been moving in recently to compete with the East Europeans.
Clean, Angie might be. But most worrying of all for Fry was the question of where her sister might have been getting a hundred pounds a day or more to feed her habit. And who she’d been scoring the smack from.
Ben Cooper stood over the grave and read the inscription: Here lies buried … it began. But that’s what they all said. In this case, was it true?
‘It’s ten feet long, if it’s an inch,’ said Gavin Murfin. ‘I don’t believe it.’
Old churchyards always filled Cooper with a sense of history. It was the thought of generation upon generation of the same families mouldering together under his feet. According to the memorial stones around him, scores of Eyres and Thorpes, Proctors and Fieldings had been buried here over the centuries. But this churchyard seemed to have mixed history with folklore.
‘A thirty-inch thigh bone is impossible anyway,’ said Murfin. ‘It must have been an elk or something.’
‘An elk?’
‘A reindeer. A moose. God, I don’t know. Something big, anyway. Something that lived around here in the Ice Age.’
The Church of St Michael and All Angels stood high above Hathersage next to an earthwork built by Danish invaders. Transco had dug a hole in the road outside the church gates, and the smell of gas was strong when they got out of the car. But at least mobile phones worked up here. In many areas of the Hope Valley it was impossible to get a signal.
Murfin had produced a ham sandwich from his pocket. He brushed some crumbs on to the grave, as if he were a grieving relative scattering the first handfuls of soil at a funeral, paying tribute to the dead. The plaque on the grave was quite specific: Here lies buried Little John, the friend and lieutenantof Robin Hood.
‘Is there any evidence?’ said Murfin. ‘I mean, have they done the DNA?’
Among the newer graves to the west of the church, they could see a figure in a red T-shirt, with short blonde hair. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves, and she was dusting a headstone with what looked like a hearth brush. She bent occasionally to pull at a few weeds.
‘You definitely think that’s her?’ said Murfin.
‘There’s no one else here. And she answers the description the neighbour gave.’
‘OK, let’s talk to her then.’
‘No, we ought to wait until she’s finished,’ said Cooper.
‘Why?’
‘She’s tending her husband’s grave, Gavin.’
‘Right. And you don’t want to interrupt her while she’s enjoying herself. I suppose she’ll start singing in a minute, and do a little dance.’
‘Gavin …’
‘Yeah?’
‘Are you having trouble with your marriage, by any chance?’
‘Trouble? No, everything’s going according to plan. I’ll be dead in a year or two, and Jean and the kids will get the insurance money. Then everybody will be happy.’
The woman in the red T-shirt straightened up, brushed off her hands and began to walk back through the rows of gravestones. From the front, she looked more her age, which must have been approaching seventy.
‘Who’s going to take the lead?’ said Murfin.
‘I suppose I’d better. She might need to be handled sensitively.’
‘That’s what I thought, too.’
As the woman came nearer, she looked across at the two detectives, probably aware that they’d been watching her. She was only a few paces away, clutching a plastic bag with her gloves and brush in it, when Cooper raised a hand to stop her.
‘Excuse me – Mrs Enid Quinn?’
‘Can I help you?’
Cooper showed his warrant card. ‘Detective Constable Cooper and Detective Constable Murfin, Edendale CID. We really need to talk to you, Mrs Quinn. You haven’t been answering your phone.’
She was a slim woman with pale skin like lined parchment. Liver spots freckled her bare arms and thin hands. She looked up at Cooper with a faint smile, ironic and resigned.
‘Police? Well, I wonder what you could possibly want to talk to me about,’ she said.
Enid Quinn took Ben Cooper and Diane Fry into her sitting room. Inside the house, her red T-shirt made her look even paler. She settled on a sofa and sat very primly, her hands folded on her knees, as she listened to Murfin and the two PCs trampling up her stairs.
‘Do I have to tell you anything?’ she said.
‘We’re hoping for your co-operation, Mrs Quinn,’ said Fry.
The woman looked at Cooper’s notebook. ‘My son isn’t here.’
‘Where is he, then?’
‘I can’t tell you. Sorry.’
‘When you say you can’t tell us … ?’ said Fry.
‘I mean I can’t. I don’t know where Mansell is.’
‘Has he been here?’
Mrs Quinn unfolded her hands and folded them again in the opposite direction. She gazed back at Fry steadily. ‘When?’
‘In the past twenty-four hours, perhaps?’
‘No.’
‘He hasn’t visited you? Or phoned you?’
‘No. I don’t know where he is.’
‘Nevertheless, we hope you might have some suggestions about where he could be heading. What friends does he have in the area? Is there somewhere he might think of going to stay – a place where he’d feel safe?’
‘I don’t think there’s anywhere safe for him,’ said the woman calmly.
Cooper realized that Mrs Quinn had a slight Welsh accent. It wasn’t so much the way she pronounced the words as the intonation, the unfamiliar pattern of emphasis in a sentence.
‘Do you have any other sons or daughters?’ asked Fry.
‘No, Mansell is my only child.’
‘Any other relatives in the area?’
She shook her head. ‘We’re not from Derbyshire originally. Both my family and my husband’s are from Mid Wales.’
‘We know of two friends of your son’s,’ said Fry. ‘Raymond Proctor and William Thorpe.’
‘I’m aware of the names,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘That’s all.’
‘Can you name any other friends of his?’
‘No. I don’t believe he has any remaining friends. Not in this area. I don’t know what acquaintances he might have made in prison, of course.’
Cooper wasn’t writing very much in his notebook. He looked at the old lady with her dyedblonde hair, and thought she seemed out of place. Despite the trellises and patios and dormer windows of the estate outside, Mrs Quinn had a sort of poise that suggested she’d be more at home sitting in a grand drawing room at Chatsworth House or one of the county’s other stately homes.
‘You were visiting your husband’s grave at the church earlier?’ he said.
‘Certainly. He died many years ago.’
‘Before your son went to prison?’
‘Yes, thank God. The trial would have killed him.’
Cooper was so thrown by the unconscious irony that he forgot the next question that he’d been planning to ask. But Fry either didn’t notice or didn’t care about such things, because she stepped in with exactly the right question, as if they’d been thinking along the same lines for once.
‘Did you visit your son in prison very often, Mrs Quinn?’
The hands moved again. They stayed unfolded this time, and instead tugged at the hem of her T-shirt. Her neck was slightly red from her exposure to the sun on the hill above the village.
‘He got them to send me a visiting order sometimes,’ she said. ‘I didn’t always use it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’
‘And what about his wife?’ asked Fry.
‘Rebecca? What about her?’
‘Did she make a good prison visitor?’
‘She visited him a few times, but she went less and less often, and eventually stopped going altogether.’
‘Why do you think she stopped, Mrs Quinn?’
‘At first, Rebecca said it was too difficult getting there by public transport, and she couldn’t afford taxi fares and a hotel overnight. But then she gave another version. She said she couldn’t keep up the pretence any more once Mansell was inside.’
Cooper looked up and saw Gavin Murfin go past the front window. He waved, shrugged, and signalled that he was going round to the back of the house.
‘Pretence? What pretence?’ said Fry.
Mrs Quinn shrugged very slightly, as if merely settling her T-shirt more comfortably around her shoulders. ‘Well, marriage,’ she said. ‘You know.’
‘I don’t think I understand what you mean, Mrs Quinn.’
‘I mean that she couldn’t be bothered making the effort to keep their marriage together.’
‘Ah. Not if it meant putting herself out to visit her husband in the nick?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And then they divorced.’
‘She couldn’t wait, I imagine. That’s the way things go these days. Couples don’t stand by each other, not like we used to do in my day. When we made our marriage vows, they counted for something. Now, they’re planning the divorce before they’ve swept up the confetti. It’s utter hypocrisy, in my view.’
‘You don’t think much of your former daughter-in-law?’
‘It’s not obligatory, is it?’
‘Well, no …’
‘I didn’t think she was bringing the children up very well, if you want the truth.’
‘That’s not an unusual view for grandparents to take,’ said Fry.
‘That’s as may be. But I was convinced it was the reason Simon went off the rails the way he did when the murder happened. If he’d been a more stable, disciplined child, like his sister, it might have been different. But he’d already been allowed to get into bad ways by the time he was fifteen. He was mixing with the wrong company, missing lessons at school. Drinking alcohol, even.’
‘None of that was your son’s fault, I suppose? He was Simon’s father, after all.’
‘I have my own views,’ said Enid Quinn firmly. ‘I know where I put the blame.’
Fry paused. Out of the corner of his eye, Cooper saw her give him a slight nod.
‘Mrs Quinn, your son’s former wife, Rebecca Lowe, was attacked and killed last night at her home in Aston,’ he said.
Enid Quinn could no longer keep her hands still. Unsteadily, she felt in her pocket for a handkerchief, but didn’t use it except to twist it in her fingers.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Andrea called me this morning. That’s my granddaughter. She still keeps in touch. But Mansell can’t have done that to Rebecca. He wouldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
She didn’t answer, and Fry began to get impatient.
‘You realize we have to take this very seriously, Mrs Quinn,’ she said. ‘It’s no use protesting that your son is innocent. He was convicted by a court and served his sentence. And now we think he’s a danger to more people. We need to find him.’
Mrs Quinn seemed to gain a little more dignity.
‘I was not going to protest Mansell’s innocence,’ she said. ‘On the contrary, I’m quite sure that he was guilty of murdering Carol Proctor.’
‘You are?’
‘Yes. But you see, whatever I think, it won’t stop my son from seeking what he wants.’
‘And what’s that, Mrs Quinn?’ said Fry.
‘Retribution.’
9
Adopting his best manner with grieving members of the public, DI Hitchens turned to the Lowes. ‘Are you ready?’
Simon Lowe nodded. From Andrea, there was no visible response. But they seemed to take a step closer together, and then began to move towards the viewing window.
Andrea Lowe wore blue denims and a pearl-grey sweatshirt, with her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. She seemed very calm and self-contained. But Diane Fry had seen her almost step out into the traffic as she crossed the car park to get to the mortuary.
Her brother seemed the most distressed. He clung to Andrea’s hand, looking almost like an older version of her, but slightly lighter in his colouring and several inches taller. At first, Fry thought he seemed to have no strength in him for the task of identifying his mother, yet it was Simon who spoke.
‘Yes, it’s her. That’s our mother.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Simon’s voice was very low, and he hardly moved his mouth when he spoke, as if all the energy had been drained out of him. His sister said nothing, but leaned closer to the glass, as close as she could get. She dropped her brother’s hand and pressed her fingers against the window, like a small child peering into a toy shop. Her breath condensed on the glass, and she touched the patch of moisture with her forehead.
Through the window, the mortuary attendant hovered uncertainly, not sure if an identification had been made and he should now replace the sheet, or whether the bereaved relatives should be allowed a last, lingering look at the deceased.
‘Miss Lowe, are you all right?’ said Fry.
Andrea nodded, but Simon pulled her hand away from the glass and gripped it. Hitchens shuffled his feet and looked around for the family liaison officer, who was trained to deal with grieving relatives.
‘You know we’re looking for your father,’ said Hitchens. ‘He was released from prison yesterday.’
Then a strange thing happened. Simon Lowe changed colour. Fry had seen this happen to family members identifying their loved ones – but usually they turned white, or worse, an unnerving shade of green. But Simon had flushed a deep red, almost purple. Blood suffused his face and neck until he reminded Fry of the corpse of a strangulation victim who had lain on the same slab as Rebecca Lowe not many months ago.
‘If you mean Mansell Quinn,’ said Simon, ‘he’s not my father.’
‘Oh, but I thought –’
Andrea turned away from the glass at last and threw her arms round her brother, becoming the little sister in a moment. Simon took a deep breath that shuddered through air passages swollen with emotion.
‘He was my father. But not any more. He hasn’t been my father for fourteen years.’
‘I see,’ said Hitchens.
‘Do you?’
‘I think I understand how you feel. So if you should happen to have any idea where your … I mean, where Mr Quinn is at the moment, you would be sure to let us know?’
‘Of course we would,’ said Simon.
‘And you, madam?’
Hitchens waited politely for Andrea to reply.
‘I spoke to Mum, you know. Not long before it happened. I spoke to her on the phone, and I told her to make sure she was safe. I didn’t think she was taking the situation seriously enough. But that was Mum – she preferred to enjoy life than to worry about things all the time.’
‘We’ll want a statement from you,’ said Hitchens. ‘If you feel up to it.’
‘I’ll do it today,’ she said.
‘In the meantime …’
‘We’ll tell you anything we can think of that might help, Inspector.’
Fry noticed that it was Simon who had taken over again. Rebecca Lowe’s children clung together as though they were inseparable.
The cattle market that used to stand on the main road in Hope had been demolished. Perhaps it had lost too much business during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, when all livestock markets had been closed for a year. Now the site had been redeveloped for housing.
‘Mansell Quinn was given a twenty-year sentence,’ said Ben Cooper. ‘If he was refused parole, his automatic release date must have been two-thirds of the way through his sentence. That’s, er …’
‘Thirteen years and four months.’
Diane Fry looked up briefly as Cooper slowed to avoid a squirrel that darted across the road. But, as usual, she showed little interest in the scenery.
‘Why do you think he changed his story about the Carol Proctor murder?’ said Cooper. ‘All it meant was that they refused him parole and he got knocked back.’
‘There are all kinds of factors the parole board would have taken into consideration,’ said Fry. ‘They’d want to know about his plans when he got out. And he had some issues to deal with – anger problems.’
‘Right.’
Hope village lay in the centre of the valley, dominated on one side by Lose Hill and Win Hill, and on the other by the cement works. Going up the valley, the chimney of the works had been visible from as far away as the Rising Sun Inn. Its curious tower-like structure resembled the ruins of a castle, with gaping holes like empty windows in a high battlement. Behind it was the long white scar of the quarries driven deep into Bradwell Moor.
Cooper had looked at Mansell Quinn’s mugshots earlier. For a long time in prison, Quinn must have been like a man holding his breath under water. Worse, he would have had no idea how long he needed to hold it for. There would have been a time when he hoped to get parole and be out of prison at the ten-year mark. But he’d been branded unsuitable for release. Many men might have given up then, stopped holding their breath and let the despair rush in. But Quinn had waited.
‘I suppose his home circumstances didn’t meet the requirements. Not suitable for assisting his rehabilitation.’
‘It’s not a sensible option to change your mind about whether you’re guilty,’ said Fry. ‘You’re branding yourself a liar. Most men who change their stories in prison do it the other way round, though. Remorse being more important than innocence, they express remorse and get their parole.’
Cooper had to drive more carefully through Hope, where a constant stream of lorries rumbled backwards and forwards over the bridge to reach the cement works.
He had seen men leaving prison after their release, setting off along the roadside in the direction of the nearest town, their entire belongings in one bag and only the vaguest idea where they were going. He’d often wondered whether they made it any further than the nearest pub, following the first sniff of freedom that drifted through a bar-room window.
‘If it were me, I’d do anything to get out, including lying through my teeth. I mean, if I was actually innocent, I’d know I was – even if no one else did. So it wouldn’t be on my conscience …’ Cooper paused. ‘Quinn won’t be planning to go back inside again, that’s for sure.’
‘That’s what I thought, too,’ said Fry.
A few minutes later, Cooper and Fry stood at the bottom of Rebecca Lowe’s garden at Parson’s Croft. A stiff breeze had sprung up, and Cooper watched it bustling through the trees on the slopes of Win Hill.
The SOCOs were still working on the house, and a group of officers were on their hands and knees searching the garden and driveway, seeking traces of the killer on his route to the house. Cooper noticed a garden ornament here, too – not a squirrel or a rabbit, but a concrete heron standing on one leg in the middle of the lawn, as if waiting for a pond to arrive.
‘They think he may have waited under the trees for a while before he approached the house,’ said Fry, who’d been speaking to the Crime Scene Manager. ‘Probably he wanted to be sure she was alone.’
‘Here?’ said Cooper.
‘A few yards along the fence. See the markers? He must have watched the place for a while before he entered. This is the best spot to remain unnoticed, yet have a clear view of the house.’
Cooper looked up at the tree above his head. Most of its leaves were dark green, with the distinctive pointed tip of the lime. But many of the branches had thinner, paler foliage. With a slight stretch he was able to reach up, take hold of a branch and give it a shake. A shower of water droplets fell from the surface of the leaves, followed by a small cloud of brown specks that landed in Fry’s hair and on her shoulders, and clung to the sleeves of Cooper’s shirt.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ said Fry.
Cooper picked one of the specks off his shirt and looked at it. It was a tiny round floret on a short piece of dried stem.
‘This lime tree is seeding,’ he said. ‘There are thousands of these things up there. If the killer stood here, even for a few minutes, he’ll have them on his clothes, like us.’
‘And in his hair,’ said Fry, brushing the top of her head. ‘OK, if we find Quinn, they’ll still be on him. I don’t suppose he’s changing his clothes very much.’
‘We ought to suggest to the SOCOs that they look for seeds in the material they bagged from inside the house.’
‘It wouldn’t really prove anything. Rebecca Lowe could have carried seeds into the house herself. They could have been taken in by the dog, or anyone.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’
Fry stared at him. She wasn’t used to being told that she was right. But Cooper had a picture in his mind. He was imagining the killer standing here, under the lime tree, watching the house. He hadn’t approached the house straight away, but had stood for some time, waiting. Waiting for what, though?
‘It was already dark, wasn’t it?’ said Cooper. ‘It had been for an hour or so.’
‘Yes, of course it was dark.’
She watched him in amazement as he reached up and shook the nearest branch of the tree again. This time he tugged a bit harder, and the bough dipped. More water fell around them. Fry got a spatter of it in her face and wiped it away with her fingers as she stared at Cooper.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if it had already started to rain.’
‘I’ve no idea, Ben.’
Cooper looked at the ground. He saw a ripe seedhead from a stem of grass that had been chewed by mice or something. Nearby were a series of markers placed on the damp soil by the SOCOs.
‘Footprints,’ said Cooper.
‘Boots, by the look of them. Nice, clear impressions.’
‘Useful.’
Between the lime trees and the house stretched two gently sloping lawns edged by flower borders and divided by a brick-paved path. The path meandered a little before ending at a sundial on a stone plinth. Cooper could see no more white markers, and the SOCOs were already progressing towards the drive and garage.
‘There are no impressions between here and the house, though. Yet the grass is fairly long, not recently cut.’
Fry shrugged. ‘He must have walked on the path.’
‘Oh, right. He was worried about damaging the grass with his big boots. And what about the six-foot leap to the sundial?’
‘Ben, the grass just didn’t retain any impressions, that’s all.’
‘But it would do,’ said Cooper, ‘if it was wet.’
He watched Gavin Murfin scouting around the side of the house, peering over the dense hedge into the neighbours’ property. Cooper realized this was the first time that he’d been alone with Diane Fry for months, without Murfin or anybody else being on hand to overhear what they were saying or butt in. For once, Fry wasn’t trying to get away from him. In fact, she seemed to be absorbed with her own thoughts.
‘Diane …’ he said.
‘What?’
Fry looked at him suspiciously, already alerted by a change in the tone of his voice. Cooper wished he were a better actor sometimes.
‘I know it’s none of my business,’ he said, and paused while she rolled her eyes in exasperation, though she still didn’t move away. ‘But I heard that Angie is staying with you.’
‘Been gossiping round the coffee machine, have you?’
‘Is it true, Diane?’
‘Like you said, Ben: it’s none of your business.’
‘I was involved, in a way –’
‘In a way? Too bloody involved, if you ask me.’
‘Yes, I know, I know. But is Angie just visiting or has she moved in? I mean, are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Diane?’
‘Ben, would you like me to break your neck now, or do you want to annoy me for a bit longer?’
Fry began to walk across the garden, her shoulders stiff. Cooper had seen her walk away from him like that too often before. He shook his head, spraying more water and brown specks from his hair. Then he hurried after Fry, falling into step alongside her.
‘Have you seen anything of Rebecca Lowe’s children?’ he said.
‘They came in earlier today for identification of the body,’ said Fry. ‘They already knew Mansell Quinn was coming out of prison, of course. Andrea said she’d tried to get her mother to take extra precautions.’
‘Andrea and … Simon?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Any children from the second marriage?’
‘She was too old by then, Ben.’
‘I meant, did the second husband have any children? Step-children for Mrs Lowe.’
‘No.’
‘A woman living alone, then.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But if Mansell Quinn came looking for revenge,’ said Cooper, ‘why his ex-wife? What did she do?’
‘We don’t know. And there’s another thing we don’t know: who else he might be looking for.’
‘What?’
‘What I mean, Ben, is – who’s next?’
Will Thorpe had taken to watching other people breathe. It was effortless and automatic for most of them. They weren’t even aware they were doing it. He liked to watch their chests gently rise and fall, and imagine the smooth flow of air in and out of their lungs. He stared at their mouths as they talked or ate, trying to recollect a time in his past when it had been possible to talk and breathe at the same time, as these people did. He cocked his head to listen to them, but he couldn’t hear them breathing.
There were some, of course, who gave themselves away. Now and then, he heard a wheeze or a cough, and he’d turn around to find where it had come from. They must know the reality – or if not, they soon would. But others he watched so long that he began to believe they didn’t breathe at all. Maybe they absorbed oxygen through their pores, or drew it in with the sunlight, like trees did through their leaves.
These people didn’t understand what breathing was. It was the most important thing in the world, a privilege that had to be fought for every minute of the day and night. Especially the night.
Thorpe was sitting in a small grassy hollow overlooking the entrance to Cavedale. Below him was a series of worn limestone shelves that he’d climbed to reach his vantage point. It had taken him a few minutes, frequently pausing to get his breath, fighting to control the pain in his chest.
From here, he was looking down on people entering the dale through the narrow cleft in the limestone at the Castleton end. Behind him, a clump of elms and sycamores screened the roofs of the tea rooms and B & Bs near Cavedale Cottages. If he kept still, even the walkers coming down the dale wouldn’t notice him in his hollow. Once they’d passed below the keep of the castle, they didn’t look up any more but kept their eyes on the ground to avoid stumbling on loose stones.
After a few minutes, Thorpe lit a cigarette. Two young boys entered the dale, chattering loudly, oblivious to the fact they were being watched. They were probably part of the group he’d seen in the village carrying their worksheets, ticking off the things they were supposed to find.
These two had found Cavedale, but they weren’t satisfied with simply ticking it off. They scrambled up the rock across the dale from Thorpe and stood at the mouth of one of the small caves in the limestone cliff. It looked dark and mysterious, but Thorpe knew that it ended after only a few feet. Though the hill was honeycombed by the Peak Cavern and Speedwell system, there was no entrance to it from Cavedale.
The two boys looked around and noticed him. Perhaps it was the whiff of his cigarette smoke that had alerted them to his presence.
‘Excuse me, is this cave safe?’ called one of the boys.
Thorpe was impressed by polite children. They always took him by surprise.
‘Safe?’
‘Are there bats – or anything?’
‘No, I don’t think there’ll be any bats. Or bears.’
‘Thank you. We’re going in to explore.’
‘If you’re not out in an hour, I’ll call cave rescue,’ said Thorpe.
The boys disappeared. Thorpe laughed to himself, coughing and taking a drag on his cigarette. The hollow was quite a little sun trap, and the warmth felt good on his skin. He’d forgotten that it was possible to feel like this. Temporarily, he could even ignore the constant struggle to draw in air. Once he’d got this burden off his mind, he’d be able to breathe properly at last. No dust or poisons would break down his lungs, no holes would erupt into his chest cavity. He’d take a breath with ease, as everyone else did. That was all he wanted.
‘Did you know it was so small?’ called a voice.
Thorpe looked up. The two youngsters were out of the cave, looking disappointed. There had been no bats, then. Only a couple of yards of damp sandy floor and a graffiti-covered rock face.
‘No, I didn’t. Sorry.’
The boys looked as though they didn’t believe him. But Thorpe reckoned you had to find things out for yourself in this life. You had to learn from your disappointments. There would be bigger ones to come later on.
He watched the youngsters clamber down the rocky path and head back into Castleton. What was next on the worksheet? Church, youth hostel, school?
In the distance, Thorpe could hear a hammer tapping on stone, a whistle blowing for a football game, and kids chattering in the market square. He lay back on the grass, letting a cloud of blue smoke drift away into the sky, and closed his eyes. In the warmth of the sun, he began to relax, and was almost asleep by the time Mansell Quinn found him.
10
In the incident room at Edendale, officers found themselves in a reversal of the normal routine – they were drawing up a list of potential victims rather than suspects.
For a few minutes, DCI Oliver Kessen watched Hitchens organizing the enquiry teams.
‘And once we have a list of names, what do we do?’ said Kessen.
‘We warn them of the risk, sir.’
‘Look, we have to be careful here. If the press gets hold of the idea that there might be more murders, it could lead to a general panic.’
‘That goes without saying.’
‘Does it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Ben Cooper hadn’t quite got used to DCI Kessen. He was too quiet by far. In fact, he was so quiet as he moved around West Street that his officers often turned around to find him standing in the doorway, watching them. And they wouldn’t know how long he’d been there, or what he was thinking.
‘All right, so who have we got?’ said Kessen.
‘There are the two children from the Quinns’ marriage,’ said Hitchens. ‘The daughter, Andrea, is twenty-six. I don’t suppose she’ll remember all that much of her father. But the son, Simon, is twenty-eight now. He’d have been about fifteen years old when his father was sent down. He’ll remember.’
‘I should think he damn well would.’
‘But I don’t think we’re looking at the children as potential victims. He’s still their father, after all.’
Kessen shrugged. ‘Unfortunately, fathers have been known to kill their children. Do we have any evidence as to how Quinn viewed his two?’
He watched Hitchens shake his head. ‘No.’
‘Get somebody on to the prison authorities. They have personal officers for prisoners on each wing these days. They also have counsellors, and all that business. Someone will have talked to Quinn about his family. Or tried to, at least. Let’s see what we can get out of them. Any insight into how his mind might be working would be useful.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Where do Quinn’s family live?’
‘The daughter is working in London. But the son, Simon – he has a job in Development Control with the district council. He recently bought a house right here in Edendale.’
‘He was lucky,’ said Gavin Murfin. ‘There isn’t much property for first-time buyers around here.’
‘No, you’re right. I wonder how he managed the mortgage.’ Hitchens sighed. ‘There’s an awful lot of stuff to work on, sir.’
‘Information is what we need,’ said Kessen. ‘If we can establish what sort of people we’re dealing with and what terms they’re on with Quinn, we might be able to work out his intentions.’
‘I suppose so. But we can’t begin to take measures to protect all these people, can we?’
‘We can warn them that they might be at risk. Who else do we have?’
‘There are two friends of Mansell Quinn. Or former friends, at least. The three of them were very close at the time of the murder. Both were called to give evidence at the trial, and both declined to give him an alibi. That was pretty much the clincher.’
‘Who needs enemies, eh?’
‘Number one, we have Raymond Proctor, aged fifty, married. He runs a caravan park near Hope.’
‘Family?’
‘Married, as I said. Two teenage children. Hang on, no – one grown-up son. The teenagers are step-children, from his wife’s previous marriage. Poor bugger.’
Kessen regarded him coolly. ‘Proctor, you say?’
‘Yes, this is the guy whose first wife was killed by Quinn – he’d been having an affair with her. So we can’t expect much love lost there, I suppose.’
‘Friend number two?’
‘Number two is William Edward Thorpe, aged forty-five, single. Thorpe was a soldier, spent quite a lot of his time serving overseas. He was with the local regiment, the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, but he was discharged last year.’
‘Current whereabouts?’
‘Unknown.’
‘His regiment should have records.’
‘We’ve tried them,’ said Hitchens. ‘On discharge, Thorpe went to Derby for a while. He was staying with one of his old army buddies who’d finished his stint a few months earlier. But the friend says Thorpe walked out after a few days, and he doesn’t know where he went after that. The computer throws up a drunk-and-disorderly charge for a William Edward Thorpe in Ashbourne a couple of months ago, but his address was given as “no fixed abode”.’
‘We need to find him. Quinn has a motive for looking him up.’
‘So much work,’ said Hitchens.
DCI Kessen waved away the comment.
‘Sudbury’s an open prison, right?’ said Murfin.
‘Yes.’
‘Didn’t we have one who escaped from there recently?’
‘If you can call it escaping. He was on an unsupervised work party on the prison farm, and never went back to his cell at the end of the day.’
‘I don’t know why they bother doing it. I mean, those open prisons are a cushy number. And he’ll only get sent back to somewhere worse when he’s caught.’
‘If he’s caught.’
‘Come on, sir. When did we not catch someone who’d walked out of Sudbury? These blokes always go straight home. The poor sods don’t know what else to do.’
Cooper put his hand up. ‘Gavin has a point, sir. Mansell Quinn didn’t escape, but his thinking could be the same. He might just have been going home.’
‘Damn right. He turned up at his wife’s house and killed her.’
Cooper shook his head. ‘That wasn’t his home. He never lived there.’
‘No, you’re right. His previous address was in Castleton. But somebody else lives there now. Complete strangers, I assume. Check on it, would you, Murfin.’
‘Quinn’s mother lives in Hathersage,’ said Cooper. ‘That will be the place he thinks of as home.’
‘We’ve talked to her, haven’t we? DS Fry?’
‘Yes, sir. But I don’t think she was being entirely open with us.’
‘Put a bit of pressure on, then. Get some officers into the area to talk to all the neighbours. See if we can get a sighting of Quinn. OK, Paul?’
Hitchens had no choice but to nod.
‘Somebody look into public transport,’ said Kessen. ‘Is there a railway station near Sudbury?’
‘We’ll check, sir.’
‘He might have hired a car,’ said someone. ‘Or stolen one.’
‘We should look into it,’ said Hitchens. ‘Right.’
‘If Quinn does have a car,’ pointed out Kessen, ‘it’s going to make it much less difficult for us. A known vehicle will be easier to locate than an individual who may or may not be on foot, and who has the whole of the Peak District to wander around in.’
‘We hope for the easy option, then,’ said Hitchens.
‘Obviously. So we want sightings of vehicles in Aston, near the victim’s home.’
‘And appeals, sir?’
‘The press office are already on to that. They’re fixing up a press conference later this afternoon. We aim to get Quinn’s photograph on the local TV news tonight. We need as many members of the public looking out for him as possible.’
‘I got chatting with some of Mrs Lowe’s neighbours at Aston this morning,’ said Murfin. ‘They said they were just passing, but of course they’d come for a nosy around to see what was going on.’
‘The next-door neighbours?’
‘No, further up the village. They didn’t see anything last night, but they volunteered Mansell Quinn’s name themselves. They’d heard he was due out.’
‘Where did they hear that from?’
‘They seemed to think it was something everybody knew.’
‘The Carol Proctor killing is a case everyone in that area will remember,’ said Hitchens. ‘At least, everyone who was living around there in 1990. But we have to reach the others as well – the newcomers, and all those thousands of visitors, too.’
‘If necessary, we’ll spend some money on distributing posters. Anything else, Paul?’
‘I think that’s it for now, sir.’
But Cooper raised a hand. ‘Sir, if Quinn is looking for revenge for some perceived injustice at his trial, I wonder if he might also go after the professionals involved. For example, the judge, the lawyers –’
‘– or the police officers,’ said Kessen. ‘Yes. Specifically, the officers who worked on the Carol Proctor case and put the evidence together that got him sent down.’
The DCI looked at Hitchens. ‘You’d better add looking up the investigating officers to your list of tasks, Paul,’ he said.
Hitchens looked more uncomfortable than ever. ‘No, sir.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t need anyone to look them up.’
Kessen smiled at him. ‘Perhaps you’d better tell us why, DI Hitchens. I think some of us here don’t know.’
‘Well, one of those officers,’ said Hitchens, ‘was me.’
Rebecca Lowe might have lived alone, but she had an active enough life. Analysing her diary, address books and other material that had been taken from her house, the incident room staff had already begun to piece together her movements, her regular activities and closest contacts. Later, her phone records would be gone through, her letters and bank statements read in the hope of tracing connections that might point to a motive, a suspect, or a possible witness.
Along with the forensic examination and the postmortem, it was all part of the routine that had to be observed to demonstrate that things were being done properly. But everyone knew that a separate operation was going on at the same time – the effort to find the man already identified as the prime suspect: Mansell Quinn.
Ben Cooper found himself with an interview to do almost immediately. At least once a week, Rebecca Lowe had attended a gym located on an industrial estate in Edendale. Her sister Dawn said that she’d been talking about joining a new fitness centre at Hathersage instead, because it was nearer. But changing your gym was a bit like converting from one religion to another. You risked being told that everything you’d done so far in your life was wrong. Perhaps Rebecca had been a bit set in her ways, after all. She’d stayed at the Edendale gym.
‘One of our more mature ladies,’ said the trainer at Valley Fitness. ‘But she was in better shape than most. In fact, she could outlast a lot of the younger women on the bikes. Also, she wasn’t afraid to try new things. She’d put her name down for a trial Pilates class.’
‘Did she ever talk about her ex-husband?’
‘Wait a minute – he died, didn’t he?’
‘Sorry, I mean the husband before that.’
‘An earlier ex? No, I didn’t know she had one. She’d lived a bit then, had she, Rebecca? Seen off two husbands, but still kept herself in condition? Well, good for her.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Monday morning. She always comes in for a session on Monday morning. Never misses.’
That checked with the photocopy Cooper had of a page from Rebecca Lowe’s week-to-view diary.
‘And she was definitely there yesterday morning?’
‘Yes, ten o’clock to eleven. She made a joke about working off the excesses of the weekend. She liked a bottle of wine now and then, I think.’
Cooper looked at the entries for the previous two days. Lunch with her sister on Saturday. A dinner party with some friends on Sunday night.
‘And did Mrs Lowe seem her normal self?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Did she seem worried about anything? Did she mention anything that was bothering her?’
‘I didn’t talk to her that much, but she seemed perfectly happy. Just as usual. Wait a minute, though …’
‘Yes?’
The phone was silent for a moment. Cooper could hear a series of strange noises in the background, and imagined the running and stretching and pedalling that must be going on while they spoke. The thought of it made him feel tired.
‘There was a man who was due out of prison about now,’ said the trainer. ‘Is that right? Somebody that Rebecca knew very well.’
‘Yes, that’s right. Did Mrs Lowe tell you that?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Oh.’
‘Somebody else must have mentioned it. An old murder case, wasn’t it? Or maybe it’s just a bit of gossip. I might be able to remember his name, if you give me a minute.’
‘Never mind. I expect it was Quinn.’
‘That’s it! So is it right? Is he out?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
As Cooper put the phone down, he was handed a photograph. It was a recent shot of Rebecca Lowe, the one they’d be issuing with the press releases. She was dressed for the outdoors, in a green body warmer and jeans, and she had a dog at her heels – a small thing with a plumed tail and a screwed-up face. Rebecca had rather a narrow face, with lines around her eyes but enviable cheekbones. Her hair was blonde, though surely it must be dyed at forty-nine.
The trainer at the fitness club was right – Rebecca Lowe looked in good condition. But seen off two husbands? It looked as though one of them had come back again.
For a while, Cooper found himself waiting for someone to tell him what to do next. A major murder enquiry was a rigid bureaucracy, with clearly defined responsibilities and not much chance for anyone to work outside the system. As a divisional detective, he’d be allocated to the Outside Enquiry Team. Somebody had to do the physical part of the investigation, even if the SIO opted for HOLMES.
Of course, Cooper regretted that he’d have to let Amy and Josie down and skip the visit to the caverns. But they would understand – they always did.
Finally, he saw Diane Fry walking between the desks in the CID room.
‘You’re supposed to be on a rest day, aren’t you, Ben?’ she said.
‘Yes, but –’
‘You might as well take what’s left of it off.’
‘Don’t you need me?’ said Cooper, hearing his own voice rising a pitch in surprise. And sensing, perhaps, that sinking feeling of disappointment.
‘Not today. It looks like a self-solver. We just need to get some leads on where Mansell Quinn is and catch up with him.’
‘Are you sure, Diane?’
‘That’s what they’re saying further up.’
‘Well, I don’t mind, because I’ve got things planned. It just doesn’t feel right, that’s all.’
Fry shrugged. ‘We just do what we’re told, don’t we?’
It felt strange to Cooper to be leaving the office and going home when a major enquiry might be about to start. But, if he stayed, he’d become eligible for overtime. Somebody was making tough budget decisions in an office upstairs, gambling on an early conclusion.
Before Cooper could escape from the building, DI Hitchens put his head round the door and caught his eye.
‘DC Cooper.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Have you got a few minutes? Just before you go.’
Hitchens inclined his head to his office, and Cooper followed him in.
‘Shut the door.’
Hitchens looked serious – more serious than Cooper could remember seeing him for a long time, not since the DI had failed his interview for a chief inspector’s job. He also seemed a little uncomfortable, hesitating at his desk as if about to sit down, but then remaining where he was at the window. Apart from the football ground, there was nothing for him to look at outside, only the roofs of houses in the streets that ran downhill towards the centre of Edendale.
Cooper waited until the DI pulled his thoughts together.
‘I thought I’d tell you this privately first, Ben,’ he said, ‘rather than during a team briefing.’
Now it was Cooper who was starting to feel uneasy. He could sense bad news coming. Was he going to be reprimanded for something? Had he committed a serious enough offence to face a disciplinary enquiry – or worse? Cooper swallowed. He knew that he had. But time had passed, and he’d become convinced that he was safe. There was only one person who might have shopped him.
He studied the DI’s face to try to gauge how serious it was. Hitchens hadn’t even bothered to use the positive-negative-positive technique that was taught to managers. He ought to have praised Cooper for something first before he tackled the difficult subject, so as not to destroy his morale. Maybe that meant it was something else. A transfer, perhaps. Cooper had a few years of his tenure in CID to go yet, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t dispense with his services sooner.
‘It’s the Mansell Quinn case,’ said Hitchens, taking Cooper by surprise. ‘I mean, the murder of Carol Proctor.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘It’s funny that you should be the one to raise the point about the professionals involved in the case being at risk. I’m thinking about the police officers particularly.’
‘You were one of the officers involved, sir.’
‘Yes, I was, Cooper.’
‘But how does that affect me? Is there something you want me to do?’
Hitchens smiled.
‘You think I might be asking you to protect me? That’s very good of you, Ben. But I’ll take my chances.’
Then the DI sat down at last and folded his hands on the desk, intertwining his long fingers nervously.
‘This is a bit difficult, Cooper,’ he said. ‘But, first of all, you’ve got to remember that the Carol Proctor killing was nearly fourteen years ago. I was a divisional DC then, much like yourself. A bit younger, in fact, but every bit as keen. Anyway, it was my first murder case, so I remember it well. I made notes of everything. Of course, things were done a bit differently in those days.’
Cooper nodded. He had run out of things to say.
‘All the senior officers on the case have long since retired,’ said Hitchens. ‘The SIO died three years ago. Heart attack.’
‘I’m sorry. Was he a good detective, sir?’
Cooper knew that the first Senior Investigating Officer you worked for on a major enquiry could make a lasting impression, like an influential school teacher. He still thought fondly of DCI Tailby, who he’d worked for a couple of times.
‘A good detective? Not particularly,’ said Hitchens. ‘He was an old school dick – some of them were still around in the early nineties. He had his own ideas about how things were done. Well, he wasn’t the only one, of course.’
‘No, sir.’
‘My old DS is still around, but he’s a training officer at Bramshill now,’ Hitchens continued. ‘That only leaves me from the main enquiry team that put Mansell Quinn away. However, the actual arrest wasn’t made by CID but by uniforms. The suspect was still at the scene when the first officers arrived and so the FOAs arrested him. They found the knife, too. Obviously, Quinn hadn’t given any thought to concocting a story before the patrol turned up.’
Cooper shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand, sir.’
Hitchens sighed. ‘I know how much the death of your father meant to you, Ben. I think it still bothers you a lot, am I right?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The words hardly came out, because Cooper’s mouth felt numb. His mind had latched on to the acronym FOA – first officers to arrive. A uniformed patrol responding to a 999 call. He had a sinking certainty that he knew what the
DI was going to say next. ‘So in the Mansell Quinn case … ?’
Hitchens nodded. ‘Yes. After Carol Proctor was murdered,’ he said, ‘the arresting officer was Sergeant Joe Cooper.’
11
Another enquiry team had been assigned the action on Mansell Quinn’s friend, William Thorpe. And good luck to them. According to the initial intelligence, he was living on the streets, as so many ex-soldiers did.
To Diane Fry, ‘living on the street’ meant one of the big cities – Sheffield or Manchester, maybe even Derby. Edendale didn’t have many homeless people. Those who hung around the town were too much of a nuisance to the tourists to be tolerated for long. If Thorpe had been surviving locally, he’d have been picked up by a patrol, but there was no record of it. The only leads were his drunk-and-disorderly charge in Ashbourne, thirty miles to the south, and the existence of an ex-wife, long since divorced. So that action was likely to tie up two unlucky DCs for a good while.

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