05.One Last Breath

by Stephen Booth

  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 be
hind 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 h
im 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.