05.One Last Breath

by Stephen Booth

  Fry took a deep breath. ‘We’d advise you to take whatever precautions you can, Mr Proctor. Keep your doors and windows locked, don’t open the door to anyone you can’t identify, make sure someone knows where you are at all times, and keep in touch.’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary.’

  ‘We hope not, sir. But it’s better to be safe than sorry. We can give you a number to phone if you’re worried. Of course, it would be even better if you left the area for a while. Perhaps you could take your family on holiday or stay with friends?’

  ‘You are kidding, aren’t you?’ said Proctor. ‘Have you seen this place? Who do you think runs it? This is our busiest time of the year. If I’m away from the site for a couple of hours, the whole thing starts to grind to a halt.’

  ‘Well, what about your family? They could go away somewhere.’

  ‘Connie and her kids? Chance would be a fine thing.’

  ‘Just until the situation is resolved.’

  ‘Until you’ve caught Mansell Quinn, you mean? Well, I’m not holding my breath.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sergeant, but I don’t think it’s very likely that you’ll catch him. I know your lot – you couldn’t catch a cold in winter. In my opinion, if Quinn’s gone walkabout, he won’t be caught until he wants to be.’

  Fry hesitated, still concerned that Raymond Proctor hadn’t grasped the seriousness of the situation, or the immediacy of the danger he was in.

  ‘What sort of security arrangements do you have here, sir?’

  Proctor simply laughed in her face. ‘Are you thinking in terms of razor wire and searchlights? You think I should get a dog? Perhaps a couple of Rottweilers to patrol the garden? Or a few mantraps and CCTV cameras?’ He stared out of the window, and for the first time Fry thought she saw a trace of uncertainty in the man’s eyes. ‘None of them would mean anything to Quinn.’

  ‘We can’t offer protection, I’m afraid, sir,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t expect it. Believe me, I don’t. What, some goon of a bobby hanging around my gate? It wouldn’t achieve anything, except to scare my customers off.’

  ‘We can ask patrols to come by at regular intervals.’

  ‘Oh, if you like. Now, have you finished?’

  Proctor assumed an expression of indifference. It was the sort of expression worn by teenagers who wanted to look cool. Raymond Proctor had obviously practised it to perfection over the years, and had even added a little curl of the lip that hinted at contempt. Fry expected him to shrug and say: ‘Yeah. Whatever.’

  Then she lost patience. Before she turned to leave, Fry leaned forward towards Proctor, pointing a finger in his face.

  ‘Just remember this,’ she said. ‘Every day and every night, somebody could be coming here to kill you.’

  Will Thorpe lit another cigarette. He had moved back from the hollow into the trees, where he could look across the rooftops of the houses on the southern edge of Castleton.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any fags on you?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  Mansell Quinn wouldn’t sit down or relax. He stood among the trees, staring down into the gardens of the houses, running his eyes across the back windows, watching anyone who came in view.

  ‘You must have smoked inside,’ said Thorpe.

  Quinn didn’t answer.

  ‘Suit yourself, then.’

  ‘My house is just up the road from here,’ said Quinn.

  ‘Pindale Road? It was your house.’

  Quinn turned quickly and covered the few feet between them in a second. Thorpe flinched and doubled over in a spasm of coughing. But Quinn simply stood over him. He looked up at the keep of the castle, where it hung over the sheer side of Cavedale.

  ‘See those bits sticking out of the wall of the tower?’ he said.

  Thorpe wheezed and tried to control his breathing. He wiped some saliva from his mouth.

  ‘What are you on about, Mansell?’

  ‘Can you see them?’

  ‘Yeah, all right. I can.’

  ‘They called those oubliettes,’ said Quinn. ‘It’s where they used to tip their shit out of the castle. Those folk down there in the dale would have been wading through it.’

  ‘Oh, very nice.’

  ‘But even then, they knew that you have to get rid of your shit. You can’t have it fouling up your own home. So you offload it on to someone else. Isn’t that right, Will?’

  Thorpe coughed again. ‘Get on with it, then, Mansell.’

  ‘Just one more thing, and then I’ll leave you alone.’

  Quinn continued to stare at the castle, watching the distant figures moving about on the walls. Two young girls ran up the spiral stairs into the keep and appeared in an arched window further up, laughing. Their voices reached across the dale.

  With the back of his hand, Quinn wiped away the sweat and the flies that had settled on him as he stood among the trees. But his voice was cold, like a sudden draught of air from the caves below the limestone dale.

  ‘I want the other addresses,’ he said.

  ‘Mansell, are you sure –?’

  Quinn turned then and looked down at Thorpe. ‘Have you got them or not? Did Rebecca give them to you?’

  ‘Yes, but … I’m not sure it’s right.’

  ‘What?’

  Thorpe squinted up at him. ‘He has a new life now, Mansell. Why rake it all up again after so long?’

  Quinn lashed out almost blindly. He ripped a branch from the nearest sycamore, snapped it in his hands and shredded the bark into strips, exposing the white flesh underneath. The wood tore under his fingers with a sound like a faint scream.

  ‘Everyone thinks they can just get on with their lives as if nothing happened, don’t they?’ he said. ‘They’re about to find out how wrong they are.’

  12

  The red stains of ferrous oxide showed through white limestone and a coating of green algae, and water ran continuously down the face of the multi-coloured rock. The stream bed where it left Peak Cavern was almost dry at this time of the year, but the flow reappeared down the gorge, spurting from a gash at the foot of the cliff.

  Ben Cooper and his nieces watched the jackdaws chattering continuously overhead.

  ‘Do the birds nest on the cliff ledges?’ asked Amy, who was taking an interest in wildlife at the moment.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Cooper, looking anxiously for ducklings planning to take a suicidal dive.

  Inside the cavern entrance, they found themselves on a series of wide terraces cut out of the rock. Families of ropemakers had set up their workshops here centuries ago, building their houses into the floor and knocking out tiny doors and windows, so that the rope walks they worked on were also the roofs of their homes. The rock walls were stained black from the soot of their fires.

  On the top terrace, a small crowd was watching a guide stretch hemp twine from winders to pulley-poles and twist it into rope using a sledge and a jack with rotating hooks.

  Amy and Josie ran down the dirt slope to a reconstruction of a ropemaker’s house. The roof was hinged up, so that visitors could look down into the living space, otherwise it would have been too dark to see anything. Inside, there was just enough room for a fireplace, a couple of chairs and some beds covered in straw, built into the wall like shelves. Suddenly, the girls laughed nervously.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘A ropemaker, I suppose,’ said Cooper.

  A stuffed figure was propped in one of the chairs near the fireplace. He was dressed in black and had a pale, shapeless face, with crudely defined eyes that stared blankly into a dim corner.

  ‘He’s a bit scary,’ said Amy.

  ‘It’s only like a Guy Fawkes.’

  ‘They should burn him, then.’

  Cooper blinked as he watched Amy go back to join the crowd at the demonstration. Josie stayed with him, staring into the house. She was the more thoughtful of the two, and he guess
ed she was trying to imagine what life would have been like for the ropemakers’ families. Or at least, he hoped she was. For all he knew, her mind might be absorbed in some fantasy of flames and immolation, too. He didn’t really understand children.

  He sniffed, inhaling the scent of the hemp as it moved through the guide’s hands. It smelled like wet horses’ tails.

  It occurred to Cooper that earlier visitors would have been able to smell this place long before they reached it. The ropemakers had kept animals in here – pack horses, cattle, goats, and even pigs for their tallow. The effluent must have gone into the stream flowing out of the cave, along with human waste. It would have been quite a culture shock for the genteel visitors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  ‘Welcome to the Devil’s Arse,’ said Alistair Page, coming to stand alongside him on the terrace. ‘We’ll be able to go through the show cave in a moment. We had to wait for a party to come back out, so thank you for being patient.’

  Page had a verbal mannerism that had caught Ben Cooper’s attention even when they’d been underground during the rescue exercise. On occasional words he emphasized a final ‘t’ with a click of his tongue against his teeth. It was audible in ‘moment’ and in ‘patient’. Cooper found it distracting and began to listen more carefully, to see if he could discern a pattern. He soon noticed that it only happened when the word fell at the end of a sentence. It produced an exaggerated emphasis, like a full stop pronounced out loud. Each time he heard it, he imagined Page spitting out an exclamation mark, ejecting it like an apple pip that had stuck between his teeth.

  Cooper called the girls, and they followed the path along the wall, above the terraces. The change from warm outside air to the cooler atmosphere of the cave was noticeable as they descended wide steps into a chamber called Bell House. Of course, it was a constant nine degrees Celsius down here. Mist hung in the chamber, and steam rose from the lights where water dripped from fissures in the roof.

  They entered Lumbago Walk, a low tunnel blasted from the rock. Alistair Page explained that it had been created for a visit by the young Queen Victoria. Previous visitors had been forced to enter the cavern lying flat on their backs in a shallow boat, clutching candles to their chests. The adults had had to bend double to avoid knocking themselves senseless on the roof.

  As they hunched over, Page leaned towards Cooper and whispered to him. ‘Quinn’s out of prison, isn’t he?’

  Cooper stared at Page, surprised by the question.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mansell Quinn.’

  ‘Do you know Quinn, Alistair?’

  ‘I’ve lived in Castleton all my life.’

  They emerged from the tunnel into the Great Cave, where bands of blue fluorite ran across the ceiling. Page pointed out the fossils in the rock, the remains of sea creatures that had died in the reef. He showed them a flowstone formation called Motherin-law’s Tongue and an imitation boulder left by the BBC while filming The Chronicles of Narnia.

  ‘So you were in Castleton back when Carol Proctor was murdered?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Of course. In fact, at the time I lived very near where it happened.’

  ‘In Pindale Road? So your family were neighbours of the Quinns?’

  ‘Well, very close.’

  Page pointed to crystal-clear water lying in a rock pool, with tiny blind shrimps flickering across the surface.

  ‘Apart from the shrimps, there isn’t much natural life in a cave like this,’ he said. ‘But it’s amazing how things can find a way to survive.’

  He showed them moss growing in the walls near the fibre-optic lights, and the empty webs left by spiders that had died because they found no flies to feed on. With his lamp, he pointed out the shapes formed in the walls – Father Christmas, Bambi, an alligator’s head, and the dog from Tintin, whose name none of them could remember.

  ‘And here –’ he began, as they entered the Orchestra Gallery.

  But then he stopped. Cooper looked at him, puzzled by the change in his manner. It was almost as if he’d frightened himself with his own stories.

  ‘There – in the light from the Great Cave – can you see the shadow on the wall?’

  Cooper followed the beam of his light. The outline of a head and shoulders was visible in a shadow picked out by the lights of the chamber they’d just passed through. He could even see two stubby horns protruding from the head.

  ‘It’s the Devil himself,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Page. ‘That’s who it is.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Cooper looked up at the gallery again. But without a light, the shadow had disappeared.

  ‘You see, the effect of the light is a bit funny in here,’ said Page. ‘You not only imagine shapes – sometimes you even think you can see them moving.’

  Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin had called at West Street on the way to their next call, which was all the way down the county in Sudbury.

  ‘I want to know how they’re getting on with tracking down William Thorpe,’ said Fry.

  ‘If he’s anything like Proctor, they shouldn’t bother,’ said Murfin.

  Fry was struggling to put Raymond Proctor out of her mind. She couldn’t stand people who pushed her so far that she lost control, even for a moment. Instead of thinking about Proctor, she ought to be more concerned about Dawn Cottrill. Dawn had been the one to find her sister murdered. She might have had a right to be upset, to react badly to the police. But she hadn’t.

  In the incident room she was met with shaken heads when she asked about Thorpe.

  ‘And I suppose it’s too soon for the postmortem report on Rebecca Lowe?’ Fry said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Any sign of the weapon? Have they finished searching the scene yet?’

  ‘No sign.’

  ‘DNA?’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘You didn’t ask whether Quinn had been found,’ said Murfin, following her as she stamped out.

  ‘Not much hope of that,’ said Fry. ‘If we can’t find Thorpe, what chance do we have of locating Quinn?’

  Deeper into the cavern, they entered Roger Rain’s House, where a perpetual cascade of water poured through the roof from the floor of Cave Dale. Cooper remembered it from the day before, when the water had spattered his face as he lay in the rescue stretcher. But it was only now that Page decided to mention the water had been found to contain sheep’s urine.

  ‘Oh, great,’ said Cooper, trying to remember whether he’d kept his mouth closed.

  They passed through the Devil’s Dining Room and reached a barrier at the top of a slope where the muddy remnants of a flight of steps and a wooden chute ran down into the darkness. They could hear the distant sound of rushing water.

  ‘This is the Devil’s Staircase. You can hear the River Styx from here,’ said Page, standing at the top of the chute. ‘Which is a good thing. As long as we can hear it, we’re safe. If the noise stops, it means the water on the lower level has reached the roof and the cavern is about to flood. Then we have four minutes and thirty seconds to get out.’

  ‘What’s beyond here?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Another twelve miles or so of passages, chambers, crawls and sumps. That’s what we know of, anyway – there may be hundreds of miles more that haven’t been discovered yet. But this is as far as we go today.’

  Cooper gazed down the Devil’s Staircase towards the noise of water. Even the girls were quiet as Page reeled off the names of the caverns deep in the hill: Fingernail Chamber, the Vortex, Surprise View. Many of them conjured up images of a fairyland waiting to be explored. But Cooper knew there was no fairyland, only darkness down there.

  When they walked back into the Devil’s Dining Room, Cooper noticed Page flashing his light into the corners and running it along the ledges where the shadows lay thickest. In the roof of the chamber were black spikes of stalactite, like meat hooks.

  ‘Those are called the Dev
il’s Hooks,’ said Page. ‘In fact, there’s a nice little story about this chamber. It’s where they used to hold the Beggars’ Banquet.’

  ‘The what?’

  Page seemed not to hear Cooper’s question, but continued his story with a distracted air.

  ‘For hundreds of years, Peak Cavern was used for an annual gathering of gypsies or tinkers. It was called the Beggars’ Banquet, and it was held right here in the Devil’s Dining Room every August – by royal permission, no less. It was said to be a celebration of the pagan festival, Lughnasa.’

  It might have been the echo effect of the chamber, but Page’s voice sounded unnaturally loud, as if he were addressing a more distant audience than the small group around him. He turned as he spoke, performing a complete circuit of the Devil’s Dining Room with his lamp. The stalactite spikes glittered and winked in the ceiling.

  Cooper was momentarily reminded of his panic in the narrow tunnel during the rescue exercise. He was conscious again of the massive weight of rock above him, and pictured the spiked roof gradually descending. Even from here, it seemed a very long way to the exit.

  ‘The bands of tinkers were led by a famous outlaw called Cock Lorrel, “the most notorious knave that ever lived”,’ said Page. ‘Cock Lorrel was the King of the Beggars, and it was said that he invited the Devil to his banquet in Peak Cavern to prove he was afraid of no one. Hence the Devil’s Dining Room.’

  He paused. As his voice died away, they could hear the sound of running water, the strange and unidentifiable noises made by the crevices in the rock, the inexplicable rattle of small stones.

  Page turned his head back towards where they had come from. Back towards the Devil’s Staircase and the endless web of passages deep in the darkness of the hill.

  ‘The festival went on for two weeks,’ he said, ‘so we can only imagine the condition of this place by the end of it. But what we do know is that they were pretty blood-soaked affairs. The guests at the Beggars’ Banquet were cannibals.’

  Amy and Josie laughed, thinking the story was over. Still bursting with energy, they went ahead up the wide steps through the Orchestra Gallery. Cooper saw their faces glowing in the light from the pool where the tiny, blind shrimps lived.