05.One Last Breath

by Stephen Booth

  ‘He is, isn’t he?’ said Page.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Quinn – he’s out of prison?’

  ‘It seems to be general knowledge,’ said Cooper. ‘But you must have been only a youngster in 1990, Alistair.’

  ‘I was fifteen.’

  Page fiddled with the cord of his lamp, giving his full attention to it for no apparent reason, as if to discourage Cooper from probing any further. Even though his father had dealt with violence in his job, Ben knew how deeply he himself would have been affected if, at the age of fifteen, he’d learned of a murder near to his home. Close to home, it was a different matter. He wanted to ask Page what he’d thought of Mansell Quinn, but decided to leave it. It was doubtful what value there might be in the memories of a fifteen-year-old boy.

  They caught up with the girls in the Great Cave. Amy and Josie were gazing up into the roof sixty feet above them, awed by the swirl holes made by the waters of the prehistoric river. And they were looking for the rock that had made the shape of the Devil in the next chamber.

  ‘The poet Ben Jonson wrote about Cock Lorrel and the Beggars’ Banquet,’ said Page cheerfully, spitting out the ‘t’ in ‘banquet’ so hard that it ricocheted off the walls like a bullet. ‘Back in the seventeenth century, that was. It’s in his poem The Gypsies Metamorphosed. It’s a bit gruesome, though. He says that the dishes eaten at the banquet were made from all the people Cock Lorrel and his followers didn’t like – they broke open their heads and ate their brains.’

  Page looked at the two girls doubtfully, but Cooper knew they wouldn’t be bothered by anything gruesome. Amy and Josie had been raised on a livestock farm. They’d seen more birth and death in their short lives than most adults ever did.

  Feeling the change of air as they passed through the Bell Chamber, Cooper realized he was nearly outside again. His mind went back to the conversation he’d had with DI Hitchens before he left West Street that morning. There seemed to be a short gap in his memory of what the DI had been saying, just after he’d told Cooper that his father had been the arresting officer in the Mansell Quinn case. But then Hitchens’ voice had drifted in again, like a radio station coming back on to its wavelength.

  ‘Joe Cooper and a PC were the crew of the car that responded to the 999 call when Carol Proctor was killed. Your father knew Mansell Quinn, of course.’

  ‘He knew everybody,’ Cooper had said automatically.

  ‘Yes, I think he probably did.’

  Then Hitchens had deliberately let a silence develop. Cooper had felt he was being watched for a reaction, much as the DI might watch a suspect in the interview room. Almost everyone showed physical signs of their state of mind, no matter how hard they tried to conceal them. And Cooper knew he was no exception.

  ‘Sir, does this mean that you think … ?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Hitchens. ‘I don’t know what Mansell Quinn has in mind. He might come looking for me, but I doubt it. I was only a junior DC – he probably wouldn’t even have known my name. I didn’t get any publicity, or any of the credit. You don’t, as a detective constable. I’m sure you know that, too.’

  Hitchens smiled, but Cooper found he couldn’t work his face muscles sufficiently to respond.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Obviously, I’ve had to mention this to DCI Kessen,’ said Hitchens. ‘In case it’s relevant to the current enquiry in any way.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Quinn had been in trouble prior to the murder, you know. In fact, your father had arrested him twice before – once for receiving stolen goods at a building site he was working on, and the second time for an assault in a pub. There was a general punch-up, and both Quinn and Thorpe were involved.’

  ‘Will Thorpe was there, too?’

  ‘They were good friends, don’t forget.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Quinn was charged with assaulting a police officer, among other things. Do you want to guess who the officer was?’

  ‘I remember it,’ said Cooper. ‘Dad had a black eye and a foul temper for weeks afterwards.’

  ‘But he didn’t take even a day off work, which the defence made use of at the trial, in an attempt to minimize the injuries.’

  ‘He could have lost an eye. Quinn used the thick end of a pool cue.’

  ‘That was denied by the accused, and there were no eye witnesses willing to confirm it. In fact, it was never really clear whether Quinn or Thorpe was nearest to Joe Cooper at the time. The court had no choice but to acquit Quinn on that charge.’

  ‘And then there was the Carol Proctor case.’

  ‘Yes. I always thought it was a bit lucky myself, the way Quinn’s case fell apart before it even came to a trial. But we were more than happy to get a conviction, of course.’

  ‘In what way did you think it was lucky, sir?’

  ‘The whole alibi business. Raymond Proctor and William Thorpe alibi’d each other, and Quinn’s wife was at work. So the only person without an alibi was Mansell Quinn himself.’

  ‘Right. The obvious suspect – the one found at the scene.’

  ‘The clincher, though, was the knife. It had Quinn’s fingerprints on it, and Carol Proctor’s blood. Also, the blade matched several of the wounds on her body. According to the postmortem report, some of the wounds couldn’t be conclusively matched to the knife, but some were definites. Quinn said he had never touched the knife, hadn’t touched the body, hadn’t walked in the blood.’

  ‘He might have been in a state of shock and not aware of what he was doing.’

  ‘That one was tried by the defence.’

  ‘It’s possible, sir.’

  ‘They only tried it out of desperation. They could see their client was going down for life.’

  Hitchens passed across a file. ‘I’ve dug out the interview transcripts. Why not read them, Cooper, and see what you think?’

  Cooper took the file reluctantly. ‘But this was in 1990,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, 1990. You won’t remember those days, Cooper – you haven’t been in the force long enough. PACE and tape recorders were still quite a new thing then, and some officers regarded them as a nuisance. But it’s much better the way it is now. All open and above board, and no chance for some clever defence lawyer to claim you tricked his client into confessing to something he didn’t do.’

  ‘Are you saying –? Was there anything wrong with Quinn’s conviction?’

  ‘God, no.’ The DI shook his head. ‘I’m not saying that at all. Nobody doubted it.’

  ‘Except Mansell Quinn.’

  ‘Well, that’s the point.’

  Hitchens sat back in his chair and swivelled towards the window. Looking past his shoulder, Cooper could see mould on the roof of the football stand. It seemed to symbolize the stagnation of Edendale FC, permanently stranded in the lower division of one of the pyramid leagues, forced to sell off their best players to pay their debts, with no money to buy new ones and match-day attendances dwindling to hundreds. Or maybe it just symbolized the damp weather.

  ‘Quinn’s opinion wouldn’t matter ordinarily,’ said Hitchens. ‘At the time, he was just another violent thug caught bang to rights. And now he’s another embittered old lag. But in view of what happened to his wife, it looks as though he could be an extremely dangerous old lag. You get my meaning?’

  ‘He claimed he was innocent at first, but put in a guilty plea,’ said Cooper. ‘Then he changed his story again in prison.’

  ‘Can you think of any reason for that?’ said the DI carefully.

  Cooper tried to let that sink in. ‘Sir, are you saying Mansell Quinn could have been innocent all along?’

  ‘I think Mansell Quinn might believe he was innocent. And that’s all that matters.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I think so, in the circumstances. Don’t you, Ben?’

  Hitchens smiled, as if inviting Cooper to join with him in a small conspiracy. But Cooper felt unable to respond. Something in
side him seemed to be inhibiting his reactions. He was afraid he was missing something, or that he wasn’t going to ask the right question. Or maybe that he would blurt out the right question, and the DI would give him the truth. And then it would be too late.

  ‘Do you think Quinn knows my father is dead?’ he asked instead.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Hitchens with a small sigh of relief. ‘I suppose it’s a question we could ask his probation officer, or his personal officer at Sudbury.’

  ‘We’ll be talking to those people anyway, won’t we? I mean, about any comments he might have made regarding his family, or his old associates.’

  ‘Yes, we will.’

  ‘So it might not seem too odd to be asking whether he ever talked about Sergeant Joe Cooper.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Hitchens sounded doubtful.

  ‘I suppose it might seem odd to the officers tasked with making the enquiry, though,’ said Cooper, trying to interpret the DI’s hesitation.

  ‘Damned odd, unless we explained the reasons to them. And then the results of their enquiries would have to be put into their report, and that would go back to the receiver in the incident room and be looked over by the analyst, and then entered on to the HOLMES system by one of the operators, and maybe it would generate another action which the allocator would give to a second enquiry team …’

  ‘Enough,’ said Cooper.

  ‘You see how complicated it is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Hitchens watched him for a moment. ‘So, what do you think, Cooper?’

  Cooper swallowed painfully. The effort of trying to control his physical reactions was becoming almost too much to bear.

  ‘I’ll deal with it.’

  Then the DI had nodded and smiled. ‘And do you know, Ben – that’s exactly what your father would have said.’

  *

  As he made his way back across the rope walks, Cooper smelled the hemp again, pungent with the scent of animals. He looked up at the black soot stains on the roof and thought of Alistair Page’s tale of Cock Lorrel and the Beggars’ Banquet, all the wickedness and blood-soaked horrors imagined by superstitious locals.

  But if the people who’d lived in the cavern all those centuries had meant no harm to anyone, they ought not to have become objects of fear and hatred, stigmatized as cannibals and worshippers of the Devil. They ought to have been left alone.

  And that’s what his father would have said, too.

  13

  Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin passed through the security checkpoint at the gate lodge. The building nearest to the entrance was the officers’ mess, which was surrounded by banks of colourful flowers. Yellow, purple, white and red. Fry thought the purple ones might be pansies, but there were very few flowers whose names she knew. Murfin wouldn’t know them either, unless they were something he could eat, so there was no point in asking him.

  At the entrance to the visitors’ parking area, warnings had been posted of the penalties for helping prisoners to escape or bringing in prohibited items like drugs. They offered the prospect of ten years in prison yourself or a £10,000 fine, which would certainly deter most visitors. But there had been nobody to help Mansell Quinn escape, even if he’d wanted to. Fry had just learned that Quinn had received only one personal visitor during his stay at Sudbury.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Murfin. ‘The car’s over here.’

  ‘Wait for me, Gavin. I won’t be a minute.’

  She walked over a set of speed humps towards the steel fence. A few black-and-white cattle grazed beyond the fence, and outside the gates two young prisoners with shaved heads and green waterproofs were picking litter from the grass and filling black bin liners with it. A prison officer stood watching them, glancing occasionally at his watch. Until she noticed the waterproofs, Fry hadn’t realized it was raining. It was a gentle rain here, not the downpour of the night before.

  Then she saw a pedestrian underpass leading beneath the main road, the A50. When she walked into it, Fry found it smelled of urine and the floor was scattered with rubbish and bits of broken blue plastic. Perhaps the litter team weren’t allowed this far from the gates.

  The rain had run down the grass slope and pooled in the bottom end of the underpass. Only half the lights were working down here. But it looked like a deliberate policy rather than mere vandalism, because there was a precise alternation – dark and light, dark and light, all the way along to the exit. Half of the fluorescent tubes had either been removed or switched off.

  This was something Ben Cooper would do – follow the movements of a suspect, reconstruct his actions, try to get into his mind and understand what he’d been thinking. After an hour inside the prison, Fry believed she had an inkling how Mansell Quinn might have felt on his release. It wasn’t the worst institution she’d ever been in, but the atmosphere was oppressive nevertheless.

  Sudbury had been built as a hospital to take wounded US airmen during the D-Day landings in 1944, and most of the original single-storey accommodation was still in use – rows and rows of long, cream-coloured huts. By the time she left, Fry’s head had been buzzing with positive PR for the prison regime: education and training, prerelease courses, resettlement schemes and community projects. Strictly speaking, Sudbury wasn’t even one of Her Majesty’s prisons any more, but a facility of the National Offender Management Service.

  Entering the underpass, she followed a broad white line that divided the path from a cycle track that ran through on its way to Ashbourne. Traffic buzzed overhead on the A50. Emerging on to the side of a small road, she found a pair of bus shelters facing each other across the carriageway. On this side, the buses to Sudbury and Burton on Trent stopped.

  The shelter had all but one of its glass sides knocked out, and it would be pretty miserable in there waiting for a bus. Rain came down the banking from the A50, and spray blew in from the traffic passing towards Sudbury. Instead of a bench, a sort of plastic bar had been fitted for people to perch on, as if they were birds. Signs in the shelter told passengers how to reach the prison through the underpass. Everything was painted a drab, institutional green. Perhaps the colour had been chosen specifically for the people who would use it to get to and from the prison.

  Try as she might, Fry couldn’t conjure up the image of Mansell Quinn perched in the shelter waiting for a bus to take him to a new life at the end of his sentence. She’d seen photographs of him, but they had lacked the spark of humanity that might have enabled her to form a picture of him as a real, living individual. All she saw in her mind’s eye was a dark, amorphous shape passing across her line of vision, not standing still to be pinned down but forever moving on somewhere else.

  Fry found herself frustrated by the failure of her imagination. She couldn’t work out what had been going on in Mansell Quinn’s mind. There were too few dots to be joined up yet.

  But there had been another prisoner released at the same time as Quinn: Richard Wakelin, twenty-five, from Derby. The two men had been seen talking as they left the prison gates. Perhaps Wakelin could help her to get a glimpse of what had been in Quinn’s head that morning.

  Ben Cooper had parked under one of the maple trees in the Castleton car park to get a bit of shade, and he hoped the car wouldn’t feel quite so much like a blast furnace when he got back in. One family had removed their shoes and sandals and were paddling in the stream alongside the car park, while a couple with two panting dogs had allowed them to splash in the water to cool off.

  Cooper decided they should walk into Castleton to get an ice cream. He had a fancy for a dark chocolate Magnum, and the girls went along to humour him. What he hadn’t anticipated was that they would insist on climbing the hill to Peveril Castle.

  ‘It’s a long way up,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t come to Castleton without seeing the castle,’ said Amy, as if the logic were obvious. ‘Look at all those other people going up. Some of them are even older than you, Uncle Ben.’

  By the time they reached t
he top of the hill, Cooper was sweating. The grass was warm from the sun, and he was glad of the chance to lie down while the girls explored the ruined keep of the castle. At close quarters, the tower looked gaunt and forlorn. One side of it seemed to have crumbled away over the centuries, reduced to a ruin by locals stripping the stone to use as building materials for their homes.

  According to the guide books, the castle had originally been built by a bastard son of William the Conqueror to protect his local mining interests and hunting preserves. Cooper hoped the girls didn’t ask, in case he had to explain what a bastard was.

  When he got his breath back, Cooper walked along the wall and looked down into the dale. A middle-aged couple looked up and waved. Then Cooper noticed two men together in a sheltered spot near the entrance. He couldn’t see them clearly, but one of them was wearing a black waterproof with a hood, despite the heat. He watched them for a moment, wishing he weren’t so suspicious, but with thoughts of predatory paedophiles going through his mind as he heard the voices of children in the dale.

  In fact, the two men seemed harmless, although there was some tension between them, one standing and the other sitting, as if they’d had a disagreement. A gay couple, perhaps – they should have chosen somewhere that wasn’t so easily overlooked.

  A siren began to wail at the cement quarry. Somewhere in the vast excavations, half a mile behind the works, they were preparing to blast more limestone out of Bradwell Moor. A minute or two after the wailing a sharp boom reverberated in the depths of the hillside like a single stroke of a bass drum. A cloud of white dust drifted over the edge of the quarry.

  The Peak Cavern system wasn’t far from the hole blasted to feed the cement works. Any passages running south-east would emerge from the face of the quarry. Who knew what undiscovered stalactite-hung chambers might have vanished in the blasting over the years?

  Cooper looked round for his nieces and spotted them peering from one of the windows of the tower. It was his temporary responsibility for them that was making him paranoid, he supposed. Maybe this was what being a parent was like.