One last breath bcadf-5

by Stephen Booth

  ‘We had a call from an outdoor equipment shop in Hathersage. One of the staff remembers serving someone who answers Quinn’s description. Then I’m going to drop by the railway station up there, on the chance someone might have seen him catching a train when he left his mother’s.’

  ‘Are you taking Gavin with you?’

  ‘Unless you need him.’

  ‘No, that’s fine.’ Fry tapped the file, which Cooper had almost forgotten. ‘Well, I thought you might want to see this before you go. Then you can’t say I don’t keep you up to date.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The postmortem report on Rebecca Lowe. Mrs van Door estimates that the victim had died between an hour and two hours before she was found by her sister at eleven thirty that night. She was killed by multiple knife wounds, as we know. The problem is the weapon.’

  ‘Not a kitchen knife, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But not one that we’ve found in the house.’ Fry slipped a photograph out of the file. ‘You remember me mentioning the knives at the scene?’

  ‘Mrs Lowe had a whole block full of them in her kitchen.’

  ‘Yes. Decent stuff, too. Henckels Professional S range, according to one of the suppliers in town. Stainless-steel blades. Kept in good condition, they’re as sharp as hell. And these were almost new.’

  Cooper looked at the photo. Taken by one of the SOCOs, it showed a section of the floor in Rebecca Lowe’s kitchen at Parson’s Croft. The victim’s left leg and hip were just visible on the edge of the picture, and the blood spatter spread most of the way from her body to the kitchen units. Lying on the

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  tiles were several items that Cooper hadn’t noticed when he was in the house, because he’d been too busy looking at the body and the blood.

  The wooden block itself is here, on the floor near the end unit,’ said Fry. ‘Dawn Cottrill says it usually stood on the work surface there, or on the window ledge behind it, depending on whether Rebecca had been using the knives. It would have been near enough to the door of the utility room for somebody to make a quick grab at it as he came through.’

  Cooper could see five or six black-handled knives of various sizes lying on the floor. They were all neatly labelled by the crime scene examiners, and all of them had traces of blood visible on their stainless-steel blades.

  ‘So we reckon he grabbed one knife from the block, sending the rest flying in his hurry,’ said Cooper.

  ‘The position of the block and the knives is consistent with that theory.’ Fry sniffed again and tried to clear her throat. ‘There’s a close-up of the block here.’

  ‘It still has a knife in it.’

  ‘It’s a ten-centimetre paring knife - the smallest and lightest item in the set. It wasn’t thrown clear of the block, as the others were.’

  ‘How many pieces in the set?’

  ‘Seven.’ Fry pointed at the main picture again. ‘Here’s a twenty-centimetre cook’s knife, and near it a bread knife the same length. There’s a smaller sandwich knife over here, a sharpening steel under the edge of one of the units. And just by the victim’s foot, where you can hardly make it out, there’s a pair of kitchen scissors. As you can see, they all have bloodstains on them, except the paring knife.’

  ‘So which of them was the murder weapon?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘None of them. At the PM, they tried all the blades to get a match with the victim’s wounds. There was no fit.’

  Cooper looked up. ‘One piece of the set is missing, of course.’

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  ‘Ah. So you did arithmetic at school, as well as reading.’

  ‘That means he took the murder weapon away with him.’

  ‘It would be the sensible thing to do, especially if he wasn’t wearing gloves when he grabbed it.’ Fry consulted the report again. ‘The seventh item in a set of this kind would be a slicing knife. The same length as the bread knife and the cook’s knife, but with the perfect blade for the job, I guess.’

  ‘In fact, it’s the one you’d choose if you knew what you were going for, rather than just grabbing the first thing that came to hand.’

  Fry wiped her nose again. ‘Good point, Ben. I suppose you’re thinking that he must have known what he was doing and planned which knife he was going to use in advance. Then he knocked the rest over to make it look like an impulse grab. Clever, eh?’

  Cooper was starting to feel he should have made more of an effort to escape from the office before she cornered him.

  ‘Even though I didn’t say that, I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m wrong,’ he said.

  Fry didn’t smile. She didn’t smile often enough at the best of times. But this afternoon she looked as though she just didn’t have the energy.

  ‘One of our people had the idea of obtaining a twenty centimetre slicing knife out of the Henckels Professional S range from one of the stores in town. That didn’t match the victim’s wounds either. It almost matched, but not quite. Not enough to satisfy our meticulous pathologist.’

  ‘So what’s the conclusion? Unknown weapon?’

  ‘Somebody was sent to see Dawn Cottrill,’ said Fry. ‘And they asked her to rack her brains about her sister’s kitchen equipment.’

  Cooper was starting to feel sorry for Mrs Cottrill. She was an intelligent, and no doubt imaginative, woman. Though the officers who’d spoken to her would have been discreet, she

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  could certainly have worked out for herself what they were doing with all the knives.

  ‘Poor woman,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ said Fry vaguely.

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘She got us a result, anyway. She remembered that when Rebecca was equipping the kitchen in her new house, she wanted something a bit longer for slicing. Apparently, she used to buy large joints of meat from some organic place and had to cut them up into smaller portions for herself.’

  ‘So Rebecca had the knife in the set replaced with a longer one,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And I think you were about to tell me why the killer didn’t necessarily know what he was doing when he chose that particular knife?’

  ‘So I was. Well, Ben, imagine a block full of knives with their handles pointing towards you. If you’re going to grab at one of the handles, which would be the nearest to you?’

  The longest one,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Correct again. The handle of the longest knife would be sticking out of the block furthest, yes? And the item we have missing from the crime scene is a twenty-six centimetre Henckel slicing knife. Twenty-six centimetres. That’s over ten inches long.’

  ‘Nasty.’

  Fry sneezed and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. ‘Nasty is right. It looks as though Mansell Quinn could turn out to be a very dangerous man indeed. When we find him.’

  As Fry drove her Peugeot out of the E Division car park, she was still thinking about that book. She didn’t know why she let Ben Cooper do it to her. As soon as he started one of his conversations, she knew that he’d be sticking some kind of pin into her that she wouldn’t be able to pull out for days.

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  It had been years since she’d thought about that book. She’d been in Birmingham, studying for her degree back then; deluded into thinking of herself as educated and literate, just because she went every day to a place that called itself a university. In those days she could still read books for escape, letting her mind drift off into somebody else’s world without her subconscious throwing up horrific flashbacks. Since then, events had taken place that had changed her life in ways a book never could - they had altered it permanently and painfully.

  The book in question had been so vile that it hadn’t been enough to pick it up and throw it at the wall. That was the fate of the merely bad books, the ones that irritated or annoyed her. This one had been different. This one she’d felt obliged to remove completely from her life. Normally, her unwanted books would have gone to a charity shop or into t
he recycling bank. But this particular book had been different. She hadn’t been able to bear the thought that someone else would pick the thing up. Besides, she had needed some small act of protest against the author’s unpleasant thoughts being forced into her own.

  So she’d started a fire in the garden incinerator with some dead branches. Then she’d torn as many pages as she could from the book and burned them. She had finally dropped the mutilated cover into the flames and watched the glue of its binding melt on to the boards before it caught light and the author’s name had blackened and charred, letter by letter.

  Simon Lowe was being allowed home from hospital this afternoon. Overnight observation following a blow to the head that was all you got these days.

  ‘I didn’t see a thing, to be honest,’ he said, fiddling with the plaster on a cut to his hand. ‘The first blow stunned me. And it was dark, anyway.’

  ‘Did your assailant say anything?’ asked Fry.

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  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Did you notice any other details? A sound, a smell?’

  Simon shook his head. ‘I wish I could think of something.’

  ‘A car parked nearby, perhaps?’

  ‘There were cars parked on the street near the church, but I didn’t take any notice of them. It was dark.’

  ‘Yes, you said. And you spoke to no one in the pub, apart from the landlord?’

  ‘No one.’ Simon looked at her. ‘Do you think I might have lost my memory? Did I get into an argument with someone in the George?’

  Fry sighed. ‘No. The landlord confirms that you spoke to no one, and there was no sign of any trouble.’

  ‘So that means … ?’

  ‘That means you’re going to take much more care from now on, aren’t you, Mr Lowe? Don’t go out on your own at night again. Take sensible precautions.’

  She said the words without much hope. Nobody seemed to heed her warnings.

  Simon Lowe nodded, then winced at the pain of the bruise that Fry could see on the back of his head.

  ‘But I’ll be safe back home in Edendale, won’t I?’ he said, looking at her sharply.

  ‘Well

  ‘Because he’s still in the Hope Valley, isn’t he?’

  Fry stood up. ‘Yes, sir. We think he’s still in the Hope Valley.’

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  19

  Out and About was one of the newer outdoor equipment shops on the main street in Hathersage. After speaking to a member of staff, Ben Cooper and Gavin Murfin collected a tape from their security system. The visit didn’t take long, and left them plenty of time to take a look at Hathersage station. Cooper remembered where it was, having seen the approach road from the back of the Moorland estate, where Mrs Quinn lived.

  The station car park looked full, so he pulled up at the side of the road near a row of bungalows. He was surprised by the extent of the development that had been taking place here - Hathersage Park, it was called. He could see a long row of new business units stretching past the station itself, many of them already in use.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Murfin.

  ‘I want to have a look at the station, in case there’s any way Quinn might have been seen on the platform.’

  ‘I think I’ll stay here with the car, then.’

  Cooper looked around. There was nowhere selling food, so it was probably safe.

  ‘OK, Gavin.’

  He walked through a tunnel and up a ramp to the

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  Manchester line. Not only was the station unmanned, but there wasn’t much station to speak of - just two platforms, with a small concrete shelter on each side. First North Western had provided a payphone on the Sheffield side, but that was about it. It was bad luck there were no CCTV cameras covering the platforms, but he supposed crime was more likely to happen down in the car park.

  Cooper examined the train timetables. Judging by the time of the sighting of Mansell Quinn, he must have left his mother’s house in Moorland Avenue by seven fifteen. It was only a short walk to the station, and there was a train towards Manchester at seven thirty-three, so Quinn must have waited for a quarter of an hour, perhaps on the platform.

  But when had he left Rebecca Lowe’s house? And did he leave the area by train? There were two services in either direction that he could have caught, but the times of the later trains meant Quinn would have had to stay in the house for some time with the body - or found somewhere else to be out of sight.

  Turning, Cooper looked across the car park to the new development. At the far end was a complex of apartments and penthouses. They looked perfect for affluent commuters, who could reach the centre of Sheffield by train in twenty minutes or so, yet still enjoy a rural view. Next to them were business units, and across from the corner of the car park, a health and fitness centre. Its front wall consisted mostly of glass on the upper storey, with two big, arched windows reaching from floor to ceiling.

  Cooper felt a sudden surge of interest. He could see a woman in a black sweatshirt and leggings exercising on a treadmill. She was striding out vigorously on the moving surface, doing a good five miles an hour he reckoned. There was a console in front of her that probably displayed her time, speed, distance, calories, pulse and maybe even her heart rate. It

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  was one of a row of machines lined up in the window - and they were all facing outwards.

  He jogged back down the ramp, and found Murfin starting to doze in the car.

  ‘Gavin, you might want to visit the fitness centre over there.’

  ‘Visit a fitness centre? Me?’

  ‘Look - see the woman on the treadmill up there?’

  Murfin looked up. ‘Oh, yeah. She’s not bad. Well spotted, Ben.’

  ‘She has a great view of the platform - or she would have, if she took her eyes off her console. And anyone using those machines on Monday evening would have been able to see Mansell Qumn boarding the train.’

  ‘So you want me to go and talk to a load of women in leotards and tight shorts?’

  ‘If you can manage that.’

  ‘Manage it? It’s what God made me for. But what are you going to do?’

  ‘Take a little train ride.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘I can’t stop to explain, Gavin - there’s a Manchester train due in two minutes. I’ll be back in not much above an hour.’

  When a pair of diesel units appeared around a curve in the track, Cooper was the only passenger waiting to get on. Realizing he ought to let Diane Fry know what he was doing, he checked his mobile. No signal. And the payphone was on the other side of the track - no time to get across and back before the train came. Oh, well. He could explain later.

  On the train, a guard wearing a uniform of shirt, tie and checked jacket in three different shades of blue charged him a couple of pounds, then had to tap a lot of buttons on the metal box strapped round his neck to produce a ticket. At Bamford, Cooper watched him operate the doors and step out on to the platform to see passengers on and off before signalling the driver.

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  The train crossed the River Derwent on a bridge of steel girders just before it slowed to enter Hope station. Cooper looked at his watch. The journey from Hathersage to Hope had taken just seven minutes. DI Hitchens had been right so far - it would have been ridiculously easy for Mansell Quinn to get here from his mother’s house in Moorland Avenue.

  To cross the tracks at Hope, Cooper had to climb a set of wooden steps on to an iron footbridge where two men with cameras were standing. They must be waiting for express trains to come through, because they didn’t look interested in the diesel units that had just pulled away.

  He soon found a path that led into trees and through a kissing gate before heading up the hill to Aston. A stone barn with a corrugated-iron roof stood in the middle of a field, adjoining an old cattle shelter full of spray tanks. An ideal place to loiter unseen, if you needed to.

  By the time he reached the village, Cooper was breathi
ng hard. But the walk hadn’t been taxing, just short of twelve minutes from the station. And he hadn’t seen a soul, apart from the trainspotters on the footbridge and a few sheep. In another minute or two he would pass right by Rebecca Lowe’s driveway at Parson’s Croft.

  A woman came towards him with a Labrador trailing at her heels. She gave him a close look before saying ‘hello’. Cooper knew he didn’t look like the average hiker. If she was a resident, the woman had probably been interviewed already and would be suspicious of strangers.

  At Parson’s Croft, a liveried police car was parked on the driveway and a uniformed female officer stood near the front door, but otherwise it was quiet. The press had gone away, moving on to the next news story as soon as the SOCOs and detectives had dispersed.

  Rebecca Lowe’s killer wouldn’t have needed to approach the house via the main gate. The hedge around the property was five feet high, but ragged. It consisted largely of elm

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  saplings, which would die before they reached maturity as the beetles that spread Dutch Elm Disease got under their bark. Cooper could have forced his way through in several places. Had the Crime Scene Manager worked on the assumption that the killer had arrived via the obvious route? Or had the weak points in the hedge been examined for fibres left on the branches by someone pushing their way through?

  What Cooper really wanted to do was explore the garden, but his presence would have been recorded. In any case, he ought to get back to the station if he was going to catch the train back to Hathersage.

  He reached Hope station with five minutes to spare and stood with a group of hikers on the Sheffield platform, listening to an announcement about a delay. Cooper looked round. Nobody seemed to be surprised.

  With a shriek and a whine, an express train thundered through. A plate on the locomotive said it was the ‘City of Aberdeen’. The two photographers ran from one side of the bridge to the other to get shots of the train. When it had disappeared around the bend, they began to pack their cameras away. Perhaps they were going for lunch in one of the pubs in Hope.