One last breath bcadf-5

by Stephen Booth

  Somehow Cooper’s hopeless gestures seemed to communicate more clearly what he meant than any amount of embarrassing sentences. She could have tuned out his words, refused to listen, cut him short with a few painful expletives and left him floundering. But she couldn’t defend herself against the sudden jolt of comprehension that leaped between them, like a charge of electricity from a badly earthed connection. Her eyes widened, a faint flush crept along her injured cheek. Cooper saw that she knew what he meant, after all. She’d read it in his mind, translated it from his eyes without the need for words.

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  But he didn’t expect Diane Fry to respond. He expected her to do exactly what she did next: to turn away, unable to meet his eyes. There was nothing else she needed to say.

  ‘Diane, I’ve said I’m sorry. I don’t know what else I can do.’

  Fry leaned across the table towards him. Her face was pale, as if she had been living out the summer in the darkness of the caves below Castleton instead of in the open air.

  ‘Ben, how much does it cost to get a private detox?’

  Cooper looked startled. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘About two grand, would you say?’

  ‘Thereabouts. What is it you want from me?”

  The want you to find out more about her,’ she said. The want to know what she’s been doing these last fifteen years. I need to know who she was mixed up with in Sheffield. I need to know what she’s doing now.’

  Cooper sat back in his chair. The movement was partly to give himself a little more distance from Fry’s fixed stare, which he found unnerving. But it was also to provide a moment to think. He already knew more about Angie Fry than he’d told Diane. He supposed he’d tried to push the information to the back of his mind, in the hope that he would never have to tell her.

  ‘I don’t understand, Diane. She’s your sister. You haven’t seen her for fifteen years. You must have talked to each other since you met up again -‘

  ‘We’ve hardly done anything else but talk. I’ve told Angie everything about myself, everything that’s happened to me since Warley. And she’s told me a lot about herself, too.’

  Cooper shook his head, puzzled. ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘I don’t believe her.’

  ‘What?’

  Fry seemed to have trouble getting the words out a second time, as if her lips had gone numb.

  ‘I don’t believe her. I think she’s lying to me.’

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  She took another drink, then held her glass up to the light. It was empty. A bluebottle buzzed closer, attracted by the smell, and Fry swatted at it with a vicious side-swipe of her hand.

  ‘Why would she do that?’ said Cooper, trying to put conviction into his voice.

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what I’d like to find out.’

  ‘Have you told her you don’t think she’s telling you the truth?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Fry sighed. ‘You don’t understand. I’ve just found her after all these years. Or you found her for me …’ She paused and looked at Cooper, who tried to meet her gaze, but failed and dropped his eyes. ‘I might be wrong, and I can’t risk ruining it now. She’s my sister, and I love her very much. I don’t want to lose her again. But I need to know. I need to know the truth. Do you understand that, Ben?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I could be wrong,’ said Fry. ‘But I don’t think I am.’

  Cooper was aware of a fly in the ointment here. His best bet was to say ‘no’ to what Fry wanted him to do and hope that he could keep out of the situation entirely.

  ‘If you’re worried, you could make enquiries yourself,’ he said.

  Fry shook her head. ‘There’s a big risk of her finding out that I’m checking up on her. I’m frightened she’d just walk away again. I get the feeling she’s on a knife edge, that she hasn’t quite decided whether to stay or leave. She might just disappear from my life again. I couldn’t stand that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you - I don’t think she’d be surprised if she found out that you’d been checking up on her. It would only confirm her opinion of you.’

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  ‘I see. Basically, you want me to be the fall guy if anything goes wrong?’

  ‘Basically, yes.’

  Cooper began to shake his head. But Fry fixed him with her direct stare again.

  ‘I think you owe me this, Ben,’ she said. ‘You owe me this, at least.’

  He dropped his eyes. He’d always found it difficult to meet her stare.

  ‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘if there was anyone else I could trust …’

  Cooper hesitated a moment longer. Perhaps it was a moment too long.

  ‘I’m sorry, Diane. I don’t think I can do that. I’ve already interfered enough, as you said yourself just now. My getting more involved wouldn’t do either of us any good.’

  For the last few minutes Fry had been sliding her glass backwards and forwards across the polished surface of the table, as if intrigued by the sound it made against the wood, or the patterns formed by the streaks of condensation. But now, her hand became still.

  ‘I knew this would happen,’ she said. ‘It’s been like this all my life. No matter what you think you want, it turns out to be a disappointment when you finally get it.’ She looked at her glass as she spoke, addressing the remaining mouthfuls of vodka as if it were the spirit that had disappointed her, as if its taste was just one more thing that hadn’t come up to her expectations.

  Will Thorpe heard the sound of a car engine on the road outside, climbing slowly up the hill above the cement works from Pindale. Quinn heard it, too. He let go of Thorpe’s jacket and straightened up. Thorpe watched him stoop under the connecting doorway and slip into the shadows near the entrance to wait for the car to pass. He suspected Quinn

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  wouldn’t have a car of his own, and wouldn’t want to risk walking along the road, where he’d be seen too easily. He would be intending to navigate his way across the fields back to Edendale or Castleton, or wherever he was heading next.

  Thorpe smiled in the darkness. Quinn hadn’t taken the trouble to check what he had in the pack under his blanket. He hadn’t considered his old friend a threat.

  As quietly as he could, Thorpe slipped the carrying case out of the pack. The zip made a noise that sounded loud to him. But a few feet away, Quinn didn’t react. His concentration was entirely on the vehicle approaching up the hill.

  Thorpe knew he couldn’t risk Quinn wandering around loose any longer. While Quinn was around, he would always be in danger. He’d never be able to sleep safely again for the rest of his life.

  With a surge of excitement and fear that gripped his chest and made him gasp, Thorpe slid the crossbow slowly out of his pack. He had already snapped out the arms and unfolded the stock, and he was thankful that he’d left the weapon cocked before he went to sleep, with the automatic safety on. But when the string was pulled back and locked into the trigger, it made an audible click that even the sound of the car engine wouldn’t have covered. Quinn could have heard that.

  Now Thorpe’s hand shook as he fumbled for one of the eighteen-inch bolts he’d taken from Ray Proctor’s house. It was a long time since he’d handled a crossbow, and he prayed his aim would be good. Relying almost entirely on his sense of touch in the darkness, he placed the bolt under the front sight bracket and on to the track unit, then felt for its fletches and turned one down into the track groove. Lastly, he slid the bolt back under the retainer and into the trigger mechanism.

  The car passed by. Its headlights swung briefly across the front of the building, and Thorpe could see Quinn for a moment as a blacker shape in the darkness of the barn, a momentary

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  glitter of rainwater on his smock picking him out as a target.

  Quinn raised his head only when he heard the safety button releas
ed on the side of the trigger. The noise was distinctive, and Thorpe could picture the puzzled frown on his face, perhaps even the first hint of fear.

  Thorpe sighted into the darkness towards the low doorway, holding his breath and feeling for the trigger a little more quickly than he should have.

  ‘Mansell,’ he called. ‘I believe you.’

  And Thorpe waited one second for Quinn to start turning, before he shot him.

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  Saturday, 17 July When Ben Cooper arrived at Siggate, a uniformed inspector from Traffic section was practically spinning on the spot. The reflective hoops and patches on his yellow jacket flashed and flickered in the lights as he paced along the tape. He was listening to the crackling voices from his radio, shouting instructions to somebody at the other end, then glaring at the field barn as if it had delivered a personal insult.

  ‘We can’t sustain this situation for long,’ he said. ‘We’ve had to close the road all the way back to Castleton and all the way up to Bradwell so we can operate diversions for the traffic. Highways have got the carriageway up in Castleton for repair work. I’m warning you, it’s going to be complete chaos for twenty miles in every direction in a couple of hours’ time. We’ll bring the whole of North Derbyshire to a halt.’

  The inspector swore when he was ignored and went back to his radio.

  The exact time a motorist had called in on his mobile phone to report the body had been logged by Control, but it wasn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of when the incident had occurred. The road was quiet at this time of the morning.

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  And even if other drivers had passed by earlier, they had either seen nothing or not bothered to stop.

  The body was out of sight of the road, inside the abandoned field barn. The motorist might be wishing he hadn’t called it in, now that he was being asked to explain what he’d stopped for.

  Cooper found himself quite by accident standing near DCI Kessen, who’d just arrived and was being briefed by the Crime Scene Manager.

  ‘There’s a good bit of blood inside,’ said the CSM. ‘And splashes of it in the nettles, and between the building and the gate over there.’

  ‘What about the road?’ said Kessen. ‘Traffic was still going through for a while - enough to contaminate the scene?’

  T’m not too concerned about the road. It looks as though your man came and went on foot.’

  ‘Really?’

  The CSM pointed towards the gateway. ‘We’ll be able to see things a lot better when it’s daylight, but Liz has found some traces leading off into the field there. The poor bugger inside obviously never made it as far as the gateway, so it seems a fair bet that it’s going to be your suspect’s exit route. The field is nice and empty, thank God. There’s nothing worse than a herd of inquisitive cows trampling a crime scene. They’re even worse than a bunch of heavy-footed coppers, and that’s saying something.’

  ‘Any ID?’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything on him. You might have a better chance of identifying him when you get him to the mortuary.’

  ‘Sir, could I get a closer look?’ said Cooper. ‘I might recognize him.’

  Kessen nodded. The CSM kitted Cooper out in a scene suit and guided him to a point where he could see the face of the dead man.

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  The body lay in the inner room of the field barn, sprawled on its back on the dirt floor. Cooper had to bend almost double to duck through the doorway on the stepping plates laid by the SOCOs. Lights had been set up in two of the corners, illuminating the victim like an exhibit in an art gallery. The floor around him seemed to glitter where flecks of quartz in the limestone reflected the lights. The smell was pretty bad in here. Cooper wasn’t sure how much of it was the effect of extreme violence and death on the body’s natural processes, and how much resulted from whatever had gone on in the field barn previously. Some SOCO would have the pleasure of analysing the screwed up tissues and crisp packets.

  There were bloodstains, too, and a lot of disturbance of the ground. But Cooper’s attention was drawn to the face. It was dark red, almost purple in the artificial light. What he could see of the neck was marked by deep, black bruises, the result of far more violence being used on the victim than was necessary.

  ‘Any luck, Cooper?’

  ‘Yes, I know who it is,’ he said. ‘It’s William Thorpe.’

  DCI Kessen sighed and turned to the officers waiting by their vehicles.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Why have we still got the road closed? Isn’t there anyone here from Traffic?’

  He was always like that. Whenever we had a row, I’d think it was all over and forgotten about. But he … Mansell would go away and brood about things. It seemed as though he turned everything over in his mind, everything that I’d said in the heat of the moment. He picked my words apart, analysing them, making himself more and more angiy. There were a lot of things that I didn’t mean, of course. But he never seemed to understand that. He took everything to heart and stored it up. His

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  memory was unnervingly accurate, too -1 could tell he’d rehearsed my words over and over, letting them eat away at him from the inside. Then he would come back to the subject after a while - the next morning, or two or three days later, or longer than that even. And by then he’d built up the whole thing in his mind, turned it into something else, something far worse. When he came back to it, he was angrier than he’d been while we were arguing. I called it his ‘slow burn’. It was like he had a really long fuse that took time to burn down before the explosion came. It was really quite frightening. Because I never knew when it might happen.

  Mansell was never physically violent towards me. It was only words. When the explosion did come, it was just that - an explosion of anger. What I would still call the heat of the moment. An outpouring of emotion, something he had to get out of his system. I wouldn’t describe him a cold, calculating man. Not at all …

  Statement of Eebecca Quinn, October 1990

  Ben Cooper was tired, and ready to go back home. It was three o’clock in the morning, and it was still raining. It was also his birthday.

  He stared blearily out of the window of the CID room, wondering how much rain had to fall before Peak Cavern flooded. He was picturing the parties of tourists running to get out of the cavern, foaming water rushing behind them through the passages, roaring like all the devils in Hell were after them. He knew it wouldn’t happen in real life - there would be plenty of warning before anyone was caught by a flood.

  Cooper had read Rebecca Quinn’s statement before, but this morning her analysis of her husband’s character seemed particularly ironic. Perhaps he was just tired, but she seemed to be talking about a different man altogether.

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  He guessed Rebecca wouldn’t have been allowed back into her own home for a while after that day in October 1990 not until the SOCOs were satisfied that they’d done all they could to collect the available evidence. Her sitting room had probably still been prohibited to her then, even if she’d wanted to enter it.

  Cooper tried to imagine what it would be like to go back into your house knowing someone had recently died a violent death in your sitting room, and that your husband was probably the killer. Would it still feel like your own home? Or would everything have changed? He suspected it would feel as if some alien presence had invaded your space.

  There would have been a horrible temptation to open the door of the room where it happened, to look for some sort of explanation among the familiar surroundings, to hope that the whole thing had been a bad dream. But all Rebecca Quinn would have seen were the markers left by the SOCOs, the holes cut out of the carpet to retrieve the bloodstains, a dusting of powder on the window frames and door handles. She might have smelled latex gloves, and the sweat of people working indoors in crime scene suits. She might have noticed that the bottle was gone from the table, the cushions from the settee, and the poker from the hea
rth. All very prosaic, in a way. But all signs that the room had been the setting for a violent crime.

  Cooper looked through the statement list for an interview with neighbours called Page. Alistair Page had been only sixteen at the time, but if his parents were still around they might be worth talking to. If they’d lived quite close, they ought to have known the Quinns pretty well in a place like Castleton. And independent witnesses were distinctly in short supply.

  But there were no Pages on the list. Cooper made a note to ask Alistair about his parents. Then he turned back to Rebecca’s statement. She recalled leaving the house at eight

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  thirty that morning to go to her job as a secretary in a solicitor’s office in Hathersage. Normally, she wouldn’t have returned home before five thirty, but she’d been phoned by the police earlier in the afternoon. She said she’d been too shocked and confused at first to understand what she was being told.

  Rebecca had stayed at her sister Dawn’s house that night. Neighbours had looked after the Quinn children when they arrived home from school, until they, too, had gone to their aunt’s house. Cooper looked for the name of the helpful neighbours. Townsend. Maybe they were still around, at least.

  There was a statement from another neighbour on the opposite side of the road, a woman called Needham. But neither she nor Mrs Townsend remembered seeing anyone enter the Quinns’ house until Mansell Quinn himself arrived home, driving his Vauxhall estate. It wasn’t clear from their statements how good a view either of them had of the house.

  Cooper began to gather up the statements to put them back into the Carol Proctor case file. Then he noticed a photograph of an evidence bag. According to the label, it came from Room 1 Sector B, and it carried the identification code PM24 - a scene of crime officer’s initials, plus the number of items of evidence he’d collected from the scene. He didn’t know who ‘PM’ was - not one of the present SOCOs at E Division anyway. After fourteen years, it was probably someone who had left the force or retired.