05.One Last Breath

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘See the trail of blood?’

  ‘Quinn’s footprints?’

  ‘Exactly. His fingerprints were in the blood on the handset of the phone, and in the smears on the dial. Having made the emergency call, he walked back to the body, then across to the other side of the room and sat down in the armchair. He said in his statement he felt faint, a bit sick. He said he was in shock.’

  ‘I suppose that’s possible,’ said Fry.

  ‘And that was where the uniformed patrol found him when they arrived,’ said Hitchens. ‘In the armchair.’

  Fry caught a fleeting moment of communication as Hitchens looked towards Cooper and met his eye. She felt a surge of anger. Somehow this was a test, and she wasn’t going to let them get away with their little secrets. She concentrated on the photographs, flicking them over one after another. Was there something she ought to be able to see, some factor they thought she would miss?

  ‘Wait a minute – was the front door open?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘I don’t know. But don’t forget that Quinn phoned the emergency services himself. He probably opened the door so they’d be able to get into the house when they arrived.’

  ‘Did he say that was what he did?’

  ‘As far as I recall, he couldn’t remember.’

  ‘Shock again?’ said Fry. ‘It can be quite convenient sometimes, don’t you think?’

  She felt Cooper watching her, too, now.

  ‘Were there bloody footprints in the hallway?’ she said.

  ‘Mmm. Not sure. But it doesn’t make any difference. Everything was tied up.’

  ‘The weapon?’

  ‘It was in the kitchen. It looked as though he’d been trying to wash the blood off it. Quinn was arrested right there at the scene. It was a self-solver. And, after he’d been interviewed, Quinn changed his story anyway. He pleaded guilty. So, no problem.’

  ‘The similarities with the Rebecca Lowe killing are obvious,’ said Fry, ‘apart from the absence of the suspect from the premises. I suppose he just learned his lesson the first time.’

  ‘In the Carol Proctor case, there was some question of an alibi,’ said Cooper.

  ‘In the early stages, yes. Quinn tried to give us a story about the time he left the pub where he’d been drinking with Raymond Proctor and William Thorpe. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, it was, in Castleton.’

  ‘I know the place. It’s hardly any distance from the Quinns’ house in Pindale Road.’

  ‘And that was a relevant point, Cooper. Quinn maintained that it took him only five minutes to drive home from the Cheshire Cheese, so he couldn’t have left the pub before three fifteen – about ten minutes before he dialled 999.’

  ‘Three fifteen would have been chucking-out time. There was no all-day opening in 1990.’

  ‘Yes. And Quinn’s argument was that he couldn’t possibly have had time to drive home, unload his tools from the car, go into the house, get into an argument with Carol Proctor, stab her several times, and then make the call. Not in ten minutes.’

  ‘I think I’d agree,’ said Fry.

  ‘Indeed. But Quinn’s two pals failed to support that version of events. When we interviewed Proctor and Thorpe, they both said their friend had left the pub earlier, before three o’clock. Quinn couldn’t account for the rest of the time.’

  ‘How long had they been drinking that day?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Since before one o’clock. And they were all heavy drinkers, by their own admission.’

  ‘Five, six pints of beer? More?’

  ‘Their statements don’t quite agree on the amounts,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘But Quinn wouldn’t have been sober.’

  ‘Far from it, Cooper. In fact, he was asleep when the first officers arrived at Pindale Road.’

  Fry sucked in her breath. ‘Asleep? With a woman lying dead on the floor in front of him, soaked in her own blood? What sort of man is that?’

  She watched both Hitchens and Cooper drop their eyes and avoid the question.

  ‘And after that,’ said the DI, ‘Quinn could only say that his memory was hazy.’

  ‘I damn well hope the vivid details came back to him eventually,’ said Fry.

  16

  The sound of Carol Proctor’s last breath still haunted him. Sometimes, when he lay in bed in his cell at night, he’d imagined all those hundreds of thousands of branching tubes, and all the millions of tiny sacs that had made up her lungs. He tried to picture the membrane that covered them. It was a fraction of the thickness of tissue paper, they said – but a hundred square yards of it, bigger than a tennis court. It seemed impossible that it should fail to draw in a breath. Just one more breath.

  Mansell Quinn closed his eyes and tried to feel Carol’s lungs as if they were his own, receiving all the blood from her heart with every beat, feeding oxygen into her arteries, supplying her brain and her heart and the other organs of her body. And then he imagined the whole system stopping, like a clock winding down. Her chest rising and falling more slowly, until the final breath had been forced through the slackened muscles of her throat with that dry rattle, the scrape of escaping air that he’d heard and still remembered.

  The memory of that sound only made him more angry. So angry that he wanted to smash something.

  Quinn breathed deeply for a few minutes to regain control, then sat up slowly. Sudden movements were much more likely to be noticed, even here among the trees, with a cover of deep bracken. But the only people he could see were the same two anglers on the banks of one of the fishing lakes, so motionless with their nets and tackle boxes that they might be asleep.

  The sight of the cement works chimney across the other side of the lakes reminded him of Will Thorpe. There was some place near here that Will had talked about using as a doss, but Quinn didn’t plan to turn up anywhere that he might be expected to.

  Talking to Will had been surprisingly difficult. For the last fourteen years, Quinn had talked to no one about his past. For all his fellow prisoners and his personal officer knew, he had no memories to speak about. Perhaps they thought he wanted to start his life afresh and put everything behind him.

  But Quinn’s memories were still there. They lay in his heart, cold and heavy. He thought of them as being like the shapes in the petrifying wells at Matlock Bath, which his father had taken him to see as a child. Some of them were ordinary household objects, hardly recognizable for what they’d once been, the accumulated layers of lime rendering them useless drip by drip, but preserving them for ever in their grotesque forms. They’d been turned to stone.

  His father had talked about a petrified bird’s nest that had belonged to his grandmother. It had been a gift from a relative who’d spent a holiday in the Peak District – and the only connection the Quinn family had had with Derbyshire until they moved there. Like the other souvenirs sold in the shops at Matlock Bath, it had been left in one of the petrifying wells until it had covered over with lime and attained the peculiar appearance that visitors prized so much. Quinn had never seen the nest, though he’d pictured it in his imagination. The detail that had impressed him most was that the nest had been complete with eggs.

  ‘Four of them,’ his father had said. And he would hold up four stubby fingers, pitted with blue scars, as if his son couldn’t count. ‘Real eggs, turned to stone. Imagine the little chicks inside them.’

  ‘Were the chicks turned to stone, too?’

  ‘I don’t know, boy. We never opened the eggs to look.’

  The thought had repelled Quinn but fascinated him at the same time. They told him at school that eggs were supposed to represent new life. But here, life had been snuffed out at the moment of birth, turned to stone for the amusement of day trippers. It had symbolized the Peak District for him then – a place where his spirit had been stifled, forcing him to fight his way out into the world all over again. He felt crushed by the weight of
the stone he could see in the hills all around him.

  ‘What sort of bird made the nest?’ he would ask his father, needing the specifics to make sense of the story.

  But there was only one answer he ever got: ‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’

  ‘A blackbird, Dad? A starling? Something bigger?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. What does it matter, for goodness sake?’

  ‘What did Grandma have the nest for?’

  ‘She just had it, that’s all.’

  Then his father would get irritated and go back to his newspaper, or he’d walk out into the garden to look at his vegetables. And next time he told the story, it would be exactly the same. He never saw his son’s need for explanation.

  Quinn thought there ought to be ways of making sense of his petrified memories, of forcing them out into the open and letting the sun pierce the calcified layers to find the original shapes underneath.

  But memories seemed to become attached to personal possessions, and he had very few of those. For years, his life had been measured by prison service regulations. The possessions he’d been allowed in his cell had been subject to what they called ‘volumetric controls’, which meant everything he possessed had to fit into two boxes. At intervals, his cell was inspected to make sure he hadn’t broken regulations and created a private life for himself beyond his battery radio and his statutory three books and six newspapers.

  Many of the permitted items held no relevance for him anyway. Diaries and calendars had seemed like self-inflicted torture, and he had no family photos for his locker.

  After a while, Quinn became aware that his lack of personal items might reflect badly on his suitability for parole. He’d placed a subscription for Peak District magazine and Birdwatching, and he’d asked the library for more books on natural history and geology. One of his magazines came with a calendar featuring scenic views of Derbyshire, which he taped to the wall of his cell. One day, an officer on lock-up had pointed out that he hadn’t turned over the page, even though the old month had finished six days ago. But the old month had been January. It showed a snow scene over Castleton to the slopes of Win Hill.

  A movement caught his attention. A couple of golfers were walking across a green on the golf course to the north of the fishing lakes, but they were too far away to see him. Quinn scanned the anglers again, then lay back down in the bracken.

  It had been in Peak District magazine that Quinn had found the article about the Castleton caves. He’d read about cave breathing, the movement of air in and out of a cave entrance. It could draw in small creatures, leading them away from their natural environment into the depths, from where they never returned. Accidentals, they were called. Creatures drawn in by cave breathing.

  Mansell Quinn liked that idea. He thought he could be called an accidental himself. He had been drawn into the darkness. But he was on his way out now. He’d learned to control the breathing.

  17

  Standing outside 14 Moorland Avenue, Ben Cooper noticed that Millstone Edge was visible from the estate, too. He’d done a bit of rock climbing up there a couple of years ago. The long cliff face lay partly in shadow, producing a corrugated effect like the edge of a pie crust. The ancestors of men who lived in Hathersage now would have worked up there on the gritstone faces, cutting the millstones the area had become famous for – the same millstones which now lay abandoned in heaps on the slopes.

  Not bothering with the bell this time, Fry pounded on the door of Enid Quinn’s house with the knocker. It sounded hollower and more echoey than ever. But now Cooper knew it was due to the bare walls of the empty hallway.

  ‘I suppose my neighbours have been sticking their noses into things that aren’t their business,’ said Mrs Quinn, when she let them in. ‘They tend to be like that around here.’

  ‘One of your neighbours saw your son near here on Monday afternoon.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Mrs Quinn settled herself down on the settee in the same position she’d occupied last time they visited her. She had her back to the window, her fair hair framed by the light. Rather than stand over her, Fry sat in one of the armchairs and motioned Cooper to do the same. He saw she’d assessed Mrs Quinn as someone who couldn’t be intimidated.

  ‘Mansell came here, didn’t he?’

  ‘I suppose there’s no point in denying it now.’

  ‘Not now that he’s got well away.’

  Enid Quinn waited impassively. Fry had not asked her a question, and she wasn’t going to be tempted into volunteering information.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us before, Mrs Quinn? Why did you lie to us?’

  ‘As I said yesterday, people of my generation don’t walk away from things as easily as they do these days.’

  ‘You were talking about marriage.’

  ‘Perhaps I was. But there are other commitments, other kinds of ties to those we love. Obligations we can’t ignore.’

  ‘Yet you believe your son was guilty of murder.’

  Again Mrs Quinn sat quietly for a moment, her hands motionless in her lap. She gave every impression of being a calm woman, untroubled by conscience.

  ‘Yes, I do believe that,’ she said. ‘But it has nothing to do with whether I love my son, or whether I’m willing to open my door to him when he calls.’

  Fry and Cooper exchanged glances. Clearly, Mrs Quinn wasn’t going to concede anything she didn’t want to.

  ‘What did your son want?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘He wanted nothing from me. Nothing except some human contact. I couldn’t refuse him that, could I?’

  ‘Did he tell you what he was planning to do?’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Nothing at all? Did he say where he was heading from Hathersage?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he talk about his ex-wife?’

  ‘He made no suggestion to me that he intended to go and see Rebecca.’

  ‘And his son, Simon?’

  Enid Quinn flushed. ‘I know about that, of course. Well, Mansell certainly didn’t attack Simon. It’s nonsense to suggest it. That’s the very last thing he would do.’

  ‘OK. So, how did your son seem when you talked to him?’ asked Cooper. ‘What state of mind was he in?’

  ‘State of mind?’

  ‘Did he seem distressed? Angry? Frightened? Or was he just his usual self?’

  Mrs Quinn smiled tremulously. ‘I don’t know what Mansell’s usual self is any more. And I couldn’t say what his state of mind was, I’m afraid. I didn’t feel I could read his mood as I used to be able to.’

  ‘But you’re his mother,’ said Cooper, who didn’t find her claim believable.

  And Enid Quinn took his point. She thought about it further. ‘I should say that he was none of those things you mentioned. He was absorbed. Distracted.’

  ‘Something on his mind?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I can’t help you.’

  ‘Mrs Quinn, when we were here yesterday, you told us you thought your son was seeking retribution. That was the word you used. What did he tell you to make you think that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘So why did you say it? Why that word – retribution?’

  Mrs Quinn shook her head. ‘It just seemed to me that’s what he’d want. Mansell was angry. He’s been angry for a long time.’

  ‘But retribution against who?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Did he want any information from you? Names and addresses?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Money? Food?’

  ‘Mansell didn’t ask me for money. But I made him a meal. Of course I did. I couldn’t refuse him that.’

  ‘What time did he leave here?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose it must have been about half past eight.’

  ‘It was still light?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he have transport? A car?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you. He was on
foot when he left here.’

  Cooper sighed, and gave Fry a small shrug.

  ‘Mrs Quinn, we have to ask you again,’ said Fry. ‘Where was your son heading?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We must find him, Mrs Quinn. You can see that, can’t you? You wouldn’t want anything to happen to somebody else, no matter how you feel about your son. Would you?’

  She shook her head jerkily. ‘I don’t know where he was going.’

  ‘Mrs Quinn, if you’re not telling us the truth –’

  ‘Look, Sergeant, the truth is that I’m not sure I’d tell you anything that would help you find my son, even if I could. But I don’t have to make that judgement, because I asked him not to tell me what he intended to do or where he was going. And he didn’t. So I can’t help you.’

  Fry’s jaw clenched. But she stood up, and Cooper followed suit.

  ‘It’s very likely that we’ll be back to ask you more questions,’ said Fry.

  ‘I’m usually here. I don’t suppose I’ll be going out much for a while. Now that my neighbours are watching every move I make.’

  Fry managed to call in to the incident room when they were back on the A625 out of Hathersage. Cooper could tell she had some news by the way she sat up straight and listened without interrupting.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, when she ended the call.

  ‘The nerve of the man is unbelievable.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mansell Quinn, of course. Enid’s golden boy. Last night’s TV appeal has brought another result. Quinn spent Monday night in a hotel in Castleton – the Cheshire Cheese.’

  ‘The hotel recognized him from the photos?’

  ‘They didn’t need to. He registered under his own name.’

  ‘Mmm. That was pretty cool.’

  ‘Quinn knew we wouldn’t be looking for him at that stage. And he was gone from the hotel in the morning.’

  ‘I suppose his room has been cleaned since then.’

  ‘Twice. But Forensics might get something, I suppose. And the staff are being interviewed.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that will help much. He won’t have talked to anybody.’

  They had crossed the point where the River Noe flowed into the Derwent and were passing the weir at Lumble Pool. Rebecca Lowe’s home lay to the north, on the lower slopes of Win Hill.