05.One Last Breath

by Stephen Booth

  ‘At least one member of the party comes out and phones 999. Then the operations room at Ripley and Cave Rescue send a team out. Of course, you’re supposed to let someone know where you’re going and what time you expect to be back, so the alarm can be raised if you’re overdue. Some people don’t bother doing that. A lot of our call-outs are false alarms – cavers who get lost or stop to rest, so they take longer than they expected.’

  ‘Is radon a problem down there?’

  ‘Not in the show caves,’ said Page. ‘There are fans to clear the air, so the radon doesn’t settle. Beyond the Devil’s Staircase, it’s a bit different.’

  Cooper got up to stretch his legs, ready to leave. It was dark outside now, and when he looked out of the front window the mouth of Peak Cavern had disappeared completely in the blackness beyond the last few cottages.

  ‘Alistair, what do you remember about Mansell Quinn?’ he said.

  ‘Quinn? Well, I wasn’t very old at the time of the murder.’

  ‘You must have had a reaction to it, though. Being so close to home and all.’

  Page shrugged. ‘I was a teenage boy, so I suppose I thought it was kind of exciting. A bit like having a TV programme come to life in your own street. We went out to look at the police cars like they were part of a film set. Murder isn’t so exciting really, though, is it? It’s very unpleasant and regrettable.’

  ‘Regrettable? Yes, I suppose it is.’

  It was an odd word to use, the sort of expression senior police officers used when they were addressing a press conference, choosing their words carefully to avoid sounding too much like a real person with emotions.

  ‘You must have been about the same age as the Quinns’ son, Simon,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I still am, I suppose.’

  Page was folding up the map of the Peak–Speedwell system. He put it away in his bookshelf, sliding it in so that it disappeared completely between the spines of two books. He said nothing more. On Tuesday, Page had been keen to hear about Mansell Quinn, but Cooper seemed to have touched too close to something sensitive.

  ‘A difficult time, was it, Alistair?’ he said.

  ‘I knew Simon Quinn very well. That’s all I can say, really. You can imagine …’

  ‘Simon is still in the area. So is his sister Andrea at the moment. After what happened to their mother, you know. I can pass your phone number on to him, if you’d like me to.’

  Page looked startled. ‘No, no, that’s all right. I’m sure he wouldn’t want to come to see me.’

  ‘OK,’ said Cooper. ‘Well, thanks for the book anyway.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  But in that moment, Alistair Page had given more away about himself than in all the time Cooper had spent talking to him. He had seemed not just startled at the idea of Simon Quinn visiting him but frightened.

  On his way back along the waterside walk, Cooper found a jackdaw going ahead of him. It fluttered along for a few yards, landed on the wall and looked back at him with a tilt of its head before moving on again. But then he got too close, and it launched itself into the air and disappeared into the shadows around the bend.

  Cooper could feel that the atmosphere had changed. A cloying dampness in the air made him feel more uncomfortable than the heat, and when he looked up he realized the sky had already darkened. He was in danger of getting very wet before he made it to his car.

  He had almost reached the bridge when the first drops fell from the sky. They began to hit the ground and splash on the roofs of the houses in a regular pattern, echoing his own footsteps, growing louder and faster, louder and faster, as the storm closed over him.

  But there was more than noise in his head. There was the memory of Alistair Page’s last words about the trapped caver, Neil Moss. As Cooper had been about to leave the house, his thoughts had come back to it, strengthened by the recollection of his own experience of feeling helpless in the darkness.

  ‘So Neil Moss was dead by the time they got him out,’ he said. ‘That’s terrible.’

  Page had paused then, as if deciding whether to tell him the next thing.

  ‘They never got Neil Moss out,’ he said. ‘In the end, they left him there and sealed up the shaft with stones.’

  ‘What? You mean …?’

  ‘Neil Moss is still in Peak Cavern. He’s been there forty-five years.’

  There had been an awkward silence between them for a few moments. Cooper hadn’t known what to say. The thought of Neil Moss’s awful death made his chest tighten. He could almost feel the weight of the rock, the air getting thinner and filling with poison.

  But finally Page spoke again.

  ‘So that’s why they call it Moss Chamber,’ he said. ‘I think he’s sort of claimed it as his own, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘I think you’re right.’

  Page had opened the door for him, and Cooper had looked out into the darkness of the gorge, glad that he could no longer see the gaping mouth of the cavern.

  ‘Do you know what the men say who were part of that rescue operation?’ said Page. ‘While they were working, they could hear Neil Moss breathing. It was very loud, because the shaft acted as a kind of amplifier, and the sound filled the chamber they were in. They said it was the worst thing in the world to be able to hear a man breathing, yet not be able to see him or reach him. Eventually, the breathing stopped. Stopped for ever …’ Page paused. ‘Unless, like some folk, you have too much imagination.’

  The thunder woke Cooper at five in the morning. It had been a threatening rumble in the distance for a while, but now it was very close. It crackled in the sky overhead like somebody ripping the clouds apart. He could hear the rain again, slapping on the roof of the conservatory and the flags of the back yard. Soon, it was tumbling from the sky in bucketloads.

  Cooper knew he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep while the storm lasted. He was even more certain of it when he heard one of the cats calling plaintively from the kitchen, and knew that he was about to get a ball of wet fur on his bed.

  As he tried to avoid Randy’s muddy paws, he thought of the people who would be outside just now, perhaps caught in the open by the downpour. Mansell Quinn was out there somewhere – though maybe he would have found himself a shelter from the storm. Quinn was a man who planned his actions carefully, and he’d have been prepared for the storm. He might even have known it was coming.

  At least William Thorpe wasn’t out there tonight. Thorpe wasn’t a man to make long-term plans. If Raymond Proctor hadn’t agreed to take him back in, he’d probably have been sleeping rough again by now. The fact the police were interested in him would have driven him from his familiar refuges. He wouldn’t have thought to take precautions against drowning in a cloudburst. But for tonight, he was safe and dry. Or dry, at least.

  Cooper shivered, imagining himself as wet and cold as the cat’s fur under his fingers, but with nowhere to go.

  Wide awake now, he got out of bed and went to the window. He pulled back the curtain just in time to see a flash of sheet lightning above the roofs of the houses on Meadow Road. It lit up the slates and chimneys for a second, leaving an imprint on his retinas before the rattle of the thunder followed.

  When the rain eased off, he went to check on the cats and see if there were any leaks in the conservatory. On an impulse, he pulled on a coat, grabbed a torch and stepped outside. He shone his torch on the ground and swung it from side to side. There were dozens of snails – big ones, trailing right across the gravel path from the crevices in the stone wall to the patch of grass that Mrs Shelley called a lawn. Their winding silvery tracks reflected in the torchlight, crossing backwards and forwards over each other in an apparently haphazard fashion.

  The picture he’d conjured of Mansell Quinn lying up somewhere safe and dry suddenly seemed unlikely. On the contrary, this was exactly the sort of time Quinn would choose to go out. Cooper imagined him emerging from the black mouth of Peak Cavern, slipping silently th
rough the gorge in the rain like the outlaw Cock Lorrel, bent on murder.

  He shuddered, and turned back towards the house. Most police officers couldn’t avoid bringing their work home in their heads now and then, especially if they didn’t have anybody to talk to. Many of them said it was vital to have another human being around with their own concerns – someone who wanted to talk about shopping or food, or new clothes for the kids. It helped to fill the space in your mind with something else, so you didn’t find yourself going over and over the events of the day. Particularly if it had been a bad day. And there could be a lot of bad days.

  Cooper had no one at home now, no one waiting with their own concerns. He knew this was why he got obsessed with little things, like snails crawling up his window. It was only to avoid having to think about the alternative – the trails of human slime that sometimes twisted and turned through his head.

  27

  Friday, 16 July

  The next morning, a vast puddle filled the yard behind 8 Welbeck Street. When Cooper went out of the back door to examine the damage, he found Randy and his friend Mrs Macavity sitting on either side of the puddle. Neither of them wanted to get their paws wet, but they couldn’t find a way around the water. The cats looked hopefully at Cooper when he appeared, but he wasn’t sure which of them he should help across. Besides, he was sure they’d just decide they were on the wrong side of the puddle and demand to be carried back.

  ‘Don’t worry, folks,’ he said. ‘It’ll go down in a day or two.’ But all he got was a look of contempt in stereo.

  Like a man troubled by a nagging toothache, Cooper kept returning to his internal reconstruction of the Carol Proctor murder scene. He worried at it as he drove into town that morning. He had a feeling that something was wrong with his scenario of events at the Quinn house in October 1990, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.

  Another thing bothered him, too: the uncomfortable gap between Sergeant Joe Cooper’s return to the house and the arrival of what his statement called ‘Specialist Officers’.

  When Cooper had first joined CID, one of the older detectives had been the type who loved to give advice. He would take any chance to lean confidentially across a desk, the bottom buttons of his shirt popping over his beer belly and his nicotine-stained fingers tapping on Cooper’s shoulder. Even now, Cooper could recall the DC’s response to a particularly naïve remark about ‘the rules’.

  ‘Now, lad, nobody’s asking you to break the rules,’ he’d said. ‘Good detective work isn’t about breaking rules. It’s about finding ways around the restrictions they put in our way. Legal ways, you understand. Nobody would argue with that, would they?’

  Cooper still heard similar things even now. And it was strange how there always seemed to be a ‘they’.

  There were rules for everything, of course, if you chose to follow them. The rules told you what to do when a dead body was found. Whatever the circumstances, the first officers arriving at the scene would check the victim was indeed dead. If a suspected offender was present, they had to make an arrest. They’d collect information and take steps to protect any evidence. Obviously, the chain of command would shift as senior officers were brought in. But in the initial stages the FOAs had a lot of responsibility.

  And no scene of sudden death was pretty. The amount of blood could be so overwhelming that it drove everything else out of the mind. Some detectives became bar-room pathologists. They had a detailed knowledge of the biological processes of dying, an expertise gained from attending scenes of death and postmortem examinations, but not one of them could claim that he’d never made a mistake at a crime scene. Mistakes were part of human nature. They were a different thing from deliberately breaking the rules.

  Cooper had plenty waiting for his attention when he got to the office. But he reached first for the transcripts of the interviews with Mansell Quinn in October 1990. Two detectives, an inspector and a sergeant, whose names Cooper didn’t recognize had conducted most of the sessions with Quinn. DC Hitchens appeared in the transcripts a couple of times, but didn’t seem to have asked many questions. He’d have been too junior then, still learning the ropes in a major enquiry.

  ‘You spent some time in the army a few years ago,’ the DS had said.

  ‘I signed up in the Foresters with Will Thorpe. He was still a lad, really, and he’d got a bit bored of living in Derbyshire.’

  ‘But what about you? You already had a family by then, didn’t you?’

  ‘It was a bad time,’ said Quinn. ‘The building firm I worked for relied on contracts from the steel works in Sheffield. But the steel industry started to fall apart, and there was no work coming in, so they laid me off. There wasn’t much else to do around here.’

  ‘So you joined the army?’

  ‘When Will said he was joining up, it seemed like a good idea. It was a regular wage for a few years, you see. I didn’t plan to be a soldier for ever. At the four-year mark I came out, but Will stayed in.’

  ‘That would be in 1986?’

  ‘Just in time for the boom in the building trade. I was lucky. I got myself on my feet pretty quick after that.’

  ‘But you had some trouble while you were in the army, didn’t you? Fighting – once in a pub near your barracks, and twice with local youths.’

  ‘A few bits of bother here and there. Nothing major. But they told me I’d be better off employed doing something else.’

  ‘Didn’t you like the army?’

  ‘Yeah. It was interesting. And it’s a good feeling to have a lot of close mates around you.’

  ‘So why did you keep getting into trouble?’

  ‘Same answer really.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean there are things you do for your mates,’ said Quinn.

  ‘There were others involved when you got into these fights?’

  ‘Look, it’s all water under the bridge, that. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else, then. Let’s talk about Carol Proctor …’

  A packet of photographs landed on Cooper’s desk, interrupting his reading. ‘Thanks,’ he said, without looking up to see who’d brought them. He knew they must be the prints from the trainspotter’s film. He slid them out and poked through the pile, pushing aside shots of trains and more trains, locomotives in the distance and in closeup, trains travelling into the sun, trains coming out of the sun.

  And there it was. With two First North Western diesel units moving away from him on the Manchester line, and the express coming towards him on the other, Mansell Quinn had been caught on camera at Hope Station, half a mile from his ex-wife’s house, within an hour of her murder. It seemed fairly damning.

  ‘Gavin,’ he called across the office, waving the packet. ‘Photos.’

  Murfin looked up in amazement. ‘Not the trainspotter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Judging by your face, he came through with the goods, so to speak.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Bloody lucky.’

  Cooper tapped his nose. ‘Instinct, Gavin.’

  ‘My missus doesn’t like me having instincts. She says it’s mucky.’

  Cooper held the print closer to study the dark figure on the westbound platform. The most that could be said was that there might be a slight hint of hesitation in Quinn’s posture. It wasn’t the look of a man with his mind set on impending violence, not the attitude of someone driven by anger. He looked uncertain, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was.

  Or so it seemed to Cooper. But he’d been told often enough that he tried too hard to empathize with victims and suspects alike. The moment he felt the first hint of understanding or sympathy for Mansell Quinn, he knew he’d have to keep it to himself. Theoretically, he ought to share his thoughts with Diane Fry, as she was his immediate supervisor. But she would only ridicule them.

  Murfin leaned over to look at the photo. ‘Mmm. Pity there wasn’t a CCTV camera on
the platform.’

  ‘Too true.’

  A couple of minutes of tape would have told Cooper whether he was imagining the hesitation. If he could see Quinn actually walking along the platform, it might reveal that any uncertainty was merely that of a man who had just been released into the outside world. When would Quinn last have travelled on a train? More than thirteen years and four months, anyway. His transfers between prisons would have been by road. And when would he last have been in Hope? Same again. Under the terms of his licence, he was supposed to live in Burton on Trent until he settled somewhere in south Derbyshire, or back in his old childhood home in Wales.

  ‘This is definitely Quinn?’ said Murfin. ‘Where are the other pictures of him?’

  Cooper pulled out the file of Quinn photographs collected by the enquiry teams. In addition to the old mugshot and a print-out from the security camera at Hathersage, he had an army file picture of Quinn as a young man, some family snaps, and even a wedding photo of him with a smiling Rebecca. Cooper put the new picture alongside the others.

  ‘What do you think, Gavin?’ said Cooper.

  ‘A bit of a chameleon, isn’t he?’

  The photographs Cooper had in his hands could have been of three or four different individuals. Just a few years difference in age seem to produce a different man – the hair slightly longer, or shorter, even a dark moustache in the shot of him in uniform. Quinn’s hair colour seemed to change, too, and the even the shade of his skin. But that could be the quality of the photography.

  According to his file, Quinn had looked after himself in prison, and had emerged from his sentence strong and fit. It was his friends William Thorpe and Raymond Proctor who had deteriorated over those thirteen years. Thorpe had been eaten away by disease, while Proctor had allowed himself to become overweight, balding and unfit. And Cooper suspected he was also worn down by despair. In a way, Mansell Quinn was already the winner.

  ‘You’re sure that’s him?’

  Diane Fry took the photo from Cooper and examined it.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m sure. He’s wearing the same black waterproof that he had on in Hathersage. It’s lucky it had stopped raining by the time this was taken, so he has the hood back.’