05.One Last Breath

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Mrs Quinn,’ she said, ‘you visited your son in prison. In fact, you were the last member of his family to see him, weren’t you? What did you talk about?’

  ‘I told you, it doesn’t matter any more. Go out with your dogs and helicopters and hunt my son down, if you must. But why do you have to persecute me?’

  ‘Did Mansell ask you to do something particular for him, Mrs Quinn?’

  The old woman waved a hand in front of her face, as if swatting away a wasp.

  ‘Look, I thought it was wrong,’ she said. ‘He shouldn’t have been digging up the past like that, trying to get dirt on someone who was dead.’

  ‘Especially someone he’d killed himself, perhaps?’

  Mrs Quinn pursed her lips at the comment, and decided to ignore it. ‘I helped him because … well, I thought it would be the last thing I’d do for him. “This one thing and no more,” I said. That’s what I told him. “If I do this for you, Mansell, that’s it. I’m never coming to visit you in here again.”’

  ‘And he accepted that?’

  ‘He had no choice, did he?’

  ‘It must have been something very important to him. He was condemning himself to years in solitary confinement, almost.’

  ‘Yes, it was very important to him. It had become an obsession. If you’d read the letters he wrote to me, you’d realize that.’

  ‘Where are those letters, Mrs Quinn?’

  ‘I burned them.’

  Fry sighed. ‘OK. And what exactly was it your son asked you to do for him?’

  ‘He wanted to have a paternity test done to prove if Simon really was his son. You can get sampling kits, and send them away for testing. Rebecca never knew about it. This was all ten years ago.’

  ‘Ten years,’ repeated Fry thoughtfully. ‘Just about the time he started to claim that he wasn’t guilty of the murder.’

  ‘About then.’

  Fry knew the type of kit Mrs Quinn was talking about. They contained two sets of buccal swabs for scraping cells from the inside of the cheek – one for the parent and one for the child. It was very simple to do, and perfectly safe. The reports were pretty comprehensive, and conclusive, one way or the other. They gave either a 100 per cent certainty that there wasn’t a paternal relationship, or a 99.5 per cent probability that there was. It was enough to stand up in court, if necessary.

  She imagined Quinn in his prison cell, looking at tables of allele numbers, identification markers and chromosome locations. He’d probably had a long wait for the test results. Back then, there had been no UK laboratories doing paternity tests, so the samples would have gone to a lab in the USA or Australia. It would have cost him a few hundred pounds, too.

  But then she frowned again. How had he obtained a sample from Simon without Rebecca knowing? True, there were companies who would extract DNA from hair roots, toothbrushes, disposable razors, or dried blood and saliva. But Quinn had no physical access to his son in prison, except at visiting times.

  ‘Was that why his family stopped visiting him?’ said Fry.

  Mrs Quinn just looked at her. Her hair had become disarranged in the breeze on the hillside. Fry remembered something Dawn Cottrill had said about Quinn upsetting his family during visits, trying to grab his son, tugging at his hair until he cried. Hair didn’t contain cells, but its roots did. Had Quinn been trying to get a hair with the root still attached for DNA analysis? But that was too soon, surely?

  ‘You need to have a DNA sample from both father and son to do a comparison,’ said Fry.

  ‘Yes, I know that. The kit Mansell had ordered came with things to scrape inside your cheek. They were a bit like Q-Tips, only longer.’

  ‘Buccal swabs.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘But what about Simon?’

  ‘That was my part in the business.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I stole a comb of Simon’s. His hair was a long, tangled mess in those days, so it wasn’t difficult to get some. It had to have roots on it, Mansell said.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I wasn’t very proud of what I did,’ said Mrs Quinn.

  Fry remembered there had been talk of a new law to prevent estranged fathers from secretly taking material from their children for paternity tests. It was claimed that some of them did it to escape responsibility for child-support payments.

  But it wasn’t possible to be in intimate contact with a child without taking away a bit of their DNA. It would surely be unfeasible to create a new law that made it an offence to remove a child’s hair from a hairbrush, to take a sticking plaster off a cut finger, or pick up a bit of chewed gum, a used handkerchief, or an old toothbrush. Any one of them could contain DNA.

  ‘And all to establish whether Simon was his son?’ she said.

  The old woman turned away towards the house. Fry tried to manoeuvre to keep eye contact, but the path was too narrow and her sleeve caught on the thorns of the roses, holding her back. Mrs Quinn managed to get a few paces away.

  ‘Well, that was the idea, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘Mansell wanted to have peace of mind. He said it was the one thing he had a chance of being certain about. But there isn’t really anything you can be certain about in this life, is there? Not in my experience.’

  Fry listened carefully to her tone of voice, because she was unable to see Mrs Quinn’s face. She pulled the thorns from her sleeve, feeling a sudden prick on her thumb and seeing a bright spot of blood appear.

  ‘You asked me a minute ago how Mansell got the idea that Simon might not be his son,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘It was Simon himself who told him, when he visited him in prison. I think it was the last time he saw him, in that prison in Lancashire. After that, it preyed on Mansell’s mind. It still does, I think.’

  Fry shivered. She remembered Simon Lowe the first time she’d seen him. His words came back to her: ‘He’s not my father. He was once, but not any more.’ She couldn’t believe that it had taken her all this time to understand. Damn. Why couldn’t people say what they really meant?

  ‘Mrs Quinn, when we first came here to speak to you, you told us that you believed your son was guilty of Carol Proctor’s murder.’

  ‘That’s right, I did.’

  ‘But that wasn’t true, was it?’

  ‘You mean, you don’t believe I think he was guilty?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You think I was lying?’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘It would be a strange thing for a mother to do. If I were going to lie, wouldn’t it be to stand up for my son, to protect him? Isn’t that what mothers do in your experience, Sergeant?’

  ‘Of course. There’s only one reason you’d lie about him being guilty.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘If there was somebody else you thought needed protecting even more.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘In my experience,’ said Fry, ‘grandmothers can get ridiculously protective of their grandchildren. Especially if they get the idea that the parents aren’t doing the job properly.’

  ‘Grandchildren?’

  ‘Yes. Grandchildren.’

  ‘Sergeant, I don’t know what you mean.’

  Fry took a deep breath, and immediately regretted it. She could taste the sharp tang of the vaporized sap spraying from the neighbour’s lawnmower. She could feel the grass pollen settling on the back of her throat.

  ‘I’m suggesting that when he had the DNA tests done, Mansell found out he wasn’t Simon’s father,’ she said. ‘Which meant he’d taken the blame for someone else’s son. Isn’t that right, Mrs Quinn?’

  Enid Quinn stared at her for a moment, then began to laugh. Tears welled from her eyes. But Fry was sure she couldn’t have been all that funny.

  ‘Well, you’ve got that wrong,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘Wrong on both counts.’

  39

  Ben Cooper had intended to head straight home, but somehow he never quite made it into Edendale. It was almost as though the To
yota steered itself away from Hucklow towards the Hope Valley.

  When he reached Castleton, he carefully negotiated the market place and passed the Saxon-style cross to reach Pindale Road. The streets were narrow, and there seemed to be cars parked everywhere – not to mention the groups of visitors ambling in the roadway, as if they didn’t expect to encounter traffic. Uniformed police officers stood in pairs on the corners, watching the crowds.

  The former Quinn home stood near the top of the road, above Hope View House. When he’d lived here, Mansell Quinn had probably parked his Vauxhall estate at the roadside, as everyone else did. Castleton was one of the places where residents got seriously wound up when they couldn’t park near their own homes because of the number of visitors’ cars. The little town had been laid out many centuries before motor vehicles had been invented.

  Pindale Road became narrower the further up the hill he went. It would be possible to get a good view of number 82 from the houses across the road, if you happened to be looking out of the right window.

  Cooper had to go a long way past the house and almost to Siggate before he found a wide enough verge to turn round. He drove back down the hill and parked in the gateway of an empty house, then knocked at the door of number 84, where the Townsends had lived in 1990.

  But the helpful neighbours of the Quinns were long gone from Pindale Road, and had left no forwarding address.

  Cooper drove back down the A625 through Hope and turned up Win Hill to Aston. In rural areas like this, his street atlas was vague about what was a road or a farm track and what was merely a footpath or bridleway. He wanted to see if the track that ran parallel to Rebecca Lowe’s garden ended at the nearby farmhouse, as it seemed to on the map, or whether it diverged at any point towards Parson’s Croft.

  Sure enough, he found it was possible to get a car off the farm road. The track was wide enough to drive along the back of Rebecca Lowe’s hedge. It would be too muddy in the winter perhaps, but at the moment the surface was fine. A car could be parked unseen, and there were gaps in the hedge where anyone could approach the back door of Parson’s Croft.

  But who would have done that? It was all very well having a feeling that Mansell Quinn didn’t fit the crime, but who else was there? Diane Fry herself had asked him if he had another suspect in mind. And, of course, he didn’t.

  Raymond Proctor drove a bright red Renault van with the caravan park’s logo emblazoned on the side. It wasn’t the sort of vehicle to go unnoticed in the lanes of Aston. William Thorpe might have made it up to the house on foot. But if the Newbolds’ sighting was genuine, he’d already been to see Rebecca two weeks previously. Why would he come again? And why wasn’t he seen a second time – a passing vagrant would be sure to attract attention in this sort of neighbourhood.

  That left only one person who was close enough to Rebecca Lowe. In fact, the only person who would logically have a key to let himself into the house. Granted, there wasn’t a glimmer of a motive that Cooper could see. But motive often came later, and could be surprising.

  He still remembered a case from several years ago, where a seventeen-year-old boy had murdered his mother. Friends of the family had said the two of them always had a good relationship. But on that particular night, the victim had refused to let her son borrow her car to go out with his friends. So he’d killed her. Sometimes, it was impossible to understand what was going on in other people’s minds.

  Simon Lowe lived in Edendale. Could he have been in the Hope Valley area when his mother was killed? There had been sightings of cars reported by residents, but what sort of car did Simon drive? Perhaps the information was recorded in the incident room. He could get someone to do a check.

  Thinking about Simon brought Cooper back to the events of 9 October 1990. The transcript of the police interview with Mansell Quinn had been very frustrating. All those silences from Quinn when he was asked to back up his claim that someone else had been there. On paper, his silence had implied an inability to substantiate a false version of events. But Cooper would give anything for a video tape of the interview, so that he could watch Quinn’s face during those silences. He wondered if he would have been looking at a suspect caught out in a lie – or a man suddenly realizing the implications of what he’d seen and heard that day.

  Obviously, he needed to know more about Simon Quinn. But who else could he ask, apart from the family?

  As if on cue, his mobile rang. It was Diane Fry.

  ‘Ben,’ she said. ‘This Alistair Page – what address did he live at in 1990?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But he was somewhere in the Pindale Road area, wasn’t he? Do you have a house name?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘He’s not on the list of statements from that time, you see.’

  ‘He’d have been too young at the time,’ said Cooper. ‘Fifteen, he said.’

  ‘I see. So how did you meet him?’

  ‘Well, he came to find me one day when I was on duty at West Street.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Only a couple of weeks ago. I think one of my friends must have mentioned my name to him. I suppose they thought I might be interested in liaising with the cave rescue organization.’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s not as if you’re Mr Anonymous around here, is it?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘What’s he like? Reliable? Do you think he’s worth talking to about the Quinns?’

  ‘The impression I get is that he was a bit traumatized by the whole business. He’s desperately keen to know what’s going on, but he shied away when I asked him directly about Simon.’

  ‘They might have known each other quite well, then?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘I might talk to him, in that case. An independent view would be useful.’

  ‘Diane, is this –’

  Fry was silent for a moment. ‘It’s relevant to the official enquiry,’ she said.

  ‘I see.’ But Cooper wasn’t sure what she meant. ‘You’ve been looking at Simon Lowe, then?’

  Fry hesitated. ‘He seems a bit of an enigma, that’s all.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘He was supposed to be at school that afternoon, but as far as I can see he turned up at Pindale Road much later than he should have done if he’d come straight home. Nobody seems to have asked him where he’d been.’

  ‘And why would they, in the circumstances?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Cooper gazed out of his car window at the back door of Parson’s Croft, trying to picture another house at another time.

  ‘How about this?’ he said. ‘I know it’s speculation, but …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, if Mansell Quinn had been having an affair with Carol Proctor, it would have been devastating for the family to find out, right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What if they did find out?’ said Cooper. ‘Or rather, one of them did.’

  ‘Rebecca? You think she knew?’

  ‘No, not Rebecca. I mean Simon.’

  ‘Simon?’

  ‘What if he bunked off school that day and went home, not expecting anybody to be in. But he found Carol Proctor there.’

  ‘You mean if he’d walked in and found her lying dead on the floor? But why didn’t he phone?’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

  Fry was silent for a moment. ‘Do you have Alistair Page’s number?’

  ‘Diane, let me talk to him myself.’

  ‘All right. But let me know how it goes. As soon as you can, Ben.’

  Fry rang off. Cooper wasted no time. He had the number he needed in his mobile phone already.

  ‘Alistair,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry to bother you about this, but I don’t know who else to ask.’

  ‘What is it, Ben?’ said Page. ‘Still worrying about radon? Or scared of getting trapped in a flooded cave?’

  ‘Neither. I want to talk to you about S
imon Lowe. The boy you knew as Simon Quinn.’

  Page seemed to go away from the phone for a moment, or to put his hand over the mouthpiece. But it could just have been a fade in the signal on Cooper’s mobile.

  ‘Simon?’ Page said when he came back on the line. ‘You want to know about Simon? Well, what can I tell you? We hung around together a bit as teenagers.’

  ‘He seems rather quiet and intense. And secretive.’

  ‘Secretive?’

  ‘He’s been trying to keep quiet about the fact that Mansell Quinn is his father,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I think we’d all do that, in the circumstances. It’s not something I’d want everyone to know about – that my father was a murderer.’

  ‘It would give you a lot of street cred in some circles, Alistair. If you lived on the Devonshire Estate in Edendale, it would get you elected king.’

  ‘Not Simon. That’s not the sort of street cred he’d be interested in,’ said Page. ‘Actually, as a teenager he was unpredictable, and he had a bit of a temper. You could never be sure what he would do if you aggravated him. I suppose he got that from his father.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Alcohol was a problem for him too, I remember. A few drinks, and he could flare up in a moment. And we drank quite a bit as teenagers. We had no problem getting booze when we were fifteen or sixteen.’

  ‘Bunking off school at lunchtime?’

  ‘Yes, now and then.’

  Cooper tried to picture Alistair Page in his little cottage. He didn’t know whether Page was in a relationship, or even if he had children somewhere. He’d never mentioned anything about himself, except that he’d lived near the Quinns when he was a youngster.

  ‘Have you seen much of Simon recently, Alistair?’

  ‘No. I didn’t keep in touch with him very much after we left school, because I never really felt comfortable in his company. To be honest, I started to find him a bit scary.’

  ‘Why?’

  Page was silent for a moment. Cooper could hear music playing in the background. It was a CD from Alistair’s collection: ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. Very appropriate.

  ‘Ben,’ said Page, ‘if you want to know more about Simon Quinn, I think you’d better come to the house. Can you make it tonight?’