One last breath
( Ben Cooper and Diane Fry - 5 )
Stephen Booth
ONE LAST BREATH by Stephen Booth.
Major new psychological Peak District thriller from the acclaimed author of Blood on the Tongue and Blind to the Bones. The vast labyrinth of caverns, passages and subterranean rivers beneath the Peak District are a major tourist attraction. But this summer not all the darkness is underground, and not all the devils are folk legends. Mingling with the holidaymakers is a convicted killer, bent on revenge. Fourteen years ago Mansell Quinn was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his lover. Now he’s out under licence, whereabouts unknown, and his ex-wife has been murdered. As they try to anticipate the fugitive’s next move, detectives Diane Fry and Ben Cooper become increasingly puzzled by the case. Why did Quinn’s two friends refuse to back up his alibi? And why did nobody visit him in prison for the last ten years of his sentence? Nobody, that is, except one of those two friends: ex-soldier Will Thorpe, now living rough somewhere in the Hope Valley. Overstretched and unable to apprehend a killer who moves around the area with impunity, the police can do little but warn other potential victims to be on their guard.
By the same author
Black Dog
Dancing with the Virgins
Blood on the Tongue
Blind to the Bones
STEPHEN BOOTH
One Last Breath
4u
HarperCollins.ft
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters
and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s
imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPz(/?//5/;i?rs 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
135798642
Copyright Š Stephen Booth 2004
Stephen Booth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 00 717202 8
Typeset in Sabon by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
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permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or
otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it
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Dedicated to the men and women who explore the scariest place there is
— the world beneath our feet
No book would reach this stage without the efforts of a whole team of people, and I particularly owe a debt on this occasion to my editor Julia Wisdom and the team at HarperCollins for their support. As usual, any mistakes are entirely my own.
Castleton, Derbyshire, 9 October 1990 And then she was gone. He heard the final scrape of air as it caught in her throat, and felt her last breath brush his cheek, as if a wisp of smoke had passed through the room. For a moment, she had taken his life in her mouth like a bubble of soap, swollen to bursting and smeared with light. And she’d punctured it with a sigh, that dying whisper. With one last breath, she had blown his life away.
Mansell Quinn knew he’d heard her die. He pulled his hands away from her body, and stared at the blood staining his fingers and pooling in his palms. He turned them from side to side, and watched the blood slide over a coating of white dust on his skin. It ran across his wrists and trickled into the soft flesh of his forearms, teasing the fine hairs like the caress of a fingertip.
He shook his head, trying to clear away the thoughts that buzzed in his brain like flies. He knew there were things he should do. Things he should do now. But he couldn’t remember what they were. Quinn’s mind was whirling and the room had begun to swing around him in dizzying arcs. Painful surges of adrenalin twitched in his veins, churning through his body as if poison had been pumped into his bloodstream.
The words running through his head were no help at all. Murder. The children. The knife. He knew what the words were, but couldn’t get them in the right order.
For some reason, she was wearing the lime-green sweater. A moment ago, the fabric had been stretching and twisting in his hands where it hung open over her breast. The colour of it looked garish next to the blood. But if someone had asked him what else she was wearing, he wouldn’t have been able to say. The sweater and the blood were all he saw.
Quinn sank to the floor and knelt by the body. He could feel sweat soaking from his pores and running down his face like tears. Gas bubbled in his stomach until he thought he’d be sick. He reached to pick up the knife, thinking he should put it out of her reach, hide it, throw it away, keep it safe. He had no idea which. He took her wrist between his fingers to feel her pulse, though he’d heard her die and he knew she was dead. He flinched at the touch of her skin and the slackness of her joints, and he dropped her hand back on the floor, where it landed with a thud. Then he noticed the bloody smears he’d left on her arm; they formed a pattern of red blotches and streaks, like a mark branded on an animal.
He looked up and squinted at the room, trying to place where he was. Her death had changed the world completely, so that nothing was familiar any more. Small impressions jostled his senses, like fragments of a broken picture. Music was playing somewhere, but he didn’t recognize it. A door facing him was open, but he couldn’t remember where it led. There was light coming through the doorway, yet it ought to be dark. A sweet scent hung on the air that he should know, but he couldn’t name it. It was his own house, yet it had become a place he’d never seen before. It was an alien landscape, painted in blood.
Quinn looked down at her face, and the shock hit him a second time. He felt a desperate rush of hope that it might be possible to undo everything and turn the clock back, so
that nothing had happened at all. What if he’d come home a bit earlier, or later? Or if he hadn’t been held up by the roadworks on Back Street? What if he’d left his tools in the car, instead of taking his time getting the bag out and bringing it into the house, worrying about thieves going by on the road in the night, instead of what might happen in the next few minutes?
If he could take just one step back in time, her body might not be lying on the sitting-room floor, and the blood might magically fade from the carpet, like an advert for a miracle cleaner. She might stand up and laugh, and explain why she’d pretended to be dead. And life would go back to the way it had been before.
But Quinn had heard her die. The sound of her last breath had convinced him, not the sight of the blood or the slackness of her joints. And he knew his mistake had been made much earlier - years before, when he’d first met her and the whole thing had started. And now his life would never be normal again.
In a moment of silence, Quinn became aware of his own breathing. The sound of it seemed to fill the room, harsh and rapid, like the panting of a hunted animal, a rabbit in the jaws of the dog. He had never listened to his breathing before. He had never felt his lungs struggling to find air, or heard the shallow gasp that rushed across the roof of his mouth, like a col
d wind inside his head. He didn’t like the noise, and he was glad when the music started again to fill the silence in the house.
What was that music? Why was it playing? Quinn nodded at someone, though there was no one else in the room. He remembered that he hadn’t found what he was looking for. The words had replaced the others in his head. He still hadn’t found what he was looking for. But he hadn’t been looking for the lime-green sweater. That shouldn’t be here at all.
Then he noticed the wetness soaking through his jeans to
his knees. He stood up, staring at the purple stains on the denim, and at the blood spreading from the soles of his boots. It was so deep that it welled up from the carpet when he moved his feet.
Unsteadily, he walked round the body, praying it might look different from another angle. But all he saw now were his footprints in the blood. The carpet had been gold once a gold shadow pattern, one of the first things he and Rebecca had chosen when they were decorating the house. She’d be upset that the carpet was ruined.
Quinn looked at his hands again, and the blood reminded him of something he should do. The phone stood on a table by the door. He dialled 999, and somehow remembered his address.
‘Yes, 82 Pindale Road. An ambulance, please.’
He tried hard to listen to the voice of the operator, though he was distracted by the metallic smell of the blood on his hand and the slippery feel of the phone in his fingers.
‘Police? Yes, probably.’
When that was done, he felt as though his legs wouldn’t support him any longer. He made it back across the carpet and collapsed into an armchair. His eyes were drawn to the clock on the wall over the mantelpiece. He knew the clock was important for some reason. He listened to its ticking, waiting for it to penetrate the fog in his brain and tell him what else to do.
Finally, Quinn remembered the most important thing of all. The children. And he should have hidden the knife. The knife was dangerous.
But then exhaustion overwhelmed him, and his head fell back against the chair. When the first police officers arrived at the house, they found Mansell Quinn asleep. He was dreaming that the whole world could hear him breathing.
Monday, 12 July 2004
Today was the day Detective Constable Ben Cooper was
supposed to have died. For practical purposes, he was already
dead. His feet and hands felt icily cold, as if death might
be creeping up on him slowly, claiming his body inch by
inch.
For the past half hour, Cooper had been unable to move his arms or his legs, or even his head. Mud-stained rock filled his vision, every crack and protrusion glistening with dampness in the beams of light that swung across the passage. He could smell the mud and sweat around him, and hear the splashing of water as it echoed in the confined space. The rock was so close to his face that his breath condensed on it and fell back on him as mist. It filled his mouth with its taste. The sharp taste of stone.
Cooper had never imagined that he’d feel so helpless. The roof seemed to be sinking closer towards him, pressing down to crush his skull. He could sense the mass of the hill poised overhead. One tiny movement of the earth’s crust over Derbyshire, and millions of tons of rock would flatten him where he lay. He’d be squeezed to a juice, reduced to an inexplicable red smear for future geologists to find.
‘Only a few more minutes,’ said a voice in the darkness, ‘and we’ll reach the Devil’s Staircase.’
Then the light went off the roof, and Cooper could see nothing at all. For a moment, he thought the rock had already crushed him, and he began to panic. His lungs spasmed as if there were no oxygen left for him to breathe.
Cooper felt himself tilted violently backwards, but he was strapped in too tightly to move. Looking up from this angle, he saw a cluster of yellow PVC oversuits glowing in the sporadic light. Lamps created pools of luminescence around them and distorted their shadows on the roofs and walls. But there were no faces visible in darkness.
He was jolted again. He was sure the stretcher would turn over and tip him on to the floor of the passage, where he’d drown lying helpless in two feet of muddy water. And that would be the end of his career in Derbyshire CID. He’d never expected it to be like this.
‘I want to die in the daylight,’ he said.
But no one was listening to him. As far as they were concerned, he was already dead.
Detective Sergeant Diane Fry stumbled in the middle of the floor and kicked out in irritation. She’d never thought of herself as a tidy person - there were too many messy loose ends in her life for that. And God knew, her flat was a tip; she might have been competing with the students across the landing for the pigsty-of-the-year competition. But the intrusion of someone else’s untidiness was a different thing altogether. It made her grit her teeth every time she came home from a shift. She’d barely noticed the mess when it was her own clothes thrown on the bathroom floor, but finding a pair of black jeans halfway across the room from the laundry basket reminded her that she was no longer alone.
Fry’s pager was bleeping. She checked the number, scooped up her phone from the edge of the bath and dialled.
‘DS Fry here. Yes, sir?’
Her boss at E Division, Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens, was at his desk early this morning. Yet he sounded far from
alert.
‘Oh, Fry. Are you on your way in?’
‘Very shortly.’
‘OK.?
Fry waited expectantly, but heard nothing except a metallic whirring in the background, as if Hitchens were having some construction work done on his office.
‘Was there something, sir?’
‘Oh, just … Does the name Quinn mean anything to you, Fry?’
‘Quinn?’
‘Mansell Quinn.’
‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t.’
‘No. No, it wouldn’t do.’
Hitchens sounded as though his mind was on something else entirely. Fry pulled a face and gestured impatiently at the phone, as if she’d been reduced to using sign language to an idiot.
‘Well, make sure you come and see me before you do anything else, will you, Fry?’
‘Certainly, sir.’
Fry shrugged as she ended the call. It was probably nothing. Hitchens was just losing his grip, like everyone else around E Division. But she’d better not be late. There was no time for clearing up someone else’s clothes.
Hold on, though. She looked more closely at the jeans on the floor. These weren’t someone else’s clothes - they were hers, bought only a couple of weeks ago during a shopping trip to the Meadowhall Centre in Sheffield. Worse, they’d been a comfort purchase on a day when she’d been feeling particularly down. She hadn’t even found a chance to wear them yet.
7
‘Angie!’
There was no reply from the sitting room, where her sister lay wrapped in a duvet on the sofa. The flat was so small that the distance between the rooms was only a few feet. The fact that her sister was asleep irritated Fry even more.
‘Angie!’
She heard a grunt, and a creaking of springs as her sister stirred and turned over. Fry looked at her watch: quarter past eight. She’d better pray the traffic wasn’t too bad getting to West Street, or she’d be late.
She called again, more loudly, then picked up the jeans and tried to fold them back into their proper shape before laying them on top of the overflowing laundry basket. They were creased and scuffed across the knees, as if Angie had been crawling around the floor in them. They were hardly worth wearing now, despite the money she’d lashed out for the sake of the designer label stitched to the back pocket.
Cursing, Fry began to fuss about the bathroom, picking up more items of clothing and shoving them into the basket. She rescued a towel from the bottom of the bath and hung it on the rail. She straightened the curtains, swept up an empty toothpaste tube and a Tampax wrapper and threw them into the pedal bin. She dampened a cloth and began wip
ing splashes of soap off the mirror. Then she caught sight of her own reflection, and stopped. She didn’t like what she saw.
‘What’s all the noise about?’
Angie stood in the doorway wearing only a long T-shirt, scratching herself and peering at her sister through half-open eyes. Fry felt a rush of guilt at the sight of her sister’s bare, thin legs.
‘Nothing.’
‘What are you doing? I thought there must be a fire, or a burglar or something.’
‘No. I’m sorry. You can go back to sleep, if you want.’
Angie coughed. ‘I’m awake now, I suppose. Are you going
out, Sis?’
‘I’m on shift this morning.’
‘Yeah. Well, I’ll get myself a coffee. Do you want anything?’
‘I don’t have time.’
Angie looked around the bathroom. ‘Tidying up? Just before you go to work? You want to slow down, Di. You’ll be giving yourself a heart attack if you get so stressed.’
‘Yeah, right.’
Angie looked at her, puzzled. ‘You were shouting me though, weren’t you? I’m sure you were. What did you want?’
‘Nothing,’ said Fry. ‘It doesn’t matter. You go and get yourself that coffee.’
Angie turned away. ‘I’m sure I heard you shouting me,’ she said. ‘You sounded just like Ma.’
Fry dropped the damp cloth and leaned on the washbasin for a moment. She listened to Angie shuffling away, her bare feet slapping on the worn tiles in the passage. Fry kept her head lowered. The one thing she didn’t want to do was see herself in the mirror again. She didn’t want the memories that had been visible for a brief moment in the reflection of her own eyes, in the hard line of her mouth and the frown marks etched into her forehead.
Reluctantly, she looked at her watch. She had to go or she’d be late, and she couldn’t afford to be late when she had to set an example for the likes of Ben Cooper and Gavin Murfin, who would go wandering off in their own directions in a second if she didn’t keep an eye on them.
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