One last breath bcadf-5

by Stephen Booth

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  Cooper tried walking a bit more quickly. Perhaps if he could get away from the crowds, he’d feel a bit easier.

  ‘That’s rude,’ said Josie. ‘I don’t say rude words.’

  ‘“The Devil’s Arse” is what they call it,’ said Amy. ‘So it can’t be rude.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘It’s not. Just you ask Uncle Ben.’

  Cooper stopped. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said brightly.

  ‘Why can’t we ask you now?’ said Amy.

  ‘No, I mean we’re going there tomorrow.’

  ‘Peak Cavern,’ said Josie. ‘That’s what it’s called properly. We’ll go to Peak Cavern.’

  Cooper was sweating. And it wasn’t just the humidity either. Talking to his nieces was like walking through a minefield these days. He didn’t want Matt and Kate accusing him of teaching the girls to say ‘arse’. But he could already hear them saying it when they went home to the farm tonight. Uncle Ben says we can say ‘arse’, Dad. Just great.

  ‘It’s your day off today,’ said Amy, who was the older of the two and knew CID shift patterns and duty rosters better than he did himself.

  ‘I’ve got two days off this time,’ he said. ‘So we can go tomorrow.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But what if you get phoned up?’

  Cooper sighed. He felt a surge of sympathy for all the family men on E Division. This must be what it was like for them all the time. The constant cries of: ‘Why weren’t you there, Dad?’, ‘It’s supposed to be your day off,’ and ‘What if you get phoned wp?’

  ‘If I get phoned up,’ said Cooper, ‘we’ll go some other time. I promise.’

  He could almost hear the girls weighing up the value of his promise, and judging its reliability. They were far too wise

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  to trust any promise that an adult made, but they wanted to believe him. He opened his mouth to add: I’ve never let you down before, have ? But he knew it wouldn’t be true.p>

  A party of hikers went by. Their clothes were dazzling, and their walking poles the latest anti-shock design. Getting kitted up for a day on the Derbyshire hills was becoming an exercise in fashion awareness, and all the accessories had to be exactly right. Soon, people would be choosing their rucksacks to match the colour of their eyes.

  A white-haired man walked towards them on the pedestrianized area. The first thing Cooper noticed was his comb over. Every time he saw one, Ben prayed that he’d have enough sense not to do it himself when he was losing his hair. Be bald, wear a hat - anything but a comb-over.

  The man was wearing a silver-grey sports jacket and a blue silk shirt that hung outside his trousers. He had dazzling white trainers and a white toothbrush moustache that was probably the height of fashion when it had been black. His hair was long, too, even allowing for the requirements of his comb-over. He looked like an ageing British character actor playing the role of a faded gigolo.

  Cooper was so distracted by the shopper that at first he didn’t notice a man in a security company uniform gesturing to him from the doorway of W.H. Smith’s. He was a retired police officer who had moved into the expanding private security business, so now he got a better uniform to wear.

  ‘I think there’s a couple of those Hanson brothers just been in here,’ he said. ‘Right toe-rags, they are. There’s a warrant out for both of them. I don’t know them myself, but it looked like them from the pictures.’

  Cooper stopped. ‘I know them, but …’

  ‘You might want to keep an eye out for them. They’re probably somewhere down near the High Street.’

  Amy and Josie were looking at the man and listening with interest.

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  ‘Look, I’m off duty,’ said Cooper.

  The security man noticed the girls for the first time. ‘Oh, right. You’ve got your kids with you.’

  ‘They’re not mine, actually.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘They’re my nieces. My brother’s children.’

  Cooper had realized before he even stopped to speak to him that the ex-bobby was just the right age to have worked with his father. He found himself fidgeting immediately, anxious to move on before the reminiscences began, the stories of late turns together as young PCs. Because they would be followed very quickly by the assurances of how much everyone had respected and loved Sergeant Joe Cooper, and how devastated they’d all been when it happened.

  It wasn’t so much of a problem at the West Street station in Edendale these days, but the retired coppers were the worst. These were the blokes who had been counting the days and hours until they could collect their full pensions after thirty years’ service. Yet now you would think they’d been forced to leave behind the happiest days of their lives.

  ‘Must get on,’ said Cooper. ‘Nice to see you.’

  ‘Hey, these must be Joe Cooper’s grandchildren, then.’

  But Cooper just waved and smiled as he put distance between himself and the doorway of Smith’s. Josie had to run to catch up with him.

  Cooper thought occasionally of his own old age, though it was usually a brief speculation about whether he would live longer than his father had. He didn’t feel any great desire to be a dad himself. Not just yet, anyway. But when he was old, when he was as helpless as his own mother was now, who would be there to look after him? At the present rate, there would be no one.

  But that day was decades away; not something to worry about now. It was only the approach of his birthday that was

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  making him think about ageing. And it wasn’t just any birthday this time, either.

  Joe Cooper’s birthday had been in July, too. That meant they shared the star sign of Cancer, the crab in its shell. An astrologer would probably have been delighted that it had taken Cooper so long to move out of Bridge End Farm for a place of his own. A reluctance to leave the family home, a need to cling on to his shell. He would be thirty years old on Saturday, for heaven’s sake.

  As for his job, Cooper was sure he’d be asked one day soon to undergo a bit of lateral development and say goodbye to CID for a while. Somebody was going to turn up with a sharp knife to prise him out of his shell.

  ‘You should have introduced us to that man,’ said Amy. ‘He knew Granddad.’

  ‘I thought you wanted your lunch?’

  ‘It wasn’t very polite.’

  ‘You’re not polite either,’ said Josie to her sister. ‘You say “arse”.’

  Cooper wondered for a moment if he was being selfish. He hadn’t wanted to hear a retired bobby’s stories about his father. In fact, he’d been worried that this ex-copper might have been one of those called to the scene of Sergeant Joe Cooper’s death, and would therefore be carrying a picture in his head of the body lying in its pool of blood. He definitely didn’t want to go there.

  But Amy and Josie might want to talk about their grandfather with someone who’d known him, someone other than a member of their own family. It might help them understand what had happened.

  Cooper shook his head. That was something else he wasn’t going to take responsibility for. Matt could negotiate that minefield himself.

  At the corner of High Street and Clappergate, a few yards short of McDonald’s, Cooper saw two of the Hanson brothers

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  across the road. He recognized them without any problem. He’d arrested them himself before now, and in fact had been to school with their oldest brother. These two had failed to answer to bail given them by a lenient magistrates’ bench and had been rumoured to have left Derbyshire altogether, for fear of ending up back inside. Cooper reached automatically for his mobile phone, only now realizing that he had forgotten to switch it back on after the cave rescue exercise.

  Then he noticed Amy watching him with the sort of expression that only a child could manage, an expression that came from her natural occupation of the moral high ground when dealing with adults.

  ‘You’re
off duty,’ she said. ‘You’re not supposed to be finding criminals today.’

  Cooper looked at her, pausing with his finger on the first button. He was supposed to take the girls to McDonald’s and buy them a Happy Meal before he took them home to Bridge End Farm, preferably safe and uncorrupted.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘But sometimes they seem to find me. That’s just the way it is.’ And he continued to dial.

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  5

  The bus from Ashbourne to Edendale was almost empty. Mansell Quinn took a seat near a back window, where other passengers couldn’t see him. He watched the scenery gradually change to the familiar White Peak pattern of fields and drystone walls, until a rash of limestone quarries erupted from the landscape near the A6. They were so noticeable on the edge of the national park that Quinn was surprised they were still working.

  In Edendale, he went to find the well in Spa Lane. The water still ran from its brass pipe, and people were queuing with plastic containers. A man with a tray of two-litre bottles was collecting gallons of it. Quinn waited until they’d all gone, then bent to take a drink in his cupped hands. He’d expected the water to be cold, like a natural stream. But it was strangely tepid and had a faint mineral tang - not as he’d remembered it at all.

  All the way from Sudbury, he’d been building up courage to enter a shop. He’d passed several charity shops on the way to the well, and had noticed that all the assistants were women. As were most of the customers. He was worried that women tended to notice too much.

  Then he saw a couple heading towards the door of the

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  I

  Oxfam shop in Clappergate, and he walked in behind them, almost hanging on to their coat-tails to help him over the threshold. He bought a faded check shirt for two pounds fifty. Encouraged, he moved on, and found a pair of jeans the right size for him in Scope a few doors away.

  But he had to choose a coat carefully. He wanted something that was light but rainproof, one with a hood. He’d be outdoors a lot, but he didn’t want to be weighed down by anything too heavy in the hot weather. Quinn had a momentary panic when he realized that the same women he’d followed into Oxfam were also in Help the Aged. But they took no notice of him, and he guessed there must be some kind of circuit that people did of the charity shops. Everyone liked a routine.

  In Cancer Research, by the delivery entrance to the Clappergate shopping centre, he found exactly the right thing. It was a black Wynnster stowaway smock, waterproof and breathable, but light enough to roll up and carry. It had a peaked hood and a velcro fastening at the back, a storm flap that buttoned up to his face and a drawstring to pull the hood tight. It must have cost about thirty or forty pounds new. This one had a slight rip down one side and the lining was worn inside the collar, but that wouldn’t bother him. It smelled faintly of oil, as if someone had worn it while working on a car engine. That didn’t worry him either.

  And then, at the back of the shop, he came across a small rucksack. It was a dark khaki, not the useless garish colours that he’d seen in the shop windows. This one might have been army surplus stock at some time. It looked as though it dated from the 1950s, but it was well made, sound enough for the use he had in mind.

  ‘It’s a bit warm for hiking, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  Quinn had his cash ready in his hand, having worked out the total amount before he went to the till. He expected to

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  be able to hand over the money, take his purchases and go, without giving the woman behind the counter anything to remember him by.

  ‘Hiking,’ she said. ‘Your rucksack and waterproof - I assume you’re going hiking?’

  The woman was folding the smock and finding a plastic bag to put it in. She was only making small talk, and Quinn knew there ought to be an answer he could give that she’d think was normal.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But not here.’

  She looked up at him then, and smiled. Quinn felt she was forcing him to fill the silence.

  ‘Wales,’ he said.

  It was the first place that had come into his head. But he knew immediately it had been the wrong thing to say. If there were reports about him in the newspapers, they might mention he was from Wales.

  ‘We went there last year,’ said the woman. ‘Aberystwyth. I wouldn’t go hiking in Wales, though. There are far too many mountains for my liking. I’m getting too old for all that.’

  She gave him a quizzical look. Quinn knew she was trying to assess his age, and soon she’d be wondering why he was going hiking on his own with an ancient rucksack and a ripped waterproof.

  He could feel himself getting angry. The tremors were starting in his hands, his temples throbbed, and he could hear the hissing inside his head - the sound of blood rushing to his brain.

  ‘Are you going to take the money?’ he said.

  He put his notes on the counter and picked up the carrier bag.

  ‘Wait. You need some change,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Quinn paused outside the shop to check his purchases,

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  afraid that he might have left something behind. Instinct made him look back through the plate-glass window, where the woman who’d served him was standing at her counter. She was watching him. Her look made him feel as if someone had seen straight through him and knew exactly what he was planning to do.

  He walked quickly away from the shop. She probably wasn’t even looking at him at all - she was more than likely staring at something behind him across the street, or admiring her own reflection in the window. Then Quinn remembered that it didn’t really matter anyway. By the time he was a hundred yards away, he had calmed down; he began to walk more slowly.

  The Vine Inn was still here, anyway. He’d drunk in the pub a time or two, but it was done up now to attract a better class of customer. It had been re-painted, and the chalk boards outside offered specials from a food menu.

  Then Quinn noticed the brass plaque fixed to one of the stone flowerbeds outside the pub, and the lettering caught his eye. In memory of Sergeant Joseph Cooper. He stared at the wording, reading it over to himself several times before he looked up and remembered where he was. In memory of Sergeant Joseph Cooper.

  At least he could get out of the town now. The last few items on his list wouldn’t be found in any charity shop, so he’d have to go elsewhere. But he had to move on. There were things he had to do. And there wasn’t much time.

  On the last leg of his journey, Quinn closed his eyes and tried to rest. By the time he looked out of the window again, he was already in the Hope Valley. The familiar hills gathered close around him, welcoming, drawing him in.

  The familiarity of it caught at Quinn’s throat as he got off the bus and walked through a field towards a line of trees. Tiny flies rose from the seedheads of the long grass as he brushed through it. He broke off one of the heads and put

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  it in his mouth to chew. It tasted nutty, but reminded him of oats, too. He thought of a bowl of muesli, and then of sitting at the kitchen table in the morning, pouring milk, smelling coffee, listening to the children getting ready for school.

  And then somewhere he heard a gate creak. He was supposed to have fixed the gate. More than fourteen years ago, he’d promised to oil the hinges. That sound alone was enough to take him back to 1990, to wipe away the intervening years as if they’d never existed. The side gate creaked, and here was Mansell Quinn standing listening to it, expecting at any moment to hear his wife’s voice reminding him that he’d promised to attend to it.

  Quinn experienced a moment of confusion. He could see himself opening the door of the garage, sighing with exasperation because he’d been distracted from doing something more important. He could picture lifting a can of WD40 from the shelf, coughing at the dust as he moved a box of tools, brushing off an old spider’s web, and noticing the spare set of spark plugs he’d been looking for
. He could even remember the texture of the breeze-block wall behind the shelf, and see its colour - pale blue, because they had some paint left over when the kitchen was decorated. He recalled spraying WD40 on the hinges of the gate, and watching the rusted metal darken as the liquid soaked in and began to run. He could smell the alcohol fumes as the spray drifted back into his face.

  He’d fixed the gate. Yet still he could hear the creak. It was as if his life had re-started - not from the moment the police came to the house and arrested him, on his last day of freedom, but earlier than that. It was as though he’d walked back into his own life at a point before everything had started to go wrong.

  After a few minutes, Quinn straightened up. It wasn’t the same house, or the same gate. His memories had confused

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  him about what was in the past and what was right here in the present.

  But there was one memory he knew was real - the one that hadn’t left his mind for the past fourteen years. This one was no mere trick of deja vu. It was the memory of blood blood pooling and streaming on a golden field.

  It had begun to rain. He hadn’t noticed the clouds gathering, hadn’t even thought to look at the sky. He put on the smock and pulled up the hood. But his face was already wet, and more water dripped on him from the trees.

  Quinn had started making his plans two years ago - on the day they told him he’d be making his final move. It had been a morning in early April, a day when the beech trees visible from the exercise yard at Gartree were starting to change their shape and colour, the outline of their naked branches blurring with the suggestion of spring.

  ‘You’re being transferred to an open prison,’ his wing governor had told him. ‘LIMP Sudbury. It’s in Derbyshire. That will be a lot closer to your home, Quinn. It will make it much easier for your family to visit you.’