One last breath bcadf-5

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Do you think Quinn knows my father is dead?’ he asked instead.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Hitchens with a small sigh of relief.

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  ‘I suppose it’s a question we could ask his probation officer, or his personal officer at Sudbury.’

  ‘We’ll be talking to those people anyway, won’t we? I mean, about any comments he might have made regarding his family, or his old associates.’

  ‘Yes, we will.’

  ‘So it might not seern too odd to be asking whether he ever talked about Sergeant Joe Cooper.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Hitchens sounded doubtful.

  ‘I suppose it might seem odd to the officers tasked with making the enquiry, though,’ said Cooper, trying to interpret the DI’s hesitation.

  ‘Damned odd, unless we explained the reasons to them. And then the results of their enquiries would have to be put into their report, and that would go back to the receiver in the incident room and be looked over by the analyst, and then entered on to the HOLMES system by one of the operators, and maybe it would generate another action which the allocator would give to a second enquiry team …’

  ‘Enough,’ said Cooper.

  ‘You see how complicated it is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Hitchens watched him for a moment. ‘So, what do you think, Cooper?’

  Cooper swallowed painfully. The effort of trying to control his physical reactions was becoming almost too much to bear. Till deal with it.’

  Then the DI had nodded and smiled. ‘And do you know, Ben - that’s exactly what your father would have said.’

  As he made his way back across the rope walks, Cooper smelled the hemp again, pungent with the scent of animals. He looked up at the black soot stains on the roof and thought of Alistair Page’s tale of Cock Lorrel and the Beggars’ Banquet,

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  all the wickedness and blood-soaked horrors imagined by superstitious locals.

  But if the people who’d lived in the cavern all those centuries had meant no harm to anyone, they ought not to have become objects of fear and hatred, stigmatized as cannibals and worshippers of the Devil. They ought to have been left alone.

  And that’s what his father would have said, too.

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  Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin passed through the security checkpoint at the gate lodge. The building nearest to the entrance was the officers’ mess, which was surrounded by banks of colourful flowers. Yellow, purple, white and red. Fry thought the purple ones might be pansies, but there were very few flowers whose names she knew. Murfin wouldn’t know them either, unless they were something he could eat, so there was no point in asking him.

  At the entrance to the visitors’ parking area, warnings had been posted of the penalties for helping prisoners to escape or bringing in prohibited items like drugs. They offered the prospect of ten years in prison yourself or a 10,000 pounds fine, which would certainly deter most visitors. But there had been nobody to help Mansell Quinn escape, even if he’d wanted to. Fry had just learned that Quinn had received only one personal visitor during his stay at Sudbury.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Murfin. ‘The car’s over here.’

  ‘Wait for me, Gavin. I won’t be a minute.’

  She walked over a set of speed humps towards the steel fence. A few black-and-white cattle grazed beyond the fence, and outside the gates two young prisoners with shaved heads and green waterproofs were picking litter from

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  the grass and filling black bin liners with it. A prison officer stood watching them, glancing occasionally at his watch. Until she noticed the waterproofs, Fry hadn’t realized it was raining. It was a gentle rain here, not the downpour of the night before.

  Then she saw a pedestrian underpass leading beneath the main road, the A50. When she walked into it, Fry found it smelled of urine and the floor was scattered with rubbish and bits of broken blue plastic. Perhaps the litter team weren’t allowed this far from the gates.

  The rain had run down the grass slope and pooled in the bottom end of the underpass. Only half the lights were working down here. But it looked like a deliberate policy rather than mere vandalism, because there was a precise alternation - dark and light, dark and light, all the way along to the exit. Half of the fluorescent tubes had either been removed or switched off.

  This was something Ben Cooper would do - follow the movements of a suspect, reconstruct his actions, try to get into his mind and understand what he’d been thinking. After an hour inside the prison, Fry believed she had an inkling how Mansell Quinn might have felt on his release. It wasn’t the worst institution she’d ever been in, but the atmosphere was oppressive nevertheless.

  Sudbury had been built as a hospital to take wounded US airmen during the D-Day landings in 1944, and most of the original single-storey accommodation was still in use - rows and rows of long, cream-coloured huts. By the time she left, Fry’s head had been buzzing with positive PR for the prison regime: education and training, pre-release courses, resettlement schemes and community projects. Strictly speaking, Sudbury wasn’t even one of Her Majesty’s prisons any more, but a facility of the National Offender Management Service.

  Entering the underpass, she followed a broad white line that divided the path from a cycle track that ran through on

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  its way to Ashbourne. Traffic buzzed overhead on the A50. Emerging on to the side of a small road, she found a pair of bus shelters facing each other across the carriageway. On this side, the buses to Sudbury and Burton on Trent stopped.

  The shelter had all but one of its glass sides knocked out, and it would be pretty miserable in there waiting for a bus. Rain came down the banking from the A50, and spray blew in from the traffic passing towards Sudbury. Instead of a bench, a sort of plastic bar had been fitted for people to perch on, as if they were birds. Signs in the shelter told passengers how to reach the prison through the underpass. Everything was painted a drab, institutional green. Perhaps the colour had been chosen specifically for the people who would use it to get to and from the prison.

  Try as she might, Fry couldn’t conjure up the image of Mansell Quinn perched in the shelter waiting for a bus to take him to a new life at the end of his sentence. She’d seen photographs of him, but they had lacked the spark of humanity that might have enabled her to form a picture of him as a real, living individual. All she saw in her mind’s eye was a dark, amorphous shape passing across her line of vision, not standing still to be pinned down but forever moving on somewhere else.

  Fry found herself frustrated by the failure of her imagination. She couldn’t work out what had been going on in Mansell Quinn’s mind. There were too few dots to be joined up yet.

  But there had been another prisoner released at the same time as Quinn: Richard Wakelin, twenty-five, from Derby. The two men had been seen talking as they left the prison gates. Perhaps Wakelin could help her to get a glimpse of what had been in Quinn’s head that morning.

  Ben Cooper had parked under one of the maple trees in the Castleton car park to get a bit of shade, and he hoped the car wouldn’t feel quite so much like a blast furnace when

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  he got back in. One family had removed their shoes and sandals and were paddling in the stream alongside the car park, while a couple with two panting dogs had allowed them to splash in the water to cool off.

  Cooper decided they should walk into Castleton to get an ice cream. He had a fancy for a dark chocolate Magnum, and the girls went along to humour him. What he hadn’t anticipated was that they would insist on climbing the hill to Peveril Castle.

  ‘It’s a long way up,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t come to Castleton without seeing the castle,’ said Amy, as if the logic were obvious. ‘Look at all those other people going up. Some of them are even older than you, Uncle Ben.’

  By the time they reached the top of the hill, Cooper was sweating. The grass was warm from the sun,
and he was glad of the chance to lie down while the girls explored the ruined keep of the castle. At close quarters, the tower looked gaunt and forlorn. One side of it seemed to have crumbled away over the centuries, reduced to a ruin by locals stripping the stone to use as building materials for their homes.

  According to the guide books, the castle had originally been built by a bastard son of William the Conqueror to protect his local mining interests and hunting preserves. Cooper hoped the girls didn’t ask, in case he had to explain what a bastard was.

  When he got his breath back, Cooper walked along the wall and looked down into the dale. A middle-aged couple looked up and waved. Then Cooper noticed two men together in a sheltered spot near the entrance. He couldn’t see them clearly, but one of them was wearing a black waterproof with a hood, despite the heat. He watched them for a moment, wishing he weren’t so suspicious, but with thoughts of predatory paedophiles going through his mind as he heard the voices of children in the dale.

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  In fact, the two men seemed harmless, although there was some tension between them, one standing and the other sitting, as if they’d had a disagreement. A gay couple, perhaps - they should have chosen somewhere that wasn’t so easily overlooked.

  A siren began to wail at the cement quarry. Somewhere in the vast excavations, half a mile behind the works, they were preparing to blast more limestone out of Bradwell Moor. A minute or two after the wailing a sharp boom reverberated in the depths of the hillside like a single stroke of a bass drum. A cloud of white dust drifted over the edge of the quarry.

  The Peak Cavern system wasn’t far from the hole blasted to feed the cement works. Any passages running southeast would emerge from the face of the quarry. Who knew what undiscovered stalactite-hung chambers might have vanished in the blasting over the years?

  Cooper looked round for his nieces and spotted them peering from one of the windows of the tower. It was his temporary responsibility for them that was making him paranoid, he supposed. Maybe this was what being a parent was like.

  Passing the prison sign and the officers’ mess to return to the car, Diane Fry took one more look at the violently colourful display of bedding plants and sneezed. A few seconds later, she sneezed again. She could feel the membranes inside her nose swelling and her eyes starting to water. Damn. Hay fever.

  The pollen count must be up today. She’d been told she should always try to breathe in through her nose instead of her mouth, to filter out the dust and pollutants in the air and prevent them from reaching her airways. Her grass pollen allergy had been worst in her late teens and early twenties, but it still hit her now and then, forcing her to resort to sunglasses to reduce the irritation to her eyes - even if it

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  meant having to put up with cracks from the station wits about her having deserted E Division for the LAPD.

  She got back into the car with Murfin, and they were soon heading towards Ashbourne on the A515. As they passed a tractor dealer’s, Fry looked across the fields to the rows of cream-coloured huts that formed the prison, with several large greenhouses lined up behind them. She thought of how hot it would be inside those glass buildings among the plants. Stifling.

  ‘Get anything useful?’ said Murfin, unsettled by her silence.

  ‘Yeah. Everything I could possibly want.’

  Andrea Lowe stopped her brother at the door, her hand on his arm enough to communicate her concern.

  ‘Stay here,’ she said.

  Simon shook his head. ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  ‘Jackie will be worried sick.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Anyway, there are things to do at home. The plumber is coming first thing in the morning, and if I’m not there to let him in he might not be available again for weeks. And I have to let them know at work what’s happening.’

  Andrea was staying at their aunt’s house in Castleton. She was the sort of person who needed company for reassurance, so being constantly under Dawn’s eye would suit her.

  ‘You can’t go back to work, Simon,’ she said.

  ‘No, of course not. There are just a few things to sort out jobs I was in the middle of yesterday when they called me. You know what I mean. I’ll come back here as soon as I can.’

  ‘I don’t like you being on your own,’ said Andrea. ‘Not now, Simon. If Mum hadn’t been on her own yesterday …’

  Simon squeezed her shoulder and smiled. Till be fine. Stop worrying.’

  ‘You should tell the police, shouldn’t you?’

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  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  Andrea held the door and stood on the step, still reluctant to let him go. He could see her studying the houses in the close, as if afraid that they were being watched from behind the curtains at any one of half a dozen windows. Simon thought she was probably right. It was one of the reasons he had to get away.

  ‘Well, take care, then,’ she said. ‘Simon, take care.’

  Simon nodded and walked quickly to his car. The whole day had been spent indoors, most of it in unfamiliar surroundings, among unsettling sounds and smells. A bit of fresh air was what he needed, and a chance to get things straight in his own head, before he had to go over it all again with his fiancee back in Edendale. Everything that had happened during the day, all the questions the police had asked him, every emotion he’d felt in the past few hours - Jackie would want to know the lot.

  He drove down into the centre of Castleton and parked in the market square, intending to take a walk by the river. But when he saw the pubs in Castle Street, Simon realized that what he really needed was a drink. Or perhaps a couple. If the police stopped him driving home later on, then it was just tough. After a day like today, he didn’t really care.

  Simon chose the George, for no other reason than it was the nearest pub, just a short walk through the quiet churchyard from the market square. He’d never been inside it before, but he liked the look of its whitewashed frontage with clematis growing up the walls. It looked a safe and reassuring place.

  But once he’d set his mind on a drink, Simon forgot all about his promise to his sister to take care. And he forgot that it would be dark by the time he left the pub to walk back through the churchyard to his car.

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  Ben Cooper bumped his Toyota down the rough track to Bridge End Farm, twisting the wheel at the familiar points along the way to avoid the worst of the potholes. The girls were curled up together in the back of the car as it rattled over the cattle grid and into the yard past the tractor shed. Only the big John Deere stood in the shed now, because Matt had sold the old grey Fergie that he used to tinker with. He’d said it was no good to him any more, and other people might be able to afford an expensive hobby better than he could.

  Bridge End was still good land. Their maternal grandfather had cared for it well, tottering about the place in his shiny black suit with baling twine round his trouser bottoms. Their father had never been interested in running the place, though occasionally he’d roll up his sleeves to help.

  Like all the family, Joe Cooper had been a tall man, with well-muscled forearms and big hands. He’d been such an archetype of integrity and moral principles that it was impossible to imagine him bending the rules. Even among his family, rules were made to be kept.

  ‘Home,’ called Cooper, turning off the engine.

  Amy and Josie clambered out and ran across the yard to the house, being immediately surrounded by a flurry of dogs.

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  Cooper heard his sister-in-law, Kate, greet them from the kitchen and send them to wash their hands. There was a clatter of feet on tiles and excited voices.

  He followed the girls in, taking his time. He had too much on his mind to be able to cope with the memories that leaped out at him from the corners of the house.

  The kitchen was the room they’d always used most at Bridge End, and these days it seemed to smell of herbs whenever he
entered it. Kate made him a coffee, and he told her about his day. His sister-in-law was easy to talk to, and he was happy to get a chance to chat to her alone now and again.

  ‘I hope you’re ready for the party on Saturday,’ she said. ‘Amazingly, we seem to have got everything organized and under control.’

  ‘You’ve worked miracles, Kate. I just wish you’d let me do more for myself.’

  Kate cocked her head, listening to the sound of raised voices at the back of the house. For a moment it sounded as though an argument was developing, but the children quietened down again, apart from a bit of thumping and pounding of feet, which was perfectly normal. Kate went back to what she had been doing.

  ‘We thought of making it a surprise,’ she said.

  ‘The party? Why? Were you worried I wouldn’t come if I knew about it?’

  ‘What?’ She looked at him with concern, but decided he was joking. ‘Anyway, we’ve arranged for Isabel to have a day out of the Old School so she can come, and we knew she’d mention it you.’

  ‘If she remembers,’ said Cooper, and instantly regretted sounding churlish.

  He could hear the voices of his nieces coming towards them through the house. In another moment, their mother would be swept up by their demands, and she’d have no more time

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  for Ben. But right now, she could sense that something was wrong. Sometimes, Cooper thought he must walk around with a traffic light on his head, because his moods seemed to be so transparent to the women in his life.

  ‘Are you worried about her, Ben?’

  ‘No, Kate. Like you say, Mum’s doing well.’

  ‘But there’s something ‘