One last breath bcadf-5

by Stephen Booth

  And then it was too late, as the girls burst through the door of the kitchen, talking nineteen to the dozen. Their voices rose a few decibels, and Ben had to give each of them a hug.

  So the moment passed, and he didn’t have to think of something to say. But he knew what the problem was - he didn’t want to see his mother back in her old house. It was an unkind reaction, but he feared that seeing his mother back at Bridge End Farm would bring home to him, as nothing else had until now, the extent to which she’d deteriorated.

  Finally, Cooper tore himself away from the warm kitchen and went back to his car. After only a few months living in town, he knew he’d started to lose touch with his family. On the farm, he’d regarded the landscape as a place to make a living. The most important things were the fertility of the land, the quality of the drainage, the stability of the walls that kept the cattle and sheep on their grazing. But as he drove around the Peak District now, he found himself admiring the shape of a hill or noticing the way a quarry spoiled the view, as if it was all some kind of scenic backdrop.

  Cooper saw his brother coming towards the house, still in his working overalls. Matt was bulking up as he got older, and was looking more like their father every year.

  Matt nodded. ‘Ben. Had a good day?’

  ‘I think the girls enjoyed themselves.’

  ‘Good. I hope they used up some of their energy. They tire me out when they’re at home.’

  While they stood in the yard, it began to rain. Neither of

  147

  them made a move to go inside. Cooper tried to see what stock was in the sheds or grazing on the in-by land.

  ‘Will there be some calves going to market soon?’ he asked.

  Matt looked at him in surprise. ‘The only batch of calves I had went in last week. Colin Sidebotham came over to give me a hand.’

  ‘That was good of him.’

  ‘Well, I helped him get his hay in a week or two back. He cut it just before the forecast turned bad.’

  That’s the way it works.’

  ‘It’s how it used to work. Some of the miserable buggers I see at the mart wouldn’t give me the time of day any more. It’s every man for himself. They’re all worried about going under next season, or the one after. I reckon they don’t want anyone coming down to their place, just in case.’

  ‘In case what?’

  ‘In case we see them laying out a new golf course, or ripping up their fields to make fishing lakes.’

  Cooper knew his brother had moody fantasies these days in which every livestock farm in the valley sold off its stock and diversified, each becoming a little tourist attraction - a nature trail here, a tea room there, a craft centre across the lane. Matt had once muttered that he’d stick out to be the last farm still operating, then he could call his place a museum and coin in money from the tourists.

  Kate had emerged from the house again and was watching them. The rain was getting heavier, and Cooper could feel it soaking his shirt.

  ‘About Saturday,’ said Matt. ‘I’ll pick Mum up from Old School a couple of hours before the party starts.’

  ‘No, I’ll pick her up myself - if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Matt, frowning a bit. ‘If you’re sure, Ben.’

  ‘Just a few minutes together would be nice.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Matt. ‘She’ll be chuffed with that.’

  148

  Cooper found himself exchanging a nod with his older brother. It was a gesture they’d developed between themselves as teenagers, a means to avoid having to put their feelings into words. A nod had communicated anything they wanted it to.

  Sharing that gesture now seemed to remove all the distance that Cooper had begun to sense between Matt and himself. It brought a sudden rush of affection, like making up with someone after an argument. But he didn’t know quite how to express the feeling. So he hesitated for a moment. And then he gave Matt another nod.

  Diane Fry walked towards the sitting room from her kitchen, where she’d been sorting the ironing into separate piles outfits for the office, casual stuff, clothes for special occasions. The difference in the size of the piles had started to depress her, and she’d given up.

  Angie was watching TV, a hospital drama in which a doctor was spending all his time trying to reunite a dying woman with her estranged son. She’d also found a box of chocolates from somewhere. Fry had forgotten she had them in the flat, so the box must have been hidden away in a safe place. Another comfort resource.

  ‘Hey, Sis, don’t you ever go out?’ said Angie.

  Fry stopped. ‘Out?’

  ‘Yeah. O-U-T. Out.’

  ‘Out where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just out of here -‘ Angie waved a hand lazily around the room.

  ‘I go out every day,’ said Fry. ‘I’m not a hermit. I have a job.’

  ‘I don’t mean go out to work. I mean go out to enjoy yourself. Jesus, Di.’

  Fry didn’t answer. She didn’t like being forced to justify her private life, even to her sister. She had grown accustomed to not having to justify herself to anybody.

  149

  ‘Surely you must need to get out of this place occasionally?’ said Angie. ‘I mean, look at it.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s so depressing. Jesus.’

  ‘You said that.’

  ‘Well, it is. Come on, Di, couldn’t you do a bit better for yourself than this on a detective sergeant’s salary?’

  ‘Maybe. But there’s not much choice around here. Property is so expensive.’

  ‘And you don’t even have a bloke,’ said Angie. ‘Or do you?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’ ‘Not even nice Constable Cooper?’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  Angie sucked some chocolate off a praline. ‘Hey, Di, you’re not gay, are you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just asking. You said yourself we had a lot to learn about each other.’

  Fry smoothed her hands on the T-shirt she was carrying. ‘Tell you what, Angie, let’s go out together.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Well, tomorrow - are you up for it?’

  ‘Damn right,’ said Angie. ‘Let’s hit the high spots of Edendale. Let’s get totally rat-arsed!’

  ‘We can go out for a meal.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can have dinner at a restaurant. A couple of glasses of wine, perhaps. Then we can relax a bit.’

  ‘It takes more than a couple of glasses of wine to help me relax,’ said Angie.

  Fry felt her face harden and her jawline tighten. She tried to control her expression, but knew she wasn’t succeeding.

  ‘The restaurants shouldn’t be busy at this time of the week,’ she said. ‘We can get somewhere quiet, relax and talk.’

  150

  ‘Are you sure there’s nowhere we can go clubbing?’ ‘You’re too old to go clubbing.’ Angie laughed. ‘Too old? You cow.’

  She chose another chocolate, got bored with the doctor and clicked the remote to find something more interesting.

  When Ben Cooper finally got home that night, he decided he must be so exhausted that he was hallucinating. In the reflection of the fluorescent light in the kitchen, he thought he saw a single eye pressed up against the rain-soaked window. It was a hard, grey eye surrounded by a patch of wrinkled skin, crumpled against the wet glass, with water trickling around it in two small streams.

  He froze with his finger on the light switch. His first instinct had been to turn it off again so that he could see what was outside, instead of being distracted by the reflection of himself standing in his own kitchen, his mouth hanging open like an idiot. But he waited until everything came properly into focus and his brain began to work again. Halfway up his kitchen window, there was a snail.

  He supposed it had been following the stream of rainwater - though what it hoped to find on his window, he couldn’t imagine. Its antennae wag
gled left and right, as if it couldn’t quite figure out where it was.

  Cooper tilted his head to see the creature better. Its underside looked like the pursed lips of a long-dead corpse.

  ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ he said.

  He watched it for a moment longer, then looked at his watch, remembering the appeal for sightings of Mansell Quinn was due on the local TV news. He drew the blind, and turned to find Randy smiling at him from the floor, eyes half-closed and his front paws paddling on the tiles.

  ‘Yes, I was talking to you, obviously,’ said Cooper. ‘Who else would I be talking to?’

  He began to relax, shrugging off the uneasy feeling he’d

  151

  experienced when he entered the flat. It was just a wet, lost creature that had been watching him from the night, after all.

  The blow came out of the darkness like a stab of lightning. It caught Simon Lowe in the back of the head and half stunned him. He staggered for a few seconds on the edge of a grave, his brain bouncing painfully against his skull, unable to make sense of what had happened. He knew the wall of the church was only a few yards away, but he couldn’t see it. He saw only blurred streaks of light shooting across his vision. He knew there must be someone behind him in the churchyard, but his muscles had lost the power to turn his body or lift his head. There were other people, too, dozens of them laughing and shouting, back there in the warmth of the pub. But he couldn’t hear their voices. Simon heard only a faint whistling in the air, a sound which seemed to go on almost for ever, until the second blow fell.

  152

  15

  Wednesday, 14 July

  The incident room staff at West Street had been maintaining a sequence chart. It showed what was believed to be the order of events leading up to the murder of Rebecca Lowe, and following it. It also revealed the gaps which the enquiry team’s efforts had so far failed to fill.

  Some time during the morning, the analyst had removed two items from the chart and replaced them with additional information. Each entry had a time, a description of the information and its source.

  ‘I can’t help worrying that we’re relying too much on doubtful intelligence to dictate the direction of the enquiry,’ said Ben Cooper, running his eye over the chart. ‘There ought to be some trace and interview tasks for us to handle, at least.’

  Diane Fry didn’t even glance at the chart. No doubt she’d checked the new information already, before anyone else came into the office.

  ‘It’s a resources decision, Ben,’ she said. ‘Why should we commit staff to needless T/Is and chasing down witness statements when a ready-made suspect presents himself on a plate? It’s manpower on the ground that’s vital now. Quinn can’t be far away.’

  153

  Cooper shook his head. ‘We’ll just end up doing the work later on.’

  ‘Let’s hope not.’

  ‘DCI Tailby wouldn’t have done it this way. He’d have made sure all the possibilities were covered.’

  ‘Yes, but that approach fills up the system with vast amounts of irrelevant data. There’s a lot to be said for being more focused.’

  ‘Provided you’re focusing on the right things,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Well, we’ll see who’s right, won’t we?’

  To be fair, plenty of intelligence was available this morning - calls were flooding in from members of the public responding to the local TV news bulletins. A decision had been taken to release Mansell Quinn’s name as a person being sought to help with enquiries, and all the usual phrases. The broadcast of his mugshot had netted a shoal of potential sightings, even before the attack on Simon Lowe in Castleton last night.

  ‘Any news from the hospital?’ said Cooper.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ said Fry. ‘A few cuts and bruises, that’s all. He’s lucky the people in that area take an interest in each other’s welfare. In a lot of places, he would have been left to bleed.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he saw anything?’

  ‘No. He was attacked from behind, in the dark. And it seems the resident who heard the disturbance and found him made a big performance of putting all his lights on and creating a lot of noise before he came out of his house, so the assailant was well away before he got near.’

  ‘Sensible.’

  ‘But not helpful to us, in the circumstances. Lowe’s attacker could have been anyone - an opportunist mugger, or just some drunk who thought Lowe looked at him a bit funny in the pub. Who knows?’

  Cooper looked at the map again. ‘But the temptation is to chalk it up to Quinn, right?’

  154

  Fry shrugged. ‘Scenes of crime are there, but I don’t think we should hold our breath for anything useful. If it was Quinn, he’ll be off to the next place by now. He vanishes too easily for my liking.’

  ‘He knows the area well,’ said Cooper. ‘But why would he attack his own son?’

  But Fry had turned her attention to a call from a lady living on Moorland Avenue, Hathersage.

  ‘Near Mansell Quinn’s mother?’ she asked the actions allocator in the incident room.

  ‘That’s right. She’s lived there for a long time and knows Quinn by sight. But she wasn’t sure until she saw his photo on the news last night. Now she says she saw him in the street near his mother’s house on Monday afternoon.’

  ‘I knew old Mrs Quinn was lying,’ said Fry. ‘I just knew it.’

  Cooper felt uncomfortable at the tone of her voice. He didn’t like being lied to himself, but it went with the territory. Some people lied to him automatically, simply because he was a police officer, and all he could hope for was an opportunity to expose the lie. Fry’s reaction sounded too much like gloating.

  ‘You’ll get a chance to ask her to explain herself, anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Damn right.’

  A large-scale map of the Hope Valley had also been pinned to the wall of the incident room. Rebecca Lowe’s house in Aston was marked in red on the slopes of Win Hill, halfway along the valley, as was Castle Street, where a local resident had found Simon Lowe lying unconscious in the churchyard.

  Blue stickers flagged Raymond Proctor’s caravan park outside Hope and Mrs Quinn’s home on the estate at Hathersage. A third blue sticker had been reserved for when they located William Thorpe. The bottom of the map reached as far south as Bradwell and Hazlebadge, and right up to the

  155

  Camphill gliding club on Abney Moor. Just off the map was Bridge End Farm.

  ‘Damn it, the quickest and easiest way for him to get from Hathersage to Aston would be on the train,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘We need to talk to the station staff at both ends and see if they remember him.’

  The railway line from Sheffield to Manchester, passing through Totley Tunnel and up the valley, with stations at Hathersage and Hope. The Sheffield stretch was also used by cement trains from the works. But what Hitchens had noticed was that Hathersage railway station lay right behind the estate where Mansell Quinn’s mother lived, while the stop at Hope was only a mile from the marker indicating Rebecca Lowe’s house at Aston. The red blobs made the connection obvious.

  ‘I think they’re both unmanned stops,’ said Cooper. ‘He’d have to buy a ticket from the guard on the train.’

  ‘Is that how it works? Well, check it out, Cooper. See if you can map his route to Rebecca Lowe’s house. Any sightings of him. You know the routine.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘This is all very well,’ said DCI Kessen, settling the team down again. ‘But we’re only establishing where Quinn has been, not where he is now. Or at least where he might be heading next.’

  ‘With respect, sir, the key to his intentions surely lies in the past,’ said Fry. ‘Either with the circumstances of the Carol Proctor case fourteen years ago, or with what happened while he was in prison.’

  The quite agree, DS Fry. So what about while he was inside? Any interactions with his family or other contacts that might cast light on his intentions?’ />
  ‘Well, his mother doesn’t seem to have visited him very often,’ said Fry. ‘She was cagey about it when we spoke to her, but her name doesn’t appear in the visitor records at

  156

  Sudbury for the two years he was there. We’ve haven’t checked back any further than that, but if we need to …’

  ‘No, that’s enough.’

  ‘And the victim, Quinn’s ex-wife, hadn’t visited him for ten years. Though I got two different versions of why that was - one from his mother, and one from her sister, who both might be considered biased, I suppose.’

  ‘These two close friends of Quinn’s ‘

  ‘Former close friends,’ said Hitchens. ‘I think that’s how I described them.’

  ‘Don’t tell me - they were so close they couldn’t be bothered to visit him in prison?’

  ‘It’s true he doesn’t seem to have had many visitors to speak of.’

  ‘OK, the two friends … ?’

  ‘Raymond Proctor and William Thorpe. Proctor, of course, was the husband of Quinn’s first victim.’

  Till grant you, that’s enough to damage a friendship. Your best mate kills your wife, it puts a bit of a dent in the old camaraderie.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  Cooper turned to stare in amazement at Murfin. It was unlike him to offer constructive comments during a briefing. He was more the sarcastic muttering under his breath sort of man.

  ‘What do you mean, DC Murfin?’

  ‘Well, it depends on what sort of relationship you have with your wife. The state of your marriage, like. Some folk would be glad to get rid of their better halves. Grateful to the bloke who did her in, even.’

  DCI Kessen looked at him silently for a moment, his mind almost visibly ticking over. Cooper reflected that this was one of the differences between working for Mr Kessen and their former DCI, Stewart Tailby. Cooper had liked Tailby, but he’d have put Murfin down within seconds.