One last breath bcadf-5

by Stephen Booth

  The bag contained a Coke bottle. It looked like the bottle that had been sitting on the Quinns’ table in the crime scene photographs. Cooper could see the fingerprint dust on the surface.

  Faithful old fingerprints - they were sometimes sniffed at these days by forensic experts who described them as an art, not a science. But the team attending 82 Pindale Road in 1990 had dusted the bottle for prints. And they’d found them, though they were too smeared to get a match. That was odd

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  in itself - glass was perfect material to lift fingerprints from. Unless it had been deliberately wiped.

  With a weary sigh, Cooper put the file down and looked at his watch. He wondered if he’d ever get chance to take a look at the Quinns’ old house in Pindale Road.

  Finally, he saw Diane Fry coming into the room. She looked as tired as he felt.

  ‘William Edward Thorpe,’ she said. ‘He started off as one of your actions, didn’t he, Ben?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In fact, he was a TIE - to be traced, interviewed and eliminated.’

  ‘We traced him and interviewed him.’

  ‘But somebody else managed to eliminate him.’

  ‘Mansell Quinn?’ said Cooper,

  ‘It seems a good bet. Looks as if DI Hitchens was right - Quinn has got a list.’

  ‘Thorpe was the odd one out, though,’ said Cooper.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We know where all the others on the list are.’

  ‘Always assuming,’ said Fry, ‘that Quinn’s list is the same as ours.’

  ‘But this one doesn’t feel right,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Why?’

  Cooper was looking at the map showing Quinn’s appearances in the Hope Valley. ‘It’s in the wrong place somehow. But then, the pattern is probably just accidental.’

  ‘Of course it is. Quinn isn’t planning all that carefully, is he?’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper doubtfully.

  He remembered descending Siggate into Pindale from the field barn. He’d been able to see all the way to the top end of the Hope Valley, where the yellow street lights glowed along the A625. He’d made out the dark belt of trees that marked the route of the railway line from the cement works.

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  It passed Hope Valley College and swung towards the main line near Killhill Bridge.

  A little to the east, he’d seen the lights of the Proctors’ caravan park, Wingate Lees. But the lights had looked dimmer there. They were half hidden by the railway embankment and the slope behind the site, as if trapped between the shadows.

  ‘What arc you reading that’s making you look like that?’ said Fry.

  Her voice sounded nasal and muffled. She had a tissue pressed to her nose, and her eyes were red.

  Cooper showed her Rebecca Quinn’s statement.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Quinn’s wife said he was the kind of man who stored things up.’

  ‘For days, she said. Not fourteen years.’

  ‘It might have been a shorter time if he’d had the opportunity to get the anger out of his system. But he didn’t have the chance on the inside. He has now, though. Now that he’s out.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘It still doesn’t feel right, Diane. Tracking people down one by one isn’t an explosion of rage. It’s far too calculating. Too cold. Exactly the things Rebecca said Quinn wasn’t.’

  ‘Ben, nobody doubts Quinn’s guilt.’

  ‘Don’t they?’

  ‘The evidence was pretty convincing - at least, the jury must have thought it was.’

  ‘It’s all circumstantial,’ said Cooper.

  ‘One piece of evidence wouldn’t have been enough to get a conviction on its own, I grant you. But, taken as a whole, there was enough to make a substantial case. The jury decided it went beyond the possibility of coincidence. Quinn was there, Ben. Right on the spot. He had Carol Proctor’s blood on his hands.’

  ‘But what exactly is the evidence that Quinn killed his ex-wife on Monday night?’

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  ‘There were no signs of a breakin. Somebody came into the house who knew her, or who had a key. Unless she left the back door unlocked.’

  ‘There’s no way Quinn would’ve had a key to Parson’s Croft.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘Are there any traces that identify him?1

  ‘You know we don’t have his DNA on record, Ben. There are some fibres at the scene that might be from his clothing, but until we locate him, we can’t attempt a match.’

  ‘It’s all conjecture, isn’t it?’

  ‘He’s a convicted killer, Ben. He was released from prison that morning, and promptly disappeared. We know he turned up shortly afterwards in the Hope Valley area - we have plenty of hard evidence for that. There are witnesses, we’ve got him on film. And then his wife is killed within a few hours. He came back to the area for a reason, Ben.’

  ‘Like I said, it’s conjecture.’

  Fry sighed. ‘Rebecca Lowe knew she was at risk from him. She had a phone conversation with her daughter about it that afternoon.’

  ‘Actually, Andrea said that her mother insisted she wasn’t worried.’

  ‘And she went on to say that her mother was just putting on a brave face for her benefit.’

  ‘It means nothing either way. Not as evidence.’

  ‘Ben, your trainspotter got a photograph of Quinn within half a mile of Parson’s Croft that evening. Does that mean nothing?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘All this will become academic when we find Quinn himself.’

  ‘You hope,’ said Cooper.

  ‘What else we can we do in the meantime?’ She laughed when she looked at his expression. ‘Unless you have another suspect in mind?’

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  Cooper flushed a little. ‘I think it’s odd that we have no witnesses who saw Quinn in Aston. He would have been conspicuous.’

  ‘And you think the fact that no one saw him proves he wasn’t there? You can’t prove a negative, Ben. It was dark when he left - no one would have seen him crossing the fields. Everyone who was outside would have gone indoors. No croquet players, no dog walkers. He planned it carefully. But he had a bit of luck, too. That’s the story, Ben, right?’

  ‘OK.’

  Fry glared at him. ‘I’d ask you what your problem is, but I know already, don’t I?’

  Cooper reached for his jacket. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’m going home for a few hours. I think I’ve had enough for now.’

  ‘Haven’t we all?’

  He headed for the door, conscious that Fry was watching him all the way. He was almost out of the office when she called his name, and he stopped.

  ‘Yes, Diane?’

  ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘happy birthday.’

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  Mansell Quinn cut off the forelegs at the first joint and scored the skin of the belly, careful not to pierce through to the gut or bladder. Then he loosened the skin around the back legs. Keeping one end of the hare’s body taut against the other, he pulled the skin down towards the stumps of the forelegs. It was stiff in places where it clung to the body, but slowly it peeled away, uncovering the layers of muscle and sinew. Finally, the skin came cleanly over the head of the animal in one piece.

  Quinn gutted the animal carefully, wiping the blood and fluids from his fingers so that the knife didn’t slip in his hands. He wanted to save the liver, which was valuable protein. When he’d finished, he buried the stomach and intestines under a tree and washed his hands in the stream. He watched the thin swirls of blood curling downstream on the surface of the pure, cold water. The smell of the gutted hare would linger in the vicinity for a while, but it couldn’t be helped.

  He’d built a small fire to cook the hare. He could survive for a while without food, as long as he could get water. But he mustn’t go hungry for too long, or he’d start to lose his strength and h
is mental alertness would be blunted. Already,

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  he was feeling a little light-headed. It left him a bit detached from reality, and that was dangerous. It would be too easy to make a mistake if he wasn’t fully alert.

  He was pleased with the results of his practice with the crossbow. He’d used one before, many years ago, before he’d gone inside. The strange thing was that he remembered Ray Proctor as the one who’d been interested in them. Ray’s father had let him have an air rifle from an early age, and Ray had bought himself a crossbow as soon as he could afford it on his wages from the building site. He was forever persuading his friends to go with him on to the moors and into the old quarries to shoot rabbits and pigeons. Once, Ray had shot a swan on the river and broken its wing, which had sickened Quinn. But Will Thorpe had been keen on that, all right.

  Quinn lifted his shirt to look at the wound in his side. The blood had almost dried now, but he’d have to wash the stains out of the shirt if he was going to avoid being too noticeable when he went down into Castleton again. The cut was clean. The crossbow bolt had penetrated the layer of fat above his left hip - almost the only fat on his body these days. He was lucky that Will Thorpe’s hand had been none too steady when he fired.

  In fact, Will had been in a pretty bad way. Quinn told himself that he’d done him a favour, really. There came a point when it wasn’t worth living any more.

  To eat his meal, Quinn moved to a vantage point on an outcrop of limestone. It was a narrow valley with thickly wooded slopes and a river running in the bottom. In places, its sides rose into vertical cliffs riddled with small caves and old mine workings. It would take him days to do a proper recce, but he hadn’t prepared for it. It had been the sight of the police swarming in the Castleton car park that had forced him to find a refuge out of the town. Someone must have recognized him leaving the toilets.

  After he’d cooked the hare and eaten the thin strips of

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  meat, Quinn washed himself in the stream. He still felt hungry. He had that same gnawing in his belly that hadn’t gone away for days. In fact, it had been there for months. For years.

  Later that morning, Quinn noticed the sheep. It was a young ewe that had somehow scrambled through the fence at the top of the slope, no doubt thinking it had spotted some tidbit the others couldn’t reach. Now it was teetering on the rocky edge, finding the ground too unstable to get back up, and too frightened to go any further down. There was always a suicidal sheep or two in any flock. This one would become weaker and weaker until a fox found it or the crows pecked out its eyes. He’d be doing it a favour.

  Quinn positioned himself against a horizontal branch and slipped a bolt into the crossbow. With luck, there would be mutton on the menu tonight.

  A moment later, he scrambled down the slope to where the sheep had fallen. His bolt had gone through its neck, and its legs were still kicking when he reached it. The twitching hooves were gouging holes in the leaf litter. He grasped a handful of wool and pulled the sheep’s head back, then drew the blade of his knife quickly across its throat, feeling the skin part and the blood vessels sever. As blood gushed on to the leaves, he withdrew the crossbow bolt from its neck and wiped both bolt and knife carefully on a fistful of damp leaves.

  Then he stopped and raised his head to listen. He could hear voices somewhere to the west, two females at least, coming his way. He reckoned they must be on the path that ran alongside the river further down the slope. The sheep wasn’t within view of the path, and he if lay still the women probably wouldn’t see him. It was a risk, though.

  As they came closer, one of the women seemed to raise her voice and call to someone. A child, perhaps? But then Quinn heard an answering bark. It didn’t sound like a large dog 354

  something like a terrier, perhaps. But that was bad enough.

  Reluctantly, he packed everything away and backed up the slope towards the denser woods, kicking the leaf litter over his footprints until he was on dry ground. When he reached the first limestone outcrop, he used the rocks for cover and increased his pace to put distance between himself and the dead sheep.

  Within a few minutes, Quinn was out of the dale and over a stone wall into a field. It was a pity to leave, but he could come back later when it was safe. Perhaps after nightfall, when there was no risk of being interrupted.

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  Despite the cattle grid that narrowed it to a single track, Winnats Pass was the main route from Castleton through to Chapel-en-le-Frith and the whole of the western side of the Peak District. It hadn’t always been the case, though. Just down the hill, Ben Cooper could see the remains of the old A625. A landslip from Mam Tor had swept it away after years of battling by the highways department to protect the tarmac from its unstable shale slopes.

  Diane Fry looked tired. He wondered if she’d managed to sleep at all before the early morning call to the abandoned field barn above Pindale.

  ‘These hills are an odd shape,’ she said, as they drove up the steepest part of the pass.

  ‘It’s a coral reef,’ said Cooper. ‘Well, a limestone reef.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘There was a tropical lagoon here. It stretched right down to Dovedale and Matlock, with a few volcanoes in the middle, and these reefs were the outer edge of it. The reefs were formed by algae and shells, the fossils of molluscs and corals. Fish teeth and scales, stuff like that.’

  Fry said nothing. She sniffed and scratched her nose irritably.

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  ‘Of course, that was when Britain lay south of the Equator,’ said Cooper.

  Silently, Fry got a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose.

  ‘You’re not impressed?’ said Cooper.

  ‘I’m waiting for you to start making sense again.’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  And it was true. The lagoon had existed here three hundred million years ago, and masses of shells had collected on the fore reef, where it shelved down towards the valley. It was one of the things Cooper had learned during his school project.

  He could still remember his own incredulity when he read the description in the work pack. But the sight of the limestone reefs in Winnats Pass had convinced him - even before he found his first fossils, the perfectly preserved imprint of a spiral shell in a piece of limestone, and the outline of a tiny fish in the face of the cliff.

  ‘Your birthday is today, isn’t it?’ said Fry.

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘I was wondering if you’re old enough to be grown up yet.’

  Carefully overtaking a cyclist who was going purple in the face on the climb, Cooper drove over the top of the pass. It had just occurred to him that Fry had taken the trouble to remember the date of his birthday - but he had absolutely no idea when hers was.

  ‘So it was too late, then?’ said Jim Thorpe. ‘He’ll never come home now.’

  ‘No, sir. I’m sorry.’

  Mr Thorpe looked beyond morose today. Ben Cooper couldn’t even think of a comparison. The old man had been crying, and he looked as though he might begin again at any moment.

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  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Mr Thorpe,’ said Cooper, shifting uneasily. Maybe he was undergoing an unnecessary guilt trip, but he had a sneaking suspicion that it had been partly his own fault.

  ‘I had to identify him,’ said Mr Thorpe. The hardly recognized him at first. But it was William all right.’

  ‘He was staying at a caravan park near Hope, but he decided to leave. That was a mistake.’

  ‘A caravan park?’

  ‘Belonging to Raymond Proctor.’

  ‘Oh, yes. But why there?’

  Cooper already felt guilty enough. ‘We agreed he’d be safer there, among other people. And 1 suppose he would have been safer, if he’d stayed.’

  ‘Why did he leave?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The cat was sitting in
the middle of the room, glaring at the visitors. Cooper sensed that it didn’t feel it was getting enough attention. It clawed at the carpet a bit, then clawed harder when nobody told it to stop. It came closer, and began to shred the table leg.

  ‘You never know what’s going to happen, do you?’ said Mr Thorpe. ‘It’s a bit like the weather in these parts. The sun might be shining one minute, but the next second you can be drowned by rain. Nobody can tell what’s going to come next.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Cooper.

  Thorpe looked at him sadly. ‘You said you met my son, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘But you never answered my question.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I asked you what you’d call him. A loner, an outcast, a tramp?’

  ‘No, sir. He was just a man who was lost without an institution to look after him.’

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  Cooper said it without having thought the idea through. But it sounded right. Leaving the army, Will Thorpe had been like a prisoner released after a long sentence, with his carrier bag full of clothes and no idea how much a bus fare home was. Thorpe and Quinn hadn’t been all that different.

  As they left Rakelow House, Cooper noticed one more thing. The house stood on the western side of the hill. It meant that old Mr Thorpe would always be able to see the weather coming off the moor, if he took the trouble to look.

  Gavin Murfin had been teamed up with a PC in plain clothes, and they had toured shops in Castleton with their photos of Mansell Quinn. Old-fashioned legwork, Murfin called it. He looked more exhausted than Ben Cooper had ever seen him, and he was stuffing a beef and mustard sandwich into his mouth with an air of desperation. Yet Murfin also seemed remarkably pleased with himself as he patted the PC on the arm like a friendly uncle and sent him to fetch the coffees.