One last breath bcadf-5

by Stephen Booth

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘According to all the evidence, your father didn’t arrive at the house while Alan was there - or, at least, he wasn’t the first to arrive. The person your friend would have seen coming up the drive was Carol Proctor - his own mother. When she came into the house, he must have realized she was having an affair with your father.’

  ‘You don’t think he would … ?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Fry. ‘What do you think?’

  But Simon Lowe said nothing.

  ‘OK. So let’s try this - who told your father about Alan Proctor being there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t know? Mr Lowe, there’s only one person it could have been. Apart from Alan Proctor himself, you were the only one who knew.’

  She could see Simon was sweating now. If she’d made him uncomfortable, she’d achieved at least part of her aim in coming here.

  ‘My father wrote to me from prison once,’ he said. ‘His letter sounded almost reasonable.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About nine years ago, or a bit less.’

  ‘So you told him about Alan?’

  ‘He asked me what I remembered of that day. He said his memories were very vague and fragmented. Well, I understood that. I was like that myself for a long time after it happened. Shock can do that.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Lowe. So you told him?’

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  ‘I told my father what I could remember. None of it seemed important, especially after all that time. And I never heard from him again, so I put it out of my mind.’

  ‘Why do you think he didn’t write again?’ said Fry.

  ‘I don’t know. I supposed he hadn’t really wanted to make contact with me, but just needed the information.’

  ‘Well, there is another possibility.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Perhaps your father concluded that you knew who’d really killed Carol Proctor, but you’d let him go to prison for it, as everyone else had.’

  ‘Oh, but ‘

  ‘And maybe,’ said Fry, ‘he thought your betrayal was the greatest of all.’

  Simon glowered. ‘I hardly think betrayal is a word you can use in the circumstances.’

  ‘No? Didn’t you try to tell your father at one point that you weren’t his son?’

  ‘That was just something I said in the heat of the moment. I was only a teenager, and I was upset.’

  Fry paused for a moment, conscious that it made Lowe nervous about what was coming next.

  ‘Did you know that Alan Proctor was your half-brother?’ she said. ‘Your father’s son?’

  Simon looked as though all his fears had been realized. ‘What? My father - and Carol Proctor? I don’t believe it. That can’t be true, can it?’

  ‘You know it can,’ said Fry. ‘Ask Raymond Proctor. He believes it. And Alan found out later, too.’

  ‘That would have devastated him. He thought the world of Ray.’

  ‘Yes, I think the feeling was mutual. It was a dangerous kind of love, though, as it turns out.’

  The really don’t understand what you mean, Detective Sergeant. This is all too much to take in.’

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  Fry knew it was time to leave, and she studied the Lowes for the last time. The brother and sister always looked so close that it made her wonder what it would take to split them apart and set them against each other. There’d be something, no doubt. There always was.

  ‘What I mean, sir,’ she said, ‘is that DNA isn’t everything. As Raymond Proctor said to me himself only yesterday, blood doesn’t always have to be thicker than water.’

  When he saw Ben Cooper back in the office, Gavin Murfin was the first to slap him on the back, as if he were some sort of hero. But Cooper knew perfectly well that he wasn’t anything of the kind.

  ‘Well, we don’t need to do a DNA test on you, Ben,’ said Murfin. ‘There’s no mistaking who your father was. You’re so like him it’s unbelievable.’

  Cooper smiled. It was the reaction expected of him, and he’d practised it.

  ‘So they tell me, Gavin.’

  ‘I don’t mean just the way you look. It’s the way you go about the job. Joe Cooper was the same - he wanted to know everything about everybody. Who was doing what to who, how often and what with. It seems a bit of an old-fashioned idea to us modern coppers, but I suppose it has its advantages. He knew Mansell Quinn. And I’ll bet he knew Alan Proctor, too.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I gather he was a bit of a teenage tearaway, always getting into fights. I wonder if your Dad ever pulled him in for anything?’

  ‘I don’t know, Gavin.’

  ‘Away, when he was nineteen the magistrates finally lost patience and he got sent down for twelve months. He was past the age for youth detention centres by then, so he got a spell in Gartree. And guess who he ran into there, among Her Majesty’s guests?’

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  ‘Mansell Quinn.’

  ‘Right in one. And it was Quinn who knocked Alan Proctor’s front teeth out. He had to wear dentures after that. It must have been a right bugger for a lad in his twenties. According to the records at Gartree, Quinn would never give a reason for the assault. But they obviously had something between them. Who says they don’t let men form close relationships in prison?’

  Cooper could see Diane Fry busy at her desk. She seemed to have shaken off the hay fever, or at least the drugs were working. She looked less tired this morning than he’d seen her for days. At Simon Lowe’s house, Fry had been very much back on her old form - combative, direct and getting results. But missing all the subtleties.

  ‘Thanks for letting me come with you this morning, Diane,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘That’s OK, Ben. As long as you don’t take it into your head to have any more outings. You need to rest that leg. Stay in the office. Do some paperwork.’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘Simon Lowe is coming in later on to make a formal statement and have a chat with the DI. You can bet Lowe wasn’t very happy about it, but that’s too bad. I thought we got a lot out of him, didn’t you? It seems to tie up a loose end or two, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s what it does.’

  Fry looked thoughtful. ‘It’s a pity we can’t interview Will Thorpe again, though. He was very important in all this, wasn’t he? Thorpe felt under an obligation to Quinn.’

  ‘Of course he did, Diane. He made a choice fourteen years ago - Quinn hoped Thorpe would lie for him, but he didn’t. Even when you’ve made a right decision, you can still feel guilty about it. That was why he agreed to do favours for Quinn when he was due out of prison.’

  ‘Right. For a start, he got addresses for him. But when

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  Thorpe actually saw Quinn, he started to worry about what he’d do when he got out. So Will Thorpe must have told Rebecca Lowe the truth, mustn’t he?’

  ‘All of the truth?’ said Cooper, frowning. ‘Everything that he knew from Quinn - including about Alan Proctor having killed Carol?’

  ‘Yes, why not? He was trying to clear his conscience, I suppose. He knew he hadn’t got much longer to live.’

  ‘Let’s hope it worked, then.’ He frowned again. ‘But wait did Will Thorpe die knowing that Rebecca had been murdered, or not?’

  ‘Oh yes, Ben,’ said Fry. ‘Don’t you remember? We told him ourselves.’

  Cooper closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Yes, we did.’

  He’d been standing at the window of the CID room, but now he limped back to his desk. His leg wasn’t too painful, but he was resigned to being stuck on desk jobs for a week or two. He wondered about asking Fry if he could move his desk next to the window, so he could get a bit more light.

  Cooper was well aware of his own role in the death of Alan Proctor, and it didn’t make him a hero. The only reason that Alan had entered the cavern that night was because his elderly neigh
bour told him Cooper had gone there to look for him. Maybe the old girl really had thought he was a suspicious character, and had laid it on a bit thick. Otherwise, Mansell Quinn might well have waited in vain for Alan to appear on his security check, thanks to the false alarm at Speedwell.

  It was nothing if not ironic. At one stage, Cooper had imagined that Quinn was trying to draw him into the cavern. But he had never been Quinn’s intended victim. Alan Proctor had. And, in the end, Cooper had made it possible for Quinn to achieve his aim.

  And now where was Quinn himself? It seemed as though the caverns had simply swallowed him and digested him.

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  Cooper looked at Gavin Murfin. What was it Murfin had said a few minutes ago? ‘Like father, like son.’ Quinn had used the same words that day in Peak Cavern. At the time it had seemed he was talking about Cooper and his father, and he’d meant it as a compliment.

  He thought about fathers and sons while he tried to clear up some of the stuff that had gathered in his trays. You didn’t have to retire from the job for your desk to become everybody’s dumping ground around here. The layers of accumulated paper were as deep as the pile of the carpet at Rebecca’s Lowe’s house. Nothing had protected her at Parson’s Croft. But then, she hadn’t known what direction the danger would come from.

  ‘Diane,’ said Cooper.

  He heard her sigh. ‘Yes, Ben?’

  ‘What about Rebecca Lowe? Why would Alan Proctor have killed her! Why is there no forensic evidence? And what was his motive?’

  ‘We’ll never know, thanks to Quinn,’ she said. ‘With all three of them gone, the relationship between them is impossible to figure out.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  Cooper moved a stack of paper aside and found a packet of photographs. What were these? He slid one out. ‘The City of Aberdeen’, hurtling towards distant hills and an evening sky ominous with thunderclouds. He’d forgotten to send the trainspotter’s pictures back.

  The photo of Mansell Quinn on the westbound platform at Hope was missing, of course. But the photographer had been right - the light had been interesting that night. Over to the right he could see the slopes of Win Hill and Lose Hill, and in the centre the distinctive shape of Mam Tor stood out against the sky. Mam Tor meant Mother Hill. But it was a father who’d been most important in this case. Like father, like son. And there was something else that Diane Fry had

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  said today. Something about a dangerous love. DNA isn’t everything.

  Cooper dropped the photos suddenly and stared out of the window at the sunlight on the roofs of Edendale. It was a nice day again out there. But they’d had an awful lot of rain recently.

  He spun round to see if Fry was still there.

  ‘Diane,’ he said.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I know you said I shouldn’t think about outings …’

  ‘Yes, Ben?’

  ‘But do you have time for a drive?’

  She turned to stare at him as if he’d made an indecent suggestion.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Well, first of all, I’d like to call at the Cheshire Cheese in Castleton.’

  ‘A pub? It’s a bit early, Ben, isn’t it?’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘No, it’s late enough. I just hope it isn’t too late.’

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  46

  Beyond the railway line it wasn’t much of a road, more of a dirt track. But it had been well constructed, and it didn’t have too many potholes to gather mud when it rained. It passed a farm entrance and skirted the edge of Win Hill before petering out in a gateway. From there, the route marked on Ben Cooper’s street atlas was actually a public footpath that crossed a stile and ran along the edge of a field, where it was barely visible but for a line of flattened grass.

  ‘OK, the times fit all right,’ said Diane Fry. Ten o’clock at the Cheshire Cheese, and the journey between the two locations is what - fifteen minutes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘And it’s only a short walk from here.’ ‘It’s been too long to get any impressions from the track, Ben.’

  ‘And too wet. Shall we walk to the house?’ ‘What about your leg? Are you sure you can manage?’ ‘Well, that’s part of what we’re trying to find out.’ They followed the faint outline of the footpath, keeping a few yards to the side of it. And within ten minutes they’d reached the hedge of elm saplings.

  ‘Do we have to push our way through it?’ said Fry doubtfully, looking down at her clothes.

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  ‘No need. There’s a little gate, look. I never knew that was here.’

  ‘It doesn’t appear to have been used much.’

  Cooper eased open the gate in the hedge, wincing as it creaked on its hinges. ‘It needs oiling,’ he said.

  ‘OK, so we’re in the garden. What now, Ben?’

  ‘This way.’

  Fry followed him as he walked round the side of the house. Cooper crossed one of the lawns, then stopped.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘The concrete heron,’ he said.

  ‘We came all this way to look at a concrete heron? Why? You don’t even have a garden of your own, Ben.’

  ‘No. I wonder if it was made out of cement from the Hope works, though.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  Cooper put on a pair of latex gloves and grasped the heron’s head. It took the indignity with a stony glare.

  ‘Ben, what are you doing?’

  ‘If I take the weight a bit -‘ he said. ‘Diane, I can’t bend too well at the moment. Could you … ?’

  Fry crouched to look.

  ‘The base is hollow,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute …’ She reached out a hand.

  ‘I shouldn’t touch it. Fingerprints, you know. But I take it there’s a key under there?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the back-door key, I suppose. But this means somebody could have used it to get into the house.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Fry shook her head. ‘No, Ben.’

  ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘If somebody used the key to get in and kill Rebecca Lowe, why would they put it back?’

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  Cooper gently lowered the heron back into position and removed his gloves.

  ‘Habits die hard,’ he said. ‘If you’re used to handling keys all the time, it’s important to get into the habit of putting them back exactly where you got them from.’

  Fry nodded. ‘All right. I’ll get someone up here to check for prints.’

  ‘I think the concrete is probably useless for prints, especially after all the rain.’

  ‘But the key is perfectly dry.’

  Slowly, Fry walked back to the hedge and looked through it at the path they’d used to cross the field.

  ‘And you’re right,’ she called. ‘If he came under the railway bridge and parked where we have, it’s just a short walk.’

  ‘I had no trouble, despite my injured leg.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘So it would be easily manageable,’ said Cooper. ‘Even for a man with a touch of arthritis in his knee.’

  Fry nodded again, and Cooper went to stand alongside her at the hedge. Below the embankment of the distant railway bridge, he could see a row of static caravans, and the rustic log walls of the nearest holiday lodge.

  Then Cooper saw what he hoped for. He saw Diane Fry smile for the first time in days.

  ‘I think I’m going to enjoy this bit,’ she said.

  And then, after all that, she sent him back to the office to put his feet up and rest his leg. He wasn’t even allowed to be present at the arrest or take part in the search. Ben Cooper had never taken inactivity well. Now he felt like an invalid who had to be kept out of the way. A liability.

  Somebody had brought him a coffee, but he let it go cold on his desk while he sulked. He didn’t want to appear to be enjoying himself when they came back from the caravan park.
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  Then, when he finally saw Diane Fry coming through the door, Cooper threw his legs off the desk and couldn’t suppress a small gasp of pain.

  ‘Well, we found the knife,’ said Fry. ‘Do you want to guess where?’

  ‘In one of the old caravans,’ said Cooper, rubbing his leg. ‘Did he try to blame it on Iraqi refugees, by any chance?’

  ‘Not this time. But you’re right. Connie seems to have watched him like a hawk, so his options for disposing of it would have been limited and I suppose the old ‘van seemed as good a place as any to hide it. Nobody else went there except him.’

  ‘And Will Thorpe, when he was staying at the site. And us, when we asked to see inside them.’

  ‘Poor Mr Proctor - he must have been sweating bricks for days. Well, it was obvious all along that he was frightened. But it wasn’t Mansell Quinn he was frightened of. He told us that himself, several times.’

  The don’t know if you noticed,’ said Cooper, ‘but when we were in the office that day he made a bit of a fuss about finding the keys for the old ‘vans.’

  ‘So he did.’

  ‘I thought it was odd, because the rest of the keys were all neatly organized and labelled on their hooks. But there was one key that he had to get out of a drawer. That’s why he made a performance of it.’

  ‘I thought he was just being awkward.’

  ‘Also, Proctor tried to pretend he didn’t know Quinn was coming out of prison last Monday. But he must have known - he’d spoken to Rebecca Lowe earlier in the day. I checked the phone records - it was the office number at Wingate Lees that Rebecca rang, not the Proctors’ home number. It would have been Ray she spoke to.’

  ‘It seems likely. Connie told us he kept her out of the office.’

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  ‘And it wasn’t a short call. So I wondered what else they might have talked about.’

  Fry took off her jacket. She looked warm, but not dissatisfied with the day’s work. ‘Sounds as if you’ve been doing a bit of thinking while we were out, Ben.’