05.One Last Breath Page 19

  He jogged back down the ramp, and found Murfin starting to doze in the car.

  ‘Gavin, you might want to visit the fitness centre over there.’

  ‘Visit a fitness centre? Me?’

  ‘Look – see the woman on the treadmill up there?’

  Murfin looked up. ‘Oh, yeah. She’s not bad. Well spotted, Ben.’

  ‘She has a great view of the platform – or she would have, if she took her eyes off her console. And anyone using those machines on Monday evening would have been able to see Mansell Quinn boarding the train.’

  ‘So you want me to go and talk to a load of women in leotards and tight shorts?’

  ‘If you can manage that.’

  ‘Manage it? It’s what God made me for. But what are you going to do?’

  ‘Take a little train ride.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘I can’t stop to explain, Gavin – there’s a Manchester train due in two minutes. I’ll be back in not much above an hour.’

  When a pair of diesel units appeared around a curve in the track, Cooper was the only passenger waiting to get on. Realizing he ought to let Diane Fry know what he was doing, he checked his mobile. No signal. And the payphone was on the other side of the track – no time to get across and back before the train came. Oh, well. He could explain later.

  On the train, a guard wearing a uniform of shirt, tie and checked jacket in three different shades of blue charged him a couple of pounds, then had to tap a lot of buttons on the metal box strapped round his neck to produce a ticket. At Bamford, Cooper watched him operate the doors and step out on to the platform to see passengers on and off before signalling the driver.

  The train crossed the River Derwent on a bridge of steel girders just before it slowed to enter Hope station. Cooper looked at his watch. The journey from Hathersage to Hope had taken just seven minutes. DI Hitchens had been right so far – it would have been ridiculously easy for Mansell Quinn to get here from his mother’s house in Moorland Avenue.

  To cross the tracks at Hope, Cooper had to climb a set of wooden steps on to an iron footbridge where two men with cameras were standing. They must be waiting for express trains to come through, because they didn’t look interested in the diesel units that had just pulled away.

  He soon found a path that led into trees and through a kissing gate before heading up the hill to Aston. A stone barn with a corrugated-iron roof stood in the middle of a field, adjoining an old cattle shelter full of spray tanks. An ideal place to loiter unseen, if you needed to.

  By the time he reached the village, Cooper was breathing hard. But the walk hadn’t been taxing, just short of twelve minutes from the station. And he hadn’t seen a soul, apart from the trainspotters on the footbridge and a few sheep. In another minute or two he would pass right by Rebecca Lowe’s driveway at Parson’s Croft.

  A woman came towards him with a Labrador trailing at her heels. She gave him a close look before saying ‘hello’. Cooper knew he didn’t look like the average hiker. If she was a resident, the woman had probably been interviewed already and would be suspicious of strangers.

  At Parson’s Croft, a liveried police car was parked on the driveway and a uniformed female officer stood near the front door, but otherwise it was quiet. The press had gone away, moving on to the next news story as soon as the SOCOs and detectives had dispersed.

  Rebecca Lowe’s killer wouldn’t have needed to approach the house via the main gate. The hedge around the property was five feet high, but ragged. It consisted largely of elm saplings, which would die before they reached maturity as the beetles that spread Dutch Elm Disease got under their bark. Cooper could have forced his way through in several places. Had the Crime Scene Manager worked on the assumption that the killer had arrived via the obvious route? Or had the weak points in the hedge been examined for fibres left on the branches by someone pushing their way through?

  What Cooper really wanted to do was explore the garden, but his presence would have been recorded. In any case, he ought to get back to the station if he was going to catch the train back to Hathersage.

  He reached Hope station with five minutes to spare and stood with a group of hikers on the Sheffield platform, listening to an announcement about a delay. Cooper looked round. Nobody seemed to be surprised.

  With a shriek and a whine, an express train thundered through. A plate on the locomotive said it was the ‘City of Aberdeen’. The two photographers ran from one side of the bridge to the other to get shots of the train. When it had disappeared around the bend, they began to pack their cameras away. Perhaps they were going for lunch in one of the pubs in Hope.

  Cooper gazed around the station. Unlike Hathersage, the platforms here weren’t overlooked. It was well out of the village, and the only vantage point was from the footbridge. On an impulse, he ran up the wooden steps and explained to the photographers what he wanted. He wasn’t very hopeful, but it made sense to cover all the bases while he was here.

  ‘When did you say?’ asked one.

  ‘Monday. Between seven thirty and nine in the evening.’

  The photographer shook his head and zipped up his bag. But the other man hesitated, reluctant to get involved, or perhaps keen to get started on his lunch.

  ‘I was here,’ he said.

  ‘You were?’

  ‘I live just down the road in Bradwell, and I noticed the light was interesting that night. There were some thunderclouds moving in from the west. Cumulonimbus.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It made for some nice lighting effects. I knew a Manchester express was due, so I chucked the bag in the car and came down.’

  ‘You were here, on the bridge?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘What time would you have been in position?’

  ‘About seven thirty, I suppose. I did a bit of setting up, checked the light meter, put a high-speed film in, and took a few trial shots.’

  ‘Did you notice anyone on either of the platforms?’

  ‘On the platforms?’ The photographer looked down from the bridge, as if seeing the platforms for the first time. ‘But they’re waiting for the local trains, aren’t they?’

  Cooper sighed, recognizing the fact that the photographer wouldn’t have noticed another human being unless they were there on the footbridge with him, comparing the sizes of their zoom lenses.

  ‘Have you had the film developed?’ he asked.

  ‘No, it’s still here in my bag.’

  ‘Would you let me borrow it? I’ll give you a receipt, and you’ll get free prints from it.’

  Cooper heard the first rattle of the approaching Sheffield train, the one that would take him back to Hathersage. He braced himself for an argument that he didn’t have time for.

  ‘Will it help?’ said the photographer.

  ‘It might do. I can’t say until we have a look at it.’

  The friend was fidgeting impatiently in the background, tapping the iron railing of the bridge. The photographer looked over his shoulder at him. And Cooper saw with relief that he, too, didn’t have time to get into a long argument.

  ‘Here, you can have it,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they’ll come out too well, anyway. The sun was at the wrong angle.’

  Diane Fry had more driving to do this afternoon. Just her luck, when she felt so bad and all she wanted to do was stay indoors, away from the pollen. She’d have to leave her car windows closed all the way. Her doctor had told her to avoid freshly-cut grass, but from May onwards the stuff was all around her in the Peak District. First there were silage trailers blocking the roads, and then vast loads of hay bales filling the air with dust. Try keeping that lot out of your car.

  Fry had two more people to interview this afternoon – first, Mansell Quinn’s probation officer, and then a convicted burglar called Richard Wakelin, aged twenty-five, who lived in Allestree, on the outskirts of Derby. Wakelin had been the last person to speak to Quinn on his release from HMP Sudbury. She didn’t
think that Quinn would have said anything to either of them that would hint at his intentions or where he was heading. But the long shots had to be covered. At the moment, they had no other leads.

  On her way through Ashbourne, Fry pulled in at a chemist’s and bought herself some Zirtek antihistamine tablets. She ought to have had pollen-extract injections before the summer started. The tablets would be nowhere near as effective, but at least they’d make life more tolerable.

  On the train back to Hathersage, Ben Cooper showed his return ticket to the guard, who simply nodded, making no effort to clip a hole in it or tear it to show the return portion had been used. It didn’t seem quite right to Cooper. It meant he could use the same ticket again later in the day, if he felt like it. That sort of thinking must come from mixing with too many criminals.

  He took a closer look at his ticket. It showed the date and time he’d bought it, as well as his starting point and destination. In addition, there was a long serial number – seventeen figures in total. Before he got off at Hathersage, Cooper asked the guard what happened to his ticket machine when he finished his shift.

  ‘I just hand it in at the office with the money, and collect a new one when I clock on again the next morning.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Cooper watched him go through his routine, checking passengers on and off the train, closing the doors, giving the driver his signal. A small crowd had got on at Bamford, and the guard hadn’t managed to issue tickets to them all by the time the train arrived in Hathersage.

  If the train had been full on the evening that Mansell Quinn had travelled on it, the guard might not have reached him by Bamford, or even Hope. There must be people who managed to take short journeys without ever buying a ticket. It wasn’t likely that the guard would remember one individual who’d ridden two stops on a busy evening run, unless that passenger drew attention to himself.

  And a man planning to commit murder wasn’t going to do anything to draw attention to himself, was he?

  As Cooper walked back down the ramp to the car park at Hathersage, the smell of garlic was wafting from one of the bungalows. Someone had tied a bouquet of flowers to the station fence as a funeral tribute to a train service that had been cancelled. The flowers themselves were long since dead.

  ‘How did you get on with the lycra ladies?’ he asked Murfin, who was waiting in the car.

  ‘They’re a bit self-obsessed.’

  ‘They didn’t notice anything?’

  ‘Nope. And, worse than that, they weren’t interested in me. Still, I got a coffee out of it. No cake, obviously. What about you, Ben?’

  ‘I met a trainspotter.’

  ‘Well, the afternoon wasn’t entirely wasted, then. Did you get his autograph?’

  ‘Better – I got a film.’

  ‘You’re hoping to get evidence that Quinn was at Hope? A bit of a long shot, isn’t it?’

  Yes, of course it was. And it still wouldn’t answer the big question: where did Quinn go after he left Rebecca Lowe’s house at Aston? Back to the station? If so, he might have retraced his route and returned to his mother’s home in Hathersage. Alternatively, he could have stayed on the train and travelled as far as Sheffield, or crossed the tracks and been in Manchester within an hour.

  In either case, it would be difficult to track him down. No known associates of Quinn’s lived in either city, so there was nowhere to start. DCI Kessen could ask for Quinn’s details to be circulated to all the B&Bs, hostels and cheap hotels – but there must be hundreds of them, possibly thousands. And what about the railway and coach stations? The airports, even? How much money did Quinn have with him, anyway? Might his mother have subbed him, handed over her life savings to help him get clear? Could she have found enough for an airline ticket? Nearly two days had passed since Rebecca Lowe had been killed. In theory, Mansell Quinn could be anywhere in the world by now.

  Cooper shook his head. There was only one consolation. Any one of these scenarios might make Quinn more difficult to find – but at least it would mean he was out of Derbyshire for a while, and therefore not a threat to anyone else he might have on his list. But in his heart, Cooper felt that Quinn was still around.

  He looked at the Ordnance Survey map he kept in the car, locating Aston and then the railway station half a mile away down the slopes of Win Hill. The station was a long way out of Hope village. That was because instead of continuing up the Hope Valley, the line took a shallow curve to follow the course of the River Noe and crossed a series of small bridges before it met the cement works spur. Trains had to pass over three unmade roads leading to farms or isolated homes. He could see some of the names on the map – Farfield Farm, Birchfield Park, the Homestead.

  And there, just a little way to the north of Hope station, less than a mile west of Rebecca Lowe’s house, was the track that led to Wingate Lees. The Proctors’ caravan park.

  Cooper shivered, though he wasn’t cold. Thunder flies had coated the windscreen of his car, dying slowly in their dozens on the hot glass. He tried to clear them away, but his wipers smeared them into a sticky mess, leaving greasy swirls embedded with black specks. It took several minutes before he could see clearly enough to drive back through Hathersage.

  20

  Before she got ready to go out that night, Diane Fry spent ten minutes running through some exercises, winding down from the day, flexing her muscles and stretching her limbs until her body tingled comfortably.

  It had been a frustrating afternoon. Neither the probation officer nor the released prisoner, Richard Wakelin, had been able to offer her any insights into Mansell Quinn’s mind. It looked as though Quinn had been playing his cards pretty close to his chest for some time, as if he knew that somebody like her would come along asking questions.

  In the middle of a bend, Fry found herself looking at a patch of wallpaper, noticing where the edge had starting peeling away from the wall. She’d never really noticed it before. She always felt she’d been lucky to find the flat in Grosvenor Avenue when she came to Edendale. It was depressing, but in a tangible sort of way. It contained no painful memories or associations, no significant possessions from her old life – she’d thrown them all away.

  But Angie’s arrival had changed that. The flat was no longer empty of feeling. It was starting to fill up with random recollections, incidents from her childhood that she’d long since forgotten or buried in her subconscious. They were reappearing now in the sound of a half-familiar phrase of Angie’s, or in the tone of her voice, or a gesture of her hand that hadn’t changed since she was a teenager. They were creeping into the corners of the rooms and hanging in the air – small things in themselves, but capable of catching her off guard with a jolt of remembrance. Some of the memories made her smile, but others took her breath away with the pain they caused.

  She closed the window of the sitting room to keep out the pollen, had a shower and washed her hair, hoping for an allergy-free atmosphere for a while. But still she sneezed and her eyes ached. She used tissue after tissue, screwing them up and throwing them in the bin. Sometimes, she screwed one up just for the sake of it, because it made her feel a bit better.

  ‘God, is it that bad?’ said Angie, after watching her sister for a while.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can’t you have a jab for it or something?’

  ‘It’s too late for that. I’ve got some tablets, which might help. But otherwise, you’ll just have to watch me suffer.’

  ‘You can still eat, can’t you?’

  ‘If I don’t try to breathe at the same time.’

  ‘Because we’re going out tonight, you know.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten. It’s all booked.’

  Angie watched her throw another tissue towards the bin and miss. Fry remembered that there was a genetic link to hay fever. Allergies ran in families.

  ‘Angie, did you ever have hay fever as a teenager?’ she said.

  ‘Nope. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered. It was
one of those things I couldn’t remember.’

  ‘You didn’t catch it from me, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’

  ‘I couldn’t have caught from you. It’s an allergy.’

  ‘Well, there you go. I never had an allergy in my life.’

  Fry sniffled. ‘Something else we don’t have in common, then.’

  After he’d delivered the tape and film to the incident room at West Street, Ben Cooper realized it was time for him to go off duty. No overtime today.

  His face felt itchy, and he brushed at his cheeks and forehead, suspecting they were covered in thunder flies, attracted by his sweat. There always seemed to be one week of the year, in the middle of July, when the flies moved in from the fields and invaded the town in swarms. Walking down Clappergate and the High Street became an ordeal; it was a mistake to leave any parts of your skin bare outdoors. Even in the office, they were impossible to avoid. They were attracted to computer screens, and he often found them sitting among the black letters as he typed, like stray commas. No matter how many he squashed under his thumb, another would appear in a different part of the text.

  Closing the windows failed to keep the flies out. There were too many of them, and they were too small. Every draught of air through an open door brought more in, and anybody entering from outside carried dozens of them on their clothes and in their hair. By the end of the working day, all Cooper wanted to do was get home and have a shower, in the hope that he could get rid of the itchiness.

  He went into the men’s toilets and splashed cold water on his face. Drying himself with a paper towel, he looked in the mirror, seeking the black specks he’d imagined were crawling in his hairline and sitting in the folds behind his ears. But he could see nothing.

  As soon as he entered his flat, Cooper heard the bang made by Randy coming in through the cat flap. But instead of marching straight into the sitting room, the cat stayed in the kitchen. It was an unusual enough break in routine for Cooper to go to see if he was all right.