05.One Last Breath Read online

  ‘You’re just trying to put me off,’ said Murfin.

  ‘He was in Northern Ireland in the eighties. Kuwait and Iraq during the first Gulf War; Bosnia, too. Did he see much action?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘I don’t know. They won’t give us that sort of information.’

  ‘I was just thinking a few survival skills would help him.’

  Fry shook her head. ‘Lots of people claim to have been in the SAS, but very few actually were. Even fewer ever talk about it, and the ones that do tend to write books. But we’ll check, anyway.’

  A railway engine went past on the cement works spur, pulling a line of dirty white tankers over the bridge.

  Fry gazed at the works. ‘This place is pretty big,’ she said. ‘What’s it doing here? How come the environment lobby didn’t stop it?’

  ‘It was here before the national park,’ said Cooper. ‘Besides, it employs a lot of local people.’

  ‘A bit of the real world, eh?’

  Cooper was sent to follow the public footpath that ran alongside the works fence and skirted the hillside hollowed out by quarrying operations. The whole scene was coloured a drab cement grey, but for red doors among the buildings and the occasional worker in orange overalls.

  Against a continuous background roar and rumble, he heard the squeal of some kind of machinery operating on the spoil heap at the edge of the quarry. Down in the centre of the works, he saw a slowly rotating metal tube about two hundred yards long, its end disappearing into one of the buildings. Cement several inches thick lay encrusted on pipes, like ice formed on the masts of an Arctic exploration ship. Sirens sounded now and then, but not the one like an air-raid warning he’d heard from Peveril Castle.

  The path crossed the tracks to the quarry itself, and conveyor belts rattled through a runway over his head. A vast hunk of machinery passed him on one of the tracks. He had to step aside and cling precariously to the banking in order to avoid its tyres, which only just fit into the width of the track.

  Then he found an abandoned concrete building. Its walls were broken and its steel reinforcements were exposed. It lay half-buried in a mountain of limestone chippings, like a bombed bunker.

  After only a few minutes in the vicinity of the cement works, Cooper’s mouth was starting to feel dry. His tongue was coated with dust, and he could taste nothing but limestone. Soon, he was having difficulty swallowing.

  Cooper looked down at the ground. The bottom inch of his boots had turned white with cement dust. When he stamped his feet, the dust flew off them in clouds.

  Diane Fry was standing on the grass in the middle of the works compound while a worker in orange overalls and a white helmet pointed out where he’d seen Thorpe. The strange structure of the pre-heater building towered above them, and the long metal tube of the kiln rumbled behind them as it rotated slowly.

  A marked police car pulled into the works entrance. Back-up. If Thorpe was around here and saw that, he’d be away.

  Cooper came to a point where three dirt tracks met just beyond the fence, and he stopped underneath the runway of the conveyor belt and a cement-encrusted pipe. Two uniformed officers were making their way up the path from the road, puffing a bit on the steeper stretches.

  ‘Some of these buildings near the fence are empty,’ said Fry. ‘They don’t look as though they’re used for anything. And there isn’t even a door on this one – anybody could walk in.’

  ‘We’ll have to check them, I suppose.’

  Cooper recalled the abandoned building outside the fence, half buried in waste limestone. No one could be desperate enough to try living rough in something that looked like a bombed-out bunker. But as a temporary refuge, it would do fine.

  While Fry directed the two PCs, Cooper walked a few yards further along the path. He thought the building had been under the gantries carrying the conveyor-belt mechanism, where the limestone came down from the rock crushers. At first, he couldn’t see it. His eyes had become too used to seeing everything in the same shade of cement grey. But the broken walls and exposed steel reinforcements gradually emerged from the dusty background.

  Cooper stepped on to the unstable heap of limestone chippings, his boots crunching as if he was walking on a shingle beach. He stopped, and looked back to see where Fry had got to. She was still some way down the track, and he ought to wait for her to catch him up.

  The continuous roar and rumble from the works and the squeal of machinery above him on the edge of the quarry made it difficult for Cooper to hear much else. But he heard the cough quite clearly.

  He peered through an empty and broken window into the darkness of the building, squinting to adjust his vision from the glare of the sun on the limestone. He felt as though he was staring deep into the hillside, though the building couldn’t have been more than a few yards across. It was a wheeze of breath that gave him a fix on what he was looking for, and a pair of startled eyes came suddenly into focus.

  Then somebody was running. A figure had burst out of the doorway of the building, ten feet up the right-hand track. Cooper tried to turn too quickly, and found himself slithering on the heap of limestone, with his feet sinking in as he threw out an arm to support himself, sending up a cloud of white dust.

  ‘Diane!’ he called. ‘Up here!’

  But Fry had already seen what was happening.

  ‘Don’t let him get away,’ she shouted.

  Cooper slid to the bottom of the limestone, scraping his hand on a protruding piece of reinforced concrete, and began to run up the track. The figure ahead of him was dressed in a dirty khaki anorak and baggy blue jeans, with greying hair that hung over his collar. Cooper felt sure it was William Thorpe. And this time, Thorpe wasn’t going to get very far. He had chosen to escape along the dirt track that led uphill towards the edge of the quarry, and he clearly wasn’t a fit man. Within seconds, he was starting to flag. Instead of running on his toes, he was kicking clouds of dust into Cooper’s face with his heels.

  In another moment, Cooper would have caught up with him. But then the ground began to shake, and a rumbling noise hit them as a dump truck came round a bend of the track and started to descend the slope towards them.

  Thorpe stumbled and froze. He looked tiny and helpless as he stood outlined against the massive snout of the truck. Its tyres came almost to head height, and it left barely two inches of clearance on either side of the track – nowhere near enough to fit a human body. If Thorpe tried to go to the side, the wheels would crush him against the dirt wall. And a thing that size wasn’t going to stop too quickly coming down a steep slope.

  Then Cooper had reached Thorpe. Grabbing his anorak from behind, he pulled him to the side and began to drag him bodily up the banking into the trees. Thorpe was lighter than he looked, but Cooper was unable to keep his footing and had to lie down in the dusty earth and brace himself against the root of a tree to get Thorpe clear.

  He became aware of the dump truck grinding to halt, and saw Fry standing in front of it on the track, waving her arms like a traffic policeman. Thankfully, Thorpe was lying still. He was breathing with difficulty and felt like a dead weight.

  Cooper’s mouth was full of dust. It blocked his saliva glands and stuck to the back of his throat like a coating of pebble dash. He was having real difficulty swallowing now. In fact, he didn’t want to swallow for fear of layering his stomach with an indigestible skin of limestone.

  Fry helped him to get Thorpe down from the banking.

  ‘Come along, sir,’ she said. ‘All we want to do is talk to you.’

  Back on the ground, Cooper looked down at himself. Earlier, the bottom inch of his boots had been white with cement dust. Now, his trousers were covered with it right up to his belt. No doubt it was on his back, too. He brushed at himself, but only added more dust to the air around him. He wondered if he could manage not to breathe until he got back to the car.

  23

  Mansell Quinn leaned his head against the wall and stared at the ceiling. He w
as sitting in one of the cubicles at the men’s toilets in the main Castleton car park. He’d managed to get a wash, and had even shaved himself as he sat in the cubicle, using the safety razor and mirror he’d brought with him from prison. Looking grubby would draw too much attention.

  The car park had two blocks of toilets, so there were plenty of cubicles for the people he could hear coming in and out. No one would trouble him for some time, unless a cleaner came by later in the day. He’d seen police walking the streets in Castleton, mingling with the visitors, wanting to be noticed in their yellow reflective jackets. For now, the car park was the safest place for him to be. Though it was right in the centre of Castleton, the only people around were tourists. They’d stay in town for a few hours, thinking of nothing but visiting the caverns, or the castle or the gift shops, and having lunch in one of the pubs. And then they would leave again, off to their homes miles away. They wouldn’t know Mansell Quinn, or even be familiar with the name. As far as they were concerned, he was just one more person with a rucksack among hundreds.

  But Quinn had picked up a copy of a Sheffield newspaper that somebody had left in the bin outside. When he unfolded it, his own photograph had jumped out at him. He’d known it would happen, and that wasn’t a problem. It was the picture of Rebecca that had hit him hardest. He hardly dared to read the story that went with it.

  The door of the toilets banged open, and he heard the voices of two or three boys entering and using the urinals. Quinn thrust his hands into the pockets of his waterproof and kept quite still. His fingers found some of the seedheads he’d pulled from the long grass growing near the river. He waited until he heard the taps running and the hand driers blowing before he took one out and chewed it. He’d found it gave him a bit of comfort. It produced a little surge of satisfaction as his teeth bit down on the hard kernel, cracking it with a tiny explosion in his jaw.

  Quinn was trying to hold in the rage, the way he’d been taught on the anger-management course. He knew that if he let it out, it would burst from his mouth like fire. With an effort, he forced it to disperse through his body. He could feel it seething in his guts and seeping out through the pores of his skin, until it seemed to shimmer around him in the cubicle like an aura. By the time the anger had died down, he was hot and sweating, and his palms left wet marks on the walls when he steadied himself to stand up. Finally, he dared to release a breath.

  There had been times in the last thirteen years when illogical things had made Quinn angry. Before Sudbury, he had been in HMP Gartree in Leicestershire, a place that reminded him of a 1960s comprehensive school. There hadn’t even been any bus services; a prison minivan ran visitors from the railway station at weekends, but not during the week, and taxis were far too expensive. Not that he had any visitors by then. Quinn had already seen the last of his children.

  But there had been a visitor centre located by the main gate at Gartree, with a play area and baby-changing facilities. Two afternoons a week, volunteers had run a children’s corner there. Perhaps it made some of the lifers feel better, but for Quinn the thought of children playing near the main gate made everything seem so much worse.

  He listened carefully, checking that the toilets were empty, then came out of his cubicle. He spat out the stalk from the grass seed, and took a last look at himself in the mirror over the washbasin.

  Quinn had learned more from the anger management course than the prison authorities would ever realize. He’d learned to recognize anger and channel it. He’d learned that it could be used. And he’d discovered that anger could give you strength.

  With a shrug, Quinn shook out his waterproof smock and put it back on. And then he went out into the rain that he could hear falling on Castleton.

  24

  William Thorpe sat in one of the interview rooms at West Street with his elbows on the table and his head drooping, as if his neck didn’t have the strength to hold it up.

  ‘You’ve no reason to keep me here,’ he said.

  ‘We just want to ask you a few questions, sir.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing.’

  Diane Fry consulted the file she had on William Edward Thorpe. She took a few moments over it, frowning a little, before she looked at Thorpe again. Watching her, Ben Cooper wondered if Fry had considered getting herself a pair of half-moon glasses, which would have completed the effect of a disapproving headmistress.

  ‘You’re here voluntarily, sir,’ said Fry. ‘You’re free to leave at any time. But if we don’t clear up a few things now, we may have to talk to you again in the near future. And if the matter becomes more urgent, we might not have time for all the courtesies.’

  Thorpe was thinking about it. For a moment, Cooper thought he was going to get up and walk out. Fry wasn’t even watching him, but had dropped her head to read the papers in front of her, as if it was of no concern to her whether Thorpe stayed or left, since she had plenty of other things to do. But Thorpe had understood what she was saying. He was free to leave now because he was co-operating voluntarily. If they had to pick him up a second time, it might not be so voluntary.

  ‘I’m not sure what you want to know,’ he said.

  Fry looked up, as if slightly surprised that Thorpe was still there. She smiled.

  ‘Well, let’s see what we can do about that, sir.’

  Cooper thought that Thorpe’s eyes had the pale, watery look of someone who never slept enough. They were deep in their sockets, and looked even deeper because of the dark shadows that lay on his cheekbones and underneath his eyebrows. His cheeks were covered in grey stubble that accentuated their sunkenness.

  ‘Mr Thorpe, you were discharged from the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment nearly a year ago,’ said Fry.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘A medical problem, I gather.’

  ‘My time was almost up,’ said Thorpe.

  ‘Even so, you left the army before your discharge date.’

  ‘A few months, that’s all.’

  ‘They don’t tell us what the medical problem was,’ said Fry, raising her eyebrows and turning over a page as if to look for a medical report she knew wasn’t there.

  Thorpe said nothing.

  ‘Nothing to be ashamed of it, is it?’ asked Fry.

  ‘I was diagnosed with emphysema.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘My lungs are shit.’

  ‘So you left your regiment a few months early. And you went to live at an address in Derby, according to your regimental office.’

  ‘That’s right. With a friend.’

  ‘You didn’t come home to this area straight away?’

  ‘I had no reason to, did I?’ Thorpe shook his head. ‘I still don’t know what you want from me.’

  ‘Let’s come forward a bit, then. You left the address in Derby. After that, your life is something of a mystery. Your regiment has no further record of you. No one seems to know where you were …’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Except,’ said Fry, ‘for a drunk and disorderly charge in Ashbourne in May this year.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘What were you doing in Ashbourne, sir?’

  ‘Getting pissed,’ said Thorpe. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Do you have more friends in that area?’

  ‘I might have.’

  ‘Staying with them, were you? I mean, I know old friends look after each other – especially army mates. They’re the sort of people you can call on when you need help, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they are.’

  ‘So, were you staying with a friend in Ashbourne?’

  ‘I’m not telling you about any of my friends.’

  ‘Well, if you were,’ said Fry, checking her file, ‘it’s odd that you were listed as “no fixed abode” when you appeared in the magistrates court there for your drunk and disorderly. Was that a lie?’

  ‘I’ve spent some time on the streets,’ said Thorpe. ‘I’m not ashamed of it. It just happened. Someti
mes, your circumstances change, you know.’

  ‘What circumstances would those be?’

  ‘Look, I stayed with some mates in Derby when I came out of the army, you know that. The doctors had told me I was a mess. I felt really pissed off that I’d spent all that time to reach my discharge date, and then suddenly there was no future for me.’

  ‘Had you planned a future after the army? I presume you must have. You knew your discharge was approaching.’

  ‘I thought of setting up a little business,’ said Thorpe. ‘A shop.’

  ‘Anything in particular?’

  ‘Weapons. Only legal stuff, obviously. Air rifles, slingshots, crossbows, samurai swords. That sort of stuff.’

  ‘Samurai swords?’

  ‘There’s a lot of demand. And I know about weapons.’

  ‘Do you, indeed?’

  ‘It was my main interest,’ said Thorpe. ‘In the army, I mean.’

  ‘But according to your regiment, you spent most of your time as a mortar man.’

  ‘I was an infantryman in the beginning, same as everyone else. Then I got into a mortar unit. You have to know about weapons. I mean, that’s what it’s all about.’

  ‘I don’t know much about mortars,’ said Fry. ‘But I’ve a feeling they’re a bit different from Samurai swords. A bit more twenty-first century.’

  ‘I can learn. I knew blokes who collected stuff like that. Two of my friends in Derby were going to come into the business with me. We were going to use the money we’d saved to start up a shop.’

  ‘So what went wrong, Mr Thorpe?’

  ‘Like I told you, it was the illness. It knocked the stuffing out of me at first and I couldn’t see the future any more. There just didn’t seem any point in putting all that work into starting a business. I’d never have seen any of the profit. That’s the way it looked at the time.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Thorpe sneered. ‘Do you?’

  Cooper could see that Thorpe was gaining more confidence as he talked. But that wasn’t a bad thing – at least he was talking. It was a sign that he felt on safe ground.