05.One Last Breath Read online

  It was very warm inside the porch, the glass panels focusing too much sun into the small space. The cat looked listless, and barely roused itself to stare at Cooper when he clicked his tongue at it. Bluebottles buzzed around the plants, and one of them circled Cooper’s head as he introduced himself to Jim Thorpe. He swatted it away, but still had the impression that it followed him into the house.

  Mr Thorpe was a morose-looking man with a long, bony face like a sheep. His wrists and chest sprouted wiry hair, which burst from the cuffs and collar of his shirt. Raymond Proctor had said he was a miserable bugger, and Cooper had come prepared to find exactly that. Old or middle-aged men living on their own were rarely the most sociable of people. But tea had been offered readily when he arrived, with the instinctive hospitality of a genuine country person.

  While Mr Thorpe was out of the room, Cooper bent to take a closer look at the window sill near the door. The sill and the lower edges of the casement were covered in spots of blood. They were smeared on the white paint across a wide area, but not in a consistent pattern – and at the same time too far apart to be caused by a spray of blood from a wound.

  ‘Biscuit?’

  Cooper jerked upright, embarrassed to find that Mr Thorpe was watching him, a cup and saucer in one hand and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies in the other. His face registered no curiosity about what his visitor had been doing with his nose pressed into the window sill. But Cooper mentally chided himself for becoming so absorbed that he’d lost his alertness.

  ‘Er, yes – thank you.’

  ‘Take a seat, then.’

  He pointed at the table, and Cooper pulled out one of the dining chairs. Mr Thorpe himself sat in the armchair near the window. He had his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and the sunlight fell on his bare arms, making the forest of fair hairs glint and sparkle. The cat walked into the room and rubbed itself against the old man’s legs. Thorpe seemed to ignore the animal at first, but as soon as he’d settled in his chair, the cat jumped on to his lap and began to purr. Thorpe stroked it obediently.

  ‘As you know, I’d like to talk to you about your son, William,’ said Cooper.

  Now Mr Thorpe became even more morose. His nose seemed to droop towards his moustache, and his expression became puzzled and slightly pained. It was a Swaledale ewe he resembled, thought Cooper.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ said the old man.

  ‘Yes, sir. I interviewed him earlier today.’

  ‘What would you call my son, then? A loner, a hermit, an outcast? Maybe a tramp?’

  ‘None of those, sir.’

  ‘Well, that’s what you say.’ Mr Thorpe took a drink of tea. ‘He joined the army, you know. Will was happy in the army. The life suited him down to the ground. There were rules for everything, and somebody to tell him what to do all the time. He never had to make a decision for himself.’

  Cooper frowned. ‘Your son saw service in a number of hotspots. He must have been in action.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So I imagine he had to make a few tough decisions along the way, don’t you?’

  Mr Thorpe lifted one hip and pulled out something that had been pushed down the side of the seat cushion. It was a newspaper, but one that had been folded and crushed into a shape about a foot long.

  The old man shook his head. ‘He was trained how to respond to everything. He was trained when to shoot people, and how. He was trained always to obey orders. He was trained by his mates how to enjoy himself when he was off duty – how many pints of beer he was expected to drink, how often he was supposed to go with a tart, when it was the right time to get in a punch-up. You know.’

  ‘Some people need that kind of structure.’

  ‘William needed it. It was no good for him at home. He had no mates here, and no routine. It made him edgy and frustrated. Any time he came home on leave, it was obvious he couldn’t wait to get back to his regiment. He’d go out all night and drink himself silly, then sleep all day. It broke his mother’s heart. She saw so little of him, and she was always disappointed when he was here.’

  Mr Thorpe seemed to have become distracted. He didn’t look at Cooper as he spoke, but at something in another part of the room. Suddenly, the old man raised the newspaper and smacked it down hard on the window sill. He lifted it again and inspected the underside: a flattened bluebottle was stuck to the paper. Mr Thorpe flicked the squashed body towards the fireplace.

  ‘Filthy little buggers,’ he said.

  Even from his chair at the dining table, Cooper could see a new smear of blood on the sill.

  ‘We get a lot of wildlife in here,’ said Mr Thorpe. ‘You can’t keep nature out.’

  Cooper nodded. Bridge End Farm was like that in the summer, too. If they left a window open at night, the whole of nature would end up inside the house, one way or another.

  ‘Your son must have had a few mates around here,’ he said. ‘He didn’t go drinking on his own, did he?’

  Jim Thorpe looked at him with vague eyes, as if surprised to find somebody sitting at his table, listening to what he was saying. Cooper wondered if he, too, talked to the cat when he was alone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who were those friends, Mr Thorpe?’

  ‘You know who they were.’

  ‘Mansell Quinn and Raymond Proctor?’

  ‘Aye, those were the two that William drank with most when he was on leave. They’d kept in touch for years. Quinn and William acted as best man for each other when they got married.’

  ‘Your son’s marriage didn’t last, did it?’

  ‘About eighteen months. Compared to some young folk these days, that’s a marathon.’

  ‘She didn’t like army life?’

  ‘She got bored in no time. She was working as a receptionist at a car showroom when she met William. I always reckoned she only wanted to get married so she could be the centre of attention for a day.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Buggered if I know. She found some other bloke quick as you like, and went off with him.’

  Cooper examined the biscuits. He was trying to judge which might be the least stale without having to pick them up, which he had been brought up to consider rude. Finally, he chose one from the bottom of the pile, but knew as soon as it was in his fingers that he’d made the wrong choice.

  ‘Why didn’t your son come home here after he was discharged from the army?’

  The old man began to stroke the cat a little faster, brushing the back of its head too hard, so that the cat growled a low warning. He didn’t look at Cooper, but at the phone on the table, as if regretting the call he had made earlier. Surely he must have known he’d be asked questions that might be painful. There always came a time to face up to these things. For a moment, Cooper wondered what had made Jim Thorpe decide to make that call. But it didn’t really matter.

  ‘Like I told you, he was always bored here,’ said Thorpe. ‘And he had some friends in Derby, old army pals. I never met them, but I expect he would have been happier with them.’

  ‘I don’t think he was,’ said Cooper. ‘He went off drinking again in Derby. Only this time, he was on his own.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘In the end, he had no friends left.’

  Thorpe lowered his head towards the cat, which purred more loudly. Cooper thought he had seen a faint glitter in the old man’s eye for a moment, but he couldn’t be sure.

  ‘And you know he’s ill? He has emphysema.’

  Thorpe nodded.

  ‘But you wouldn’t let him come back here to live when he called you, would you?’

  Jim Thorpe lifted the cat off his lap and put it down on the floor. He got up and left the room without a word, leaving Cooper chewing the last of a stale biscuit. The cat glared at him, knowing without hesitation whose fault the interruption was. Cooper put his hand out to the cat as a friendly gesture. It opened its mouth in a sharp snarl and lashed out with a paw. A set of claws whistled past the skin on the
back of his hand.

  ‘OK, I get the message.’

  A few more minutes passed, and Cooper began to feel very uncomfortable. He was about to get up and leave quietly, thinking he had already outstayed his welcome, when he heard footsteps in the next room.

  ‘This is William when he was a youngster, with me and his mum,’ said Thorpe.

  The family photographs. Cooper groaned inwardly. He wasn’t sure what he had said or done to bring on a burst of nostalgia. But perhaps he should have got up and left while he’d had the chance. Now it was going to be more difficult to do it politely.

  ‘Very nice,’ he said.

  ‘No. You’re not looking properly,’ said Thorpe.

  Cooper looked at the photograph again. He could recognize Jim Thorpe without any difficulty, though he must have been about forty years younger. The long, bony nose and morose expression were distinctive, even under the flat cap he wore. He was standing in front of the farmhouse with his arm round a dark-haired woman in a flowered dress. She was a well-built, cheerful-looking woman, a woman that his mother would have described as ‘bonny’. This was no scrawny receptionist from a Buxton car showroom. She was made to be a farmer’s wife. Standing in front of the couple, and looking rather shy at having his photograph taken, was a boy of about six with soft, dark hair falling on to his forehead in a fringe. He was smiling and leaning into his mother with a look of contentment.

  ‘William?’ he said, tapping the picture of the boy.

  ‘Of course. We never had any other children.’

  There was nothing unusual about the photograph, as far as Cooper could see. They were an ordinary family group – a little old-fashioned for the middle of the 1960s, but that wasn’t surprising for a farming family. The latest trends didn’t reach Derbyshire hill farms for a decade or two. He could see nothing worth commenting on. Yet Thorpe waited impatiently for him to notice something.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.’

  Thorpe jabbed a finger. ‘There, look. A cigarette.’

  Cooper had to squint to see the faint trail of smoke caught by the camera as it drifted across the sleeve of Thorpe’s jacket towards his wife.

  ‘You smoked. But I still don’t see …’

  He looked around the room he was sitting in. It hadn’t been decorated for years, yet the paintwork and the ceiling were merely dusty, not stained yellow with nicotine. There was no sign of an ashtray, not even a plant pot with a pile of butts stubbed out in its compost. And Mr Thorpe himself smelled slightly of cat hair and hay, which wasn’t particularly unpleasant.

  ‘You don’t smoke any more,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Not for years. Not since she died.’

  ‘Who? Your wife?’

  ‘She got lung cancer.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s very quick. But it took Sylvia a long time to die.’

  ‘Did she smoke as well?’

  ‘No.’

  Thorpe took the photograph from him. He looked at it for a moment, then he drew another from the envelope and passed it over.

  This one showed only father and son. Cooper wondered for a moment who had taken the photographs, but guessed it was some visiting relative insisting on a snap of the occasion. It was obvious that this time neither of the subjects had wanted to be photographed. And certainly not together.

  William Thorpe might have been in his mid-twenties by then. He was tall and upright, and he looked tough and smart in his soldier’s uniform. Perhaps he had just arrived home on leave that afternoon, and his relatives had been so impressed by the uniform that they’d had to get a snap. And, of course, his proud father had to be in the picture, too.

  The family resemblance between the two Thorpes was noticeable this time, in a way that it hadn’t been when the boy was six years old and smiling. This young man looked as though he didn’t know how to smile and had never smiled in his life. He was frowning and serious. No, not serious – angry.

  ‘That was the last time he came here,’ said Thorpe.

  ‘He looks very smart,’ said Cooper, knowing how inane the comment sounded. But the old man didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘She was dead by then.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And William said it was me that killed her.’

  Diane Fry reached Derby again by the late afternoon. The address she’d been given by the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters regimental office was in an area of Victorian terraced housing close to the city centre. Most of the people on the street were Asian, and an old Methodist church had been converted into a Hindu temple.

  The original sandstone lintels and door jambs had been cleaned and brick chimney pots added at some time. But the northern façade of the entire row had been rendered with cement. The render had turned grey and somebody had chipped it off in several places, as if to check what was underneath. A few tufts of grass were pushing their way through cracks at the base of a chimney, where seeds dropped by birds had germinated in the warmth and a thin covering of soot.

  ‘Oh yeah, Will was in a state,’ said the friend, Eddie Berrow. ‘I mean, the bloke ought to have been able to pull himself together. He was a soldier, for God’s sake. He fought in the Balkans. He must have seen some shit go down in his time.’

  ‘It’s different when the shit is happening to you,’ said Fry.

  ‘Oh, yeah? Know about that, do you?’ said Berrow, giving her a sharp stare.

  ‘Why did he leave?’ she said. ‘Did you kick him out?’

  ‘We didn’t have any choice. He lay in bed for the first few days, then went out on a bender. Well, that was OK, we all like a drink and a bit of a laugh. But for Will, the party just went on and on. He didn’t want it to end. I reckon he had decided he never wanted to be sober again. He spent his money on booze, drugs, gambling, women – bloody hell, he went through it like water.’

  ‘Women?’ Fry hadn’t imagined Thorpe forming relationships.

  ‘Prostitutes,’ said Berrow. ‘But only decent ones.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘We couldn’t stick it any more, Terry and me. So we packed his bag one day and left it out on the doorstep – not that he had much stuff of his own, basically just what he had when he came out of the regiment. Will got the message. I mean, he wasn’t paying us rent or anything. And we knew he wasn’t coming into the business by then. The fact is, he’d just become a liability. Being an old mate is one thing. Being a right royal pain in the arse is another.’

  ‘He’d changed from when he was in the army?’

  ‘Oh, totally.’

  ‘He didn’t have any problems when he was in the regiment? Like the alcohol, I mean.’

  ‘We all drank quite a bit, of course,’ said Berrow. ‘But no drugs. Soldiers have to go through random compulsory drug testing. A positive test means a discharge.’

  ‘Right, I see.’ Fry looked around the interior of the garage. ‘Are you the one who’s the expert on Samurai swords?’

  ‘No, that’s Terry.’ Then Berrow looked at Fry more keenly. ‘Are you interested in buying?’

  ‘I could probably find a use for one, but not just now.’

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘Business not good, then?’

  Berrow shrugged. ‘We never did find a location for a shop. Without Will, we didn’t have enough money between us for the rent.’

  ‘So he scuppered your business, in effect?’

  ‘No, we do mail order. Are you sure you’re not interested?’

  Ben Cooper wondered whether he had really learned anything useful from his visit to Rakelow House, except that Jim Thorpe’s name might be one they should add to the ‘at risk’ list.

  ‘I don’t know much about it, Mr Thorpe,’ he said. ‘But there’s no way the doctors could say conclusively that your wife’s lung cancer was caused by passive smoking, is there? What evidence could there be?’

  ‘Who needs evidence?’ said Thorpe. ‘It’s
what you believe that counts. Like religion.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘William never had any doubts. He was a pigheaded sort of a lad in a lot of ways. Priggish, too.’

  Cooper picked up the most recent photograph again. ‘How long is it since your wife died, Mr Thorpe?’

  ‘Twenty years, nearly.’

  ‘So this photograph was taken …?’

  ‘On the day of her funeral.’

  ‘And that was the last time he came home?’

  ‘Aye. William got compassionate leave and arrived home a couple of days before the funeral. The night before we buried his mum, we had a blazing row. I was smoking a lot then, as you might imagine – it was a bit of a trying time. But then, I’d always smoked a lot. Had done since I was a kid. We didn’t know any better then.’

  ‘And William blamed your smoking for his mother’s lung cancer – that’s what he meant when he said you’d killed her?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘But your son was a smoker himself.’

  ‘All his life, practically.’

  ‘So –’

  Mr Thorpe shook his head. ‘Don’t ask me to explain that. Maybe some of it was guilt. But there was something else as well. William was always getting hold of odd ideas, and once they were in his head, they stayed there. Somebody had told him about this gas – radon.’

  ‘Radon? I know it can be a problem in some areas.’

  ‘We’re on limestone here, you know,’ said Thorpe. ‘William said radon can be sucked into houses that are built on limestone. He said that two thousand people a year die from it. And he said that breathing tobacco smoke and radon multiply your chances of getting lung cancer.’

  ‘And that was your fault?’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Thorpe. ‘If I hadn’t made Sylvia live here, and hadn’t smoked, she might still be alive. So William was right, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Mr Thorpe, I have no idea.’