05.One Last Breath Page 3

  These days, he supposed farmers treated their seed with chemicals to kill the poppies, to make every crop they planted perfectly pure and golden, totally sterile and dull. There was no more scarlet among the yellow, no more blood in the cornfields. Now, the blood moved only in his memory.

  Rick looked at Quinn, leaving his own fantasy world for a moment.

  ‘Have you been inside for a while, like?’

  ‘Thirteen years and four months.’

  ‘Thirteen years? That’s tough.’

  Quinn could see him working it out. You learned to do that in prison – to calculate parole and automatic release dates, all the stuff that the system hid with acronyms, as if they were no more than letters on the page of a report, rather than the days of a man’s freedom. Rick could work it out for himself. Thirteen years and four months meant his sentence must have been at least twenty years, even without parole.

  ‘A lifer, then?’

  They had emerged from the underpass, back into the light. Quinn turned slowly, trying to orientate himself. The busy stretch of trunk road above him was new, and he didn’t know which direction anything was from the underpass. It was almost as if the prison existed in a strange little universe of its own, created to keep it away from the rest of the world.

  ‘Yes, a lifer.’

  He knew that Rick wanted to ask the next question, but something was stopping him – maybe he was distracted by the slight stirring of the air between them, a draught blowing up from the underpass, causing a swirl of dust at their feet. Rick opened his mouth to speak, but a look of doubt clouded his eyes and he didn’t ask.

  ‘Who did you kill?’ he wanted to say. But he didn’t.

  And that was a good thing. Because Mansell Quinn might not have been able to tell him.

  There must be a way for the buses to come down off the A50, because there was a stop right here near the underpass and another across the road. In fact, there was a bus coming now, on his side of the road, heading for Burton upon Trent.

  ‘Here we go, then. Here we go.’

  Rick took a firmer grip on his carrier bag. He spat into the gutter and watched his saliva seep into the dust.

  ‘Good luck, mate,’ said Quinn.

  His companion looked at him oddly, but his attention was diverted by the approach of the bus. As soon as it pulled up to the stop and the doors folded open, he jumped on board.

  Suddenly, Quinn took a step back from the bus stop. He gave the driver a blank stare as the man met his eye expectantly. Rick turned to watch him, not understanding what was happening, perhaps even a bit hurt. Then the doors closed, and the driver accelerated away from the stop.

  Quinn watched the bus until it was out of sight. Despite the noise of traffic, all the cars were passing above him, on the main road. He looked for a moment at the exit from the concrete underpass, at the barbed-wire fences and the pale, bland acres of corn. Then he crouched, picked up a lump of stone that had fallen from the banking, and hurled it at the bus shelter. A glass panel shattered and crazed, its broken fragments showering on to the tarmac like crushed ice.

  For a moment, Quinn smiled at the noise that exploded into the silence. And then he began to walk. Behind him, four words still seemed to echo amid the sound of shattering glass: Who did you kill?

  3

  Rebecca Lowe’s new house in Aston had been built to be almost airtight. The insulation created a difference in the internal air pressure from the outside world, so that the back door opened with a soft little cough as it parted from its draught-proof lining. The air was sticky outside, and the thunder flies were swarming. The tiny black insects covered everything when she wasn’t looking, and even the thought of them made her skin prickle, so that she constantly wanted to wash her face.

  Inside the house, she had air conditioning. It had been one of the things Rebecca had insisted on after the discomfort of the previous summer and its record high temperatures. She couldn’t bear the humidity, which made her head ache, her temples throb and her hands slippery with perspiration. She’d slept badly for weeks, and changed her bedclothes every morning. The rumble of the washing machine had become a permanent background accompaniment to the long summer days.

  In the new house, she could be cool. Parson’s Croft had been built of breeze-block on the inside, but with local gritstone on the outside, so that it blended in with the older houses and the landscape, as well as meeting the national park planning regulations. The site had a belt of mature sycamores and chestnut trees to screen the house and provide shade when the sun was in the west. But the air conditioning only worked properly if she kept all the doors and windows closed. Sometimes, the atmosphere in the house tasted stale, as if she were breathing the same air over and over again. It created its own kind of oppressiveness, a feeling that was almost as bad as the humidity outside.

  Her dog Milly felt it, too. She lay in her basket all day, dozing restlessly, until it was time for her evening walk. And even when she got outside, she was bad tempered. She would yap at strangers, or worry obsessively at a stick or a piece of stone lying on the grass verge.

  Today, Rebecca felt she would even welcome rain to bring a bit of freshness. As she finished washing up and wiped her hands, she walked into the lounge to look out through the double-glazed picture window. She examined the view down into the Hope Valley and up the slopes of Bradwell Moor and Abney Moor, her gaze skirting quickly past the tall chimney of the cement works in Pindale. Grey clouds were gathering over the moors, with darker patches among them, like blue bruises in the sky. There might be a shower later, with a bit of luck.

  The phone rang in the still air. Rebecca put her towel down on the window ledge before she answered it, immediately identifying a familiar voice.

  ‘Mum, you know what day it is today?’

  ‘Monday,’ said Rebecca. ‘There, you see – I’m not entirely ga-ga yet. Try me with another one.’

  She heard her daughter sigh at the other end of the line. She could picture Andrea sitting in a coffee bar somewhere, or striding along a London street with her mobile phone clamped to her ear. Living independently in the city and being good at her job as a buyer for a big retail chain had turned her into a formidable young woman.

  ‘Today’s the day he’s coming out, Mum,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, they told me.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not? But, Mum, what if he comes out there?’

  Rebecca was still looking out of the lounge window. She could see nothing but the flowering cherry tree and buddleias at the bottom of her garden, and a pair of mature lime trees. Red-and-black butterflies fluttered around the buddleias, bright and gaudy in the sun. A flycatcher dipped from his perch on the telephone wire, caught a mouthful of food on the wing, and landed back on the wire in one graceful movement.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll come here,’ she said.

  ‘A change of name isn’t going to fool him, you know.’

  ‘Of course not, Andrea.’

  ‘So what will you do, Mum? What precautions are you taking?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t fed Milly for days,’ said Rebecca lightly.

  ‘Mum, a geriatric Shih Tzu isn’t going to do much to protect you from an intruder, no matter how hungry she is.’

  ‘I was joking, dear.’

  Rebecca moved a little to the right and lifted the curtain aside. Beyond the lime trees, she could see part of the field that backed on to the garden of Parson’s Croft. The field sloped away towards a stone barn where the farmer kept hay as winter fodder for his sheep.

  ‘This is nothing to joke about, Mum. You’re remembering to set the burglar alarms, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Mum, if you’re not taking any precautions, I’m going to have to come up there and make sure you do.’

  ‘No. I don’t want you to.’ But then Rebecca heard her daughter’s intake of breath, and realized she might have sounde
d rude and ungrateful. ‘Not that I wouldn’t be pleased to see you. I always am, dear, any time. But I’m all right. Really.’

  ‘What about Simon? He’ll come and stay with you for a while. You know he will.’

  ‘Yes, he offered, but I told him not to. He’s not very far away, and I can always phone him. But I don’t want you or your brother to think you have to drop what you’re doing. You’re both much too busy.’

  She heard her daughter sigh. ‘But, Mum –’

  ‘Look, I’m sure he won’t come here.’

  ‘Mum, remember what happened. You do remember what happened?’

  ‘Of course, dear. I was involved at the time. You weren’t.’

  ‘Not involved? I was twelve years old. You may not have been paying much attention to me, but I knew exctly what was going on.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Rebecca. ‘I don’t think you can have known exactly what was going on, can you?’

  ‘Well, OK. Just don’t tell me I wasn’t involved, Mum.’

  Rebecca leaned to the left and let her forehead touch the glass of the window. This way, she could just make out the gable end of her neighbours’ roof. It was another new house, but much bigger than hers, with a fishpond, stone terraces, and a vast billiard-table lawn with sprinklers that ran eighteen hours a day in the hot weather. She rarely spoke to them, but they would occasionally smile and wave if they passed her in their Jaguar as she walked Milly on the lane.

  ‘I’m sorry, Andrea,’ she said. ‘You’re right. It must have been very traumatic for you.’

  Her daughter went away from her phone for a couple of seconds. Rebecca could hear background chatter, and wondered if Andrea was mouthing a commentary at somebody sitting with her, wherever she was, exclaiming in exasperation at the impossible eccentricity of her mother back home in Derbyshire.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said Andrea when she came back to the phone, ‘what on earth could you have to talk to him about now, Mum?’

  ‘There are things,’ said Rebecca, ‘that you might say were still unresolved.’

  ‘Oh God, Mum. I despair of you.’

  Rebecca smiled. Her daughter really didn’t know everything.

  ‘But, in any case,’ Rebecca said, ‘he won’t come here.’

  With an effort, Raymond Proctor smiled and nodded, forcing himself to be pleasant despite the anxiety in his stomach. These people were customers, after all. And customers were too few these days at Wingate Lees. They were a family from Hertfordshire – mum, dad and two kids. Their car stood near the roadway in front of one of the static caravans, ready to go.

  ‘Where are you off to today, then? Somewhere nice? The weather should be all right for you, I reckon.’

  The woman stopped for a moment, ushering her children ahead of her to the car. ‘The kids want to go to one of the caverns,’ she said. ‘We thought we’d visit the one you suggested to us yesterday, Peak Cavern.’

  ‘Ah. The Devil’s Arse,’ said Proctor, grinning.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘That’s what they call it these days. I suppose they thought it would be more marketable.’ Then Proctor saw she wasn’t smiling. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s not the sort of language we think suitable for the children to hear.’

  Proctor shrugged. ‘I’m afraid you’ll see it on the signs.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll go somewhere else, then. There’s Speedwell.’

  ‘Well, that’s interesting, too. But Peak Cavern’s best. Let me know what you think of it when you get back. Say hello to the guide for me while you’re there. And don’t forget to ask him –’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ The woman turned to go.

  ‘It’s a pleasure,’ said Proctor, maintaining his smile. ‘Of course, if you’re going underground, it won’t matter what the weather’s like, will it? I said, it won’t matter …’

  But the woman didn’t answer him. She fussed over the children’s seat belts and snapped something at her husband as she got into the passenger seat next to him.

  ‘Unless it rains really, really hard,’ said Proctor through gritted teeth, after they’d started the engine. ‘And then the caves might flood, and you could all drown.’

  He kicked the head off a wallflower growing in a bed near the phone box, and winced at a twinge of pain in his leg. His arthritis was troubling him this morning, which meant it probably would rain later, after all. Slowly he walked past the shop and the TV lounge, irritated as always by their log-effect façades. The design had been Connie’s idea – she said it would go with the style of the cabins and give the site a theme. But Proctor thought it made the place look like a Wild West frontier town. Just too bloody tacky for the sort of guest he was trying to attract to Wingate Lees.

  There was a lot of competition from other caravan parks in the Hope Valley, and Wingate Lees was a bit off the main road for passing trade. People had to turn off the A625 for half a mile, then drive over Killhill Bridge and under the railway line to find his little site tucked into the edge of Win Hill. The nearest village was Aston, but there was no way of getting there from the site except by walking – and nothing to do if you went there, anyway.

  The reputation of Wingate Lees was important if it was going to survive. He didn’t have endless amounts of money to spend on marketing, so he relied on word of mouth to get him business. He needed his guests to be happy. Though, God knew, it was difficult to be polite to some of them when what they really deserved was a kick up the backside. A lot of the time, he hardly felt like bothering.

  Proctor supposed he might feel differently about the business if Alan were here to run it with him. Having somebody to pass it on to – that was what mattered. But all he had was Connie and her kids, and it wasn’t the same at all. Nothing was the same as your own son.

  He stopped to check on the girl who helped in the shop and looked after the coin-op laundry. Then he glared across the grass to where Henry, the maintenance man, was raking the gravel around the hardstandings. He couldn’t find fault with either of them, so he kept on walking, passing along the lines of mobile homes to the touring caravan pitches, and past them to the pond, which his promotional leaflets called a water amenity. A copse of trees lay across the pond, and an area of grass where visitors could walk their dogs. Convenient exercise facilities available for the use of pet owners.

  Four old caravans were pitched here, well away from the rest of the site and in the shadow of the railway embankment. He only let these out to visitors when the rest of the place was full – which was a rare occurrence these days – or if he had a bunch of students on the site he didn’t like the look of. If they wrecked an old ’van, it would be a lot cheaper to replace than one of the family units, which had to be in good condition or he’d lose his customers.

  This was where Proctor came to get away from the family. He could see the house from here, allowing him advance warning if Connie was on the prowl.

  Because there was no demand, he hadn’t maintained the old ’vans properly, and now some of the joints in the shells had developed leaks. The lad who came in to wash the caravans must have noticed, because he hadn’t bothered to clean these two. Moss had started to grow on their surfaces, staining the paintwork green. The heavy rain in the last few days had streaked the dirt, making their deteriorating condition even more obvious.

  Proctor was breathing heavily by the time he reached this part of the site. He’d been getting overweight ever since he married Connie. She fed him junk food every day, then told him he ought to get more exercise.

  He’d come this far feeling calm enough, but now he felt uneasy as he reached out to try the handle on the door of the first caravan. He rattled it quickly, withdrawing his fingers as if he might get burned. He peered through the orange curtains, using his hands to cut out reflections from the window. Then he moved on to the next caravan and did the same.

  ‘What are you doing, Ray?’

  Proctor jumped guiltily. His wife was standing on the other side of the pond. Sh
e was wearing a baggy white sweatshirt and yellow pedal pushers that emphasized the muscles of her thighs. And her feet were shoved into those ridiculous trainers with enormous tongues and lights in the heels. That was why he hadn’t heard her coming.

  ‘Just checking the old ’vans,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In case we need them.’

  ‘Ray, take a look around you – half the site is empty.’

  ‘You never know.’

  Connie stared at him in open disbelief. ‘Really.’

  ‘I’m making sure everything is OK down here, that’s all. We mustn’t let them get too neglected.’

  She looked at the mould and streaks of dirt on the nearest caravan. ‘Neglected? You should have got rid of them years ago. If you want something useful to do, there’s still that leak in cabin six that needs fixing.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’ll see to it in a minute.’

  But Connie stood watching him until he sighed, moved away, and went back through the trees. She would have put her hands on her hips like an old schoolmistress – if she had any hips.

  A cement train ran southwards across the bridge, with a long line of Blue Circle tankers coming away full from the Hope works. As they rattled over the stone arch, their wheels rumbled like approaching thunder. The sound went on for so long that Raymond Proctor found it hard to resist breaking into a run.

  Down at the cement works, Will Thorpe had watched the line of tankers leave. Now, an excavator was trundling along the skyline, a black outline against the afternoon sun as it worked its way along the edge of the quarry. Beneath Thorpe’s feet, dead bracken branches snapped, releasing puffs of cement dust. Decaying leaves still lay on the ground from the previous autumn, but now they were white, as if they’d been covered in frost.

  Thorpe licked his lips. They were dry and cracked from the sun and dust. He knew he should stay away from the Hope works. His lungs hurt badly enough without the abrasive powder that hung in the air. But at night, it was irresistible. Here, the night-time world was a window on to another reality. The works was lit up like a city in a science fiction film, full of glittering towers and glaring lights, with drifting spurts of steam and mysterious rumbles and screeches from hidden machinery.