05.One Last Breath Page 32

  ‘Why would she do that?’ said Cooper, trying to put conviction into his voice.

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what I’d like to find out.’

  ‘Have you told her you don’t think she’s telling you the truth?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Fry sighed. ‘You don’t understand. I’ve just found her after all these years. Or you found her for me …’ She paused and looked at Cooper, who tried to meet her gaze, but failed and dropped his eyes. ‘I might be wrong, and I can’t risk ruining it now. She’s my sister, and I love her very much. I don’t want to lose her again. But I need to know. I need to know the truth. Do you understand that, Ben?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I could be wrong,’ said Fry. ‘But I don’t think I am.’

  Cooper was aware of a fly in the ointment here. His best bet was to say ‘no’ to what Fry wanted him to do and hope that he could keep out of the situation entirely.

  ‘If you’re worried, you could make enquiries yourself,’ he said.

  Fry shook her head. ‘There’s a big risk of her finding out that I’m checking up on her. I’m frightened she’d just walk away again. I get the feeling she’s on a knife edge, that she hasn’t quite decided whether to stay or leave. She might just disappear from my life again. I couldn’t stand that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you – I don’t think she’d be surprised if she found out that you’d been checking up on her. It would only confirm her opinion of you.’

  ‘I see. Basically, you want me to be the fall guy if anything goes wrong?’

  ‘Basically, yes.’

  Cooper began to shake his head. But Fry fixed him with her direct stare again.

  ‘I think you owe me this, Ben,’ she said. ‘You owe me this, at least.’

  He dropped his eyes. He’d always found it difficult to meet her stare.

  ‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘if there was anyone else I could trust …’

  Cooper hesitated a moment longer. Perhaps it was a moment too long.

  ‘I’m sorry, Diane. I don’t think I can do that. I’ve already interfered enough, as you said yourself just now. My getting more involved wouldn’t do either of us any good.’

  For the last few minutes Fry had been sliding her glass backwards and forwards across the polished surface of the table, as if intrigued by the sound it made against the wood, or the patterns formed by the streaks of condensation. But now, her hand became still.

  ‘I knew this would happen,’ she said. ‘It’s been like this all my life. No matter what you think you want, it turns out to be a disappointment when you finally get it.’

  She looked at her glass as she spoke, addressing the remaining mouthfuls of vodka as if it were the spirit that had disappointed her, as if its taste was just one more thing that hadn’t come up to her expectations.

  Will Thorpe heard the sound of a car engine on the road outside, climbing slowly up the hill above the cement works from Pindale. Quinn heard it, too. He let go of Thorpe’s jacket and straightened up. Thorpe watched him stoop under the connecting doorway and slip into the shadows near the entrance to wait for the car to pass. He suspected Quinn wouldn’t have a car of his own, and wouldn’t want to risk walking along the road, where he’d be seen too easily. He would be intending to navigate his way across the fields back to Edendale or Castleton, or wherever he was heading next.

  Thorpe smiled in the darkness. Quinn hadn’t taken the trouble to check what he had in the pack under his blanket. He hadn’t considered his old friend a threat.

  As quietly as he could, Thorpe slipped the carrying case out of the pack. The zip made a noise that sounded loud to him. But a few feet away, Quinn didn’t react. His concentration was entirely on the vehicle approaching up the hill.

  Thorpe knew he couldn’t risk Quinn wandering around loose any longer. While Quinn was around, he would always be in danger. He’d never be able to sleep safely again for the rest of his life.

  With a surge of excitement and fear that gripped his chest and made him gasp, Thorpe slid the crossbow slowly out of his pack. He had already snapped out the arms and unfolded the stock, and he was thankful that he’d left the weapon cocked before he went to sleep, with the automatic safety on. But when the string was pulled back and locked into the trigger, it made an audible click that even the sound of the car engine wouldn’t have covered. Quinn could have heard that.

  Now Thorpe’s hand shook as he fumbled for one of the eighteen-inch bolts he’d taken from Ray Proctor’s house. It was a long time since he’d handled a crossbow, and he prayed his aim would be good. Relying almost entirely on his sense of touch in the darkness, he placed the bolt under the front sight bracket and on to the track unit, then felt for its fletches and turned one down into the track groove. Lastly, he slid the bolt back under the retainer and into the trigger mechanism.

  The car passed by. Its headlights swung briefly across the front of the building, and Thorpe could see Quinn for a moment as a blacker shape in the darkness of the barn, a momentary glitter of rainwater on his smock picking him out as a target.

  Quinn raised his head only when he heard the safety button released on the side of the trigger. The noise was distinctive, and Thorpe could picture the puzzled frown on his face, perhaps even the first hint of fear.

  Thorpe sighted into the darkness towards the low doorway, holding his breath and feeling for the trigger a little more quickly than he should have.

  ‘Mansell,’ he called. ‘I believe you.’

  And Thorpe waited one second for Quinn to start turning, before he shot him.

  31

  Saturday, 17 July

  When Ben Cooper arrived at Siggate, a uniformed inspector from Traffic section was practically spinning on the spot. The reflective hoops and patches on his yellow jacket flashed and flickered in the lights as he paced along the tape. He was listening to the crackling voices from his radio, shouting instructions to somebody at the other end, then glaring at the field barn as if it had delivered a personal insult.

  ‘We can’t sustain this situation for long,’ he said. ‘We’ve had to close the road all the way back to Castleton and all the way up to Bradwell so we can operate diversions for the traffic. Highways have got the carriageway up in Castleton for repair work. I’m warning you, it’s going to be complete chaos for twenty miles in every direction in a couple of hours’ time. We’ll bring the whole of North Derbyshire to a halt.’

  The inspector swore when he was ignored and went back to his radio.

  The exact time a motorist had called in on his mobile phone to report the body had been logged by Control, but it wasn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of when the incident had occurred. The road was quiet at this time of the morning. And even if other drivers had passed by earlier, they had either seen nothing or not bothered to stop.

  The body was out of sight of the road, inside the abandoned field barn. The motorist might be wishing he hadn’t called it in, now that he was being asked to explain what he’d stopped for.

  Cooper found himself quite by accident standing near DCI Kessen, who’d just arrived and was being briefed by the Crime Scene Manager.

  ‘There’s a good bit of blood inside,’ said the CSM. ‘And splashes of it in the nettles, and between the building and the gate over there.’

  ‘What about the road?’ said Kessen. ‘Traffic was still going through for a while – enough to contaminate the scene?’

  ‘I’m not too concerned about the road. It looks as though your man came and went on foot.’

  ‘Really?’

  The CSM pointed towards the gateway. ‘We’ll be able to see things a lot better when it’s daylight, but Liz has found some traces leading off into the field there. The poor bugger inside obviously never made it as far as the gateway, so it seems a fair bet that it’s going to be your suspect’s exit route. The field is nice and empty, thank God. There’s nothing worse than a herd of
inquisitive cows trampling a crime scene. They’re even worse than a bunch of heavy-footed coppers, and that’s saying something.’

  ‘Any ID?’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything on him. You might have a better chance of identifying him when you get him to the mortuary.’

  ‘Sir, could I get a closer look?’ said Cooper. ‘I might recognize him.’

  Kessen nodded. The CSM kitted Cooper out in a scene suit and guided him to a point where he could see the face of the dead man.

  The body lay in the inner room of the field barn, sprawled on its back on the dirt floor. Cooper had to bend almost double to duck through the doorway on the stepping plates laid by the SOCOs. Lights had been set up in two of the corners, illuminating the victim like an exhibit in an art gallery. The floor around him seemed to glitter where flecks of quartz in the limestone reflected the lights.

  The smell was pretty bad in here. Cooper wasn’t sure how much of it was the effect of extreme violence and death on the body’s natural processes, and how much resulted from whatever had gone on in the field barn previously. Some SOCO would have the pleasure of analysing the screwed-up tissues and crisp packets.

  There were bloodstains, too, and a lot of disturbance of the ground. But Cooper’s attention was drawn to the face. It was dark red, almost purple in the artificial light. What he could see of the neck was marked by deep, black bruises, the result of far more violence being used on the victim than was necessary.

  ‘Any luck, Cooper?’

  ‘Yes, I know who it is,’ he said. ‘It’s William Thorpe.’

  DCI Kessen sighed and turned to the officers waiting by their vehicles.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Why have we still got the road closed? Isn’t there anyone here from Traffic?’

  He was always like that. Whenever we had a row, I’d think it was all over and forgotten about. But he … Mansell would go away and brood about things. It seemed as though he turned everything over in his mind, everything that I’d said in the heat of the moment. He picked my words apart, analysing them, making himself more and more angry. There were a lot of things that I didn’t mean, of course. But he never seemed to understand that. He took everything to heart and stored it up. His memory was unnervingly accurate, too – I could tell he’d rehearsed my words over and over, letting them eat away at him from the inside. Then he would come back to the subject after a while – the next morning, or two or three days later, or longer than that even. And by then he’d built up the whole thing in his mind, turned it into something else, something far worse. When he came back to it, he was angrier than he’d been while we were arguing. I called it his ‘slow burn’. It was like he had a really long fuse that took time to burn down before the explosion came. It was really quite frightening. Because I never knew when it might happen.

  Mansell was never physically violent towards me. It was only words. When the explosion did come, it was just that – an explosion of anger. What I would still call the heat of the moment. An outpouring of emotion, something he had to get out of his system. I wouldn’t describe him a cold, calculating man. Not at all …

  Statement of Rebecca Quinn, October 1990

  Ben Cooper was tired, and ready to go back home. It was three o’clock in the morning, and it was still raining. It was also his birthday.

  He stared blearily out of the window of the CID room, wondering how much rain had to fall before Peak Cavern flooded. He was picturing the parties of tourists running to get out of the cavern, foaming water rushing behind them through the passages, roaring like all the devils in Hell were after them. He knew it wouldn’t happen in real life – there would be plenty of warning before anyone was caught by a flood.

  Cooper had read Rebecca Quinn’s statement before, but this morning her analysis of her husband’s character seemed particularly ironic. Perhaps he was just tired, but she seemed to be talking about a different man altogether.

  He guessed Rebecca wouldn’t have been allowed back into her own home for a while after that day in October 1990 – not until the SOCOs were satisfied that they’d done all they could to collect the available evidence. Her sitting room had probably still been prohibited to her then, even if she’d wanted to enter it.

  Cooper tried to imagine what it would be like to go back into your house knowing someone had recently died a violent death in your sitting room, and that your husband was probably the killer. Would it still feel like your own home? Or would everything have changed? He suspected it would feel as if some alien presence had invaded your space.

  There would have been a horrible temptation to open the door of the room where it happened, to look for some sort of explanation among the familiar surroundings, to hope that the whole thing had been a bad dream. But all Rebecca Quinn would have seen were the markers left by the SOCOs, the holes cut out of the carpet to retrieve the bloodstains, a dusting of powder on the window frames and door handles. She might have smelled latex gloves, and the sweat of people working indoors in crime scene suits. She might have noticed that the bottle was gone from the table, the cushions from the settee, and the poker from the hearth. All very prosaic, in a way. But all signs that the room had been the setting for a violent crime.

  Cooper looked through the statement list for an interview with neighbours called Page. Alistair Page had been only sixteen at the time, but if his parents were still around they might be worth talking to. If they’d lived quite close, they ought to have known the Quinns pretty well in a place like Castleton. And independent witnesses were distinctly in short supply.

  But there were no Pages on the list. Cooper made a note to ask Alistair about his parents. Then he turned back to Rebecca’s statement. She recalled leaving the house at eight thirty that morning to go to her job as a secretary in a solicitor’s office in Hathersage. Normally, she wouldn’t have returned home before five thirty, but she’d been phoned by the police earlier in the afternoon. She said she’d been too shocked and confused at first to understand what she was being told.

  Rebecca had stayed at her sister Dawn’s house that night. Neighbours had looked after the Quinn children when they arrived home from school, until they, too, had gone to their aunt’s house. Cooper looked for the name of the helpful neighbours. Townsend. Maybe they were still around, at least.

  There was a statement from another neighbour on the opposite side of the road, a woman called Needham. But neither she nor Mrs Townsend remembered seeing anyone enter the Quinns’ house until Mansell Quinn himself arrived home, driving his Vauxhall estate. It wasn’t clear from their statements how good a view either of them had of the house.

  Cooper began to gather up the statements to put them back into the Carol Proctor case file. Then he noticed a photograph of an evidence bag. According to the label, it came from Room 1 Sector B, and it carried the identification code PM24 – a scene of crime officer’s initials, plus the number of items of evidence he’d collected from the scene. He didn’t know who ‘PM’ was – not one of the present SOCOs at E Division anyway. After fourteen years, it was probably someone who had left the force or retired.

  The bag contained a Coke bottle. It looked like the bottle that had been sitting on the Quinns’ table in the crime scene photographs. Cooper could see the fingerprint dust on the surface.

  Faithful old fingerprints – they were sometimes sniffed at these days by forensic experts who described them as an art, not a science. But the team attending 82 Pindale Road in 1990 had dusted the bottle for prints. And they’d found them, though they were too smeared to get a match. That was odd in itself – glass was perfect material to lift fingerprints from. Unless it had been deliberately wiped.

  With a weary sigh, Cooper put the file down and looked at his watch. He wondered if he’d ever get chance to take a look at the Quinns’ old house in Pindale Road.

  Finally, he saw Diane Fry coming into the room. She looked as tired as he felt.

  ‘William Edward Thorpe,’ she said. ‘He started off
as one of your actions, didn’t he, Ben?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In fact, he was a TIE – to be traced, interviewed and eliminated.’

  ‘We traced him and interviewed him.’

  ‘But somebody else managed to eliminate him.’

  ‘Mansell Quinn?’ said Cooper.

  ‘It seems a good bet. Looks as if DI Hitchens was right – Quinn has got a list.’

  ‘Thorpe was the odd one out, though,’ said Cooper.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We know where all the others on the list are.’

  ‘Always assuming,’ said Fry, ‘that Quinn’s list is the same as ours.’

  ‘But this one doesn’t feel right,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Why?’

  Cooper was looking at the map showing Quinn’s appearances in the Hope Valley. ‘It’s in the wrong place somehow. But then, the pattern is probably just accidental.’

  ‘Of course it is. Quinn isn’t planning all that carefully, is he?’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper doubtfully.

  He remembered descending Siggate into Pindale from the field barn. He’d been able to see all the way to the top end of the Hope Valley, where the yellow street lights glowed along the A625. He’d made out the dark belt of trees that marked the route of the railway line from the cement works. It passed Hope Valley College and swung towards the main line near Killhill Bridge.

  A little to the east, he’d seen the lights of the Proctors’ caravan park, Wingate Lees. But the lights had looked dimmer there. They were half hidden by the railway embankment and the slope behind the site, as if trapped between the shadows.

  ‘What are you reading that’s making you look like that?’ said Fry.

  Her voice sounded nasal and muffled. She had a tissue pressed to her nose, and her eyes were red.

  Cooper showed her Rebecca Quinn’s statement.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Quinn’s wife said he was the kind of man who stored things up.’

  ‘For days, she said. Not fourteen years.’

  ‘It might have been a shorter time if he’d had the opportunity to get the anger out of his system. But he didn’t have the chance on the inside. He has now, though. Now that he’s out.’