05.One Last Breath Read online

  ‘As you long as you take care,’ said Cooper. ‘And remember – if you do see Mansell Quinn, stay clear of him.’

  ‘So,’ said Gavin Murfin when Ben Cooper got back to the office in Edendale. ‘I hear we’ve even got a Beast of Bradwell now. What’s the place coming to?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Beast of Bradwell. One of those mysterious giant cats that roam the countryside during the silly season. Apparently, it’s been savaging sheep. It’s in the bulletins.’

  ‘I haven’t seen them yet.’

  Cooper read the reports. Predictably, a team of firearms officers had been called out to search the area where a sheep had been found with its throat ‘ripped out’, according to the report. The site was close to a path used by walkers and their dogs, so someone considered there might be a threat to the public. But as far as Cooper was concerned, sending coppers with guns into the woods was more of a risk to the public than any type of wildlife they were likely to encounter, real or imaginary.

  ‘It wasn’t in Bradwell,’ he said. ‘It was in Rakedale.’

  ‘That’s no good,’ said Murfin.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It doesn’t begin with a “B”. The Beast of Rakedale doesn’t have the same ring. No good for a newspaper headline.’

  ‘Accuracy was never your strongpoint, was it, Gavin?’

  ‘I’ve always thought I might make a good journalist. Anyway, it’s near enough, isn’t it?’

  Cooper read through the report again. Rakedale was a narrow, meandering limestone valley on the other side of Bradwell Moor from the Castleton area. It joined the Eden Valley further south, passing within a mile of Bridge End Farm. Cooper was very familiar with its wooded sides and limestone cliffs, and the pure stream running through it. He also knew it had many small caves, and some old mine workings.

  ‘It doesn’t sound as though anyone has taken a proper look at the victim yet,’ he said.

  ‘Eh? You’re expecting a postmortem? Mrs Van Doon would have kittens if we sent her a sheep.’

  ‘I was thinking of a vet. They ought to get a vet to look at it. Someone will have thought of that, won’t they?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’ll mention it to the officer in charge,’ said Cooper.

  ‘But what else could rip a sheep’s throat out? A dog, maybe?’

  ‘A dog wouldn’t do so much damage. They’ll chase sheep, but they lose interest once they stop running.’

  ‘Has to be a big cat, then,’ said Murfin confidently.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘There’s one other species that would inflict that kind of damage on an animal, and do it just for sport. The human species.’

  Cooper watched one of the incident room staff place a new marker on the map. Mansell Quinn’s trail through the Hope Valley had reached Castleton, almost at the head of the valley. Cooper felt sure there would be a second location to add soon. But he had no doubt at all about Quinn’s final destination. Death Underground had some meaning for him and, somehow, he was intending to enter the cavern system. But he wouldn’t do that until he’d finished what he’d come to do. And they still didn’t know what names had been on Quinn’s list.

  Raymond Proctor seemed to have aged ten years. Ben Cooper and Diane Fry found him at his desk, staring into space. Though no bottle was visible, a smell of whisky hung in the air. The office looked more untidy than ever. Only the rows of keys remained neat and orderly, as if Proctor thought their orderliness could resist the spread of chaos.

  ‘I’m really sorry about Will,’ he said. ‘But there wasn’t anything I could have done, was there?’

  Fry didn’t seem inclined to ease his conscience.

  ‘Certainly. If you’d called us when Quinn came here on Wednesday night, we could have had him out of circulation and your friend would still be alive now.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Proctor looked towards the old filing cabinet. Maybe that was where he kept the whisky.

  ‘Also, if your crossbow had been properly secured, Quinn wouldn’t now be in possession of a lethal weapon. Would he, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mr Proctor, do you have any idea who else might be in danger from Quinn? Did he say anything that might give us a clue?’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Because I’m sure you wouldn’t want another death on your conscience, would you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please think carefully then, sir. What did he talk about?’

  Proctor stared into space. ‘He talked about coming out of prison and things being different.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He mentioned somebody else living in his old house.’

  ‘His old house? The one on Pindale Road?’

  ‘I suppose that’s where he meant.’

  ‘What else did he say, Mr Proctor?’

  Proctor frowned. ‘He must have been thinking about Rebecca. That house in Pindale Road was their home – his and Rebecca’s. But she couldn’t wait to get away from it after what happened. Can’t say I blame her.’

  ‘Did you know her well, Mr Proctor?’

  ‘I did back then. She left the valley for a while when she married the second time, you know. She wanted to move back, but she had to have a brand-new house, which isn’t easy to get planning permission for. Anyway, they managed it, and Parson’s Croft was the result. Only trouble was, the new husband had a heart attack before the house was finished.’

  ‘That must have been tough.’

  ‘Not for Rebecca. She was quids in. Very comfortable.’

  ‘Comfortably dead.’

  ‘Well, yeah. She is now.’

  ‘She’d have been better off spending some of her money getting away from the area. Moving down south, or out of the country altogether.’

  ‘Probably. But you can’t help wanting to come back to where you belong, can you?’

  Fry watched him. He did seem to be trying to help this time. ‘Anything else, sir?’

  Proctor shook his head. ‘Nothing I can remember.’

  ‘We’d better have a word with your wife, then.’

  ‘She won’t remember any more than me,’ said Proctor. ‘She hardly saw him.’

  ‘He was saying something about children when I came in here,’ said Connie when she was called into the office. ‘That’s all I remember. It was such a shock seeing him. But I knew straight away who he was.’

  ‘Whose children?’ said Fry.

  ‘Not Jason and Kelly, anyway – he’s never met them, thank God. In fact, he’d never met me until that night.’

  ‘It must have been his own children he was referring to, then? Simon and Andrea.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But they don’t even live in the Castleton area any more, do they?’

  ‘No, that’s true.’ Fry looked disappointed. ‘Oh, well. We’re leaving a patrol car at the entrance for the time being.’

  ‘My guests won’t like that.’

  ‘Don’t bother telling me. I don’t care any more.’

  ‘Well, you were right about the Beast of Bradwell, Ben,’ said Gavin Murfin, when Ben Cooper got back to the office. West Street was a bit quiet, and Cooper thought the senior officers must be in a meeting somewhere.

  ‘Oh? No beast?’

  ‘The vet’s report says the sheep’s throat wasn’t ripped by teeth. It was cut with a sharp knife.’

  ‘There you go, then. Another sicko wandering the area. A few years ago it was horses, remember? Doesn’t sound like a professional poacher – they’re much more organized, and they take entire flocks rather than slaughtering an individual animal in the woods like that.’

  ‘This was in the daytime, too. Two witnesses came forward who thought they heard something run off when their dog barked. Or someone.’

  Cooper noticed that Murfin was looking too smug.

  ‘Anything else happened, Gavin?’

  ‘Good vet they got,’ said Murfin. ‘Almost as good a
s a pathologist.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He said the sheep had been shot. With a crossbow.’

  ‘My God. Have they –’

  ‘Everybody’s out there now,’ said Murfin. ‘Didn’t you notice how quiet it is?’

  The search party was working its way along the sides of Rakedale, but the going was slow. The trees on the slopes were too dense, the caves too deep, the holes and crevices in the limestone too numerous to count. Armed officers went ahead of the main group, and their caution slowed the search down even more. But without them, the task force officers would have been too vulnerable, because their attention had to be focused on the ground and on their immediate surroundings. They were looking for traces of recent occupation in the caves, or in the ruins of the old mine buildings that were scattered along the northern side of the dale, almost overgrown with ivy and brambles.

  ‘It’s much too slow,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘If he’s in here, he’ll see us coming half a mile away.’

  ‘There’s no way we can speed the search up,’ said DCI Kessen. ‘The troops are too exposed already. If Quinn should be waiting up on one of those limestone cliffs, he could do a lot of damage.’

  ‘That’s if he’s still armed. We don’t know that for certain.’

  ‘I’m not taking the chance.’

  ‘The dogs seem to be all over the place,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘They don’t know what they’re looking for. We have nothing of Quinn’s to give them.’

  ‘The helicopter should be here soon, though. Its thermal camera will identify any bodies hiding among these trees.’

  ‘In the trees, perhaps. But not in the caves.’

  ‘And what about the public?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘They’re a nightmare …’

  At the bottom end of the dale, several families were enjoying the sun by the water. Half a dozen Mallard ducks sat in a row on a log submerged in a green pool, watching the children rushing about on the grass.

  ‘… but there’s no way we can get rid of them altogether.’

  The search didn’t reach the end of the dale until early evening. The co-ordinator called a halt where the trees petered out and the limestone sides gave way to a patchwork of fields crisscrossed by stone walls.

  ‘He’s not here. Not any more, anyway.’

  Kessen and Hitchens gathered around him for a hasty conference. Two officers carried over a pile of bin liners filled with evidence bags.

  ‘I don’t want to see all that,’ said Kessen. ‘What have we got that’s of any significance?’

  ‘Someone camped out in one of the caves recently. About halfway along the valley on the south side. You can’t see it until you get right up to it. It isn’t big, but it’s dry, and there’s a sort of ledge at the back where you can lie up and be out of the weather, as well as out of sight.’

  ‘What traces are there?’

  ‘A couple of the SOCOs are going over it now. I’d say they’ll get no more than some wax and ashes, and a few scuff marks in the dirt on the cave floor.’

  ‘Nothing we can get a DNA sample from?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘He must have defecated and urinated somewhere.’

  The search co-ordinator shrugged. ‘This man is very careful. There’s no sign of anything in the vicinity of the cave. My guess is he’ll have gone deep into the woods somewhere, a different location each time, and concealed the traces in a scrape in the ground. We’d never find anything like that.’

  ‘Here’s the helicopter at last,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Much good it’ll do.’

  In the briefing room, Ben Cooper could see that DCI Kessen and DI Hitchens were frustrated at Mansell Quinn’s ability to move freely around the Hope Valley. The tone of the newspaper and radio reports was reflecting the public’s incredulity. An incredulity echoed by senior officers in Ripley.

  ‘He’s too unpredictable,’ said Hitchens. ‘One minute he’s living rough in some remote bit of woodland, and the next he’s mingling brazenly with the crowds in the middle of Castleton. It makes us look like complete prats.’

  ‘I’m not happy about these CCTV pictures,’ said Kessen. ‘It looks as though he’s taunting us. He’s constantly one step ahead, and he knows it.’

  Cooper studied the photo of Mansell Quinn taken from the camera at the gift shop. To him, Quinn didn’t seem to be laughing at all.

  ‘And the weather is too good,’ said Hitchens. ‘What we need is rain. The heavier the better.’

  The DI was right there. If the weather stayed the same, there would be chaos on Sunday. Traffic would be gridlocked in Castleton, just as it would in Dovedale and at Matlock Bath. On summer weekends and bank holidays, visitors would queue in their cars for hours to get to the honeypots and mingle with crowds of other tourists, until they were so thick on the ground no one could move for ice-cream cones and frisbees.

  Castleton would be busy every day now for the rest of the summer. It boasted five of the Peak District’s ten most popular attractions, and the show caves alone brought in thousands of people every weekend. But the tea rooms and gift shops would soon empty if the tourists became aware of a multiple killer at large in the area. What if a tourist got killed? Or a child? It would be a disaster for the tourism trade – worse even than the foot and mouth outbreak.

  Watching his senior officers fretting, Cooper shook his head. Surely the chiefs were worrying more than necessary? It was obvious that Quinn had specific targets in mind, and he wasn’t about to start attacking strangers. And this man was no predatory paedophile or child killer. He could have no possible reason to harm a child.

  35

  Mansell Quinn’s hands trembled slightly as he ran the sights of the crossbow back across the same stretch of undergrowth, looking for the movement. He focused on the base of a tree and gripped the shaft in his other hand. Despite its lightness, he knew it had the power to bring down an animal the size of a deer, if necessary. It was silent and deadly, too. He could even retrieve the bolt from the body with his knife, and no one need ever know how his quarry had died.

  Despite the trembling, his motions were slow and steady. He made another sweep across the ground. There was the movement again. Now it had come into the open, and he could see what it was. A little girl was running down the slope. She was no more than eight years old, wearing a bright blue dress, with brown hair tied into bunches and her feet shoved into over-sized trainers. Her face was screwed up in concentration as she ran. Quinn noted every detail – her thin white legs, a scab on her left knee, an imitation gold bracelet around one wrist.

  Of course, her mother wouldn’t be far away – she’d be among the other adults and children enjoying the sunshine. But this child was independent. She’d decided to go exploring on her own, tempted away from the safety of the adults by a glint of water through the trees, or just an urge to run down the slope in the sun. Quinn liked independence. He thought it was one of his own best characteristics.

  Quinn tried to imagine what people would be saying about him now. They’d be judging him, and he couldn’t stand the thought of that. Everyone had always judged him when he was inside. Prisoners were each other’s jailers, in a way. If you weren’t guilty when you went in, you soon convinced yourself you were. It was too easy to turn that anger on to yourself.

  He was glad to have got the chance to wash in the stream. Sometimes, he thought he’d never get the smell of prison off his skin – that stale stink of a place filled with too many bodies, where fresh air never blew. Now and then, he’d taken the chance to inch a bit closer to a prison visitor, to see if he could detect the smell of someone who’d stroked their pet dog, or walked in their garden that morning, or touched a child. The tiniest whiff of a remembered smell could bring the outside world back. It kept the connection from breaking entirely.

  The girl stopped at the bottom of the slope, poised on the edge of the water. She looked up at the hillside, staring directly at where Quin
n was positioned. He held his breath and didn’t move; there was no way she could see him. Her child’s eyes weren’t good enough to pick him out, and she couldn’t yet have learned to recognize danger so easily.

  Then, inexplicably, the girl smiled. Quinn’s heart gave a lurch. She must have been smiling at a particularly pleasing pattern of trees, or a bird glimpsed in the branches above him. After a moment, she lost interest in whatever it was and began to poke around among the small stones at the edge of the stream. He could see her white trainers beginning to turn darker at the edges as the water soaked into them. When her mother found her, the girl would be in trouble for getting her feet wet.

  Quinn lowered the crossbow for a moment. Where was her mother? The girl shouldn’t have been allowed to wander off alone like that. It was dangerous.

  The girl suddenly broke into a run. Quinn watched her trot along the slope, her arms waving to keep her balance, and her blue skirt blowing in the breeze. The girl’s bare legs were white and streaked with dirt, and she stumbled as she dodged the bigger stones. She was moving fast now and changing direction, heading diagonally across in front of him. In another thirty seconds she would reach the flat area of grass and be into the trees, and then he’d no longer be able to see her clearly.

  Quinn squinted against the low sun, focusing on the blue skirt, assessing the trajectory of the bright scrap of colour as it travelled across his range of vision. Slowly, he lifted the crossbow back to his shoulder, and slid a bolt into place.

  36

  Isabel Cooper was waiting in the lounge of the Old School nursing home, wearing her best coat and her best shoes, and looking expectant. Somebody had joked with her that she must be going to a wedding, and now she wasn’t quite sure whether she ought to be wearing a hat.

  The staff of the nursing home knew Ben. He visited regularly, and more than one care assistant had been ticked off for spending too much time talking to him. And today Cooper’s mother recognized him, too. She got up to greet him, and he bent to give her a hug and a kiss.