05.One Last Breath Read online

  Cooper took a step forward towards the stream, but stopped when he heard brambles crackle under his feet. He squinted into the trees, now no longer sure if he’d seen anything, or whether he was simply imagining the way a scatter of raindrops passed in and out of the light, etching a silhouette in the darkness.

  He pictured a black hood and a pair of shoulders streaming with rain, and the vague features of a human face, with eyes set too deep in shadow to be visible. It was a figure that had been moving through his mind all week, as if a ghost had been following him.

  And then even the suggestion of a shape was gone. Cooper narrowed his eyes to peer into the darkness again, but could no longer make out a thing. He hadn’t seen any movement, or even heard a noise. There had been no footsteps, no crackling underfoot, no rustling of clothes. It had been nothing more than an illusion created by the rain and his imagination.

  Cooper realized his head was spinning. The buildings and trees swayed around him, and he had to sit down suddenly to avoid falling over. He put his hands to his head and groaned. Then he rolled over on to his stomach and was sick into the stream.

  Now Cooper was oblivious to everything around him. He wouldn’t have noticed anyone, not even if they’d been moving towards him from the trees and across the footbridge, moving slowly and deliberately, dripping water from a black hood in which he couldn’t see a face.

  37

  Within a few minutes, Mansell Quinn was too far in to feel the movement of air. He noticed the stillness by the lack of sensation in his hands, an absence of touch on the skin of his face. For the first time, he was beyond the breathing.

  He shone his torch on to the sides of the passage. He had no spare battery, and the light wouldn’t last long. It was better to use it just to orientate himself, to be sure that he didn’t fall into some unseen shaft as he felt his way along the walls. There was no need to go too far. There would be nobody along this way to find him. Not tonight, anyway. Nor would there be anybody to bring him out safely if he fell and broke his ankle. Not tonight, or any other night.

  Moving through complete blackness was like walking through the dreams that came whenever he managed to sleep. That was the only darkness Quinn had ever found terrifying, the darkness behind his eyes when he lay down at night. And that was because too much light filtered through his eyelids, creating pictures, shapes dancing and gesturing, dim figures silently playing out scenes of a life he didn’t recognize. The shapes were like those of people on the TV screen in one of his prisons, when the reception had been so bad that the picture was a fog. Behind his eyes, those figures might be no more than a faint glow of colour, the suggestion of a human shape. What were those people doing, there behind his eyes?

  Quinn moved on a little further, going gradually deeper. In Death Underground there had been a map of the Peak–Speedwell cavern system. All those miles of branching and winding tubes resembled a huge set of lungs. That set him thinking about Will Thorpe and his emphysema. It had been a mercy to kill him, really. He pictured the postmortem, imagined Will’s lungs being taken out and examined. They would be a shrivelled black mass, the disease-ravaged lung tissue replaced by fleshy pustules.

  He felt a jolt of pain in his side, and touched the reassuring weight of the crossbow over his shoulder. It hadn’t been right tonight, but he could wait a little longer. For now, he was enjoying the feeling of calmness within himself. It felt good, as if the deep, dark mouth of the cavern had sucked the anger from his blood.

  Down in a cave, cut off from the real world. Quinn repeated it to himself. Yes, he was cut off from the real world. Whatever the real world was.

  He was splashing, head-bowed, through an underground river bed, the noise of his boots echoing on the walls as he rattled over the stones. He moved to the sound of constantly running water. It cascaded out of holes in the roof, ran down the walls and trickled into rock pools.

  If you stood still in here, it could get chilly. Some of the chambers had a bad atmosphere, too. From time to time, he had the conviction that he must be following someone, because he could hear noises ahead, like another person’s boots dislodging stones or splashing in a pool. But Quinn ignored the noises and the illusions, taking his time, feeling his way along the walls as he walked through the stream, the water sometimes over and inside his boots.

  What would it be like if the cavern flooded? He thought of white foam and the roar as the water rushed over the rocks, the rumbling as it grew in volume and reached the roof.

  Quinn reached another pool and turned on his torch. He saw flickering movements in the water and realized that life existed down here after all. Minute creatures were wriggling along on their sides, like tiny fragments of fingernail. Troglodytic shrimps, living in an environment free of predators. He wondered why they didn’t they get washed out when the caves flooded.

  Here, the floor was covered in flowstone with water running over it. Quinn crouched close to the ground. He could hear voices all the time now, though he knew it was just the echoes of the cave. These caverns should be as remote and unaffected by man as the furthest reaches of the planet. Time meant something here, because the cave had gone through millions of years like this, experiencing the slow dissolving of rock in water. It made him feel tiny and transitory.

  Yet the curtains of flowstone had been splattered and smeared with mud by hundreds of pairs of cavers’ boots over the years. He’d read about members of one of the caving clubs going into Moss Chamber with scrubbing brushes to restore the flowstone to its original gleaming whiteness. Apparently they’d not been here, for he could see imprints left by the recent passage of many boots. If he wanted to, he could leave his own mark. The mud would stick to him, too. It would cling to him like a dirty memory.

  Now he was here, he knew the cavern was the right place. He could have waited above the house in Castleton and made the shot whenever he wanted to, but it wouldn’t have felt right. He’d waited so long that another day was nothing, if it meant doing it properly.

  Quinn knelt to take a drink from the pool in his cupped hands. Unlike the water from the well in Edendale, this was freezing cold, and it made him gasp. It left an aftertaste on the back of his mouth – a strange, acid bitterness. It was the bitterness of stone.

  38

  Sunday, 18 July

  Diane Fry sat back in her chair at West Street, staring at the notes she’d made. It was a pity that they didn’t have Mansell Quinn’s DNA profile. There ought to be something – some identifiable trace of him that would remove the doubts Ben Cooper had raised. They were the sort of baseless doubts that Fry would normally have dismissed as a wild-goose chase. It was Cooper’s kind of obsession, not hers.

  Somebody had opened the windows again in the CID room, though Fry had asked them not to. Already this morning she could sense nature sneaking in. Every seeding patch of grass in the Peak District was sending its pollen in her direction right now. Though she’d taken the antihistamine tablets, she could feel the membranes in her nose beginning to swell.

  At least authorization had come through for her to get information from Human Resources on PC 4623 Netherton, Arthur. According to his file, he’d received the Chief Constable’s Commendation and a Royal Humane Society Testimonial for rescuing a woman who’d been threatening to jump from a bridge over the River Derwent some years ago. Another hero, then.

  But Arthur Netherton had retired from Derbyshire Constabulary in 2000 after thirty years’ service, and had moved to Spain. Death benefits under his pension provision had been paid to his widow three years later. Netherton had died of a heart attack in his mid-fifties. Too much of the good life in too short a time, perhaps? Fry suppressed a surge of jealousy. Too much of the good life? Chance would be a fine thing.

  With both of the uniformed heroes gone to the great dress parade in the sky, her options for a first-hand account of events at 82 Pindale Road in October 1990 were limited. Mansell Quinn was unavailable, while Carol Proctor was the most silent witness of all.
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  And now Rebecca Quinn was dead, too. What might Rebecca have been able to tell her? Anything useful? Well, perhaps Quinn himself had thought so – or somebody had. Whoever stabbed her with the carving knife had made sure she wouldn’t talk.

  Fry sighed. She was starting to sound like Ben Cooper. Quinn was guilty, and no one should have any doubts.

  So who was left? The Quinns’ neighbours? She pulled out the Hope Valley telephone directory, but found no listing for any Townsends at 84 Pindale Road. She tried calling a couple of possibilities in Bamford and Bradwell, but they were the wrong Townsends and no relation – or not admitting to it. Then she dug out the electoral roll for the Castleton ward. The current residents of 84 Pindale Road were a family by the name of Ho.

  Great. So it looked as though the Townsends had left the area, too. The world was full of people trying to put the past behind them. And some of them were doing it more successfully than others.

  The gala was over in Hathersage. As Diane Fry drove through the village, workmen were taking down the bunting, and the bus shelter had reverted to its normal boring state.

  On the Moorland estate, children were playing on the grass and adults were washing their cars. This time, Fry found herself taking notice of small things here and there – a clown puppet hanging by its strings in an upstairs window, a rabbit with long golden fur in a hutch on a front lawn. There was a ‘Not in my name’ poster in a bedroom window, left over from an Iraqi War protest, while across the street someone had painted a smiley face on their wheelie bin. A lady sat outside at a plastic table reading a newspaper, with a collie dog asleep at her feet.

  Enid Quinn had a distracted air today. She had been standing in a corner of her garden, wearing her yellow rubber gloves to dead-head the roses.

  ‘I know it’s hard having to go over it again and again,’ said Fry. ‘But you must understand how necessary it is.’

  Mrs Quinn wouldn’t look at Fry, but watched the children on the grass across the road.

  ‘Of course it’s necessary,’ she said. ‘I know that. It’s all absolutely bloody necessary.’

  Fry watched her carefully from the corner of her eye. The woman’s voice had taken on an unfamiliar edginess that might be the first sign of a crack in her composure. The people who seemed most in control were often the ones who disintegrated in a big way when the stress finally became too much. She didn’t want that to happen to Mrs Quinn.

  ‘We could go and talk somewhere else, if you like?’ she said. ‘Perhaps we could go in the house and have a cup of tea?’

  ‘No, this is fine.’

  The scent of the roses was too strong for Fry. The smell hung around her like cheap perfume. But it was grass pollen that triggered her hay fever, so she might be OK.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Fry, ‘we need to go over the past, because it may be the only way of figuring out what’s going through your son’s mind.’

  ‘If it’s Simon and Andrea you’re interested in, you should be talking to them, not me. I don’t remember anything. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘I’ve made an appointment to see them later today. But I think there are things you may be able to tell me, even though you weren’t there. Simon and Andrea are your grandchildren, after all.’

  Mrs Quinn looked back towards the house with a half-shrug of her shoulders, as if it wasn’t important. Fry frowned at her, trying to divine her thoughts, and failing. She wasn’t a psychologist, she was a police officer. Her own experiences didn’t give her access to the mind of someone like Mrs Quinn.

  ‘Andrea is all right,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘A bit too serious, and she doesn’t know how to enjoy herself properly. But she’s a sensible enough girl. The most sensible one of the family, probably.’

  ‘And your grandson?’

  The old woman sighed. ‘Simon had a tough time of it. He was already going through a difficult phase when he was fifteen. And when it all happened, he got very mixed up. I think he still is. It was bad enough for a lad of his age when his father was convicted of murder. Simon still admired his father. He had loyalty. But it completely knocked him for six when someone told him –’

  She fastened her gaze on a climbing rose and snipped at one of its flowers angrily, though to Fry it hardly seemed to have begun to wilt.

  ‘Told him what, Mrs Quinn?’

  ‘Someone told Simon that Mansell wasn’t really his father.’

  Fry raised her eyebrows. ‘Who would do that?’

  ‘Someone trying to stir up trouble, obviously.’

  ‘But who? Do you know?’

  ‘I’m … well, I’m not sure. You know what people are like. They love to be malicious.’

  ‘And was it true?’

  ‘It was possible,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘That was the worst thing, I suppose. It was possible.’

  It was late afternoon by the time Ben Cooper started the Toyota in the yard at Bridge End Farm. The dogs, recognizing the sound of the engine, ran towards him. But Cooper sat in the car for a few minutes, looking at the farmhouse, the place that was so familiar and yet no longer his home.

  In some ways his father still lived here. He still walked in the shadow of the barn, or sat in a quiet corner of the kitchen. Every time Cooper entered the house, he knew he’d be able to smell his father’s presence. No amount of fresh paint and wallpaper could cover up the memories. Joe Cooper’s spirit had seeped into the walls, and it would stay there until the day the farmhouse was demolished.

  The dogs barked in a puzzled way for a while, but settled down in a gateway and waited for the car to move. In the cold light of morning, Cooper was sure that his experience in the early hours had been the result of too much alcohol combined with the worries that had been preying on his mind. At the first opportunity, he’d gone to look for footprints in the wet ground by the stream, but had found only his own tracks, crazily wandering and confused. He hoped he was right, because he didn’t know how he could ever tell Matt and Kate that they might be at risk. Nothing that he said would help them to understand.

  On the other hand, he would never forgive himself for not warning them, if he turned out to be wrong.

  Then carbonadoed and cooked with pains,

  Was brought up a cloven sergeant’s face:

  The sauce was made of his yeoman’s brains,

  That had been beaten out with his mace.

  Whatever logic told him, Cooper couldn’t resist the feeling that the poem Josie had found was somehow about his father. Sergeant Joe Cooper had died when his head had been kicked in by drunken thugs in Clappergate while trying to make an arrest without back-up. A cloven sergeant’s face.

  At first, Cooper had been puzzled by Mansell Quinn’s conversation with Raymond Proctor at the caravan park on Wednesday night. Quinn had been talking about children, particularly about sons. And Proctor hadn’t been sure whose son he meant.

  What if Quinn had been thinking of Sergeant Joe Cooper’s son? What was that line from the Bible? The sins of the fathers. It must be somewhere in the Old Testament, which had a lot about vengeance and blood. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

  ‘You’re telling me Rebecca Quinn had an affair?’ said Diane Fry. ‘But it must have been some time ago?’

  ‘Yes. It was before she and Mansell got married – while they were engaged, in fact.’

  Enid Quinn put down her secateurs and stripped off the yellow gloves, revealing her thin hands and pale skin like lined parchment. The smell of hand cream mingled with the scent of the roses.

  ‘It wasn’t a long engagement,’ she said. ‘Mansell was madly in love with her, and he was impatient to get wed. So it was all a bit of a rush, not at all what I would have wanted for him, if I’d had my way. I like things to be done with all due consideration for what’s right and proper. I don’t think either of them had really thought things through. I said so at the time, of course, but he didn’t take any notice. That was Mansell in those days: impetuous.’

  ‘He seems to have learned bett
er now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Fry. ‘Nothing important. And then a child came along – but that must have been after they were married, surely?’

  ‘Yes, but not too long after – six months. Mansell had no suspicions. I’d heard the rumours, though, so I wondered about it. For me, there was something about the boy that wasn’t right, and there always has been. Simon never looked like Mansell, you see. Not in any way. But that wasn’t the sort of thing Mansell would notice. And I wasn’t going to be the one to ruin my son’s happiness.’

  ‘So how did Mansell find out? Did he start to suspect? Did he ask Rebecca?’

  ‘No. Well, that would have been difficult. If he really was the father, it would have caused problems in the marriage if she knew that he doubted her. And if he wasn’t … would she have told him the truth?’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘He didn’t want to lose Rebecca, you see. That was the last thing Mansell wanted. But still, he needed to know the truth.’

  ‘So what did he do?’

  Mrs Quinn sighed wearily. ‘It doesn’t matter now. It can’t matter, can it? I’m tired of it all. I think you should leave me alone.’

  Fry felt a momentary twinge of sympathy for the old woman. Then she heard a lawnmower start up in the neighbour’s garden. Within minutes, the air would be full of spores from freshly cut grass – one of the triggers she’d been warned to avoid. Soon, she’d be feeling like death again. The thought made her unreasonably annoyed.