One last breath bcadf-5 Read online

  Nobody noticed when Cooper slipped away to stand in the back garden, where he could look up at the trees on the hill391

  side and see the stars. It was a bit cooler out here. He’d started off the evening drinking beer - mostly Budweiser and Grolsch, and some obscure Continental brands that Matt had bought in. Later, he’d found himself switching to white wine, simply because it was there. That had probably been a mistake. He didn’t feel drunk, just sort of fuzzy and detached from reality.

  Of course, someone had asked about Mansell Quinn. None of the family had lived in Castleton, but everyone seemed to have friends who did. It was Uncle John who couldn’t believe that Quinn had been let out of prison.

  ‘Life?’ he said. ‘Thirteen years isn’t life. I’ve had dogs that lived twice as long as that.’

  And that had started Matt off. He had a regular grumble about prisons, which he said were subsidized competition for dairy farmers. Prison farms produced twenty million pints of milk each year, not to mention goal nets for most of the English league football clubs.

  ‘And taxpayers like me shell out twenty-five thousand pounds a year to keep a prisoner inside doing that work,’ he said. ‘I’m paying to put myself out of business. Make sense of that, if you can.’

  When the rain began to fall again, Cooper was surprised how good it felt. For a while, the splashes dried on the ground as soon as they’d fallen. And then the rhythm increased, and soon the drops were hissing through the trees and into the grass. Cooper held out his hands and let the rain gather in his palms, the way he’d done as a child.

  Somehow, he seemed to have taken a long time to get to the age of thirty. The years since he was eighteen had lasted forever. The death of his father had begun to feel as though it had happened in an entirely different existence, from which he was only now emerging, like a man staggering from the water after a cross-Channel swim. The trouble was, he wasn’t quite sure whether this was a good or bad thing, whether he wanted to leave the old life behind or needed to hang on to it for safety.

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  Cooper walked along the side wall of the yard, where he knew he’d be out of range of the movement sensors that set off the security lights. Matt had installed the lights a few years ago after a spate of thefts from equipment sheds in the area. He’d lost a generator one night, and that had been the last straw. But the sensors couldn’t cover every corner, so they were directed on the main approaches and weren’t designed to catch people slipping away between the jumble of buildings, as Cooper was now.

  He passed the end of the tractor shed and found himself among the old byres and pig sties. They stood unused now, rotting away quietly until Matt decided he needed the space for a new milking parlour or silage clamp. Cooper liked the smells down here - the scent of moss-grown stone and ancient wooden beams, and the ingrained odours of the animals that had lived and breathed in these buildings for generations. They were the smells of his childhood; he’d spent much of his spare time here, trying to help out, or simply hanging about and getting in the way, observing everything.

  Cooper wished that Mansell Quinn hadn’t been mentioned, not tonight. And not here at the farm. On the face of it, his fear made no more sense than Alistair Page’s nervousness earlier that day. But he thought that unlike Page he might have good reason to be afraid - the history that existed between Quinn and Sergeant Joe Cooper might have been enough to set Quinn on his trail.

  But Joe Cooper had two sons. Of course, Matt ought to be told about the situation, but Cooper didn’t know how he could broach the subject. There was no way he could tell Matt there might be a risk without explaining the reason. His own memory of his father might be tarnished, but spreading the contagion to the rest of the family was a different matter. He owed his father something, at least. And all Joe Cooper had left now was his reputation.

  Cooper’s head turned sharply. A security light on the garage

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  door had come on. It bathed the gate and the top end of the driveway in light. Cooper watched for a moment, expecting to see a cat that had set off the movement sensor. But nothing moved in the area picked out by the light. Beyond the light, the lower part of the drive now looked like a black hole into which anything could vanish, or from where anything could appear. The rain continued to hiss all around him. A tapping had started somewhere - a drip of water from a blocked gutter, or the overflow from a water butt falling on a metal drain cover. The steady tap-tap-tap sounded like someone drumming their fingers with increasing impatience.

  He wailed a few minutes, and the light went off. He blinked to readjust his eyes to the darkness. Behind the stone buildings was the stream. Cooper could hear it rushing over the stones, more noisily than usual because of the amount of rain that had fallen. And beyond the stream, the trees climbed up the hillside in dense, black clumps.

  A public footpath ran through the fields here, and the sheep were used to people. They didn’t move or bleat as walkers passed, especially in the dark. Most of them didn’t even stop cudding.

  When he looked across the stream, Cooper felt disorientated by the utter darkness, and he swayed a little, reminded of how much he’d had to drink. He had felt fine when he first got out into the fresh air, but he certainly couldn’t describe himself as sober, and suddenly the effects of the beer and wine seemed to be catching up with him.

  ‘Oh dear, that doesn’t feel too good,’ he said, feeling his stomach lurch as if someone had punched him in the gut.

  And then, across the stream, he thought he saw a movement. He realized straight away that he was imagining things. He shook his head, but that only made him feel worse. Peering into the trees, he found his eyes drifting out of focus and had to concentrate to get them back into position. Ahead, where a rock formed an elbow in the bank of the stream and the

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  water foamed as it flowed round it - was something there? In the blackness he thought he saw a darker glistening, the uncertain outline of a shape formed by water swirling in different directions. Droplets of rain gathered and trickled sideways, while others lay glittering in random patterns on horizontal surfaces before running downwards again. In the centre of the outline was a void, where no rain touched.

  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.

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  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 j
ust 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

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  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.

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  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

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  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.

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  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

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  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.

  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.

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  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 co
llie 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.’

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  ‘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.’