05.One Last Breath Read online

  He shook his head. No one who was superstitious or claustrophobic would dream of entering. But Cock Lorrel and his outlaws had been beyond the normal bounds of society, associated in the imagination with the Devil, and with every evil practice that people could think of – including cannibalism.

  That reputation must have been relished by the gypsies and tinkers who’d come to the cavern each year for the Beggars’ Banquet. In fact, they had probably cultivated the myth, knowing it would ensure they’d be left alone.

  A deep rumbling he’d been hearing came closer, and Cooper saw lightning over Castleton. He touched the handle of the iron gates. There should have been a chain and padlock, but the gates swung open easily at his touch. He could see several footprints at the top of the first terrace, where water running from the cliff face and splashing off the ticket booth had softened the surface.

  ‘No way,’ he said. ‘There’s no way I’m going in there again. Not on my own, in the dark.’

  He fingered his phone, remembering that he’d have to walk all the back into the village to get a signal, or talk his way into someone’s house.

  Cooper was about to turn away from the gates, but stopped. The last shreds of light from the lamps on the path reached a few feet past the ticket booth before being swallowed up in the blackness of the cavern. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could make out the shapes of the abandoned ropemakers’ equipment on the terraces – the sledges and winders, and the jack with its rotating hooks.

  And a few yards along the top terrace, he could see a human figure, motionless, slumped over one of the pulley-poles.

  He pulled out his torch and shone it on the figure, illuminating a hunched back in a dark jacket, and legs that dragged on the floor at an unnatural angle. It hung on the edge of the darkness that led to the Devil’s Dining Room, and he knew he was looking at no one alive.

  Carefully, Cooper moved over the terrace towards it. He touched the shoulder, already feeling a prickle of apprehension from the knowledge that something wasn’t right. His hand rested on the dusty fabric, and sank in. His fingers pushed into the shoulder as if it had been reduced to shreds of straw. The figure sagged and slipped sideways. Dust fell out of its sleeves, and a pale, shapeless face rolled towards him, painted eyes staring past him towards the soot-blackened roof.

  Somewhere in the darkness of the cavern, Cooper heard a metallic scrape, the drawing back of a powerful spring.

  ‘Put down the torch and turn round,’ said a voice. ‘Or you’re as dead as that dummy.’

  41

  Outside Speedwell Cavern, Diane Fry could see the road that ran up into Winnats Pass. The sides of the pass certainly looked a peculiar shape, but no doubt there was some sound geological reason for that. Coral reefs and tropical lagoons, indeed.

  Ben Cooper had also told her a story about the old A625 being closed by landslips from Mam Tor. She’d found it hard to believe, having spent most of her life among roads that stayed pretty much where they were put. But, from Speedwell, she could see the collapsed slopes of the hill, where the shale had been loosened by the vast amounts of water that fell in these parts. It was obvious even to her that thousands of tons of rock had slithered down into the valley, carrying the road with it, ripping up yards of tarmacked surface as if it had been so much black crepe paper.

  A member of staff was waiting for them in a room at the top of a steep flight of steps. He made them put on white safety helmets from a heap on a table.

  ‘Was it you who called in?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what’s your name, sir?’

  ‘Page.’

  ‘Mr Alistair Page?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Fry studied him for a moment.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you later, Mr Page,’ she said.

  A guide took them down the steps, which ran back under the road, descending steeply into the hillside. The arched roof was low, as if constructed with small men in mind. Fry found it impossible to get into her stride as she went down. She had to take the steps one at a time for fear of losing her balance and pitching headlong to the bottom, where even her hard hat might not save her. Behind her, Gavin Murfin clutched cautiously at the handrail, which meant he had to stoop rather than walk in the middle of the steps where the roof was high enough to stand upright.

  ‘And how far does this canal thing run?’ Fry asked the guide.

  ‘Over half a mile. The old lead miners cut southwards from here to intersect the veins that run east to west through this hill. Some of the veins are still visible in the tunnel we’ll go through.’

  ‘We’re not here for the tour, by the way.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  When they reached the landing stage at the bottom, two members of the task force dressed in boots and overalls were already sitting in a long punt-type boat. In front of them was the mouth of a tunnel cut through the rock. Once they entered it, they would find their heads only an inch or two below the roof.

  ‘There isn’t much weight in this boat, so it’s going to ride a bit high in the water, I’m afraid,’ said their guide. ‘You’ll have to duck as we go through the tunnel. Also, it might go a bit too fast for me to control properly. But don’t worry – it’s perfectly safe.’

  He switched on an electric motor and the boat began to move. The low hum of the motor was no louder than the splash of water and the bump of the hull against the walls. They ducked their heads to avoid the roof, but couldn’t avoid the occasional scrape of a helmet on rock. Around them was the smell of cold, wet stone. And the tunnel was dead straight. All Fry could see ahead were two rows of lights fixed to the walls, reflecting in the slowly moving water like elongated candles. They made the tunnel seem endless, and the entrance to the cavern unreachably far away.

  Ben Cooper watched Mansell Quinn closely for a clue to his intentions. He knew he was trying to look for humanity in a face hardened by despair. The creases at the corners of Quinn’s eyes hadn’t been there in the old photographs, and his hairline had receded a little from his forehead. But his hair was still much the same colour – still that sandy blond, like desert camouflage.

  Quinn was very lean, but the muscles in his shoulders were well defined. Apart from his hands and face, he had remarkably fine, translucent skin. He’d taken off his shirt, and his ribs and collarbones were visible, their fragile shapes like scaffolding under plastic sheeting. Blue veins snaked across his shoulders and along the insides of his arms, and gathered in clusters in the crooks of his elbows. Above his left hip was an angry wound, about three inches across, that wept trickles of blood.

  ‘I’m Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police. Please put the weapon down, sir.’

  Quinn didn’t respond. His torso was wet, as if he’d been washing, perhaps trying to clean the wound. He was standing a few yards away on one of the terraces where the ropemakers’ sledges and winders stood abandoned. Cooper guessed he’d been down to the stream in the bottom of the cavern.

  The crossbow was pointing steadily at Cooper’s chest. Quinn nodded towards the interior of the cavern.

  ‘Walk straight ahead on to the path.’

  ‘This isn’t a good idea, Mr Quinn. Put the weapon down.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what is and isn’t a good idea.’

  Cooper hesitated. The usual advice was to keep the subject talking in a situation like this. But he saw Quinn’s reaction and remembered his reputation for violence and a quick temper. It might be best to co-operate, or seem to.

  ‘It is Mr Quinn, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Walk straight ahead. Don’t step off the path. And don’t stop until I tell you.’

  ‘I’ll need the torch,’ said Cooper, gesturing at his feet. ‘The lights are off in there.’

  ‘No. There’ll be all the light we need. Just move.’

  Cooper looked at the crossbow in Quinn’s hands. The bolt was about eighteen inches long, with a wickedly sharp point. A draw of a hundred
and fifty pounds, and a hunting range of forty yards. The statistics had seemed academic at the time. But not now.

  Cooper turned towards the path, and walked into the darkness.

  ‘There’s Poor Vein, then Pocket Holes,’ said the guide. ‘They found blocks of lead ore in there weighing several pounds, buried in yellow clay. We’re four hundred and fifty feet below the surface now.’

  ‘I did say –’

  ‘I know you did. But I thought it might help if I keep talking.’

  Diane Fry silently cursed the man for noticing that she was having a problem. Once they’d entered the tunnel, she’d begun to feel the rock closing around her. She knew without the guide telling her that they were getting deeper, the weight pressing down harder and harder as they slid through the water.

  The darkness ahead was unnerving, too. Despite the lights, she couldn’t see an end to the tunnel. The walls converged slowly, but vanished in the distance before they met. There was still a long way to go before she could get out of the boat. Fry looked down into the water.

  ‘How deep is it?’

  ‘Only three feet.’

  Enough for her to drown in, if she had a panic attack and went over the side of the boat. She didn’t have much hope of Gavin Murfin saving her, if that happened. Fry looked at Murfin on the next seat. His shoulders were hunched and his head was down. He was very quiet.

  ‘Enjoying it, Gavin?’ she said.

  He shook his head, squinting at the sides of the tunnel. The bow swung to the right and hit the wall with a bang, shuddering the planks in the bottom. The guide pushed against the rock face to get it back into the centre. But with no more than a few inches’ clearance, the boat bounced off the opposite wall almost immediately.

  The guide looked back into the boat at his passengers.

  ‘There’s no way anybody could get in here. You can see that.’

  ‘We have to check,’ said Fry.

  He shrugged. ‘Just here is Halfway House – it’s a branch canal, made so that two boats can pass in the tunnel. It’s only a few yards long.’

  Fry dipped her hand in the water. They’d been told the temperature down here was a constant nine Celsius, but the water itself was a few degrees colder.

  ‘How does it stay full of water?’ said Murfin.

  ‘There’s a dam up ahead in Far Canal.’

  ‘Another canal?’

  ‘It’s more of a continuation of this one, further into the hillside. But we don’t go as far as that. We stop at the Bottomless Pit.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Murfin. ‘I think.’

  The cavern system was full of flowstone curtains, delicate calcite dams, and little gour pools holding crystal-clear water. Irregular fragile growths hung on the passage walls, while stalactites and stalagmites grew from the roof and floor, forming drip by drip from the evaporation of dissolved calcium.

  But Ben Cooper saw none of it. Mansell Quinn had the only torch, and he kept it pointed at the floor so they could see where they were putting their feet on the uneven flights of steps and slippery patches of wet limestone. The light didn’t seem very strong to Cooper. He wondered how long Quinn had been using the battery. A torch wasn’t on the list of items he’d bought at Out and About, so where had he got it? Was it something his mother had kept in a kitchen drawer in case of emergencies? Cooper prayed that Quinn at least had a spare set of batteries. Peak Cavern wasn’t a place to be without a source of light.

  And it was clear that they were heading deeper into the cavern. They had bent double as they passed through Lumbago Walk and into the Great Cave. The dome-like avens in the roof far above had gone by unseen as Cooper tried to listen for the echoes that identified the acoustics of the Orchestra Gallery. But the familiar cascade of water still caught him by surprise, and he was unable to turn his head away in time to avoid it. Roger Rain’s House.

  In a flicker of Quinn’s torch, Cooper saw the moss around a fibre-optic light on the wall, growing from spores that had been carried into the cavern on visitors’ clothes, or that had drifted in on the air.

  ‘OK, stop,’ said Quinn a few minutes later.

  Another second of light, and Cooper saw the yellowish-white calcite sheets glistening on the walls, and tiny black hooks hanging from the roof. Then the torch turned away, and there was only darkness around him again. The surface was four hundred feet away now, through solid rock.

  Cooper realized that his skin was tingling in the cool air. All his attempts to engage Quinn in conversation had failed so far. Maybe he could think of something that would force him to answer.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Quinn. He pointed with the torch. ‘On the floor.’

  Quinn had the torch in his left hand, on his injured side. But the crossbow was gripped firmly in his right, his index finger curled close to the trigger. Cooper sat cross-legged on the floor, immediately feeling the chill of the damp rock through his trousers. He hadn’t come dressed for this. In fact, he hadn’t come equipped for it, either. Like the most foolhardy of amateur cave explorers, he had no equipment, no proper clothing, no food or water, and now no light of his own. And he hadn’t told anybody where he was going. What an idiot. Alistair Page was the only person who might think of looking for him in the cavern.

  Quinn sat on a boulder across the chamber, at a safe distance and above Cooper’s level. He was taking no chances. But Cooper saw that Quinn hadn’t put his shirt back on. It would be difficult for him to do that now without losing control of the crossbow or the torch, or both. His body had dried, but he must be feeling the cold.

  ‘Why did you confess to killing Carol Proctor?’ said Cooper.

  His voice jarred the silence. He’d never heard himself sound so small and tinny. As the cavern swallowed the sound of his words, he was overwhelmed with a sense of his own insignificance in the vastness of the cave system.

  But at least it had worked.

  ‘Because I was guilty,’ said Quinn.

  ‘That’s not what you said at first.’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘Why?’

  The torchlight flickered. Quinn put the torch down on the boulder next to him, flexed his left arm and gripped the shaft of the crossbow to steady it. Cooper saw that he was shivering.

  ‘Why did you change your mind? Was it because your friends let you down, didn’t give you an alibi for the right time? Without that, your defence wouldn’t stand up, would it?’

  Quinn didn’t answer. So Cooper tried again – he had to keep him talking.

  ‘Or was it because of what you remembered during the police interviews, Mr Quinn?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Cooper leaned forward and talked a little more quickly and insistently, focusing Quinn’s attention on him.

  ‘I think it must have been very traumatic going into your own house and finding your lover dying on the floor. The shock would’ve driven everything else out of your mind. You couldn’t think properly, could you? I can see that’s how it must have been. But some things came back later, didn’t they? Details, impressions. They came back when the detectives asked you questions.’

  Quinn stared at him. ‘I don’t understand how you can know that. You weren’t there.’

  ‘I’ve read the transcripts, Mr Quinn. I think I could tell where it happened – where the memories came back to you.’

  ‘You can’t know something like that. You’re making it up.’

  Quinn shifted the butt of the crossbow a little. It must be very uncomfortable, pressed against his naked shoulder like that.

  Cooper leaned an inch or two closer. The torchlight was definitely failing now, but Quinn didn’t seem to notice. The gradual fading of light could be indiscernible, until it was too late. Until you realized it was already too dark to see.

  ‘What was it you saw that day?’ said Cooper. ‘You noticed something in the room, something that surprised you. It shouldn’t have been there. What did you remember seeing?’

  Quinn�
��s eyes were drifting away, and he was losing concentration. The nose of the crossbow dipped a little. Cooper realized that Quinn must be exhausted. He’d been sleeping rough for the past few nights, and constantly on the move during the day, always looking over his shoulder for a police car or a CCTV camera. It was almost over for him now; he was drawing on his last reserves of energy.

  ‘The Coke bottle,’ said Quinn, as if talking in his sleep. ‘I smelled it first. There was a Coca Cola bottle on the table. It wasn’t quite empty.’

  ‘What was wrong with the Coke bottle being there?’

  ‘Carol didn’t drink Coke. She hated it. The bottle shouldn’t have been there.’

  ‘And what else?’

  But Cooper couldn’t get out the next question before Quinn cut across him.

  ‘And there was a light – a light from upstairs. Carol wouldn’t have gone upstairs. She wouldn’t go near the bedroom, not even to pass it on the way to the loo.’

  Cooper wanted to hold his breath, so as not to disturb Quinn’s recall. But he needed to ask one more thing.

  ‘There was something you heard?’

  ‘Music. There was music in the house.’

  Cooper hadn’t expected that. A voice, a footstep, the sound of a door closing, perhaps.

  ‘Music? What music?’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Quinn. ‘Not at the time. But later, I recognized it. It was U2.’

  ‘U2?’ Cooper closed his eyes. It had been there in the transcript of the interview, after all. But he hadn’t understood it. Nor had the interviewers. As far as they were concerned, Mansell Quinn had said, ‘You, too.’

  ‘Somebody else had been in the house before you arrived,’ said Cooper. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’