05.One Last Breath Page 42

  ‘A few months in that place was enough for me. There’s no way I’m going to end up like you, Quinn. I’m not going to spend half of my life inside, the way you did.’

  ‘Not much chance of that, Alan. You aren’t going to live that long.’

  The voices were louder now. Cooper couldn’t tell if it was because he was closer to them, or because the two men were getting angry, or both. Groping his way round an angle of rock, he felt the first spatter of water in his face. Damn the sheep urine. This time it felt good – it meant he knew where he was at last.

  Then Cooper’s foot slipped on the wet surface, and he hit the ground hard. He felt his ankle twist, and his knee cracked against the sharp point of a rock. He lay still, winded for a moment. In total darkness, the fact that he was lying on his back made almost no difference to how he felt. Except for the pain in his leg.

  ‘Are you threatening me, Quinn? You’re an old man now. Prison has destroyed you. I can see that in your eyes. You’re frightened – terrified of your own shadow. Why else would you be hiding down here? Hiding away from the light.’

  And suddenly Cooper recognized the second voice. It was the last word that did it – that final ‘t’ spat out like an audible exclamation mark. As if there were always an apple pip stuck between his teeth.

  Diane Fry had pinned Raymond Proctor against the wall of one of the cottages. A couple of vehicles went past her towards the cavern, lights flashing and engines groaning in low gear up the slope.

  ‘Alistair Page –’ said Fry ‘– is your son, Alan. He changed his name, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Proctor.

  ‘I suppose he didn’t want people reminding him of his mother’s murder all the time? Understandable, considering he was responsible for it.’

  Proctor said nothing. He wasn’t paying full attention to her. She could see his eyes wandering towards the cavern entrance and the activity around it.

  ‘Ten years ago,’ said Fry. ‘It was ten years ago that Mansell Quinn started telling the prison authorities and his fellow prisoners that he wasn’t guilty after all. That was a stupid thing to do – it could have been a factor in his parole hearing. Suddenly, a third of the way through his life sentence, Quinn was in denial. You see, it’s usually the other way around – when prisoners change their story, it’s to admit their guilt. Showing remorse helps them get parole.’

  ‘I know all that,’ said Proctor.

  ‘Of course you do. But it didn’t make sense to me. At first, I thought it was because Quinn had found out that Simon wasn’t really his son, and he wasn’t going to take the blame for another man’s child. But Enid Quinn put me right on that. Simon is Mansell’s son, and the DNA test proved it.’

  Proctor shook his head. ‘What’s that to me?’

  ‘It wasn’t Simon who killed Carol, was it, Mr Proctor?’ said Fry. ‘That was what Mansell found out somehow, ten years ago. And he was pretty much the last to know, wasn’t he? No wonder he’s so angry. He’s spent more than thirteen years in prison. I’d be pretty bloody angry with people who did that to me.’

  Proctor heard her out with a puzzled expression. But he didn’t ask what she was talking about. He had his own concerns.

  ‘Where’s Alan?’ he said.

  Fry drew in a long breath. ‘I don’t know, Mr Proctor. But we’re going to find him. Let’s hope nobody else has suffered to protect your son.’

  ‘He isn’t my son,’ said Proctor.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Alan is Mansell’s son. I’ve known that for a long time. All the gossip about Rebecca and the stuff about paternity tests, it made me laugh. Mansell was worried that he had no son, but he has two. I’m the one that has no son.’

  Fry stared at him. She could see that Proctor was sweating heavily from fear or anxiety, or both.

  ‘So why did you protect him?’

  ‘I’d lost Carol. In fact, I’d already lost her before she died. I may not have any real family now – but Alan is the closest thing I’ve got.’

  Proctor tried to move away then, but Fry took his arm.

  ‘Does Alan know who his real father is?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Proctor. ‘I thought he ought to know, so I told him when he was eighteen. It didn’t do any good. We were really close until then, but it seemed to destroy our relationship. I never understood why, exactly. I mean, you can be close to somebody without being related by blood, can’t you? Blood doesn’t always have to be thicker than water.’

  ‘And Quinn? Is he aware that Alan is his son?’

  Proctor shook his head. ‘Not unless Alan has told him.’

  44

  Mansell Quinn’s hand shot out and grabbed Alan Proctor around the neck, forcing his head back. If Alan had expected him to move more slowly, he’d been wrong. Prison hadn’t destroyed Quinn physically, at least. He threw his weight forward, and Alan crashed backwards, his head hitting the water of the pool.

  ‘You stupid bastard. Get off me!’

  Quinn plunged Alan’s head back into the pool. He kept it under for a few seconds longer this time, watching the other man’s face disappear in a swirl of silt from the bottom. When Alan came up again, he was coughing and spitting out streams of brown water. Quinn waited until he opened his eyes. He read the fear in them, the knowledge that the next breath Alan took could be his last.

  He tightened his grip on a handful of collar.

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Alan. ‘Let me get up.’

  Quinn heaved him up on to his knees then and stood back, bringing the crossbow smoothly over his shoulder.

  ‘You deserve everything that’s coming to you. Don’t you think so, Alan? Do you think you should get away with it completely? You killed Carol. For God’s sake, you killed your own mother.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re mad.’

  Quinn sneered. He pulled a bolt out of his rucksack, cocked the bow and loaded it. ‘I suppose you think you’ve suffered,’ he said. ‘Did you spend years expecting the police to come for you? Even after I went to prison, were you convinced someone would realize there’d been a mistake? Did you think there’d be a knock on the door one night, or somebody would be waiting for you when you were called out of class? If a car you didn’t recognize was parked on the road, did you believe it belonged to somebody who was watching you? I hope so, Alan.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ said Alan. ‘When I heard you coming home that night, I ran out of the house. I was in a panic, not thinking about anything except getting away. It was only afterwards I remembered I’d left the Coke bottle on the table and a tape in the cassette player. Simon had bought The Joshua Tree that week. It was still playing when I left the house. I can still hear it now, when I think about it. It was either “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” or “With or Without You”. It was playing, right there in the house. You must have noticed. There are some things you can’t help but notice.’

  ‘But there was no reason for you to worry yourself,’ said Quinn. He slid the bolt back into the trigger mechanism and released the safety. ‘Not once they’d got me sent down.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Alan, trembling now with cold and fear, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got this all wrong. What I told you in Gartree – that was true. There weren’t any other men with Mum at the same time as you. I really am your son. I’m a bastard, but I’m your bastard. You can’t do this to me.’

  But Quinn just shook his head.

  ‘You should start running now,’ he said.

  Ben Cooper knew the two men weren’t far ahead of him. But his leg wouldn’t support him any more, and he could only drag himself a few inches at a time through the darkness. He’d be glad now even to see a glimmer of Mansell Quinn’s light stick, though he was sure Alan Proctor must have come into the cavern with a lamp. He craved any kind of light.

  The words the men spoke were hardly penetrating Cooper’s brain. But phrases stuck in his mind, and he knew they ha
d meaning. The Coke bottle he remembered. Somebody had wiped the fingerprints from it – wasn’t that it? So had they been Alan Proctor’s fingerprints, not Simon’s? Quinn had remembered Simon playing U2 in the house. But Alan was a fan of the band, too. He had their CDs in his rack.

  Cooper gasped with the pain, but almost laughed at the same time. ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. It had been playing in the background when he phoned Alan. What day had that been? Back when he still thought of Alan Proctor as Alistair Page, anyway. And that was something else funny – Will Thorpe had almost told them the truth before he was killed. It was Alan who’d made a new life for himself. He’d even changed his name.

  The voices had stopped. Cooper tried to listen, but could hear only his own breathing. And then there was a loud snap and something whistled over his head. Then he heard a crack and clatter as it began to ricochet violently between the walls of the passage behind him.

  The echo hadn’t died away before there was a second snap, followed by a dull thump and a slap, like a butcher’s cleaver slicing a piece of steak.

  Cooper kept his head down. If he’d been standing upright, the first bolt might have gone straight through him. He waited for more noises, but there were none. The natural sounds of the cave began to creep back, the trickling of water and the distant rumble of the river. They were impressions that he would carry with him for ever, if he got out alive.

  While he waited, Cooper tried to make sense of what he’d heard – the Coke bottle and the music, signs that a teenager had been there at the scene of Carol Proctor’s murder. He thought of the ten minutes that Sergeant Joe Cooper had been alone at the Quinns’ house, securing the scene. He was an observant man, so he’d have picked up the clues of another person’s presence in the house. There were some things you couldn’t help but notice.

  Finally, Cooper decided it was safe to keep moving. He seemed to be crawling for a long time, but he had covered only a few yards. He sensed an obstruction in front of him and stopped again, feeling tentatively around the object. Illogically, his hopes rose. He thought at first that he’d somehow found his way back to the dummy of the ropemaker lying near the cavern entrance. But that would have meant he’d passed through the Orchestra Gallery and Lumbago Passage without noticing them.

  Then logic took over and told him that if he was in the cavern entrance he would be able to see the light of the streetlamps in Riverside Walk.

  But there was no light, only darkness. The body on the floor was too solid to be a dummy. And it wasn’t dust that leaked from its clothes, but blood.

  Diane Fry hadn’t stopped being angry. The search team had reported the discovery of the dummy, the series of footprints going into the cavern, and the police-issue torch abandoned on the terrace. Armed officers had arrived, and they were heading further in, using caution, though now they at least had lights. Cave rescue were on their way, in case casualties needed to be recovered from the cavern. DI Hitchens had arrived, and DCI Kessen would be on the scene soon. It was no longer her responsibility.

  A cheer went up from the team in the cavern entrance. The task force officers had succeeded in entering the ticket booth and locating the main control panel for the lighting. High on the cave walls the fibre-optics began to glow.

  A short while later, Ben Cooper experienced a series of familiar sounds and movements – a swaying and tipping, the heavy breathing of effort and discomfort. The constriction was familiar, too. And the darkness, the occasional flash of light across the rock surface. And there was the constant trickle of water. Splashes of it landing on his face.

  And at last, he felt a change in the temperature of the air, and heard a babble of voices and clatter of machinery filling a much larger space around him. The DCRO rescue party had brought him to the cavern entrance.

  ‘I bet you’re glad to be out in the daylight at last,’ someone said.

  Cooper nodded, but couldn’t speak. He’d been so far into the darkness that the light hurt.

  From the waiting room at Edendale General Hospital an hour later, Cooper made a call on his mobile to Bridge End Farm. He told Matt part of what had happened, and reassured him he was OK.

  When he ended the call, he looked around the waiting room. There was no sign of him getting near the front of the queue yet. Gavin Murfin had set off to fetch him a cup of tea, but had been gone a long time. Cooper imagined he’d found a cafeteria and was putting away a quick pie and chips before he returned.

  His next call was to Diane Fry.

  ‘How is Alistair Page? I mean, Alan Proctor?’

  ‘Dead,’ said Fry.

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And Mansell Quinn?’

  Fry’s voice lowered to little more than a whisper as she failed to hide her disappointment and tiredness.

  ‘We lost him.’

  Cooper tried to sit up straight, but a jolt of pain shot through his ankle and up his leg.

  ‘Lost him? You’re kidding.’

  ‘I wish.’

  ‘Do you think he got out of the caves?’

  ‘I don’t see how, Ben. But if he did, he’ll turn up somewhere.’

  ‘There’s one other possibility. Maybe Neil Moss is about to have company.’

  Formations, stals or pretties – those were the names the cavers gave to the calcite deposits in the caverns. Somewhere there might be cave pearls, the tiny calcite spheres lying in their own nests. Mansell Quinn remembered the petrified bird’s nest that his father had shown him, its eggs apparently turned to stone. But down here was real stone, millions of tons of it. No question of the slow smothering of new life. Here, life could be crushed in a moment.

  He raised the light stick above his head and looked at the translucent yellow sheets covering the rock. Flowstone, they called it. Well, it might have flowed at some time, many thousands of years ago. But now it was solid and hard, flowing nowhere. If he chipped a lump out of the wall, would the remaining calcite flow over to fill the hole? Not in a million years. The hole would stay right where it was, and the broken lump would crumble in his hand. It hung in great, dead sheets in the darkness, untouched by the outside world. It was beyond the breathing.

  Quinn stepped to the edge of the black void. He took hold of the crossbow by the butt and threw it into the darkness. It vanished from sight instantly, but took a long time to fall. He listened patiently to the silence until the weapon hit the water with a distant splash. Then the rucksack followed, and the waterproof, and the bloodstained shirt. He didn’t need them any more.

  He thought about the early cave explorers, back in the 1950s, using primitive diving equipment, walking on the bottom of flooded passages in weighted boots. In a sump, you couldn’t come up for air. There was only one way out – the way you came in. Quinn knew that in those circumstances the only thing to worry about was fear. You could die with nothing wrong, simply because you’d panicked.

  He had expected to be cold, but he didn’t feel chilled any more. The temperature was warm enough down here to attract new life into the cave system – the bats and spiders and insects. But some were accidentals, like himself. They fell in through the cracks in the rock, or were washed in by the underground rivers or the water soaking through the hill. Others just followed the movement of air, the irresistible pull of cave breathing. They drifted with the current, taking the easiest route – until they found themselves out of their environment, isolated from their own world. They’d been drawn in by the breathing. And there was no way to return.

  Quinn lifted his arms above his head like a high diver. He felt the wound on his side break open and begin to ooze blood, but he ignored it. The yellow glow was fading at last. The light was almost gone.

  Then Mansell Quinn took one last breath. And the darkness rose up to meet him.

  45

  Monday, 19 July

  Simon Lowe had been lucky to get this house, all right. In fact, Diane Fry could see that he’d be the envy of many a first-t
ime home buyer in North Derbyshire.

  The house stood in the middle of a traditional stone terrace on a side street off Meadow Road, one of the few parts of Edendale where property hadn’t moved up into an unreachable price range. The street ended at the fence that enclosed a school playing field. In common with all the older areas of town, there was almost nowhere to park.

  A lot of the tension and anger seemed to have gone out of Simon since Fry had spoken to him at his aunt’s the day before. As she watched him move a roll of carpet aside so they could squeeze down the narrow passage into the house, she remembered how alike he and his sister had seemed on the day they identified the body of their mother at the mortuary. How alike, and how close.

  But after days of studying photographs of Mansell Quinn, she could see Simon’s father in him now, too. He had the same colouring and the same slightly wary look in the eyes.

  ‘Watch where you walk,’ said Simon. ‘Sorry about the mess. There isn’t a habitable room in the house at the moment.’

  ‘It’s no problem.’

  Fry turned to see where Ben Cooper had got to. He was still coming up the path, though it was only a few feet from the pavement to the door. He limped awkwardly over the step, smiling at her as though his leg wasn’t troubling him in the least.

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to stay in the car, Ben?’ she said.

  ‘No, no. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.’

  She tried to rein in her irritation. Cooper had practically begged to come in on this interview, and she knew she’d made a mistake in agreeing. She didn’t really need him now, not once she’d picked the relevant information out of his statement. She’d let him come because she felt sorry for him. But if he was going to be a martyr, it was just too much.

  All the rooms of Simon Lowe’s house seemed to smell of old floorboards and stale plaster. When he led them through into a back room, Fry could see why. There were no carpets down, and most of the wallpaper had been stripped. Wires protruded from holes at skirting-board level.

  ‘Have you been in this house long?’ she asked.