One last breath bcadf-5 Read online

  Cooper knew it must be sarcasm. Quinn was taunting him. Yet the man’s voice was flat, and Cooper could detect no emotion behind his taunt. In fact, Quinn’s words seemed to falter and die in the air of the chamber, as if they lacked enough conviction to reach the walls. They sank quietly, like carbon dioxide settling to the lowest point of the cave, and their meaning was swallowed up by the layer of silt on the floor.

  Of course, Quinn was a man who had stifled any real feelings long ago. Any feelings except that deep, consuming anger.

  Quinn tensed, watching him intently in the yellow light.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you that,’ he said.

  Against his will, Cooper closed his eyes. He knew it was

  446

  I

  going to happen now, and he didn’t want to see the look in Quinn’s eyes as he squeezed the trigger of the crossbow.

  In that moment, Cooper felt his senses heighten. He could feel his clothes sticking to his body with sweat, and the bite of the underground chill on his hands and face. He could taste the dampness of the air in his mouth. Around him were the smells of mud and rock, and water draining through layers of earth, like the odours of the grave.

  Cooper listened for the sound of breathing, but couldn’t even hear his own. He heard only the faint hissing of the light stick and the trickle water from the roof, as he waited for the thud of the bolt leavine the shaft.

  447

  By the time Diane Fry found Alistair Page’s house in Lunnen’s Back, she was feeling sick. Her spell in the cavern had built up the pressure in her head until she thought it would explode. She couldn’t blame the hay fever alone, although it had left her feeling rough for days. Now it was compounded by anxiety. Not anxiety - fear.

  When the boat had finally brought them back to the landing stage, they’d climbed the steps only to discover that Alistair Page had disappeared. And she still had no idea where Ben Cooper was.

  ‘Mr Hitchens isn’t happy,’ said Gavin Murfin as he finished a call to the West Street station. ‘He wants to know what your justification is for diverting the task force from Speedwell. He says you don’t have the authority, Diane.’

  Till give him justification,’ said Fry. ‘Let him wait.’

  ‘Is that Page?’ said Murfin.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the corner there, just below the house. There’s somebody lurking underneath the street lamp.’

  ‘No,’ said Fry, ‘but it’s somebody I 43

  want to talk to. It’s Raymond Proctor.’

  448

  I

  *

  After a few moments, Ben Cooper opened his eyes, expecting to find Mansell Quinn still there, his face yellow in the glow from the light stick. But Quinn was gone, and so was the light. Around him was darkness. Real darkness.

  Cooper stood up. It was the only thing he felt confident enough to do. Even so, he almost lost his balance. His head swam dizzily, and he had to flap his arms as he struggled to orientate himself. Without light, there was no way of knowing which way was up or down. But after a moment of panic, he calmed down. He practised standing still for a while to ease the pins and needles in his legs. The damp rock he’d been sitting on had chilled him through to the bone.

  He had no idea which direction Quinn had taken. In fact, it was impossible to tell which way the passage ran. All he could do was find the wall and feel his way along it. It would be slow going, but it was the best he could do for now. He might at least be able to work out whether he was going up or down - out of the cavern, or deeper into it. All Cooper knew was that he was in the Devil’s Dining Room. In the light from Quinn’s torch, he’d recognized the black stalactites in the roof: the Devil’s Hooks.

  He began to move in the darkness, then stopped after a few paces, feeling anxious about bumping into something hard. He waved his hands in front of his face, like a blind man. Maybe the more sensible course would have been to stay where he was and wait to be rescued. But he was wet from the cascade of water, and when he stood still he began to feel very cold. He knew hypothermia was a real danger if he was down here too long. There was no Little Dragon handy to provide warm air for him to breathe.

  He started to move again. It felt as if the darkness had diminished his powers of logic and perspective, as well as disrupting his physical senses. He tried to remember how far he was from the place where Neil Moss had died, trapped in the limestone and running out of air. It had seemed a long

  449

  way into the cave system on the map, yet Moss’s presence felt suddenly very close.

  And who knew what could be around him in complete darkness? The chamber could be full of dead bodies, stacked to the roof sixteen deep, heaps of buried carnage that no one would ever see. The damp smell in his nostrils could be the stench of their bones, picked clean by pale, fat insects that had fallen off and died in the pools of ice-cold water, bloated with human flesh. If Cooper reached out a hand, his fingers might not touch stone at all, but the smoothness of a skull, the crevice of an eye socket, the dusty fragments of a young man’s hair.

  Cooper felt like a man walking through his own dreams, stumbling across a darkened, illusory landscape, where anything could be true, or everything could be false.

  He stopped when the toe of his boot hit a solid obstruction. He felt around with his foot, and stretched a hand out, moving it carefully downwards through the air to judge the height of the obstacle. It was a low boulder, no more than two feet high. If he hadn ‘t been moving so slowly, he would probably have tripped over it. He could feel nothing but empty air on the other side.

  It dawned on Cooper that he’d expected the cavern to be silent. Darkness and silence seemed to go to together. But he’d been wrong. Tlie river that ran deep in the limestone was a long way below him, but he could hear its roar through the rock. And water was running through the streamways, trickling over sheets of flowstone, seeping down the walls, dripping froťm the roof. Water was moving constantly everywhere.

  But there was something else, too - something that he heard only if he concentrated hard. It was a more subtle sound, a gentle rhythm that might have been caused by the movement of air, or could have been inside his own head. It was the swishing and pulse of a distant tide, invisible in the

  450

  endless darkness. As he stood in the depths of the cavern, deprived of sight, Cooper found the sensation oddly reassuring. The sounds he heard around him were like the liquid stirrings of a womb, and the distant beat of a mother’s heart.

  Of course, there was no such thing as silence. Not on Earth, anyway. Even the movement of the atmosphere made the planet hum, made it ring like a bell at a frequency beyond the reach of human hearing. If you were able to listen closely enough, you might be able to pick up the vibration. But of course, it was never quiet enough to do that. You’d always be able to hear the wind and the movement of the trees, the beating of your heart, and the sound of your own breathing. There was no such thing as silence.

  And that meant it would be very easy to hear voices in here. There were strange echoes among the murmurings and tricklings of the water. He wondered if cavers were superstitious and populated the caves with their own ghosts and demons. He wondered if they ever thought they heard Neil Moss, calling them. Heard Neil Moss, breathing.

  Cooper could hear a voice now. It sounded a long way off, but it bounced softly off the walls, drawn towards him on the cool air.

  ‘You should never have come back. You should never have come back into my life.’

  He didn’t recognize the voice. Its resonance was distorted and flattened by the rock, and the words were overlain by echoes. Cooper turned his head from side to side, trying to locate it, to identify the direction it had come from.

  ‘But you knew that I would, one day.’

  A second voice. This one was Mansell Quinn, he was sure. In Quinn’s case, the flatness of tone wasn’t entirely due to the acoustics. It was an intonation Cooper had been listening to
during the last hour - the voice of a man on the edge.

  ‘Yes. And I knew what you’d do once you were out of prison.’

  451

  ‘Of course you knew. You’re just like me.’

  ‘Like you? The hell I am.’

  Cooper began to edge cautiously towards the voices. He mustn’t be too hasty, or it could be disastrous. If he was heading towards the entrance of the cavern, then somewhere ahead of him would be the slippery limestone floor and ice-cold pools of Roger Rain’s I louse. He didn’t want to die face down in water with tiny, blind shrimps in his hair.

  ‘Yes, you’re just like me. Except that you really are a killer.’

  ‘What? You’re kidding.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have let you out. They kept me inside for years, but they let you out.’

  ‘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

  452

  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.’

  The 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

  453

  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.

  ‘Whatr

  ‘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.’

  ASA

  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.’

  455

  ‘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 onc
e 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.

  456

  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 had 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.