One last breath bcadf-5 Page 44

  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

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  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 street lamps 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.

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  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.’

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  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.

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  1’

  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 rhe 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.

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  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-time 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.’

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  ‘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.

  Simon laughed. ‘A couple of months. I suppose you think it isn’t possible to live here when it’s in this condition, but you get used to it.’

  Well, at least there was furniture. A three-seater settee stood opposite a TV set, and Simon whipped off a couple of dust sheets to reveal matching armchairs.

  ‘There’s a lot of work to do on it, of course,’ he said. ‘It’ll have to be completely re-plastered and re-wired, and it needs a new floor in the kitchen. And you ought to see the bathroom - you couldn’t go in there without a decontamination suit when I first saw it. It’ll all have to be ripped out. But I can do most of it myself, given time.’

  Cooper was having difficulty lowering himself into one of

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  the armchairs, because his leg didn’t seem to bend properly. Fry hoped she wouldn’t have to help him up when it came time to go. She might prefer just to leave him there.

  ‘Do you live here alone, then?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘For the moment. But I’m engaged, and my fiancee and I are planning to get married next April. We’d already been saving up for a while, so when we saw this house on the market we snapped it up. It has three bedrooms, so we can start a family as soon as we want. We were very lucky.’

  ‘Yes, you were. But you’re taking a lot on, aren’t you?’

  Tm nearly twenty-nine,’ said Simon. ‘It’s time I settled down.’

  Fry heard a noise in the kitchen. ‘Is your fiancee here?’

  ‘No, that’s Andrea. I presume it’s all right my sister being here?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Simon glanced towards the kitchen. ‘You know, we’ve always been very close. Well, not always, perhaps. I didn’t appreciate having a little sister when I was in my early teens. But after what happened with our father, we became close. And now, after all this, well …’

  ‘There are times when you need to turn to members of your family for support,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Fry looked at Cooper, but he wasn’t paying her any attention. He was gazing around the room, as if memorizing the entire contents. If he could have moved more easily, she thought he would have got up to count the videos and CDs, and inspect the magazines in the rack by the telly.

  ‘Mr Lowe,’ she said, ‘I have to ask you some serious questions.’

  Simon’s face fell. ‘Go ahead, then.’

  Andrea came into the room then, as if on cue, and sat next to her brother on the settee. She nodded at Fry and Cooper, but said nothing.

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  ‘For a start,’ said Fry, ‘did it ever occur to you that it might not have been your father who killed Carol Proctor?’

  Simon looked shocked by her directness. She saw the first hint of that rush of colour to his face, but it died away again.

  ‘No, it didn’t.’

  ‘It’s a pity. But the scapegoat was too obvious, wasn’t he? Too obvious, and too easy.’

  ‘That’s uncalled for.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Fry. ‘We were all the same. It helped everybody to believe that your father was guilty.’

  Simon leaned forward. ‘Look, I honestly believed he was guilty. I mean, he did kill Carol Proctor, didn’t he?’

  ‘We can’t be entirely sure of that, in the light of recent events.’

  ‘Oh?’ Simon and Andrea looked at each other. ‘And what’s your evidence for that?’ said Simon.

  Instead of answering, Fry changed tack, trying to keep him off balance.

  ‘You bunked off school a lot when you were about fifteen, didn’t you, sir?’

  ‘So what? Everyone does it. It means nothing.’

  ‘I know. Believe it or not, I did it myself.’

  ‘Where is this leading, Sergeant?’

  ‘The day Carol Proctor was killed, you both bunked off school together, didn’t you? I mean, you and your good friend Alan.’

  Now Simon looked really surprised, and Fry knew she was right. Until that moment, she hadn’t been entirely sure.

  ‘Well, not together exactly,’ he said. ‘We were supposed to sneak out separately and meet up at my house. We were just going to drink Coke and listen to some music, it was as innocent as that. But Alan managed to get away from school and I didn’t. One of the teachers spotted me and sent me back. I was supposed to be preparing for my GCSEs, you see. I didn’t want a bad report going back to my parents. They wanted me to do well - you know what it’s like.’

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  Fry nodded as if she understood. But proud and ambitious parents were one pressure that she’d never had to suffer.

  ‘So Alan went to your house and waited for you to turn up. But he got into the house, didn’t he? How could he have done that?’

  Simon sighed. ‘There was a spare back-door key under one of Mum’s garden ornaments - a concrete rabbit with a hollow base. She didn’t trust me or Andrea not to lose keys of our own, so she always left one under the rabbit for us in case we came home when no one was in. Alan knew about the key. He’d seen me get it from there before. That day, he waited outside for a while, but it started raining, so he got the key and went into the house. He knew I wouldn’t mind we were good mates.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You know, Mum carried on doing that, even after we left home. She used to say wherever we all were in the world, her house was still our home.’

  Fry watched him for a moment, fearing a show of emotion that she’d have to pretend to sympathize with.

  Then she realized that Cooper had tensed and was sitting forward in his armchair. She gave him a glance, but he was concentrating on Lowe. At least he wasn’t going to interrupt at the wrong moment.

  ‘So let’s go over that again,’ she said. ‘Alan Proctor had gone into your parents’ house to get out of the rain. He was waiting for you, but you didn’t turn up. So what did he do with himself?’

  ‘He got a bottle of Coke from the fridge, then went up to my room, drew the curtains and put some music on the stereo. That’s what we would have done anyway, if I’d been there. There was nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘OK. And then?’

  ‘He waited a bit, until eventually he realized there must be something wrong. After a while, he knew there was a chance

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  of my father coming home, and it would look odd him being in the house without me. So when he heard somebody coming up the path, he scarpered.’

  ‘Out of the back door?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘So whoever he heard must have been approaching the house from the front?’

  Simon shrugged. ‘I imagine he heard my father parking his car and
coming in through the gate. Maybe Alan actually saw him - my room looked out on to the street. Dad had a bit of a temper, and he didn’t like Alan very much. He thought he was a bad influence on me - you know the sort of ideas parents get.’

  ‘Did Alan tell you all this himself?’

  ‘I’m sure he told me some of it - about going into the house anyway, then leaving sharpish.’

  ‘When did you see him to talk about it?’

  ‘Oh, it was days later.’ Simon frowned. ‘In fact, it must have been weeks. Andrea and I stayed at our Aunt Dawn’s for a while, and we didn’t go back to school until nearly the end of term. My memories of that time are all a bit vague. I was thinking mostly about my father, and worrying about my mother. The shock, you know … To be honest, I don’t think it even occurred to me at the time that Alan would have been at the house. Everything else seemed so unimportant.’

  ‘And when you did see Alan again, did you ask him about it? Or did he volunteer this story?’

  ‘He volunteered it. Like I say, I hadn’t even remembered that he was going to the house. When he told me, I just thought he was so lucky that he’d got out of the way in time. If my father was drunk and lost his temper, he might have attacked Alan too.’

  Fry studied him. Concern for a friend was all very well, up to a point. Had Simon Lowe’s sense and judgement been

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  influenced by his feelings for the people involved? Well, why not? Everyone else’s had.

  ‘But I don’t understand why you call it a story,’ said Simon. ‘Don’t you believe it?’

  ‘Surely you can see there’s something wrong with your friend’s version of events?’ said Fry.