One last breath bcadf-5 Read online

  ‘There wasn’t much else to do.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I think that when Rebecca Lowe phoned, she told Ray Proctor she knew about Alan, and that she was going to tell Quinn the truth, if he came back.’

  ‘Tell him that it was Alan who killed Carol? But Quinn had already figured that out for himself years ago, thanks to Simon.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘Yes. But neither Rebecca nor Proctor knew that.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘How can I be? We’ll never know what was going through Will Thorpe’s mind, or how much he told Rebecca. This is total conjecture, Diane, but it’s the only way it makes sense.’

  ‘You mean Ray Proctor had no reason to shut Rebecca up? It achieved nothing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Cooper. ‘If only Will Thorpe had told her the whole truth, it could have saved both their lives.’

  Fry sat down suddenly and stared at him. ‘But, instead, Rebecca’s threat must have upset Proctor badly.’

  ‘So badly that he needed a drink. We know Ray Proctor drank at the Cheshire Cheese. He always has done, and he’s never altered his habits. Some people never do. He was out drinking that Monday night - Connie mentioned it. She said he came back late.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘The landlord confirms Proctor was in the Cheshire Cheese that night. Which means he’d have seen Quinn - remember, Quinn was in the bar from about ten o’clock.’

  ‘Well, perhaps he did see him,’ said Fry.

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  ‘Yes, I think he did. Quinn checked in and went up to his room, then came back down to the bar later. I think Proctor saw Quinn come into the pub, and so he made a quick exit.’

  ‘And he went to Parson’s Croft?’

  ‘To see Rebecca Lowe,’ said Cooper. ‘He thought that’s where Quinn would go, so he wanted to get there first.’

  ‘You’ve got it all worked out.’ Fry looked at him. ‘It’s almost like the Carol Proctor case all over again, isn’t it?’

  ‘He’d been drinking heavily for a while by then. And he was desperate to stop Rebecca telling Quinn the truth.’

  ‘But the boot impressions, Ben - they matched the prints at the field barn where Will Thorpe was killed. Quinn was definitely at Parson’s Croft that night. You can’t escape that fact.’

  ‘Yes, he was there all right. It’s ironic, but by the time Proctor saw him in the pub he’d already been to Parson’s Croft. And Rebecca was still very much alive when he left. I’m sure he just stood at the bottom of the garden and never even approached the house, let alone went in.’

  ‘But why?’

  Cooper remembered the images of Quinn captured on the security cameras at Hathersage and Castleton. His expression had been difficult to read at the time, but it came back to Cooper now.

  The think he was frightened,’ he said. ‘His courage failed him. I think he couldn’t face Rebecca after all that time.’

  ‘He couldn’t face her sober, you mean?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So Rebecca was alive, you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘If his courage hadn’t failed him at that moment, Mansell Quinn might have saved her life.’

  Fry was silent for a moment. ‘It remains to be seen how co-operative Raymond Proctor will be. Without his prints on the back-door key for Parson’s Croft, we’d have had no evidence to justify the search. We knew Rebecca Lowe made

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  a phone call to Proctor that day, but so what? They’d known each other for years. OK, so Proctor was drinking at the Cheshire Cheese that night, where he might or might not have seen Mansell Quinn, and he might or might not have left the pub when he did. Again, so what? Why shouldn’t he get out of the way rather than risk a confrontation? We have no witnesses to say Proctor went to Parson’s Croft, no one who saw his vehicle on the farm track, and no tyre impressions. There was no DNA at the scene, nothing. If Proctor had used a bit of logic and kept the key, or just wiped it, or worn gloves, he’d still have been waiting for the right moment to dispose of the knife.’

  ‘Logic doesn’t necessarily work at a time like that, does it?’

  More members of the team were arriving back in the office now. Their voices could be heard in the corridor, loud and excited. Downstairs, Ray Proctor had been processed, booked in and allocated his cell. Cooper wondered whether he’d be sent to Gartree to start his sentence. And whether, in fourteen years’ time, he’d find himself walking out of the gates of LIMP Sudbury, abandoned by his family and about to slip through the cracks in the system.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Fry. ‘Proctor must have been really worried about Will Thorpe. Full marks to your persuasive powers for getting him to take Thorpe back again, Ben.’

  ‘Proctor made sure he didn’t stay, though.’

  ‘And Quinn finally sorted the problem out for him.’

  ‘I suppose we still haven’t located Quinn?’ said Cooper.

  ‘No. But he’ll turn up somewhere. Not even Mansell Quinn can slip through the cracks completely.’

  Gavin Murfin came in, smiling and sweating. ‘Hey, Ben,’ he said, ‘We don’t need to do a DNA test on you. Did I ever say that?’

  ‘Yes, you did say that, Gavin.’

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  ‘I know, but it’s amazing. Did you check to see whether your Dad ever pulled Alan Proctor?’

  ‘No. But Dad would have given any fifteen-year-old boy a second chance,’ said Cooper. ‘He always did with youngsters.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard that, too,’ said Fry.

  She’d perched on her desk as the room filled up, looking relaxed and enjoying the atmosphere. Or at least, that’s what Cooper thought she was doing.

  ‘I heard he preferred to take the initiative into his own hands and just give them a ticking off, or a bit of friendly advice,’ she said. ‘Like Gavin says, a real old-style copper. You wouldn’t get away with it these days. Not for a minute.’

  Cooper turned to face Fry. He managed to hold her gaze for once, despite the fact that he knew she could see straight through him.

  ‘Everyone deserves a second chance,’ he said.

  ‘Not quite everyone, Ben.’

  He wasn’t sure who she was referring to. Who didn’t get a second chance? Mansell Quinn or Alan Proctor? Or was she referring to hint! Or even to herself?

  It reminded Cooper that he’d come nowhere near to understanding Diane Fry the way she seemed to understand him. At times, he felt as though he was getting closer to an insight into her mind, but she always drifted away again, like something too fragile to be grasped in the hand.

  He couldn’t remember which of the Castleton show caves contained a well-known calcite formation - a stalactite and stalagmite that had grown towards each other until they were only four centimetres apart. Just four centimetres away from touching, and merging together. But geologists had calculated that it would take at least another thousand years before they finally met, if ever.

  Cooper cast around for something to say that would take her mind off the subject, something that might restore the personal understanding they came so close to now and then.

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  ‘How is Angle, by the way?’ he said.

  Fry slid off her desk. She came towards him slowly and leaned her face towards his, touching her hand lightly on the sleeve of his shirt, where it lay like a branding iron against his skin.

  ‘Ben, did you happen to get any additional information out of Mansell Quinn, anything that would help us to clear his name and prove that it was Alan Proctor who killed Carol?’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘I didn’t.’

  She stared at him, and Cooper still couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  ‘OK.’

  Of course, the one mind that Cooper had no trouble understanding was his father’s. He and Joe Cooper were very much alike, as everyone pointed out. They both believed in a second chance. For Mansell Quinn and Alan Proctor, it was too late. But had Sergeant Joe
Cooper attempted to conceal the presence of a fifteen-year-old boy at a murder scene? It seemed possible that someone had stopped the music, turned off the upstairs light and wiped the Coke bottle. Had those efforts been in vain? Cooper hoped not. And he didn’t know if he’d undo what his father had done fourteen years earlier, even if he could.

  He felt a sudden chill run up his spine and along the back of his neck, as if someone had opened a fridge door behind him, and he turned to the window. It was open, but the air coming in was no icy draught. What he’d felt was a gust of air from a world where it was much colder than a humid summer in Edendale.

  The window looked down on to the car park, and Cooper saw Simon Lowe walking to his car. He must have completed his formal statement, and had probably been kept waiting around for a while. Andrea was waiting in the car, and she got out of the passenger seat to meet him as soon as he

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  appeared. There was another woman sitting in the back of the car, somebody Cooper didn’t recognize. The fiancee, Jackie, perhaps? They had a wedding planned for next April, and an awful lot of work to do on their new house if they were going to start a family.

  ‘Diane,’ said Cooper, ‘did you ever track down the teacher who caught Simon Lowe bunking off school and made him go back in?’

  ‘No,’ said Fry vaguely. ‘He gave me the man’s name, but it turned out he retired years ago, and has since died of a heart attack. Funny - it reminded me of your father’s partner, PC Netherton. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. It was just the last loose end, really.’

  ‘It’s good to clear up loose ends. But you were wrong about one thing, weren’t you, Ben?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘None of it had anything to do with your father. So that’s one problem out of the way.’

  ‘Yes, Diane.’

  But Cooper didn’t think that was right. For a moment, his father had walked back into his life, to remind him that he was dealing with people, and not with a sequence of numbers and chromosome locations on a DNA profile. He was in no doubt that it was Sergeant Joe Cooper himself who’d crept up behind him a second ago and breathed that icy breath on the back of his neck. His father had sent him a message with a single cold touch, an unspoken word in his ear.

  Cooper watched Simon and Andrea Lowe standing together for a moment by the car. They weren’t touching or speaking, just looking into each other’s faces, communicating the way you could with a sibling. Then they threw their arms around each other and hugged so tightly it must have been painful.

  At last they got into the car, reversed carefully among the police vehicles, and turned out on to the road towards

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  Edendale. Simon drove a little too fast, as if afraid he might not get a second chance, after all, if he didn’t get away soon.

  Cooper had heard of a Chinese religion called Taoism. Its members believed you were born containing all the breath you’d ever possess in your life. For them, every exhalation was a step nearer death. When you used up your last breath, there was no more.

  But Cooper had thought about it in the last few days, and he knew they were wrong about that. There was always one last breath.

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  Speedwell Cavern, 10 September 2004 It was towards the end of the summer when a party of retired college teachers from Virginia climbed slowly down the steps at Speedwell Cavern to take the underground boat ride.

  When they disembarked on to the platform above the Bottomless Pit, they straightened their safety helmets and looked up into the roof of the cavern hundreds of feet above their heads, where the remains of primitive wooden ladders still protruded from the rock.

  Then they gazed down into the green water far below as the guide told them about the lead miners who’d hurled tons of rock into it. They listened politely to his stories about the Devil, who the miners believed had lived at the bottom of the lake, and about the giant white serpent that was supposed to emerge from the water and roam the passages, seeking human prey.

  ‘And, of course, it’s the high lead content of the rock that gives the water its green colour,’ he said.

  The guide was about to turn off the lights and lead his party back to the boat. But one visitor had been leaning over the parapet and staring closely at the water. He was an old physics professor, and he had a question.

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  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘I understand it’s the lead that makes the water green. But what causes the bubbles?’

  Puzzled, the guide looked over the parapet. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The bubbles, see? Oh, and another thing - the smell?’

  The guide wasn’t a man to be frightened by his own stories of giant white serpents. But even he could see there was something in the lake seventy feet below. It was pale and bloated, and it almost shimmered in the lime-green water as bubbles of gas burst around it.

  And one thing he was sure of. The thing was rising slowly to the surface, gradually re-emerging from the depths of the Bottomless Pit.

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