One Last Breath

12

The red stains of ferrous oxide showed through white limestone and a coating of green algae, and water ran continuously down the face of the multi-coloured rock. The stream bed where it left Peak Cavern was almost dry at this time of the year, but the flow reappeared down the gorge, spurting from a gash at the foot of the cliff.

Ben Cooper and his nieces watched the jackdaws chattering continuously overhead.

‘Do the birds nest on the cliff ledges?’ asked Amy, who was taking an interest in wildlife at the moment.

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Cooper, looking anxiously for ducklings planning to take a suicidal dive.

Inside the cavern entrance, they found themselves on a series of wide terraces cut out of the rock. Families of ropemakers had set up their workshops here centuries ago, building their houses into the floor and knocking out tiny doors and windows, so that the rope walks they worked on were also the roofs of their homes. The rock walls were stained black from the soot of their fires.

On the top terrace, a small crowd was watching a guide stretch hemp twine from winders to pulley-poles and twist it into rope using a sledge and a jack with rotating hooks.

Amy and Josie ran down the dirt slope to a reconstruction of a ropemaker’s house. The roof was hinged up, so that visitors could look down into the living space, otherwise it would have been too dark to see anything. Inside, there was just enough room for a fireplace, a couple of chairs and some beds covered in straw, built into the wall like shelves. Suddenly, the girls laughed nervously.

‘Who’s he?’

‘A ropemaker, I suppose,’ said Cooper.

A stuffed figure was propped in one of the chairs near the fireplace. He was dressed in black and had a pale, shapeless face, with crudely defined eyes that stared blankly into a dim corner.

‘He’s a bit scary,’ said Amy.

‘It’s only like a Guy Fawkes.’

‘They should burn him, then.’

Cooper blinked as he watched Amy go back to join the crowd at the demonstration. Josie stayed with him, staring into the house. She was the more thoughtful of the two, and he guessed she was trying to imagine what life would have been like for the ropemakers’ families. Or at least, he hoped she was. For all he knew, her mind might be absorbed in some fantasy of flames and immolation, too. He didn’t really understand children.

He sniffed, inhaling the scent of the hemp as it moved through the guide’s hands. It smelled like wet horses’ tails.

It occurred to Cooper that earlier visitors would have been able to smell this place long before they reached it. The ropemakers had kept animals in here — pack horses, cattle, goats, and even pigs for their tallow. The effluent must have gone into the stream flowing out of the cave, along with human waste. It would have been quite a culture shock for the genteel visitors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

‘Welcome to the Devil’s Arse,’ said Alistair Page, coming to stand alongside him on the terrace. ‘We’ll be able to go through the show cave in a moment. We had to wait for a party to come back out, so thank you for being patient.’

Page had a verbal mannerism that had caught Ben Cooper’s attention even when they’d been underground during the rescue exercise. On occasional words he emphasized a final ‘t’ with a click of his tongue against his teeth. It was audible in ‘moment’ and in ‘patient’. Cooper found it distracting and began to listen more carefully, to see if he could discern a pattern. He soon noticed that it only happened when the word fell at the end of a sentence. It produced an exaggerated emphasis, like a full stop pronounced out loud. Each time he heard it, he imagined Page spitting out an exclamation mark, ejecting it like an apple pip that had stuck between his teeth.

Cooper called the girls, and they followed the path along the wall, above the terraces. The change from warm outside air to the cooler atmosphere of the cave was noticeable as they descended wide steps into a chamber called Bell House. Of course, it was a constant nine degrees Celsius down here. Mist hung in the chamber, and steam rose from the lights where water dripped from fissures in the roof.

They entered Lumbago Walk, a low tunnel blasted from the rock. Alistair Page explained that it had been created for a visit by the young Queen Victoria. Previous visitors had been forced to enter the cavern lying flat on their backs in a shallow boat, clutching candles to their chests. The adults had had to bend double to avoid knocking themselves senseless on the roof.

As they hunched over, Page leaned towards Cooper and whispered to him. ‘Quinn’s out of prison, isn’t he?’

Cooper stared at Page, surprised by the question.

‘Who?’

‘Mansell Quinn.’

‘Do you know Quinn, Alistair?’

‘I’ve lived in Castleton all my life.’

They emerged from the tunnel into the Great Cave, where bands of blue fluorite ran across the ceiling. Page pointed out the fossils in the rock, the remains of sea creatures that had died in the reef. He showed them a flowstone formation called Mother-in-law’s Tongue and an imitation boulder left by the BBC while filming TheChronicles of Narnia.

‘So you were in Castleton back when Carol Proctor was murdered?’ said Cooper.

‘Of course. In fact, at the time I lived very near where it happened.’

‘In Pindale Road? So your family were neighbours of the Quinns?’

‘Well, very close.’

Page pointed to crystal-clear water lying in a rock pool, with tiny blind shrimps flickering across the surface.

‘Apart from the shrimps, there isn’t much natural life in a cave like this,’ he said. ‘But it’s amazing how things can find a way to survive.’

He showed them moss growing in the walls near the fibre-optic lights, and the empty webs left by spiders that had died because they found no flies to feed on. With his lamp, he pointed out the shapes formed in the walls — Father Christmas, Bambi, an alligator’s head, and the dog from Tintin, whose name none of them could remember.

‘And here — ’ he began, as they entered the Orchestra Gallery.

But then he stopped. Cooper looked at him, puzzled by the change in his manner. It was almost as if he’d frightened himself with his own stories.

‘There — in the light from the Great Cave — can you see the shadow on the wall?’

Cooper followed the beam of his light. The outline of a head and shoulders was visible in a shadow picked out by the lights of the chamber they’d just passed through. He could even see two stubby horns protruding from the head.

‘It’s the Devil himself,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Page. ‘That’s who it is.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine.’

Cooper looked up at the gallery again. But without a light, the shadow had disappeared.

‘You see, the effect of the light is a bit funny in here,’ said Page. ‘You not only imagine shapes — sometimes you even think you can see them moving.’

Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin had called at West Street on the way to their next call, which was all the way down the county in Sudbury.

‘I want to know how they’re getting on with tracking down William Thorpe,’ said Fry.

‘If he’s anything like Proctor, they shouldn’t bother,’ said Murfin.

Fry was struggling to put Raymond Proctor out of her mind. She couldn’t stand people who pushed her so far that she lost control, even for a moment. Instead of thinking about Proctor, she ought to be more concerned about Dawn Cottrill. Dawn had been the one to find her sister murdered. She might have had a right to be upset, to react badly to the police. But she hadn’t.

In the incident room she was met with shaken heads when she asked about Thorpe.

‘And I suppose it’s too soon for the postmortem report on Rebecca Lowe?’ Fry said.

‘Sorry.’

‘Any sign of the weapon? Have they finished searching the scene yet?’

‘No sign.’

‘DNA?’

‘You’re joking.’

‘You didn’t ask whether Quinn had been found,’ said Murfin, following her as she stamped out.

‘Not much hope of that,’ said Fry. ‘If we can’t find Thorpe, what chance do we have of locating Quinn?’

Deeper into the cavern, they entered Roger Rain’s House, where a perpetual cascade of water poured through the roof from the floor of Cave Dale. Cooper remembered it from the day before, when the water had spattered his face as he lay in the rescue stretcher. But it was only now that Page decided to mention the water had been found to contain sheep’s urine.

‘Oh, great,’ said Cooper, trying to remember whether he’d kept his mouth closed.

They passed through the Devil’s Dining Room and reached a barrier at the top of a slope where the muddy remnants of a flight of steps and a wooden chute ran down into the darkness. They could hear the distant sound of rushing water.

‘This is the Devil’s Staircase. You can hear the River Styx from here,’ said Page, standing at the top of the chute. ‘Which is a good thing. As long as we can hear it, we’re safe. If the noise stops, it means the water on the lower level has reached the roof and the cavern is about to flood. Then we have four minutes and thirty seconds to get out.’

‘What’s beyond here?’ asked Cooper.

‘Another twelve miles or so of passages, chambers, crawls and sumps. That’s what we know of, anyway — there may be hundreds of miles more that haven’t been discovered yet. But this is as far as we go today.’

Cooper gazed down the Devil’s Staircase towards the noise of water. Even the girls were quiet as Page reeled off the names of the caverns deep in the hill: Fingernail Chamber, the Vortex, Surprise View. Many of them conjured up images of a fairyland waiting to be explored. But Cooper knew there was no fairyland, only darkness down there.

When they walked back into the Devil’s Dining Room, Cooper noticed Page flashing his light into the corners and running it along the ledges where the shadows lay thickest. In the roof of the chamber were black spikes of stalactite, like meat hooks.

‘Those are called the Devil’s Hooks,’ said Page. ‘In fact, there’s a nice little story about this chamber. It’s where they used to hold the Beggars’ Banquet.’

‘The what?’

Page seemed not to hear Cooper’s question, but continued his story with a distracted air.

‘For hundreds of years, Peak Cavern was used for an annual gathering of gypsies or tinkers. It was called the Beggars’ Banquet, and it was held right here in the Devil’s Dining Room every August — by royal permission, no less. It was said to be a celebration of the pagan festival, Lughnasa.’

It might have been the echo effect of the chamber, but Page’s voice sounded unnaturally loud, as if he were addressing a more distant audience than the small group around him. He turned as he spoke, performing a complete circuit of the Devil’s Dining Room with his lamp. The stalactite spikes glittered and winked in the ceiling.

Cooper was momentarily reminded of his panic in the narrow tunnel during the rescue exercise. He was conscious again of the massive weight of rock above him, and pictured the spiked roof gradually descending. Even from here, it seemed a very long way to the exit.

‘The bands of tinkers were led by a famous outlaw called Cock Lorrel, “the most notorious knave that ever lived”,’ said Page. ‘Cock Lorrel was the King of the Beggars, and it was said that he invited the Devil to his banquet in Peak Cavern to prove he was afraid of no one. Hence the Devil’s Dining Room.’

He paused. As his voice died away, they could hear the sound of running water, the strange and unidentifiable noises made by the crevices in the rock, the inexplicable rattle of small stones.

Page turned his head back towards where they had come from. Back towards the Devil’s Staircase and the endless web of passages deep in the darkness of the hill.

‘The festival went on for two weeks,’ he said, ‘so we can only imagine the condition of this place by the end of it. But what we do know is that they were pretty blood-soaked affairs. The guests at the Beggars’ Banquet were cannibals.’

Amy and Josie laughed, thinking the story was over. Still bursting with energy, they went ahead up the wide steps through the Orchestra Gallery. Cooper saw their faces glowing in the light from the pool where the tiny, blind shrimps lived.

‘He is, isn’t he?’ said Page.

‘What?’

‘Quinn — he’s out of prison?’

‘It seems to be general knowledge,’ said Cooper. ‘But you must have been only a youngster in 1990, Alistair.’

‘I was fifteen.’

Page fiddled with the cord of his lamp, giving his full attention to it for no apparent reason, as if to discourage Cooper from probing any further. Even though his father had dealt with violence in his job, Ben knew how deeply he himself would have been affected if, at the age of fifteen, he’d learned of a murder near to his home. Close to home, it was a different matter. He wanted to ask Page what he’d thought of Mansell Quinn, but decided to leave it. It was doubtful what value there might be in the memories of a fifteen-year-old boy.

They caught up with the girls in the Great Cave. Amy and Josie were gazing up into the roof sixty feet above them, awed by the swirl holes made by the waters of the prehistoric river. And they were looking for the rock that had made the shape of the Devil in the next chamber.

‘The poet Ben Jonson wrote about Cock Lorrel and the Beggars’ Banquet,’ said Page cheerfully, spitting out the ‘t’ in ‘banquet’ so hard that it ricocheted off the walls like a bullet. ‘Back in the seventeenth century, that was. It’s in his poem The Gypsies Metamorphosed. It’s a bit gruesome, though. He says that the dishes eaten at the banquet were made from all the people Cock Lorrel and his followers didn’t like — they broke open their heads and ate their brains.’

Page looked at the two girls doubtfully, but Cooper knew they wouldn’t be bothered by anything gruesome. Amy and Josie had been raised on a livestock farm. They’d seen more birth and death in their short lives than most adults ever did.

Feeling the change of air as they passed through the Bell Chamber, Cooper realized he was nearly outside again. His mind went back to the conversation he’d had with DI Hitchens before he left West Street that morning. There seemed to be a short gap in his memory of what the DI had been saying, just after he’d told Cooper that his father had been the arresting officer in the Mansell Quinn case. But then Hitchens’ voice had drifted in again, like a radio station coming back on to its wavelength.

‘Joe Cooper and a PC were the crew of the car that responded to the 999 call when Carol Proctor was killed. Your father knew Mansell Quinn, of course.’

‘He knew everybody,’ Cooper had said automatically.

‘Yes, I think he probably did.’

Then Hitchens had deliberately let a silence develop. Cooper had felt he was being watched for a reaction, much as the DI might watch a suspect in the interview room. Almost everyone showed physical signs of their state of mind, no matter how hard they tried to conceal them. And Cooper knew he was no exception.

‘Sir, does this mean that you think …?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Hitchens. ‘I don’t know what Mansell Quinn has in mind. He might come looking for me, but I doubt it. I was only a junior DC — he probably wouldn’t even have known my name. I didn’t get any publicity, or any of the credit. You don’t, as a detective constable. I’m sure you know that, too.’

Hitchens smiled, but Cooper found he couldn’t work his face muscles sufficiently to respond.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Obviously, I’ve had to mention this to DCI Kessen,’ said Hitchens. ‘In case it’s relevant to the current enquiry in any way.’

‘I understand.’

‘Quinn had been in trouble prior to the murder, you know. In fact, your father had arrested him twice before — once for receiving stolen goods at a building site he was working on, and the second time for an assault in a pub. There was a general punch-up, and both Quinn and Thorpe were involved.’

‘Will Thorpe was there, too?’

‘They were good friends, don’t forget.’

‘Right.’

‘Quinn was charged with assaulting a police officer, among other things. Do you want to guess who the officer was?’

‘I remember it,’ said Cooper. ‘Dad had a black eye and a foul temper for weeks afterwards.’

‘But he didn’t take even a day off work, which the defence made use of at the trial, in an attempt to minimize the injuries.’

‘He could have lost an eye. Quinn used the thick end of a pool cue.’

‘That was denied by the accused, and there were no eye witnesses willing to confirm it. In fact, it was never really clear whether Quinn or Thorpe was nearest to Joe Cooper at the time. The court had no choice but to acquit Quinn on that charge.’

‘And then there was the Carol Proctor case.’

‘Yes. I always thought it was a bit lucky myself, the way Quinn’s case fell apart before it even came to a trial. But we were more than happy to get a conviction, of course.’

‘In what way did you think it was lucky, sir?’

‘The whole alibi business. Raymond Proctor and William Thorpe alibi’d each other, and Quinn’s wife was at work. So the only person without an alibi was Mansell Quinn himself.’

‘Right. The obvious suspect — the one found at the scene.’

‘The clincher, though, was the knife. It had Quinn’s fingerprints on it, and Carol Proctor’s blood. Also, the blade matched several of the wounds on her body. According to the postmortem report, some of the wounds couldn’t be conclusively matched to the knife, but some were definites. Quinn said he had never touched the knife, hadn’t touched the body, hadn’t walked in the blood.’

‘He might have been in a state of shock and not aware of what he was doing.’

‘That one was tried by the defence.’

‘It’s possible, sir.’

‘They only tried it out of desperation. They could see their client was going down for life.’

Hitchens passed across a file. ‘I’ve dug out the interview transcripts. Why not read them, Cooper, and see what you think?’

Cooper took the file reluctantly. ‘But this was in 1990,’ he said.

‘Yes, 1990. You won’t remember those days, Cooper — you haven’t been in the force long enough. PACE and tape recorders were still quite a new thing then, and some officers regarded them as a nuisance. But it’s much better the way it is now. All open and above board, and no chance for some clever defence lawyer to claim you tricked his client into confessing to something he didn’t do.’

‘Are you saying — ? Was there anything wrong with Quinn’s conviction?’

‘God, no.’ The DI shook his head. ‘I’m not saying that at all. Nobody doubted it.’

‘Except Mansell Quinn.’

‘Well, that’s the point.’

Hitchens sat back in his chair and swivelled towards the window. Looking past his shoulder, Cooper could see mould on the roof of the football stand. It seemed to symbolize the stagnation of Edendale FC, permanently stranded in the lower division of one of the pyramid leagues, forced to sell off their best players to pay their debts, with no money to buy new ones and match-day attendances dwindling to hundreds. Or maybe it just symbolized the damp weather.

‘Quinn’s opinion wouldn’t matter ordinarily,’ said Hitchens. ‘At the time, he was just another violent thug caught bang to rights. And now he’s another embittered old lag. But in view of what happened to his wife, it looks as though he could be an extremely dangerous old lag. You get my meaning?’

‘He claimed he was innocent at first, but put in a guilty plea,’ said Cooper. ‘Then he changed his story again in prison.’

‘Can you think of any reason for that?’ said the DI carefully.

Cooper tried to let that sink in. ‘Sir, are you saying Mansell Quinn could have been innocent all along?’

‘I think Mansell Quinn might believe he was innocent. And that’s all that matters.’

‘Is it?’

‘I think so, in the circumstances. Don’t you, Ben?’

Hitchens smiled, as if inviting Cooper to join with him in a small conspiracy. But Cooper felt unable to respond. Something inside him seemed to be inhibiting his reactions. He was afraid he was missing something, or that he wasn’t going to ask the right question. Or maybe that he would blurt out the right question, and the DI would give him the truth. And then it would be too late.

‘Do you think Quinn knows my father is dead?’ he asked instead.

‘I have no idea,’ said Hitchens with a small sigh of relief. ‘I suppose it’s a question we could ask his probation officer, or his personal officer at Sudbury.’

‘We’ll be talking to those people anyway, won’t we? I mean, about any comments he might have made regarding his family, or his old associates.’

‘Yes, we will.’

‘So it might not seem too odd to be asking whether he ever talked about Sergeant Joe Cooper.’

‘Mmm.’ Hitchens sounded doubtful.

‘I suppose it might seem odd to the officers tasked with making the enquiry, though,’ said Cooper, trying to interpret the DI’s hesitation.

‘Damned odd, unless we explained the reasons to them. And then the results of their enquiries would have to be put into their report, and that would go back to the receiver in the incident room and be looked over by the analyst, and then entered on to the HOLMES system by one of the operators, and maybe it would generate another action which the allocator would give to a second enquiry team …’

‘Enough,’ said Cooper.

‘You see how complicated it is?’

‘Yes.’

Hitchens watched him for a moment. ‘So, what do you think, Cooper?’

Cooper swallowed painfully. The effort of trying to control his physical reactions was becoming almost too much to bear.

‘I’ll deal with it.’

Then the DI had nodded and smiled. ‘And do you know, Ben — that’s exactly what your father would have said.’

As he made his way back across the rope walks, Cooper smelled the hemp again, pungent with the scent of animals. He looked up at the black soot stains on the roof and thought of Alistair Page’s tale of Cock Lorrel and the Beggars’ Banquet, all the wickedness and blood-soaked horrors imagined by superstitious locals.

But if the people who’d lived in the cavern all those centuries had meant no harm to anyone, they ought not to have become objects of fear and hatred, stigmatized as cannibals and worshippers of the Devil. They ought to have been left alone.

And that’s what his father would have said, too.