One Last Breath

16

The sound of Carol Proctor’s last breath still haunted him. Sometimes, when he lay in bed in his cell at night, he’d imagined all those hundreds of thousands of branching tubes, and all the millions of tiny sacs that had made up her lungs. He tried to picture the membrane that covered them. It was a fraction of the thickness of tissue paper, they said — but a hundred square yards of it, bigger than a tennis court. It seemed impossible that it should fail to draw in a breath. Just one more breath.

Mansell Quinn closed his eyes and tried to feel Carol’s lungs as if they were his own, receiving all the blood from her heart with every beat, feeding oxygen into her arteries, supplying her brain and her heart and the other organs of her body. And then he imagined the whole system stopping, like a clock winding down. Her chest rising and falling more slowly, until the final breath had been forced through the slackened muscles of her throat with that dry rattle, the scrape of escaping air that he’d heard and still remembered.

The memory of that sound only made him more angry. So angry that he wanted to smash something.

Quinn breathed deeply for a few minutes to regain control, then sat up slowly. Sudden movements were much more likely to be noticed, even here among the trees, with a cover of deep bracken. But the only people he could see were the same two anglers on the banks of one of the fishing lakes, so motionless with their nets and tackle boxes that they might be asleep.

The sight of the cement works chimney across the other side of the lakes reminded him of Will Thorpe. There was some place near here that Will had talked about using as a doss, but Quinn didn’t plan to turn up anywhere that he might be expected to.

Talking to Will had been surprisingly difficult. For the last fourteen years, Quinn had talked to no one about his past. For all his fellow prisoners and his personal officer knew, he had no memories to speak about. Perhaps they thought he wanted to start his life afresh and put everything behind him.

But Quinn’s memories were still there. They lay in his heart, cold and heavy. He thought of them as being like the shapes in the petrifying wells at Matlock Bath, which his father had taken him to see as a child. Some of them were ordinary household objects, hardly recognizable for what they’d once been, the accumulated layers of lime rendering them useless drip by drip, but preserving them for ever in their grotesque forms. They’d been turned to stone.

His father had talked about a petrified bird’s nest that had belonged to his grandmother. It had been a gift from a relative who’d spent a holiday in the Peak District — and the only connection the Quinn family had had with Derbyshire until they moved there. Like the other souvenirs sold in the shops at Matlock Bath, it had been left in one of the petrifying wells until it had covered over with lime and attained the peculiar appearance that visitors prized so much. Quinn had never seen the nest, though he’d pictured it in his imagination. The detail that had impressed him most was that the nest had been complete with eggs.

‘Four of them,’ his father had said. And he would hold up four stubby fingers, pitted with blue scars, as if his son couldn’t count. ‘Real eggs, turned to stone. Imagine the little chicks inside them.’

‘Were the chicks turned to stone, too?’

‘I don’t know, boy. We never opened the eggs to look.’

The thought had repelled Quinn but fascinated him at the same time. They told him at school that eggs were supposed to represent new life. But here, life had been snuffed out at the moment of birth, turned to stone for the amusement of day trippers. It had symbolized the Peak District for him then — a place where his spirit had been stifled, forcing him to fight his way out into the world all over again. He felt crushed by the weight of the stone he could see in the hills all around him.

‘What sort of bird made the nest?’ he would ask his father, needing the specifics to make sense of the story.

But there was only one answer he ever got: ‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’

‘A blackbird, Dad? A starling? Something bigger?’

‘I’ve no idea. What does it matter, for goodness sake?’

‘What did Grandma have the nest for?’

‘She just had it, that’s all.’

Then his father would get irritated and go back to his newspaper, or he’d walk out into the garden to look at his vegetables. And next time he told the story, it would be exactly the same. He never saw his son’s need for explanation.

Quinn thought there ought to be ways of making sense of his petrified memories, of forcing them out into the open and letting the sun pierce the calcified layers to find the original shapes underneath.

But memories seemed to become attached to personal possessions, and he had very few of those. For years, his life had been measured by prison service regulations. The possessions he’d been allowed in his cell had been subject to what they called ‘volumetric controls’, which meant everything he possessed had to fit into two boxes. At intervals, his cell was inspected to make sure he hadn’t broken regulations and created a private life for himself beyond his battery radio and his statutory three books and six newspapers.

Many of the permitted items held no relevance for him anyway. Diaries and calendars had seemed like self-inflicted torture, and he had no family photos for his locker.

After a while, Quinn became aware that his lack of personal items might reflect badly on his suitability for parole. He’d placed a subscription for Peak District magazine and Birdwatching, and he’d asked the library for more books on natural history and geology. One of his magazines came with a calendar featuring scenic views of Derbyshire, which he taped to the wall of his cell. One day, an officer on lock-up had pointed out that he hadn’t turned over the page, even though the old month had finished six days ago. But the old month had been January. It showed a snow scene over Castleton to the slopes of Win Hill.

A movement caught his attention. A couple of golfers were walking across a green on the golf course to the north of the fishing lakes, but they were too far away to see him. Quinn scanned the anglers again, then lay back down in the bracken.

It had been in Peak District magazine that Quinn had found the article about the Castleton caves. He’d read about cave breathing, the movement of air in and out of a cave entrance. It could draw in small creatures, leading them away from their natural environment into the depths, from where they never returned. Accidentals, they were called. Creatures drawn in by cave breathing.

Mansell Quinn liked that idea. He thought he could be called an accidental himself. He had been drawn into the darkness. But he was on his way out now. He’d learned to control the breathing.