One Last Breath

18

‘Anger-management training,’ said Diane Fry. ‘It’s a bit of an American idea, isn’t it? It seems to go with botox and pre-nuptial agreements.’

Ben Cooper looked up and noticed her sniffing and rubbing her eyes, which seemed a bit red today. He had been getting ready to go out of the office again when she came to his desk. She was carrying a file, too, but he couldn’t quite see what it was.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe it works for some people.’

‘Not in Mansell Quinn’s case, obviously.’

‘I imagine Quinn to be quite an intelligent man,’ said Cooper.

‘Why?’

‘Well, you’d need to have some power of concentration to stay angry for so long. When most people get angry, they just flare up for a short while, and then it’s all over. A few minutes later, they can hardly remember what they were angry about.’

‘I know what you mean. The blessings of a short attention span.’

‘But to stay angry for thirteen or fourteen years — that’s quite some achievement.’

‘Yeah.’

Fry sneezed and pulled out a tissue from a pocket. Cooper noticed her eyes were not only red but watering.

‘Hay fever?’ he said.

‘Full marks. I’ll probably be like this for weeks. Should give you a good laugh, anyway.’

She pulled the file from under her arm and looked for a place to put it on his desk, which was crammed with overdue paperwork as usual.

‘Well, I hope you feel better soon.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t be going off sick and leaving you to your own devices. That’s much too risky.’

‘I didn’t mean that, Diane. I — ’

Fry ignored him. ‘Anyway, if we can get back to the business in hand; I don’t think what Mansell Quinn is doing right now is the behaviour of an intelligent man, do you?’

‘I’m not sure I agree,’ said Cooper. ‘I think he’s an otherwise intelligent person doing something extremely stupid. Like we all do sometimes in our lives.’

With an exasperated sigh, Fry snatched up the report again. ‘Point taken.’

‘Hold on,’ said Cooper. ‘I didn’t mean anything.’

‘No?’

‘Diane, wait. I was just wondering what sort of books Quinn reads. Did you check with the prison library what he was interested in?’

‘Books?’ said Fry, as if he’d suggested checking the sewers for evidence of what Quinn had been eating.

Cooper couldn’t help smiling. ‘You don’t read many books, do you, Diane?’

‘I’m a graduate, damn it,’ she said. ‘I’ve read more books than you’ve ever dreamed of. I just don’t bother with fiction — I can’t see the point.’

But Cooper still smiled. He wasn’t impressed by this graduate business. All right, he’d never gone to university himself, but he knew plenty of people with degrees. And he’d noticed that it was possible to be a graduate and still be ignorant.

‘What was the last book you remember reading?’ he said. ‘I mean, really remember. The last book that changed your life.’

‘No book has ever changed my life,’ said Fry. ‘People have messed up my life for me often enough. But not books.’

‘That wasn’t quite I meant,’ said Cooper. He already knew he was going to regret mentioning the subject. Everything he said to Fry these days seemed to be taken as an intrusion into her private life. But when he asked her what book had changed her life, he’d assumed there must have been one that changed it for the better.

He looked at Fry hopefully. Did she understand at all? What subject had she taken her degree in, anyway? It wasn’t something she talked about very much, and he’d never thought to ask her. It would have to be some kind of legal subject, he guessed. Criminal Justice, perhaps? Something that focused on rules and procedures and didn’t involve dealing with real people.

‘There is one book I remember,’ said Fry.

‘Really?’ Cooper looked at her hard, suspecting she was about to make some cutting remark.

‘I can’t say it changed my life, though.’

‘No — but you remember how it made you feel?’ he said.

‘Yes. It made me feel filthy.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The author’s thoughts were in my head, and I didn’t want them there.’

‘Diane, that wasn’t what I meant either.’

‘So I burned it.’

‘What? You burned a book?’ Cooper was shocked. He wanted to ask her what book it was, but he was worried he might be even more shocked if she told him.

‘You’re right, though,’ said Fry. ‘I’ll check with the prison library what Quinn liked to read when he was inside. Maybe he let some kind of poison into his mind.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So what are you doing this afternoon, Ben?’

‘We had a call from an outdoor equipment shop in Hathersage. One of the staff remembers serving someone who answers Quinn’s description. Then I’m going to drop by the railway station up there, on the chance someone might have seen him catching a train when he left his mother’s.’

‘Are you taking Gavin with you?’

‘Unless you need him.’

‘No, that’s fine.’ Fry tapped the file, which Cooper had almost forgotten. ‘Well, I thought you might want to see this before you go. Then you can’t say I don’t keep you up to date.’

‘What is it?’

‘The postmortem report on Rebecca Lowe. Mrs van Doon estimates that the victim had died between an hour and two hours before she was found by her sister at eleven thirty that night. She was killed by multiple knife wounds, as we know. The problem is the weapon.’

‘Not a kitchen knife, then?’

‘Oh, yes. But not one that we’ve found in the house.’ Fry slipped a photograph out of the file. ‘You remember me mentioning the knives at the scene?’

‘Mrs Lowe had a whole block full of them in her kitchen.’

‘Yes. Decent stuff, too. Henckels Professional S range, according to one of the suppliers in town. Stainless-steel blades. Kept in good condition, they’re as sharp as hell. And these were almost new.’

Cooper looked at the photo. Taken by one of the SOCOs, it showed a section of the floor in Rebecca Lowe’s kitchen at Parson’s Croft. The victim’s left leg and hip were just visible on the edge of the picture, and the blood spatter spread most of the way from her body to the kitchen units. Lying on the tiles were several items that Cooper hadn’t noticed when he was in the house, because he’d been too busy looking at the body and the blood.

‘The wooden block itself is here, on the floor near the end unit,’ said Fry. ‘Dawn Cottrill says it usually stood on the work surface there, or on the window ledge behind it, depending on whether Rebecca had been using the knives. It would have been near enough to the door of the utility room for somebody to make a quick grab at it as he came through.’

Cooper could see five or six black-handled knives of various sizes lying on the floor. They were all neatly labelled by the crime scene examiners, and all of them had traces of blood visible on their stainless-steel blades.

‘So we reckon he grabbed one knife from the block, sending the rest flying in his hurry,’ said Cooper.

‘The position of the block and the knives is consistent with that theory.’ Fry sniffed again and tried to clear her throat. ‘There’s a close-up of the block here.’

‘It still has a knife in it.’

‘It’s a ten-centimetre paring knife — the smallest and lightest item in the set. It wasn’t thrown clear of the block, as the others were.’

‘How many pieces in the set?’

‘Seven.’ Fry pointed at the main picture again. ‘Here’s a twenty-centimetre cook’s knife, and near it a bread knife the same length. There’s a smaller sandwich knife over here, a sharpening steel under the edge of one of the units. And just by the victim’s foot, where you can hardly make it out, there’s a pair of kitchen scissors. As you can see, they all have bloodstains on them, except the paring knife.’

‘So which of them was the murder weapon?’ asked Cooper.

‘None of them. At the PM, they tried all the blades to get a match with the victim’s wounds. There was no fit.’

Cooper looked up. ‘One piece of the set is missing, of course.’

‘Ah. So you did arithmetic at school, as well as reading.’

‘That means he took the murder weapon away with him.’

‘It would be the sensible thing to do, especially if he wasn’t wearing gloves when he grabbed it.’ Fry consulted the report again. ‘The seventh item in a set of this kind would be a slicing knife. The same length as the bread knife and the cook’s knife, but with the perfect blade for the job, I guess.’

‘In fact, it’s the one you’d choose if you knew what you were going for, rather than just grabbing the first thing that came to hand.’

Fry wiped her nose again. ‘Good point, Ben. I suppose you’re thinking that he must have known what he was doing and planned which knife he was going to use in advance. Then he knocked the rest over to make it look like an impulse grab. Clever, eh?’

Cooper was starting to feel he should have made more of an effort to escape from the office before she cornered him.

‘Even though I didn’t say that, I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m wrong,’ he said.

Fry didn’t smile. She didn’t smile often enough at the best of times. But this afternoon she looked as though she just didn’t have the energy.

‘One of our people had the idea of obtaining a twenty-centimetre slicing knife out of the Henckels Professional S range from one of the stores in town. That didn’t match the victim’s wounds either. It almost matched, but not quite. Not enough to satisfy our meticulous pathologist.’

‘So what’s the conclusion? Unknown weapon?’

‘Somebody was sent to see Dawn Cottrill,’ said Fry. ‘And they asked her to rack her brains about her sister’s kitchen equipment.’

Cooper was starting to feel sorry for Mrs Cottrill. She was an intelligent, and no doubt imaginative, woman. Though the officers who’d spoken to her would have been discreet, she could certainly have worked out for herself what they were doing with all the knives.

‘Poor woman,’ he said.

‘Who?’ said Fry vaguely.

‘Never mind.’

‘She got us a result, anyway. She remembered that when Rebecca was equipping the kitchen in her new house, she wanted something a bit longer for slicing. Apparently, she used to buy large joints of meat from some organic place and had to cut them up into smaller portions for herself.’

‘So Rebecca had the knife in the set replaced with a longer one,’ said Cooper.

‘Correct.’

‘And I think you were about to tell me why the killer didn’t necessarily know what he was doing when he chose that particular knife?’

‘So I was. Well, Ben, imagine a block full of knives with their handles pointing towards you. If you’re going to grab at one of the handles, which would be the nearest to you?’

‘The longest one,’ said Cooper.

‘Correct again. The handle of the longest knife would be sticking out of the block furthest, yes? And the item we have missing from the crime scene is a twenty-six centimetre Henckel slicing knife. Twenty-six centimetres. That’s over ten inches long.’

‘Nasty.’

Fry sneezed and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. ‘Nasty is right. It looks as though Mansell Quinn could turn out to be a very dangerous man indeed. When we find him.’

As Fry drove her Peugeot out of the E Division car park, she was still thinking about that book. She didn’t know why she let Ben Cooper do it to her. As soon as he started one of his conversations, she knew that he’d be sticking some kind of pin into her that she wouldn’t be able to pull out for days.

It had been years since she’d thought about that book. She’d been in Birmingham, studying for her degree back then; deluded into thinking of herself as educated and literate, just because she went every day to a place that called itself a university. In those days she could still read books for escape, letting her mind drift off into somebody else’s world without her subconscious throwing up horrific flashbacks. Since then, events had taken place that had changed her life in ways a book never could — they had altered it permanently and painfully.

The book in question had been so vile that it hadn’t been enough to pick it up and throw it at the wall. That was the fate of the merely bad books, the ones that irritated or annoyed her. This one had been different. This one she’d felt obliged to remove completely from her life. Normally, her unwanted books would have gone to a charity shop or into the recycling bank. But this particular book had been different. She hadn’t been able to bear the thought that someone else would pick the thing up. Besides, she had needed some small act of protest against the author’s unpleasant thoughts being forced into her own.

So she’d started a fire in the garden incinerator with some dead branches. Then she’d torn as many pages as she could from the book and burned them. She had finally dropped the mutilated cover into the flames and watched the glue of its binding melt on to the boards before it caught light and the author’s name had blackened and charred, letter by letter.

Simon Lowe was being allowed home from hospital this afternoon. Overnight observation following a blow to the head — that was all you got these days.

‘I didn’t see a thing, to be honest,’ he said, fiddling with the plaster on a cut to his hand. ‘The first blow stunned me. And it was dark, anyway.’

‘Did your assailant say anything?’ asked Fry.

‘Not a word.’

‘Did you notice any other details? A sound, a smell?’

Simon shook his head. ‘I wish I could think of something.’

‘A car parked nearby, perhaps?’

‘There were cars parked on the street near the church, but I didn’t take any notice of them. It was dark.’

‘Yes, you said. And you spoke to no one in the pub, apart from the landlord?’

‘No one.’ Simon looked at her. ‘Do you think I might have lost my memory? Did I get into an argument with someone in the George?’

Fry sighed. ‘No. The landlord confirms that you spoke to no one, and there was no sign of any trouble.’

‘So that means …?’

‘That means you’re going to take much more care from now on, aren’t you, Mr Lowe? Don’t go out on your own at night again. Take sensible precautions.’

She said the words without much hope. Nobody seemed to heed her warnings.

Simon Lowe nodded, then winced at the pain of the bruise that Fry could see on the back of his head.

‘But I’ll be safe back home in Edendale, won’t I?’ he said, looking at her sharply.

‘Well …’

‘Because he’s still in the Hope Valley, isn’t he?’

Fry stood up. ‘Yes, sir. We think he’s still in the Hope Valley.’