One Last Breath

22

At fifty, Raymond Proctor was older than either Quinn or Thorpe. And Ben Cooper found himself thinking of the caravan park owner as the most tired and demoralized of the three men. He wasn’t sure why this was — Proctor was happily married, and the big trauma in his life had happened fourteen years ago. He ought to have put it all behind him by now.

‘Mr Proctor, with your permission, we’d like to have a look inside some of your caravans,’ said Diane Fry when they found him in the office at Wingate Lees.

Proctor stood up, immediately aggressive.

‘You can’t do that,’ he said. ‘They’re occupied. I’ve got visitors in them. I can’t let the police go ferreting around in their property while they’re out. What do you think it would do to my business? And what are you looking for, anyway?’

‘We’re looking for your old friend William Thorpe,’ said Fry. ‘And we don’t want to look in the occupied units, just the old ’vans down at the far end.’

‘Those? They’re empty.’

‘We’d like to check, if you don’t mind.’

Proctor sighed heavily, and made a great performance of opening and shutting drawers, then sorting out the right keys from the neat rows of hooks on the wall behind his desk.

‘I’ll have to come with you.’

‘Fine.’

They followed him through the site, past the trees and the pond.

‘Do they look occupied?’ said Proctor, gesturing at the caravans.

‘No, they don’t. That’s the point.’

‘Oh, so you think it’s all a clever plot to fool you, do you? What do you reckon I’m doing — running an international drugs operation from a two-berth caravan?’

‘Stranger things have been known.’

‘Not in the Hope Valley, they haven’t.’

Proctor poked a key into the door of the first caravan, rattled it without any result, and had to try another one before he got the door open. He cursed continuously as he did it.

Fry and Cooper exchanged a glance. Proctor was making far more noise than necessary. Was it merely a gesture of irritation, a bit of reassurance for himself? Or a warning to someone?

‘Look — there’s nobody in them,’ said Proctor, flinging open the door.

Fry peered in. ‘Nobody in this one, perhaps.’

‘What?’

‘We’d like to see inside them all.’

‘You’re joking.’

She pointed at the next ’van. ‘Mr Proctor, if you don’t mind …’

‘For God’s sake. What a waste of time.’

The interior of the second caravan smelled mouldy and stale. A bad leak in a corner of the roof had stained the ceiling brown and one of the panels was peeling away.

‘Who lives here?’ asked Cooper.

‘No one. Well, no one at the moment.’

‘Someone has been living here recently. There’s used bedding, and some cutlery in the sink.’

‘They were Iraqi refugees.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘As far as I know, they went back to Iraq.’

‘They left some of their belongings behind,’ said Cooper, looking at a pair of old shoes and a portable TV set.

‘Probably they didn’t want to cart the stuff all the way to Baghdad.’

‘Really?’

Cooper looked at Proctor. His story was almost possible. Refugees and asylum seekers turned up in the most surprising places.

‘Mr Proctor, you told us that William Thorpe left the caravan site at the end of April, because you needed the caravan for the tourist season.’

‘Yes.’

‘But that wasn’t right, was it? We believe that William Thorpe was still living here much later than the end of April.’

Proctor shrugged. ‘All right, I felt for sorry for him. Like you said, he didn’t have anywhere to go. He asked me for a few more weeks.’

‘And you didn’t have any bookings?’

‘Bookings have been a bit quiet this season. They were quiet last season, too. They’ve been bloody quiet ever since the foot and mouth thing.’

‘So it wasn’t a problem for you to have Thorpe staying in the caravan a bit longer?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. Will got to be a nuisance after a while. I had the paying customers to think of. Business is bad enough, without having someone like Will around the place, scaring them off.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us this before, sir?’

‘I thought he might be in trouble.’

‘Perhaps he is.’

‘Well, there’s the question of loyalty, you know.’

‘Oh, suddenly there’s a question of loyalty, is there?’

Proctor glowered and began to turn away.

‘Was there some particular incident that brought matters to a head?’ asked Fry.

‘Yes, there was. It was the last straw. I told him, “Will, I’ve done what I can for you, but I can’t do any more. You’re going to have to go.”’

‘What happened exactly?’

‘Some fool gave him money. I don’t know whether Will had been in the village begging from the tourists, or if he’d nicked it, but he used the money to buy booze and he got himself totally pissed. He was going round banging on all the caravan doors wanting people to let him in so they could have a party. I’ve never had so many complaints as I did that night. We had kids crying, and half the men threatening to punch his lights out. There were two women staying in one of the Westmorlands. They never said a word at the time, but they upped and left first thing next morning. Good customers lost.’

It was the longest speech they’d heard from Raymond Proctor. He had become a bit red in the face as he spoke, and his voice had grown louder.

‘I’m sure you can’t afford to lose business,’ said Cooper.

‘Damn right I can’t. Do you know how difficult it is to make enough profit in this business to keep that lot in the house in food and clothes, let alone the bills I have to pay? And I’m here at every silly bugger’s beck and call, all hours of the day and night. It’s a mug’s game, mate.’

‘All right, Mr Proctor. Calm down.’

Proctor glared at him. ‘Somebody else should be looking after Will Thorpe, not me. By rights, he should be in hospital. But he’s such an awkward bugger, he’d never agree to that. That’s why he steers clear of Social Services and all those kind of folk. He’s terrified they’ll put him away in a hospital and he’ll never come out again. Will has set his mind on dying in the open air, and that’s what he’ll do, no doubt. It won’t take much longer, either. Another bad winter, and that’ll be the end of him.’

‘What exactly is wrong with Mr Thorpe?’

‘He has emphysema. It was diagnosed while he was still in the army. Too many cigarettes from too young an age, I suppose.’

‘Nobody can do anything to help him unless we find him,’ said Fry.

Proctor shrugged. ‘Try near the cement works. God knows why, but he hangs out up there.’

Fry nodded to Cooper, and they turned to go. Proctor watched them, clearing his throat and rattling his keys nervously. He caught Fry’s eye for a second.

‘I hope you haven’t forgotten our advice about taking precautions,’ said Fry.

‘I told you, I’m not frightened,’ said Proctor. ‘Not of Mansell Quinn. I’m ready for anyone.’

‘You don’t happen to have any unauthorized weapons on the premises, do you, sir?’

Proctor instantly looked capable of being belligerent again.

‘Oh, this is a different tune now,’ he said. ‘Well, don’t worry your head about that. I know all about what happens to people who try to defend themselves. Don’t we all?’

As they reached the car, Cooper looked up at the railway bridge and the embankment rising over the caravan park. The bridge had stones missing here and there, and thick clumps of weed grew on the parapet. It would be impossible to see if anyone was up there, unless they wanted to be seen. Cooper suddenly felt very vulnerable standing under such a perfect vantage point.

Fry followed his gaze. ‘Personally, I don’t think Quinn will still be in this area. He’s miles away by now. He has a head start on us.’

‘Where would he be going?’

‘I’ve no idea. But he’d want to get some distance away from here, wouldn’t he?’

‘Only if he’d done what he came to do.’

‘Which he has, hasn’t he?’

Cooper felt the back of his neck prickle. He turned away from the viaduct. Trees and dense undergrowth climbed the banking behind the Proctors’ house. It was dark in there, even in the middle of the day. No sunlight penetrated the canopy. The ground would be dry and covered in dead leaves, an ideal place to lie in the shade, unseen, and watch what was going on down in the caravan park. But surely it must only be his imagination that made him feel as though he was being watched?

When Ben Cooper drove to the gate of the cement works, he was seeing it up close for the first time. The entire place was the colour of cement — pale, like a desert landscape. The girders and aerial conveyor belts, towers and silos, hangars and concrete tanks all blended into each other as if camouflaged. Above them rose the tall chimney that was visible from both ends of the valley. To the south, a huge fan of quarries had been blasted into the hillside. On the map, the cement works and its quarries looked as big as Hathersage, Hope and Castleton all lumped together.

He met Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin in a lay-by near the bridge. Another team of officers were on the older part of the site to the east, where exhausted quarries had been landscaped with trees and fishing lakes.

Murfin had been gathering information on William Thorpe, and he seemed to have brought it all with him. Thorpe had served in the local regiment, the First Battalion of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment, referred to in the army documents as 1WFR.

‘Join the army and see the world,’ said Murfin. ‘According to the Regimental HQ in Nottingham, this battalion has spent the last few years serving everywhere from the Falkland Islands to Sierra Leone and Brunei. Me, I joined the police, and all I’ve seen is a selection of the worst shit-holes in Derbyshire.’

‘They wouldn’t have taken you in the army,’ said Fry.

‘You’re right. I had too many GCSEs. It seems you’re over-qualified for the infantry if you can spell your name on the application form.’

‘So where’s the battalion now?’ said Cooper.

‘Back in their barracks after a spell in Northern Ireland. Did you know the squaddies get nine weeks leave and four long weekends a year? And the army pays to get them home, too.’

‘Nine weeks? So where did William Thorpe go all those times when he was on leave? He didn’t come home to Derbyshire — not to his dad’s place, anyway.’

‘Are you thinking of a change in career, Gavin?’ asked Fry hopefully, looking at Murfin’s copy of the army recruitment booklet.

‘I’m just amazed,’ he said. ‘Amazed how easy it is to get into the army. You don’t need any educational qualifications at all. You take an entrance test, but they give you a practice book beforehand, and you can have three goes at passing it. How difficult can that be?’

‘Well, I suppose you don’t have to be a genius to be a soldier. As long as you can fire an automatic weapon in the right direction.’

‘It says here Thorpe was in a mortar platoon.’

Cooper picked up Thorpe’s file and looked at the photos of him. The ex-soldier wasn’t a big man physically — only five feet six inches tall. As a recruit to the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, he must have been one of those soldiers who looked out of place marching in the ranks, with the peak of his cap a few inches below those of the men on either side.

But a photograph of him in a T-shirt suggested he must have spent time working out in the gym to make up for his lack of size. He would already have been in his forties when the photo was taken, but the muscles in his shoulders and upper arms were still firm, though the flesh was receding a little from his cheekbones, giving his face a sharp look, like an old dog fox.

In the picture, Thorpe wore a black beret at a jaunty angle, and his face was tanned. The narrowing of his eyes as he stared at the camera hinted at hostility. Cooper thought it might simply be a result of living outdoors, a physical reaction against exposure to wind and sunlight, or an effort to keep out the fine, hot sand that filled the desert air. But there could also have been a trace of ingrained suspicion, a need to be aware of dangers approaching from a distance.

Cooper passed the photograph back. ‘When was he discharged, Gavin?’

‘Nine months ago. The army says he was a good soldier. A sound record, and all that.’

‘He served in several hotspots, I see.’

‘That’s not so unusual these days,’ said Fry. ‘The time is long past when British soldiers could look forward to spending their service careers idling around in Germany or Cyprus. They have to go out and get shot at on peacekeeping missions.’

‘You’re just trying to put me off,’ said Murfin.

‘He was in Northern Ireland in the eighties. Kuwait and Iraq during the first Gulf War; Bosnia, too. Did he see much action?’ asked Cooper.

‘I don’t know. They won’t give us that sort of information.’

‘I was just thinking a few survival skills would help him.’

Fry shook her head. ‘Lots of people claim to have been in the SAS, but very few actually were. Even fewer ever talk about it, and the ones that do tend to write books. But we’ll check, anyway.’

A railway engine went past on the cement works spur, pulling a line of dirty white tankers over the bridge.

Fry gazed at the works. ‘This place is pretty big,’ she said. ‘What’s it doing here? How come the environment lobby didn’t stop it?’

‘It was here before the national park,’ said Cooper. ‘Besides, it employs a lot of local people.’

‘A bit of the real world, eh?’

Cooper was sent to follow the public footpath that ran alongside the works fence and skirted the hillside hollowed out by quarrying operations. The whole scene was coloured a drab cement grey, but for red doors among the buildings and the occasional worker in orange overalls.

Against a continuous background roar and rumble, he heard the squeal of some kind of machinery operating on the spoil heap at the edge of the quarry. Down in the centre of the works, he saw a slowly rotating metal tube about two hundred yards long, its end disappearing into one of the buildings. Cement several inches thick lay encrusted on pipes, like ice formed on the masts of an Arctic exploration ship. Sirens sounded now and then, but not the one like an air-raid warning he’d heard from Peveril Castle.

The path crossed the tracks to the quarry itself, and conveyor belts rattled through a runway over his head. A vast hunk of machinery passed him on one of the tracks. He had to step aside and cling precariously to the banking in order to avoid its tyres, which only just fit into the width of the track.

Then he found an abandoned concrete building. Its walls were broken and its steel reinforcements were exposed. It lay half-buried in a mountain of limestone chippings, like a bombed bunker.

After only a few minutes in the vicinity of the cement works, Cooper’s mouth was starting to feel dry. His tongue was coated with dust, and he could taste nothing but limestone. Soon, he was having difficulty swallowing.

Cooper looked down at the ground. The bottom inch of his boots had turned white with cement dust. When he stamped his feet, the dust flew off them in clouds.

Diane Fry was standing on the grass in the middle of the works compound while a worker in orange overalls and a white helmet pointed out where he’d seen Thorpe. The strange structure of the pre-heater building towered above them, and the long metal tube of the kiln rumbled behind them as it rotated slowly.

A marked police car pulled into the works entrance. Back-up. If Thorpe was around here and saw that, he’d be away.

Cooper came to a point where three dirt tracks met just beyond the fence, and he stopped underneath the runway of the conveyor belt and a cement-encrusted pipe. Two uniformed officers were making their way up the path from the road, puffing a bit on the steeper stretches.

‘Some of these buildings near the fence are empty,’ said Fry. ‘They don’t look as though they’re used for anything. And there isn’t even a door on this one — anybody could walk in.’

‘We’ll have to check them, I suppose.’

Cooper recalled the abandoned building outside the fence, half buried in waste limestone. No one could be desperate enough to try living rough in something that looked like a bombed-out bunker. But as a temporary refuge, it would do fine.

While Fry directed the two PCs, Cooper walked a few yards further along the path. He thought the building had been under the gantries carrying the conveyor-belt mechanism, where the limestone came down from the rock crushers. At first, he couldn’t see it. His eyes had become too used to seeing everything in the same shade of cement grey. But the broken walls and exposed steel reinforcements gradually emerged from the dusty background.

Cooper stepped on to the unstable heap of limestone chippings, his boots crunching as if he was walking on a shingle beach. He stopped, and looked back to see where Fry had got to. She was still some way down the track, and he ought to wait for her to catch him up.

The continuous roar and rumble from the works and the squeal of machinery above him on the edge of the quarry made it difficult for Cooper to hear much else. But he heard the cough quite clearly.

He peered through an empty and broken window into the darkness of the building, squinting to adjust his vision from the glare of the sun on the limestone. He felt as though he was staring deep into the hillside, though the building couldn’t have been more than a few yards across. It was a wheeze of breath that gave him a fix on what he was looking for, and a pair of startled eyes came suddenly into focus.

Then somebody was running. A figure had burst out of the doorway of the building, ten feet up the right-hand track. Cooper tried to turn too quickly, and found himself slithering on the heap of limestone, with his feet sinking in as he threw out an arm to support himself, sending up a cloud of white dust.

‘Diane!’ he called. ‘Up here!’

But Fry had already seen what was happening.

‘Don’t let him get away,’ she shouted.

Cooper slid to the bottom of the limestone, scraping his hand on a protruding piece of reinforced concrete, and began to run up the track. The figure ahead of him was dressed in a dirty khaki anorak and baggy blue jeans, with greying hair that hung over his collar. Cooper felt sure it was William Thorpe. And this time, Thorpe wasn’t going to get very far. He had chosen to escape along the dirt track that led uphill towards the edge of the quarry, and he clearly wasn’t a fit man. Within seconds, he was starting to flag. Instead of running on his toes, he was kicking clouds of dust into Cooper’s face with his heels.

In another moment, Cooper would have caught up with him. But then the ground began to shake, and a rumbling noise hit them as a dump truck came round a bend of the track and started to descend the slope towards them.

Thorpe stumbled and froze. He looked tiny and helpless as he stood outlined against the massive snout of the truck. Its tyres came almost to head height, and it left barely two inches of clearance on either side of the track — nowhere near enough to fit a human body. If Thorpe tried to go to the side, the wheels would crush him against the dirt wall. And a thing that size wasn’t going to stop too quickly coming down a steep slope.

Then Cooper had reached Thorpe. Grabbing his anorak from behind, he pulled him to the side and began to drag him bodily up the banking into the trees. Thorpe was lighter than he looked, but Cooper was unable to keep his footing and had to lie down in the dusty earth and brace himself against the root of a tree to get Thorpe clear.

He became aware of the dump truck grinding to halt, and saw Fry standing in front of it on the track, waving her arms like a traffic policeman. Thankfully, Thorpe was lying still. He was breathing with difficulty and felt like a dead weight.

Cooper’s mouth was full of dust. It blocked his saliva glands and stuck to the back of his throat like a coating of pebble dash. He was having real difficulty swallowing now. In fact, he didn’t want to swallow for fear of layering his stomach with an indigestible skin of limestone.

Fry helped him to get Thorpe down from the banking.

‘Come along, sir,’ she said. ‘All we want to do is talk to you.’

Back on the ground, Cooper looked down at himself. Earlier, the bottom inch of his boots had been white with cement dust. Now, his trousers were covered with it right up to his belt. No doubt it was on his back, too. He brushed at himself, but only added more dust to the air around him. He wondered if he could manage not to breathe until he got back to the car.