One Last Breath

23

Mansell Quinn leaned his head against the wall and stared at the ceiling. He was sitting in one of the cubicles at the men’s toilets in the main Castleton car park. He’d managed to get a wash, and had even shaved himself as he sat in the cubicle, using the safety razor and mirror he’d brought with him from prison. Looking grubby would draw too much attention.

The car park had two blocks of toilets, so there were plenty of cubicles for the people he could hear coming in and out. No one would trouble him for some time, unless a cleaner came by later in the day. He’d seen police walking the streets in Castleton, mingling with the visitors, wanting to be noticed in their yellow reflective jackets. For now, the car park was the safest place for him to be. Though it was right in the centre of Castleton, the only people around were tourists. They’d stay in town for a few hours, thinking of nothing but visiting the caverns, or the castle or the gift shops, and having lunch in one of the pubs. And then they would leave again, off to their homes miles away. They wouldn’t know Mansell Quinn, or even be familiar with the name. As far as they were concerned, he was just one more person with a rucksack among hundreds.

But Quinn had picked up a copy of a Sheffield newspaper that somebody had left in the bin outside. When he unfolded it, his own photograph had jumped out at him. He’d known it would happen, and that wasn’t a problem. It was the picture of Rebecca that had hit him hardest. He hardly dared to read the story that went with it.

The door of the toilets banged open, and he heard the voices of two or three boys entering and using the urinals. Quinn thrust his hands into the pockets of his waterproof and kept quite still. His fingers found some of the seedheads he’d pulled from the long grass growing near the river. He waited until he heard the taps running and the hand driers blowing before he took one out and chewed it. He’d found it gave him a bit of comfort. It produced a little surge of satisfaction as his teeth bit down on the hard kernel, cracking it with a tiny explosion in his jaw.

Quinn was trying to hold in the rage, the way he’d been taught on the anger-management course. He knew that if he let it out, it would burst from his mouth like fire. With an effort, he forced it to disperse through his body. He could feel it seething in his guts and seeping out through the pores of his skin, until it seemed to shimmer around him in the cubicle like an aura. By the time the anger had died down, he was hot and sweating, and his palms left wet marks on the walls when he steadied himself to stand up. Finally, he dared to release a breath.

There had been times in the last thirteen years when illogical things had made Quinn angry. Before Sudbury, he had been in HMP Gartree in Leicestershire, a place that reminded him of a 1960s comprehensive school. There hadn’t even been any bus services; a prison minivan ran visitors from the railway station at weekends, but not during the week, and taxis were far too expensive. Not that he had any visitors by then. Quinn had already seen the last of his children.

But there had been a visitor centre located by the main gate at Gartree, with a play area and baby-changing facilities. Two afternoons a week, volunteers had run a children’s corner there. Perhaps it made some of the lifers feel better, but for Quinn the thought of children playing near the main gate made everything seem so much worse.

He listened carefully, checking that the toilets were empty, then came out of his cubicle. He spat out the stalk from the grass seed, and took a last look at himself in the mirror over the washbasin.

Quinn had learned more from the anger management course than the prison authorities would ever realize. He’d learned to recognize anger and channel it. He’d learned that it could be used. And he’d discovered that anger could give you strength.

With a shrug, Quinn shook out his waterproof smock and put it back on. And then he went out into the rain that he could hear falling on Castleton.