One Last Breath

26

Castleton was one of the cleanest places Ben Cooper knew. The thousands of plastic bottles, aluminium drinks cans and polystyrene cups were actually in the litter bins rather than scattered on the grass or floating in the stream. Even the feral pigeons were more attractive than the dirty grey things on city streets. When he paused near the bridge at Stones Bottom, they flocked around his feet in seconds. Even though it was already dusk, they hadn’t given up hope of a tourist with spare bread from his sandwiches to feed them.

Cooper could still taste the dust from the cement works in the back of his throat. It made him unnaturally thirsty, and he’d have preferred to be heading for the Hanging Gate right now for a few pints of beer to wash the coating away. But he didn’t have time, if he was going to call on Alistair Page tonight. He knew Diane Fry would have said he’d spent too long at Rakelow House. But she’d wanted background on Will Thorpe, and he’d come away with plenty of that. She might see a reconciliation with his father as exactly what she needed to make Thorpe open up.

Knowing there wasn’t time for a proper meal either, Cooper called into a chippy on the hill near the Market Place and bought a jumbo sausage and chips, which he ate in his car. When he’d finished, he jammed the paper and wooden fork into a bin near the visitor centre, and went into one of the toilet blocks to wash the grease off his hands.

Returning to Castleton had reminded him of the two men he’d seen from the castle on Tuesday, when he’d been with Amy and Josie. Watching the tape from the outdoor shop, he’d been convinced that he recognized Mansell Quinn as one of the men who’d been talking in that secluded spot above Cavedale. But a few hours later, the memory was fading and he was less sure. No doubt it had been his imagination leaping into action because of the similarity between the black, slicker-type waterproofs.

Cooper was glad he’d said nothing — it would only have made him look a fool. He supposed it was the idea of Quinn in such close proximity to Amy and Josie that had frightened him beyond rationality.

Turning his hands in the stream of warm air from a drier, he wondered when these toilets were cleaned. Early in the morning perhaps, before the first visitors. Like the bins outside, the one in the toilet block was full. And there was something scattered on the floor near his feet, and on the edge of the washbasin, speckling the stainless steel.

Cooper looked more closely. The specks resembled the seeds that had fallen from the lime tree in Rebecca Lowe’s garden at Parson’s Croft. Under the waste pipe leading down from the washbasin, he saw a pale leaf lying in a small pool of water, as if it had dropped from someone’s clothes.

He felt a prickling in the small of his back, and turned sharply to look at the cubicles. Only one door was closed, down at the far end.

‘Paranoid,’ he said to himself. ‘Paranoid — that’s what you are.’

But still he pushed the door open, just in case. The cubicle was empty.

Then Cooper looked at the floor. He crouched, felt in his pocket for some latex gloves or a plastic bag, but found nothing because he’d left his jacket in the car. He pulled a few sheets of toilet paper off the roll. It would have to do for now.

Gingerly, he grasped the thing in a fold of paper and held it up to the light. It was the ripe seed-head of a grass stalk, and it had been chewed. And surely by something bigger than a mouse.

The outer door of the toilet block creaked open on its spring. Still crouching, Cooper turned his head. An old man had entered and was unzipping himself at the urinal. He looked at Cooper squatting on the floor of the cubicle, clutching a small brown thing in a wad of toilet paper.

‘Pervert,’ he said. ‘You ought to get out of here before I have the police on you.’

Alistair Page lived in a narrow lane that rose steeply from the cavern approach. The house had recently been renovated, but alterations to the appearance of a property were strictly controlled in this area. The stonework had been cleaned, the new window frames were made of pine, and the front door was a stable-type design to match the nearby cottages. In the hillside above was a house with an arched window, like a chapel.

Page’s house sat right into the limestone cliff, with a gap knocked out of the rock big enough to take a small car. A blue Volkswagen was parked there now, but it was a narrow fit — its wing mirror came with an inch or two of a High Peak Council wheelie bin standing against the side door of the house. There was no garden. And the front door, like most of the others, opened directly on to the street.

The view was impressive, though. The first-floor windows looked down on to the cottages in the gorge below, and right into the mouth of Peak Cavern itself.

The sight of the cavern made Ben Cooper pause. The Devil’s Arse, they called it. But surely they had the wrong part of the anatomy. To Cooper, the cavern entrance resembled a gaping maw waiting to suck in unwary passers-by, like the business end of a primeval sea creature lying just below the surface, its mouth hung with enticing stalactites and curtains of flowstone to tempt in the curious minnows that it fed on.

And during the daytime, minnows flocked into the mouth in large numbers. Cooper had seen them queuing at the turnstile to pay their money, and gathering at the top of the ropemakers’ terraces to watch the demonstrations before venturing deeper into the cave. More of them had been climbing the path into the gorge — scores of them thronging the riverside walk to the car park. The cavern’s gaping mouth never went hungry. Not during the tourist season, anyway.

‘Come in, come in,’ said Alistair Page, appearing at the front door of his cottage in a black T-shirt and jeans. ‘I was watching out for you. I don’t normally use this door much — I go in and out at the side entrance, so I’m not stepping right into the roadway.’

‘Of course.’

‘You look hot. You’ll find it cooler in here.’

Cooper did feel a bit sticky from the walk. It wasn’t the heat that was the problem — the temperatures hadn’t got anywhere near last year’s record high. It was the humidity that wore him down and made him uncomfortable.

‘Sit down,’ said Page. ‘Drink?’

‘Yes. Something cold would be good.’

‘Cranberry juice OK?’

‘Fine.’

‘Sit down, then, while I get the drinks.’

Cooper didn’t like to sit down right away, if he could avoid it. Not in a house he’d never visited before. Slumped in one of these low-level imitation leather armchairs, he would miss a lot of the details that gave a house its character and told him so much about its owner.

So instead of accepting Page’s invitation, he paced the room a little, then stood in front of the gas fire like a man warming himself at an open hearth. Within those few seconds, he’d taken in the main impressions. There was no sign of a pet of any kind. No children, either. No sign of a partner, in fact. This was a single man’s home.

Page’s interests were indicated by the caving and hill-walking books that filled the pine shelves in an alcove next to the fireplace, and by the widescreen TV and DVD player with a neatly ordered selection of DVDs, all in their cases and possibly even arranged in alphabetical order. Cooper saw Blade Runner — Director’s Cut near one end, and The Sixth Sense at the other. Science fiction classics and disaster movies, with a smattering of comedies.

And there were stacks of CDs, too — U2, Del Amitri, INXS. You could almost rely on being able to judge someone’s age from their CD collection. Many people formed their musical tastes in their teenage years. In Alistair’s case, the crucial period had been the late eighties and early nineties. Cooper remembered that time himself — in fact, Del Amitri’s ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ had provided the backing track for a particularly painful spell of teenage angst.

He examined the rest of the room. During renovations to the cottage, an open-plan staircase had been installed. A couple of steps led up into a kitchen extension at the back of the house, where Page was chinking glasses and slamming the door of a fridge. Space must have been very tight, because the back window of the extension looked directly on to a stone wall bordering the next property. The whole place was very small, of course — there wouldn’t have been scope to build any bigger in this side of the gorge.

‘The houses at this end of town were built pretty randomly,’ said Page, coming out of the kitchen and catching Cooper’s glance at the back window. ‘They were miners’ cottages, of course. When a new miner arrived, they used to buy a corner of someone else’s yard and put up their own property, which is why the cottages ended up so close together.’

‘I suppose you get the problem of tourists gawping through the windows,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, it’s an occupational hazard if you live in Castleton. Aren’t you going to take a pew?’

‘Thanks.’

‘You said on the phone you were interested in a book,’ said Page.

‘That’s right. It’s called Death Underground.’

‘Yes, I’ve got a copy you can borrow. But what’s your interest? Were you really so scared by your experience on Monday?’

‘Well, it was pretty scary. But I remembered you mentioning a death in the cavern. A real death. It was unique, but a long time ago, you said.’

‘Not many people know that story now,’ said Page. He went to the shelves and pulled out a book. ‘Death Underground has a chapter on it. There was a young caver who died.’

‘Where did it happen?’

‘Some way into the system from the show cave. A place called Moss Chamber.’

‘That’s an odd name. How could there be moss, when there’s no light down there?’

‘The chamber is named after the caver. He was called Neil Moss.’

‘I see.’

‘This was back in the late fifties, when the system was first explored to any extent.’

‘Neil Moss was the first to discover this chamber, I suppose, if it was named after him?’

‘No, he didn’t discover the chamber itself, but a tiny fissure that goes down inside the wall. You can’t see it now — only a sort of depression filled with small stones.’

‘Who was this man?’

‘Neil Moss? He was a philosophy student at Oxford University; about twenty years old at the time. In March 1959 he joined a party exploring beyond the Mucky Ducks. When they saw the opening in the rock, Moss volunteered to try it out, to see how far it went. The thing about this shaft is that it’s only about two feet wide. A human body barely fits into it, and it must have been a really tight squeeze for Moss. It also descends at a steep angle, and about eighteen feet down there’s a corkscrew twist which he just managed to get round. Moss reached the bottom. But on the way back up, he got stuck.’

‘Damn.’

‘The shaft was so narrow that he couldn’t bend his legs or move his arms. He couldn’t do anything to raise himself. Unfortunately, he wasn’t belayed — they’d assumed that the shaft was too tight for him to fall through it. It was only when he got stuck that a line was lowered. But it was a light hand-line, not meant for hauling the weight of a human body. They struggled for nearly three days, trying to get Neil Moss out.’

‘Three days?’

‘If he’d been able to move just a few inches, it would have made all the difference,’ said Page. ‘But carbon dioxide sinks. And at the level where Neil Moss was trapped, it began to build up, fouling his air. On top of that, his acetylene lamp went out, adding carbide fumes to the mix. Cave rescue techniques weren’t as good then as they are now. The party had no oxygen with them — you know lack of oxygen causes brain damage?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, Moss became weaker and weaker, until he was unconscious. Eventually, his father sent a message that he didn’t want any more people risking their lives trying to save his son. So Neil Moss died down there. He was unable to move or, finally, to breathe.’

Cooper was hardly aware of his surroundings now. Mentally, he’d put himself in the young caver’s place and was trapped in a two-foot cleft in the rock, unable to move his arms and legs, with his air almost exhausted.

‘You can take the book with you, if you want,’ said Page.

‘Thanks.’

‘It wasn’t the best of times for the cave rescue organizations. They took a lot of flak over that lad’s death, and it put exploration back for years.’

Cooper picked up the book. It was the sort of thing you’d only find in a secondhand bookshop or a library. Mansell Quinn had found one in the prison library at Sudbury, perhaps donated by some benefactor. What had been his fascination with it?

‘Can you explain how far into the cavern it was that Moss died, Alistair?’

‘I can do better than that — I can show you.’

Page unfolded a huge map of the Peak-Speedwell cave system and spread it out on the floor, which was the only flat surface big enough. He crouched over it eagerly, like a child showing off a favourite game.

‘This shows the whole system, as far as we know. It links up Peak and Speedwell caverns, as you can see.’

‘It’s vast,’ said Cooper. ‘Is it possible to get all the way through from one show cave to the other?’

Page poked a finger at a point in the middle of the map. ‘Well, for a long time a boulder choke at the end of the Trenches here was the limit from Peak Cavern. But in the eighties some cavers managed to force a way through into a low passage they called Colostomy Crawl. That was the first time non-divers could get into Speedwell.’

Cooper looked for the Peak Cavern entrance. ‘Visitors only see a very small part of it on the show cave tour, don’t they?’

‘Only as far as the top of the Devil’s Staircase these days. They used to be taken through Five Arches, but the passage floods completely in wet weather and it gets too muddy. On the exercise, we took you past that. And the party Neil Moss was with went way beyond Five Arches.’

Page continued to move his finger slowly along the route of the wandering passages.

‘The Inner Styx is the river at the foot of the Devil’s Staircase. You’ll have heard it from the show cave. Downstream is a sump — a section that’s full of water right up to the roof. The only way past that is by diving. But the other way, through Five Arches, you’ve got an ascending passage and a short crawl to the Mucky Ducks. The ducks are stoops in deep water. Normally, there’s just enough air space, provided you keep your head down.’

‘And there’s still a long way to go.’

‘Yes. There’s a boulder passage, and about a hundred and fifty metres from Mucky Ducks you find a tube up in the right-hand wall. That’s another crawl you do partly full length, with an awkward bend almost blocked by another sump. Above that is a narrow eyehole that it’s just possible to wriggle through, and then you go up a mud slope, wade through a pool and locate a small fissure in the scree. And that’s it. That’s where Neil Moss died.’

Cooper sat back, feeling exhausted and stunned. ‘It sounds like a week’s journey to me. Even if you could face all those crawls and ducks.’

‘Experienced cavers do it regularly. And there’s another ten miles or so of the system beyond that.’

‘What happens if there’s an emergency down there — if somebody is trapped or injured?’

‘At least one member of the party comes out and phones 999. Then the operations room at Ripley and Cave Rescue send a team out. Of course, you’re supposed to let someone know where you’re going and what time you expect to be back, so the alarm can be raised if you’re overdue. Some people don’t bother doing that. A lot of our call-outs are false alarms — cavers who get lost or stop to rest, so they take longer than they expected.’

‘Is radon a problem down there?’

‘Not in the show caves,’ said Page. ‘There are fans to clear the air, so the radon doesn’t settle. Beyond the Devil’s Staircase, it’s a bit different.’

Cooper got up to stretch his legs, ready to leave. It was dark outside now, and when he looked out of the front window the mouth of Peak Cavern had disappeared completely in the blackness beyond the last few cottages.

‘Alistair, what do you remember about Mansell Quinn?’ he said.

‘Quinn? Well, I wasn’t very old at the time of the murder.’

‘You must have had a reaction to it, though. Being so close to home and all.’

Page shrugged. ‘I was a teenage boy, so I suppose I thought it was kind of exciting. A bit like having a TV programme come to life in your own street. We went out to look at the police cars like they were part of a film set. Murder isn’t so exciting really, though, is it? It’s very unpleasant and regrettable.’

‘Regrettable? Yes, I suppose it is.’

It was an odd word to use, the sort of expression senior police officers used when they were addressing a press conference, choosing their words carefully to avoid sounding too much like a real person with emotions.

‘You must have been about the same age as the Quinns’ son, Simon,’ said Cooper.

‘I still am, I suppose.’

Page was folding up the map of the Peak-Speedwell system. He put it away in his bookshelf, sliding it in so that it disappeared completely between the spines of two books. He said nothing more. On Tuesday, Page had been keen to hear about Mansell Quinn, but Cooper seemed to have touched too close to something sensitive.

‘A difficult time, was it, Alistair?’ he said.

‘I knew Simon Quinn very well. That’s all I can say, really. You can imagine …’

‘Simon is still in the area. So is his sister Andrea at the moment. After what happened to their mother, you know. I can pass your phone number on to him, if you’d like me to.’

Page looked startled. ‘No, no, that’s all right. I’m sure he wouldn’t want to come to see me.’

‘OK,’ said Cooper. ‘Well, thanks for the book anyway.’

‘You’re welcome.’

But in that moment, Alistair Page had given more away about himself than in all the time Cooper had spent talking to him. He had seemed not just startled at the idea of Simon Quinn visiting him but frightened.

On his way back along the waterside walk, Cooper found a jackdaw going ahead of him. It fluttered along for a few yards, landed on the wall and looked back at him with a tilt of its head before moving on again. But then he got too close, and it launched itself into the air and disappeared into the shadows around the bend.

Cooper could feel that the atmosphere had changed. A cloying dampness in the air made him feel more uncomfortable than the heat, and when he looked up he realized the sky had already darkened. He was in danger of getting very wet before he made it to his car.

He had almost reached the bridge when the first drops fell from the sky. They began to hit the ground and splash on the roofs of the houses in a regular pattern, echoing his own footsteps, growing louder and faster, louder and faster, as the storm closed over him.

But there was more than noise in his head. There was the memory of Alistair Page’s last words about the trapped caver, Neil Moss. As Cooper had been about to leave the house, his thoughts had come back to it, strengthened by the recollection of his own experience of feeling helpless in the darkness.

‘So Neil Moss was dead by the time they got him out,’ he said. ‘That’s terrible.’

Page had paused then, as if deciding whether to tell him the next thing.

‘They never got Neil Moss out,’ he said. ‘In the end, they left him there and sealed up the shaft with stones.’

‘What? You mean …?’

‘Neil Moss is still in Peak Cavern. He’s been there forty-five years.’

There had been an awkward silence between them for a few moments. Cooper hadn’t known what to say. The thought of Neil Moss’s awful death made his chest tighten. He could almost feel the weight of the rock, the air getting thinner and filling with poison.

But finally Page spoke again.

‘So that’s why they call it Moss Chamber,’ he said. ‘I think he’s sort of claimed it as his own, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘I think you’re right.’

Page had opened the door for him, and Cooper had looked out into the darkness of the gorge, glad that he could no longer see the gaping mouth of the cavern.

‘Do you know what the men say who were part of that rescue operation?’ said Page. ‘While they were working, they could hear Neil Moss breathing. It was very loud, because the shaft acted as a kind of amplifier, and the sound filled the chamber they were in. They said it was the worst thing in the world to be able to hear a man breathing, yet not be able to see him or reach him. Eventually, the breathing stopped. Stopped for ever …’ Page paused. ‘Unless, like some folk, you have too much imagination.’

The thunder woke Cooper at five in the morning. It had been a threatening rumble in the distance for a while, but now it was very close. It crackled in the sky overhead like somebody ripping the clouds apart. He could hear the rain again, slapping on the roof of the conservatory and the flags of the back yard. Soon, it was tumbling from the sky in bucketloads.

Cooper knew he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep while the storm lasted. He was even more certain of it when he heard one of the cats calling plaintively from the kitchen, and knew that he was about to get a ball of wet fur on his bed.

As he tried to avoid Randy’s muddy paws, he thought of the people who would be outside just now, perhaps caught in the open by the downpour. Mansell Quinn was out there somewhere — though maybe he would have found himself a shelter from the storm. Quinn was a man who planned his actions carefully, and he’d have been prepared for the storm. He might even have known it was coming.

At least William Thorpe wasn’t out there tonight. Thorpe wasn’t a man to make long-term plans. If Raymond Proctor hadn’t agreed to take him back in, he’d probably have been sleeping rough again by now. The fact the police were interested in him would have driven him from his familiar refuges. He wouldn’t have thought to take precautions against drowning in a cloudburst. But for tonight, he was safe and dry. Or dry, at least.

Cooper shivered, imagining himself as wet and cold as the cat’s fur under his fingers, but with nowhere to go.

Wide awake now, he got out of bed and went to the window. He pulled back the curtain just in time to see a flash of sheet lightning above the roofs of the houses on Meadow Road. It lit up the slates and chimneys for a second, leaving an imprint on his retinas before the rattle of the thunder followed.

When the rain eased off, he went to check on the cats and see if there were any leaks in the conservatory. On an impulse, he pulled on a coat, grabbed a torch and stepped outside. He shone his torch on the ground and swung it from side to side. There were dozens of snails — big ones, trailing right across the gravel path from the crevices in the stone wall to the patch of grass that Mrs Shelley called a lawn. Their winding silvery tracks reflected in the torchlight, crossing backwards and forwards over each other in an apparently haphazard fashion.

The picture he’d conjured of Mansell Quinn lying up somewhere safe and dry suddenly seemed unlikely. On the contrary, this was exactly the sort of time Quinn would choose to go out. Cooper imagined him emerging from the black mouth of Peak Cavern, slipping silently through the gorge in the rain like the outlaw Cock Lorrel, bent on murder.

He shuddered, and turned back towards the house. Most police officers couldn’t avoid bringing their work home in their heads now and then, especially if they didn’t have anybody to talk to. Many of them said it was vital to have another human being around with their own concerns — someone who wanted to talk about shopping or food, or new clothes for the kids. It helped to fill the space in your mind with something else, so you didn’t find yourself going over and over the events of the day. Particularly if it had been a bad day. And there could be a lot of bad days.

Cooper had no one at home now, no one waiting with their own concerns. He knew this was why he got obsessed with little things, like snails crawling up his window. It was only to avoid having to think about the alternative — the trails of human slime that sometimes twisted and turned through his head.