One Last Breath

27

Friday, 16 July

The next morning, a vast puddle filled the yard behind 8 Welbeck Street. When Cooper went out of the back door to examine the damage, he found Randy and his friend Mrs Macavity sitting on either side of the puddle. Neither of them wanted to get their paws wet, but they couldn’t find a way around the water. The cats looked hopefully at Cooper when he appeared, but he wasn’t sure which of them he should help across. Besides, he was sure they’d just decide they were on the wrong side of the puddle and demand to be carried back.

‘Don’t worry, folks,’ he said. ‘It’ll go down in a day or two.’ But all he got was a look of contempt in stereo.

Like a man troubled by a nagging toothache, Cooper kept returning to his internal reconstruction of the Carol Proctor murder scene. He worried at it as he drove into town that morning. He had a feeling that something was wrong with his scenario of events at the Quinn house in October 1990, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.

Another thing bothered him, too: the uncomfortable gap between Sergeant Joe Cooper’s return to the house and the arrival of what his statement called ‘Specialist Officers’.

When Cooper had first joined CID, one of the older detectives had been the type who loved to give advice. He would take any chance to lean confidentially across a desk, the bottom buttons of his shirt popping over his beer belly and his nicotine-stained fingers tapping on Cooper’s shoulder. Even now, Cooper could recall the DC’s response to a particularly naïve remark about ‘the rules’.

‘Now, lad, nobody’s asking you to break the rules,’ he’d said. ‘Good detective work isn’t about breaking rules. It’s about finding ways around the restrictions they put in our way. Legal ways, you understand. Nobody would argue with that, would they?’

Cooper still heard similar things even now. And it was strange how there always seemed to be a ‘they’.

There were rules for everything, of course, if you chose to follow them. The rules told you what to do when a dead body was found. Whatever the circumstances, the first officers arriving at the scene would check the victim was indeed dead. If a suspected offender was present, they had to make an arrest. They’d collect information and take steps to protect any evidence. Obviously, the chain of command would shift as senior officers were brought in. But in the initial stages the FOAs had a lot of responsibility.

And no scene of sudden death was pretty. The amount of blood could be so overwhelming that it drove everything else out of the mind. Some detectives became bar-room pathologists. They had a detailed knowledge of the biological processes of dying, an expertise gained from attending scenes of death and postmortem examinations, but not one of them could claim that he’d never made a mistake at a crime scene. Mistakes were part of human nature. They were a different thing from deliberately breaking the rules.

Cooper had plenty waiting for his attention when he got to the office. But he reached first for the transcripts of the interviews with Mansell Quinn in October 1990. Two detectives, an inspector and a sergeant, whose names Cooper didn’t recognize had conducted most of the sessions with Quinn. DC Hitchens appeared in the transcripts a couple of times, but didn’t seem to have asked many questions. He’d have been too junior then, still learning the ropes in a major enquiry.

‘You spent some time in the army a few years ago,’ the DS had said.

‘I signed up in the Foresters with Will Thorpe. He was still a lad, really, and he’d got a bit bored of living in Derbyshire.’

‘But what about you? You already had a family by then, didn’t you?’

‘It was a bad time,’ said Quinn. ‘The building firm I worked for relied on contracts from the steel works in Sheffield. But the steel industry started to fall apart, and there was no work coming in, so they laid me off. There wasn’t much else to do around here.’

‘So you joined the army?’

‘When Will said he was joining up, it seemed like a good idea. It was a regular wage for a few years, you see. I didn’t plan to be a soldier for ever. At the four-year mark I came out, but Will stayed in.’

‘That would be in 1986?’

‘Just in time for the boom in the building trade. I was lucky. I got myself on my feet pretty quick after that.’

‘But you had some trouble while you were in the army, didn’t you? Fighting — once in a pub near your barracks, and twice with local youths.’

‘A few bits of bother here and there. Nothing major. But they told me I’d be better off employed doing something else.’

‘Didn’t you like the army?’

‘Yeah. It was interesting. And it’s a good feeling to have a lot of close mates around you.’

‘So why did you keep getting into trouble?’

‘Same answer really.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean there are things you do for your mates,’ said Quinn.

‘There were others involved when you got into these fights?’

‘Look, it’s all water under the bridge, that. I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Let’s talk about something else, then. Let’s talk about Carol Proctor …’

A packet of photographs landed on Cooper’s desk, interrupting his reading. ‘Thanks,’ he said, without looking up to see who’d brought them. He knew they must be the prints from the trainspotter’s film. He slid them out and poked through the pile, pushing aside shots of trains and more trains, locomotives in the distance and in closeup, trains travelling into the sun, trains coming out of the sun.

And there it was. With two First North Western diesel units moving away from him on the Manchester line, and the express coming towards him on the other, Mansell Quinn had been caught on camera at Hope Station, half a mile from his ex-wife’s house, within an hour of her murder. It seemed fairly damning.

‘Gavin,’ he called across the office, waving the packet. ‘Photos.’

Murfin looked up in amazement. ‘Not the trainspotter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Judging by your face, he came through with the goods, so to speak.’

‘I think so.’

‘Bloody lucky.’

Cooper tapped his nose. ‘Instinct, Gavin.’

‘My missus doesn’t like me having instincts. She says it’s mucky.’

Cooper held the print closer to study the dark figure on the westbound platform. The most that could be said was that there might be a slight hint of hesitation in Quinn’s posture. It wasn’t the look of a man with his mind set on impending violence, not the attitude of someone driven by anger. He looked uncertain, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was.

Or so it seemed to Cooper. But he’d been told often enough that he tried too hard to empathize with victims and suspects alike. The moment he felt the first hint of understanding or sympathy for Mansell Quinn, he knew he’d have to keep it to himself. Theoretically, he ought to share his thoughts with Diane Fry, as she was his immediate supervisor. But she would only ridicule them.

Murfin leaned over to look at the photo. ‘Mmm. Pity there wasn’t a CCTV camera on the platform.’

‘Too true.’

A couple of minutes of tape would have told Cooper whether he was imagining the hesitation. If he could see Quinn actually walking along the platform, it might reveal that any uncertainty was merely that of a man who had just been released into the outside world. When would Quinn last have travelled on a train? More than thirteen years and four months, anyway. His transfers between prisons would have been by road. And when would he last have been in Hope? Same again. Under the terms of his licence, he was supposed to live in Burton on Trent until he settled somewhere in south Derbyshire, or back in his old childhood home in Wales.

‘This is definitely Quinn?’ said Murfin. ‘Where are the other pictures of him?’

Cooper pulled out the file of Quinn photographs collected by the enquiry teams. In addition to the old mugshot and a print-out from the security camera at Hathersage, he had an army file picture of Quinn as a young man, some family snaps, and even a wedding photo of him with a smiling Rebecca. Cooper put the new picture alongside the others.

‘What do you think, Gavin?’ said Cooper.

‘A bit of a chameleon, isn’t he?’

The photographs Cooper had in his hands could have been of three or four different individuals. Just a few years difference in age seem to produce a different man — the hair slightly longer, or shorter, even a dark moustache in the shot of him in uniform. Quinn’s hair colour seemed to change, too, and the even the shade of his skin. But that could be the quality of the photography.

According to his file, Quinn had looked after himself in prison, and had emerged from his sentence strong and fit. It was his friends William Thorpe and Raymond Proctor who had deteriorated over those thirteen years. Thorpe had been eaten away by disease, while Proctor had allowed himself to become overweight, balding and unfit. And Cooper suspected he was also worn down by despair. In a way, Mansell Quinn was already the winner.

‘You’re sure that’s him?’

Diane Fry took the photo from Cooper and examined it.

‘Yes, yes, I’m sure. He’s wearing the same black waterproof that he had on in Hathersage. It’s lucky it had stopped raining by the time this was taken, so he has the hood back.’

‘He’s carrying a small rucksack, too. Wouldn’t you give your eye teeth to know what’s in it?’

‘I’m betting he has a self-inflating mattress in a stuff sack, and a packet of light sticks,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s what he bought in the Out and About shop at Hathersage before he caught the train.’

‘I was more concerned about any weapons he might be carrying.’

‘Of course. Diane, isn’t there a problem over the time of Mrs Lowe’s death?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Mrs van Doon estimated that she was killed within an hour or two of her sister finding the body at eleven thirty.’

‘You know we can’t expect anything more accurate.’

‘No — but we have the trainspotter’s photo of Quinn, which shows him at Hope station around seven forty. It doesn’t take more than twenty minutes to walk up to Parson’s Croft, so he’d be there by eight, in daylight. That doesn’t square with Mrs Lowe being killed by somebody bursting into the house two hours later.’

‘We have the footprints from the garden,’ said Fry. ‘So we know he waited under the trees.’

‘For nearly two hours? In daylight?’

‘It was getting dusk. You said so yourself.’

‘No, not until nine thirty. Besides, Quinn could have had no idea of the lay-out of the house or garden — the place wasn’t even built last time he was in the Hope Valley.’

‘Ben, you’re just trying to pick holes for the sake of it, and it doesn’t work. Physically, the times fit just fine. Quinn was there on Monday night.’

‘We don’t even know the footprints are his,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we?’ Fry looked at the picture again. ‘I suppose there’s a lot of open country around the Hope Valley for Quinn to vanish into,’ she said.

Cooper laughed. So she’d noticed the hills where the railway line disappeared into the distance — the bulk of Mam Tor, and the twin heights of Win Hill and Lose Hill.

‘It’s almost all open country,’ he said. ‘Take a look at the map. Unless we get really lucky, the only chance we’re going to have of catching him is if he decides to go after another victim. Then we have to hope that he makes a mistake, or that someone recognizes him from the TV or newspapers.’

‘It comes back to the same question, then,’ said Fry. ‘Who else might Quinn be going after? Who might he have a grudge against?’

‘It would have to be a pretty personal animosity, wouldn’t it?’

Fry looked at him curiously for a moment. ‘What are you thinking, Ben?’

‘Well … what about Proctor?’

‘If it weren’t for his family, I wouldn’t be worrying about that one at all.’

‘I think Will Thorpe knows a lot more than he’s telling. Quinn must have asked him about specific people. We need to find some way of persuading him to talk to us.’

Fry sighed. ‘If we pull him in again, he’ll just clam up.’

‘Yes, you’re right. But now he’s at Wingate Lees … it might be interesting to talk to him and Raymond Proctor together.’

Fry handed him the photograph back. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

‘There’s one other thing,’ said Cooper. ‘It was something old Mr Thorpe said that made me think of it. You remember Mrs Lowe’s neighbours, the Newbolds?’

‘The croquet set.’

‘That’s them. Well, they reported seeing a tramp on the road near Mrs Lowe’s house a couple of weeks before she was killed.’

‘You think it might have been William Thorpe?’ said Fry.

‘He’d fit the bill, wouldn’t he? But what would he be doing, visiting Rebecca Lowe?’

‘We’ll both go together,’ said Fry. ‘Just give me a few minutes.’

While he waited for Fry, Cooper tried to look busy. For a moment, he’d almost blurted out something about his father. That was the animosity he’d been thinking about — the history between Mansell Quinn and Sergeant Joe Cooper. There had been something personal there, no doubt.

He looked at the interview transcript on his desk again. It was one of the earlier interviews, before Quinn had changed his mind and entered a guilty plea. When the detectives first questioned him, Quinn had given the story that he’d come home, found the body on the floor, tried to turn it over. That was how he’d got blood on himself. He hadn’t killed Carol, he said. He repeated it, no matter how many times they tried to rephrase the questions.

‘So if you didn’t kill Carol Proctor, who did?’ the DS had asked at last.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who else could have done it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was anyone else there at the time?’

‘No.’

‘Well, Mr Quinn, how is it possible that somebody else could have killed Carol Proctor, if no one else was there but you?’

‘I don’t know. But I didn’t kill her.’

‘But, Mr Quinn — ’

‘Somebody else had been there, just before I got home. I could tell somebody else had been there.’

The DI had taken over the questions then. He might have been trying to be fair to Mansell Quinn, to give him a chance to suggest another scenario. That was the way it read in the transcript. But Cooper also knew that a lie was difficult to sustain once it was subjected to detailed questioning. Especially a spontaneous lie. Few people were quick-witted enough to fill in the details on the spur of the moment.

‘So, Mr Quinn, you say you could tell someone else had been there? In your house?’

‘Yes.’

‘How could you tell?’

[Silence]

‘Mr Quinn, you said you could tell. How could you tell someone had been in your house?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, let’s think about it. Was there anything out of place, for example?’

‘Out of place?’

‘Had anything been moved? Was there anything in the room that shouldn’t have been?

‘I …’

‘Yes, Mr Quinn?’

[Silence]

‘So you can’t remember noticing anything out of place in your house when you got home?’

[Silence]

‘Did you hear any noises?’

‘There …’

‘Yes, sir? Would you like to repeat that?’

[Silence]

‘Perhaps you heard somebody leaving the house? Was that it?’

‘No, I didn’t hear that.’

‘What, then?’

[Silence]

‘Voices? Footsteps running away?’

[Silence]

‘Come on, man, I’m giving you a chance. What did you hear?’

[Silence]

‘Mr Quinn, you’re not helping yourself. I can’t believe anything you say.’

[Faintly] ‘You, too.’

‘Yes, me too. So … let’s talk about Carol Proctor again, shall we?’

The transcript showed that Quinn had failed to substantiate his assertion. Cooper could almost hear the satisfaction in the voices of the detectives asking the questions. And Quinn must have realized himself that his position was hopeless. From that moment, he’d accepted his guilt.

The Proctors’ house at Wingate Lees was the sort of home where the television was never switched off. Ben Cooper saw a second TV mounted on the wall in the kitchen, and he imagined the children would have their own sets in their rooms.

‘So where is he, Mr Proctor?’ said Diane Fry angrily.

Raymond Proctor shook his head. ‘I don’t know. When I went out this morning, he’d gone. That’s all I can tell you. I couldn’t keep him here against his will, could I? What did you expect me to do, lock him in the caravan? If you wanted him locked up, you should have kept him in a cell.’

‘Do you know why he went?’

‘No. Who knows what goes on his mind? Will’s a sick man.’

‘What time did you see him last, sir?’ asked Cooper.

‘I spoke to him about ten o’clock, to see if he needed anything. Those ’vans aren’t exactly luxurious, but he said he was OK. He told me he was tired and he was going to sleep.’

‘And nobody saw him go?’

‘Not so far as I know.’

‘Damn it, he could be miles away by now,’ said Fry.

‘Will doesn’t move all that fast,’ said Proctor. ‘If it helps.’

Cooper turned his back on the TV screen, finding the picture too distracting.

‘Did you talk to Mr Thorpe yesterday?’ he asked.

‘A bit.’

‘What about?’

‘Why do you want to know that?’

‘It might help us to understand why he left.’

A faint crack could be heard behind the Proctors’ house, then a slithering somewhere above their heads, like claws sliding down the tiles of the roof. With a small thump, a wood pigeon hit the guttering and flopped over the edge. It hung upside down for a moment, its head rolling drunkenly as if it were trying to see down into the house. Then its weight carried it forward, and it fell past the window with its beak hanging open, the pinion feathers of its wings fluttering.

Proctor seemed glad of the interruption. ‘I see Jason got another one,’ he said.

‘Jason?’ said Fry.

‘My step-son.’

‘Is he shooting them?’

‘Aye. They’re buggers, those pigeons. They wake us up at three o’clock every bloody morning. They feed on the fields, then they roost up here on our roof. Dirty, they are. Look at the bird-shit on the caravans up at this end of the site. It gets on the customers’ cars, too, and they don’t like it. Pigeons! The only way to get rid of them is to shoot ’em.’

‘They’re not a protected species, then?’

‘Protected?’ said Proctor.

Fry put on her most officious voice. ‘Well, they’re wood pigeons, aren’t they? Wild birds, not captive bred. I believe it’s an offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act to intentionally kill or injure any wild bird. Unless you have a licence, sir.’

‘Licence?’ said Proctor. ‘They’re bloody pigeons — flying vermin. You don’t need a licence to shoot vermin. I’ve never heard such rubbish.’

But he didn’t sound certain. Cooper was pretty sure that Fry didn’t know whether you needed a licence to shoot wood pigeons, not without looking it up in her copy of the Police Training Manual. But he wasn’t going to say anything.

Fry patted her pockets as if searching for a notebook and stared thoughtfully at the roof for a while longer, until Proctor snorted in disgust. He stamped down the passage to the back yard, and they heard him shouting to somebody. A brief altercation followed, punctuated by swear words on both sides and the word ‘police’. Then Proctor slammed a gate and strode back.

After a moment, a youth carrying an air rifle appeared outside the window. He stared in at Fry as a visitor to a zoo might stare into a cage containing a two-headed buffalo. He looked as if he didn’t quite believe that such a creature could exist, and was transfixed by a sort of horrified fascination. In the hand that wasn’t holding the air rifle, he dangled two dead wood pigeons. The colours of their plumage were still bright. Cooper could see the pink patches on their breasts and the white under their open wings.

‘So,’ said Fry, ‘why did Mr Thorpe leave?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Proctor.

‘What did you say to him?’

‘Nothing.’

During a pause they became aware of Connie Proctor standing in the doorway.

‘I know what happened,’ she said.

‘Connie, you can leave this to me,’ said her husband.

But Mrs Proctor continued into the room, and she didn’t look as though as she was going to take any notice of her husband.

‘It was because Ray told him about Quinn. He told him that Quinn had been here.’

‘He’s been here? When?’

‘Wednesday night.’

Fry glared at Proctor. Cooper braced himself to try to restrain her if she decided to throttle him.

‘Nothing happened,’ said Proctor, taking a step back. ‘You said he’d come to kill me. But he didn’t.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us about this?’ said Fry quietly.

Proctor was sweating. He withdrew a couple more paces, as if he wanted to be back in his office, hearing nothing but the blare of the TV. His wife glared at him with contempt.

‘He’s scared to death,’ she said. ‘Look at him, you can see it. He’s scared of you. But he’s even more scared of Mansell Quinn.’

‘You don’t shop a mate,’ said Proctor. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I know it was wrong of me not to say anything. But you don’t shop a mate, whatever he’s done.’

‘Even when he’s killed somebody?’

‘Well …’

‘And what if he kills somebody else?’ said Fry. ‘Would you have bothered telling us then? Or do other people’s lives not matter to you, Mr Proctor?’

Proctor shook his head. ‘He wasn’t after me, you see. I’ve done nothing against him. But Will — ’

‘What about him?’

‘I don’t know. Will was more worried than me, though. He thought Mansell might be angry with him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was all about. I thought he’d done Mansell a favour, but there was something else, too.’

‘What did Quinn come here for?’ said Fry. ‘What did he want?’

‘He didn’t say. He talked about how things were, what it was like coming out of prison.’

‘He just knocked on the door, and you let him in for a chat?’

‘Well, not exactly.’

‘What, then?’

‘I found him waiting in the office when I got back to the house.’

‘He just walked in?’

‘I don’t usually lock the back door, because I’m in and out all the time when I’m on the site. I’m never far away, and it saves me bothering Connie and the kids in the house.’

Fry put her hand to her head. ‘After all we said to you about security, you just leave your back door open for a convicted murderer to walk in?’

Proctor laughed nervously. ‘I leave the door open completely if there’s no one else at home, so I can hear the phone if it rings. You’ve got to make sure you answer the phone in a business like this, or you can lose bookings. If they don’t get an answer, customers just go somewhere else.’

‘Of course, I could answer the phone for him, but he doesn’t like me coming in the office,’ said Connie. ‘He doesn’t want me to know what he’s up to in there.’

‘And you’ve no idea why Quinn came here?’ said Fry impatiently. ‘Was he looking for Will Thorpe?’

‘He didn’t say so,’ said Proctor. ‘I don’t really know what he wanted.’

‘The funny thing is, Thorpe says he tried to put Quinn off tracking you down. He told Quinn that people who’d made a new life for themselves should be allowed to get on with it.’

Proctor laughed unexpectedly. ‘Well, that was good of him.’

‘Is there anything missing?’ said Cooper.

‘Not as far as I can see.’

‘Might Quinn have taken money from the office?’

Proctor shook his head. ‘The only money on the premises is in the safe. I don’t leave that open.’

Fry growled. ‘I do not believe that Mansell Quinn came here just for a chat about old times. What do you say, Mr Proctor?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Mr Proctor, we’re going to ask you to come down to the station later on to make a statement. This is very serious. A senior officer may want to speak to you about your actions.’

At that, Connie Proctor looked triumphant. ‘A good thing, too. But it won’t make any difference,’ she said. ‘He’s a lost cause.’

She closed the door with a firm click of the lock as they walked away from the house. Her husband came out, but stayed on the path. When they arrived, he’d been unloading some propane gas canisters from the red Renault van, which had a rustic log cabin logo on its side and wingate lees caravan park in large letters, with the address and phone number.

When he looked at his own car, parked inside the entrance to the site, Cooper found he could almost picture Mansell Quinn coming through the gate and moving up the roadway towards him. He saw a Quinn dressed in black and indistinct in outline, his face not quite clear because Cooper had never seen him in the flesh.

As he reached the car, Cooper shuddered. He’d never met Quinn, yet the thought of the man made him apprehensive. Surely he couldn’t be the only one who recognized the need to be afraid?

But of course he wasn’t. William Thorpe was afraid, too.

Cooper started up the car and let it drift slowly forward, past the end of the nearest caravan, so that they could see the house a hundred yards up the hill. Raymond Proctor was striding towards the back door, moving quickly in spite of his slight limp.

‘He couldn’t wait for us to leave, in the end,’ said Fry.

‘I’m certain something occurred to him that he decided not to tell us about.’

‘Something that he thought might be missing?’

‘Yes. And now it looks as though he’s going to check whether that something is still there.’

They watched Proctor enter the house via the back door, where his office was. He didn’t bother to shut the door behind him.

‘Wasn’t there something else you wanted to ask Mr Proctor, Ben?’ said Fry.

‘Was there?’

‘Something you forgot, but you’ve just remembered. Maybe you wanted to ask him for directions back to Edendale?’

‘You’re right. I’d better go up to the house and speak to him.’

A moment later, Cooper found Raymond Proctor in the untidy office, leaning into one of the heavy oak cupboards on the far wall. Cooper couldn’t quite see what was in the cupboard because the man’s body was in the way.

‘Mr Proctor?’ he called, knocking hard on the open door.

Proctor dropped the bunch of keys he’d been clutching and jumped back from the cupboard, wincing as he twisted his bad leg.

‘What the hell — I thought you’d gone!’

‘I just came back to ask — ’ Cooper began.

And then he noticed Proctor’s frightened expression, and a couple of empty wooden shelves behind him.

‘What should be in the cupboard?’ he said.

Proctor looked at him, dumbfounded. ‘I can’t believe it. I always have it locked, but the keys were on a hook with the others. I never thought anybody would bother to look in the cupboards.’

‘What’s missing?’

‘But it’s gone. He’s taken it. Some bolts, too.’

‘What’s gone, Mr Proctor?’

‘My crossbow.’