One Last Breath

29

‘The net is closing in,’ said DCI Oliver Kessen. ‘But we’re asking everyone in the area to be vigilant and report any possible sightings of this man.’

Kessen looked sombre. He gazed directly at the camera for a few moments with a determined expression until he was faded out and the newsreader came back on to give the phone number. Watching the performance, Ben Cooper wondered if the DCI had been on a media course recently. He’d got the direct gaze off quite well.

‘Well, that was a result,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘A few tears, a bit of emotion. That should get us on the one o’clock news. They couldn’t have done it any better.’

‘I take it you mean the Lowes, rather than Mr Kessen,’ said Chief Superintendent Colin Jepson. The divisional commander had joined the enquiry team for half an hour to watch the broadcast. He sat stiffly on a chair among the detectives, trying for an air of informality.

‘Well, quite, sir,’ said Hitchens.

But Cooper wasn’t sure about that. He looked around the room for the reaction of the rest of the team. For him, Andrea Lowe had performed well at the press conference. She’d been articulate and compelling, her manner suggesting strong emotion barely restrained. But her brother, Simon? There had been little from him throughout. This time, he’d left Andrea to do all the talking as he sat, tense and uncomfortable, uttering only monosyllables of agreement.

Cooper found himself wondering about the nature of Simon’s relationship with his father. He’d been fifteen years old at the time of Carol Proctor’s murder, and the trauma must have gone pretty deep. Cooper knew how difficult it could be to deal with conflicting emotions about a parent. In Simon Lowe, he was looking at someone who was almost a mirror image of himself.

‘You know we’re going to get every busybody in Derbyshire phoning in, don’t you?’ said the Chief Superintendent, as Hitchens killed the TV picture with the remote. ‘Everybody will want to think they’ve seen Mansell Quinn. Within twenty-four hours, you’ll be nobody around here unless you’ve had Quinn lurking in your back garden. You won’t be able to hold your head up with the neighbours if you haven’t stood next to him in the queue at the chippy at least once.’

‘We are rather relying on the public, sir,’ said Hitchens. ‘We don’t have any other options at the moment.’

‘All we can rely on the public to do is to tie up all my resources.’

‘It will use a lot of resources manning the phones and checking out the sightings,’ said Hitchens. ‘But we need the help of the public. We’ve got to catch this man before he strikes again.’

‘Strikes again?’ said Jepson. ‘Are you writing headlines for the newspapers these days, Hitchens? Have you taken a sub-editor’s course at the Derbyshire Times? Are you going to start talking in words of one syllable?’

‘Sorry, chief. I meant, we’re gathering community-based intelligence in our efforts to establish the location of the principal suspect prior to a recurrence of his offending behaviour.’

The Chief Superintendent went rather red in the face. Watching him, Cooper shifted uneasily in his chair. He hadn’t yet learned to overcome the awe for his divisional commander that he’d felt ever since he was a trainee PC. Hearing somebody provoking him so blatantly was rather shocking.

‘You know who’s going to get the blame for all this?’ said Jepson.

‘Sir?’ said Hitchens.

‘Me.’ The Chief Superintendent sighed. ‘But quite frankly, it goes with the job description. As divisional commander, you have to be ready to take all the flak that people want to fire at you. And believe me, it comes in from every direction.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But it doesn’t worry me,’ said Jepson. ‘In fact, I take it as a compliment. If people are permanently having a go at you, at least it means they think you’re big enough to be a target.’

‘You ain’t nobody unless you’ve been booed some time,’ said Hitchens.

Jepson stared at him. ‘Sorry?’

‘It was something Bob Dylan said.’

‘DI Hitchens, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Sorry, sir. I thought Bob Dylan might have been your era.’

Jepson went a little red around the ears. ‘For your information, Hitchens, as a young man I was already an enthusiast for Italian opera. I suspect you’re being facetious, Inspector.’

‘Not at all, sir. Just trying to help with the cultural references. It’s so easy to get out of touch, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps it’s time you were back at work on the Quinn case. There’s must be a great deal to do.’

‘Yes, sir.’

It was obvious why everyone was on edge. Progress had ground to a halt. Painstaking legwork and hours of phone calls had established Quinn’s route from Sudbury Prison. He’d used buses as far as Hathersage, then a train the short distance to Hope. After that, he seemed to have been on foot, because the information from the public transport system had dried up.

Most worrying of all, it was now Friday, and there had been no reported sightings of Quinn since Wednesday night, when he’d called on Raymond Proctor at the caravan park.

Cooper watched the DI stand in front of the maps and run his eyes over the geography of the Hope Valley for the hundredth time, perhaps considering the futility of sending the helicopter support unit up to cover the ground. They’d be looking for one man in a landscape scattered with hikers and in villages thronged with tourists.

Hitchens turned and looked at Cooper. ‘What do you think, Ben?’

‘He’s still in the area somewhere,’ said Cooper.

‘Why?’

‘He hasn’t finished what he came back for yet.’

Will Thorpe had walked out of Wingate Lees caravan park as soon as he thought no one was looking. He would have preferred to be in a hostel. At least he’d have had no problem with the accommodation, or the people who ran the place. They were usually civil enough.

But the idea that everyone knew where he was had started to make him feel nervous. He felt trapped, pinned down, expected to wait helplessly for the arrival of anyone who chose to find him. Within minutes of arriving at Wingate Lees, he’d known he would have to get away. He had noticed Connie Proctor watching him. Next day, she’d have got Ray to tell him to leave anyway.

Thorpe remembered the abandoned field barn. He was pretty sure he’d used it before. He didn’t mind the smells. In fact, he hardly noticed them any more. They were simply a sign of the presence of humanity nearby, a warning that he should go carefully and be on the alert.

The stone building stood between Dirtlow Rake and the quarry of the cement works. Thorpe could hear the growl and squeal of machinery in the quarry and the rumble of the excavators. From the doorway, he could see a dumper truck driving along the ridge, throwing up a trail of dust.

Inside, the field barn was divided into two bare rooms, connected by a doorway so low that he had to stoop to get under the lintel. The dirt floor was uneven and scattered with lumps of limestone that had fallen out of the walls, as well as crisp packets and screwed-up tissues left by the last people in here. There were round beams above head height and openings high in the wall — one of them looked as though it had been a fireplace, with ventilation through the wall into a chimney.

Thorpe looked around doubtfully. The building had no doors, and the empty windows narrowed from a foot to a couple of inches on the outside, like arrow slits. There would be no escape for anything through these holes, either animal or human.

The roof was mostly sound, though, and Thorpe could see from the dirt floor that the rain came through in only one spot. Unless there was a storm, when the wind would drive rain through every nook and cranny. It was exposed up here, and even now the wind gusted raggedly around the building with a noise like someone battering on the walls.

Thorpe found a piece of corrugated tin lying in deep nettles in front of the building. It must have been there for some time, because the nettles were growing through the bolt holes. The tin crackled loudly when he walked across it, and he decided to drag it across the open doorway, just as a precaution.

He was very tired, and all he really wanted to do was sleep. Sometimes he wished he were like a bird — they didn’t sleep the way people did, but were able to shut down just one half of their brain at a time, while the other half remained on the alert.

He wouldn’t be staying long here anyway. Tomorrow, he’d move on, get away from the area altogether. It wasn’t safe for him here any more. But it had been an exhausting day, and he needed sleep.

Outside, the dumper truck rumbled back across the ridge. The dust it threw up turned yellow as dark clouds gathered in the east, swallowing the evening light. But Will Thorpe was no longer aware of it.

Diane Fry could stand it no longer. That evening, she looked up Ben Cooper’s phone number and called him at home.

‘Oh, Diane, it’s you,’ he said. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? I thought perhaps Quinn had been found. Or someone else …’

‘No. Nothing.’

‘Right.’

There was an awkward pause. It was one of those pauses she’d promised herself she wouldn’t allow to develop, in case she felt obliged to fill it with the usual: ‘Well, I’ll let you get on, then.’

But Cooper filled the pause himself with some inconsequential chatter about his landlady and people they knew at the station. There was even something about snails that she didn’t understand. Fry was trying to judge whether he wanted to talk or was just trying to get her off the phone by boring her to death.

She’d almost decided to put the phone down and stop bothering him, when Cooper took her by surprise.

‘Diane,’ he said, ‘would it be possible for me to come round and see you?’

‘What?’ she said, struck by the sudden change in his voice.

‘If you don’t want me to, it’s OK.’

‘Well …’

‘Or you could come to see me, if you like. Or we could meet somewhere else. Whichever you prefer. Only, it’s a bit difficult on the phone.’

‘What is, Ben?’

‘Talking. I mean, talking properly.’

Fry could feel herself smiling. She was smiling so hard that her cheeks were hurting. ‘You want to talk about something, Ben?’

‘Yes. Look, I know it’s an imposition. You won’t want to bother. But if you could spare a bit of time. Just half an hour. Do you think you could? Spare a bit of time for me?’

‘Yes, Ben,’ she said. ‘Of course I could.’

She heard him sigh with relief.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘There’s something I really do need to talk to you about.’

Will Thorpe was woken by the rain. Even in his half-asleep state, he knew that something was wrong, but it took a few seconds before he could figure out what. Then he began to wonder why the rain was falling on his face. He vaguely recalled that he was in the field barn, and that he’d chosen his spot carefully to be in the dry. But water was definitely dripping on him.

Thorpe groaned and cursed. The wind must have changed direction during the night and now the rain was blowing in on him. If he didn’t move, he’d be soaking wet by morning and his joints would be so stiff that he’d hardly be able to walk. And he had to be away early. He had to get away from the area, because it wasn’t safe.

Nevertheless, he lay thinking about it for a second or two longer. Perhaps the rain would stop and save him from having to move. But he could hear it falling steadily on the roof of the barn. Instead, Thorpe listened for the wind — it might be just a passing squall that was blowing the rain in. Against his will, he felt his brain become a little more alert, his senses stirring sluggishly in response to some anxiety. He screwed his eyes tight shut and listened again. There was no wind.

Thorpe’s eyelids creaked open. At first, he could see nothing. His vision was unfocused by sleep, and his surroundings unfamiliar. He recognized the smells he’d fallen asleep among — stale cigarette butts and urine, damp concrete and soil. But he detected something new, too, something that hadn’t been there before. The smell of another human being.

Another drop of water fell on Thorpe’s cheek. And with a lurch of terror, he became aware of the figure looming over him, a dark shape bending downwards, water leaking from its black angles, and invisible eyes staring at him in silence.

Thorpe began to scream. The noise came from deep in his belly, almost bypassing his exhausted lungs, shocking him with its volume. At the same time, he thrashed around in his blanket, trying to sit up, free his hands, or roll away from whoever was standing over him. The noise of his screaming filled the field barn, cracking an echo off the stone walls and the ancient beams in a derisive imitation of his fear.

The figure had been still until now. But the yelling jolted it into action. Two black arms slipped towards his face and hands covered his mouth, crushing his lips against his teeth and forcing his head back against the dirt floor. And Thorpe’s screaming stopped.