One Last Breath

31

Saturday, 17 July

When Ben Cooper arrived at Siggate, a uniformed inspector from Traffic section was practically spinning on the spot. The reflective hoops and patches on his yellow jacket flashed and flickered in the lights as he paced along the tape. He was listening to the crackling voices from his radio, shouting instructions to somebody at the other end, then glaring at the field barn as if it had delivered a personal insult.

‘We can’t sustain this situation for long,’ he said. ‘We’ve had to close the road all the way back to Castleton and all the way up to Bradwell so we can operate diversions for the traffic. Highways have got the carriageway up in Castleton for repair work. I’m warning you, it’s going to be complete chaos for twenty miles in every direction in a couple of hours’ time. We’ll bring the whole of North Derbyshire to a halt.’

The inspector swore when he was ignored and went back to his radio.

The exact time a motorist had called in on his mobile phone to report the body had been logged by Control, but it wasn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of when the incident had occurred. The road was quiet at this time of the morning. And even if other drivers had passed by earlier, they had either seen nothing or not bothered to stop.

The body was out of sight of the road, inside the abandoned field barn. The motorist might be wishing he hadn’t called it in, now that he was being asked to explain what he’d stopped for.

Cooper found himself quite by accident standing near DCI Kessen, who’d just arrived and was being briefed by the Crime Scene Manager.

‘There’s a good bit of blood inside,’ said the CSM. ‘And splashes of it in the nettles, and between the building and the gate over there.’

‘What about the road?’ said Kessen. ‘Traffic was still going through for a while — enough to contaminate the scene?’

‘I’m not too concerned about the road. It looks as though your man came and went on foot.’

‘Really?’

The CSM pointed towards the gateway. ‘We’ll be able to see things a lot better when it’s daylight, but Liz has found some traces leading off into the field there. The poor bugger inside obviously never made it as far as the gateway, so it seems a fair bet that it’s going to be your suspect’s exit route. The field is nice and empty, thank God. There’s nothing worse than a herd of inquisitive cows trampling a crime scene. They’re even worse than a bunch of heavy-footed coppers, and that’s saying something.’

‘Any ID?’

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything on him. You might have a better chance of identifying him when you get him to the mortuary.’

‘Sir, could I get a closer look?’ said Cooper. ‘I might recognize him.’

Kessen nodded. The CSM kitted Cooper out in a scene suit and guided him to a point where he could see the face of the dead man.

The body lay in the inner room of the field barn, sprawled on its back on the dirt floor. Cooper had to bend almost double to duck through the doorway on the stepping plates laid by the SOCOs. Lights had been set up in two of the corners, illuminating the victim like an exhibit in an art gallery. The floor around him seemed to glitter where flecks of quartz in the limestone reflected the lights.

The smell was pretty bad in here. Cooper wasn’t sure how much of it was the effect of extreme violence and death on the body’s natural processes, and how much resulted from whatever had gone on in the field barn previously. Some SOCO would have the pleasure of analysing the screwed-up tissues and crisp packets.

There were bloodstains, too, and a lot of disturbance of the ground. But Cooper’s attention was drawn to the face. It was dark red, almost purple in the artificial light. What he could see of the neck was marked by deep, black bruises, the result of far more violence being used on the victim than was necessary.

‘Any luck, Cooper?’

‘Yes, I know who it is,’ he said. ‘It’s William Thorpe.’

DCI Kessen sighed and turned to the officers waiting by their vehicles.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Why have we still got the road closed? Isn’t there anyone here from Traffic?’ He was always like that. Whenever we had a row, I’d think it was all over and forgotten about. But he … Mansell would go away and brood about things. It seemed as though he turned everything over in his mind, everything that I’d said in the heat of the moment. He picked my words apart, analysing them, making himself more and more angry. There were a lot of things that I didn’t mean, of course. But he never seemed to understand that. He took everything to heart and stored it up. His memory was unnervingly accurate, too — I could tell he’d rehearsed my words over and over, letting them eat away at him from the inside. Then he would come back to the subject after a while — the next morning, or two or three days later, or longer than that even. And by then he’d built up the whole thing in his mind, turned it into something else, something far worse. When he came back to it, he was angrier than he’d been while we were arguing. I called it his ‘slow burn’. It was like he had a really long fuse that took time to burn down before the explosion came. It was really quite frightening. Because I never knew when it might happen. Mansell was never physically violent towards me. It was only words. When the explosion did come, it was just that — an explosion of anger. What I would still call the heat of the moment. An outpouring of emotion, something he had to get out of his system. I wouldn’t describe him a cold, calculating man. Not at all … Statement of Rebecca Quinn, October 1990

Ben Cooper was tired, and ready to go back home. It was three o’clock in the morning, and it was still raining. It was also his birthday.

He stared blearily out of the window of the CID room, wondering how much rain had to fall before Peak Cavern flooded. He was picturing the parties of tourists running to get out of the cavern, foaming water rushing behind them through the passages, roaring like all the devils in Hell were after them. He knew it wouldn’t happen in real life — there would be plenty of warning before anyone was caught by a flood.

Cooper had read Rebecca Quinn’s statement before, but this morning her analysis of her husband’s character seemed particularly ironic. Perhaps he was just tired, but she seemed to be talking about a different man altogether.

He guessed Rebecca wouldn’t have been allowed back into her own home for a while after that day in October 1990 — not until the SOCOs were satisfied that they’d done all they could to collect the available evidence. Her sitting room had probably still been prohibited to her then, even if she’d wanted to enter it.

Cooper tried to imagine what it would be like to go back into your house knowing someone had recently died a violent death in your sitting room, and that your husband was probably the killer. Would it still feel like your own home? Or would everything have changed? He suspected it would feel as if some alien presence had invaded your space.

There would have been a horrible temptation to open the door of the room where it happened, to look for some sort of explanation among the familiar surroundings, to hope that the whole thing had been a bad dream. But all Rebecca Quinn would have seen were the markers left by the SOCOs, the holes cut out of the carpet to retrieve the bloodstains, a dusting of powder on the window frames and door handles. She might have smelled latex gloves, and the sweat of people working indoors in crime scene suits. She might have noticed that the bottle was gone from the table, the cushions from the settee, and the poker from the hearth. All very prosaic, in a way. But all signs that the room had been the setting for a violent crime.

Cooper looked through the statement list for an interview with neighbours called Page. Alistair Page had been only sixteen at the time, but if his parents were still around they might be worth talking to. If they’d lived quite close, they ought to have known the Quinns pretty well in a place like Castleton. And independent witnesses were distinctly in short supply.

But there were no Pages on the list. Cooper made a note to ask Alistair about his parents. Then he turned back to Rebecca’s statement. She recalled leaving the house at eight thirty that morning to go to her job as a secretary in a solicitor’s office in Hathersage. Normally, she wouldn’t have returned home before five thirty, but she’d been phoned by the police earlier in the afternoon. She said she’d been too shocked and confused at first to understand what she was being told.

Rebecca had stayed at her sister Dawn’s house that night. Neighbours had looked after the Quinn children when they arrived home from school, until they, too, had gone to their aunt’s house. Cooper looked for the name of the helpful neighbours. Townsend. Maybe they were still around, at least.

There was a statement from another neighbour on the opposite side of the road, a woman called Needham. But neither she nor Mrs Townsend remembered seeing anyone enter the Quinns’ house until Mansell Quinn himself arrived home, driving his Vauxhall estate. It wasn’t clear from their statements how good a view either of them had of the house.

Cooper began to gather up the statements to put them back into the Carol Proctor case file. Then he noticed a photograph of an evidence bag. According to the label, it came from Room 1 Sector B, and it carried the identification code PM24 — a scene of crime officer’s initials, plus the number of items of evidence he’d collected from the scene. He didn’t know who ‘PM’ was — not one of the present SOCOs at E Division anyway. After fourteen years, it was probably someone who had left the force or retired.

The bag contained a Coke bottle. It looked like the bottle that had been sitting on the Quinns’ table in the crime scene photographs. Cooper could see the fingerprint dust on the surface.

Faithful old fingerprints — they were sometimes sniffed at these days by forensic experts who described them as an art, not a science. But the team attending 82 Pindale Road in 1990 had dusted the bottle for prints. And they’d found them, though they were too smeared to get a match. That was odd in itself — glass was perfect material to lift fingerprints from. Unless it had been deliberately wiped.

With a weary sigh, Cooper put the file down and looked at his watch. He wondered if he’d ever get chance to take a look at the Quinns’ old house in Pindale Road.

Finally, he saw Diane Fry coming into the room. She looked as tired as he felt.

‘William Edward Thorpe,’ she said. ‘He started off as one of your actions, didn’t he, Ben?’

‘Yes.’

‘In fact, he was a TIE — to be traced, interviewed and eliminated.’

‘We traced him and interviewed him.’

‘But somebody else managed to eliminate him.’

‘Mansell Quinn?’ said Cooper.

‘It seems a good bet. Looks as if DI Hitchens was right — Quinn has got a list.’

‘Thorpe was the odd one out, though,’ said Cooper.

‘How do you mean?’

‘We know where all the others on the list are.’

‘Always assuming,’ said Fry, ‘that Quinn’s list is the same as ours.’

‘But this one doesn’t feel right,’ said Cooper.

‘Why?’

Cooper was looking at the map showing Quinn’s appearances in the Hope Valley. ‘It’s in the wrong place somehow. But then, the pattern is probably just accidental.’

‘Of course it is. Quinn isn’t planning all that carefully, is he?’

‘No,’ said Cooper doubtfully.

He remembered descending Siggate into Pindale from the field barn. He’d been able to see all the way to the top end of the Hope Valley, where the yellow street lights glowed along the A625. He’d made out the dark belt of trees that marked the route of the railway line from the cement works. It passed Hope Valley College and swung towards the main line near Killhill Bridge.

A little to the east, he’d seen the lights of the Proctors’ caravan park, Wingate Lees. But the lights had looked dimmer there. They were half hidden by the railway embankment and the slope behind the site, as if trapped between the shadows.

‘What are you reading that’s making you look like that?’ said Fry.

Her voice sounded nasal and muffled. She had a tissue pressed to her nose, and her eyes were red.

Cooper showed her Rebecca Quinn’s statement.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Quinn’s wife said he was the kind of man who stored things up.’

‘For days, she said. Not fourteen years.’

‘It might have been a shorter time if he’d had the opportunity to get the anger out of his system. But he didn’t have the chance on the inside. He has now, though. Now that he’s out.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘It still doesn’t feel right, Diane. Tracking people down one by one isn’t an explosion of rage. It’s far too calculating. Too cold. Exactly the things Rebecca said Quinn wasn’t.’

‘Ben, nobody doubts Quinn’s guilt.’

‘Don’t they?’

‘The evidence was pretty convincing — at least, the jury must have thought it was.’

‘It’s all circumstantial,’ said Cooper.

‘One piece of evidence wouldn’t have been enough to get a conviction on its own, I grant you. But, taken as a whole, there was enough to make a substantial case. The jury decided it went beyond the possibility of coincidence. Quinn was there, Ben. Right on the spot. He had Carol Proctor’s blood on his hands.’

‘But what exactly is the evidence that Quinn killed his ex-wife on Monday night?’

‘There were no signs of a break-in. Somebody came into the house who knew her, or who had a key. Unless she left the back door unlocked.’

‘There’s no way Quinn would’ve had a key to Parson’s Croft.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘Are there any traces that identify him?’

‘You know we don’t have his DNA on record, Ben. There are some fibres at the scene that might be from his clothing, but until we locate him, we can’t attempt a match.’

‘It’s all conjecture, isn’t it?’

‘He’s a convicted killer, Ben. He was released from prison that morning, and promptly disappeared. We know he turned up shortly afterwards in the Hope Valley area — we have plenty of hard evidence for that. There are witnesses, we’ve got him on film. And then his wife is killed within a few hours. He came back to the area for a reason, Ben.’

‘Like I said, it’s conjecture.’

Fry sighed. ‘Rebecca Lowe knew she was at risk from him. She had a phone conversation with her daughter about it that afternoon.’

‘Actually, Andrea said that her mother insisted she wasn’t worried.’

‘And she went on to say that her mother was just putting on a brave face for her benefit.’

‘It means nothing either way. Not as evidence.’

‘Ben, your trainspotter got a photograph of Quinn within half a mile of Parson’s Croft that evening. Does that mean nothing?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘All this will become academic when we find Quinn himself.’

‘You hope,’ said Cooper.

‘What else can we do in the meantime?’ She laughed when she looked at his expression. ‘Unless you have another suspect in mind?’

Cooper flushed a little. ‘I think it’s odd that we have no witnesses who saw Quinn in Aston. He would have been conspicuous.’

‘And you think the fact that no one saw him proves he wasn’t there? You can’t prove a negative, Ben. It was dark when he left — no one would have seen him crossing the fields. Everyone who was outside would have gone indoors. No croquet players, no dog walkers. He planned it carefully. But he had a bit of luck, too. That’s the story, Ben, right?’

‘OK.’

Fry glared at him. ‘I’d ask you what your problem is, but I know already, don’t I?’

Cooper reached for his jacket. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’m going home for a few hours. I think I’ve had enough for now.’

‘Haven’t we all?’

He headed for the door, conscious that Fry was watching him all the way. He was almost out of the office when she called his name, and he stopped.

‘Yes, Diane?’

‘By the way,’ she said, ‘happy birthday.’