One Last Breath

36

Isabel Cooper was waiting in the lounge of the Old School nursing home, wearing her best coat and her best shoes, and looking expectant. Somebody had joked with her that she must be going to a wedding, and now she wasn’t quite sure whether she ought to be wearing a hat.

The staff of the nursing home knew Ben. He visited regularly, and more than one care assistant had been ticked off for spending too much time talking to him. And today Cooper’s mother recognized him, too. She got up to greet him, and he bent to give her a hug and a kiss.

‘I need to find a hat before we go,’ she said.

‘No, Mum, you’ll be fine as you are.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘We’re only going to Bridge End.’

She didn’t answer, and he knew she’d noticed the careful way he referred to the farm. It was awkward trying not to say ‘home’. He would always think of it as her home, and he was sure that she must, too. But the family had an unspoken agreement that it was a word they should avoid saying out loud.

She brightened up when they got into the car and drove out of Edendale. After they passed through a shower, the evening sun broke through again and lit up the fields and wet trees, revealing fresh colours in the landscape. In town, Cooper quite liked the odour of hot pavements dampened by rain. But on some days, after it had rained, parts of the valley would steam like a tropical swamp as water vapour rose through the trees.

‘I’ve got you a present, Ben,’ said his mother. ‘It’s your birthday.’

‘Yes, I know. Thank you, Mum.’

He was aware of her opening her handbag and rummaging among the tissues and spare glasses, Polo mints, family photographs, and whatever else she kept in there.

‘I think we’ll have to go back,’ she said. ‘I’ve forgotten to bring it.’

‘No, you haven’t, Mum. It’s at the farm. Matt and Kate have got it. You can give it to me when we arrive.’

‘Oh, yes. I remember.’

Kate was very good at organizing these things. She planned ahead so that they could anticipate what Mum might do and make things easier. Most things were accepted without question, or any need for lengthy explanations. His mother knew that she forgot things a lot.

‘Your Dad and I can give it you together,’ she said.

Cooper’s heart sank. ‘What, Mum?’

‘It’ll be nice to see Joe. He hasn’t managed to visit me this week. I suppose he’s too busy.’

He didn’t answer. A moment later, she began to hum quietly to herself. She was happy as they passed familiar landscapes — the houses of friends she remembered, the old cottage hospital where she’d worked for a while, the stone bridge over the river where Joe had once scraped the side of the car against the parapet and she hadn’t been able to open the door to get out.

And then something brought out another memory. Cooper had no idea what it was — a glimpse of a particular hill, or the look of someone’s face in a car going the other way, or maybe just something floating to the surface of his mother’s mind, like a rotting leaf disturbed from the mud on the bottom of a stagnant pond.

‘I heard that Mansell Quinn is out,’ she said.

Cooper almost lost control of the car and steered into a field full of Friesians. They’d have got as big as a shock as he’d just had.

‘What?’

‘Mansell Quinn. Do you remember, Ben?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do, Mum.’

Isabel frowned. ‘You must have been quite young at the time. We tried to keep it from you.’

‘You didn’t keep as much from me as you thought.’

‘Oh.’

Cooper hesitated, but couldn’t resist asking the question. ‘How did you know he was out?’

‘Somebody at the Old School mentioned it.’

‘Do you remember the case? I mean, the murder?’

‘Murder?’

‘Mansell Quinn killed a woman. Do you remember, at the time, did Dad …?’

Cooper turned to look at his mother as he spoke, and saw a look of terrible anguish on her face. He could have been looking at a child facing some unseen terror in the darkness.

‘Ben,’ she said, ‘your dad’s dead.’

Ashamed, he faced towards the road again and took the next bend a little too fast, forgetting to brake, or not bothering.

‘Yes, Mum,’ he said. ‘I know.’

Two minutes later, Cooper swung the car up the hill towards Bridge End Farm. On the upper slopes, the leaves of the limes and sycamores shone almost yellow against the background of dark clouds still shouldering their way across the moors. He thought it would probably rain again later.

When they arrived in the farmhouse, Cooper was immediately surrounded by a scrum of family. There seemed to be more of them than he remembered. His sister Claire was there with a new boyfriend who said he was a doctor but looked more like a car salesman. Uncle John and Aunt Margaret were there with a whole gaggle of cousins. And of course there were Matt and Kate, and Kate’s parents. But it was his nieces, Josie and Amy, who insisted on crowding in first to deliver their presents.

When Cooper had made all the right noises and a birthday cake had been cut, the fuss finally died down and he found himself sitting among a pile of wrapping paper and cards with a glass of beer in his hand. One of those momentary quiet spells had descended, allowing him a second or two to think. But Cooper looked up and found Josie standing at his elbow, waiting patiently for him to notice her.

‘Uncle Ben, I’ve got the poem,’ she said.

‘What poem, Josie?’

‘The one the man was talking about at Peak Cavern. It’s by Ben Jonson.’

Cooper smiled when he heard Josie call the place ‘Peak Cavern’, hoping that he would notice she’d used the polite name. Her sister Amy took pleasure in saying ‘the Devil’s Arse’, for the opposite reason. Or perhaps it was for the same reason — to get his attention.

‘What was the poem called again?’

‘Well, the man said it was The Gypsies Metamorphosed, but that’s the name of a book, not the poem. Anyway, the poem’s called “Cock Lorrel”. Do you want to read it?’

‘Er …’ Cooper looked at the book Josie was holding, and then at her face. ‘OK. Thank you.’

He took it and read the first verse of the poem aloud: ‘Cock Lorrel would needs have the Devil his guest, And bade him once into the Peak to dinner, Where never the fiend had such a feast Provided him yet at the charge of a sinner.’

He began to read the second verse, then paused. ‘Did you read this, Josie?’

‘Yes. It’s a bit gruesome, I think.’

‘Yes, it is a bit.’

Silently, Cooper scanned the rest of the poem. It seemed to be a catalogue of the dishes enjoyed by Cock Lorrel and the Devil during one of the notorious cannibalistic feasts in the cavern — the Beggars’ Banquets. There was: ‘A rich, fat usurer stewed in his marrow,/ And by him a lawyer’s head and green sauce’ and ‘Six pickled tailors sliced and cut,/Sempsters and tirewomen, fit for his palate.’

‘What are tirewomen?’ said Josie, effortlessly following his progress through the poem.

‘I don’t know. You’ll have to look it up.’

Then Cooper wondered whether that was the right thing to have said. For all he knew, tirewomen could be some kind of prostitute. Matt would be thrilled if he thought his brother was encouraging his daughters to do that sort of research.

But the passage that made Cooper stop was roughly halfway through the poem. Ben Jonson had really managed to hit a nerve with this one: Then carbonadoed and cooked with pains, Was brought up a cloven sergeant’s face: The sauce was made of his yeoman’s brains, That had been beaten out with his mace.

With an effort to appear calm, Cooper handed the book back to his niece. He smiled, knowing as he did it that she’d be able to read every emotion on his face.

‘You did a great job finding the poem, Josie,’ he said. ‘A really great job.’

At West Street that night, Diane Fry was working late. A shift had gone off duty, and another had come on without her noticing. The noise and chaos of changeover would normally have irritated her, but tonight it passed her by. She was sitting at a desk in the CID room with a pile of papers on either side of her, turning over pages with one hand and making notes with the other. Occasionally, Fry looked up, slightly disorientated. Nobody who came into the room even tried to speak to her, though they looked at her curiously. The expression on her face was enough to deter them from asking her why she was sitting not at her own desk, but at Ben Cooper’s.

If anyone had dared to ask, Fry would probably have said that she was reading the documents from the Carol Proctor case because she had nothing better to do. Earlier, Angie had surprised her by phoning her at the office.

‘Hi, are you busy?’ she’d said.

‘I’m always busy.’

‘Right. You never stop trying to climb that slippery ladder, do you, Sis?’

‘What do you want?’ said Fry. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No. It’s just that I didn’t see you this morning before you went out. How did you get on with nice Constable Cooper last night?’

‘Angie, I haven’t time for this — ’

‘OK, OK.’ Angie’s tone had changed. ‘I want to let you know I’ll be out tonight. Just in case you start getting worried about me.’

‘Where are you going?’ said Fry, conscious that she was sounding like a fussy parent again.

‘I’ve got people to see, that’s all. I do have a life of my own, Diane. It went on without you for fifteen years, and it doesn’t just stop.’

Fry hadn’t pressed her any further, though she knew she’d spend the night worrying. She wanted to ask Angie what time she’d be home, but she managed to hold back the words.

So tonight, Fry needed something else to think about, to take her mind off her sister. The hay fever was making her feel rough enough without the extra stress. The trouble was, the material that she was reading on the Carol Proctor case wasn’t making her any happier.

Mansell Quinn smiled. He released the pressure on the trigger and swung the sights of the crossbow past the running girl and back to the windows of the house. The more he handled the weapon, the more confident he felt with it. The perfect balance and the feel of its stock in his hands helped to counter the pain in his side.

Quinn slid his hand inside his shirt to check the bleeding. Will Thorpe had taken a three-inch gouge out of his skin with the bolt he’d fired in the field barn. It hadn’t been too bad a shot — not in the dark, at a moving target, with no time to aim properly. Quinn knew he was lucky to be alive.

He looked for movement in the downstairs windows one by one, then raised the sights of the crossbow to the first floor, watching the play of light and shadow carefully as the evening light faded. He shifted slightly on the grass, conscious of several small stones lying against his ribs. The movement sent a stab of pain through his side that made him wince and catch his breath.

The wound would slow him down, of course, and that might have been a problem when he was going to be faced with someone much younger than himself. But now he had the crossbow it wouldn’t matter so much. If he’d wanted to, he could have killed the girl. If he’d missed the first time, he could have fired two or three bolts into her, and no one would have known where they came from.

He froze for a moment, focusing all his attention on one of the windows. But the movement he could see was only the lengthening shadows of the trees on the opposite hill, outlined by the low sun.

Quinn let out his breath. Of all the things he’d worried about until now, he had never doubted that he would recognize the moment when it came, and recognize the man. Despite the difference in age, he would know him. Like father, like son. Wasn’t that what they said?

Shortly after one o’clock in the morning, Ben Cooper decided he needed some fresh air. The party was still going strong, though only members of his family were left, his friends and Matt’s in-laws having sensibly set off for the drive home.

The serious drinkers had moved into the kitchen among the rows of empty bottles and stacks of washing up that would be left for the morning. The conversation had drifted into unlikely areas. Matt was trying to get everyone to recite their favourite funny lines from TV comedy shows, while Uncle John had startled a few people with his imaginative solutions to the country’s asylum problem.

Meanwhile, those who were up past their bedtime and were beginning to flag had propped themselves up in the sitting room with a jug of coffee and the remains of the birthday cake, and were watching an old Star Wars video. The girls had been watching it the day before, and they’d left it in the video player. It hadn’t occurred to anyone to change it for something quieter, and now the older members of the family were having difficulty nodding off because the sound effects were so loud. His mother had long since been helped to bed and was sleeping in her old room.

Nobody noticed when Cooper slipped away to stand in the back garden, where he could look up at the trees on the hillside and see the stars. It was a bit cooler out here. He’d started off the evening drinking beer — mostly Budweiser and Grolsch, and some obscure Continental brands that Matt had bought in. Later, he’d found himself switching to white wine, simply because it was there. That had probably been a mistake. He didn’t feel drunk, just sort of fuzzy and detached from reality.

Of course, someone had asked about Mansell Quinn. None of the family had lived in Castleton, but everyone seemed to have friends who did. It was Uncle John who couldn’t believe that Quinn had been let out of prison.

‘Life?’ he said. ‘Thirteen years isn’t life. I’ve had dogs that lived twice as long as that.’

And that had started Matt off. He had a regular grumble about prisons, which he said were subsidized competition for dairy farmers. Prison farms produced twenty million pints of milk each year, not to mention goal nets for most of the English league football clubs.

‘And taxpayers like me shell out twenty-five thousand pounds a year to keep a prisoner inside doing that work,’ he said. ‘I’m paying to put myself out of business. Make sense of that, if you can.’

When the rain began to fall again, Cooper was surprised how good it felt. For a while, the splashes dried on the ground as soon as they’d fallen. And then the rhythm increased, and soon the drops were hissing through the trees and into the grass. Cooper held out his hands and let the rain gather in his palms, the way he’d done as a child.

Somehow, he seemed to have taken a long time to get to the age of thirty. The years since he was eighteen had lasted forever. The death of his father had begun to feel as though it had happened in an entirely different existence, from which he was only now emerging, like a man staggering from the water after a cross-Channel swim. The trouble was, he wasn’t quite sure whether this was a good or bad thing, whether he wanted to leave the old life behind or needed to hang on to it for safety.

Cooper walked along the side wall of the yard, where he knew he’d be out of range of the movement sensors that set off the security lights. Matt had installed the lights a few years ago after a spate of thefts from equipment sheds in the area. He’d lost a generator one night, and that had been the last straw. But the sensors couldn’t cover every corner, so they were directed on the main approaches and weren’t designed to catch people slipping away between the jumble of buildings, as Cooper was now.

He passed the end of the tractor shed and found himself among the old byres and pig sties. They stood unused now, rotting away quietly until Matt decided he needed the space for a new milking parlour or silage clamp. Cooper liked the smells down here — the scent of moss-grown stone and ancient wooden beams, and the ingrained odours of the animals that had lived and breathed in these buildings for generations. They were the smells of his childhood; he’d spent much of his spare time here, trying to help out, or simply hanging about and getting in the way, observing everything.

Cooper wished that Mansell Quinn hadn’t been mentioned, not tonight. And not here at the farm. On the face of it, his fear made no more sense than Alistair Page’s nervousness earlier that day. But he thought that unlike Page he might have good reason to be afraid — the history that existed between Quinn and Sergeant Joe Cooper might have been enough to set Quinn on his trail.

But Joe Cooper had two sons. Of course, Matt ought to be told about the situation, but Cooper didn’t know how he could broach the subject. There was no way he could tell Matt there might be a risk without explaining the reason. His own memory of his father might be tarnished, but spreading the contagion to the rest of the family was a different matter. He owed his father something, at least. And all Joe Cooper had left now was his reputation.

Cooper’s head turned sharply. A security light on the garage door had come on. It bathed the gate and the top end of the driveway in light. Cooper watched for a moment, expecting to see a cat that had set off the movement sensor. But nothing moved in the area picked out by the light. Beyond the light, the lower part of the drive now looked like a black hole into which anything could vanish, or from where anything could appear. The rain continued to hiss all around him. A tapping had started somewhere — a drip of water from a blocked gutter, or the overflow from a water butt falling on a metal drain cover. The steady tap-tap-tap sounded like someone drumming their fingers with increasing impatience.

He waited a few minutes, and the light went off. He blinked to readjust his eyes to the darkness. Behind the stone buildings was the stream. Cooper could hear it rushing over the stones, more noisily than usual because of the amount of rain that had fallen. And beyond the stream, the trees climbed up the hillside in dense, black clumps.

A public footpath ran through the fields here, and the sheep were used to people. They didn’t move or bleat as walkers passed, especially in the dark. Most of them didn’t even stop cudding.

When he looked across the stream, Cooper felt disorientated by the utter darkness, and he swayed a little, reminded of how much he’d had to drink. He had felt fine when he first got out into the fresh air, but he certainly couldn’t describe himself as sober, and suddenly the effects of the beer and wine seemed to be catching up with him.

‘Oh dear, that doesn’t feel too good,’ he said, feeling his stomach lurch as if someone had punched him in the gut.

And then, across the stream, he thought he saw a movement. He realized straight away that he was imagining things. He shook his head, but that only made him feel worse. Peering into the trees, he found his eyes drifting out of focus and had to concentrate to get them back into position. Ahead, where a rock formed an elbow in the bank of the stream and the water foamed as it flowed round it — was something there? In the blackness he thought he saw a darker glistening, the uncertain outline of a shape formed by water swirling in different directions. Droplets of rain gathered and trickled sideways, while others lay glittering in random patterns on horizontal surfaces before running downwards again. In the centre of the outline was a void, where no rain touched.

Cooper took a step forward towards the stream, but stopped when he heard brambles crackle under his feet. He squinted into the trees, now no longer sure if he’d seen anything, or whether he was simply imagining the way a scatter of raindrops passed in and out of the light, etching a silhouette in the darkness.

He pictured a black hood and a pair of shoulders streaming with rain, and the vague features of a human face, with eyes set too deep in shadow to be visible. It was a figure that had been moving through his mind all week, as if a ghost had been following him.

And then even the suggestion of a shape was gone. Cooper narrowed his eyes to peer into the darkness again, but could no longer make out a thing. He hadn’t seen any movement, or even heard a noise. There had been no footsteps, no crackling underfoot, no rustling of clothes. It had been nothing more than an illusion created by the rain and his imagination.

Cooper realized his head was spinning. The buildings and trees swayed around him, and he had to sit down suddenly to avoid falling over. He put his hands to his head and groaned. Then he rolled over on to his stomach and was sick into the stream.

Now Cooper was oblivious to everything around him. He wouldn’t have noticed anyone, not even if they’d been moving towards him from the trees and across the footbridge, moving slowly and deliberately, dripping water from a black hood in which he couldn’t see a face.