One Last Breath

38

Sunday, 18 July

Diane Fry sat back in her chair at West Street, staring at the notes she’d made. It was a pity that they didn’t have Mansell Quinn’s DNA profile. There ought to be something — some identifiable trace of him that would remove the doubts Ben Cooper had raised. They were the sort of baseless doubts that Fry would normally have dismissed as a wild-goose chase. It was Cooper’s kind of obsession, not hers.

Somebody had opened the windows again in the CID room, though Fry had asked them not to. Already this morning she could sense nature sneaking in. Every seeding patch of grass in the Peak District was sending its pollen in her direction right now. Though she’d taken the antihistamine tablets, she could feel the membranes in her nose beginning to swell.

At least authorization had come through for her to get information from Human Resources on PC 4623 Netherton, Arthur. According to his file, he’d received the Chief Constable’s Commendation and a Royal Humane Society Testimonial for rescuing a woman who’d been threatening to jump from a bridge over the River Derwent some years ago. Another hero, then.

But Arthur Netherton had retired from Derbyshire Constabulary in 2000 after thirty years’ service, and had moved to Spain. Death benefits under his pension provision had been paid to his widow three years later. Netherton had died of a heart attack in his mid-fifties. Too much of the good life in too short a time, perhaps? Fry suppressed a surge of jealousy. Too much of the good life? Chance would be a fine thing.

With both of the uniformed heroes gone to the great dress parade in the sky, her options for a first-hand account of events at 82 Pindale Road in October 1990 were limited. Mansell Quinn was unavailable, while Carol Proctor was the most silent witness of all.

And now Rebecca Quinn was dead, too. What might Rebecca have been able to tell her? Anything useful? Well, perhaps Quinn himself had thought so — or somebody had. Whoever stabbed her with the carving knife had made sure she wouldn’t talk.

Fry sighed. She was starting to sound like Ben Cooper. Quinn was guilty, and no one should have any doubts.

So who was left? The Quinns’ neighbours? She pulled out the Hope Valley telephone directory, but found no listing for any Townsends at 84 Pindale Road. She tried calling a couple of possibilities in Bamford and Bradwell, but they were the wrong Townsends and no relation — or not admitting to it. Then she dug out the electoral roll for the Castleton ward. The current residents of 84 Pindale Road were a family by the name of Ho.

Great. So it looked as though the Townsends had left the area, too. The world was full of people trying to put the past behind them. And some of them were doing it more successfully than others.

The gala was over in Hathersage. As Diane Fry drove through the village, workmen were taking down the bunting, and the bus shelter had reverted to its normal boring state.

On the Moorland estate, children were playing on the grass and adults were washing their cars. This time, Fry found herself taking notice of small things here and there — a clown puppet hanging by its strings in an upstairs window, a rabbit with long golden fur in a hutch on a front lawn. There was a ‘Not in my name’ poster in a bedroom window, left over from an Iraqi War protest, while across the street someone had painted a smiley face on their wheelie bin. A lady sat outside at a plastic table reading a newspaper, with a collie dog asleep at her feet.

Enid Quinn had a distracted air today. She had been standing in a corner of her garden, wearing her yellow rubber gloves to dead-head the roses.

‘I know it’s hard having to go over it again and again,’ said Fry. ‘But you must understand how necessary it is.’

Mrs Quinn wouldn’t look at Fry, but watched the children on the grass across the road.

‘Of course it’s necessary,’ she said. ‘I know that. It’s all absolutely bloody necessary.’

Fry watched her carefully from the corner of her eye. The woman’s voice had taken on an unfamiliar edginess that might be the first sign of a crack in her composure. The people who seemed most in control were often the ones who disintegrated in a big way when the stress finally became too much. She didn’t want that to happen to Mrs Quinn.

‘We could go and talk somewhere else, if you like?’ she said. ‘Perhaps we could go in the house and have a cup of tea?’

‘No, this is fine.’

The scent of the roses was too strong for Fry. The smell hung around her like cheap perfume. But it was grass pollen that triggered her hay fever, so she might be OK.

‘The thing is,’ said Fry, ‘we need to go over the past, because it may be the only way of figuring out what’s going through your son’s mind.’

‘If it’s Simon and Andrea you’re interested in, you should be talking to them, not me. I don’t remember anything. I wasn’t there.’

‘I’ve made an appointment to see them later today. But I think there are things you may be able to tell me, even though you weren’t there. Simon and Andrea are your grandchildren, after all.’

Mrs Quinn looked back towards the house with a half-shrug of her shoulders, as if it wasn’t important. Fry frowned at her, trying to divine her thoughts, and failing. She wasn’t a psychologist, she was a police officer. Her own experiences didn’t give her access to the mind of someone like Mrs Quinn.

‘Andrea is all right,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘A bit too serious, and she doesn’t know how to enjoy herself properly. But she’s a sensible enough girl. The most sensible one of the family, probably.’

‘And your grandson?’

The old woman sighed. ‘Simon had a tough time of it. He was already going through a difficult phase when he was fifteen. And when it all happened, he got very mixed up. I think he still is. It was bad enough for a lad of his age when his father was convicted of murder. Simon still admired his father. He had loyalty. But it completely knocked him for six when someone told him — ’

She fastened her gaze on a climbing rose and snipped at one of its flowers angrily, though to Fry it hardly seemed to have begun to wilt.

‘Told him what, Mrs Quinn?’

‘Someone told Simon that Mansell wasn’t really his father.’

Fry raised her eyebrows. ‘Who would do that?’

‘Someone trying to stir up trouble, obviously.’

‘But who? Do you know?’

‘I’m … well, I’m not sure. You know what people are like. They love to be malicious.’

‘And was it true?’

‘It was possible,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘That was the worst thing, I suppose. It was possible.’

It was late afternoon by the time Ben Cooper started the Toyota in the yard at Bridge End Farm. The dogs, recognizing the sound of the engine, ran towards him. But Cooper sat in the car for a few minutes, looking at the farmhouse, the place that was so familiar and yet no longer his home.

In some ways his father still lived here. He still walked in the shadow of the barn, or sat in a quiet corner of the kitchen. Every time Cooper entered the house, he knew he’d be able to smell his father’s presence. No amount of fresh paint and wallpaper could cover up the memories. Joe Cooper’s spirit had seeped into the walls, and it would stay there until the day the farmhouse was demolished.

The dogs barked in a puzzled way for a while, but settled down in a gateway and waited for the car to move. In the cold light of morning, Cooper was sure that his experience in the early hours had been the result of too much alcohol combined with the worries that had been preying on his mind. At the first opportunity, he’d gone to look for footprints in the wet ground by the stream, but had found only his own tracks, crazily wandering and confused. He hoped he was right, because he didn’t know how he could ever tell Matt and Kate that they might be at risk. Nothing that he said would help them to understand.

On the other hand, he would never forgive himself for not warning them, if he turned out to be wrong. 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.

Whatever logic told him, Cooper couldn’t resist the feeling that the poem Josie had found was somehow about his father. Sergeant Joe Cooper had died when his head had been kicked in by drunken thugs in Clappergate while trying to make an arrest without back-up. A cloven sergeant’s face.

At first, Cooper had been puzzled by Mansell Quinn’s conversation with Raymond Proctor at the caravan park on Wednesday night. Quinn had been talking about children, particularly about sons. And Proctor hadn’t been sure whose son he meant.

What if Quinn had been thinking of Sergeant Joe Cooper’s son? What was that line from the Bible? The sins of the fathers. It must be somewhere in the Old Testament, which had a lot about vengeance and blood. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

‘You’re telling me Rebecca Quinn had an affair?’ said Diane Fry. ‘But it must have been some time ago?’

‘Yes. It was before she and Mansell got married — while they were engaged, in fact.’

Enid Quinn put down her secateurs and stripped off the yellow gloves, revealing her thin hands and pale skin like lined parchment. The smell of hand cream mingled with the scent of the roses.

‘It wasn’t a long engagement,’ she said. ‘Mansell was madly in love with her, and he was impatient to get wed. So it was all a bit of a rush, not at all what I would have wanted for him, if I’d had my way. I like things to be done with all due consideration for what’s right and proper. I don’t think either of them had really thought things through. I said so at the time, of course, but he didn’t take any notice. That was Mansell in those days: impetuous.’

‘He seems to have learned better now.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ said Fry. ‘Nothing important. And then a child came along — but that must have been after they were married, surely?’

‘Yes, but not too long after — six months. Mansell had no suspicions. I’d heard the rumours, though, so I wondered about it. For me, there was something about the boy that wasn’t right, and there always has been. Simon never looked like Mansell, you see. Not in any way. But that wasn’t the sort of thing Mansell would notice. And I wasn’t going to be the one to ruin my son’s happiness.’

‘So how did Mansell find out? Did he start to suspect? Did he ask Rebecca?’

‘No. Well, that would have been difficult. If he really was the father, it would have caused problems in the marriage if she knew that he doubted her. And if he wasn’t … would she have told him the truth?’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘He didn’t want to lose Rebecca, you see. That was the last thing Mansell wanted. But still, he needed to know the truth.’

‘So what did he do?’

Mrs Quinn sighed wearily. ‘It doesn’t matter now. It can’t matter, can it? I’m tired of it all. I think you should leave me alone.’

Fry felt a momentary twinge of sympathy for the old woman. Then she heard a lawnmower start up in the neighbour’s garden. Within minutes, the air would be full of spores from freshly cut grass — one of the triggers she’d been warned to avoid. Soon, she’d be feeling like death again. The thought made her unreasonably annoyed.

‘Mrs Quinn,’ she said, ‘you visited your son in prison. In fact, you were the last member of his family to see him, weren’t you? What did you talk about?’

‘I told you, it doesn’t matter any more. Go out with your dogs and helicopters and hunt my son down, if you must. But why do you have to persecute me?’

‘Did Mansell ask you to do something particular for him, Mrs Quinn?’

The old woman waved a hand in front of her face, as if swatting away a wasp.

‘Look, I thought it was wrong,’ she said. ‘He shouldn’t have been digging up the past like that, trying to get dirt on someone who was dead.’

‘Especially someone he’d killed himself, perhaps?’

Mrs Quinn pursed her lips at the comment, and decided to ignore it. ‘I helped him because … well, I thought it would be the last thing I’d do for him. “This one thing and no more,” I said. That’s what I told him. “If I do this for you, Mansell, that’s it. I’m never coming to visit you in here again.”’

‘And he accepted that?’

‘He had no choice, did he?’

‘It must have been something very important to him. He was condemning himself to years in solitary confinement, almost.’

‘Yes, it was very important to him. It had become an obsession. If you’d read the letters he wrote to me, you’d realize that.’

‘Where are those letters, Mrs Quinn?’

‘I burned them.’

Fry sighed. ‘OK. And what exactly was it your son asked you to do for him?’

‘He wanted to have a paternity test done to prove if Simon really was his son. You can get sampling kits, and send them away for testing. Rebecca never knew about it. This was all ten years ago.’

‘Ten years,’ repeated Fry thoughtfully. ‘Just about the time he started to claim that he wasn’t guilty of the murder.’

‘About then.’

Fry knew the type of kit Mrs Quinn was talking about. They contained two sets of buccal swabs for scraping cells from the inside of the cheek — one for the parent and one for the child. It was very simple to do, and perfectly safe. The reports were pretty comprehensive, and conclusive, one way or the other. They gave either a 100 per cent certainty that there wasn’t a paternal relationship, or a 99.5 per cent probability that there was. It was enough to stand up in court, if necessary.

She imagined Quinn in his prison cell, looking at tables of allele numbers, identification markers and chromosome locations. He’d probably had a long wait for the test results. Back then, there had been no UK laboratories doing paternity tests, so the samples would have gone to a lab in the USA or Australia. It would have cost him a few hundred pounds, too.

But then she frowned again. How had he obtained a sample from Simon without Rebecca knowing? True, there were companies who would extract DNA from hair roots, toothbrushes, disposable razors, or dried blood and saliva. But Quinn had no physical access to his son in prison, except at visiting times.

‘Was that why his family stopped visiting him?’ said Fry.

Mrs Quinn just looked at her. Her hair had become disarranged in the breeze on the hillside. Fry remembered something Dawn Cottrill had said about Quinn upsetting his family during visits, trying to grab his son, tugging at his hair until he cried. Hair didn’t contain cells, but its roots did. Had Quinn been trying to get a hair with the root still attached for DNA analysis? But that was too soon, surely?

‘You need to have a DNA sample from both father and son to do a comparison,’ said Fry.

‘Yes, I know that. The kit Mansell had ordered came with things to scrape inside your cheek. They were a bit like Q-Tips, only longer.’

‘Buccal swabs.’

‘If you say so.’

‘But what about Simon?’

‘That was my part in the business.’

‘How?’

‘I stole a comb of Simon’s. His hair was a long, tangled mess in those days, so it wasn’t difficult to get some. It had to have roots on it, Mansell said.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I wasn’t very proud of what I did,’ said Mrs Quinn.

Fry remembered there had been talk of a new law to prevent estranged fathers from secretly taking material from their children for paternity tests. It was claimed that some of them did it to escape responsibility for child-support payments.

But it wasn’t possible to be in intimate contact with a child without taking away a bit of their DNA. It would surely be unfeasible to create a new law that made it an offence to remove a child’s hair from a hairbrush, to take a sticking plaster off a cut finger, or pick up a bit of chewed gum, a used handkerchief, or an old toothbrush. Any one of them could contain DNA.

‘And all to establish whether Simon was his son?’ she said.

The old woman turned away towards the house. Fry tried to manoeuvre to keep eye contact, but the path was too narrow and her sleeve caught on the thorns of the roses, holding her back. Mrs Quinn managed to get a few paces away.

‘Well, that was the idea, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘Mansell wanted to have peace of mind. He said it was the one thing he had a chance of being certain about. But there isn’t really anything you can be certain about in this life, is there? Not in my experience.’

Fry listened carefully to her tone of voice, because she was unable to see Mrs Quinn’s face. She pulled the thorns from her sleeve, feeling a sudden prick on her thumb and seeing a bright spot of blood appear.

‘You asked me a minute ago how Mansell got the idea that Simon might not be his son,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘It was Simon himself who told him, when he visited him in prison. I think it was the last time he saw him, in that prison in Lancashire. After that, it preyed on Mansell’s mind. It still does, I think.’

Fry shivered. She remembered Simon Lowe the first time she’d seen him. His words came back to her: ‘He’s not my father. He was once, but not any more.’ She couldn’t believe that it had taken her all this time to understand. Damn. Why couldn’t people say what they really meant?

‘Mrs Quinn, when we first came here to speak to you, you told us that you believed your son was guilty of Carol Proctor’s murder.’

‘That’s right, I did.’

‘But that wasn’t true, was it?’

‘You mean, you don’t believe I think he was guilty?’

‘No.’

‘You think I was lying?’

‘Were you?’

‘It would be a strange thing for a mother to do. If I were going to lie, wouldn’t it be to stand up for my son, to protect him? Isn’t that what mothers do in your experience, Sergeant?’

‘Of course. There’s only one reason you’d lie about him being guilty.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘If there was somebody else you thought needed protecting even more.’

‘Like who?’

‘In my experience,’ said Fry, ‘grandmothers can get ridiculously protective of their grandchildren. Especially if they get the idea that the parents aren’t doing the job properly.’

‘Grandchildren?’

‘Yes. Grandchildren.’

‘Sergeant, I don’t know what you mean.’

Fry took a deep breath, and immediately regretted it. She could taste the sharp tang of the vaporized sap spraying from the neighbour’s lawnmower. She could feel the grass pollen settling on the back of her throat.

‘I’m suggesting that when he had the DNA tests done, Mansell found out he wasn’t Simon’s father,’ she said. ‘Which meant he’d taken the blame for someone else’s son. Isn’t that right, Mrs Quinn?’

Enid Quinn stared at her for a moment, then began to laugh. Tears welled from her eyes. But Fry was sure she couldn’t have been all that funny.

‘Well, you’ve got that wrong,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘Wrong on both counts.’