One Last Breath

40

There was no bell tolling in Castleton tonight. As darkness came, Ben Cooper had expected to hear it. The memory of its sound came back to him as he crossed the road and followed the riverside walk.

Cooper had visited Castleton twice as a child. Not on a school trip the second time, but with his family. It had been during the evening, and in winter, too — perhaps they’d come to see the Christmas lights, he wasn’t sure. He’d been with his mother and father, and he knew it was winter, because he remembered the bell: a single note repeated over and over. He’d heard it rolling out from behind the buildings as they walked along Cross Street, getting louder as they turned the corner to the church. The bell had a sharp after-note — a bitter, unhappy sound that echoed off the walls of the George and the Castle Hotel, where tables and chairs had stood on deserted patios.

A man in one of the shops had told them it was called the Curfew Bell. It was rung in Castleton every evening during the winter, marking the hour when the villagers should put out their fires and lights for the night. The tradition dated back to a time when people had lived in wooden huts with thatched roofs. Now it served only to recall the past.

But this was July, and the night was quiet as Cooper walked alone by the river under the subdued light of the streetlamps. Yet his father’s presence had been evoked for a moment by his memory of the bell.

He could see into the brightly lit rooms of cottages that lay close to the path, squeezed into the lower end of the gorge. At one point, a black chasm appeared between them. Judging from the noise, much of the water that poured out of the cave system must emerge here. Its roaring rose into the high spaces between the walls, its sound the only thing to fill the dark void except his imagination.

Cooper felt like an intruder as he walked in silence towards Lunnen’s Back. The past still clung to the stones here. It had a powerful grip, which many decades had failed to shift. Some of the houses gave the impression that they hadn’t quite made it into the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. They might have central heating and satellite TV, but these seemed transitory things that hardly touched on their real existence. These houses had been carved out of the sides of the limestone gorge. And as darkness fell, they seemed to be retreating into the hillside, slowly shuffling back into the rock, edging away from the modern world, as if they came out only in the daylight. With each step Cooper took towards the cavern, he felt he was walking into the past.

A few minutes later, Cooper was knocking on Alistair Page’s door but getting no reply. He banged harder. Rock Cottage was such a small house that he ought to be able to hear somebody calling or even moving around inside, but there was nothing.

He peered through the window, feeling like one of those intrusive tourists. There was a light on in the kitchen extension at the back, but he could see no sign of Page. Cooper tried banging on the window, but got no better result.

He pulled out his phone. He didn’t have a mobile number for Alistair Page, but Page had rung him the other day, so his number should still be logged in his last ten calls list. But no — Cooper remembered that Page had rung him at the office, not on his mobile.

Then he noticed an old lady watching him. She had come out of one of the other cottages — perhaps the white one with the black door, or the empty-looking place with crumbling stonework. She was grey-haired and neat, and she reminded him of Enid Quinn in the cemetery at Hope, tending her husband’s grave with her rubber gloves and hearth brush.

‘It’s no use trying to phone young Alistair, if that’s what you’re doing,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘You won’t get through where he is.’

‘Has he gone up to the cavern? Oh, of course, he does a security check, doesn’t he? But he said that was at nine o’clock. He should have been home long since.’

The old lady shook her head. ‘He went off and hasn’t come back, anyway.’

Cooper looked up at the sides of the gorge. He had a sudden image of Mansell Quinn watching him from the edges of the cliff, or from the trees near Peveril Castle, or from the mouth of Peak Cavern itself.

‘Of course. Could I use your phone, please?’

The old lady retreated a few feet. ‘I don’t let anybody into my house. I don’t know who you are.’

‘Very sensible. But I’m a police officer.’

‘Have you got any identification?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Cooper patted his pockets, but it was a warm night and he’d left his jacket in the car, all the way back in the main car park, knowing there was nowhere to leave it in these narrow alleys. ‘Damn. I’m sorry, I haven’t.’

‘We’ve been told to watch out for strange men hanging about here at night,’ said the old lady. ‘There’s a prisoner on the loose, you know. A man who did a murder.’

‘Yes, I know. Look, if I could just use your phone.’

‘Not without showing me your identification. That’s what the policeman said who came to talk to us at the Darby and Joan Club. “Don’t let anybody in without identification,” he said.’

‘It’s very good advice normally.’

‘He gave us some little plastic cards, too. I’ve got one stuck to the inside of my door, so I know what to do, if I forget.’

‘Yes, but — ’

Then Cooper heard a phone ringing in Rock Cottage. He turned towards the sound, listened to it ring four times, then stop, as if an answering machine had cut in.

‘Do you happen to know — ’ he said.

But the old lady had gone. She’d faded silently back into the jumble of stone cottages and left him on his own.

As she walked back into the office at West Street, Diane Fry considered the irony of what Mansell Quinn’s mother had told her. A DNA profile of Quinn had existed after all. Ten years ago, he’d used a buccal swab on himself and had his own sample analysed. But the result of a private DNA test couldn’t be obtained by the police, even if it still existed, which was unlikely.

There were no messages from Ben Cooper at the office. Fry tried his phone again, but still got no signal. If he’d been in one of the Dark Peak’s notorious black spots, he ought to have come out of it by now. Cave, indeed. Cooper was trying to avoid her.

Did that mean he’d got something useful from Alistair Page? If Cooper had gone off on some crusade of his own without telling her, she’d have his guts for garters this time. Enough was enough.

Fry picked up the Carol Proctor file and looked through the list of statements again. There was definitely nothing from anyone called Page. Maybe his parents had had a different name; perhaps, like Rebecca Lowe, his mother had remarried.

Of course, if the Carol Proctor enquiry were taking place now, there’d be a searchable index of houses and their occupants, the kind of index the HOLMES system provided as routine. Every name that cropped up would have been entered, and links established automatically by the computer. There would be indexes, too, for vehicles, street names, telephone numbers. A major enquiry could produce thousands and thousands of entries. On some enquiries, there were so many entries you’d think the SIO was going for the Guinness Book of Records.

But no such luck in this case. It was like delving back into the Stone Age.

Fry hesitated. Perhaps she should get the name checked out by the current HOLMES team anyway, and see if something came up.

She went through the files one last time, flicking through the questionnaires and statements again, looking now not for the name Page, but just for a boy of the right age. There was Simon Quinn, of course — himself now with a new identity. In his case, there had been no real need to change his name except for a desire to put the events at Pindale Road in the past.

Finally, she came to a halt. Apart from Simon, there appeared to have been only one other fifteen-year-old youth in the immediate area. A youth called Alan. He was Raymond and Carol Proctor’s son.

‘My God, why has nobody mentioned him?’

Fry hardly knew where to start. The phone book showed no Alan Proctor anywhere in the Hope Valley; the electoral roll had no one by that name either, and certainly not living at Wingate Lees caravan park with Ray and Connie.

She reached for the phone. She really didn’t want to have to speak to Raymond Proctor right now, but there was no choice. Alan Proctor was what she’d been looking for — a missing piece in the equation.

Then Fry stopped and withdrew her hand. No, he wasn’t missing at all, just there in a different form, a man who had adapted his identity. She was quite certain that Alan Proctor and Alistair Page were one and the same person.

But before she could figure out exactly what that meant, Gavin Murfin stuck his head round the door.

‘Diane, are you coming?’

Fry stared at him. ‘Where?’

‘There’s been an alarm at one of the show caves in Castleton.’

‘Peak Cavern?’

‘No, Speedwell. The troops are all revved up to go. They think it could be Mansell Quinn.’

The lights ended at the last cottage, and the rest of the path was in darkness. As Ben Cooper reached the head of the gorge, with the streaked cliffs towering above him, he couldn’t help tilting his head to look up. A cluster of spindly trees on the edge of the cliff framed one of the brightest stars in the sky.

By the time he stood at the gates of the cavern, he could hear water dripping raggedly on to the roof of the ticket booth inside. The concrete floor was damp where the water gathered and ran away to join the stream further down the gorge.

Cooper felt very small standing at the entrance to the cavern. The outer gates were black wrought iron, topped with spikes. A steel mesh fence on either side was backed with thick rushes and strung with barbed wire, and it ran down into the stream bed to meet the wall of the cliff. Not an easy prospect for climbing over.

The constant chattering of the jackdaws overhead had begun to resemble the cry of seagulls at the seaside. The sound had that same harsh, high-pitched quality.

Cooper jumped as a stone dropped from the cliff and thudded on a wooden table between the ticket booth and the ropemakers’ house. Maybe the stone had been dislodged from a ledge by one of the jackdaws. Perhaps the cliff face was even more dangerous than it looked.

Looking at the black mouth of the cavern, Cooper knew it must have been a perfect place for outlaws. Who would venture into those depths to face them? Who’d want to leave the daylight far behind and pass along the stream bed, feeling that change in the air on the descent into the Devil’s Dining Room? By flickering candlelight, they’d have seen the stalactites like black hooks in the roof of the chamber, and watched shadowy shapes moving in the walls as the River Styx rushed far below.

He shook his head. No one who was superstitious or claustrophobic would dream of entering. But Cock Lorrel and his outlaws had been beyond the normal bounds of society, associated in the imagination with the Devil, and with every evil practice that people could think of — including cannibalism.

That reputation must have been relished by the gypsies and tinkers who’d come to the cavern each year for the Beggars’ Banquet. In fact, they had probably cultivated the myth, knowing it would ensure they’d be left alone.

A deep rumbling he’d been hearing came closer, and Cooper saw lightning over Castleton. He touched the handle of the iron gates. There should have been a chain and padlock, but the gates swung open easily at his touch. He could see several footprints at the top of the first terrace, where water running from the cliff face and splashing off the ticket booth had softened the surface.

‘No way,’ he said. ‘There’s no way I’m going in there again. Not on my own, in the dark.’

He fingered his phone, remembering that he’d have to walk all the back into the village to get a signal, or talk his way into someone’s house.

Cooper was about to turn away from the gates, but stopped. The last shreds of light from the lamps on the path reached a few feet past the ticket booth before being swallowed up in the blackness of the cavern. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could make out the shapes of the abandoned rope-makers’ equipment on the terraces — the sledges and winders, and the jack with its rotating hooks.

And a few yards along the top terrace, he could see a human figure, motionless, slumped over one of the pulley-poles.

He pulled out his torch and shone it on the figure, illuminating a hunched back in a dark jacket, and legs that dragged on the floor at an unnatural angle. It hung on the edge of the darkness that led to the Devil’s Dining Room, and he knew he was looking at no one alive.

Carefully, Cooper moved over the terrace towards it. He touched the shoulder, already feeling a prickle of apprehension from the knowledge that something wasn’t right. His hand rested on the dusty fabric, and sank in. His fingers pushed into the shoulder as if it had been reduced to shreds of straw. The figure sagged and slipped sideways. Dust fell out of its sleeves, and a pale, shapeless face rolled towards him, painted eyes staring past him towards the soot-blackened roof.

Somewhere in the darkness of the cavern, Cooper heard a metallic scrape, the drawing back of a powerful spring.

‘Put down the torch and turn round,’ said a voice. ‘Or you’re as dead as that dummy.’