Stephen Booth - One Last Breath

‘He’d been drinking heavily for a while by then. And he was desperate to stop Rebecca telling Quinn the truth.’

‘But the boot impressions, Ben — they matched the prints at the field barn where Will Thorpe was killed. Quinn was definitely at Parson’s Croft that night. You can’t escape that fact.’

‘Yes, he was there all right. It’s ironic, but by the time Proctor saw him in the pub he’d already been to Parson’s Croft. And Rebecca was still very much alive when he left. I’m sure he just stood at the bottom of the garden and never even approached the house, let alone went in.’

‘But why?’

Cooper remembered the images of Quinn captured on the security cameras at Hathersage and Castleton. His expression had been difficult to read at the time, but it came back to Cooper now.

‘I think he was frightened,’ he said. ‘His courage failed him. I think he couldn’t face Rebecca after all that time.’

‘He couldn’t face her sober, you mean?’

‘Maybe.’

‘So Rebecca was alive, you think?’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘If his courage hadn’t failed him at that moment, Mansell Quinn might have saved her life.’

Fry was silent for a moment. ‘It remains to be seen how co-operative Raymond Proctor will be. Without his prints on the back-door key for Parson’s Croft, we’d have had no evidence to justify the search. We knew Rebecca Lowe made a phone call to Proctor that day, but so what? They’d known each other for years. OK, so Proctor was drinking at the Cheshire Cheese that night, where he might or might not have seen Mansell Quinn, and he might or might not have left the pub when he did. Again, so what? Why shouldn’t he get out of the way rather than risk a confrontation? We have no witnesses to say Proctor went to Parson’s Croft, no one who saw his vehicle on the farm track, and no tyre impressions. There was no DNA at the scene, nothing. If Proctor had used a bit of logic and kept the key, or just wiped it, or worn gloves, he’d still have been waiting for the right moment to dispose of the knife.’

‘Logic doesn’t necessarily work at a time like that, does it?’

More members of the team were arriving back in the office now. Their voices could be heard in the corridor, loud and excited. Downstairs, Ray Proctor had been processed, booked in and allocated his cell. Cooper wondered whether he’d be sent to Gartree to start his sentence. And whether, in fourteen years’ time, he’d find himself walking out of the gates of HMP Sudbury, abandoned by his family and about to slip through the cracks in the system.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Fry. ‘Proctor must have been really worried about Will Thorpe. Full marks to your persuasive powers for getting him to take Thorpe back again, Ben.’

‘Proctor made sure he didn’t stay, though.’

‘And Quinn finally sorted the problem out for him.’

‘I suppose we still haven’t located Quinn?’ said Cooper.

‘No. But he’ll turn up somewhere. Not even Mansell Quinn can slip through the cracks completely.’

Gavin Murfin came in, smiling and sweating. ‘Hey, Ben,’ he said, ‘We don’t need to do a DNA test on you. Did I ever say that?’

‘Yes, you did say that, Gavin.’

‘I know, but it’s amazing. Did you check to see whether your Dad ever pulled Alan Proctor?’

‘No. But Dad would have given any fifteen-year-old boy a second chance,’ said Cooper. ‘He always did with youngsters.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard that, too,’ said Fry.

She’d perched on her desk as the room filled up, looking relaxed and enjoying the atmosphere. Or at least, that’s what Cooper thought she was doing.

‘I heard he preferred to take the initiative into his own hands and just give them a ticking off, or a bit of friendly advice,’ she said. ‘Like Gavin says, a real old-style copper. You wouldn’t get away with it these days. Not for a minute.’

Cooper turned to face Fry. He managed to hold her gaze for once, despite the fact that he knew she could see straight through him.

‘Everyone deserves a second chance,’ he said.

‘Not quite everyone, Ben.’

He wasn’t sure who she was referring to. Who didn’t get a second chance? Mansell Quinn or Alan Proctor? Or was she referring to him ? Or even to herself?

It reminded Cooper that he’d come nowhere near to understanding Diane Fry the way she seemed to understand him. At times, he felt as though he was getting closer to an insight into her mind, but she always drifted away again, like something too fragile to be grasped in the hand.

He couldn’t remember which of the Castleton show caves contained a well-known calcite formation — a stalactite and stalagmite that had grown towards each other until they were only four centimetres apart. Just four centimetres away from touching, and merging together. But geologists had calculated that it would take at least another thousand years before they finally met, if ever.

Cooper cast around for something to say that would take her mind off the subject, something that might restore the personal understanding they came so close to now and then.

‘How is Angie, by the way?’ he said.

Fry slid off her desk. She came towards him slowly and leaned her face towards his, touching her hand lightly on the sleeve of his shirt, where it lay like a branding iron against his skin.

‘Ben, did you happen to get any additional information out of Mansell Quinn, anything that would help us to clear his name and prove that it was Alan Proctor who killed Carol?’

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘I didn’t.’

She stared at him, and Cooper still couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

‘OK.’

Of course, the one mind that Cooper had no trouble understanding was his father’s. He and Joe Cooper were very much alike, as everyone pointed out. They both believed in a second chance. For Mansell Quinn and Alan Proctor, it was too late. But had Sergeant Joe Cooper attempted to conceal the presence of a fifteen-year-old boy at a murder scene? It seemed possible that someone had stopped the music, turned off the upstairs light and wiped the Coke bottle. Had those efforts been in vain? Cooper hoped not. And he didn’t know if he’d undo what his father had done fourteen years earlier, even if he could.

He felt a sudden chill run up his spine and along the back of his neck, as if someone had opened a fridge door behind him, and he turned to the window. It was open, but the air coming in was no icy draught. What he’d felt was a gust of air from a world where it was much colder than a humid summer in Edendale.

The window looked down on to the car park, and Cooper saw Simon Lowe walking to his car. He must have completed his formal statement, and had probably been kept waiting around for a while. Andrea was waiting in the car, and she got out of the passenger seat to meet him as soon as he appeared. There was another woman sitting in the back of the car, somebody Cooper didn’t recognize. The fiancée, Jackie, perhaps? They had a wedding planned for next April, and an awful lot of work to do on their new house if they were going to start a family.

‘Diane,’ said Cooper, ‘did you ever track down the teacher who caught Simon Lowe bunking off school and made him go back in?’

‘No,’ said Fry vaguely. ‘He gave me the man’s name, but it turned out he retired years ago, and has since died of a heart attack. Funny — it reminded me of your father’s partner, PC Netherton. Why?’

‘Oh, nothing. It was just the last loose end, really.’

‘It’s good to clear up loose ends. But you were wrong about one thing, weren’t you, Ben?’

‘What’s that?’

‘None of it had anything to do with your father. So that’s one problem out of the way.’