Stephen Booth - One Last Breath

‘… but there’s no way we can get rid of them altogether.’

The search didn’t reach the end of the dale until early evening. The co-ordinator called a halt where the trees petered out and the limestone sides gave way to a patchwork of fields crisscrossed by stone walls.

‘He’s not here. Not any more, anyway.’

Kessen and Hitchens gathered around him for a hasty conference. Two officers carried over a pile of bin liners filled with evidence bags.

‘I don’t want to see all that,’ said Kessen. ‘What have we got that’s of any significance?’

‘Someone camped out in one of the caves recently. About halfway along the valley on the south side. You can’t see it until you get right up to it. It isn’t big, but it’s dry, and there’s a sort of ledge at the back where you can lie up and be out of the weather, as well as out of sight.’

‘What traces are there?’

‘A couple of the SOCOs are going over it now. I’d say they’ll get no more than some wax and ashes, and a few scuff marks in the dirt on the cave floor.’

‘Nothing we can get a DNA sample from?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘He must have defecated and urinated somewhere.’

The search co-ordinator shrugged. ‘This man is very careful. There’s no sign of anything in the vicinity of the cave. My guess is he’ll have gone deep into the woods somewhere, a different location each time, and concealed the traces in a scrape in the ground. We’d never find anything like that.’

‘Here’s the helicopter at last,’ said Hitchens.

‘Much good it’ll do.’

In the briefing room, Ben Cooper could see that DCI Kessen and DI Hitchens were frustrated at Mansell Quinn’s ability to move freely around the Hope Valley. The tone of the newspaper and radio reports was reflecting the public’s incredulity. An incredulity echoed by senior officers in Ripley.

‘He’s too unpredictable,’ said Hitchens. ‘One minute he’s living rough in some remote bit of woodland, and the next he’s mingling brazenly with the crowds in the middle of Castleton. It makes us look like complete prats.’

‘I’m not happy about these CCTV pictures,’ said Kessen. ‘It looks as though he’s taunting us. He’s constantly one step ahead, and he knows it.’

Cooper studied the photo of Mansell Quinn taken from the camera at the gift shop. To him, Quinn didn’t seem to be laughing at all.

‘And the weather is too good,’ said Hitchens. ‘What we need is rain. The heavier the better.’

The DI was right there. If the weather stayed the same, there would be chaos on Sunday. Traffic would be gridlocked in Castleton, just as it would in Dovedale and at Matlock Bath. On summer weekends and bank holidays, visitors would queue in their cars for hours to get to the honeypots and mingle with crowds of other tourists, until they were so thick on the ground no one could move for ice-cream cones and frisbees.

Castleton would be busy every day now for the rest of the summer. It boasted five of the Peak District’s ten most popular attractions, and the show caves alone brought in thousands of people every weekend. But the tea rooms and gift shops would soon empty if the tourists became aware of a multiple killer at large in the area. What if a tourist got killed? Or a child? It would be a disaster for the tourism trade — worse even than the foot and mouth outbreak.

Watching his senior officers fretting, Cooper shook his head. Surely the chiefs were worrying more than necessary? It was obvious that Quinn had specific targets in mind, and he wasn’t about to start attacking strangers. And this man was no predatory paedophile or child killer. He could have no possible reason to harm a child.

35

Mansell Quinn’s hands trembled slightly as he ran the sights of the crossbow back across the same stretch of undergrowth, looking for the movement. He focused on the base of a tree and gripped the shaft in his other hand. Despite its lightness, he knew it had the power to bring down an animal the size of a deer, if necessary. It was silent and deadly, too. He could even retrieve the bolt from the body with his knife, and no one need ever know how his quarry had died.

Despite the trembling, his motions were slow and steady. He made another sweep across the ground. There was the movement again. Now it had come into the open, and he could see what it was. A little girl was running down the slope. She was no more than eight years old, wearing a bright blue dress, with brown hair tied into bunches and her feet shoved into over-sized trainers. Her face was screwed up in concentration as she ran. Quinn noted every detail — her thin white legs, a scab on her left knee, an imitation gold bracelet around one wrist.

Of course, her mother wouldn’t be far away — she’d be among the other adults and children enjoying the sunshine. But this child was independent. She’d decided to go exploring on her own, tempted away from the safety of the adults by a glint of water through the trees, or just an urge to run down the slope in the sun. Quinn liked independence. He thought it was one of his own best characteristics.

Quinn tried to imagine what people would be saying about him now. They’d be judging him, and he couldn’t stand the thought of that. Everyone had always judged him when he was inside. Prisoners were each other’s jailers, in a way. If you weren’t guilty when you went in, you soon convinced yourself you were. It was too easy to turn that anger on to yourself.

He was glad to have got the chance to wash in the stream. Sometimes, he thought he’d never get the smell of prison off his skin — that stale stink of a place filled with too many bodies, where fresh air never blew. Now and then, he’d taken the chance to inch a bit closer to a prison visitor, to see if he could detect the smell of someone who’d stroked their pet dog, or walked in their garden that morning, or touched a child. The tiniest whiff of a remembered smell could bring the outside world back. It kept the connection from breaking entirely.

The girl stopped at the bottom of the slope, poised on the edge of the water. She looked up at the hillside, staring directly at where Quinn was positioned. He held his breath and didn’t move; there was no way she could see him. Her child’s eyes weren’t good enough to pick him out, and she couldn’t yet have learned to recognize danger so easily.

Then, inexplicably, the girl smiled. Quinn’s heart gave a lurch. She must have been smiling at a particularly pleasing pattern of trees, or a bird glimpsed in the branches above him. After a moment, she lost interest in whatever it was and began to poke around among the small stones at the edge of the stream. He could see her white trainers beginning to turn darker at the edges as the water soaked into them. When her mother found her, the girl would be in trouble for getting her feet wet.

Quinn lowered the crossbow for a moment. Where was her mother? The girl shouldn’t have been allowed to wander off alone like that. It was dangerous.

The girl suddenly broke into a run. Quinn watched her trot along the slope, her arms waving to keep her balance, and her blue skirt blowing in the breeze. The girl’s bare legs were white and streaked with dirt, and she stumbled as she dodged the bigger stones. She was moving fast now and changing direction, heading diagonally across in front of him. In another thirty seconds she would reach the flat area of grass and be into the trees, and then he’d no longer be able to see her clearly.

Quinn squinted against the low sun, focusing on the blue skirt, assessing the trajectory of the bright scrap of colour as it travelled across his range of vision. Slowly, he lifted the crossbow back to his shoulder, and slid a bolt into place.