Stephen Booth - One Last Breath

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.