Stephen Booth - One Last Breath

‘We need someone who can tell us, don’t we?’

‘We’ve already got someone,’ said Fry. ‘Oh, damn.’ She poked at the buttons on her mobile.

‘What’s up?’

‘Ben Cooper never phoned. He was supposed to talk to an old schoolfriend of Simon’s, some bloke called Alistair Page. But there are no messages from him.’ She dialled Cooper’s number, and cursed. ‘And now he’s switched his mobile off. There’s no signal.’

Murfin laughed. ‘You know our Ben,’ he said. ‘He’s probably in a cave again.’

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 .