One Last Breath

‘Are you having trouble with your marriage, by any chance?’

‘Trouble? No, everything’s going according to plan. I’ll be dead in a year or two, and Jean and the kids will get the insurance money. Then everybody will be happy.’

The woman in the red T-shirt straightened up, brushed off her hands and began to walk back through the rows of gravestones. From the front, she looked more her age, which must have been approaching seventy.

‘Who’s going to take the lead?’ said Murfin.

‘I suppose I’d better. She might need to be handled sensitively.’

‘That’s what I thought, too.’

As the woman came nearer, she looked across at the two detectives, probably aware that they’d been watching her. She was only a few paces away, clutching a plastic bag with her gloves and brush in it, when Cooper raised a hand to stop her.

‘Excuse me – Mrs Enid Quinn?’

‘Can I help you?’

Cooper showed his warrant card. ‘Detective Constable Cooper and Detective Constable Murfin, Edendale CID. We really need to talk to you, Mrs Quinn. You haven’t been answering your phone.’

She was a slim woman with pale skin like lined parchment. Liver spots freckled her bare arms and thin hands. She looked up at Cooper with a faint smile, ironic and resigned.

‘Police? Well, I wonder what you could possibly want to talk to me about,’ she said.

Enid Quinn took Ben Cooper and Diane Fry into her sitting room. Inside the house, her red T-shirt made her look even paler. She settled on a sofa and sat very primly, her hands folded on her knees, as she listened to Murfin and the two PCs trampling up her stairs.

‘Do I have to tell you anything?’ she said.

‘We’re hoping for your co-operation, Mrs Quinn,’ said Fry.

The woman looked at Cooper’s notebook. ‘My son isn’t here.’

‘Where is he, then?’

‘I can’t tell you. Sorry.’

‘When you say you can’t tell us … ?’ said Fry.

‘I mean I can’t. I don’t know where Mansell is.’

‘Has he been here?’

Mrs Quinn unfolded her hands and folded them again in the opposite direction. She gazed back at Fry steadily. ‘When?’

‘In the past twenty-four hours, perhaps?’

‘No.’

‘He hasn’t visited you? Or phoned you?’

‘No. I don’t know where he is.’

‘Nevertheless, we hope you might have some suggestions about where he could be heading. What friends does he have in the area? Is there somewhere he might think of going to stay – a place where he’d feel safe?’

‘I don’t think there’s anywhere safe for him,’ said the woman calmly.

Cooper realized that Mrs Quinn had a slight Welsh accent. It wasn’t so much the way she pronounced the words as the intonation, the unfamiliar pattern of emphasis in a sentence.

‘Do you have any other sons or daughters?’ asked Fry.

‘No, Mansell is my only child.’

‘Any other relatives in the area?’

She shook her head. ‘We’re not from Derbyshire originally. Both my family and my husband’s are from Mid Wales.’

‘We know of two friends of your son’s,’ said Fry. ‘Raymond Proctor and William Thorpe.’

‘I’m aware of the names,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘That’s all.’

‘Can you name any other friends of his?’

‘No. I don’t believe he has any remaining friends. Not in this area. I don’t know what acquaintances he might have made in prison, of course.’

Cooper wasn’t writing very much in his notebook. He looked at the old lady with her dyedblonde hair, and thought she seemed out of place. Despite the trellises and patios and dormer windows of the estate outside, Mrs Quinn had a sort of poise that suggested she’d be more at home sitting in a grand drawing room at Chatsworth House or one of the county’s other stately homes.

‘You were visiting your husband’s grave at the church earlier?’ he said.

‘Certainly. He died many years ago.’

‘Before your son went to prison?’

‘Yes, thank God. The trial would have killed him.’

Cooper was so thrown by the unconscious irony that he forgot the next question that he’d been planning to ask. But Fry either didn’t notice or didn’t care about such things, because she stepped in with exactly the right question, as if they’d been thinking along the same lines for once.

‘Did you visit your son in prison very often, Mrs Quinn?’

The hands moved again. They stayed unfolded this time, and instead tugged at the hem of her T-shirt. Her neck was slightly red from her exposure to the sun on the hill above the village.

‘He got them to send me a visiting order sometimes,’ she said. ‘I didn’t always use it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’

‘And what about his wife?’ asked Fry.

‘Rebecca? What about her?’