One Last Breath

‘Just checking the old ’vans,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘In case we need them.’

‘Ray, take a look around you – half the site is empty.’

‘You never know.’

Connie stared at him in open disbelief. ‘Really.’

‘I’m making sure everything is OK down here, that’s all. We mustn’t let them get too neglected.’

She looked at the mould and streaks of dirt on the nearest caravan. ‘Neglected? You should have got rid of them years ago. If you want something useful to do, there’s still that leak in cabin six that needs fixing.’

‘I know, I know. I’ll see to it in a minute.’

But Connie stood watching him until he sighed, moved away, and went back through the trees. She would have put her hands on her hips like an old schoolmistress – if she had any hips.

A cement train ran southwards across the bridge, with a long line of Blue Circle tankers coming away full from the Hope works. As they rattled over the stone arch, their wheels rumbled like approaching thunder. The sound went on for so long that Raymond Proctor found it hard to resist breaking into a run.

Down at the cement works, Will Thorpe had watched the line of tankers leave. Now, an excavator was trundling along the skyline, a black outline against the afternoon sun as it worked its way along the edge of the quarry. Beneath Thorpe’s feet, dead bracken branches snapped, releasing puffs of cement dust. Decaying leaves still lay on the ground from the previous autumn, but now they were white, as if they’d been covered in frost.

Thorpe licked his lips. They were dry and cracked from the sun and dust. He knew he should stay away from the Hope works. His lungs hurt badly enough without the abrasive powder that hung in the air. But at night, it was irresistible. Here, the night-time world was a window on to another reality. The works was lit up like a city in a science fiction film, full of glittering towers and glaring lights, with drifting spurts of steam and mysterious rumbles and screeches from hidden machinery.

When he spread his hand flat against the ground, Thorpe could feel the vibration that went with the noise. It reminded him of the movement of a column of armoured vehicles on a desert road, their steel tracks grinding the surface into dust, and their gun barrels swollen and heavy, like ripe fruit. The recollection was so clear that he could almost taste the sand in his mouth and feel the sun on his neck below the band of his beret.

Thorpe would have liked to be able to step into another reality. If ever it was possible, it ought to be possible now. He’d checked the date when he was in Castleton earlier in the day, and he knew it was 12 July. Somehow, he’d convinced himself that the day would never arrive, but here it was.

Will Thorpe had seen enough death to believe that he could sense it in the air when it was coming. Not slow, drawn-out death, drugged against the pain and hooked up to drips in a hospital bed. But sudden, violent death that fell out of the sky or burst from the ground, killing in an explosion of blood. The sort of death that he’d prefer for himself, given the choice.

Thorpe closed his eyes against the pain in his chest, against the sights that he saw in the deep shadows among the trees and the tumbled rocks on the slopes of the quarry.

‘Oh shit, oh shit,’ he said.

He wished he could spit out the permanent bitter taste at the back of his mouth as easily as he could spit out the cement dust. But the taste of violence had soaked into his glands, and now it seeped into his mouth with every trickle of saliva.

Thorpe’s hands were trembling. He knew the trembling was caused by hunger, not fear. In fact, he had never been afraid, not even in the worst times, when his mates had been blasted to bits alongside him, when the blood had splattered his face mask so thickly that he could no longer see the enemy. He knew that other men were afraid when they went into action, but somehow it had never bothered him, the knowledge that he might die at any moment. In fact, he wasn’t afraid of death at all. It was living that caused him pain.

Thorpe smiled, feeling several days’ stubble move on his face. You learned to develop the right instincts, because they might be all that kept your mates and yourself alive. Your senses evolved so that you knew precisely where the members of your own unit were positioned and could see an area of ground as if it were magnified on a TV screen, with any movement immediately apparent. That was what he sensed now – a movement somewhere in the hills. Something coming this way.

There was no sense in giving away his own position. He’d seen men who’d made stupid mistakes and given themselves away. Those men didn’t survive long. Worse, they put their mates at risk.

The loud squealing of the vehicle working high on the quarry edge echoed over the cement works like the voice of a desert demon. A huge dumper truck had come over the ridge and was descending the banking. Thorpe couldn’t see it yet, but he could feel the vibration in the ground long before it reached him.

4

DI Hitchens poked a strip of paper into his desk fan. The whirling blades chewed it with a noise like a high-speed power drill.

‘Her name was Carol Proctor,’ he said. ‘Quite a good-looking woman when she was alive.’

Diane Fry stared out of the window of the DI’s office, wondering what her sister Angie was doing now. Probably she’d gone back to bed, and was rolled up tight in her duvet with a mug of coffee going cold on the floor by the settee. Or maybe she was in the bedroom, trying on her sister’s clothes. With a bit of luck, none of them would fit her. But that was ungracious. And unlikely.

‘I hope that was noted in her file,’ said Fry. ‘It would make her relatives feel so much better.’

Hitchens looked up at her sharply from his fan, but she kept her back turned. She didn’t really want to get into an argument with her boss about detectives whose first response at a murder scene was to comment on the sexual attractiveness of the victim. Not just now, anyway.

‘This was in 1990,’ said Hitchens.

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Carol Proctor was married to one of Mansell Quinn’s closest friends. But Quinn had been knocking her off for years.’

‘He was married himself?’

‘Oh, yes. The Quinns were doing quite well for themselves, and had bought a nice little detached house in Castleton. He was in the building trade – but he was bright, you know, not some dim brickie with a sunburnt arse. In fact, he’d recently started his own contracting business, if I remember rightly. Small-scale, but doing OK, by all accounts. There’s always plenty of work in that area – extensions and modernizations, you know the sort of thing.’

‘You said they bought the house in Castleton, though,’ said Fry. ‘He didn’t build it himself.’

‘No, the cobbler’s wife and all that. This place was new, and nicely done out. I wouldn’t have minded somewhere like that myself, but you can’t get houses in Castleton these days.’

Fry turned away from the window, irritated by the sound of another strip of paper being fed into the fan. The grinding was making her think of her last visit to the dentist’s.

‘Were there any children, sir?’

‘The Quinns had two, one of each. Sounds like the perfect happy family, doesn’t it?’

‘But this Carol Proctor … ?’

‘Yes, that’s where the pretty picture falls apart. The other woman.’

‘It sounds rather predictable.’

‘Maybe. Unfortunately, we were never able to establish why Carol Proctor had gone to the Quinn house that day. She only lived down the road, so maybe it was just an impulse, or she had something to say to Quinn that wouldn’t wait. We couldn’t find out why they’d argued, either. Quinn himself was notably unhelpful.’

‘And his affair had been going on for some time, regardless of the nice new house, two children and a dog?’

‘There wasn’t a dog,’ said Hitchens.

‘I meant it figuratively.’

Hitchens watched her as she moved away from the window and found a chair.

‘Are you all right, Fry?’ he said. ‘You seem to be in a strange mood this morning.’

Fry gave herself a mental shake. ‘I’m fine. Sorry.’

‘Good. Anyway, yes. Quinn’s affair was long standing. I was amazed at the time. I mean, how do you keep up a lie to a person you’ve lived with for so long, and not get caught out? You’d be bound to slip up in some way, wouldn’t you?’