Fry crouched to look.
‘The base is hollow,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute …’ She reached out a hand.
‘I shouldn’t touch it. Fingerprints, you know. But I take it there’s a key under there?’
‘Yes. It’s the back-door key, I suppose. But this means somebody could have used it to get into the house.’
‘Yes.’
Fry shook her head. ‘No, Ben.’
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘If somebody used the key to get in and kill Rebecca Lowe, why would they put it back?’
476
Cooper gently lowered the heron back into position and removed his gloves.
‘Habits die hard,’ he said. ‘If you’re used to handling keys all the time, it’s important to get into the habit of putting them back exactly where you got them from.’
Fry nodded. ‘All right. I’ll get someone up here to check for prints.’
‘I think the concrete is probably useless for prints, especially after all the rain.’
‘But the key is perfectly dry.’
Slowly, Fry walked back to the hedge and looked through it at the path they’d used to cross the field.
‘And you’re right,’ she called. ‘If he came under the railway bridge and parked where we have, it’s just a short walk.’
‘I had no trouble, despite my injured leg.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘So it would be easily manageable,’ said Cooper. ‘Even for a man with a touch of arthritis in his knee.’
Fry nodded again, and Cooper went to stand alongside her at the hedge. Below the embankment of the distant railway bridge, he could see a row of static caravans, and the rustic log walls of the nearest holiday lodge.
Then Cooper saw what he hoped for. He saw Diane Fry smile for the first time in days.
‘I think I’m going to enjoy this bit,’ she said.
And then, after all that, she sent him back to the office to put his feet up and rest his leg. He wasn’t even allowed to be present at the arrest or take part in the search. Ben Cooper had never taken inactivity well. Now he felt like an invalid who had to be kept out of the way. A liability.
Somebody had brought him a coffee, but he let it go cold on his desk while he sulked. He didn’t want to appear to be enjoying himself when they came back from the caravan park.
477
Then, when he finally saw Diane Fry coming through the door, Cooper threw his legs off the desk and couldn’t suppress a small gasp of pain.
‘Well, we found the knife,’ said Fry. ‘Do you want to guess where?’
‘In one of the old caravans,’ said Cooper, rubbing his leg. ‘Did he try to blame it on Iraqi refugees, by any chance?’
‘Not this time. But you’re right. Connie seems to have watched him like a hawk, so his options for disposing of it would have been limited and I suppose the old ‘van seemed as good a place as any to hide it. Nobody else went there except him.’
‘And Will Thorpe, when he was staying at the site. And us, when we asked to see inside them.’
‘Poor Mr Proctor - he must have been sweating bricks for days. Well, it was obvious all along that he was frightened. But it wasn’t Mansell Quinn he was frightened of. He told us that himself, several times.’
The don’t know if you noticed,’ said Cooper, ‘but when we were in the office that day he made a bit of a fuss about finding the keys for the old ‘vans.’
‘So he did.’
‘I thought it was odd, because the rest of the keys were all neatly organized and labelled on their hooks. But there was one key that he had to get out of a drawer. That’s why he made a performance of it.’
‘I thought he was just being awkward.’
‘Also, Proctor tried to pretend he didn’t know Quinn was coming out of prison last Monday. But he must have known - he’d spoken to Rebecca Lowe earlier in the day. I checked the phone records - it was the office number at Wingate Lees that Rebecca rang, not the Proctors’ home number. It would have been Ray she spoke to.’
‘It seems likely. Connie told us he kept her out of the office.’
478
‘And it wasn’t a short call. So I wondered what else they might have talked about.’
Fry took off her jacket. She looked warm, but not dissatisfied with the day’s work. ‘Sounds as if you’ve been doing a bit of thinking while we were out, Ben.’
‘There wasn’t much else to do.’
‘And?’
‘I think that when Rebecca Lowe phoned, she told Ray Proctor she knew about Alan, and that she was going to tell Quinn the truth, if he came back.’
‘Tell him that it was Alan who killed Carol? But Quinn had already figured that out for himself years ago, thanks to Simon.’
Cooper nodded. ‘Yes. But neither Rebecca nor Proctor knew that.’
