She’d perched on her desk as the room filled up, looking relaxed and enjoying the atmosphere. Or at least, that’s what Cooper thought she was doing.
‘I heard he preferred to take the initiative into his own hands and just give them a ticking off, or a bit of friendly advice,’ she said. ‘Like Gavin says, a real old-style copper. You wouldn’t get away with it these days. Not for a minute.’
Cooper turned to face Fry. He managed to hold her gaze for once, despite the fact that he knew she could see straight through him.
‘Everyone deserves a second chance,’ he said.
‘Not quite everyone, Ben.’
He wasn’t sure who she was referring to. Who didn’t get a second chance? Mansell Quinn or Alan Proctor? Or was she referring to hint! Or even to herself?
It reminded Cooper that he’d come nowhere near to understanding Diane Fry the way she seemed to understand him. At times, he felt as though he was getting closer to an insight into her mind, but she always drifted away again, like something too fragile to be grasped in the hand.
He couldn’t remember which of the Castleton show caves contained a well-known calcite formation - a stalactite and stalagmite that had grown towards each other until they were only four centimetres apart. Just four centimetres away from touching, and merging together. But geologists had calculated that it would take at least another thousand years before they finally met, if ever.
Cooper cast around for something to say that would take her mind off the subject, something that might restore the personal understanding they came so close to now and then.
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‘How is Angle, by the way?’ he said.
Fry slid off her desk. She came towards him slowly and leaned her face towards his, touching her hand lightly on the sleeve of his shirt, where it lay like a branding iron against his skin.
‘Ben, did you happen to get any additional information out of Mansell Quinn, anything that would help us to clear his name and prove that it was Alan Proctor who killed Carol?’
‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘I didn’t.’
She stared at him, and Cooper still couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
‘OK.’
Of course, the one mind that Cooper had no trouble understanding was his father’s. He and Joe Cooper were very much alike, as everyone pointed out. They both believed in a second chance. For Mansell Quinn and Alan Proctor, it was too late. But had Sergeant Joe Cooper attempted to conceal the presence of a fifteen-year-old boy at a murder scene? It seemed possible that someone had stopped the music, turned off the upstairs light and wiped the Coke bottle. Had those efforts been in vain? Cooper hoped not. And he didn’t know if he’d undo what his father had done fourteen years earlier, even if he could.
He felt a sudden chill run up his spine and along the back of his neck, as if someone had opened a fridge door behind him, and he turned to the window. It was open, but the air coming in was no icy draught. What he’d felt was a gust of air from a world where it was much colder than a humid summer in Edendale.
The window looked down on to the car park, and Cooper saw Simon Lowe walking to his car. He must have completed his formal statement, and had probably been kept waiting around for a while. Andrea was waiting in the car, and she got out of the passenger seat to meet him as soon as he
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appeared. There was another woman sitting in the back of the car, somebody Cooper didn’t recognize. The fiancee, Jackie, perhaps? They had a wedding planned for next April, and an awful lot of work to do on their new house if they were going to start a family.
‘Diane,’ said Cooper, ‘did you ever track down the teacher who caught Simon Lowe bunking off school and made him go back in?’
‘No,’ said Fry vaguely. ‘He gave me the man’s name, but it turned out he retired years ago, and has since died of a heart attack. Funny - it reminded me of your father’s partner, PC Netherton. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing. It was just the last loose end, really.’
‘It’s good to clear up loose ends. But you were wrong about one thing, weren’t you, Ben?’
‘What’s that?’
‘None of it had anything to do with your father. So that’s one problem out of the way.’
‘Yes, Diane.’
But Cooper didn’t think that was right. For a moment, his father had walked back into his life, to remind him that he was dealing with people, and not with a sequence of numbers and chromosome locations on a DNA profile. He was in no doubt that it was Sergeant Joe Cooper himself who’d crept up behind him a second ago and breathed that icy breath on the back of his neck. His father had sent him a message with a single cold touch, an unspoken word in his ear.
Cooper watched Simon and Andrea Lowe standing together for a moment by the car. They weren’t touching or speaking, just looking into each other’s faces, communicating the way you could with a sibling. Then they threw their arms around each other and hugged so tightly it must have been painful.
At last they got into the car, reversed carefully among the police vehicles, and turned out on to the road towards
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Edendale. Simon drove a little too fast, as if afraid he might not get a second chance, after all, if he didn’t get away soon.
Cooper had heard of a Chinese religion called Taoism. Its members believed you were born containing all the breath you’d ever possess in your life. For them, every exhalation was a step nearer death. When you used up your last breath, there was no more.
But Cooper had thought about it in the last few days, and he knew they were wrong about that. There was always one last breath.
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Speedwell Cavern, 10 September 2004 It was towards the end of the summer when a party of retired college teachers from Virginia climbed slowly down the steps at Speedwell Cavern to take the underground boat ride.
