‘Sorry, chief. I meant, we’re gathering community-based intelligence in our efforts to establish the location of the principal suspect prior to a recurrence of his offending behaviour.’
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The Chief Superintendent went rather red in the face. Watching him, Cooper shifted uneasily in his chair. He hadn’t yet learned to overcome the awe for his divisional commander that he’d felt ever since he was a trainee PC. Hearing somebody provoking him so blatantly was rather shocking.
‘You know who’s going to get the blame for all this?’ said Jepson.
‘Sir?’ said Hitchens.
The.’ The Chief Superintendent sighed. ‘But quite frankly, it goes with the job description. As divisional commander, you have to be ready to take all the flak that people want to fire at you. And believe me, it comes in from every direction.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But it doesn’t worry me,’ said Jepson. ‘In fact, I take it as a compliment. If people are permanently having a go at you, at least it means they think you’re big enough to be a target.’
‘You ain’t nobody unless you’ve been booed some time,’ said Hitchens.
Jepson stared at him. ‘Sorry?’
‘It was something Bob Dylan said.’
‘DI Hitchens, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Sorry, sir. I thought Bob Dylan might have been your era.’
Jepson went a little red around the ears. ‘For your information, Hitchens, as a young man I was already an enthusiast for Italian opera. I suspect you’re being facetious, Inspector.’
‘Not at all, sir. Just trying to help with the cultural references. It’s so easy to get out of touch, isn’t it?’
‘Perhaps it’s time you were back at work on the Quinn case. There’s must be a great deal to do.’
‘Yes, sir.’
It was obvious why everyone was on edge. Progress had ground to a halt. Painstaking legwork and hours of phone
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calls had established Quinn’s route from Sudbury Prison. He’d used buses as far as Hathersage, then a train the short distance to Hope. After that, he seemed to have been on foot, because the information from the public transport system had dried up.
Most worrying of all, it was now Friday, and there had been no reported sightings of Quinn since Wednesday night, when he’d called on Raymond Proctor at the caravan park.
Cooper watched the DI stand in front of the maps and run his eyes over the geography of the Hope Valley for the hundredth time, perhaps considering the futility of sending the helicopter support unit up to cover the ground. They’d be looking for one man in a landscape scattered with hikers and in villages thronged with tourists.
Hitchens turned and looked at Cooper. ‘What do you think, Ben?’
‘He’s still in the area somewhere,’ said Cooper.
‘Why?’
‘He hasn’t finished what he came back for yet.’
Will Thorpe had walked out of Wingate Lees caravan park as soon as he thought no one was looking. He would have preferred to be in a hostel. At least he’d have had no problem with the accommodation, or the people who ran the place. They were usually civil enough.
But the idea that everyone knew where he was had started to make him feel nervous. He felt trapped, pinned down, expected to wait helplessly for the arrival of anyone who chose to find him. Within minutes of arriving at Wingate Lees, he’d known he would have to get away. He had noticed Connie Proctor watching him. Next day, she’d have got Ray to tell him to leave anyway.
Thorpe remembered the abandoned field barn. He was pretty sure he’d used it before. He didn’t mind the smells. In fact, he hardly noticed them any more. They were simply a
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sign of the presence of humanity nearby, a warning that he should go carefully and be on the alert.
The stone building stood between Dirtlow Rake and the quarry of the cement works. Thorpe could hear the growl and squeal of machinery in the quarry and the rumble of the excavators. From the doorway, he could see a dumper truck driving along the ridge, throwing up a trail of dust. gjf
Inside, the field barn was divided it into two bare rooms, connected by a doorway so low that he had to stoop to get under the lintel. The dirt floor was uneven and scattered with lumps of limestone that had fallen out of the walls, as well as crisp packets and screwed-up tissues left by the last people in here. There were round beams above head height and openings high in the wall - one of them looked as though it had been a fireplace, with ventilation through the wall into a chimney.
Thorpe looked around doubtfully. The building had no doors, and the empty windows narrowed from a foot to a couple of inches on the outside, like arrow slits. There would be no escape for anything through these holes, either animal or human. The roof was mostly sound, though, and Thorpe could see from the dirt floor that the rain came through in only one spot. Unless there was a storm, when the wind would drive rain through every nook and cranny. It was exposed up here, and even now the wind gusted raggedly around the building with a noise like someone battering on the walls.
Thorpe found a piece of corrugated tin lying in deep nettles in front of the building. It must have been there for some time, because the nettles were growing through the bolt holes. The tin crackled loudly when he walked across it, and he decided to drag it across the open doorway, just as a precaution.
He was very tired, and all he really wanted to do was sleep. Sometimes he wished he were like a bird - they didn’t sleep
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the way people did, but were able to shut down just one half of their brain at a time, while the other half remained on the alert.
He wouldn’t be staying long here anyway. Tomorrow, he’d move on, get away from the area altogether. It wasn’t safe for him here any more. But it had been an exhausting day, and he needed sleep.
Outside, the dumper truck rumbled back across the ridge. The dust it threw up turned yellow as dark clouds
