‘All right,’ he said. ‘Why have we still got the road closed? Isn’t there anyone here from Traffic?’
He was always like that. Whenever we had a row, I’d think it was all over and forgotten about. But he … Mansell would go away and brood about things. It seemed as though he turned everything over in his mind, everything that I’d said in the heat of the moment. He picked my words apart, analysing them, making himself more and more angiy. There were a lot of things that I didn’t mean, of course. But he never seemed to understand that. He took everything to heart and stored it up. His
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memory was unnervingly accurate, too -1 could tell he’d rehearsed my words over and over, letting them eat away at him from the inside. Then he would come back to the subject after a while - the next morning, or two or three days later, or longer than that even. And by then he’d built up the whole thing in his mind, turned it into something else, something far worse. When he came back to it, he was angrier than he’d been while we were arguing. I called it his ‘slow burn’. It was like he had a really long fuse that took time to burn down before the explosion came. It was really quite frightening. Because I never knew when it might happen.
Mansell was never physically violent towards me. It was only words. When the explosion did come, it was just that - an explosion of anger. What I would still call the heat of the moment. An outpouring of emotion, something he had to get out of his system. I wouldn’t describe him a cold, calculating man. Not at all …
Statement of Eebecca Quinn, October 1990
Ben Cooper was tired, and ready to go back home. It was three o’clock in the morning, and it was still raining. It was also his birthday.
He stared blearily out of the window of the CID room, wondering how much rain had to fall before Peak Cavern flooded. He was picturing the parties of tourists running to get out of the cavern, foaming water rushing behind them through the passages, roaring like all the devils in Hell were after them. He knew it wouldn’t happen in real life - there would be plenty of warning before anyone was caught by a flood.
Cooper had read Rebecca Quinn’s statement before, but this morning her analysis of her husband’s character seemed particularly ironic. Perhaps he was just tired, but she seemed to be talking about a different man altogether.
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He guessed Rebecca wouldn’t have been allowed back into her own home for a while after that day in October 1990 not until the SOCOs were satisfied that they’d done all they could to collect the available evidence. Her sitting room had probably still been prohibited to her then, even if she’d wanted to enter it.
Cooper tried to imagine what it would be like to go back into your house knowing someone had recently died a violent death in your sitting room, and that your husband was probably the killer. Would it still feel like your own home? Or would everything have changed? He suspected it would feel as if some alien presence had invaded your space.
There would have been a horrible temptation to open the door of the room where it happened, to look for some sort of explanation among the familiar surroundings, to hope that the whole thing had been a bad dream. But all Rebecca Quinn would have seen were the markers left by the SOCOs, the holes cut out of the carpet to retrieve the bloodstains, a dusting of powder on the window frames and door handles. She might have smelled latex gloves, and the sweat of people working indoors in crime scene suits. She might have noticed that the bottle was gone from the table, the cushions from the settee, and the poker from the hearth. All very prosaic, in a way. But all signs that the room had been the setting for a violent crime.
Cooper looked through the statement list for an interview with neighbours called Page. Alistair Page had been only sixteen at the time, but if his parents were still around they might be worth talking to. If they’d lived quite close, they ought to have known the Quinns pretty well in a place like Castleton. And independent witnesses were distinctly in short supply.
But there were no Pages on the list. Cooper made a note to ask Alistair about his parents. Then he turned back to Rebecca’s statement. She recalled leaving the house at eight
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thirty that morning to go to her job as a secretary in a solicitor’s office in Hathersage. Normally, she wouldn’t have returned home before five thirty, but she’d been phoned by the police earlier in the afternoon. She said she’d been too shocked and confused at first to understand what she was being told.
Rebecca had stayed at her sister Dawn’s house that night. Neighbours had looked after the Quinn children when they arrived home from school, until they, too, had gone to their aunt’s house. Cooper looked for the name of the helpful neighbours. Townsend. Maybe they were still around, at least.
There was a statement from another neighbour on the opposite side of the road, a woman called Needham. But neither she nor Mrs Townsend remembered seeing anyone enter the Quinns’ house until Mansell Quinn himself arrived home, driving his Vauxhall estate. It wasn’t clear from their statements how good a view either of them had of the house.
Cooper began to gather up the statements to put them back into the Carol Proctor case file. Then he noticed a photograph of an evidence bag. According to the label, it came from Room 1 Sector B, and it carried the identification code PM24 - a scene of crime officer’s initials, plus the number of items of evidence he’d collected from the scene. He didn’t know who ‘PM’ was - not one of the present SOCOs at E Division anyway. After fourteen years, it was probably someone who had left the force or retired.
The bag contained a Coke bottle. It looked like the bottle that had been sitting on the Quinns’ table in the crime scene photographs. Cooper could see the fingerprint dust on the surface.
Faithful old fingerprints - they were sometimes sniffed at these days by forensic experts who described them as an art, not a science. But the team attending 82 Pindale Road in 1990 had dusted the bottle for prints. And they’d found them, though they were too smeared to get a match. That was odd
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I
in itself - glass was perfect material to lift fingerprints from. Unless it had been deliberately wiped.
With a weary sigh, Cooper put the file down and looked at his watch. He wondered if he’d ever get chance to take a look at the Quinns’ old house in Pindale Road.
Finally, he saw Diane Fry coming into the room. She looked as tired as he felt.
‘William Edward Thorpe,’ she said. ‘He started off as one of your actions, didn’t he, Ben?’
‘Yes.’
‘In fact, he was a TIE - to be traced, interviewed and eliminated.’
‘We traced him and interviewed him.’
‘But somebody else managed to eliminate him.’
‘Mansell Quinn?’ said Cooper,
