was the worst thing, I suppose. It was possible.’
It was late afternoon by the time Ben Cooper started the Toyota in the yard at Bridge End Farm. The dogs, recognizing the sound of the engine, ran towards him. But Cooper sat in the car for a few minutes, looking at the farmhouse, the place that was so familiar and yet no longer his home.
In some ways his father still lived here. He still walked in the shadow of the barn, or sat in a quiet corner of the kitchen. Hvery time Cooper entered the house, he knew he’d be able to smell his father’s presence. No amount of fresh paint and wallpaper could cover up the memories. Joe Cooper’s spirit had seeped into the walls, and it would stay there until the day the farmhouse was demolished.
The dogs barked in a puzzled way for a while, but settled down in a gateway and waited for the car to move. In the cold light of morning, Cooper was sure that his experience in the early hours had been the result of too much alcohol combined with the worries that had been preying on his mind. At the first opportunity, he’d gone to look for footprints in the wet ground by the stream, but had found only his own tracks, crazily wandering and confused. He hoped he was right, because he didn’t know how he could ever tell Matt and Kate that they might be at risk. Nothing that he said would help them to understand.
On the other hand, he would never forgive himself for not warning them, if he turned out to be wrong.
Then carbonadoed and cooked with pains, Was brought up a cloven sergeant’s face: The sauce was made of his yeoman’s brains, That had been beaten out with his mace.
404
Whatever logic told him, Cooper couldn’t resist the feeling that the poem Josie had found was somehow about his father. Sergeant Joe Cooper had died when his head had been kicked in by drunken thugs in Clappergate while trying to make an arrest without back-up. A cloven sergeant’s face.
At first, Cooper had been puzzled by Mansell Quinn’s conversation with Raymond Proctor at the caravan park on Wednesday night. Quinn had been talking about children, particularly about sons. And Proctor hadn’t been sure whose son he meant.
What if Quinn had been thinking of Sergeant Joe Cooper’s son? What was that line from the Bible? The sins of the fathers. It must be somewhere in the Old Testament, which had a lot about vengeance and blood. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
‘You’re telling me Rebecca Quinn had an affair?’ said Diane Fry. ‘But it must have been some time ago?’
‘Yes. It was before she and Mansell got married - while they were engaged, in fact.’
Enid Quinn put down her secateurs and stripped off the yellow gloves, revealing her thin hands and pale skin like lined parchment. The smell of hand cream mingled with the scent of the roses.
‘It wasn’t a long engagement,’ she said. ‘Mansell was madly in love with her, and he was impatient to get wed. So it was all a bit of a rush, not at all what I would have wanted for him, if I’d had my way. I like things to be done with all due consideration for what’s right and proper. I don’t think either of them had really thought things through. I said so at the time, of course, but he didn’t take any notice. That was Mansell in those days: impetuous.’
‘He seems to have learned better now.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ said Fry. ‘Nothing important. And then a child
405
came along - but that must have been after they were married, surely?’
‘Yes, but not too long after - six months. Mansell had no suspicions. I’d heard the rumours, though, so I wondered about it. For me, there was something about the boy that wasn’t right, and there always has been. Simon never looked like Mansell, you see. Not in any way. But that wasn’t the sort of thing Mansell would notice. And I wasn’t going to be the one to ruin my son’s happiness.’
‘So how did Mansell find out? Did he start to suspect? Did he ask Rebecca?’
‘No. Well, that would have been difficult. If he really was the father, it would have caused problems in the marriage if she knew that he doubted her. And if he wasn’t … would she have told him the truth?’
‘I see what you mean.’
‘He didn’t want to lose Rebecca, you see. That was the last thing Mansell wanted. But still, he needed to know the truth.’
‘So what did he do?’
Mrs Quinn sighed wearily. ‘It doesn’t matter now. It can’t matter, can it? I’m tired of it all. I think you should leave me alone.’
Fry felt a momentary twinge of sympathy for the old woman. Then she heard a lawnmower start up in the neighbour’s garden. Within minutes, the air would be full of spores from freshly cut grass - one of the triggers she’d been warned to avoid. Soon, she’d be feeling like death again. The thought made her unreasonably annoyed.
‘Mrs Quinn,’ she said, ‘you visited your son in prison. In fact, you were the last member of his family to see him, weren’t you? What did you talk about?’
‘I told you, it doesn’t matter any more. Go out with your dogs and helicopters and hunt my son down, if you must. But why do you have to persecute me?’
406
‘Did Mansell ask you to do something particular for him, Mrs Quinn?’
The old woman waved a hand in front of her face, as if swatting away a wasp.
‘Look, I thought it was wrong,’ she said. ‘He shouldn’t have been digging up the past like that, trying to get dirt on someone who was dead.’
‘Especially someone he’d killed himself, perhaps?’
Mrs Quinn pursed her lips at the comment, and decided to ignore it. ‘I helped him because … well, I thought it would be the last thing I’d do for him. “This one thing and no more,” I said. That’s what I told him. “If I do this for you, Mansell, that’s it. I’m never coming to visit you in here again.”’
‘And he accepted that?’
‘He had no choice, did he?’
‘It must have been something very important to him. He was condemning himself to years in solitary confinement, almost.’
