‘Yes, it was very important to him. It had become an obsession. If you’d read the letters he wrote to me, you’d realize that.’
‘Where are those letters, Mrs Quinn?’
‘I burned them.’
Fry sighed. ‘OK. And what exactly was it your son asked you to do for him?’
‘He wanted to have a paternity test done to prove if Simon really was his son. You can get sampling kits, and send them away for testing. Rebecca never knew about it. This was all ten years ago.’
‘Ten years,’ repeated Fry thoughtfully. ‘Just about the time he started to claim that he wasn’t guilty of the murder.’
‘About then.’
Fry knew the type of kit Mrs Quinn was talking about. They contained two sets of buccal swabs for scraping cells
407
from the inside of the cheek - one for the parent and one for the child. It was very simple to do, and perfectly safe. The reports were pretty comprehensive, and conclusive, one way or the other. They gave either a 100 per cent certainty that there wasn’t a paternal relationship, or a 99.5 per cent probability that there was. It was enough to stand up in court, if necessary.
She imagined Quinn in his prison cell, looking at tables of allele numbers, identification markers and chromosome locations. He’d probably had a long wait for the test results. Back then, there had been no UK laboratories doing paternity tests, so the samples would have gone to a lab in the USA or Australia. It would have cost him a few hundred pounds, too.
But then she frowned again. How had he obtained a sample from Simon without Rebecca knowing? True, there were companies who would extract DNA from hair roots, toothbrushes, disposable razors, or dried blood and saliva. But Quinn had no physical access to his son in prison, except at visiting times.
‘Was that why his family stopped visiting him?’ said Fry.
Mrs Quinn just looked at her. Her hair had become disarranged in the breeze on the hillside. Fry remembered something Dawn Cottrill had said about Quinn upsetting his family during visits, trying to grab his son, tugging at his hair until he cried. Hair didn’t contain cells, but its roots did. Had Quinn been trying to get a hair with the root still attached for DNA analysis? But that was too soon, surely?
‘You need to have a DNA sample from both father and son to do a comparison,’ said Fry.
‘Yes, I know that. The kit Mansell had ordered came with things to scrape inside your cheek. They were a bit like Q Tips, only longer.’
‘Buccal swabs.’
‘If you say so.’
‘But what about Simon?’
408
‘That was my part in the business.’
‘How?’
‘I stole a comb of Simon’s. His hair was a long, tangled mess in those days, so it wasn’t difficult to get some. It had to have roots on it, Mansell said.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I wasn’t very proud of what I did,’ said Mrs Quinn.
Fry remembered there had been talk of a new law to prevent estranged fathers from secretly taking material from their children for paternity tests. It was claimed that some of them did it to escape responsibility for child- support payments.
But it wasn’t possible to be in intimate contact with a child without taking away a bit of their DNA. It would surely be unfeasible to create a new law that made it an offence to remove a child’s hair from a hairbrush, to take a sticking plaster off a cut finger, or pick up a bit of chewed gum, a used handkerchief, or an old toothbrush. Any one of them could contain DNA.
‘And all to establish whether Simon was his son?’ she said.
The old woman turned away towards the house. Fry tried to manoeuvre to keep eye contact, but the path was too narrow and her sleeve caught on the thorns of the roses, holding her back. Mrs Quinn managed to get a few paces away.
‘Well, that was the idea, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘Mansell wanted to have peace of mind. He said it was the one thing he had a chance of being certain about. But there isn’t really anything you can be certain about in this life, is there? Not in my experience.’
Fry listened carefully to her tone of voice, because she was unable to see Mrs Quinn’s face. She pulled the thorns from her sleeve, feeling a sudden prick on her thumb and seeing a bright spot of blood appear.
‘You asked me a minute ago how Mansell got the idea that Simon might not be his son,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘It was Simon himself who told him, when he visited him in prison. I think
409
it was the last time he saw him, in that prison in Lancashire. After that, it preyed on Mansell’s mind. It still does, I think.’
Fry shivered. She remembered Simon Lowe the first time she’d seen him. His words came back to her: ‘He’s not my father. He was once, but not any more.’ She couldn’t believe that it had taken her all this time to understand. Damn. Why couldn’t people say what they really meant?
‘Mrs Quinn, when we first came here to speak to you, you told us that you believed your son was guilty of Carol Proctor’s murder.’
‘That’s right, I did.’
‘But that wasn’t true, was it?’
‘You mean, you don’t believe I think he was guilty?’
