‘No.’
‘You think I was lying?’
‘Were you?’
‘It would be a strange thing for a mother to do. If I were going to lie, wouldn’t it be to stand up for my son, to protect him? Isn’t that what mothers do in your experience, Sergeant?’
‘Of course. There’s only one reason you’d lie about him being guilty.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘If there was somebody else you thought needed protecting even more.’
‘Like who?’
‘In my experience,’ said Fry, ‘grandmothers can get ridiculously protective of their grandchildren. Especially if they get the idea that the parents aren’t doing the job properly.’
‘Grandchildren?’
‘Yes. Grandchildren.’
‘Sergeant, I don’t know what you mean.’
Fry took a deep breath, and immediately regretted it. She could taste the sharp tang of the vaporized sap spraying from the neighbour’s lawnmower. She could feel the grass pollen settling on the back of her throat.
410
‘I’m suggesting that when he had the DNA tests done, Mansell found out he wasn’t Simon’s father,’ she said. ‘Which meant he’d taken the blame for someone else’s son. Isn’t that right, Mrs Quinn?’
Enid Quinn stared at her for a moment, then began to laugh. Tears welled from her eyes. But Fry was sure she couldn’t have been all that funny.
‘Well, you’ve got that wrong,’ said Mrs Quinn. ‘Wrong on both counts.’
411
39
Ben Cooper had intended to head straight home, but somehow he never quite made it into Edendale. It was almost as though the Toyota steered itself away from Hucklow towards the Hope Valley.
When he reached Castleton, he carefully negotiated the market place and passed the Saxon-style cross to reach Pindale Road. The streets were narrow, and there seemed to be cars parked everywhere - not to mention the groups of visitors ambling in the roadway, as if they didn’t expect to encounter traffic. Uniformed police officers stood in pairs on the corners, watching the crowds.
The former Quinn home stood near the top of the road, above Hope View House. When he’d lived here, Mansell Quinn had probably parked his Vauxhall estate at the roadside, as everyone else did. Castleton was one of the places where residents got seriously wound up when they couldn’t park near their own homes because of the number of visitors’ cars. The little town had been laid out many centuries before motor vehicles had been invented.
Pindale Road became narrower the further up the hill he went. It would be possible to get a good view of number 82
412
from the houses across the road, if you happened to be looking out of the right window.
Cooper had to go a long way past the house and almost to Siggate before he found a wide enough verge to turn round. He drove back down the hill and parked in the gateway of an empty house, then knocked at the door of number 84, where the Townsends had lived in 1990.
But the helpful neighbours of the Quinns were long gone from Pindale Road, and had left no forwarding address.
Cooper drove back down the A625 through Hope and turned up Win Hill to Aston. In rural areas like this, his street ailas was vague about what was a road or a farm track and what was merely a footpath or bridleway. He wanted to see if the track that ran parallel to Rebecca Lowe’s garden ended at the nearby farmhouse, as it seemed to on the map, or whether it diverged at any point towards Parson’s Croft.
Sure enough, he found it was possible to get a car off the farm road. The track was wide enough to drive along the back of Rebecca Lowe’s hedge. It would be too muddy in the winter perhaps, but at the moment the surface was fine. A car could be parked unseen, and there were gaps in the hedge where anyone could approach the back door of Parson’s Croft.
But who would have done that? It was all very well having a feeling that Mansell Quinn didn’t fit the crime, but who else was there? Diane Fry herself had asked him if he had another suspect in mind. And, of course, he didn’t.
Raymond Proctor drove a bright red Renault van with the caravan park’s logo emblazoned on the side. It wasn’t the sort of vehicle to go unnoticed in the lanes of Aston. William Thorpe might have made it up to the house on foot. But if the Newbolds’ sighting was genuine, he’d already been to see Rebecca two weeks previously. Why would he come again? And why wasn’t he seen a second time - a passing vagrant would be sure to attract attention in this sort of neighbourhood.
413
That left only one person who was close enough to Rebecca Lowe. In fact, the only person who would logically have a key to let himself into the house. Granted, there wasn’t a glimmer of a motive that Cooper could see. But motive often came later, and could be surprising.
He still remembered a case from several years ago, where a seventeen-year-old boy had murdered his mother. Friends of the family had said the two of them always had a good relationship. But on that particular night, the victim had refused to let her son borrow her car to go out with his friends. So he’d killed her. Sometimes, it was impossible to understand what was going on in other people’s minds.
Simon Lowe lived in Edendale. Could he have been in the Hope Valley area when his mother was killed? There had been sightings of cars reported by residents, but what sort of car did Simon drive? Perhaps the information was recorded in the incident room. He could get someone to do a check.
Thinking about Simon brought Cooper back to the events of 9 October 1990. The transcript of the police interview with Mansell Quinn had been very frustrating. All those silences from Quinn when he was asked to back up his claim that someone else had been there. On paper, his silence had implied an inability to substantiate a false version of events. But Cooper would give anything for a video tape of the interview, so that he could watch Quinn’s
