‘He gave us some little plastic cards, too. I’ve got one stuck to the inside of my door, so I know what to do, if I forget.’
‘Yes, but ‘
Then Cooper heard a phone ringing in Rock Cottage. He turned towards the sound, listened to it ring four times, then stop, as if an answering machine had cut in.
‘Do you happen to know -‘ he said. 41
But the old lady had gone. She’d faded silently back into —r:
the jumble of stone cottages and left him on his own. T
As she walked back into the office at West Street, Diane Fry considered the irony of what Mansell Quinn’s mother had told her. A DNA profile of Quinn had existed after all. Ten years ago, he’d used a buccal swab on himself and had his own sample analysed. But the result of a private DNA test couldn’t be obtained by the police, even if it still existed, which was unlikely.
There were no messages from Ben Cooper at the office. Fry tried his phone again, but still got no signal. If he’d been in one of the Dark Peak’s notorious black spots, he ought to have come out of it by now. Cave, indeed. Cooper was trying to avoid her.
Did that mean he’d got something useful from Alistair Page? If Cooper had gone off on some crusade of his own without telling her, she’d have his guts for garters this time. Enough was enough.
Fry picked up the Carol Proctor file and looked through the list of statements again. There was definitely nothing from anyone called Page. Maybe his parents had had a different
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name; perhaps, like Rebecca Lowe, his mother had remarried.
Of course, if the Carol Proctor enquiry were taking place now, there’d be a searchable index of houses and their occupants, the kind of index the HOLMES system provided as routine. Every name that cropped up would have been entered, and links established automatically by the computer. There would be indexes, too, for vehicles, street names, telephone numbers. A major enquiry could produce thousands and thousands of entries. On some enquiries, there were so many entries you’d think the SIO was going for the Guinness Book of Records.
But au such luck in this case. It was like delving back into the Stone Age.
Fry hesitated. Perhaps she should get the name checked out by the current HOLMES team anyway, and see if something came up.
She went through the files one last time, flicking through the questionnaires and statements again, looking now not for the name Page, but just for a boy of the right age. There was Simon Quinn, of course - himself now with a new identity. In his case, there had been no real need to change his name except for a desire to put the events at Pindale Road in the past.
Finally, she came to a halt. Apart from Simon, there appeared to have been only one other fifteen-year-old youth in the immediate area. A youth called Alan. He was Raymond and Carol Proctor’s son.
‘My God, why has nobody mentioned bimT
Fry hardly knew where to start. The phone book showed no Alan Proctor anywhere in the Hope Valley; the electoral roll had no one by that name either, and certainly not living at Wingate Lees caravan park with Ray and Connie.
She reached for the phone. She really didn’t want to have to speak to Raymond Proctor right now, but there was no choice. Alan Proctor was what she’d been looking for - a missing piece in the equation.
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Then Fry stopped and withdrew her hand. No, he wasn’t missing at all, just there in a different form, a man who had adapted his identity. She was quite certain that Alan Proctor and Alistair Page were one and the same person.
But before she could figure out exactly what that meant, Gavin Murfin stuck his head round the door.
‘Diane, are you coming?’
Fry stared at him. ‘Where?’
‘There’s been an alarm at one of the show caves in Castleton.’
‘Peak Cavern?’
‘No, Speedwell. The troops are all revved up to go. They think it could be Mansell Quinn.’
The lights ended at the last cottage, and the rest of the path was in darkness. As Ben Cooper reached the head of the gorge, with the streaked cliffs towering above him, he couldn’t help tilting his head to look up. A cluster of spindly trees on the edge of the cliff framed one of the brightest stars in the sky.
By the time he stood at the gates of the cavern, he could hear water dripping raggedly on to the roof of the ticket booth inside. The concrete floor was damp where the water gathered and ran away to join the stream further down the gorge.
Cooper felt very small standing at the entrance to the cavern. The outer gates were black wrought iron, topped with spikes. A steel mesh fence on either side was backed with thick rushes and strung with barbed wire, and it ran down into the stream bed to meet the wall of the cliff. Not an easy prospect for climbing over.
The constant chattering of the jackdaws overhead had begun to resemble the cry of seagulls at the seaside. The sound had that same harsh, high-pitched quality.
Cooper jumped as a stone dropped from the cliff and
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thudded on a wooden table between the ticket booth and the ropemakers’ house. Maybe the stone had been dislodged from a ledge by one of the jackdaws. Perhaps the cliff face was even more dangerous than it looked.
Looking at the black mouth of the cavern, Cooper knew it must have been a perfect place for outlaws. Who would venture into those depths to face them? Who’d want to leave the daylight far behind and pass along the stream bed, feeling that change in the air on the descent into the Devil’s Dining Room? By flickering candlelight, they’d have seen the stalactites like black hooks in the roof of the chamber, and watched shadowy shapes moving in the walls as the River Styx rushed far below.
He shook his head. No one who was superstitious or claustrophobic would dream of entering. But Cock Lorrel and his outlaws had been beyond the normal bounds of society, associated in the imagination with the Devil, and with every evil practice that people could think of - including cannibalism.
