‘And there was a light - a light from upstairs. Carol wouldn’t have gone upstairs. She wouldn’t go near the bedroom, not even to pass it on the way to the loo.’
Cooper wanted to hold his breath, so as not to disturb Quinn’s recall. But he needed to ask one more thing.
‘There was something you heard?’
‘Music. There was music in the house.’
Cooper hadn’t expected that. A voice, a footstep, the sound of a door closing, perhaps.
‘Music? What music?’
The knew it,’ said Quinn. ‘Not at the time. But later, I recognized it. It was U2.’
‘U2?’ Cooper closed his eyes. It had been there in the transcript of the interview, after all. But he hadn’t understood it. Nor had the interviewers. As far as they were concerned, Mansell Quinn had said, ‘You, too.’
‘Somebody else had been in the house before you arrived,’ said Cooper. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘Only the kids drank Coke. And the light was from Simon’s room. He used to draw the curtains and put the lamps on, even in broad daylight. He played U2 all the time up there,
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and it drove me mad. When he had it on too loud, I got angry with him. Too angry.’
He turned his attention back to Cooper, who sank reluctantly back on his heels as the crossbow straightened up again.
‘I’ve been angry all my life,’ said Quinn.
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42
When the torchlight finally became too low, Mansell Quinn reached into his rucksack with one hand and withdrew a round foil packet about eight inches long, which he opened with his teeth.
Ben Cooper couldn’t make it out properly. ‘What’s that?’ he said.
At least Quinn had become calmer now. For a moment, Cooper had feared he’d pushed the man too far. But instead he’d withdrawn into silence again, wrapped up in his own thoughts.
‘Light sticks - high intensity,’ said Quinn, taking the end of one of the sticks in his teeth and removing it from the packet. ‘They last thirty minutes.’
‘Thirty minutes?’
‘It’s enough,’ said Quinn.
Out of its foil, the light stick itself was a translucent yellow tube full of fluid, capped at one end and with a small hook at the other. Quinn bent the tube in the middle until the inner section burst with a snap. The fluid made contact with the crystals in the cap and began to glow. It threw a greenish yellow light around the chamber that would have been bright enough for Cooper to read by if he’d held it close to his face.
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Its glow was almost fluorescent, and it threw complicated shadows on the walls and roof, and on the faces of the two men.
Quinn found a level part of the floor and stood the tube upright on its cap. Lit from below, his features seemed skeletal and demonic. But Cooper thought he probably looked the same way himself.
He gazed at the yellow glow. ‘You bought a packet of two light sticks at the outdoor shop in Hathersage.’
‘Yes,’ said Quinn. He didn’t seem at all surprised that Cooper should know.
‘Two light sticks,’ repeated Cooper.
‘That’s right.’ And Quinn paused. ‘The other one is for me.’
Cooper sneaked a glance at his watch, tilting it to catch a gleam of light, wishing that it had a luminous face. It seemed important to know the exact position of the hands. In thirty minutes’ time, there would be no more light. One way or another.
‘What are you waiting for?’ said Cooper.
Suddenly, Quinn focused on him properly, as if he’d just been woken from a dream.
‘What did you say?’
‘I asked what you’re waiting for. You are waiting for something, aren’t you? Or someone?’
Quinn nodded.
‘A killer.’
The pool of bright green water was a long way below. Diane Fry experienced a moment of vertigo as she looked down from the edge of the platform. She saw a scatter of white safety helmets lying on a sort of stony beach at the edge of the water, and instinctively raised a hand to hold on to her own helmet as she leaned over the iron rail.
The colour of the pool looked garish and unnatural in the
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electric lights, but the guide had already explained that the green was caused by the high lead content of the water. Superstitious lead miners had named it the Bottomless Pit because the forty thousand tons of rubble they’d hurled into it from the walls of the cavern had failed to raise the level by an inch. According to the guide, the miners had concluded that it connected directly to the underworld, where the Devil was presumably unfazed by the amount of rock falling on his head.
There was also some legend about a giant serpent that would emerge from the water and squirm its way through the caves and passages looking for anything warm and alive to eat. Fry shook her head. Those old miners must have lived in constant terror of what they would find around the next boulder.
