from the main enquiry team that put Mansell Quinn away. However, the actual arrest wasn’t made by CID but by uniforms. The suspect was still at the scene when the first officers arrived and so the FOAs arrested him. They found the knife, too. Obviously, Quinn hadn’t given any thought to concocting a story before the patrol turned up.’
Cooper shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand, sir.’
Hitchens sighed. The know how much the death of your
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father meant to you, Ben. I think it still bothers you a lot, am I right?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The words hardly came out, because Cooper’s mouth felt numb. His mind had latched on to the acronym FOA - first officers to arrive. A uniformed patrol responding to a 999 call. He had a sinking certainty that he knew what the DI was going to say next. ‘So in the Mansell Quinn case … ?’
Hitchens nodded. ‘Yes. After Carol Proctor was murdered,’ he said, ‘the arresting officer was Sergeant Joe Cooper.’
Ill
11
Another enquiry team had been assigned the action on Mansell Quinn’s friend, William Thorpe. And good luck to them. According to the initial intelligence, he was living on the streets, as so many ex-soldiers did.
To Diane Fry, ‘living on the street’ meant one of the big cities - Sheffield or Manchester, maybe even Derby. Edendale didn’t have many homeless people. Those who hung around the town were too much of a nuisance to the tourists to be tolerated for long. If Thorpe had been surviving locally, he’d have been picked up by a patrol, but there was no record of it. The only leads were his drunk-and-disorderly charge in Ashbourne, thirty miles to the south, and the existence of an ex-wife, long since divorced. So that action was likely to tie up two unlucky DCs for a good while.
Fry was on victim’s background. The only trouble was, she’d been teamed up with Gavin Murfin. Their first task was a visit to Dawn Cottrill, Rebecca Lowe’s sister, who had found the body.
Mrs Cottrill lived at the end of a modern cul-de-sac in Castleton. It was what the designers called a ‘hammerhead’ close, opening out into two stubby arms at the top. Fry understood this to be something that the planners insisted on to
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provide room for fire appliances to turn round. Otherwise, the whole point of these modern developments was to allow people to feel they were out of the way of the passing hoi polloi, while still being handy for the shops.
As they drove into the road, two young men in dark suits and white shirts were walking up the drive of one of the houses. They had short hair and carried leather satchels.
‘Watch out,’ said Murfin. ‘Jehovah’s.’
‘What?’
‘Jehovah’s Witnesses. Don’t stand still when you’re out in the open, or they’ll get you.’
‘Just concentrate on the job, Gavin.’
By the time they’d found somewhere to park the car, the two young men had disappeared - maybe somebody had actually let them in. As Fry looked around the cul-de-sac, she realized it must have been one of the last developments built in Castleton before the national park planning regulations were tightened. To stem the influx of affluent outsiders, the only planning permissions given now were to affordable homes for people who’d lived in the village for at least ten years or had strong family ties with the area.
‘Well, I’m not local enough,’ said Murfin when she mentioned it. ‘And I’m damn sure you’re not. They probably lynch Brummies around here.’
‘I’m from the Black Country.’
‘You sound like a Brummie, though. Maybe you’d better let me do the talking, Diane.’
‘What does Dawn Cottrill do?’ asked Fry.
‘She’s a lecturer at High Peak College. Economic history.’
‘Educated, then.’
‘Well, obviously.’
‘Maybe you’d better let me do the talking in that case, Gavin.’
Dawn Cottrill had iron- grey hair in a bob. Her face was pale, and her cheekbones seemed very prominent. Fry could almost
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have believed that her hair had turned grey overnight since her sister’s death, that her face had been sharpened by the pain.
‘It seems impossible to believe that something like this could happen again,’ said Mrs Cottrill. ‘But this time …’
‘Yes, I understand,’ said Fry. ‘When you think something is a long way in your past, it’s very shocking.’
They had been ushered through the house on to a sort of wooden veranda overlooking the garden. The decking had been partly covered with rugs and set out with a table, on which stood glasses and a jug filled with fruit juice and ice. Fry and Murfin sat on a settee with a blue blanket thrown over it and cushions scattered everywhere.
Dawn Cottrill sat with her back to the sun, perhaps to avoid having the light in her face as she talked. With a steady hand, she poured them a drink. Fry was impressed by the woman’s composure, a reassuring sign when her job was to ask difficult questions.
‘Mrs Cottrill, do you happen to know when your sister last saw her ex-husband, Mansell Quinn?’
‘It would be the final visit Rebecca made to him in prison. Not the open prison at Sudbury, but about two before that. I’m sorry, but they seemed to keep moving him from one prison to another. I think this one was somewhere in Lancashire.’
‘And that last visit was several years ago, I think?’
‘Oh, yes. I can’t remember how long exactly, I’m afraid. But Andrea was still quite young.’
‘Before the divorce and her new marriage, though?’
‘Of course. Rebecca was only married to Maurice Lowe for eighteen months before he died. He had a heart attack, you know. He’d been playing squash. I always thought it was too energetic a game for a man of his
