Cooper tried to let that sink in. ‘Sir, are you saying Mansell Quinn could have been innocent all along?’
‘I think Mansell Quinn might believe he was innocent. And that’s all that matters.’
‘Is it?’
‘I think so, in the circumstances. Don’t you, Ben?’
Hitchens smiled, as if inviting Cooper to join with him in a small conspiracy. But Cooper felt unable to respond. Something inside him seemed to be inhibiting his reactions. He was afraid he was missing something, or that he wasn’t going to ask the right question. Or maybe that he would blurt out the right question, and the DI would give him the truth. And then it would be too late.
‘Do you think Quinn knows my father is dead?’ he asked instead.
‘I have no idea,’ said Hitchens with a small sigh of relief.
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‘I suppose it’s a question we could ask his probation officer, or his personal officer at Sudbury.’
‘We’ll be talking to those people anyway, won’t we? I mean, about any comments he might have made regarding his family, or his old associates.’
‘Yes, we will.’
‘So it might not seern too odd to be asking whether he ever talked about Sergeant Joe Cooper.’
‘Mmm.’ Hitchens sounded doubtful.
‘I suppose it might seem odd to the officers tasked with making the enquiry, though,’ said Cooper, trying to interpret the DI’s hesitation.
‘Damned odd, unless we explained the reasons to them. And then the results of their enquiries would have to be put into their report, and that would go back to the receiver in the incident room and be looked over by the analyst, and then entered on to the HOLMES system by one of the operators, and maybe it would generate another action which the allocator would give to a second enquiry team …’
‘Enough,’ said Cooper.
‘You see how complicated it is?’
‘Yes.’
Hitchens watched him for a moment. ‘So, what do you think, Cooper?’
Cooper swallowed painfully. The effort of trying to control his physical reactions was becoming almost too much to bear. Till deal with it.’
Then the DI had nodded and smiled. ‘And do you know, Ben - that’s exactly what your father would have said.’
As he made his way back across the rope walks, Cooper smelled the hemp again, pungent with the scent of animals. He looked up at the black soot stains on the roof and thought of Alistair Page’s tale of Cock Lorrel and the Beggars’ Banquet,
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all the wickedness and blood-soaked horrors imagined by superstitious locals.
But if the people who’d lived in the cavern all those centuries had meant no harm to anyone, they ought not to have become objects of fear and hatred, stigmatized as cannibals and worshippers of the Devil. They ought to have been left alone.
And that’s what his father would have said, too.
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13
Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin passed through the security checkpoint at the gate lodge. The building nearest to the entrance was the officers’ mess, which was surrounded by banks of colourful flowers. Yellow, purple, white and red. Fry thought the purple ones might be pansies, but there were very few flowers whose names she knew. Murfin wouldn’t know them either, unless they were something he could eat, so there was no point in asking him.
At the entrance to the visitors’ parking area, warnings had been posted of the penalties for helping prisoners to escape or bringing in prohibited items like drugs. They offered the prospect of ten years in prison yourself or a 10,000 pounds fine, which would certainly deter most visitors. But there had been nobody to help Mansell Quinn escape, even if he’d wanted to. Fry had just learned that Quinn had received only one personal visitor during his stay at Sudbury.
‘Where are you going?’ said Murfin. ‘The car’s over here.’
‘Wait for me, Gavin. I won’t be a minute.’
She walked over a set of speed humps towards the steel fence. A few black-and-white cattle grazed beyond the fence, and outside the gates two young prisoners with shaved heads and green waterproofs were picking litter from
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the grass and filling black bin liners with it. A prison officer stood watching them, glancing occasionally at his watch. Until she noticed the waterproofs, Fry hadn’t realized it was raining. It was a gentle rain here, not the downpour of the night before.
Then she saw a pedestrian underpass leading beneath the main road, the A50. When she walked into it, Fry found it smelled of urine and the floor was scattered with rubbish and bits of broken blue plastic. Perhaps the litter team weren’t allowed this far from the gates.
The rain had run down the grass slope and pooled in the bottom end of the underpass. Only half the lights were working down here. But it looked like a deliberate policy rather than mere vandalism, because there was a precise alternation - dark and light, dark and light, all the way along to the exit. Half of the fluorescent tubes had either been removed or switched off.
This was something Ben Cooper would do - follow the movements of a suspect, reconstruct his actions, try to get into his mind and understand what he’d been thinking. After an hour inside the prison, Fry believed she had an inkling how Mansell Quinn might have felt on his release. It wasn’t the worst institution she’d ever been in, but the atmosphere was oppressive nevertheless.
Sudbury had been built as a hospital to take wounded US airmen during the D-Day landings in 1944, and most of the original single-storey accommodation was still in use - rows and rows of long, cream-coloured huts. By the time she left, Fry’s head had been buzzing with positive PR for the prison regime: education and training, pre- release courses, resettlement schemes and community projects. Strictly speaking, Sudbury wasn’t even one of Her
