Majesty’s prisons any more, but a facility of the National Offender Management Service.
Entering the underpass, she followed a broad white line that divided the path from a cycle track that ran through on
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its way to Ashbourne. Traffic buzzed overhead on the A50. Emerging on to the side of a small road, she found a pair of bus shelters facing each other across the carriageway. On this side, the buses to Sudbury and Burton on Trent stopped.
The shelter had all but one of its glass sides knocked out, and it would be pretty miserable in there waiting for a bus. Rain came down the banking from the A50, and spray blew in from the traffic passing towards Sudbury. Instead of a bench, a sort of plastic bar had been fitted for people to perch on, as if they were birds. Signs in the shelter told passengers how to reach the prison through the underpass. Everything was painted a drab, institutional green. Perhaps the colour had been chosen specifically for the people who would use it to get to and from the prison.
Try as she might, Fry couldn’t conjure up the image of Mansell Quinn perched in the shelter waiting for a bus to take him to a new life at the end of his sentence. She’d seen photographs of him, but they had lacked the spark of humanity that might have enabled her to form a picture of him as a real, living individual. All she saw in her mind’s eye was a dark, amorphous shape passing across her line of vision, not standing still to be pinned down but forever moving on somewhere else.
Fry found herself frustrated by the failure of her imagination. She couldn’t work out what had been going on in Mansell Quinn’s mind. There were too few dots to be joined up yet.
But there had been another prisoner released at the same time as Quinn: Richard Wakelin, twenty-five, from Derby. The two men had been seen talking as they left the prison gates. Perhaps Wakelin could help her to get a glimpse of what had been in Quinn’s head that morning.
Ben Cooper had parked under one of the maple trees in the Castleton car park to get a bit of shade, and he hoped the car wouldn’t feel quite so much like a blast furnace when
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he got back in. One family had removed their shoes and sandals and were paddling in the stream alongside the car park, while a couple with two panting dogs had allowed them to splash in the water to cool off.
Cooper decided they should walk into Castleton to get an ice cream. He had a fancy for a dark chocolate Magnum, and the girls went along to humour him. What he hadn’t anticipated was that they would insist on climbing the hill to Peveril Castle.
‘It’s a long way up,’ he said.
‘We can’t come to Castleton without seeing the castle,’ said Amy, as if the logic were obvious. ‘Look at all those other people going up. Some of them are even older than you, Uncle Ben.’
By the time they reached the top of the hill, Cooper was sweating. The grass was warm from the sun, and he was glad of the chance to lie down while the girls explored the ruined keep of the castle. At close quarters, the tower looked gaunt and forlorn. One side of it seemed to have crumbled away over the centuries, reduced to a ruin by locals stripping the stone to use as building materials for their homes.
According to the guide books, the castle had originally been built by a bastard son of William the Conqueror to protect his local mining interests and hunting preserves. Cooper hoped the girls didn’t ask, in case he had to explain what a bastard was.
When he got his breath back, Cooper walked along the wall and looked down into the dale. A middle-aged couple looked up and waved. Then Cooper noticed two men together in a sheltered spot near the entrance. He couldn’t see them clearly, but one of them was wearing a black waterproof with a hood, despite the heat. He watched them for a moment, wishing he weren’t so suspicious, but with thoughts of predatory paedophiles going through his mind as he heard the voices of children in the dale.
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In fact, the two men seemed harmless, although there was some tension between them, one standing and the other sitting, as if they’d had a disagreement. A gay couple, perhaps - they should have chosen somewhere that wasn’t so easily overlooked.
A siren began to wail at the cement quarry. Somewhere in the vast excavations, half a mile behind the works, they were preparing to blast more limestone out of Bradwell Moor. A minute or two after the wailing a sharp boom reverberated in the depths of the hillside like a single stroke of a bass drum. A cloud of white dust drifted over the edge of the quarry.
The Peak Cavern system wasn’t far from the hole blasted to feed the cement works. Any passages running southeast would emerge from the face of the quarry. Who knew what undiscovered stalactite-hung chambers might have vanished in the blasting over the years?
Cooper looked round for his nieces and spotted them peering from one of the windows of the tower. It was his temporary responsibility for them that was making him paranoid, he supposed. Maybe this was what being a parent was like.
Passing the prison sign and the officers’ mess to return to the car, Diane Fry took one more look at the violently colourful display of bedding plants and sneezed. A few seconds later, she sneezed again. She could feel the membranes inside her nose swelling and her eyes starting to water. Damn. Hay fever.
The pollen count must be up today. She’d been told she should always try to breathe in through her nose instead of her mouth, to filter out the dust and pollutants in the air and prevent them from reaching her airways. Her grass pollen allergy had been worst in her late teens and early twenties, but it still hit her now and then, forcing her to resort to sunglasses to reduce the irritation to her eyes - even if it
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meant having to put up with cracks from the station wits about her having deserted E Division for the LAPD.
She got back into the car with Murfin, and they were soon heading towards Ashbourne on the A515. As they passed a tractor dealer’s, Fry looked across the fields to the rows of cream-coloured huts that formed the prison, with several large greenhouses lined up behind them. She thought of how hot it would be inside those glass buildings among the plants. Stifling.
‘Get anything useful?’ said Murfin, unsettled by her silence.
‘Yeah. Everything I could possibly want.’
Andrea Lowe stopped her brother at the door, her hand on his arm enough to communicate her concern.
‘Stay here,’ she said.
Simon shook his head. ‘No, I can’t.’
‘Why not?’ she said.
‘Jackie will be worried sick.’
