‘Mmm. Not sure. But it doesn’t make any difference. Everything was tied up.’
‘The weapon?’
‘It was in the kitchen. It looked as though he’d been trying to wash the blood off it. Quinn was arrested right there at the scene. It was a self-solver. And, after he’d been interviewed, Quinn changed his story anyway. He pleaded guilty. So, no problem.’
‘The similarities with the Rebecca Lowe killing are obvious,’ said Fry, ‘apart from the absence of the suspect from the premises. I suppose he just learned his lesson the first time.’
‘In the Carol Proctor case, there was some question of an alibi,’ said Cooper.
‘In the early stages, yes. Quinn tried to give us a story about the time he left the pub where he’d been drinking with Raymond Proctor and William Thorpe. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, it was, in Castleton.’
‘I know the place. It’s hardly any distance from the Quinns’ ho’use in Pindale Road.’
‘And that was a relevant point, Cooper. Quinn maintained that it took him only five minutes to drive home from the Cheshire Cheese, so he couldn’t have left the pub before three fifteen - about ten minutes before he dialled 999.’
‘Three fifteen would have been chucking-out time. There was no all-day opening in 1990.’
‘Yes. And Quinn’s argument was that he couldn’t possibly have had time to drive home, unload his tools from the car, go into the house, get into an argument with Carol Proctor, stab her several times, and then make the call. Not in ten minutes.’
‘I think I’d agree,’ said Fry.
‘Indeed. But Quinn’s two pals failed to support that version of events. When we interviewed Proctor and Thorpe, they
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both said their friend had left the pub earlier, before three o’clock. Quinn couldn’t account for the rest of the time.’
‘How long had they been drinking that day?’ asked Cooper.
‘Since before one o’clock. And they were all heavy drinkers, by their own admission.’
‘Five, six pints of beer? More?’
‘Their statements don’t quite agree on the amounts,’ said Hitchens.
‘But Quinn wouldn’t have been sober.’
‘Far from it, Cooper. In fact, he was asleep when the first officers arrived at Pindale Road.’
Fry sucked in her breath. ‘Asleep? “With a woman lying dead on the floor in front of him, soaked in her own blood? What sort of man is that?’
She watched both Hitchens and Cooper drop their eyes and avoid the question.
‘And after that,’ said the DI, ‘Quinn could only say that his memory was hazy.’
‘I damn well hope the vivid details came back to him eventually,’ said Fry.
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16
The sound of Carol Proctor’s last breath still haunted him. Sometimes, when he lay in bed in his cell at night, he’d imagined all those hundreds of thousands of branching tubes, and all the millions of tiny sacs that had made up her lungs. He tried to picture the membrane that covered them. It was a fraction of the thickness of tissue paper, they said - but a hundred square yards of it, bigger than a tennis court. It seemed impossible that it should fail to draw in a breath. Just one more breath.
Mansell Quinn closed his eyes and tried to feel Carol’s lungs as if they were his own, receiving all the blood from her heart with every beat, feeding oxygen into her arteries, supplying her brain and her heart and the other organs of her body. And then he imagined the whole system stopping, like a clock winding down. Her chest rising and falling more slowly, until the final breath had been forced through the slackened muscles of her throat with that dry rattle, the scrape of escaping air that he’d heard and still remembered.
The memory of that sound only made him more angry. So angry that he wanted to smash something.
Quinn breathed deeply for a few minutes to regain control, then sat up slowly. Sudden movements were much more likely
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to be noticed, even here among the trees, with a cover of deep bracken. But the only people he could see were the same two anglers on the banks of one of the fishing lakes, so motionless with their nets and tackle boxes that they might be asleep.
The sight of the cement works chimney across the other side of the lakes reminded him of Will Thorpe. There was some place near here that Will had talked about using as a class , but Quinn didn’t plan to turn up anywhere that he might be expected to.
Talking to Will had been surprisingly difficult. For the last fourteen years, Quinn had talked to no one about his past. For all his fellow prisoners and his personal officer knew, he had no memories to speak about. Perhaps they thought he wanted to start his life afresh and put everything behind him.
But Quinn’s memories were still there. They lay in his heart, cold and heavy. He thought of them as being like the shapes in the petrifying wells at Matlock Bath, which his father had taken him to see as a child. Some of them were ordinary household objects, hardly recognizable for what they’d once been, the accumulated layers of lime rendering them useless drip by drip, but preserving them for ever in their grotesque forms. They’d been turned to stone.
His father had talked about a petrified bird’s nest that had belonged to his grandmother. It had been a gift from a relative who’d spent a holiday in the Peak District - and the only connection the Quinn family had had with Derbyshire until they moved there. Like the other souvenirs sold in the shops at Matlock Bath, it had been left in one of the petrifying wells until it had covered over with lime and attained the peculiar appearance that visitors prized so much. Quinn had never seen the nest, though he’d pictured it in his imagination. The detail that had impressed him most was that the nest had been complete with eggs.
‘Four of them,’ his father had said. And he would hold up
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four stubby fingers, pitted with blue scars, as if his son couldn’t count. ‘Real eggs, turned to stone. Imagine the little chicks inside them.’
