Fry had two more people to interview this afternoon first, Mansell Quinn’s probation officer, and then a convicted burglar called Richard Wakelin, aged twenty-five, who lived in Allestree, on the outskirts of Derby. Wakelin had been the last person to speak to Quinn on his release from LIMP Sudbury. She didn’t think that Quinn would have said anything to either of them that would hint at his intentions or where he was heading. But the long shots had to be covered. At the moment, they had no other leads.
On her way through Ashbourne, Fry pulled in at a chemist’s and bought herself some Zirtek antihistamine tablets. She ought to have had pollen-extract injections before the summer started. The tablets would be nowhere near as effective, but at least they’d make life more tolerable.
On the train back to Hathersage, Ben Cooper showed his return ticket to the guard, who simply nodded, making no effort to clip a hole in it or tear it to show the return portion had been used. It didn’t seem quite right to Cooper. It meant he could use the same ticket again later in the day, if he felt like it. That sort of thinking must come from mixing with too many criminals.
He took a closer look at his ticket. It showed the date and time he’d bought it, as well as his starting point and
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destination. In addition, there was a long serial number seventeen figures in total. Before he got off at Hathersage, Cooper asked the guard what happened to his ticket machine when he finished his shift.
‘I just hand it in at the office with the money, and collect a new one when I clock on again the next morning.’
‘Thanks.’
Cooper watched him go through his routine, checking passengers on and off the train, closing the doors, giving the driver his signal. A small crowd had got on at Bamford, and the guard hadn’t managed to issue tickets to them all by the time the train arrived in Hathersage.
If the train had been full on the evening that Mansell Quinn had travelled on it, the guard might not have reached him by Bamford, or even Hope. There must be people who managed to take short journeys without ever buying a ticket. It wasn’t likely that the guard would remember one individual who’d ridden two stops on a busy evening run, unless that passenger drew attention to himself.
And a man planning to commit murder wasn’t going to do anything to draw attention to himself, was he?
As Cooper walked back down the ramp to the car park at Hathersage, the smell of garlic was wafting from one of the bungalows. Someone had tied a bouquet of flowers to the station fence as a funeral tribute to a train service that had been cancelled. The flowers themselves were long since dead.
‘How did you get on with the lycra ladies?’ he asked Murfin, who was waiting in the car.
‘They’re a bit self-obsessed.’
‘They didn’t notice anything?’
‘Nope. And, worse than that, they weren’t interested in me. Still, I got a coffee out of it. No cake, obviously. What about you, Ben?’
The met a trainspotter.’
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‘Well, the afternoon wasn’t entirely wasted, then. Did you get his autograph?’
‘Better - I got a film.’
‘You’re hoping to get evidence that Quinn was at Hope? A bit of a long shot, isn’t it?’
Yes, of course it was. And it still wouldn’t answer the big question: where did Quinn go after he left Rebecca Lowe’s house at Aston? Back to the station? If so, he might have retraced his route and returned to his mother’s home in Hathersage. Alternatively, he could have stayed on the train and travelled as far as Sheffield, or crossed the tracks and been in Manchester within an hour.
In either case, it would be difficult to track him down. No known associates of Quinn’s lived in either city, so there was nowhere to start. DCI Kessen could ask for Quinn’s details to be circulated to all the B&Bs, hostels and cheap hotels but there must be hundreds of them, possibly thousands. And what about the railway and coach stations? The airports, even? How much money did Quinn have with him, anyway? Might his mother have subbed him, handed over her life savings to help him get clear? Could she have found enough for an airline ticket? Nearly two days had passed since Rebecca Lowe had been killed. In theory, Mansell Quinn could be anywhere in the world by now.
Cooper shook his head. There was only one consolation. Any one of these scenarios might make Quinn more difficult to find - but at least it would mean he was out of Derbyshire for a while, and therefore not a threat to anyone else he might have on his list. But in his heart, Cooper felt that Quinn was still around.
He looked at the Ordnance Survey map he kept in the car, locating Aston and then the railway station half a mile away down the slopes of Win Hill. The station was a long way out of Hope village. That was because instead of continuing up the Hope Valley, the line took a shallow curve to follow the
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course of the River Noe and crossed a series of small bridges before it met the cement works spur. Trains had to pass over three unmade roads leading to farms or isolated homes. He could see some of the names on the map - Farfield Farm, Birchfield Park, the Homestead.
And there, just a little way to the north of Hope station, less than a mile west of Rebecca Lowe’s house, was the track that led to Wingate Lees. The Proctors’ caravan park.
Cooper shivered, though he wasn’t cold. Thunder flies had coated the windscreen of his car, dying slowly in their dozens on the hot glass. He tried to clear them away, but his wipers smeared them into a sticky mess, leaving greasy swirls embedded with black specks. It took several minutes before he could see clearly enough to drive back through Hathersage.
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20
Before she got ready to go out that night, Diane Fry spent ten minutes running through some exercises, winding down from the day, flexing her muscles and stretching her limbs until her body tingled comfortably.
It had been a frustrating afternoon. Neither the probation officer nor the released prisoner, Richard Wakelin, had been able to offer her any insights into Mansell Quinn’s mind. It looked as though Quinn had been playing his cards pretty close to his chest for some time, as if he knew that somebody like her would come along asking questions.
In the middle of a bend, Fry found herself looking at a patch of wallpaper, noticing where the edge had starting peeling away from the wall. She’d never really noticed it before. She always felt she’d been lucky to find the flat in
