When he saw me enter the room, the Defendant said, ‘I don’t know what the hell’s happened here.’
Lying on the floor of the room was the body of a woman I now know to be Mrs Carol Proctor. There was a considerable quantity of blood around the body, and I noted a knife on the floor nearby. It was a large kitchen knife with a serrated edge. I formed the initial impression that Mrs Proctor was dead.
I summoned PC Netherton, who entered the room. I instructed him to observe the Defendant while I approached the body of Mrs Proctor and checked for signs of life. There were none. I then used my radio to summon assistance, whereupon the Defendant rose from his chair, as if to attempt to leave the room. I told him. that I was placing him under arrest and I cautioned him, to which he made no reply. PC Netherton assisted me in handcuffing the Defendant, who offered no resistance.
PC Netherton then placed the Defendant in our vehicle, while I secured the scene and waited the arrival of Specialist Officers.
Signed: Police Sergeant 285 Cooper
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Ben Cooper closed the file, and shuddered. It was as if the words on the page still carried the breath of the man who’d spoken them.
The file had been lying on his desk for almost two days, since DI Hitchens gave it to him on Tuesday. But his reluctance to read it had been justified. Even from a quick scan, it was clear that Sergeant Joe Cooper must have been alone at the scene of Carol Proctor’s murder for a short time. There would have been a crucial gap, if only for a few minutes, between the prisoner being escorted to the police vehicle and the arrival of CID, scenes of crime officers, a medical examiner, and the whole paraphernalia.
Cooper knew from experience that once the mob descended on a murder scene, it could be chaos for a while. A lot depended on the officer who had taken responsibility for securing the scene. Any contamination that happened before that point couldn’t be helped. But once the scene was secured, precautions were foremost in everyone’s mind.
Though DNA would not have been foremost in the minds of the officers at a crime scene back in 1990, it would have been even less significant to the perpetrators. Back then, fingerprints would have been the main worry. Offenders wouldn’t have thought twice about leaving other traces of themselves. Hence the high detection rate for cold cases crimes that had lain on the files for years. It came as a shock to many criminals to find they could be connected to an offence they committed fifteen years ago.
Cooper looked again at the photographs of the Quinns’ sitting room. If Quinn had maintained his innocence and persuaded somebody to take up his case, perhaps to pursue it as far as the Criminal Cases Review Commission, then evidence might have turned up to throw doubt on his conviction. Traces might have been found on the knife, on the victim’s clothes, or on the Coke bottle standing on the table.
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In fact, those traces might be found even now, if the evidence had been stored in the right conditions. But there had been no reason for anyone to doubt Quinn’s conviction.
Cooper paused, and looked a bit more closely at the bottle. Who had been drinking from it? Had it been Mansell Quinn, who had allegedly had arrived home only a few minutes before becoming involved in a violent argument with the murder victim? Or Carol Proctor, who wasn’t even in her own home but had let herself in with a spare key to surprise her lover?
Flicking through the files again, Cooper found an interview with Raymond Proctor. He’d answered questions the way a bereaved husband might be expected to: he seemed shocked, uncomprehending. He had no explanation for what had happened. He hadn’t been aware that his wife had been conducting an affair with Mansell Quinn, though he admitted their marriage had been going through a rocky patch. Proctor told the interviewers he’d known Quinn for twenty years. They’d started work as labourers for a local building firm at the same time, straight from leaving school. The two had become close friends, drinking together regularly in the local pubs - no doubt before they were of legal age, though that went unsaid. Carol had been ‘one of the crowd’, a girl they’d both known but whom Raymond Proctor had later married. Quinn had agreed to be his best man, just as he had for William Thorpe.
Cooper skipped through the transcript to the afternoon of Carol Proctor’s death. According to Proctor, he’d arranged to go for a drink in the Cheshire Cheese with Mansell Quinn and Will Thorpe, who was home on leave from the army. They’d drunk several pints of beer - Proctor couldn’t remember how many rounds, but it was Thorpe they’d both been trying to keep up with. At some stage, Quinn had switched to single-malt whiskies.
It was difficult now to imagine the three men as they
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would have been in their thirties. But Cooper suspected there might have been some tension in the group - perhaps between the experienced soldier, Will Thorpe, who had seen action in Northern Ireland by then, and the two older men, who had barely been outside Derbyshire. Usually, male friends drifted apart when their lives diverged to such an extent. Cooper wondered whether they’d have had much to talk about, or if there had been some kind of ritual element to the meeting, just something they’d always done and were still doing after twenty years. Maybe they’d been drinking quickly to numb the embarrassment, to overcome the feeling that they had nothing to say to each another.
Cooper wanted to know who had suggested the meeting, but it seemed that nobody in the interview room at West Street in 1990 had thought to ask Raymond Proctor. Of course, the interview had been approaching the crucial question by then. The times had been important, and the two detectives had probably spent a good deal of effort maneuvering Raymond Proctor towards a statement that was as precise as it could be. Proctor claimed that Mansell Quinn had left the Cheshire Cheese first, at about ten to three, leaving Proctor and Thorpe together until chucking- out time - which meant they’d staggered out of the pub at around three-twenty, this being a Monday afternoon.
Cooper put the transcript down and picked up Thorpe’s statement. It was a shorter document, referring mostly to the drinking session in the pub. Again, the interviewee had been questioned carefully on the time of Quinn’s departure. Thorpe’s story coincided with Raymond Proctor’s to within a couple of minutes.
Despondent now, Cooper checked the statement list for an independent witness. The landlord of the Cheshire Cheese had been interviewed. He remembered all three of the men being in the bar that afternoon, but was unsure about the exact time they left, because the place had been busy. The
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only other thing he recalled was that the last round of drinks had been bought just before closing time by Raymond Proctor, and had consisted of two pints of beer. No malt whisky for Mansell Quinn, then.
Cooper sucked at his teeth. As evidence, it wasn’t just peripheral but orbiting somewhere beyond Pluto. Quinn might still have been there, but falling behind his friends’ consumption of alcohol. Besides, Proctor and Thorpe were the only sources for the claim that it was Quinn who’d been drinking whisky.
If the two men had conspired to concoct a story undermining Quinn’s alibi, they’d been taking a big risk. The landlord might have remembered seeing Quinn, and so might some of the other customers. Assuming the enquiry team had taken the trouble to ask them, of course. But Quinn had presented himself as the obvious suspect. Why bother to put in unnecessary work on the case?
Cooper went back to Proctor’s statement. The final thing to strike him was a question about the Quinns’ house.
