‘So that’s why they call it Moss Chamber,’ he said. The think he’s sort of claimed it as his own, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘I think you’re right.’
Page had opened the door for him, and Cooper had looked out into the darkness of the gorge, glad that he could no longer see the gaping mouth of the cavern.
‘Do you know what the men say who were part of that rescue operation?’ said Page. ‘While they were working, they could hear Neil Moss breathing. It was very loud, because the shaft acted as a kind of amplifier, and the sound filled the chamber they were in. They said it was the worst thing in the world to be able to hear a man breathing, yet not be able to see him or reach him. Eventually, the breathing stopped. Stopped for ever …’ Page paused. ‘Unless, like some folk, you have too much imagination.’
286
The thunder woke Cooper at five in the morning. It had been a threatening rumble in the distance for a while, but now it was very close. It crackled in the sky overhead like somebody ripping the clouds apart. He could hear the rain again, slapping on the roof of the conservatory and the flags of the back yard. Soon, it was tumbling from the sky in bucket loads.
Cooper knew he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep while the storm lasted. He was even more certain of it when he heard one of the cats calling plaintively from the kitchen, and knew that he was about to get a ball of wet fur on his bed.
As he tried to avoid Randy’s muddy paws, he thought of the people who would be outside just now, perhaps caught in the open by the downpour. Mansell Quinn was out there somewhere - though maybe he would have found himself a shelter from the storm. Quinn was a man who planned his actions carefully, and he’d have been prepared for the storm. He might even have known it was coming.
At least William Thorpe wasn’t out there tonight. Thorpe wasn’t a man to make long-term plans. If Raymond Proctor hadn’t agreed to take him back in, he’d probably have been sleeping rough again by now. The fact the police were interested in him would have driven him from his familiar refuges. He wouldn’t have thought to take precautions against drowning in a cloudburst. But for tonight, he was safe and dry. Or dry, at least.
Cooper shivered, imagining himself as wet and cold as the cat’s fur under his fingers, but with nowhere to go.
Wide awake now, he got out of bed and went to the window. He pulled back the curtain just in time to see a flash of sheet lightning above the roofs of the houses on Meadow Road. It lit up the slates and chimneys for a second, leaving an imprint on his retinas before the rattle of the thunder followed.
When the rain eased off, he went to check on the cats and
287
see if there were any leaks in the conservatory. On an impulse, he pulled on a coat, grabbed a torch and stepped outside. He shone his torch on the ground and swung it from side to side. There were dozens of snails - big ones, trailing right across the gravel path from the crevices in the stone wall to the patch of grass that Mrs Shelley called a lawn. Their winding silvery tracks reflected in the torchlight, crossing backwards and forwards over each other in an apparently haphazard fashion.
The picture he’d conjured of Mansell Quinn lying up somewhere safe and dry suddenly seemed unlikely. On the contrary, this was exactly the sort of time Quinn would choose to go out. Cooper imagined him emerging from the black mouth of Peak Cavern, slipping silently through the gorge in the rain like the outlaw Cock Lorrel, bent on murder.
He shuddered, and turned back towards the house. Most police officers couldn’t avoid bringing their work home in their heads now and then, especially if they didn’t have anybody to talk to. Many of them said it was vital to have another human being around with their own concerns - someone who wanted to talk about shopping or food, or new clothes for the kids. It helped to fill the space in your mind with something else, so you didn’t find yourself going over and over the events of the day. Particularly if it had been a bad day. And there could be a lot of bad days.
Cooper had no one at home now, no one waiting with their own concerns. He knew this was why he got obsessed with little things, like snails crawling up his window. It was only to avoid having to think about the alternative - the trails of human slime that sometimes twisted and turned through his head.
288
27
Friday, 16 July
The next morning, a vast puddle filled the yard behind 8 Welbeck Street. When Cooper went out of the back door to examine the damage, he found Randy and his friend Mrs Macavity sitting on either side of the puddle. Neither of them wanted to get their paws wet, but they couldn’t find a way around the water. The cats looked hopefully at Cooper when he appeared, but he wasn’t sure which of them he should help across. Besides, he was sure they’d just decide they were on the wrong side of the puddle and demand to be carried back.
‘Don’t worry, folks,’ he said. ‘It’ll go down in a day or two.’ But all he got was a look of contempt in stereo.
Like a man troubled by a nagging toothache, Cooper kept returning to his internal reconstruction of the Carol Proctor murder scene. He worried at it as he drove into town that morning. He had a feeling that something was wrong with his scenario of events at the Quinn house in October 1990, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.
Another thing bothered him, too: the uncomfortable gap between Sergeant Joe Cooper’s return to the house and the arrival of what his statement called ‘Specialist Officers’.
289
When Cooper had first joined CID, one of the older detectives had been the type who loved to give advice. He would take any chance to lean confidentially across a desk, the bottom buttons of his shirt popping over his beer belly and his nicotine-stained fingers tapping on Cooper’s shoulder. Even now, Cooper could recall the DC’s response to a particularly naive remark about ‘the rules’.
‘Now, lad, nobody’s asking you to break the rules,’ he’d said. ‘Good detective work isn’t about breaking rules. It’s about finding ways around the restrictions they put in our way. Legal ways, you understand. Nobody would argue with that, would they?1
Cooper still heard similar things even now. And it was strange how there always seemed to be a ‘they’.
There were rules for everything, of course, if you chose to follow them. The rules told you what to do when a dead body was found. Whatever the circumstances, the first officers arriving at the scene would check the victim was indeed dead. If a suspected offender was present, they had to make an arrest. They’d collect information and take steps to protect any evidence. Obviously, the chain of command would shift as senior officers were brought in. But in the initial stages the FOAs had a lot of responsibility.
And no scene of sudden death was pretty. The amount of blood could be so overwhelming that it drove everything else out of the mind. Some detectives became bar-room pathologists. They had a detailed knowledge of
