the biological processes of dying, an expertise gained from attending scenes of death and postmortem examinations, but not one of them could claim that he’d never made a mistake at a crime scene. Mistakes were part of human nature. They were a different thing from deliberately breaking the rules.
Cooper had plenty waiting for his attention when he got to the office. But he reached first for the transcripts of the inter290
views with Mansell Quinn in October 1990. Two detectives, an inspector and a sergeant, whose names Cooper didn’t recognize had conducted most of the sessions with Quinn. DC Hitchens appeared in the transcripts a couple of times, but didn’t seem to have asked many questions. He’d have been too junior then, still learning the ropes in a major enquiry.
‘You spent some time in the army a few years ago,’ the DS had said.
‘I signed up in the Foresters with Will Thorpe. He was still a lad, really, and he’d got a bit bored of living in Derbyshire.’
‘But what about you? You already had a family by then, didn’t you?’
‘It was a bad time,’ said Quinn. ‘The building firm I worked for relied on contracts from the steel works in Sheffield. But the steel industry started to fall apart, and there was no work coming in, so they laid me off. There wasn’t much else to do around here.’
‘So you joined the army?’
‘When Will said he was joining up, it seemed like a good idea. It was a regular wage for a few years, you see. I didn’t plan to be a soldier for ever. At the four-year mark I came out, but Will stayed in.’
That would be in 1986?’
‘Just in time for the boom in the building trade. I was lucky. I got myself on my feet pretty quick after that.’
‘But you had some trouble while you were in the army, didn’t you? Fighting - once in a pub near your barracks, and twice with local youths.’
‘A few bits of bother here and there. Nothing major. But they told me I’d be better off employed doing something else.’
‘Didn’t you like the army?’
‘Yeah. It was interesting. And it’s a good feeling to have a lot of close mates around you.’
‘So why did you keep getting into trouble?’
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‘Same answer really.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean there are things you do for your mates,’ said Quinn.
‘There were others involved when you got into these fights?’
‘Look, it’s all water under the bridge, that. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Let’s talk about something else, then. Let’s talk about Carol Proctor …’
A packet of photographs landed on Cooper’s desk, interrupting his reading. ‘Thanks,’ he said, without looking up to sec who’d brought them. He knew they must be the prints from the trainspotter’s film. He slid them out and poked through the pile, pushing aside shots of trains and more trains, locomotives in the distance and in close-up, trains travelling into the sun, trains coming out of the sun.
And there it was. With two First North Western diesel units moving away from him on the Manchester line, and the express coming towards him on the other, Mansell Quinn had been caught on camera at Hope Station, half a mile from his ex-wife’s house, within an hour of her murder. It seemed fairly damning.
‘Gavin,’ he called across the office, waving the packet. ‘Photos.’
Murfin looked up in amazement. ‘Not the trainspotter?’
‘Yes.’ ‘Judging by your face, he came through with the goods, so to speak.’
‘I think so.’
‘Bloody lucky.’
Cooper tapped his nose. ‘Instinct, Gavin.’
‘My missus doesn’t like me having instincts. She says it’s mucky.’
Cooper held the print closer to study the dark figure on the westbound platform. The most that could be said was
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that there might be a slight hint of hesitation in Quinn’s posture. It wasn’t the look of a man with his mind set on impending violence, not the attitude of someone driven by anger. He looked uncertain, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was.
Or so it seemed to Cooper. But he’d been told often enough that he tried too hard to empathize with victims and suspects alike. The moment he felt the first hint of understanding or sympathy for Mansell Quinn, he knew he’d have to keep it to himself. Theoretically, he ought to share his thoughts with Diane Fry, as she was his immediate supervisor. But she would only ridicule them.
Murfin leaned over to look at the photo. ‘Mmm. Pity there wasn’t a CCTV camera on the platform.’
‘Too true.’
A couple of minutes of tape would have told Cooper whether he was imagining the hesitation. If he could see Quinn actually walking along the platform, it might reveal that any uncertainty was merely that of a man who had just been released into the outside world. When would Quinn last have travelled on a train? More than thirteen years and four months, anyway. His transfers between prisons would have been by road. And when would he last have been in Hope? Same again. Under the terms of his licence, he was supposed to live in Burton on Trent until he settled somewhere in south Derbyshire, or back in his old childhood home in Wales.
‘This is definitely Quinn?’ said Murfin. ‘Where are the other pictures of him?’
