remember where it led. There was light coming through the doorway, yet it ought to be dark. A sweet scent hung on the air that he should know, but he couldn’t name it. It was his own house, yet it had become a place he’d never seen before. It was an alien landscape, painted in blood.
Quinn looked down at her face, and the shock hit him a second time. He felt a desperate rush of hope that it might be possible to undo everything and turn the clock back, so
that nothing had happened at all. What if he’d come home a bit earlier, or later? Or if he hadn’t been held up by the roadworks on Back Street? What if he’d left his tools in the car, instead of taking his time getting the bag out and bringing it into the house, worrying about thieves going by on the road in the night, instead of what might happen in the next few minutes?
If he could take just one step back in time, her body might not be lying on the sitting-room floor, and the blood might magically fade from the carpet, like an advert for a miracle cleaner. She might stand up and laugh, and explain why she’d pretended to be dead. And life would go back to the way it had been before.
But Quinn had heard her die. The sound of her last breath had convinced him, not the sight of the blood or the slackness of her joints. And he knew his mistake had been made much earlier - years before, when he’d first met her and the whole thing had started. And now his life would never be normal again.
In a moment of silence, Quinn became aware of his own breathing. The sound of it seemed to fill the room, harsh and rapid, like the panting of a hunted animal, a rabbit in the jaws of the dog. He had never listened to his breathing before. He had never felt his lungs struggling to find air, or heard the shallow gasp that rushed across the roof of his mouth, like a cold wind inside his head. He didn’t like the noise, and he was glad when the music started again to fill the silence in the house.
What was that music? Why was it playing? Quinn nodded at someone, though there was no one else in the room. He remembered that he hadn’t found what he was looking for. The words had replaced the others in his head. He still hadn’t found what he was looking for. But he hadn’t been looking for the lime-green sweater. That shouldn’t be here at all.
Then he noticed the wetness soaking through his jeans to
his knees. He stood up, staring at the purple stains on the denim, and at the blood spreading from the soles of his boots. It was so deep that it welled up from the carpet when he moved his feet.
Unsteadily, he walked round the body, praying it might look different from another angle. But all he saw now were his footprints in the blood. The carpet had been gold once a gold shadow pattern, one of the first things he and Rebecca had chosen when they were decorating the house. She’d be upset that the carpet was ruined.
Quinn looked at his hands again, and the blood reminded him of something he should do. The phone stood on a table by the door. He dialled 999, and somehow remembered his address.
‘Yes, 82 Pindale Road. An ambulance, please.’
He tried hard to listen to the voice of the operator, though he was distracted by the metallic smell of the blood on his hand and the slippery feel of the phone in his fingers.
‘Police? Yes, probably.’
When that was done, he felt as though his legs wouldn’t support him any longer. He made it back across the carpet and collapsed into an armchair. His eyes were drawn to the clock on the wall over the mantelpiece. He knew the clock was important for some reason. He listened to its ticking, waiting for it to penetrate the fog in his brain and tell him what else to do.
Finally, Quinn remembered the most important thing of all. The children. And he should have hidden the knife. The knife was dangerous.
But then exhaustion overwhelmed him, and his head fell back against the chair. When the first police officers arrived at the house, they found Mansell Quinn asleep. He was dreaming that the whole world could hear him breathing.
Monday, 12 July 2004
Today was the day Detective Constable Ben Cooper was
supposed to have died. For practical purposes, he was already
dead. His feet and hands felt icily cold, as if death might
be creeping up on him slowly, claiming his body inch by
inch.
For the past half hour, Cooper had been unable to move his arms or his legs, or even his head. Mud-stained rock filled his vision, every crack and protrusion glistening with dampness in the beams of light that swung across the passage. He could smell the mud and sweat around him, and hear the splashing of water as it echoed in the confined space. The rock was so close to his face that his breath condensed on it and fell back on him as mist. It filled his mouth with its taste. The sharp taste of stone.
Cooper had never imagined that he’d feel so helpless. The roof seemed to be sinking closer towards him, pressing down to crush his skull. He could sense the mass of the hill poised overhead. One tiny movement of the earth’s crust over Derbyshire, and millions of tons of rock would flatten him where he lay. He’d be squeezed to a juice, reduced to an inexplicable red smear for future geologists to find.
‘Only a few more minutes,’ said a voice in the darkness, ‘and we’ll reach the Devil’s Staircase.’
Then the light went off the roof, and Cooper could see nothing at all. For a moment, he thought the rock had already crushed him, and he began to panic. His lungs spasmed as if there were no oxygen left for him to breathe.
Cooper felt himself tilted violently backwards, but he was strapped in too tightly to move. Looking up from this angle, he saw a cluster of yellow PVC oversuits glowing in the sporadic light. Lamps created pools of luminescence around them and distorted their shadows on the roofs and walls. But there were no faces visible in darkness.
He was jolted again. He was sure the stretcher would turn over and tip him on to the floor of the passage, where he’d drown lying helpless in two feet of muddy water. And that would be the end of his career in Derbyshire CID. He’d never expected it to be like this.
