One Last Breath. Stephen Booth

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      Fry tried to dial her home number, but eventually her own voice cut in on the answering machine. That didn’t mean Angie wasn’t there, just that she wasn’t bothering to answer the phone. She ought to have a mobile of her own. For a moment, Fry thought of buying her one – she had a feeling she could add an extra handset to her account quite easily. But that would be like treating her sister as a child.

      Like a neurotic mother, Fry found herself imagining the worst: Angie still sitting in the armchair at Grosvenor Avenue, heating white powder on a piece of tin foil and inhaling the fumes through a tube. Chasing the dragon – was that still what they called it? Heroin dealers existed in Edendale, of course, as they did in every market town in England, cutting their product for sale on the street with glucose, flour, chalk or even talcum powder. But in E Division they weren’t quite such big business or so well organized as the city operations, where Asian gangs had been moving in recently to compete with the East Europeans.

      Clean, Angie might be. But most worrying of all for Fry was the question of where her sister might have been getting a hundred pounds a day or more to feed her habit. And who she’d been scoring the smack from.

      Ben Cooper stood over the grave and read the inscription: Here lies buried … it began. But that’s what they all said. In this case, was it true?

      ‘It’s ten feet long, if it’s an inch,’ said Gavin Murfin. ‘I don’t believe it.’

      Old churchyards always filled Cooper with a sense of history. It was the thought of generation upon generation of the same families mouldering together under his feet. According to the memorial stones around him, scores of Eyres and Thorpes, Proctors and Fieldings had been buried here over the centuries. But this churchyard seemed to have mixed history with folklore.

      ‘A thirty-inch thigh bone is impossible anyway,’ said Murfin. ‘It must have been an elk or something.’

      ‘An elk?’

      ‘A reindeer. A moose. God, I don’t know. Something big, anyway. Something that lived around here in the Ice Age.’

      The Church of St Michael and All Angels stood high above Hathersage next to an earthwork built by Danish invaders. Transco had dug a hole in the road outside the church gates, and the smell of gas was strong when they got out of the car. But at least mobile phones worked up here. In many areas of the Hope Valley it was impossible to get a signal.

      Murfin had produced a ham sandwich from his pocket. He brushed some crumbs on to the grave, as if he were a grieving relative scattering the first handfuls of soil at a funeral, paying tribute to the dead. The plaque on the grave was quite specific: Here lies buried Little John, the friend and lieutenant of Robin Hood.

      ‘Is there any evidence?’ said Murfin. ‘I mean, have they done the DNA?’

      Among the newer graves to the west of the church, they could see a figure in a red T-shirt, with short blonde hair. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves, and she was dusting a headstone with what looked like a hearth brush. She bent occasionally to pull at a few weeds.

      ‘You definitely think that’s her?’ said Murfin.

      ‘There’s no one else here. And she answers the description the neighbour gave.’

      ‘OK, let’s talk to her then.’

      ‘No, we ought to wait until she’s finished,’ said Cooper.

      ‘Why?’

      ‘She’s tending her husband’s grave, Gavin.’

      ‘Right. And you don’t want to interrupt her while she’s enjoying herself. I suppose she’ll start singing in a minute, and do a little dance.’

      ‘Gavin …’

      ‘Yeah?’

      ‘Are you having trouble with your marriage, by any chance?’

      ‘Trouble? No, everything’s going according to plan. I’ll be dead in a year or two, and Jean and the kids will get the insurance money. Then everybody will be happy.’

      The woman in the red T-shirt straightened up, brushed off her hands and began to walk back through the rows of gravestones. From the front, she looked more her age, which must have been approaching seventy.

      ‘Who’s going to take the lead?’ said Murfin.

      ‘I suppose I’d better. She might need to be handled sensitively.’

      ‘That’s what I thought, too.’

      As the woman came nearer, she looked across at the two detectives, probably aware that they’d been watching her. She was only a few paces away, clutching a plastic bag with her gloves and brush in it, when Cooper raised a hand to stop her.

      ‘Excuse me – Mrs Enid Quinn?’

      ‘Can I help you?’

      Cooper showed his warrant card. ‘Detective Constable Cooper and Detective Constable Murfin, Edendale CID. We really need to talk to you, Mrs Quinn. You haven’t been answering your phone.’

      She was a slim woman with pale skin like lined parchment. Liver spots freckled her bare arms and thin hands. She looked up at Cooper with a faint smile, ironic and resigned.

      ‘Police? Well, I wonder what you could possibly want to talk to me about,’ she said.

      Enid Quinn took Ben Cooper and Diane Fry into her sitting room. Inside the house, her red T-shirt made her look even paler. She settled on a sofa and sat very primly, her hands folded on her knees, as she listened to Murfin and the two PCs trampling up her stairs.

      ‘Do I have to tell you anything?’ she said.

      ‘We’re hoping for your co-operation, Mrs Quinn,’ said Fry.

      The woman looked at Cooper’s notebook. ‘My son isn’t here.’

      ‘Where is he, then?’

      ‘I can’t tell you. Sorry.’

      ‘When you say you can’t tell us … ?’ said Fry.

      ‘I mean I can’t. I don’t know where Mansell is.’

      ‘Has he been here?’

      Mrs Quinn unfolded her hands and folded them again in the opposite direction. She gazed back at Fry steadily. ‘When?’

      ‘In the past twenty-four hours, perhaps?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘He hasn’t visited you? Or phoned you?’

      ‘No. I don’t know where he is.’

      ‘Nevertheless, we hope you might have some suggestions about where he could be heading. What friends does he have in the area? Is there somewhere he might think of going to stay – a place where he’d СКАЧАТЬ