One Last Breath. Stephen Booth
with the cleaner.
‘You won’t remember him, DS Fry,’ he said. ‘Quinn got a life sentence for murder some years ago. He lived in Castleton, a few miles up the road from here, in the Hope Valley. Do you know it?’
‘A tourist honeypot, isn’t it?’
‘Interesting place, actually. I went there as a kid. I remember being particularly impressed by the sheep – they came right down into the centre of the town. I suppose they must have been looking for food. I hadn’t seen one up close before.’
‘Sir?’ said Fry. ‘You were talking about somebody called Quinn …’
‘Yes, Mansell Quinn.’ Hitchens swung his chair back again and gazed out of the window. His eyes seemed to go out of focus, as if he were staring beyond Edendale to the country further north – towards Hope Valley, on the fringes of the Dark Peak. ‘Well, Castleton’s quiet most of the year, when the tourists aren’t there. People know each other very well. Quinn’s case caused quite a stir. It was a pretty violent killing – blood on the sitting-room carpet, and all that.’
Fry hadn’t been asked to sit down, so she leaned against the wall by the door instead.
‘A domestic?’
‘Well, sort of,’ said Hitchens. ‘The thing was, Quinn denied the charge at first, but entered a guilty plea at trial. Then he changed his mind again when he’d been inside for a while. He said he didn’t do it after all.’
‘A bit perverse. Did he get parole?’
‘No.’
‘He ruined his own case, then. The parole board would have thought he was in denial.’
‘It doesn’t work like that any more. Early release depends on an assessment of any future risk you might pose, not on whether you’ve accepted the court’s verdict. The Home Office makes an issue of it in its policy for lifers these days.’
‘They were forced into that, weren’t they?’
‘That’s a sore point around here, Fry.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Risk assessment,’ said Hitchens. ‘That’s what it comes down to. We know about risk assessment, don’t we?’
Fry nodded. Too often, it meant covering your back, a means of avoiding litigation or compensation payouts. But that was one thought she didn’t articulate. It might not have been what the DI meant.
‘Mansell Quinn had behaviour issues,’ said Hitchens. ‘He had to undertake anger-management training in prison.’
‘And he still didn’t get parole?’
‘No. Quinn served thirteen years and four months, until he reached his automatic release date.’ Hitchens turned round fully in his chair and leaned forward on his desk. ‘And that date is today. Mansell Quinn was due to collect his belongings and walk out of HMP Sudbury at half past eight this morning.’ Hitchens looked at his watch. ‘Half an hour ago, in fact.’
‘So?’
‘Quinn will be on licence. He’s supposed to move into temporary hostel accommodation in Burton on Trent, and he has an appointment with his probation officer this afternoon. One of the conditions of his licence is that he stays away from this area. We’ve been asked to keep an eye out for him, in case he breaches his conditions.’
Fry shrugged. ‘So what if he does turn up here? Sometimes prisoners get a bit over-excited about being out and decide to celebrate. We might find him in a pub somewhere, but it will mean nothing.’
‘Probably.’
She straightened up to leave the DI’s office. But then Fry hesitated, feeling there might be something more that he hadn’t told her.
‘Anger management? So Quinn is a violent man, would you say, sir?’
‘No doubt about it,’ said Hitchens. ‘He has a long history of violent incidents in his past. In fact, he got knockback early in his sentence because he assaulted a fellow prisoner. He broke the man’s arm and removed a couple of his teeth. And he couldn’t explain why he did it. Or wouldn’t.’
‘And what about the original murder?’
‘Well, there was certainly enough blood at the scene. The place was like an abattoir. Not what you’d want your sitting room to look like – especially in your nice new three-bedroom detached house in Castleton. Pindale Road, that was the place.’
Fry settled back against the wall with a sigh. ‘What happened exactly?’
‘Well, it seems that Quinn had made his way home from the pub, where he’d been drinking with his mates all afternoon. There was a row; he lost his temper, grabbed a handy kitchen knife … And bingo – a body on the floor, blood on the shag-pile, and the suspect still on the premises when a patrol responds to the 999 call. Terrible scenes with the kids arriving home. The whole street hanging out of their doors to see what was going on and generally getting in the way. All the usual mess. The victim was dead at the scene. She had multiple stab wounds to her body.’
‘An ordinary domestic, then,’ said Fry, irrationally disappointed. ‘One like thousands of others. I suppose the reasons for the argument might vary a bit, but the choice of household object doesn’t usually show much imagination. And it’s always the wife who ends up dead on the floor.’
‘Except there was one big difference in the Quinn case.’
Fry lifted her head.
‘What?’
‘The body on Quinn’s sitting-room floor,’ said Hitchens. ‘It wasn’t his wife’s.’
2
Sudbury Prison, Derbyshire
There used to be poppies in every cornfield once – they were bright red, like splashes of fresh blood. Mansell Quinn was sure he’d seen them all through the summer. As soon as the sun came out, they were everywhere in little clusters, peering from among the yellow stalks, nodding their bloodied heads in the sun, waiting for the combine to scythe them down. For a few hot days each year, a field in the bottom of the valley would be filled with entire red rivers of poppies, pooling and streaming, moving slowly in the breeze.
This morning, he noticed for the first time that there was a cornfield right across the road, its acres of brown stalks just starting to seed. The fences around it were strung barbed wire. Quinn looked for poppies in the corn, needing that glimpse of red. But there were no poppies.
As he walked towards the outer gate clutching a plastic carrier bag and his travel warrant, Quinn began to realize that even his liberty clothing was too big for him, and too stiff to be comfortable. He’d lost weight during the last fourteen years, and his body had hardened, as if a callus had grown over his skin, the way it had grown over his heart.
Past the gatehouse, he turned to look back for the last time. Above a bank of flowers was the white sign with its slogan Custody with Care and a mission statement: committed to rehabilitation and resettlement of prisoners.
Eight thirty was time for the morning collection. Right now, a court van was turning in through the gate and slowing for the speed hump, its steel grilles and reinforced doors making it look like an armoured personnel carrier. As Quinn stepped on to the grass to let it pass, the driver gave him a cautious glance, though the van would be empty yet this morning, its cage still smelling of too much disinfectant.
‘I’ll be home in an hour or so. And I can’t bloody wait. What about you?’
The man who fell into step alongside him was at least twenty years younger than Quinn, somewhere in his mid-twenties. He had short, gelled hair and a tattoo on the side of his neck, and he looked freshly shaved and scrubbed. He could have mingled with any bunch of lads in town on a Saturday night – which was just what he’d be doing by tonight, no doubt.