One Last Breath. Stephen Booth
You sound like a Derbyshire bloke, though.’
‘That’s exactly what I am.’
‘Right.’
But Quinn had been born in the Welsh borders. It was there that the poppies had filled his summers. He supposed they must have found their way into the seed that the farmers sowed, or lay hidden in the ground until disturbed by the plough. Then they would flower before the wheat ripened, flourishing secretly between sowing and harvest. For the young Mansell Quinn, those poppies had been like a glimpse of wicked things existing where they shouldn’t be.
But when his father had got himself a new job as a forester on a country estate near Hathersage, his family had moved north to the Hope Valley. There were no cornfields among the gritstone hills and shale valleys of the Dark Peak.
The young man laughed. ‘You mean you’re getting right away from the old place? I don’t blame you, mate. Not for a minute.’
Quinn had no idea who the lad was. Yet in a way, they were as close as brothers. There were things that created a bond, ties that didn’t need to be talked about in these few minutes between the prison gate and the outside world.
‘Have you got somebody waiting at home for you?’ said Quinn.
‘Bloody right. I told her we’d get married when I came out. It’s only right, for the sake of the kids. We’ve got a council house and everything.’
‘Lucky.’
‘Yeah. I won’t be going back, that’s for sure.’
Quinn had stopped listening. His mind was on another house and another family.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you have to go back.’
‘You what? What are you saying? You know nothing about me, mate.’
‘No,’ said Quinn. ‘Nothing.’
The young man’s edginess subsided. It was only tension born of a fear of the unknown.
‘I’m Rick. You?’
‘Quinn.’
‘I’ve seen you around, I think. But I’ve not spoken to you before.’
‘Make the most of it.’
They walked across the road from the gate. This road was a dead end, created to serve the prison when the Sudbury bypass had been built. Ahead of them was the entrance to a concrete underpass.
‘So where are you heading?’ said Rick.
‘Burton on Trent. Some hostel my probation officer fixed up.’
The underpass was damp and smelly, a dim tunnel leading towards a patch of light. Their voices echoed from the walls, but the sound of their footsteps was muffled by the dirt floor.
‘First thing tomorrow,’ said Rick, ‘I’ll be off to Meadowhall to get myself a load of new gear. Well, after I’ve slept off the hangover from tonight, anyway. Getting pissed is the first priority.’ He laughed. ‘You too, I bet.’
‘Me too what?’
‘You’ll be getting some new clothes.’
Quinn looked down at what he was wearing. One of the first things he should do was find one of those charity shops where they sold secondhand stuff for a couple of pounds – the places he’d seen on his escorted absences: Oxfam, Cancer Research, Help the Aged. In one of those shops, he could pick up some jeans and a couple of shirts, maybe an old jacket that smelled of fag smoke, and a pair of boots. Dead men’s clothes probably, but who cared? They’d make him less noticeable. He had his discharge grant in his pocket, but there were other things he might need money for. Dead men could provide his clothes for now. It would be appropriate, in a way.
‘I’ve even got a job lined up,’ said Rick. ‘What a stroke of luck, eh? My probation officer helped me. He’s a decent enough bloke. A bit of money in your pocket, that makes all the difference, doesn’t it? A home to go to and your family around you. I’m going to get my life sorted out, just you watch.’
‘Good for you.’
‘I mean, I’m only twenty-five – I’ve got my whole future ahead of me. Besides, you can’t waste your life away when you’re a dad. I want my two to be proud of me some day. I don’t want them to think they’ve got a dad who’s a waster because he’s spent most of his life in the nick, do I?’
‘No.’
‘Have you got kids yourself, then?’
Mansell Quinn grimaced, and his jaw tightened. He said nothing. But the young man hadn’t really been interested in an answer.
‘I want them to do better for themselves than I’ve done,’ said Rick. ‘I want them to work hard and get on in the world. So I’m going to set them an example from now on. I promised Sharon I would. My lad wants to be a doctor, and I’m going to help him do that.’
The A50 was dusty, and the passing traffic stank of petrol and hot metal. Quinn had inhaled more fumes in the past five minutes than in the last fourteen years. He wished there had been poppies in the field. They would have been a good omen – blood in the fields matching the blood in his mind. But their absence made him uneasy. For the first time it occurred to him that life in the outside world might have changed in too many ways while he’d been gone.
These days, he supposed farmers treated their seed with chemicals to kill the poppies, to make every crop they planted perfectly pure and golden, totally sterile and dull. There was no more scarlet among the yellow, no more blood in the cornfields. Now, the blood moved only in his memory.
Rick looked at Quinn, leaving his own fantasy world for a moment.
‘Have you been inside for a while, like?’
‘Thirteen years and four months.’
‘Thirteen years? That’s tough.’
Quinn could see him working it out. You learned to do that in prison – to calculate parole and automatic release dates, all the stuff that the system hid with acronyms, as if they were no more than letters on the page of a report, rather than the days of a man’s freedom. Rick could work it out for himself. Thirteen years and four months meant his sentence must have been at least twenty years, even without parole.
‘A lifer, then?’
They had emerged from the underpass, back into the light. Quinn turned slowly, trying to orientate himself. The busy stretch of trunk road above him was new, and he didn’t know which direction anything was from the underpass. It was almost as if the prison existed in a strange little universe of its own, created to keep it away from the rest of the world.
‘Yes, a lifer.’
He knew that Rick wanted to ask the next question, but something was stopping him – maybe he was distracted by the slight stirring of the air between them, a draught blowing up from the underpass, causing a swirl of dust at their feet. Rick opened his mouth to speak, but a look of doubt clouded his eyes and he didn’t ask.
‘Who did you kill?’ he wanted to say. But he didn’t.
And that was a good thing. Because Mansell Quinn might not have been able to tell him.
There must be a way for the buses to come down off the A50, because there was a stop right here near the underpass and another across the road. In fact, there was a bus coming now, on his side of the road, heading for Burton upon Trent.
‘Here we go, then. Here we go.’
Rick took a firmer grip on his carrier bag. He spat into the gutter and watched his saliva seep into the dust.
‘Good luck, mate,’ said Quinn.
His companion looked at him oddly, but his attention was diverted by the approach of the bus. As soon as it pulled up to the stop and the doors folded