One Last Breath

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Then the DI sat down at last and folded his hands on the desk, intertwining his long fingers nervously.

‘This is a bit difficult, Cooper,’ he said. ‘But, first of all, you’ve got to remember that the Carol Proctor killing was nearly fourteen years ago. I was a divisional DC then, much like yourself. A bit younger, in fact, but every bit as keen. Anyway, it was my first murder case, so I remember it well. I made notes of everything. Of course, things were done a bit differently in those days.’

Cooper nodded. He had run out of things to say.

‘All the senior officers on the case have long since retired,’ said Hitchens. ‘The SIO died three years ago. Heart attack.’

‘I’m sorry. Was he a good detective, sir?’

Cooper knew that the first Senior Investigating Officer you worked for on a major enquiry could make a lasting impression, like an influential school teacher. He still thought fondly of DCI Tailby, who he’d worked for a couple of times.

‘A good detective? Not particularly,’ said Hitchens. ‘He was an old school dick – some of them were still around in the early nineties. He had his own ideas about how things were done. Well, he wasn’t the only one, of course.’

‘No, sir.’

‘My old DS is still around, but he’s a training officer at Bramshill now,’ Hitchens continued. ‘That only leaves me from the main enquiry team that put Mansell Quinn away. However, the actual arrest wasn’t made by CID but by uniforms. The suspect was still at the scene when the first officers arrived and so the FOAs arrested him. They found the knife, too. Obviously, Quinn hadn’t given any thought to concocting a story before the patrol turned up.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand, sir.’

Hitchens sighed. ‘I know how much the death of your father meant to you, Ben. I think it still bothers you a lot, am I right?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The words hardly came out, because Cooper’s mouth felt numb. His mind had latched on to the acronym FOA – first officers to arrive. A uniformed patrol responding to a 999 call. He had a sinking certainty that he knew what the

DI was going to say next. ‘So in the Mansell Quinn case … ?’

Hitchens nodded. ‘Yes. After Carol Proctor was murdered,’ he said, ‘the arresting officer was Sergeant Joe Cooper.’

11

Another enquiry team had been assigned the action on Mansell Quinn’s friend, William Thorpe. And good luck to them. According to the initial intelligence, he was living on the streets, as so many ex-soldiers did.

To Diane Fry, ‘living on the street’ meant one of the big cities – Sheffield or Manchester, maybe even Derby. Edendale didn’t have many homeless people. Those who hung around the town were too much of a nuisance to the tourists to be tolerated for long. If Thorpe had been surviving locally, he’d have been picked up by a patrol, but there was no record of it. The only leads were his drunk-and-disorderly charge in Ashbourne, thirty miles to the south, and the existence of an ex-wife, long since divorced. So that action was likely to tie up two unlucky DCs for a good while.