One Last Breath. Stephen Booth

his memory was of that time. The events ought to be imprinted on his mind, but even now there were gaps in his recollection that he couldn’t fill. Some of it had come back to him almost randomly in the days and weeks following his arrest, with a sudden, sharp detail hacked out of his memory by a question from the police or a snatch of music in the next room. But not everything. A few of the triggers he needed were still missing, and he didn’t know where to find them.

      Quinn eyed the barman to see if he was watching and took a drink of his tonic water, which tasted sharp and bitter, like acid. After a while, he regained his composure and noticed the smells of food drifting from the kitchen. He’d eaten nothing since breakfast at the prison that morning, before his eight thirty release. He found a menu on the table, and ordered scampi and chips.

      ‘Don’t panic,’ said the barman, when he brought the food. ‘But do you want tartare sauce?’

      As closing time approached at eleven o’clock, Quinn finished his drink and went to his room. He paused in the passage to listen to the sound of staff chatting and clattering their cooking equipment in the kitchen, wondering if they were talking about him. On the landing, he walked under the lens of a security camera that pointed towards his room. He would pass it again tomorrow on the way out.

      He’d started thinking about cameras in Edendale, when he noticed the CCTV system covering the shopping area. He had watched the cameras swivelling on their tall poles, and had pictured the operators in a room somewhere – a bit like the control room at Gartree, where they’d watched every move he made when he was out of his cell. But in Edendale they were watching everyone. And nobody seemed to mind.

      Quinn counted the number of licence conditions he’d already broken. He hadn’t kept his appointment at the probation office, he wasn’t living where he was supposed to, and he hadn’t told his probation officer where he was going. There were people he wasn’t supposed to get in contact with, too. But what was the saying about a sheep and a lamb?

      All the money he had was a bit of cash he’d earned working on the farm unit and his discharge grant. The grant was equivalent to a week’s benefit, and was supposed to cover him until he received Income Support or Jobseeker’s Allowance. At least he didn’t have to worry about gate arrest, as so many prisoners did when they were due for release. The police had shown no interest in him.

      His room at the Cheshire Cheese was almost filled by a double bed. A shower cubicle stood in one corner, and a couple of steps led down to an alcove containing a toilet and washbasin. A small TV screen perched high up on a bracket near the ceiling. Quinn paced the room for a while. It was dark outside by now, so he drew the curtains. On the window ledge he found a small teddy bear sitting in a spindle chair with a black-and-white cat on its knee.

      He played with a touch lamp on the bedside table, then he lay on the bed and pressed buttons on the TV remote. A game show appeared and he left it on, not listening to the voices but watching the faces of the contestants. They seemed to be family groups – mother, father, a couple of teenage kids. They smiled and laughed at the compere’s jokes. But Quinn knew there would be arguments in the car on the way home. Tears, accusations, the old resentments and insults dragged out and rehearsed all over again.

      Soon, he began to feel tired. Anger tended to drain all the energy from him. He peeled off his charity-shop clothes and took a shower, knowing it might be the last he’d have for a while. The hot water felt good on his skin.

      When Quinn got into bed, he could still taste the bitterness of the tonic water in his mouth, and the spiciness of the tartare sauce. The two flavours mingled in his thoughts as he drifted into sleep. Spice and bitterness, bitterness and spice. The taste of blood and kisses.

      7

       Tuesday, 13 July

      No matter how many dead bodies he’d seen, Ben Cooper would never forget the first. He’d been thirteen years old at the time, a pubescent youth in baggy jeans. Until then, he’d been protected from most of the unpleasantness of the world. He was oblivious to the grubby human realities that were waiting to jostle him with their sharp elbows and breathe their stale breath into his face. He’d thought he was immortal then. He’d thought that everyone around him would live forever, too. But most of the things he’d believed were wrong.

      It was shortly before Christmas, and the pavements in Edendale had been cold and wet. Ben and his mother had been shopping for last-minute presents and the vast amount of food involved in celebrating a family Christmas at Bridge End Farm. The young Ben had been tired and bad tempered, and he was sulking about being dragged round the shops. It was already dark by late afternoon and illuminated Santas hung from the lamp posts, while plastic trees twinkled in every shop window.

      ‘Mum, can we go home yet?’ he’d been saying, without any hope.

      And then they had turned the corner of Bargate and walked into a small crowd of people on the pavement between the Unicorn pub and Marks and Spencers. They were arguing with a policeman and each other as they waited for an ambulance to arrive.

      In the middle of the crowd, a man had been lying on the floor, covered with a sheet that someone had brought out from the pub. Only the soles of his boots were showing, tilted at an unnatural angle. The wet pavement around him had reflected the Christmas lights, breaking up their colours into fragments of rainbow, as if the man had been lying in the middle of an oil slick.

      That was all Ben could take in before his mother hurried him away. There had been no blood to see, no injuries, no staring eyes or offensive bodily fluids. It had been the boots and the angle of them, impossible in life, which had told him the man was dead.

      And now, in Rebecca Lowe’s home, it was the small things again that conveyed the story of violent death. Not the blood or the stains on the kitchen floor, or even the distinctive smell. It was the way her head had tipped too far back and lay at an angle that would make it difficult for her to breathe if she were alive. It was the position of her right hand, still curled in a spasm as it clutched at the floor, the fingers digging so hard into the tiles that her nails had splintered and broken, and the pale varnish lay around them in flakes of glittering dust. And it was the single blue sandal, turned the wrong way up, lying on the floor a few inches from the victim’s foot. Her toes were pointing towards it, as if she had been reaching to retrieve her sandal in her last moments, but had failed.

      Some of the team had been allowed into the house, entering via the integral garage into a passage where they could access the lounge and dining room, and reach the stairs. Cooper had been waiting in the garage for ten minutes with other officers until the door had been opened, and there hadn’t been enough oxygen in there for them to share. He’d have given anything for a bit of fresh air right now.

      Inside the house, Cooper paused in the hallway and looked into the lounge. Fitted carpet lapped from wall to wall, and from doorway to doorway, flowing out into the hall in an unbroken sea of Wilton. Thick curtains covered the windows – in fact, not just the windows, but the whole wall from floor to ceiling, a great blanket of brown velvet designed to shut off the room from the outside, as if the double glazing wasn’t enough to do the job on its own.

      He imagined that everything in the house had been sealed: the fireplace would have no chimney, the doors would be insulated, and no doubt the roof space was layered with fibreglass. Parson’s Croft felt like a warm cocoon.

      To Cooper, it seemed unnatural to think about hiding away from the outside world to such an extent. If you were going to cut yourself off from the sun and fresh air like this, you might as well be in prison. And in any case, when a killer had come looking for Rebecca Lowe, her house had given her no protection at all.

      An hour earlier, Cooper had found Diane Fry at the rendezvous point on the outer cordon, outside the front gate of Parson’s Croft.

      ‘Ah, Ben,’ she’d said. ‘How nice to see you. Well, this is what is technically known as a crime scene. There’s usually at least one involved in a major enquiry, such as the murder case we’re currently investigating.’

      ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

      ‘I tried to call