One Last Breath. Stephen Booth

understanding what was happening, perhaps even a bit hurt. Then the doors closed, and the driver accelerated away from the stop.

      Quinn watched the bus until it was out of sight. Despite the noise of traffic, all the cars were passing above him, on the main road. He looked for a moment at the exit from the concrete underpass, at the barbed-wire fences and the pale, bland acres of corn. Then he crouched, picked up a lump of stone that had fallen from the banking, and hurled it at the bus shelter. A glass panel shattered and crazed, its broken fragments showering on to the tarmac like crushed ice.

      For a moment, Quinn smiled at the noise that exploded into the silence. And then he began to walk. Behind him, four words still seemed to echo amid the sound of shattering glass: Who did you kill?

      3

      Rebecca Lowe’s new house in Aston had been built to be almost airtight. The insulation created a difference in the internal air pressure from the outside world, so that the back door opened with a soft little cough as it parted from its draught-proof lining. The air was sticky outside, and the thunder flies were swarming. The tiny black insects covered everything when she wasn’t looking, and even the thought of them made her skin prickle, so that she constantly wanted to wash her face.

      Inside the house, she had air conditioning. It had been one of the things Rebecca had insisted on after the discomfort of the previous summer and its record high temperatures. She couldn’t bear the humidity, which made her head ache, her temples throb and her hands slippery with perspiration. She’d slept badly for weeks, and changed her bedclothes every morning. The rumble of the washing machine had become a permanent background accompaniment to the long summer days.

      In the new house, she could be cool. Parson’s Croft had been built of breeze-block on the inside, but with local gritstone on the outside, so that it blended in with the older houses and the landscape, as well as meeting the national park planning regulations. The site had a belt of mature sycamores and chestnut trees to screen the house and provide shade when the sun was in the west. But the air conditioning only worked properly if she kept all the doors and windows closed. Sometimes, the atmosphere in the house tasted stale, as if she were breathing the same air over and over again. It created its own kind of oppressiveness, a feeling that was almost as bad as the humidity outside.

      Her dog Milly felt it, too. She lay in her basket all day, dozing restlessly, until it was time for her evening walk. And even when she got outside, she was bad tempered. She would yap at strangers, or worry obsessively at a stick or a piece of stone lying on the grass verge.

      Today, Rebecca felt she would even welcome rain to bring a bit of freshness. As she finished washing up and wiped her hands, she walked into the lounge to look out through the double-glazed picture window. She examined the view down into the Hope Valley and up the slopes of Bradwell Moor and Abney Moor, her gaze skirting quickly past the tall chimney of the cement works in Pindale. Grey clouds were gathering over the moors, with darker patches among them, like blue bruises in the sky. There might be a shower later, with a bit of luck.

      The phone rang in the still air. Rebecca put her towel down on the window ledge before she answered it, immediately identifying a familiar voice.

      ‘Mum, you know what day it is today?’

      ‘Monday,’ said Rebecca. ‘There, you see – I’m not entirely ga-ga yet. Try me with another one.’

      She heard her daughter sigh at the other end of the line. She could picture Andrea sitting in a coffee bar somewhere, or striding along a London street with her mobile phone clamped to her ear. Living independently in the city and being good at her job as a buyer for a big retail chain had turned her into a formidable young woman.

      ‘Today’s the day he’s coming out, Mum,’ she said.

      ‘Yes, they told me.’

      ‘Aren’t you worried?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘You’re not? But, Mum, what if he comes out there?’

      Rebecca was still looking out of the lounge window. She could see nothing but the flowering cherry tree and buddleias at the bottom of her garden, and a pair of mature lime trees. Red-and-black butterflies fluttered around the buddleias, bright and gaudy in the sun. A flycatcher dipped from his perch on the telephone wire, caught a mouthful of food on the wing, and landed back on the wire in one graceful movement.

      ‘I don’t think he’ll come here,’ she said.

      ‘A change of name isn’t going to fool him, you know.’

      ‘Of course not, Andrea.’

      ‘So what will you do, Mum? What precautions are you taking?’

      ‘Well, I haven’t fed Milly for days,’ said Rebecca lightly.

      ‘Mum, a geriatric Shih Tzu isn’t going to do much to protect you from an intruder, no matter how hungry she is.’

      ‘I was joking, dear.’

      Rebecca moved a little to the right and lifted the curtain aside. Beyond the lime trees, she could see part of the field that backed on to the garden of Parson’s Croft. The field sloped away towards a stone barn where the farmer kept hay as winter fodder for his sheep.

      ‘This is nothing to joke about, Mum. You’re remembering to set the burglar alarms, aren’t you?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ said Rebecca.

      ‘Mum, if you’re not taking any precautions, I’m going to have to come up there and make sure you do.’

      ‘No. I don’t want you to.’ But then Rebecca heard her daughter’s intake of breath, and realized she might have sounded rude and ungrateful. ‘Not that I wouldn’t be pleased to see you. I always am, dear, any time. But I’m all right. Really.’

      ‘What about Simon? He’ll come and stay with you for a while. You know he will.’

      ‘Yes, he offered, but I told him not to. He’s not very far away, and I can always phone him. But I don’t want you or your brother to think you have to drop what you’re doing. You’re both much too busy.’

      She heard her daughter sigh. ‘But, Mum –’

      ‘Look, I’m sure he won’t come here.’

      ‘Mum, remember what happened. You do remember what happened?’

      ‘Of course, dear. I was involved at the time. You weren’t.’

      ‘Not involved? I was twelve years old. You may not have been paying much attention to me, but I knew exctly what was going on.’

      ‘Not exactly,’ said Rebecca. ‘I don’t think you can have known exactly what was going on, can you?’

      ‘Well, OK. Just don’t tell me I wasn’t involved, Mum.’

      Rebecca leaned to the left and let her forehead touch the glass of the window. This way, she could just make out the gable end of her neighbours’ roof. It was another new house, but much bigger than hers, with a fishpond, stone terraces, and a vast billiard-table lawn with sprinklers that ran eighteen hours a day in the hot weather. She rarely spoke to them, but they would occasionally smile and wave if they passed her in their Jaguar as she walked Milly on the lane.

      ‘I’m sorry, Andrea,’ she said. ‘You’re right. It must have been very traumatic for you.’

      Her daughter went away from her phone for a couple of seconds. Rebecca could hear background chatter, and wondered if Andrea was mouthing a commentary at somebody sitting with her, wherever she was, exclaiming in exasperation at the impossible eccentricity of her mother back home in Derbyshire.

      ‘Well, anyway,’ said Andrea when she came back to the phone, ‘what on earth could you have to talk to him about now, Mum?’

      ‘There are things,’ said Rebecca, ‘that you might say were still unresolved.’

      ‘Oh