Dead in the Dark

by Stephen Booth

  ‘So you think it was his own fault?’ said Hurst.

  Irvine was unmoved. ‘Death by misadventure,’ he said.

  ‘Have you talked to Mr Marston?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Yes,’ said Irvine. ‘He had the usual complaints about kids trespassing on his property and causing damage, or injuring his livestock. It’s true, too. Some of the incidents are on record. But he didn’t know any of the kids by name. Shane Curtis meant nothing to him. He didn’t see them either, but he doesn’t go outside much after dark.’

  ‘He lives alone?’

  ‘Apart from a couple of dogs. Long-haired German Shepherds, and they’re a bad-tempered pair. They’re chained up in a shed across the yard from the farmhouse. Mr Marston heard them barking last night, but he says the dogs often bark at foxes and badgers when they get their scent, so he didn’t go out to see if there was something wrong. Not until he noticed the fire, anyway.’

  ‘Surely he doesn’t work this farm on his own? He isn’t a young man.’

  ‘No, he uses a couple of part-time employees.’ Irvine held out his notebook. ‘He’s written the names down for me.’

  ‘Written them down for you? Have you lost your ability to write?’

  ‘No, just these names. His workers are both East Europeans.’

  ‘Where is Mr Marston now?’

  Irvine inclined his head towards the farmhouse. ‘He’s watching us round the corner of the barn. You’re welcome to see if you can get anything out of him, boss. I can’t.’

  Cooper found the old farmer leaning on a gate. Marston could have been any one of scores of farmers he’d seen leaning on the pen sides at the cattle market in Edendale, or grabbing a handful of fleece on a sheep at Bakewell Show. He wore the flat cap favoured by the older generation, rather than the baseball caps their sons and grandsons had opted for, and a pair of brown corduroy trousers tucked into his boots.

  ‘Mr Marston? Detective Inspector Cooper.’

  ‘Are you the bloke in charge here?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I gather from one of my officers that you have two East European men working here at the farm.’

  ‘You’re not immigration enforcement, are you?’

  ‘No, sir. Edendale CID.’

  He scowled. ‘Same thing.’

  ‘I just wanted to ask a few questions about your workers.’

  ‘Look, those two lads have been helping me out on the farm,’ he said. ‘Feeding the pigs, moving arks, scraping muck off the yard. They’re hard workers and they’ve never been any trouble.’

  ‘Do you talk to them much, Mr Marston?’

  ‘Well, not beyond the basics. They don’t speak much English. I show them what to do and they get on with it. We don’t exactly socialise.’

  ‘So you don’t really know anything about them, do you?’

  ‘I know all I need to,’ said Marston obstinately. ‘If you want to know more, you’ll have to ask them yourself.’

  Cooper saw this kind of obstinacy often. Perhaps it was a characteristic of people living and working in an environment where you needed a powerful streak of stubbornness to survive. No one wanted to admit they were wrong, or give in to what might look inevitable from the outside. He could admire that pig-headedness sometimes. But not always.

  He went back to the barn, where Irvine and Hurst were waiting.

  ‘Keep talking to people,’ said Cooper. ‘DS Sharma will be here soon. He’s dealing with the parents and getting a formal identification. You’ll report to him, okay?’

  Irvine and Hurst nodded and Cooper turned away to walk back to his car, stepping over the still smoking remains of a charred lump of straw.

  In a field nearby he heard sheep coughing and stopped to listen. In a human, he would have thought they were affected by the smoke. But this was a different type of cough.

  ‘Lungworm,’ he said.

  Irvine heard him, and stared across in amazement, as if he thought Cooper had just insulted him.

  ‘The sheep,’ called Cooper. ‘They’ve got lungworm.’

  Back at his office in West Street, Ben Cooper found a message waiting, asking him to call Detective Superintendent Hazel Branagh urgently. He picked up the phone straightaway.

  ‘Ben, thanks for getting back to me so quickly,’ said Branagh.

  ‘No problem, ma’am. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’ve just seen a request from you to give priority to a missing person case in Bakewell.’

  ‘That’s correct, ma’am.’

  ‘Why do you want pursue it?’ she said. ‘It’s just a missing person report. An adult missing from home, no indication of a crime or any other cause for concern.’

  ‘Because of the background,’ said Cooper. ‘The history, I mean – the Annette Bower case from ten years ago.’

  ‘I remember it well, Ben. You don’t have to tell me about it. I was the senior investigating officer.’

  ‘Of course you were.’

  ‘I’ve looked at the available information regarding the apparent disappearance of Reece Bower. I don’t think it can be regarded as a priority at the moment. Not with your arson death and the spate of armed robberies and everything else that’s going on in the division. You must see that, Ben.’

  Cooper bit his lip. She was right, of course. Without further evidence, it was officially low priority. But still …

  ‘Understood, ma’am,’ he said.

  He heard Branagh hesitate. ‘I wish I was still there in Edendale, you know,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

  ‘Of course. But it’s sometimes difficult to know when I can use my own initiative and when I need to refer things up the chain of command.’

  There was a short silence. Cooper thought he might have gone too far. But it turned out that Superintendent Branagh was thinking something quite different. When she replied, she had lowered her voice to a more confidential tone. Cooper instinctively leaned forward to listen what she had to say. He felt like a conspirator, worrying about electronic bugs in the light fittings of his own office.

  ‘Between you and me, Ben, I was always disappointed in the outcome of the Annette Bower case,’ said Branagh. ‘It felt like a personal failure for me as SIO.’

  ‘It was a CPS decision not to go forward with a prosecution,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Of course. But that just meant the evidence we’d gathered wasn’t considered strong enough. One contradictory witness cancelled out everything we’d done. All those weeks we’d spent working on the inquiry counted for nothing.’

  ‘They might have been right to make that decision,’ said Cooper cautiously. ‘A jury—’

  ‘Yes, yes. Perhaps it was right by their criteria. Reasonable doubt and all that.’

  Branagh made the phrase ‘reasonable doubt’ sound like a curse.

  ‘I take it you didn’t agree, ma’am?’ said Cooper.

  She was firm in her answer. ‘No, I didn’t. The Bower case was a miscarriage of justice. Oh, I know people usually take that phrase to mean someone who’s wrongly been found guilty. But it applies in these circumstances too. As far I’m concerned, Reece Bower escaped justice.’

  ‘A lot of people seem to share that view, ma’am.’

  ‘It’s also important to me personally, Ben. It’s been concerning me for ten years, ever since I saw Reece Bower walk free.’

  Even though he hadn’t been on the inquiry team, Cooper could remember the atmosphere in the station when the news came through of a new witness and an apparent sighting of Annette Bower alive and well. At first, the response had been sceptical, even dismissive. It always happened in a missing person case, or in the hunt for a wanted suspect. Sightings came in from all kinds of unlikely people and places. They had to be checked out, but it was rare they came to anything.

  In this case, everyone had been so convinced that Annette was dead that the report of a sighting barely caused a ripple. Perhaps they’d all been steered towards that certainty by the confidence of their SIO, Detective Ch
ief Inspector Hazel Branagh.

  But, gradually, the faces of the officers assigned to interview the witness told their own story. His statement was consistent; his account couldn’t be shaken; the witness would perform well on the stand under cross-questioning. In the end, DCI Branagh had returned from a conference with the lawyers of the Crown Prosecution Service with a face like thunder. On balance, there was insufficient prospect of a successful conviction against Reece Bower.

  Cooper noticed the photograph of Annette Bower sticking out from a folder on his desk. He drew it out and looked at her as he spoke. Her eyes seemed to be trying to communicate with him across a decade. But what was she trying to tell him?

  ‘Do you think Reece Bower has done a runner, ma’am?’ asked Cooper frankly.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Branagh. ‘But why would he do that ten years later? If he did kill his wife, he knew long ago that he’d got away with it. Mr Bower has settled down, changed jobs, started a new life with a new partner, and had another child. There’s no reason for him to abandon all that. He hardly sounds the sort of person who’d suddenly be overcome with guilt.’

  Cooper smiled as he recognised how thoroughly Detective Superintendent Branagh had kept up to date with what had happened in Reece Bower’s life since the original inquiry. That was more like the senior detective he knew and admired.

  ‘What if Mr Bower was aware that some new evidence was about to come to light?’ he said.

  ‘Mmm. Well, that’s possible. But what sort of new evidence? The one piece of evidence we needed most was the body. But if that’s about to turn up somewhere, how come Reece Bower knows about it – and we don’t?’

  ‘I can’t answer that, ma’am,’ said Cooper. ‘Not without making further inquiries.’

  Superintendent Branagh was so quiet that he could hear the voices of people walking down the corridor near her office. Then he thought he heard her laugh quietly.

  ‘Detective Inspector Cooper,’ she said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you could find the time to come and see me this afternoon. Towards the end of the day, if possible. Shall we say about five p.m.?’

  Cooper smiled. Five p.m. A time when most of the office-based staff would be going home.

  ‘Yes, that will be fine.’

  ‘And I dare say you might happen to pass through Bakewell on the way here?’

  And that was even better.

  ‘It would be a pleasure, ma’am,’ he said.

  After he’d finished the call, Cooper picked up the photograph of Annette Bower, gazed at it for a moment, then slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

  9

  Tammy Beresford was first on Jamie Callaghan’s list. A single mother in her late twenties, wearing clothes that smelled of charity shop. She looked from Fry to Callaghan as if they were aliens just arrived from another planet.

  ‘I don’t know what I can tell you,’ she said.

  ‘Anything would be helpful.’

  ‘You’d better come in, I suppose.’

  She showed them into the kitchen, where she began folding a stack of washing from a basket. T-shirts and socks hung over the radiator. A kettle and microwave were plugged in on the worktop, but there was no offer of a cup of tea.

  ‘Is this your house, Miss Beresford?’ asked Fry.

  ‘It’s rented. I live here on my own with my boy, Jayden. He’s ten.’

  ‘Is he at school at the moment?’

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t he be?’

  ‘No reason.’

  Fry looked around for a chair. She moved a pile of towels to make room on a dining chair at the table. Callaghan remained standing by the door and Tammy Beresford ignored him.

  ‘You know why we’re here,’ said Fry. ‘We’re making inquiries into the death of Mr Krystian Zalewski. He’s a near neighbour of yours. Or he was.’

  Tammy beat a sweater flat. ‘Yes, I heard.’

  ‘Did you know him well?’

  ‘Hardly at all. We don’t know any of them. I tell Jayden to stay away from them at school, but he can’t avoid it.’

  ‘Them?’

  Tammy sneered at her. ‘The Polish. Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘You have a problem with the migrant workers in Shirebrook.’

  ‘A problem? Yes, I’ll say there’s a problem. Why should people have to put up with them camping in front of our homes, sleeping in garages and sheds? You have Poles and the rest sleeping rough, using hedges and alleys for toilets, and looking in recycling bins for clothes. You try to get an appointment at the health centre because your child is sick and it’s booked solid, and when you go all the names being called out are Polish. They love our health service. And there’s rubbish everywhere. You can see it yourself. We’re a dumping ground. They’ve swamped us.’

  ‘I can see you’re angry—’

  Tammy slammed the basket back down on the tiled floor.

  ‘My dad was a miner,’ she said. ‘One of the last men working at Shirebrook pit. He says this place was brought to its knees in the 1980s by the closures at Shirebrook and Langwith. It put hundreds out of work. He feels so let down by the government – not just this one, or the one in the eighties, but all of them. And so do I. We’ve been ignored for too long now – like my dad says, British people are second-class citizens in their own country.’

  ‘Are you going to say “I’m not racist, but …”?’ asked Fry.

  The woman flushed. ‘It’s all right for you to sneer. But I bet you don’t live in a place like this.’

  Fry opened her mouth to explain that she lived in the city of Nottingham, which was much more multicultural than anywhere in this part of Derbyshire. But Tammy didn’t give her a chance.

  ‘You can see perfectly well what the problem is,’ she said. ‘The Polish use their language as a barrier to keep separate from us. Yes, it makes me angry that a place where everyone used to help each other has become like this, with people divided into different groups, speaking in different languages. We’re not a community any more. I’d like to get Jayden away from here, but I don’t know whether I can afford it.’

  Fry glanced at Callaghan, who gave her an ironic smile. She thought he had probably known what she was letting herself in for with this witness.

  ‘We wanted to talk to you specifically about Krystian Zalewski,’ she said.

  ‘Well, go ahead then.’

  ‘How often did you see Mr Zalewski?’

  ‘We’ve seen him at the back from time to time, going up the stairs to his flat.’

  ‘Did you ever see anyone with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘He seemed to be one of those loners that you hear about.’

  ‘Yes, I think he was,’ said Fry. ‘Go on.’

  ‘But then one day we went down to the Polish shop, Zabka.’

  ‘You shop in the polski sklep?’

  ‘What else is there? Besides, Jayden likes the sausage.’

  ‘Kielbasa?’

  ‘That’s it. I have to get it for him, or he nags me about it.’

  ‘I see. So you were in Zabka—’

  ‘And he was in there too, this bloke.’

  ‘Mr Zalewski. Did he speak to you?’

  ‘Not exactly. Jayden spoke to him, because he saw he was buying the same type of sausage. He’s a friendly kid, you know. A bit too friendly sometimes. I’ve told him not to talk to strange men, but he’d seen Zalewski a few times and knew he was a neighbour. I suppose he hasn’t learned yet that a neighbour can be just as dangerous as a stranger.’

  ‘Especially those loners,’ said Fry.

  Tammy scowled at her. ‘Well … yes.’

  ‘And did Mr Zalewski seem to present a danger to your son?’

  ‘Obviously not, or I would have done something about it. He was surprised to be spoken to at first, but he smiled and was quite pleasant actually. Jayden liked him, though he told me the man spoke a bit funny.’

  ‘Mr Zalewski’s English wasn’t very good?�
�

  ‘A bit basic. But at least he had some English. Some of them don’t bother.’

  ‘When was this meeting in the shop?’

  ‘Sunday teatime.’

  ‘That was the day he was killed,’ said Fry.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Did you see him speak to anyone else?’

  ‘He was still in the shop when we left.’

  ‘Was there anyone in the street outside?’

  Tammy shook her head. ‘No more than the usual. Nobody I would have looked at twice.’

  Fry wondered if Tammy Beresford looked at anyone twice, or whether she took the trouble to look at anyone at all.

  ‘Could you describe Mr Zalewski?’ she said.

  ‘I told you – I’d seen him going up the stairs to that flat above the shop. I knew it was him.’

  ‘So you recognised him, but you can’t describe him.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Beresford,’ said Fry. ‘I think you’ve told us what you can. I assume you’ll be around if we need to speak to you again?’

  ‘I suppose so. But I’m not sure I’ll stay in this town for long,’ she said.

  ‘But you’ll be here for the foreseeable future?’

  Tammy peered out of the window to see who was down there in the market square.

  ‘It’s all these takeaways I don’t like. People eat at those places for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They probably nip in for a snack in between to see them through. Then at night you get a group of Neanderthals fuelled up on Tennent’s Super Strong, roaming around looking for someone to fight. A punch-up outside a fast-food place doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. It’s just the evening’s entertainment.’

  ‘Is that the East Europeans, Miss Beresford?’

  Tammy looked at her with a sneer, but didn’t reply to the question.

  ‘Are you done now?’ she said.

  Next on Jamie Callaghan’s list were a Polish couple, Michal and Anna Wolak. They had rented a two-bedroom terraced house only a street away from Tammy Beresford and Krystian Zalewski.

  ‘I came here because of my sister,’ said Michal. ‘She came to Britain before me. She told me this was a place you can get work if you do not speak English.’