Dead in the Dark

by Stephen Booth

  Ben slapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’m glad about that.’

  His brother blinked. ‘There was a lot of talk about that case. The woman’s disappearance.’

  ‘Annette Bower?’

  ‘Yes. Bakewell, wasn’t it? Everyone thought the husband was guilty.’

  Ben sighed. ‘Yes, but there was too much reasonable doubt after the sighting of her.’

  ‘There was a lot of bad feeling going about. I remember it well, now. When he was let off, there were blokes who wanted to sort him out themselves, take justice into their own hands, so to speak.’

  ‘Vigilantes?’

  ‘If you want to call them that,’ said Matt. ‘Sometimes the system lets people down, you know. There was a feeling it had happened in that case. People thought that woman had been killed and no one would be punished for it. That’s wrong, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘It is wrong.’

  He saw a light go out in the kitchen of the house. Kate still stood there in the darkness, staring out towards the shed, no doubt wondering what was going on, what the two brothers might be talking about. She’d be amazed if she knew.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Matt, ‘if that Bower bloke went missing himself one day.’

  Ben turned and stared at his brother. His face was half hidden in the shadows of the shed, his head tilted down towards the dog, which gazed back at him with adoring eyes. Ben couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard. It was so rare for his brother to come up with anything he could have called an insight.

  A strong wind was blowing across the fields, bending the trees and sending the sheep scurrying to find shelter behind a stone wall. Both the trees and the sheep were used to this kind of wind up here. Even when the weather was calm, the trees stayed bent in a southerly direction, like mime artists pretending it was windy.

  Instead of heading home to his cottage in Foolow, Ben Cooper had driven up the hill from Bridge End Farm and had kept driving until he found himself on the moors, right on the edge of the gritstone area known as the Dark Peak.

  Although he’d been born and raised in the farming country of the White Peak, he’d always been drawn to the Dark Peak landscapes. The Dark Peak might look empty and desolate to some eyes, but it seemed to Cooper that it was just waiting for you to put something into it. It was a landscape for the imagination. His ancestors had peopled it with all kinds of mythical creatures and supernatural events; every rock had a story attached to it, every pool of water had its own legend. Everyone who’d lost their life out there was remembered, every incident had its place in the folk memory.

  The changing colours of the season, the transformation of light as it passed across the hills, the shadows moving under the twisted rocky outcrops – everything spoke of a land that was alive and breathing. The Dark Peak was only empty for those who had no imagination. Cooper had sometimes been told that he had too much.

  The sky was a deep black and you could see the stars clearly here. Thousands and thousands of them – some glittering brightly, some no more than a milky haze across the galaxy. That was something he would surely miss, if he ever had to live in a city. So much light pollution prevented you from seeing the stars and a few minutes standing gazing at the night sky really helped to put things into perspective. He felt so tiny in the face of that infinite universe.

  Cooper shivered. In the summer, it might still have been light at this time, or at least illuminated by that peculiar half-light that came with dusk.

  But the nights were drawing in. That’s what his mother would have said. She’d said it every year, about this time. You could have filled the date in on your calendar in advance. The leaves were turning brown, and Christmas cards were in the shops. It was already September, and the nights were drawing in.

  People thought the weather was the most important part of the seasons. But day length was the crucial factor for nature. Though there were still thirteen hours of daylight at this time of year, the hours were getting shorter by four minutes a day. Cooper had hated that knowledge as a child. It had always felt like his life was slipping away from him, slowly and certainly, an inch at a time.

  He shook himself and realised that he’d been sitting here for a long time. He looked at his watch. Dawn would come at about six twenty a.m. He hoped it would bring a bit more light into his world.

  15

  Day 3

  Next day, Stage Three of the Tour of Britain had entered the western side of the Peak District from Cheshire. Hundreds of racing cyclists were right now on the A537 Cat and Fiddle road to the west of Buxton, the longest and highest climb of the race. At the summit, the riders would turn along the A54 and head back down towards the Cheshire Plain, taking them out of Derbyshire.

  Ben Cooper had known it was about to happen – it was in the bulletins months ago, but he’d forgotten. At least the race didn’t come as far as Bakewell and Edendale. The traffic chaos would be unimaginable.

  Arriving at West Street, he passed a uniformed officer in the corridor, just on his way out to start a shift. Instinct made Cooper turn and look back at the officer. Some joker had stuck a handwritten sign on the back of his high-vis jacket. Instead of just ‘Police’, it said ‘Police, Fire, Ambulance, Paramedic, Care Worker, NHS, Mental Health, Social Services, Samaritan, Parent, Marriage Counsellor, Traffic Warden, Car Mechanic, Livestock Handler’. They’d run out of space for all the other jobs.

  Cooper opened his mouth to call to him, but changed his mind. The officer’s sergeant or one of his colleagues would tell him before he went out in public. Jokes like that were for internal consumption.

  Last week, Cooper found a printed notice taped to the wall of the men’s toilets. It said:

  ACTION TO BE TAKEN IN THE EVENT OF A MORALE ATTACK. The area must be evacuated immediately before any officers catch morale. A senior officer must remove the source of morale as soon as possible. Work can only be resumed when morale has been returned to its normally low level. Be vigilant – morale is a constant threat!

  These notices wouldn’t have appeared a few months ago. Now, no one took the trouble to take them down or find out who was producing them. The senior command staff had probably decided it was a harmless way of letting off steam.

  At least morale in the CID room seemed to be normal. Or as normal as it ever was.

  ‘Hey, I have a mate at Bolsover LPU,’ said Gavin Murfin when he saw Cooper. ‘He says Diane Fry and her EMSOU mates have been hanging around all week.’

  ‘Yes, I saw her in Chesterfield last night,’ said Cooper.

  Luke Irvine frowned at the name. ‘Diane Fry? She’s a bunny boiler.’

  ‘All women are potential bunny boilers, Luke,’ said Murfin. ‘They’re just waiting for the right moment to strike.’

  ‘I’ll tell your wife what you’ve been saying about her,’ warned Becky Hurst.

  Murfin sniffed. ‘It won’t matter. She boiled my bunny years ago.’

  ‘I happen to know you’re very happily married, Gavin,’ said Cooper. ‘And you have been for twenty-five years.’

  ‘It’s a façade. You should know better than to believe everything you’re told.’

  Hurst smiled now. She knew Murfin better than that too. But she wasn’t about to forgive Irvine.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘what do you know about Detective Sergeant Fry, Luke? You were only the office boy when she was based here.’

  ‘Get lost,’ said Irvine.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get promoted to a proper police officer one day.’

  Cooper didn’t have time to get involved in this one. That was what he had a detective sergeant for, wasn’t it?

  ‘DS Sharma, unless there’s anything urgent I’ll be in Bakewell later this morning,’ he said. ‘You can phone me if there are any problems.’

  ‘We’ll be fine, inspector. There’s just one thing …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’d like to do a media appeal, to see if we can get any information from t
he public on the robbery suspects.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘Good idea, Dev. Go ahead and set it up.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Cooper went back to his office. He forced himself to phone his brother to make sure everything was okay after the previous night. He would rather have spoken to Kate herself, but that might look as though he was going behind Matt’s back. He fully expected his brother to be irritable and bad-tempered. But he was very quiet today.

  ‘Yes, Kate is fine,’ he said. ‘We’re all fine, thanks.’

  It was so uncharacteristic that it sounded to Ben like an apology – or as close to one as his brother was ever likely to get.

  ‘Kate’s just heard she has an appointment with the consultant on Friday morning for her results,’ said Matt.

  ‘You’ll let me know how it goes, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  While he was listening to Matt, Cooper scanned the morning’s updates.

  A couple in their eighties had been visited by a man claiming to be a police officer investigating a theft. He’d flashed a photo ID card, which he said was a police warrant card. While in their house he’d stolen a wallet containing cash and various bank and debit cards. The previous day, a man matching a similar description and claiming to be a police officer had visited the home of an eighty-three-year-old man, but was refused entry and left when asked for identification.

  Elsewhere, a flood of complaints from residents about cars being parked on grass verges and street corners with For Sale signs on them turned out to be someone running a second-hand car sales business without going to the trouble and expense of buying premises to operate from.

  Several small roads around Kinder Scout had been closed temporarily for the filming of a TV motoring show. The crew would be there for about a week. Nothing to do with CID, but it was best to know.

  And there were internal problems too. He was alerted by a memo that engineers were currently on site, trying to resolve the problems that callers to the 101 non-emergency number had been experiencing. People had been facing delays in getting through to call handlers, or in some cases had been cut off during their calls. Cooper was very glad he didn’t have to deal with that problem.

  Finally he began working his way through the case files from ten years ago. He wanted to analyse the strength of the evidence against Reece Bower. Though it was an old case, Bower’s guilt or innocence might well prove relevant to his disappearance.

  Yet there was also that idea suggested by his brother last night, that Bower’s disappearance might be due to some delayed vigilante action by local people anxious to bring justice where they thought an injustice had been done. He didn’t know where to start looking for vigilantes, so the case files seemed the only place to begin.

  He began by taking out the photograph of Annette Bower and laying it on his desk where he could see it. Her picture helped to remind him that this was all about a real human being who might have lost her life, not just about a collection of evidence and witness reports. It was easy, sometimes, to lose sight of a victim as a person. Cooper was determined that Annette would be real. He wanted to feel that he knew who she was.

  ‘But who exactly were you?’ he said to the photo.

  Her details showed that she was thirty-two years old when she disappeared. She’d been born locally as Annette Slaney, educated at Lady Manners School in Bakewell, before gaining a degree in Health and Human Sciences at the University of Sheffield.

  When she graduated, Annette had taken a management job at a hospital in Sheffield, which was perhaps where she’d met Reece Bower. They’d married nineteen years ago, and had Lacey just over twelve months later. Annette had gone back to work part-time after the pregnancy, later moving to a new job at Eden Valley General. The Bowers had also moved house about that time, from Dronfield to Bakewell, moving further into Derbyshire.

  Her interests were listed as walking, running and swimming. She’d been a member of two sports clubs and had learned to play the cello. Her life seemed pretty blameless. But, at some point, everything had gone wrong.

  Cooper gazed at Annette’s photograph for a few more moments, looking into her eyes, imagining that she was right there in the office, on the other side of the desk, asking him to find out what had happened to her. He bowed his head in acknowledgment. No promises, but he would do his best.

  The first statement he turned up was from Reece Bower himself. He’d made the 999 call to report his wife’s disappearance when she failed to return home from a run on the Monsal Trail, accompanied by their yellow Labrador. The dog had come back on its own, and he’d assumed that she’d lost the dog and was still searching for it. That was why he’d waited some time before making the call. No, Annette didn’t normally take her mobile phone with her. She carried an iPod and wore headphones, and she didn’t want the extra weight. She also felt she didn’t need it when she was going to be so close to home anyway. And she had the dog, said Bower, so she felt safe.

  ‘But was she safe?’ said Cooper to himself. ‘Perhaps not. And we only have her husband’s word for that.’

  The second statement was from Annette’s mother, Catherine Slaney. She talked about her daughter’s turbulent relationship with her husband. In her interview, she seemed to want to put suspicion on Reece. But she agreed that Annette had left her husband once before, two years previously, after an argument over an affair that he’d been having with a colleague. Annette had stayed with her parents for four weeks before returning to her home in Bakewell.

  Cooper flicked through the interview reports to find the colleague in question. Surely she’d been interviewed? Yes, here she was. Her name was Madeleine Betts. She admitted the relationship with Reece Bower, but told the interviewing officer that Reece had ended the affair so that his wife would return home. She had since moved to a different job within the hospital and no longer saw Reece Bower at all. She had never met Annette, she said.

  One more witness report came from a dog walker who had been on the Monsal Trail that morning. She said she’d been accustomed to seeing Annette Bower jogging on the trail, but couldn’t say whether she’d seen the missing woman around the time of her disappearance. The witness stated that she hadn’t noticed anything unusual in the area, except the man in the red Nissan car. She said he was acting suspiciously and had driven off in a hurry when he saw her. She was unable to give a description of the man.

  Cooper made a note. He wondered if that sighting had ever been followed up. It was nebulous, to say the least. But it was still a potential lead.

  Then he read through the interviews quickly again. On the surface, there was no evidence against Reece Bower, in fact, no indication of a potential crime. Annette Bower had simply vanished. No one could say how, or why.

  So what about the forensic evidence? This was where the case became more interesting, and more awkward for Reece Bower.

  First up was a report from a forensic imagery expert, who had analysed CCTV footage. Footage showing a vehicle travelling through Bakewell on the morning of 29 October was said to show a car identical in model and colour to Bower’s blue Vauxhall, though the number plate was indistinguishable.

  Specially trained cadaver dogs on loan from South Yorkshire Police had searched the Bowers’ home. The dogs were trained to sniff out traces of blood and human remains. The dogs, two springer spaniels, had identified areas of interest in the Bowers’ back garden, where signs of recent digging were evident.

  A report from Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens summarised the contents of ten hours of interviews conducted with Mr Bower. During the interviews he’d noticed scratches and grazes on Bower’s hands. When asked about them, Bower said he had scratched his hands while gardening.

  Forensic pathologist Dr Felix Webber had been asked to examine Reece Bower. Webber said the scratches and abrasions on Bower’s hands had happened around the time Mrs Bower went missing and the injuries were consistent with gardening activities, but could have had a number of
other causes.

  A forensic scientist had been called in to conduct a search for DNA at the property in Aldern Way and in the boot of Mr Bower’s car. She confirmed that she had been unable to find any trace of Annette Bower’s DNA anywhere in the building or in the car. She said that as she opened the boot, she noticed a fresh smell coming from inside which could either have been an air freshener or a cleaning agent.

  A further examination of Reece Bower’s car found a substantial amount of mud and traces of vegetation on the chassis and embedded in the tread of the tyres, despite the fact that it had been washed at a hand car wash in Bakewell two days previously. Bower was unable to account for the mud, but suggested it had been dropped on the road by a farmer’s tractor.

  Cooper nodded to himself.

  ‘That’s perfectly possible.’

  In the next statement, Annette Bower’s sister, Frances Swann, said that Annette had confided in her about difficulties in her marriage. She had spoken about the possibility of divorce, even after the affair with Madeleine Betts was long over. Their finances were difficult and she was worried that her husband was getting into too much debt. Mrs Swann had last heard from her sister in a phone call two days before her disappearance, when she had sounded perfectly normal, with no sign of stress or any unusual state of mind.

  Mrs Swann went on to say that she and her husband Adrian had arranged to visit the Bowers that afternoon, as they often did. Annette was out when they arrived, and Reece told her his wife had gone for a run with their dog and hadn’t yet returned. Her husband Adrian was with her, but he’d taken their two Jack Russells for a walk while Frances began to prepare a meal for them. During the time she spent in the kitchen of the Bowers’ home, she’d noticed a drop of blood on the tiled floor. She had no explanation for how it had got there. She expected her sister to return home soon, but she hadn’t. Mrs Swann had persuaded Reece to walk up to the nearby section of the Monsal Trail to look for Annette. The Labrador, Taffy, had reappeared alone while he was out. On his return, Frances had pressed her brother-in-law to phone and report Annette missing, which he eventually did.