Dead in the Dark

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Oh, and there’s the teenager, of course,’ she said, before he could get the question out. ‘The girl, she’s about eighteen now, I think.’

  ‘Yes, Lacey. Do you see much of her?’

  ‘She was here on Sunday. I saw her going down the street when I was walking Henry. That’s the dog, by the way. Other than that, I can’t remember the last time. She has a life of her own, I suppose. You know the way they are at that age. Even when she was living here, she only seemed to use her dad as a taxi driver to get her where she wanted to be and pick her up again at the end of the night.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how she gets on with Mrs Heath?’

  ‘Mrs H— Oh, that’s Naomi, isn’t it? We always forget they’re not married. I suppose it isn’t unusual these days.’

  ‘Very common, in fact,’ said Cooper. ‘Does it trouble you that they’re not married?’

  ‘Oh, not at all. It’s entirely up to them. But how did Lacey get on with Naomi? I’m not sure they ever did, or they’re ever likely to. Come on, Henry.’

  She walked off with the dog and Cooper turned to his car. He felt as though he was being watched from the houses along the road. And perhaps he was. Who knew what lay behind those hedges?

  He headed the Toyota back down Aldern Way and Castle Drive, remembering which way to turn at the grit bin to get back on to Station Road.

  This had been the site of Bakewell Station when Midlands Railways trains came through on their way from Matlock to Buxton. It was unusual for a station to be built half a mile out of town, and so high on the hillside. The line had begun climbing here towards its summit at Peak Forest Junction. The station building was still there with its four tall stone chimneys, though it was being used as offices for an electronics company. The lines had been removed and the gap between platforms had been filled in to create the Monsal Trail. The goods shed, signal box and cattle dock were long gone. The iron and glass canopies over the platforms were a distant memory. Now interpretation boards had been installed to show what the station used to look like.

  So Reece Bower wouldn’t have been leaving by train anyway. The last one had stopped here in the 1960s. The former station forecourt was now a car park for walkers and cyclists using the trail. Bower could easily have been meeting someone here, a friend who’d waited for him to leave the house and picked him up by car.

  A small industrial estate had been built on the site of the goods yard. Waste management, cardboard baling, plumbing supplies, an MOT centre. He recalled that one of these units had burned down in a fire a few years ago. He wasn’t sure which one it was, as the units all looked intact now.

  Then Cooper remembered that Annette Bower was supposed to have disappeared while she was just a few yards away on the Monsal Trail running with her dog. Officers working on the initial inquiry had conducted a search of all these industrial units, in case Annette had wandered in and been injured, or something worse had happened to her.

  Cooper parked on the station forecourt and walked through a passage on to the Monsal Trail itself. The trees were dense on the eastern side of the trail, and the verges of the old track bed were thick with nettles and brambles, overlain with an impenetrable tangle of cleavers.

  Officers also searched this area intensively in the search for Annette Bower. For a while, there had been expectations that her body would be found in the undergrowth. He could imagine the curses of the search team as they struggled through the nettles, sweating under their baseball caps, probing the ground with their poles for an obstruction. It must have taken them days. And it had all been in vain.

  Cooper looked up and down the trail. In one direction, a bridge carried Station Road over the trail, while in the other the trail vanished into trees beyond the industrial estate. He wondered how far the search parameters had been extended. As SIO, Hazel Branagh would have been very thorough, he was sure of that. But the Monsal Trail stretched for a total of eight and a half miles, from the Coombs Road Viaduct south of Bakewell all the way into Wyedale.

  The hill the station had been built on was called Castle Hill, but there were no signs of a castle now, not even any discernible earthworks. Only a golf course.

  A golf course? Of course, Bakewell Golf Club. Naomi Heath had mentioned Reece Bower’s golfing buddies. Was this the club Reece Bower was a member of? It seemed likely, since it was so close to his home. Perhaps the names of some of those buddies would be in the address book Naomi had given him.

  Gavin Murfin was leaving the steel fabrications company where Reece Bower worked. It was located on a business park just off the A61north of Chesterfield, and he couldn’t find a way directly back on to the bypass, so he pulled into the side of the road to check his satnav.

  It was rare to get a bit of peace and quiet without any rushing about, so Murfin took his time over it, even closing his eyes for a few minutes to take a short nap. There was too much dashing backwards and forwards these days, not like when he was a young DC and could spend the afternoon in the pub. At least Ben Cooper trusted him out on his own now and then.

  When he opened his eyes again, Murfin wiped a trace of spittle from his mouth, sighed, and put the Skoda back into gear.

  Madeleine Betts worked at the Royal Hospital, which meant he had to drive back through Chesterfield, round a couple of roundabouts, and out towards a place called Calow. The route took him past the familiar sight of floodlights and a football ground – the Proact Stadium, home of Chesterfield FC. There had been times in the recent past when Murfin thought his own club, Derby County, might end up playing the Spireites in League One and he’d have to spend more time in Chesterfield than he really wanted to.

  Off the bypass, he found plenty of signs for the hospital. But it was a big, sprawling place and he had to ask for directions at the front desk.

  When he arrived at his destination, Madeleine Betts was waiting for him in an office where they could talk privately. She looked at Murfin suspiciously, but he was used to that. She made a fuss about inspecting his ID as a civilian support officer and didn’t seem impressed.

  ‘They let me ask questions and write things down,’ he said. ‘But I can’t nick anyone now, more’s the pity.’

  ‘Do sit down,’ she said, with a frown.

  ‘You know, I don’t like hospitals much,’ said Murfin as he eased himself into a chair.

  ‘Too many sick people, I suppose?’

  ‘No, I think it’s all the rushing about. I can’t stand accidents, or emergencies.’

  She smiled thinly at his attempts to break the ice. And there was definitely ice, a couple of inches of frost at least. Madeleine Betts looked like one of those women who’d been disappointed in life so often that she’d forgotten how to smile. Murfin had met quite a few of them.

  He coughed and pulled out his notebook, brushing ineffectually at a small stain on the cover.

  ‘It’s about Reece Bower,’ he said, lifting a corner of his eye to catch the flicker of a reaction sparked by the name.

  ‘I thought it might be,’ she said.

  ‘When his wife disappeared, you told the investigating officers that the two of you had ended your relationship some time previously.’

  ‘Yes. Annette had left him, you see. Reece ended our relationship, so that she would come back to him. I’d moved to work in a different department by then, and I no longer saw Reece at all.’

  Murfin nodded. Her wording was almost exactly the same as the statement she’d given ten years ago. He’d checked it before he set off. He was wondering whether Betts had written it down somewhere, maybe in a diary. No one’s memory was quite that good. Had she prepared her replies in advance? It was a pity he couldn’t threaten to take her back to the station. He’d already told her he wasn’t able to do that.

  ‘And is that still true, love?’

  ‘I’m not your love,’ she replied sharply.

  Murfin smiled. He heard that a lot these days.

  ‘There’s time yet,’ he said.

  Bet
ts scowled and pursed her lips. Murfin squinted at her curiously. She wasn’t his type at all. Too humourless. But he supposed there could a certain attraction about the cool blonde look, the toned muscles and stylish clothes. There had been an attraction for Reece Bower at least.

  ‘So have you been seeing Reece?’ he repeated.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen him since then.’

  ‘Any contact at all?’

  ‘I just said—’

  ‘No, you said that you hadn’t seen him. You might have spoken to him on the phone, sent a few text messages back and forth, that sort of thing.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So … Mr Bower’s phone wouldn’t show any contact with you recently at all,’ said Murfin. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He turned a page of his notebook and made a note on a new sheet, forming the words slowly and carefully, then staring doubtfully at them for a moment before adding a large question mark. Madeline Betts watched every movement he made with an expression of horrified fascination.

  ‘Have you found him?’ she said finally.

  ‘Who, Reece? No, love.’

  Of course, she wanted to ask whether his phone had been found, but she daren’t do that. It would look too obvious.

  Murfin beamed again. He liked people to be in doubt. And this woman had underestimated him from the start.

  17

  Ben Cooper was waiting to make an awkward right turn in front of the bookshop in Bakewell. The road up the hill past the church reached Burton Moor, the only route to Over Haddon without heading further on towards Monyash.

  From the top, he was looking down over Lady Manners School towards the house near Haddon Road.

  In the valley, Haddon Hall nestled among the trees where the River Wye meandered through water meadows to join the Derwent. Haddon had been abandoned by the Vernon family as their residence in the early eighteenth century in favour of Belvoir Castle. The result was an unspoilt medieval mansion, which had remained unmodernised throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a bit of a miracle that it had escaped the fate of so many grand country houses.

  The Vernons had sometimes exercised their power through crude and violent methods. In the ancient ‘trial by touch’, a suspected murderer was made to touch the body of the victim. If the suspect was guilty, the victim would begin to bleed again. It was said that one local peasant panicked so much at the prospect that he tried to run away – only to be pursued by a posse and lynched in a field near Ashford-in-the-Water. The Peak District had been like the Wild West in those days.

  Over Haddon was a small village perched on a ledge above Lathkill Dale, with a population of less than three hundred. At the bottom of a narrow road running down from the village, a clapper bridge crossed the Lathkill.

  Cars parked along the side of these narrow village roads made driving a hazard. When two cars met from opposite directions, it was sometimes a test of politeness as to who would gave way. After three o’clock on a weekday, it was best to avoid the villages altogether. School-out time meant lines of extra cars as parents waited to collect their children.

  The Swanns’ home was an eighteenth century stone cottage, with a conservatory added and a path leading into a cottage garden. Tubs and planters clustered round the front door and on a paved terrace.

  Cooper had been obliged to phone and make an appointment with Frances Swann. Often he could call on people at work, but she was a teacher and schools were sensitive about the police coming on to the premises unless it was necessary. She had taken the opportunity of a free period to come home.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me, Mrs Swann. I understand you teach at Lady Manners School.’

  ‘That’s correct. I’m in the Modern Languages department.’

  Cooper didn’t ask what languages she taught. He had no doubt she was fluent in several languages that he had never managed to learn. He also knew that being in the Lady Manners catchment area was one of the reasons that property in this area tended to be so attractive to buyers, and therefore expensive.

  Frances Swann had sharply defined cheekbones, which might have made her face look attractive when she was younger. But age had narrowed her eyes and made her lips purse in disapproval. Cooper imagined she could be quite fierce, a forbidding presence in the classroom, a stern instructor if he got his French conjugations wrong.

  Cooper was glad Gavin Murfin wasn’t here with him. Frances Swann would probably have disapproved.

  She led him through into a dining room. They passed a kitchen with a Belfast sink and an Esse range set into a deeply recessed fireplace. The dining room had a wood-burning stove, though it looked more expensive than the one in his own cottage at Foolow.

  Mrs Swann’s manner was brisk, and Cooper got the impression she would like to get him out of the house as soon as possible.

  ‘I’m afraid we haven’t heard anything from Reece, if that’s what you’re going to ask me,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that was one question,’ he said.

  ‘I have no idea why he should have left Naomi. We’re not privy to what goes on over there now, not the way we were when my sister was still here.’

  ‘You were a frequent visitor to the Bowers’ house in Aldern Way at that time, I gather?’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘Oh, I imagine you’ve been reading all the old paperwork. The details of the case against Reece.’

  ‘It isn’t all that old,’ said Cooper. ‘Ten years.’

  ‘Yes, I’m aware of that. I still think about it, of course. Almost every day I think about Annette. This latest business has brought it all back. No doubt people will be talking about it all over again, and asking questions.’

  ‘People like me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, it’s your job, I suppose. At least you have an excuse. A lot of people don’t have that pretext. Their interest is just prurient.’

  ‘I’m aware that you were the first person to raise the alarm about your sister’s disappearance, although it was Mr Bower who actually made the phone call.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And your concern started when Annette failed to return from a run.’

  ‘It wasn’t like her,’ said Frances. ‘She knew we were coming. She would normally have been back at the house getting ready. When I say “normally”, I mean always. Except that one occasion.’

  ‘So you were sure from the start that there was something wrong.’

  ‘Yes, I was. Certain. Much more than certain than Reece seemed to be. That was why …’

  Her voice tailed off. She had probably been over this part of the story many times, when she was questioned a decade ago. But clearly she hadn’t forgotten it. The details must still be sharp in her mind.

  ‘That was why you had suspicions about Reece,’ suggested Cooper.

  ‘I felt a little guilty about it at first. Having those suspicions seemed unworthy. He was my brother-in-law, after all. But I couldn’t keep the suspicions to myself – not once I noticed the blood.’

  ‘Ah, yes. A splash of blood in the kitchen.’

  Mrs Swann gave a small shudder at the recollection.

  ‘It was hardly a splash,’ she said. ‘A speck, that’s all. But I knew it was blood.’

  ‘And what was your conclusion?’

  She sighed. ‘It’s difficult to admit, even now. But the sight of that one speck of blood formed an absolute certainty in my mind that Reece had harmed Annette in some way. I know it doesn’t sound logical seen objectively. It probably doesn’t make any sense to you, when you’re looking from the outside and at this distance from the events. But it was very different for me. My conclusion was a culmination of several factors.’

  ‘What factors, Mrs Swann?’

  ‘A number of comments Annette had made to me about the ongoing state of her marriage, the fact that they’d been arguing recently and that Reece had been drinking more than usual. And his apparent lack of concern that afternoon about her
disappearance. He kept saying she would be back soon, coming up with all kinds of unlikely explanations. I didn’t believe a single one of them.’

  ‘And then there was the blood,’ said Cooper.

  ‘And then the blood,’ she agreed. ‘And it was Annette’s blood.’

  ‘Yes, it was. The DNA tests proved it.’

  ‘So I was right,’ she said.

  ‘But your sister’s body was never found,’ said Cooper as gently as he could.

  She was silent for several moments. He saw that her composure was beginning to break down and he didn’t want to do that to her. But sometimes there was no choice. Mrs Swann clenched her hands together.

  ‘No, and that’s the worst aspect of all,’ she said. ‘You can’t imagine what that’s like. No one can.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She turned away. There was nothing Frances could say to that. And nothing else he could say to make it better when ‘sorry’ just wasn’t enough.

  ‘I have to ask this, Mrs Swann,’ he said.

  ‘I know you do. Go on.’

  ‘At the time, did you have any ideas about where your sister’s body might be found?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Yes, when they began to search the garden, I was confident something would be found. I’d noticed that fresh digging myself. I remember one of the investigating officers seeing it … what was his name now?’

  ‘Detective Inspector Hitchens?’

  ‘That was it. And from that moment, when I saw the expression on his face, I expected a discovery. I had to leave the house then, of course, and return here. I sat waiting for the phone to ring, or a knock to come on the door. Can you imagine? I could have been waiting for a very long time, couldn’t I? Ten years or more. I might still be waiting now for a discovery that never came.’

  ‘They dug almost the whole garden up, but didn’t find Annette.’

  ‘That’s right. I thought the police would do more, you know. A lot more.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mrs Swann?’

  ‘I wanted them to start a search in Lathkill Dale,’ said Frances. ‘Reece and Annette went there often, and it seemed the sort of place Annette would head for if she wanted to be on her own for a while, to think things through. If Reece hadn’t killed her after all, it seemed likely to me that she’d gone there and met with an accident of some kind.’