Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  In a back street in the north of Edendale, a white Mitsubishi L200 pickup was parked at the kerb outside a semi-detached council house. People on the street passed it without comment – barely noticing it, in fact, seeing just another workmen’s vehicle. Repairs were being carried out on some of the homes on the Devonshire Estate. Vans, pickups and builder’s skips had been a common sight in the street for months.

  The paintwork of the Mitsubishi was spattered with tarry black specks, as if it had been parked under a sycamore tree. But that wasn’t unusual either. The clouds of smoke drifting over the moors had been depositing sooty debris far and wide, ever since the first moorland fire had started in the Peak District six weeks ago.

  So when two men appeared from one of the houses, no one took any notice of them. After they’d driven away, not a single passer-by in the street could have said what the men looked like. No one could have had a guess at the make or registration number of the pickup. A few wouldn’t even have been sure that it was white.

  But that was always the way with memories. There was almost nothing you could rely on as being completely accurate.

  7

  When Cooper entered the conference room, he found that his immediate boss, Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens, had been drafted in for the briefing to represent E Division. Hitchens had the unenviable task of summing up the efforts made in the original Pearson inquiry, and the sparseness of the ultimate results.

  As he listened with the other officers in the room, Cooper became aware for the first time of the complications of the inquiry. He’d been a DC on the division then, but too lowly in the hierarchy to grasp the overall picture. He recalled taking witness statements that had provided nothing of any value to the investigation, talking for hours to people who had no useful information to give. He’d been sent back to ask more and more questions, until he felt he was scraping the barrel and not producing a thing for his efforts.

  So much was known about David and Trisha Pearson after all those months of careful investigation. Yet so little of it had proved to be of any use in finding them.

  David Pearson, aged thirty-six, a senior adviser with Diamond Hybrid Securities, based in London. His wife Patricia Pearson, known as Trisha, aged thirty-three and working in public relations. A couple with no children, but a nice home in the Deepdene Wood area of Dorking, Surrey. They had spent a summer holiday in the Seychelles that year, but had chosen to take their Christmas break in the Peak District.

  On the night they disappeared, the Pearsons had been to the George in Castleton for dinner. Mushrooms in peppercorn sauce, Bantry Bay mussels, honey-glazed ham shank. At least they’d eaten well on their last night, not to mention the two bottles of wine they’d drunk.

  At the end of the meal they had set off to walk back to their holiday cottage on Brecks Farm, near the village of Peak Forest, a distance of about three miles from the George. And that was the last anyone saw or heard of them. Not a phone call, not a single confirmed sighting, not a shred of paper trail to follow.

  Hitchens tried to summarise the main facts of the case as best he could. The DI had been putting on weight recently, and there were traces of grey in his hair. His manner suggested this was one inquiry that had contributed to his premature ageing.

  ‘The Pearsons stayed late over their meal at the George, finishing the extra bottle of wine,’ he said. ‘They stayed much too late. By the time they left the restaurant, the snow had started. They were foolish to attempt to walk back to the cottage across the moor in those conditions. It wasn’t surprising that they never made it. The mystery was what happened to their bodies. They were never found.’

  ‘So what were the theories?’ asked someone.

  ‘There were several. But they boil down to two basic scenarios.’

  Hitchens turned to use the whiteboard, perhaps hoping that it would draw the attention of all those eyes away from him for a few minutes. He wasn’t a natural public speaker, which was a drawback in anyone with aspirations to become a senior officer. The TV crews would be arriving before long, and the DI wasn’t the sort of man to make a good show in front of the cameras.

  ‘Scenario number one,’ he said, scrawling the phrase as he spoke. ‘The Pearsons lost their way in the snowstorm and died somewhere on the moors before they reached their destination. In that case, we would normally have expected to find their bodies, which we didn’t. So, what then? Well, they might have strayed so far off their route that they hit the flooded open-cast workings at Wolfstones Quarry, which were partly frozen over. Or they could have taken shelter in a cave, or the entrance to one of the old lead mines, and gone in too deep. They wouldn’t be the first to go in and never come out. Some say that a party of cavers will turn up their bones one day.’

  ‘Did we send divers into the quarry?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t feasible. The edges of the water were searched, but there was no indication at what point they might have gone in. It isn’t a small body of water, you know. Without a reference point to start from, it was futile. You could tie up a team of divers for months without anything to show for it.’

  DCI Mackenzie looked up at the pause. He was reading from a file, as if following the explanation by Hitchens and comparing it to the written record.

  ‘There was another theory too, though,’ he put in.

  Hitchens sighed. ‘Yes, this was the one that seemed to find most favour at the time. It was the easiest option, of course. Not that I’m saying it influenced the outcome of the inquiry exactly, but, you know … it might have been a factor.’

  ‘And this theory was …?’ prompted Mackenzie.

  ‘Okay. Scenario number two.’ Hitchens wrote it on the board. ‘The theory that the Pearsons disappeared deliberately, did a bunk and changed their identities. The suggestion was that they wanted people to assume they’d died an accidental death.’

  ‘Why would they do that, sir?’

  The voice came from the back of the room, and Hitchens scanned the faces, looking for the speaker. Cooper recognised it as Luke Irvine. He turned and saw Irvine sitting with Gavin Murfin on the back row. That could be an unholy alliance.

  ‘When the police in Surrey looked into their backgrounds, they found evidence that David Pearson had been defrauding his employers, and their clients,’ said Hitchens. ‘It seems he’d been sifting funds out of client accounts for years, bit by bit. Some of it was in various savings accounts under his and Trisha’s names, but the suspicion was that far more money had been taken that wasn’t accounted for. It might only have existed in the form of cash.’

  ‘So they staged their own disappearance and vanished with the cash to make a new life for themselves somewhere?’ asked Irvine. ‘Anywhere in particular?’

  Hitchens shrugged uncomfortably. ‘Spain, South America. Who knows?’

  ‘There was the Canoe Man case a couple of years before.’

  Becky Hurst. That was a voice Cooper didn’t expect. He swivelled and caught Hurst’s eye. She gave him a small smile, perhaps intended to be reassuring.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure we remember that,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘In that case, he almost got away with it,’ pointed out Hurst. ‘If he hadn’t let the estate agent take his photograph when he bought the apartment in Panama, he might still be there. He didn’t realise they were going to use it in their advertising on the internet. But the Pearsons … they would have learned from what he did wrong.’

  ‘If that’s what they were planning.’

  ‘How did they get away from the area, then?’ asked Hurst. ‘Was there any evidence they actually did go back to the cottage that night? Or did they have another vehicle kept handy somewhere?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘I suppose they were smart enough to cover their tracks pretty well.’

  Hitchens hesitated, and glanced at Mackenzie, who didn’t react.

  ‘This was only a theory,’ he said. ‘It was never established as a fact. The reality is, we don’t know what
happened. We need that information first.’

  ‘Before we do what? Write them off as accidental deaths? Just another misadventure?’

  ‘That would be up to the coroner.’

  Diane Fry hadn’t yet spoken. Cooper could see her sitting to one side, near the wall. Like Mackenzie, she had been slowly turning pages of the file. He knew Fry well enough to be aware that she had a terrific memory for details. The significant facts of the case would already be logged in her mind.

  When she did speak, Fry chose her timing perfectly – not raising her voice, but inserting her question precisely into the momentary silence.

  ‘Two people went missing in bad weather, and there was no proper search?’

  Hitchens looked surprised.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. It just wasn’t feasible to mount a full search operation straight away, given the conditions. The helicopter couldn’t fly, and it was pointless trying to get boots on the ground. We would only have been putting more lives at risk.’

  ‘According to the incident log, it was five days before the search of the moor was completed.’

  ‘We did our best. Buxton Mountain Rescue went up there. They did a sweep of the immediate area as soon as the snow stopped and they had daylight hours to work in. Cave rescue checked out the disused mine shafts. No signs of the missing people. There was nothing. But, yes – it was five days before we were satisfied that we’d done a thorough search.’

  Cooper thought of the expanse of Oxlow Moor, and the neighbouring areas. Old Moor, Bradwell Moor. That was a lot of ground to cover.

  ‘Did they check all the shafts?’ he said.

  Hitchens held out his hands in a half-apologetic gesture. ‘Who even knows how many shafts exist out there? How can we say it was all?’

  ‘And why didn’t they get dogs in?’

  ‘Oh, the wrong kind of snow on the roads. The wrong kind of wheels on the snow. You know how it goes.’

  ‘Would you say the inquiry was ongoing?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Theoretically. It was never officially closed, but …’

  ‘But nobody has been putting any work into it, I suppose.’

  ‘Not for a long time. There have been no new leads. What do you expect?’

  DCI Mackenzie stood up as a set of photographs was handed out. A head shot of Trisha Pearson, cropped from a group picture. She was dressed up, perhaps for a wedding, with her hair pulled tightly back. In the photo, it looked to be a deep chestnut red, but it could be misleading. He wouldn’t have said she was beautiful, but she was quite a striking woman, her face radiating health and confidence. She was laughing, and her eyes glittered as if life was just a bit of fun.

  And then there was her husband, David Pearson. Clear blue eyes, and fair hair that was a bit longer than was fashionable these days. He reminded Cooper of a young Robert Redford from the 1970s. About the time of The Way We Were, perhaps.

  ‘As we all know, time is of the essence at the beginning of any investigation,’ said Mackenzie. ‘We have the golden hour, when there’s the best opportunity to make progress in an inquiry. Okay, we might push it further to the first twenty-four hours, or then the first forty-eight. But once you give up a crime scene, you start to lose things. Evidence becomes lost or tainted, and then it’s worthless. In this case, we lost control of the crime scene more than two years ago.’

  He allowed a moment for that fact to sink in. Officers in the room shuffled their feet uncomfortably, as if they were already being told that this inquiry had failed.

  ‘So,’ said Mackenzie, ‘it looks as though our only hope of progress is to concentrate on the victims.’

  ‘Didn’t we do that last time?’ asked someone.

  Mackenzie hesitated for a second. ‘Yes. But now we’re going to do it again.’

  Cooper glanced across at Fry, but she wasn’t meeting anyone’s eye. Not on this side of the room, anyway. He knew she would be feeling in her element now. Forensics aside, it was the piecing together of the final minutes, hours and days of the victims that was the foundation of a modern murder investigation. Fry would already be working through in her mind the procedures to be followed, the files to be reopened, the potential leads to be analysed and followed up. Murder investigations these days were a world away from the TV stereotype of two detectives rolling up to the crime scene.

  Many lessons had been learned from botched inquiries like the Stephen Lawrence fiasco. These days, the tactic was to flood a crime scene with officers to maximise the chance of uncovering vital early clues.

  The original inquiry had tasked more than thirty officers to cover all the possible angles. Some had been assigned to the family, others were involved with the forensic examination. Uniformed officers had conducted house-to-house inquiries, while detectives spoke to witnesses. The Senior Investigating Officer had logged all his decisions – and after twenty-eight days, because there was no breakthrough, a review team had been called in to provide a fresh pair of eyes. Every decision had been recorded and was open to review.

  It was known as victimology – the picture that a murder inquiry tried to build up of the relationship between the deceased, the location and the suspects who came into the picture.

  As a result of the strategies and protocols put in place, the clear-up rates for murder in England and Wales were very high – more than ninety per cent of suspicious deaths were detected, meaning someone was either convicted, or charged and later cleared.

  Yes, there were a few unsolved murders. Derbyshire Constabulary had ten of them on the books. No one wanted another one to add to the tally, and especially not two. The initial inquiry had failed to produce a result, but now they had another chance.

  The trouble was, within a few days Divisional CID would get sidelined, and they’d all be back on burglaries and stolen postboxes.

  ‘If local officers could help us by reviewing the original inquiry into the disappearance of the Pearsons, going over the ground to see what might have been missed, it would be greatly appreciated,’ said Mackenze. ‘I think we could also use another physical search, but over an expanded area. I realise this will tie up some resources at an operational level.’

  Branagh nodded her agreement, and Cooper knew his workload for the next few days had just been doubled.

  ‘Of course, our big piece of luck,’ continued Mackenzie, ‘is the find on Oxlow Moor. These are believed to be the Pearsons’ belongings.’

  Now there was a stir of interest in the room. They were no longer going over old territory that had already proved fruitless. This was something new. Police officers were only human. They were motivated by the prospect of making genuine progress and achieving results. It was what gave them that frisson of excitement.

  Mackenzie indicated large photos fixed to the whiteboard behind him.

  ‘So – first we have a couple of matching Levi’s anoraks in bright orange, with chambray linings. Not my style, but nice and visible in bad conditions, I’m told. As you can see, the larger of the two garments has staining on the left shoulder and left arm, here and here. Confirmed as human blood.’

  The stains were clearly visible in the scenes-of-crime photos, dark against the orange fabric of the anorak, which had been laid out on a table under powerful lights. Some forensic expert would even now be trying to analyse the direction of the spatter, the force of the spray, calculating angles and the position of the wearer.

  ‘Then there’s a small Italian leather rucksack. This purple doesn’t seem to go with the anoraks, but what do I know? All three of these are items the Pearsons were seen with during their visit to Castleton on that last evening, and have been confirmed as their possessions. And even if we didn’t have those …’ The DCI gestured at two more photos. ‘This is David Pearson’s wallet, containing a little over two hundred and fifty pounds in cash, three credit cards, his own business cards and several membership cards – gym, AA, frequent flyer points and so on. Obviously this leaves us in no doubt. All of these items, ladies and gentleme
n, were deliberately buried in peat on Oxlow Moor, about a mile from the cottage where the Pearsons were staying.’

  Cooper studied the photographs carefully. The items might leave no doubt about identification, but they certainly left room for speculation about motive. If David and Trisha Pearson were attacked and killed, why weren’t they robbed too? In particular, why would anyone leave that amount of cash?

  ‘Fingerprints?’ someone was asking.

  ‘Working on it.’

  That was a given. No expense spared, probably. After all this time, there would be an all-out effort to get forensic results. But it could take time.

  ‘Luckily,’ said Mackenzie, ‘a complete forensic sweep of the cottage was done at the time. No sign of a breakin, or of any violence taking place there. But after some work by the lab, they did manage to obtain enough DNA from tooth-brushes, used clothing, follicles on hairbrushes and so on to build DNA profiles for the victims. I mean, for David and Trisha Pearson, of course.’

  ‘If they are victims.’

  ‘Absolutely. Meanwhile,’ Mackenzie looked towards Fry, ‘we’ll also be concentrating on making some early progress on the fresh incident. Let’s see if we can confirm a connection between the two.’

  There was a hesitant murmur of agreement.

  Mackenzie cast his eye round the room. ‘Everyone up to speed? Good. Form your teams. There’s a lot of work to do.’

  Cooper looked round in amazement as the meeting broke up. He caught DI Hitchens by the arm as he passed on his way to the door.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Cooper. ‘The body at the pub?’

  Hitchens nodded towards the front of the room, where Fry had her head down talking to DCI Mackenzie.

  ‘Sorry, Ben,’ he said. ‘EMSOU – MC are keeping that to themselves.’

  A few minutes later, Villiers turned to Cooper with a puzzled expression.