Dead in the Dark

12

An hour later, Ben Cooper was in Detective Superintendent Branagh’s office, having fought his way through the traffic in Chesterfield just as everyone else seemed to be leaving town to go home. He’d been standing gridlocked at set after set of lights, always too close to the car in front, foot constantly on the brake.

It reminded Cooper why driving on roads in the Peak District felt such a pleasure. Even if they were narrow and winding and covered in mud from the wheels of a tractor, they were much more pleasant than this. He hoped no one ever tried to transfer him to a city.

Sitting across from Hazel Branagh, he realised how much he was missing those big shoulders, the intimidating but reassuring presence. She looked somehow crammed into her new office, even though it was actually bigger than her old one, and certainly airier and more modern, with large windows looking out over the Chesterfield. Cooper thought if he leaned a little to the side he might catch a glimpse of the famous twisted spire of St Mary and All Saints.

‘Let’s talk about the Annette Bower inquiry,’ said Branagh. ‘It’s much easier doing it face to face, don’t you think, Ben?’

‘Certainly.’

‘You’ve read up on the case, I suppose?’

‘Only the basic details. I haven’t had time to go through the case files yet.’

‘Do any questions spring to your mind?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, ask away.’

‘I did wonder what stage the inquiry had reached when it was suspended,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes, good question. I was planning to switch the search area.’

‘Really? On what evidence?’

Branagh was silent for a moment. ‘I hate to admit this. But I’m glad you’re asking me, Ben. It makes me reconsider my decisions — or the lack of them.’

‘I’m sure you made all the right calls,’ said Cooper.

‘Are you? I’m not so certain.’

Cooper waited. He could sense that Hazel Branagh wanted to tell him something, but he couldn’t rush her. She wasn’t someone you could hurry. If interrupted, she would probably just clam up.

‘I suppose you would call it a hunch,’ she said at last. ‘I hope you won’t laugh.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am.’

‘No, you wouldn’t, would you?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘You have hunches yourself don’t you, DI Cooper? It doesn’t always appear in your reports, but your colleagues are aware of them. And they’ve learned to trust them too.’

He wondered who Branagh had been talking to. She always seemed to know what was going on, right down to the most junior officers. Perhaps she just picked things up from the general atmosphere in the office. That was something else she wouldn’t be able to do, now she was based seventeen miles away.

‘The Bowers were already living in Bakewell then,’ said Branagh. ‘And they still do, of course.’

‘Well, Reece does — with his new partner and their children.’

‘Oh yes, the new partner. They’re not married, though.’

‘No. Annette is officially still alive.’

‘Mmm. Was the new partner involved in the original case, by any chance?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Cooper. ‘I haven’t checked yet, though. Her name is Naomi Heath.’

‘It doesn’t ring a bell. There was an affair Bower was having with a colleague at work, but I don’t think that was the name.’

‘I’ll run a check on her. Heath isn’t her maiden name.’

‘What is she like? How is she reacting to Mr Bower’s disappearance?’

‘It’s hard to tell. She isn’t very forthcoming. I’ll speak to her again tomorrow.’

‘Good.’ Branagh paused. ‘What was I saying?’

‘The Bowers lived in Bakewell then.’

‘Oh, yes. They were both keen walkers in those days. There was a particular area they liked to go to, not far away from Bakewell. I was thinking of it when the report came in that Reece Bower was missing. We’d exhausted the search of their property and the neighbouring area by then. We’d dug up the garden too.’

‘Oh, yes. The garden.’

‘We thought the back garden was a likely burial spot. That was where we were pinning our hopes in the beginning, because of the signs of disturbed earth. Most of it wasn’t overlooked by any of the neighbouring properties. And as soon as we saw the freshly dug ground, well, it was inevitable we were going to focus our attention there. I suppose we were a bit too blinkered, and we just followed the most obvious possibilities. We should have been more open-minded. We wasted a lot of time on that garden.’

‘It’s looking good now,’ said Cooper. ‘The plants are thriving.’

‘I’m not surprised. We gave it a thorough turning over and pulled out a lot of rubbish left there by the builders — bricks, lumps of plasterboard, you know the sort of thing. We dug for days and turned up nothing of significance, apart from a dead cat that had been buried by the previous owners. It was disheartening. Then we extended the search area to include some woods at the rear of the property, and along the edge of the Monsal Trail. We searched some industrial units too, I recall. Two of them were empty at the time. They were considered strong possibilities for a while. But nothing. Nothing at all.’

Cooper kept silent, listening to Branagh reliving the experience of running the Annette Bower inquiry. He understood how frustrating those circumstances could be, when every potential lead you came up with hit a dead end. As a DC, he’d been on an inquiry team assigned to interview neighbours in Aldern Way, and then employees at the industrial units. He was well aware of some of what Branagh was saying. But still, he didn’t interrupt.

‘There was this one other place,’ she said. ‘We would have gone there next — though, given the nature of the location, it would have been a massive undertaking. Hard enough to justify at the best of times.’

‘What location was that, ma’am?’

‘An entire valley. Lathkill Dale.’

‘Why Lathkill Dale?’ asked Cooper.

‘The Bowers originally met on a guided walk run by the Rangers. A shared interest in nature and industrial heritage, something like that. Lathkill Dale was one of their favourite areas apparently. They went there often, when they got the chance. Does that make sense to you, Ben — going for walk in the same place time after time? Personally, I’d want to go somewhere different, no matter how close by it was.’

‘Some people like it,’ said Cooper. ‘They form a special connection with a place and they enjoy the familiarity. They find it relaxing. I can imagine that they would want to keep going to Lathkill Dale, particularly if they’d met there. It would have a special meaning for them.’

‘Mmm. That sounds a bit overly romantic to me,’ said Branagh. ‘Reece Bower didn’t strike me as the romantic type.’

‘Perhaps Annette was, though. And he just went along with it. Lots of men do that.’

‘My own husband would be astonished if I developed that sort of romantic streak,’ said Branagh. ‘I think he would divorce me in an instant.’

Cooper rarely thought of Detective Superintendent Branagh as a wife or mother. She had always been a rather daunting authority figure to him. So the occasional reference to her family always took him by surprise. He knew, as a matter of record, that she’d been married for many years to the same man, a consultant paediatrician at Eden Valley General Hospital, and that they had two grown-up children. There had even been photographs of the family on her desk at West Street, but he’d never seen her look at them while he was in the office. When she was working, she fully concentrated on the job in hand. This sudden reference to her marriage sounded jarring. He wondered if there was more behind it.

‘And then there was the child,’ she was saying. ‘The Bowers’ daughter.’

‘Lacey,’ said Cooper.

‘She was very young at the time her mother went missing. About eight years old?’

‘That’s right.’

‘We couldn’t interview her obviously. Not at that age. Initially she was spoken to with her father present, but she was very uncommunicative. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen her mother, or anything she’d said. I suppose it was all too overwhelming for her. Too frightening and confusing, all those questions from strangers. She seemed very close to her father — she never let go of him, was clinging to him constantly for reassurance whenever I saw her. After the arrest, young Lacey went to stay with an aunt.’

‘Annette’s sister, Frances Swann.’

Branagh nodded. ‘I felt very bad about tearing her away from her father, but the evidence...’

‘Yes, it was the right decision.’

‘Thank you. I’ve wondered, of course. I’ve had ten years to wonder about it, whether all I did in that moment was to make a terrible situation even worse for a small child. Her mother had gone missing, and now her father was being taken away from her. I felt I must appear to be the big, bad ogre in her eyes. I hope she’s forgiven me. I’d be interested to hear how she’s grown up.’

‘She’s on my list to speak to, obviously.’

Superintendent Branagh’s face had set into a grim expression as she talked about the Bower case. Cooper could see that the memory of it made her... not regretful exactly, but angry.

‘When the victim hasn’t been found,’ she said, ‘one of the temptations for the killer is to claim themselves to have seen their victim alive. But Reece Bower didn’t need to lie. Someone else did that job for him.’

‘He was a very lucky man.’

‘Either that, or he was innocent,’ said Cooper. ‘I suppose there’s always that possibility.’

Branagh’s expression didn’t change. She continued to stare grimly at Cooper.

‘But you don’t think so,’ he said.

‘No, I don’t.’

Branagh sighed. ‘Between you and me, I see this as a chance to make amends, to explore missed opportunities,’ she said. ‘We may be able to put things right.’

‘And it’s long overdue after ten years,’ said Cooper.

He’d heard the uncertainty in the superintendent’s voice. She had a lot of trust in him, but she knew she couldn’t order him to pursue the lines of inquiry she’d missed all those years ago. When it came down to it, the decision was his. Branagh recognised that.

‘Will you do this for me, Ben?’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll do what I can.’

She sounded relieved now.

‘There will be questions asked, no doubt. I’ll back you as much as I can. Let me know if you have any problems.’

‘I’ll get straight on to it.’

Cooper stood up to leave.

‘DI Cooper...’ she said as he reached the door.

‘Ma’am?’

‘When will you be seeing Detective Sergeant Fry?’

Cooper stared at her in surprise.

‘Why would I want to see her?’

‘Well... no particular reason.’

He knew that Detective Superintendent Branagh didn’t say things like that for no particular reason.

‘I’m puzzled that you should mention her, ma’am. She’s been working with EMSOU’s Major Crime Unit for some time now.’

‘I know that, of course. But I always thought you worked together really well.’ She waved a hand to dismiss his protests. ‘Oh, I know you’re very different, and you didn’t always get on. But you were a good team. You got results.’

Cooper didn’t know how to reply. It wasn’t how he’d seen their relationship. But it might look different from the outside.

‘I don’t mean that you can’t get results on your own,’ said Branagh. ‘Of course not. I have absolute faith in you to make the right decisions, Ben.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ll try to do that.’