Dead in the Dark

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:

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 the 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 re-appeared 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.

‘Which he eventually did’? That was interesting. Cooper had read a lot of witness statements, and the inclusion of a term like ‘eventually’ suggested that Mrs Swann had been very insistent on it.

There were other statements, including one from Adrian Swann confirming his wife’s version of events, and one from Reece Bower’s manager who admitted that Bower had seemed stressed recently, though the standard of his work hadn’t suffered.

And there was a final statement, dated well after the others, from Annette Bower’s father, Evan Slaney, claiming to have seen his daughter alive and well in Buxton long after her husband was supposed to have killed her.

Cooper was frowning over the details of the sighting when he was interrupted.

‘How is it going?’

He looked up. Carol Villiers stood over his desk gazing at the sheaf of reports. Cooper hadn’t heard her either knock on the door or come into the room.

‘It doesn’t look good,’ he said.

‘Reece Bower was never actually tried. So a review of the case might produce a different opinion from the CPS. Don’t you think so?’

Cooper shook his head. ‘There would have to be some new evidence. They wouldn’t consider it otherwise.’

‘What if the credibility of the crucial witness statement was demolished?’

‘You mean her father, Mr Slaney.’

‘Yes, he’s the one who claims he saw Annette alive.’

‘You think we might be able to prove he’s lying?’

‘Or mistaken.’

‘He was very confident and consistent in his interview,’ said Cooper. ‘Who’s going to accept now that he was just mistaken?’

‘Lying then.’

‘For what reason? He had no motivation to lie, no reason to protect Reece Bower.’

‘Not that we know of.’

‘Okay,’ said Cooper dubiously. ‘So what do you think the strongest elements of the case were against Reece Bower?’

‘Well, for a start, the forensic examination found bloodstains on the floor of the Bowers’ kitchen,’ said Villiers. ‘Only tiny spots. Most of them were invisible to the human eye. It was one particular drop of blood that drew attention.’

Cooper nodded. ‘That single speck started the whole thing. The entire case rested on it in a way.’

‘It was identified as Annette Bower’s blood, though. Her DNA wasn’t on record, but they got a sample from a hairbrush for comparison. It was definitely Annette’s blood.’

‘Reece Bower’s story was that she’d cut herself on a knife a few days previously, while she was chopping vegetables. That was never disproved.’

‘How could it be?’ said Villiers. ‘It was consistent with the pattern of the blood. And since Annette Bower was never found, alive or dead, she was wasn’t able to either corroborate or contradict that version of events.’

‘Entirely circumstantial, then,’ said Cooper. ‘Not real proof.’

‘Everyone who knew the Bowers confirmed that their marriage was going a rough patch. Their neighbours, Annette’s sister, her parents, even some of their colleagues at work. Everyone agreed that the couple had been having arguments.’

‘If all those people knew about their arguments, they were hardly a secret,’ Cooper pointed out.

‘I suppose not.’

‘Is there a member of the family we don’t have a statement from?’

‘Only the daughter, Lacey,’ said Villiers. ‘She would have been eight years old at the time of her mother’s disappearance, though.’

‘It’s very young, but not too young to remember something about it. Children of that age often notice more than adults realise, or expect. It’s possible she could recall some detail that was important.’

‘But there’s no statement on record.’

‘She wouldn’t have been questioned at the time, or only in a superficial way.’

Cooper sensed a gap in the information. If she had been spoken to at all following the disappearance, an eight-year-old girl like Lacey would have been treated with kid gloves by the inquiry team. She would have been asked questions only in the presence of a responsible adult — in those circumstances, almost certainly her father. After Reece Bower was arrested and charged with murder, she went to her aunt’s to be looked after.

‘Annette Bower’s sister, Frances Swann...’ he said.

Villiers checked the list. ‘She has an address at Over Haddon.’

‘Do we know anything else about her?’

‘She’s a teacher at Lady Manners School. I don’t know what subject. Her husband works for the Health and Safety Laboratory at Harpur Hill.’

‘Adrian Swann?’

‘Yes. Do you know him, Ben?’

‘I’ve come across him. He’s a specialist in high-velocity projectile delivery systems.’

‘Mmm, whatever they are,’ said Villiers. ‘Well, the Swanns have two children of their own. One of them would be about the same age as Lacey.’

Cooper looked down at the sea of reports and statements.

‘What am I missing, Carol?’

‘I don’t know.’

They sat and stared at each other for a while. Then Villiers picked out a witness statement from the pile.

‘This man driving the red Nissan,’ she said. ‘He was never traced, it seems. There were public appeals, but no one came forward so he couldn’t be identified.’

‘If he ever actually existed.’

‘You think he was invented? But it wasn’t Reece Bower who reported seeing the Nissan, it was a member of the public who saw it behaving suspiciously near the Monsal Trail.’

‘What does “behaving suspiciously” mean? Someone sitting in a car might look suspicious to a wary passer-by with an active imagination.’ Cooper shook his head. ‘It sounds like a red herring to me.’

‘It worked in distracting the focus of the investigation for a while. It’s almost as if Bower had planted that bit of witness evidence himself.’

‘This man has an awful lot of luck,’ said Cooper.

‘Do you think his luck has finally run out?’

‘We can’t know,’ said Cooper, ‘until we find him.’

‘Well, we’ve run some checks on Reece Bower,’ said Villiers. ‘He’s not using his phone, or his credit cards. Or at least, he hasn’t since Sunday, when he disappeared. However, he did draw out four hundred pounds in cash on the Friday, two days before. I suppose he could have picked up a pay-as-you-go mobile somewhere.’

‘Even so, four hundred pounds wouldn’t last him long, unless he’s staying with someone.’

‘True. So where are you going to start, Ben?’

‘Mr Slaney is an obvious starting point. But I also want to talk to Naomi Heath again. I think it’s interesting that she still lives in the house that Annette disappeared from. She would have to believe in Reece Bower’s innocence to do that, wouldn’t she?’

‘Do you want me to come along?’

Cooper hesitated. ‘I think DS Sharma needs you here, Carol.’

‘Okay. Is there anything I can do in the meantime?’

‘Have you started working your way through the address book?’

‘Yes, but there are a lot of names. Is it okay if I share some out to Luke and Becky? There are so many to check.’

‘Yes, of course. And you could find another address for me — Lacey Bower’s. She’s a student in Sheffield.’

‘The teenage daughter?’ said Villiers. ‘I’ll get on to it.’

Ben Cooper felt he could no longer justify taking Carol Villiers away from Dev Sharma’s team. They had too much else to do. But he needed some assistance and there was a compromise solution: Gavin Murfin.

‘How are you, Gavin?’ he asked when Murfin came into his office.

‘Top notch. What’s up, boss?’

‘Gavin, there was a forensic pathologist involved in the Bower case who I don’t know. His name was Felix Webber.’

‘Oh, old Fingers Felix. We bumped heads a few times.’

‘What is he like?’

‘He’s a miserable bugger, the real life and soul of the funeral, if you know what I mean. I had to visit him a lot at one time. When he was there, a morgue was definitely a morgue, and not a place for chat. But he liked cops, had a bit of respect for the job, if you know what I mean.’

‘Not like Dr van Doon?’ said Cooper.

‘Well, aye.’

‘So where is he now?’

‘Felix Webber went independent, set up his own consultancy practice in Derby. He wrote a couple of books, did some media interviews, and got quite a name for himself. Then he became chair of one of the committees at the Royal College of Pathology.’

‘A high flier, then.’

‘I think he must be doing well. He’s gone right upmarket. Lives inside a Sunday supplement — white quartz worktops and a table made of fir planks.’

‘So you’ve kept in touch?’

‘Well, I’ve been to his house,’ said Murfin cautiously.

‘Through your job as a private investigator?’

‘I used to get information from Webber. I could phone him and talk him into giving me a few nuggets, a bit of independent advice, but I can’t get through to him now.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s far too important these days. He doesn’t even chew his own food, let alone answer his own phone.’

Cooper laughed. ‘You’re with me today, by the way.’

‘Just like old times,’ said Murfin.

‘First I want you in Chesterfield. You need to go to Reece Bower’s place of work, a steel fabrications company. Naomi Heath suggested one of his colleagues had made a comment to Reece that upset him and may have made him leave. If that’s so, I want to know who it was and what they said to him.’

‘Got it, boss.’

‘I don’t think it’s a huge outfit. It shouldn’t take you long to narrow it down to a specific individual.’

‘No problem.’

‘And there’s one other person I’d like you to track down and talk to,’ said Cooper.

‘Who’s that?’

Cooper tapped the statement from Annette Bower’s sister.

‘This woman, Madeleine Betts. She works at Chesterfield Royal Hospital.’

‘And after that?’

‘You can come and join me in Bakewell. But phone me first to find out where I’ll be.’