Dead in the Dark

16

In Bakewell town centre Ben Cooper could find only one CCTV camera, and that pointed at the entrance to a pub on Bridge Street, pretty useless for present purposes. Even if it had existed ten years ago, there was no way of tracking the movements of the Bowers’ vehicle. There weren’t even any speed cameras to catch sight of his blue Vauxhall, except for some on the A6 towards Buxton.

This was Cooper’s second visit to Bakewell in two days. But at least he’d managed to avoid market day, which was Monday.

There had been no answer to his calls to the number kept on file for Evan Slaney. Perhaps he was away, or just at work. Cooper didn’t have a business address for Slaney, so he had no option but to head first to Reece Bower’s house in Aldern Way.

When Naomi Heath appeared at the door of the house in Aldern Way, her make-up couldn’t disguise the fact that she hadn’t been sleeping well. Her eyes were sunken and smudged with dark shadows.

‘Oh, Detective Inspector Cooper,’ she said. ‘On your own this time?’

‘I do have a few more questions,’ said Cooper.

‘Come in, then. What other information can I give you?’

‘I was hoping you could tell me how Mr Bower left,’ said Cooper. ‘It says in the initial reports that his car is still here.’

‘Yes, it’s in the garage.’

‘Can I have a look at it?’

‘I’ll get you the keys. They’re on the hook by the door.’

‘Thank you.’

Reece Bower’s present car was a silver BMW. Not a new model, but about three years old. No doubt he’d got rid of the blue Vauxhall long ago. Cooper opened the boot and moved aside a bag of golf clubs to examine a blue Berghaus waterproof and a pair of Hi-Tec walking boots. The waterproof was dry, and the boots were so clean that they couldn’t have been used recently. He found nothing else — not even a spare wheel. Of course, BMWs had run-flat tyres.

Inside the car, he checked the glove compartment, all the storage areas, and even under the seats. There was nothing of interest. Nothing to see at all, except a packet of tissues and some change for parking. Reece Bower was either a very tidy man, or the car had been cleared out deliberately. It hadn’t been valeted though. That was something at least. If necessary, he could get a forensic examination carried out.

The garage itself contained all the usual stuff. Cooper knew many people with garages who used them for anything except parking their car in. They were more secure than a garden shed for storing your lawnmower and power tools, warmer and drier for stacking cardboard boxes, handier for plugging in a chest freezer. All of those things were here, but the garage was big enough to take the car as well. It probably took a bit of manoeuvring down that drive, but it did just about fit.

‘This is Mr Bower’s car,’ said Cooper, ‘so do you have a car of your own, Mrs Heath?’

‘Yes, a Mini. It’s on the other drive.’

‘Does Mr Bower drive that sometimes?’

‘Not unless he really has to. He doesn’t like it. He says it’s too small to be a proper car. But it suits me.’

‘So if he didn’t take his car, how did he leave?’

‘He set off walking down the hill towards Station Road.’

‘Did you hear him call for a taxi?’

‘No.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t have got very far on foot. Could he have been meeting someone?’

‘Who would that be?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘I was hoping you might know.’

‘I haven’t any idea.’

Cooper found himself gazing out of the back window at the flourishing garden. He had to keep reminding himself that this was the same house that Annette Bower had disappeared from ten years ago. He had no sense of a sinister history to this property, the way he did in some houses. But then, the search had found nothing. If Annette was anywhere, she wasn’t here at the house in Aldern Way.

‘You mentioned yesterday that you thought Mr Bower had been getting hassle from some the employees where he works and that something one of them said may have upset him enough to make him want to get away for a while.’

‘Yes, I did say that.’

‘I think you may know what people were saying to him.’

‘Well, they make jokes about him,’ she said. ‘Usually behind his back, but some of them to his face. They don’t seem to have any respect for him. Being in middle management is an unenviable position, I suppose. You have the responsibility, but without the power or the authority. Sometimes it just gets a bit too much for Reece.’

‘What sort of jokes do they make?’ asked Cooper.

She hesitated. ‘I’d rather not say.’

Cooper studied her carefully. ‘Are they to do with the time he was charged with the murder of his wife?’

Naomi lowered her eyes. ‘Yes, I believe so. I can’t tell you exactly what they say — Reece doesn’t go into the details. All I know is that they make him angry. I think, when they see Reece getting annoyed, it just makes them worse. They like to wind him up more if they get a reaction. It’s like kids in the playground, isn’t it? They pick on the sensitive child.’

‘So you’d say Mr Bower is sensitive?’

‘On that subject, yes. Wouldn’t you be? It was a very traumatic experience for him.’ Then she looked at Cooper more closely and seemed to recall who he was. ‘But you’re a police officer. Perhaps you don’t see it like that. Your people did their best to get him convicted.’

Cooper walked down the hallway to the front door, then turned to Naomi.

‘Are the boys at school?’ he said.

‘Yes, Daniel and Joshua attend schools here in Bakewell. You’re not going to drag them into this, are you? They have problems enough.’

‘No, that shouldn’t be necessary.’ He paused. ‘We’ll be speaking to Lacey, though.’

Naomi frowned.

‘Good luck to you, then.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know what sense you’ll get out of her.’

‘Does she talk to you, Mrs Heath? Or to her father?’

‘It depends what you mean by “talk”. She’s a teenager. Teenagers lie to their parents all the time. It’s a miracle if they tell us the truth now and then. The only view we get of what’s going on in their heads is the impression we have from the outside. The truth can be something completely different. But I’m sure you know that.’

At the top of the drive Cooper found a middle-aged woman in a red padded jacket standing near his car with a Yorkshire terrier dog on a lead. She didn’t seem to be walking the dog, just standing there as if waiting for it to do something. Or waiting for something else perhaps.

‘Hello,’ she brightly when he approached. ‘You’ve been to see Naomi.’

It was a statement rather than a question. So she must have been watching him for a while.

‘You must be a neighbour,’ he said.

‘Yes, my house is there, across the road. Are you with the police?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s gone off, hasn’t he? Reece, I mean.’

‘That’s right, Mrs...?’

‘Taylor. Evelyn.’

‘Do you know Mr Bower well?’

‘Not that well, I suppose. But they’re a very nice couple,’ she said. ‘He obviously dotes on her and can’t do enough for her. I wish all husbands were like that, actually. And they have that young boy.’

‘Daniel, their five-year-old?’

‘Yes, you see them together. Happy as any family I’ve ever seen.’

Cooper nodded. ‘What about the other children? Naomi has a son a few years older.’

‘Oh, he’s fine. A bit quiet perhaps. The younger boy is very sweet.’

Perhaps this was a woman who just liked small children. But he had to ask her about one more...

‘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.

Betts 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.