Dead in the Dark

21

The ruins were just visible through the trees. To reach them, Ben Cooper had to cross a wooden footbridge, with the River Lathkill no more than a trickle below it.

The house had been standing derelict for more than a century, slowly collapsing and decaying into the hillside. It had been a two-storey limestone structure once, with mullioned windows and a wide set of steps up to the front door. A few walls still remained, a doorway and a fireplace. But its roofless shell was only a broken memory of a home.

Carol Villiers was already on scene, despatched by Dev Sharma to cover until Cooper arrived.

‘I’m told it’s called Bateman’s House,’ she said. ‘Apparently, it was built as a home for the company agent.’

‘The lead mining company,’ said Cooper. ‘Mandale Mine.’

‘That’s right.’

‘It was probably quite grand in its day.’

‘I wouldn’t want to live here now.’

The whole valley here exuded an atmosphere of mining history. The six and a half miles of Lathkill Dale might look untouched to the casual visitor, but for many centuries it had been mined for lead. The shafts, drainage channels and spoil heaps had all been absorbed into the natural landscape.

Cooper looked at the steps, imagining the lead miners gathering at the end of each week, exhausted and filthy, to collect their pay from the agent.

‘This is the interesting bit,’ said Villiers.

Behind the house was the entrance to a shallow mineshaft. He could reach the bottom down an iron stairway bolted to the wall. It was a steep descent, and the only safe way to go down was backwards, clinging tightly on to the handrails. It wasn’t very deep, but at the bottom he felt immediately anxious as he turned to look up at the sky and get a glimpse of the trees.

This had been part of a working mine. Now it was a tourist attraction. A hand-cranked electric generator had been installed, and visitors could wind the handle to produce enough light to peer over a wall and view a second, deeper shaft.

The second shaft wasn’t easily accessible. The single light bulb powered by the generator lit the sheer, rocky walls and a glitter of water, a stream running deep below. But the bulb was too weak to show anything much on the bottom.

Now two crime scene examiners in scene suits were working in the shaft. They’d set up their own lights, and one of them had climbed an aluminium ladder down to the bottom. Cooper was almost blinded by the flash of his camera bouncing off the walls.

‘Two visitors who came to look at Bateman’s House had brought their own torch,’ said Villiers. ‘They shone it into the shaft to see the water. And they saw this instead.’

‘A wallet,’ said Cooper.

‘It’s Reece Bower’s. His credit cards are still in it, and some cash, even a few business cards. So there’s no doubt about it.’

‘Lots of latent prints,’ said Cooper, examining it through the sides of the evidence bag.

‘And DNA,’ said Villiers.

‘Where?’

She pointed at a dark stain in the creases of the brown leather of the wallet.

‘Blood,’ she said.

‘So it is.’

‘But the SOCOs say there’s no sign of a struggle here in the shaft. It’s more difficult to tell on the surface, because the ground is pretty trampled by visitors.’

Cooper climbed back up the ladder and looked around him at the deep valley and the slopes dense with trees and tangled undergrowth. He would have to organise a search. And it wasn’t going to be small scale.

‘Carol, call the duty controller at Derby Caves Rescue Organisation,’ he said. ‘We’ll need them.’

‘Okay.’

The DCRO base was located in the Fire and Rescue Centre at Buxton. Their rescue vehicle was kept there, ready and loaded with the equipment necessary for most eventualities. Almost all of their search and rescue operations took place in the limestone areas of the Peak District, either in the caves and mines around Castleton or in this area between Eyam, Monyash and Matlock.

Cave Rescue covered a vast area, though. They could be called on by police forces throughout the Midlands, as well as in South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. They were all volunteers, of course. But Cooper knew they would come.

‘Lathkill Dale isn’t an insignificant area,’ he said. ‘There are at least six miles of it. We’ll have to work our way along the dale methodically, or it will be chaos.’

‘We need some more bodies to do that,’ said Villiers.

‘I’ll call Hazel Branagh. I’m sure she’ll authorise it.’

Cooper would have liked to call in the air support unit, but the helicopter had been grounded by a laser attack. He should say another laser attack. There had been eleven attacks on NPAS aircraft in the area around its Ripley base in just one year. Pilots found it difficult to cope with a dazzling light in the cockpit. And many of the lasers being used as weapons were too high-powered even to be legal.

There was another daunting prospect. A search of this extent could produce a huge amount of material, which might or might not be potential evidence. It would all have to be examined to establish whether it was connected to Reece Bower.

At the serious end of crime, in a large murder inquiry, money was rarely a major issue. But in lower priority cases, forensic resources were too expensive to be justified. Even with the new forensic centre opened at Hucknall in Nottinghamshire to pool resources between neighbouring forces, Cooper had to think twice about whether he could justify the cost.

‘Why would Reece Bower come here to Lathkill Dale?’ said Villiers.

‘If he was here at all. When he was alive, I mean.’

‘You think it’s possible somebody dumped his body close by?’ Villiers shook her head. ‘But why here, of all places?’ she said.

‘If you were trying to think of a hiding place, it might spring to mind.’

‘What — a place that’s visited by hundreds of hikers every week?’

‘But there’s so much of it,’ said Cooper. ‘Walkers only visit a small part of the dale. Most of them stay on the trail. They might visit Bateman’s House, if they know it’s here. And they might head up the track and look at the ruined engine house. Who goes further than that? Not many.’

‘I suppose that’s true.’

‘And the people who do come up here,’ he added. ‘They’re generally the kind who could be relied on to report what they found, rather than just pocketing the money and disposing of the rest.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I’m certain of it.’

As they walked back to the trail, Cooper noticed a broken section of bridge, a length of timber cracked halfway between two posts, splinters of wood fresh in the break.

‘It was probably rotten,’ said Villiers when she saw him examining it.

‘No, it isn’t. The wood is perfectly sound.’

‘Something smashed it, then.’

A road wound steeply down from Over Haddon past a tea rooms to an old mill and a ford over the river. Cooper went back to his car parked at the bottom of the road.

‘I’ll have to go and tell Naomi Heath,’ he said. ‘And I’ll see if she can tell whether there’s anything missing from the wallet.’

‘Rather you than than me,’ said Villiers.

‘It has to be done.’

Jackdaws chattered in the trees above the mill. The first yellow leaves had begun to fall, drifting downhill towards the river.

‘And what about the daughter?’ said Villiers.

‘Lacey? Her too. I want her down here in Lathkill Dale. Let’s see what else she can remember.’

At West Street, Cooper had another call waiting for him from Detective Superintendent Branagh.

First she wanted him to bring her up to date with the Reece Bower inquiry and what progress he was making. She gave her go-ahead for the search of Lathkill Dale, but Cooper could tell she was concerned about the extent of it, and how long the search was going to take. That translated to how much it was going to cost. But budgets were a superintendent’s job to justify, thank goodness.

After he’d filled her in on the details, Cooper could tell that there was something else on Branagh’s mind.

‘Ma’am?’

‘Ben, I need you to meet with EMSOU,’ she said. ‘Their intelligence unit have come up with some information they want to share with us.’

‘In relation to one of our cases?’

‘No, theirs.’

‘Ma’am, I’m at a critical stage in the Reece Bower inquiry,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s no longer just a missing person. We’ve had some significant finds in Lathkill Dale which suggest we might have to upgrade it to a murder inquiry.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Branagh. ‘I do read the reports. And I appreciate that I was the one who sent you there in the first place. I hate to take you away from it and put more work on to you. But, to be honest... well, there isn’t anyone else. No one that I would trust this much.’

From anyone else that might be a meaningless platitude, just so much fake praise. But Cooper had never heard Detective Superintendent Branagh use platitudes. She had never felt the need. So he had to believe her.

‘Who should I speak to, ma’am?’

Branagh hesitated, and in that second of silence Cooper knew whose name she was going to give him.

‘Detective Sergeant Fry is in the area,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Cooper, ‘I know.’

Diane Fry answered Cooper’s call promptly.

‘Did you say you know where Shirebrook is?’ she began, without any pretence of small talk.

‘Obviously.’

‘Can you get there tonight?’

‘Tonight? To Shirebrook?’

‘Yes. Meet me in the market square. You know my car. I’ve still got the black Audi.’

‘It’s about thirty miles from Edendale,’ said Cooper. ‘Right over the other side of Chesterfield. It would take me about three quarters of an hour.’

‘I’ll see you later then,’ she said, and ended the call.

Cooper opened his mouth to ask why she wanted him in Shirebrook, but she’d already gone. How should he respond to her demand? He could just not go, in which case somebody else might be given the job and he would never find out what she wanted to tell him. And the times she’d offered to share information or ask for his help were rare enough that he didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.

And what else was he doing tonight? The answer was ‘nothing’, of course.