Dead in the Dark

22

A light rain had begun to fall. Ben Cooper could feel it on his face, though it was leaving hardly any impression on the concrete.

Cooper had parked his RAV4 in one of the car parks behind the shops and walked through into the marketplace. It looked pretty bleak.

On the way into Shirebrook he’d passed a dilapidated pub. A sign on the wall had said POKOJE DO WYNAJECIA OD £65 W TYM RACHUNKI — Rooms for Rent £65 a week including bills. POLEC LOKATORA A OTRZYMASZ £25 — Refer a friend and receive £25 cashback. Near a pond by the side of the road the notices said ZAKAZ WEDKOWANIA, ZAKAZ WSTEPU — No fishing, no public access.

At one time, these signs would have looked very odd. They would certainly have had local people scratching their heads. But everyone in this area had learned a few words of Polish by now. The polski sklep had become as traditional a feature of the British high street as WH Smith or Boots. Even English people had been tempted to buy Polish bread, pierogi, kielbasa, sauerkraut, or pickled cucumbers.

Cooper saw Fry’s black Audi and climbed into the passenger seat.

‘It’s hardly the Peak District, is it?’ said Fry.

‘But still Derbyshire.’

‘So you said.’

‘It’s quiet too.’

‘There’s a Public Space Protection Order,’ said Fry.

‘I know. It’s a shame.’

‘Why?’

‘The trouble with PSPOs is that they give local authorities the power to criminalise behaviour that isn’t normally criminal. And they aren’t just directed at an individual, like an ASBO is. Their geographical definition makes anyone liable to prosecution in a particular area. It kills a place like this. Shirebrook used to be full of pubs. Now most of them seem to be closed.’

Cooper watched buses come into the stops and a few people getting on. The number twenty-three to Mansfield, the number eighty-two to Chesterfield. A man passed along the pavement riding a mobility scooter with two England flags attached to the back of the seat.

‘My dad was stationed here when he was a young bobby,’ said Cooper, ‘many years ago, before the Miners’ Strike in the mid-1980s. Shirebrook was a very different place then. The strike tore it apart. You remember what the Miners’ Strike was like.’

‘I don’t think we had the Miners’ Strike in Birmingham,’ said Fry.

Cooper snorted. ‘You just weren’t interested, I suppose. You were more concerned with other things.’

‘Probably.’

‘But in places like Shirebrook, it meant everything. For a lot of these old ex-miners, the strike is still fresh in their memories. Still a raw wound. They blame everything that’s happened to them since on the Thatcher government and the closure of the pits.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Fry. ‘It was more than thirty years ago.’

‘Thirty years is nothing. Not to some of these people.’

‘I can’t believe that.’

Cooper had often had to remind himself that Diane Fry came from a different background. She wasn’t just from the West Midlands and a city girl. She’d also been a graduate entrant to the police service, with a degree in Crime and Policing from Birmingham City University.

Yet these days Fry was starting to look over-qualified. Even Cooper’s modest A levels had become unnecessary, since Derbyshire Constabulary had recently reduced the qualifications for entry. In fact, there were no longer any educational requirements at all, not even the old minimum of a level three NVQ. Now it was enough to demonstrate training or experience that the Chief Constable might consider the equivalent. It was all about expanding the pool of potential recruits and encouraging people from under-represented groups to apply. The change had been made in time for the next recruitment window, which opened for applications later in the month.

‘I’ve read up on your murder case,’ said Cooper. ‘Krystian Zalewski, found dead from stab wounds in his flat. He was apparently attacked in an alleyway off Shirebrook marketplace.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you have no witnesses to the attack?’

‘Not so far. Zalewski lived on his own, and he didn’t seek treatment for his injuries, so he died in his flat.’

‘If nobody saw it, and Mr Zalewski lived alone, who reported finding the body?’ asked Cooper.

‘No one,’ said Fry.

‘How could it be no one?’

‘The landlord downstairs came in to open his shop early next morning and found a stain on his ceiling. A red stain, and it was spreading. Not surprisingly, it took a while before it dawned on him he had blood dripping through the floor of the flat above. But then he went up to check. He has a duplicate key of course, but the door was bolted on the inside. So the landlord made a call. That’s Mr Pollitt.’

Cooper thought he detected a peculiar emphasis on the name ‘Pollitt’ as if it caused a bad taste in her mouth and she was spitting it out.

‘And response officers came and broke the door open,’ he said.

‘That’s it.’

‘But I gather that EMSOU were here before that.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Possibly? Is that all you can say?’

‘I’m restricted in what I can tell you,’ said Fry. ‘But when Krystian Zalewski was killed, we thought it was connected to an existing operation.’

‘An existing operation?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what did bring EMSOU to Shirebrook,’ asked Cooper, ‘if it wasn’t the murder?’

‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Not far.’

Just to the south of the town centre was the Model Village, the estate built for miners and their families. Rows of terraced house with narrow strips of front garden. Back alleys lined by brick privies and scattered with wheelie bins. Lines of washing filled many of the front gardens, where grass had been allowed to grow rank. One or two had squeezed a trampoline in for the children, leaving no room for anything else.

Cooper recalled his father talking about the Miners’ Strike of 1984–85. Shirebrook had been the scene of fighting between pickets and police escorting working miners. Women and children had shouted ‘Scab’ at men going to work, the wives of working miners had their windows smashed, and their children were bullied at school. A striker had been injured in an attack. At a mass meeting, NUM members had decided they would refuse to work with men who crossed picket lines, but by the February of 1985, Shirebrook miners had become so desperate that most of them went back to work.

They drove past a parade of shops, turned a corner, and reached the furthest part of the estate. Fry pulled up a few short yards from the end of the road.

‘We’re about to raid an address here,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Incident reports showed that police officers have been called to this address almost twenty times since it became an HMO,’ said Fry. ‘That’s a house in multiple occupation.’

‘I know what it means.’

‘For months now we’ve had surveillance on a Czech gang believed to be involved in slave trafficking. We’ve been working closely with the National Crime Agency, of course.’

‘Slave trafficking?’ said Cooper.

‘It’s a modern form of slavery. Victims are housed in appalling conditions, living in garages or in cupboards. Some have to forage for food in bins. They can’t wash, they don’t get clean clothes — they may be charged a pound a time by their gangmasters just to use the toilet. Most of the men are sent out to work in factories, or used as domestic servants. They’re threatened with violence or beaten to keep them frightened and submissive. Ben, the trafficking network is like a spider’s web that goes right across the continent of Europe.’

‘It’s almost unbelievable that it happens here in the UK.’

‘Not unbelievable once you’ve seen it at first-hand.’

‘Are we about to do that?’

‘Perhaps.’

Fry drew out a folder with a series of photos.

‘Katerina Drenkova is the godmother of the gang,’ she said. ‘She organised the trafficking and controlled the finances. Her husband and son were the enforcers, Ladislav and Pavel Drenko. They assaulted and threatened their victims with baseball bats.’

She shuffled the sheaf of photos to show two more men.

‘These two victims tried to escape,’ she said. ‘Two Czech men, Josef Hajek and Mikolas Zeman. Hajek turned up at A & E with a head injury after one of the Drenkos hit him with a baseball bat. He was interviewed by local police at the hospital. Hajek had been constantly threatened by the Drenkos that if he tried to leave, or did something at work to lose his job, he would get a beating.’

‘Where did he work?’ asked Cooper.

‘At a car wash. The manager described Hajek as a good worker, but said he always seemed to be hungry. He always turned up for work in the same clothes, and had er... poor hygiene habits.’

‘I see.’

‘Mikolas Zeman was trafficked into the UK by someone else and sold to Katerina Drenkova.’

‘Sold?’

‘That’s the way slavery works, Ben.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘When Zeman was trafficked, he was told he’d have a better life here in the UK. He’d be able to get work and he’d have a roof over his head. It looked like a good option for him, a new start. A more comfortable way of life than in his village in the Czech Republic. It didn’t turn out that way, of course. He and five other men shared one room at the house owned by the Drenkos, with three sleeping on the floor and two in a single bed, like sardines. Others had to sleep on the floor in a garage. They urinated into bottles and had to eat outside. One of the men was treated as a household servant, doing the cooking and cleaning. Others were sent out to work in factories.’

‘And car washes.’

‘Yes. Anyway, the NCA launched a seven-month surveillance operation, and a series of raids were subsequently carried out on addresses across the Midlands. We estimate that several dozen men were trafficked over about six years. The gang will be charged with conspiracy to traffic for the purpose of exploitation, requiring a person to perform forced or compulsory labour, and acting as a gangmaster.’

‘I don’t think those offences even existed when I was in training.’

‘The Modern Slavery Act 2015,’ said Fry. ‘I’m sure you’ll have had the updates.’

‘Of course I will.’

‘The NCA’s financial investigations found bank accounts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. So slavery can be quite profitable for the owners.’

Fry looked at her watch. Moments later, several cars and a van load of uniformed officers raced into the street. They piled out and entered the garden of a house about six doors down.

‘There are officers in the back alley too,’ said Fry.

One officer wielded the battering ram and broke down the door in three or four blows. His colleagues ran in and began leading people out and loading them into the van.

Cooper was surprised how many people came out of the house. He lost count of them after six. They were all males of working age too. Not your normal household of two parents and two and a half children. He looked to Fry for a cue.

‘Okay, we can go in now.’

A concrete path ran through a few yards of grass that could barely be called a lawn. A wheelie bin stood by the white PVC front door, which had splintered under the impact of the battering ram. Fry and Cooper stepped through the gap into a hallway. The carpet was trampled with mud, and a line of men’s work boots stood against the wall.

The interior of the house was overheated. It smelled rank and stale, thick with the stink of cigarette smoke and the sour dregs of beer. Downstairs the walls were a uniform dull grey, with net curtains and roller blinds at all the windows. The kitchen was barely seven feet wide. If he stretched, he could almost have touched both walls at once. Not that he would have wanted to. They looked as though they had absorbed years of grease and food splashes. The smell of cooking practically oozed from the paintwork.

‘I’ve been in plenty of houses like this,’ said Cooper. ‘What’s the big deal?’

‘Upstairs,’ said Fry.

The stairs creaked ominously and the carpet was frayed into tattered ribbons, as if by the constant passage of many pairs of hobnailed boots.

The same smells met Cooper on the landing. Upstairs, heavy floral patterns predominated. Massive red flowers on the wallpaper, even bigger blue flowers on the rugs. In the two first floor bedrooms upstairs, he could hardly see an inch of carpet. Three mattresses lay on the floor of each room, the piles of disarrayed blankets suggesting that they were regularly used. Clothes were hung on rails and behind the door, cardboard boxes were full of shoes and underwear, a yellow high-vis jacket hung over the side.

‘Some of these properties have owner-occupiers and have been made really nice internally,’ said Fry. ‘Well, where else could you buy a three-bedroom house for seventy thousand pounds?’

‘Not in Edendale, that’s for sure.’

Cooper thought of the Swanns’ home in Over Haddon. That was a three-bedroom property too. But the difference in price between the two houses was probably somewhere in the range of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. What was it they said about property? Location, location, location...

‘But a lot of these houses are rented,’ said Fry. ‘Landlords charge about four hundred and fifty pounds a month. If you can get nine or ten people in them, that’s very cheap.’

‘So where’s the third bedroom?’

She pointed upwards. ‘Attic.’

The trap door opened to reveal an extending ladder. In the attic, Cooper couldn’t reach the walls, but he had to duck to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling.

‘It’s the same in here,’ said Cooper. ‘Mattresses and blankets.’

‘This is more than just a house in multiple occupation. These men were being exploited.’

Cooper came back down the ladder and stood on the landing.

‘Why have you shown me all this?’ he said.

‘Detective Superintendent Branagh asked us to bring you in and make sure you were up to speed with the operation.’

‘But why?’

‘Because,’ said Fry, ‘the next house we raid may be in your area.’

‘And what do you suggest I do in the meantime?’

‘We want LPUs like yours to gather information,’ she said. ‘It’s only by obtaining intelligence on the ground that we can get a complete picture. You and your team are best placed to do that.’

‘I suppose we are,’ admitted Cooper.

Outside, the occupants of the house had been driven away in the police van. As Fry and Cooper left in her Audi, they drove through a new housing development that had been built right next to the Model Village.

Cooper noticed that the roads were called Sunflower Close, Orchid Way, and The Spinney. Now, that could be in Edendale.