Dead in the Dark

24 Day 4

Next morning, Ben Cooper found a video clip waiting for him, an extract from last night’s local TV news. When he clicked to play it, DS Dev Sharma’s face appeared in close-up on his screen.

Sharma was standing outside the Singhs’ shop on Buxton Road, making an appeal for information from the public to help identify the robbery suspects. He gave a clear description of them as far as it was known, and a photograph was shown of a motorcycle crash helmet similar to the distinctive red one worn by a suspect.

He did an excellent job too. He was calm, articulate, and exuded confidence. Cooper had authorised the appeal, but he had no idea that Sharma would come across so well in front of the cameras. No doubt senior command officers would be watching this already.

When he left his office, Cooper discovered that Dev Sharma had also brought a youth into custody at West Street. A skinny teenager who sat in an interview room in the custody suite with a solicitor and a woman Cooper recognised as a Social Services caseworker.

‘Who is that in the interview room, Dev?’ he asked in the CID room. ‘He only looks about sixteen.’

‘Not even that,’ said Sharma. ‘He’s a couple of months away from that age.’

‘But who is he?’

Sharma looked at Cooper with a solemn expression. ‘Troy Curtis. He’s Shane Curtis’s brother.’

‘And?’

‘He was the other arsonist.’

‘Damn.’

‘His mother is very upset.’

‘I can imagine.’

Cooper looked at Sharma to see how he was dealing with it. ‘This sort of case can be the hardest. Are you okay with it?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘It’s perhaps worse when you have your own children.’

Sharma nodded. ‘I haven’t told you yet. Asha is expecting our first child. He’s due next April.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s wonderful.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You said “he”?’

‘Yes, I always knew it would be a boy first.’

Cooper laughed. ‘A lot of fathers say that.’

‘We’ll have more than one, of course. But the first one changes everything, doesn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

If his marriage to Liz had gone ahead, Cooper might have been the one announcing his first child by now. In fact, it could have been months ago. He could be a father by now. And it would have changed everything. Yet it wasn’t to be. And everything had changed in an entirely different way.

Cooper swallowed. He hoped it didn’t look rude, but it might be time to end the conversation.

‘Well done with the media appeal by the way,’ he said, watching Sharma’s rare smile break through.

Then Cooper turned away.

‘Gavin,’ he said, ‘we need to get Lacey Bower down here from Sheffield. Preferably today. I want to take her into Lathkill Dale and see what she can remember.’

‘I’ll get on to it.’

‘Is that the daughter?’ said Hurst, overhearing.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, if I understand it, her mother disappeared ten years ago and her father was charged with murder. Now her father has gone missing too, and it looks as though he’s the victim of a violent crime?’

‘Yes, you’ve got it, Becky. Why?’

‘We should be treating her with extra care, shouldn’t we? She’s only eighteen. She’s vulnerable.’

‘Everyone’s “vulnerable” these days,’ said Murfin. ‘I once heard some do-gooder say that criminals who get prison sentences are “vulnerable to committing more offences”. What rubbish.’

‘Your opinions were always so old-fashioned,’ said Hurst.

Murfin sniffed. ‘What you call old-fashioned, I call common sense.’

‘We’ll treat her with care,’ promised Cooper.

‘Perhaps I should go with Gavin.’

‘Only if you have the time, Becky. I know you have a lot on. We all do.’

Cooper turned back to Dev Sharma.

‘Pass my congratulations on to Asha,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you to your suspect for now and I’ll be in my office for a while, but then I’m going out.’

Sharma raised one eyebrow as he turned to watch Cooper go.

Cooper could hardly bear to read through all the day’s memos. For a moment he thought of deleting them from his inbox unread. But there was always a chance that one of them was important and actually related to his own job and once he started reading, it was easy to relax and become absorbed in the minutiae of everyday life in Derbyshire Constabulary.

An amount of money retrieved through the Proceeds of Crime Act had been used to cover the cost of new radio equipment for the ShopWatch scheme in Edendale. The equipment allowed retailers to communicate with each other and police to share information about thefts or suspicious behaviour.

Shoplifting was a problem that not only affected retailers but had an impact on shoppers and people visiting the town. The POCA cash had come in after an application to the courts for criminals’ assets to be seized and sold. Some of the money generated also went to pay compensation to the victims.

In a recent joint operation with other agencies, more than seventy vehicles had been stopped across Derbyshire as part of a crackdown on rogue traders who preyed on vulnerable people, trying to con them into paying for unnecessary or overpriced work on their homes. The day of action had been co-ordinated by the intelligence unit as part of a week-long campaign.

CID hadn’t been involved in the operation, but there were countywide alerts to respond to reports of suspicious activities, especially in the villages, where dodgy traders targeted the elderly and housebound. That might actually have an impact on his team.

Cooper had hardly made any progress through his inbox when the door of his office opened. Carol Villiers again.

‘What’s going on, Ben?’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t forget I’ve known you for a very long time. We grew up together and we were in the same class at school. You were never able to keep a secret back then. It was always written all over your face.’

Cooper laughed. ‘I thought I was better at it now.’

‘Yes, you are. You’ve had a lot of experience,’ she said. ‘And it probably convinces most people. But I know you better than that, Ben. So what’s going on with this inquiry? Why are we giving so much attention to Reece Bower? At the end of the day it’s just a missing person case.’

‘You’re right, Carol.’

‘Of course I am. So?’

‘We’re pursuing lines of inquiry which were overlooked ten years ago.’

‘Overlooked?’

‘Well, that’s not the right word. Interrupted.’

‘You mean interrupted by the witness who claims to have seen Annette alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘So we’re picking up where Detective Superintendent Branagh left off.’

‘You know she was SIO at the time?’

‘It’s in all the files,’ said Villiers.

‘She was DCI Branagh then. I was just a divisional DC. I only saw Hazel Branagh from a distance. But everyone knew how frustrated she was when the CPS pulled the plug. She felt so strongly she couldn’t hide that.’

‘I imagine the whole team felt the same,’ said Villiers. ‘It was a major inquiry by the sound of it. A lot of effort went in to putting the case together against Reece Bower.’

‘And to finding Annette’s body. They were thwarted on both counts. All that time and effort went to waste. No one likes that.’

‘So Superintendent Branagh is bringing in a fresh pair of eyes,’ observed Villiers. ‘I understand that. But why were you so keen to pick up an old case?’

Cooper thought about his answer for a moment. He couldn’t have explained the reason for it at the time. During his conversation with Hazel Branagh, it had just felt the right thing to do. Otherwise, he would have been disappointing her.

‘Because I know that frustration,’ he said finally. ‘You’re right, Carol, it affects everyone, even when you aren’t directly involved. The Annette Bower case is one of the first major inquiries I can remember in Edendale. There’s a great sense of satisfaction when you’re part of a team which brings an inquiry to a successful conclusion. But you share the despair and disappointment when it all comes to nothing. I feel exactly the same way that Superintendent Branagh does. I’m glad she asked me to do this. I wouldn’t have wanted her to pass it to someone else. I owe an obligation to Hazel Branagh. She’s been very good to me over the years.’

‘So you’re paying back a personal debt?’

‘Something like that.’

‘It’s okay, Ben. I can relate to that.’

‘We can manage anyway,’ said Cooper. ‘The barn fire is manslaughter at most, possibly an accidental death. Shane Curtis may even have been involved in starting the fire himself. The robberies — it’s just a matter of time until they make a mistake or we get some correlation in the witness statements.’

‘There’s the murder of a Polish man in Shirebrook,’ said Villiers.

‘Not our case. It’s in Bolsover LPU, and EMSOU are on the case anyway.’

‘So they are.’

‘Carol, did you finish going through the address book Naomi Heath gave us?’

‘Sorry, Ben. DS Sharma didn’t think it was a priority, considering our workload.’

‘It’s okay.’

Cooper watched Villiers leave. He worried that if Carol didn’t get a promotion soon she would be passed over in favour of Becky Hurst, who was bright and ambitious, just the kind of officer who attracted attention from the command structure.

Hurst would deserve it, of course, though she might need just a bit more experience. But he hated the idea of Carol Villiers becoming a sort of female Gavin Murfin, middle-aged and embittered.

Murfin appeared as if on cue, arriving back from his morning visit to Bakewell.

‘Any luck?’ asked Cooper.

‘One of the old guys at a car repair business says there was a lad who used to come there ten years ago to visit his girlfriend. He had a red Nissan. I think that’s all it was, boss.’

‘The original inquiry team must have followed that up surely?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Murfin.

‘What do you mean “you suppose so”?’

Murfin shifted uneasily. ‘To be honest, I remembered this as soon as I saw the units. We went to check them out back then. I was with Bill Osborne.’

‘Your old DS?’

‘Bill was a bit of a character, like I said.’

‘A character? Gavin, are you telling me Detective Sergeant Osborne was bent in some way?’

‘No, no... it’s a bit more complicated than that. It was ten years ago. And Bill was old school.’

Cooper frowned. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like this at all. Murfin looked as guilty as hell.

‘Gavin, you’d better sit down and tell me all about it.’

Murfin collapsed wearily in a chair. ‘Well, when the two of us went to the industrial units we soon tracked down the lad with the red Nissan. It turned out he was the son of a mate of Bill’s who’d gone a bit off the rails, like. He wasn’t a bad lad really. At least, that’s what Bill said.’

‘And DS Osborne didn’t want this person interviewed for some reason?’

‘He was just visiting his girlfriend,’ said Murfin. ‘She worked at one of the other units, in the office.’

‘Come on, let’s have it, Gavin.’

Murfin sighed. ‘He’d been involved in a bit of a domestic dispute. He’d been in court and he was put on probation. One of the conditions was a restriction on his movements. He wasn’t supposed to go within five miles of Bakewell. But he badly wanted to see her. If he’d been reported, he would have gone to prison for breach of his probation order. He had nothing to do with Annette Bower’s disappearance, Ben.’

‘So you and Bill Osborne covered it up?’

‘Bill told the incident room we couldn’t trace the owner of the red Nissan. It wasn’t important.’

‘And you went along with it?’

‘It was ten years ago,’ repeated Murfin.

‘So you said.’ Cooper tapped a pen on his desk. ‘Where is DS Osborne now? He retired, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, he was only a few months away from his thirty at the time. So I reckon he didn’t really care all that much about, you know—’

‘Disciplinary hearings?’

‘Right.’

‘But the interests of the inquiry didn’t matter either, I take it?’

‘He went abroad,’ said Murfin, as if it was a defence. ‘He lives in Portugal now.’

‘I’m going to have to put this in my report,’ said Cooper. ‘I’m sorry, Gavin.’

‘Bill Osborne was very good to me,’ said Murfin as he stood up to leave the office. ‘You understand, Ben.’

Cooper sighed. That was one of the difficulties of his position. He understood all too well.

He put on his jacket, and put his head round the door of the CID room.

‘Are you okay with the arson inquiry, Dev?’

Sharma turned to him. ‘It seems fairly straightforward, Inspector. Reckless endangerment of life. A charge of involuntary manslaughter at the most. Our two suspects are juveniles, so they’ll go to youth court for remand.’

Cooper nodded. ‘Keep me up to date with how you’re getting on. What about the armed robbery?’

‘DC Hurst is following some lines of inquiry and we’re gathering the intelligence together. I’m hopeful of an arrest soon.’

‘Great job.’

Cooper was conscious of the quizzical look DS Sharma gave him as he left. No doubt Sharma wanted to ask him the same questions that Carol Villiers had. But in Sharma’s case, they didn’t know each other well enough.

Derbyshire Cave Rescue Organisation were already on the scene this morning. Cooper recognised their yellow Iveco rescue vehicle with the red-and-white checkerboard pattern and blue lights parked at the rendezvous point he’d established in Lathkill Dale. The back doors of the rescue vehicle were open, revealing an equipment storage area.

Cooper knew he was lucky to get their assistance for an extended period. A call-out could take them away to a serious incident at any moment, anywhere.

The DCRO controller had a grey beard that stuck out in tufts around the straps of his red helmet. He’d been on operations in Lathkill Dale before.

‘Actually, that shaft behind Bateman’s House originally housed a water-powered pumping engine that was installed at sough level to drain the flooded mines,’ he said. ‘They put it thirty-six feet down, then built the house over it to hide the pump.’

‘To hide it? Why?’ asked Cooper.

‘To guard against industrial espionage, so they say. The pump’s design was unique at the time. It was supposed to be secret.’

‘Really?’

‘So they say. Top secret. Mind you, it didn’t work. Not in the long run.’

Cooper had always thought of the Peak District as beautiful on the surface, but with a sense of darkness lurking underneath. That feeling was often associated with the history of places. Even the most picturesque village could have a sinister and disturbing past. The signs of it were everywhere, if you cared to look.

But here in Lathkill Dale, in this pretty valley with its wooded slopes and crystal-clear river, there was genuine darkness underneath, the real blackness of the tunnels those old lead miners had worked in.

They said that lead mining had begun in Derbyshire as early as the Bronze Age. Mandale Mine was a survival of mining activity that had lasted into the late nineteenth century. Among the undergrowth here were the remains of shafts, engine houses, ponds, and an aqueduct. And some features whose names had been forgotten, and sometimes their purpose. Coes, soughs, goits, leats, stopes and gin circles.

It was the geology of Lathkill Dale that eventually put an end to lead mining. The mine companies had dreamed of riches from the deeper veins of lead. They had one massive problem, though — underground flooding. The water that poured into the dale and sank through the limestone found its way into the mine workings in vast quantities. Engines and waterwheels were installed to power underground pumps. But nature won in the end. The vast amount of water continually flooding through the mine workings eventually forced the closure of Mandale Mine.

Attempts to drain the mine by the waterwheel and a viaduct had been a disaster. So too had the notorious Over Haddon gold rush of 1894. People could be such optimists.

One consequence of the mining was that the water table had been lowered. In dry weather the River Lathkill ran dry. Even in the average summer there was little more than a trickle. The water surged back to the surface at Bubble Springs. But it also emerged here, from these soughs, the drainage tunnels dug by the miners to channel floodwater out of the mineshafts.

Cooper had managed to gather a makeshift team together to make inquiries around Lathkill Dale.

‘We need to find out if anyone saw Reece Bower in this area on Sunday, or anyone related to the case,’ he said. ‘I’m particularly interested in sightings of Evan Slaney.’

‘Slaney?’ said Luke Irvine.

‘Annette Bower’s father. You’ve all got copies of his photograph. But anything else you can come up with may be valuable.’

‘What if someone stole the wallet from him and decided to dispose of it here in Lathkill Dale?’ said Irvine. ‘That would make our efforts pointless.’

‘I don’t think that can be what happened, Luke. Consider the blood on the wallet, and the cash and cards still in it.’

‘Well, it’s a line of inquiry.’

‘No, it’s a line of speculation,’ said Cooper. ‘Not the same thing.’

‘But—’

‘Luke, can we get on? There’s a lot of ground to cover.’

‘Yes, boss.’

Cooper looked at Villiers.

‘The schools are back, aren’t they?’ he said.

‘Yes, autumn term started this week.’

‘Thank goodness.’

Just over a year ago, a thirteen-year-old girl had fallen from a crag in a nearby dale while catching Pokémon on her mobile phone. She’d cracked her skull on a rock in the river bed and never woke from the resulting coma. In the past, there had been drownings in reservoirs or flooded quarries, children lost in caves or trapped in abandoned mine workings. But this year, they’d managed to get through the school holidays without a single fatality.

‘At least we won’t have any kids wandering about getting in the way,’ he said.

Cooper looked at the map and considered the bottom end of the dale. A long series of eleven weirs led down towards Conksbury Bridge, the deepest of them known as The Blue Waters because to its colour. At Conksbury was the site of a deserted medieval village. Sometimes visitors would park at the bridge and walk up river towards Haddon. He mentally marked that end as a lower priority. It would have to wait until last.

Several members of Cave Rescue had come down the trail in their yellow-and-red oversuits with torches and helmet lamps.

‘There’s a cave here.’

‘Let me look.’

The ground rose slightly, then dipped steeply into the cave mouth. The rocks above the cave lay tilted diagonally in cracked and broken strata, as if the earth had sunk on the downstream side. It was a distinctive opening, a dead black drop into the unknown.

And Cooper knew this cave.

He’d visited here as a child, been taken for a Sunday afternoon walk along the river by his grandparents one day during the summer holidays. The old man had his own way of warning children away from dangerous situations. Halfway along the dale, they’d stopped at this exact spot, and Granddad Cooper had pointed at the cave mouth. ‘A monster lives in there,’ he said. ‘If small children get too close to the cave, they get sucked inside by the monster. He eats them all up, and he spits their bones into the river.’

In his recollections, Cooper could see himself staring wide-eyed into the dark cave mouth, picturing the monster. He had no details, but his imagination could fill in the gaps. It was something big enough to eat a child, a thing that lived in the dark. Not human, but no kind of animal he knew of either. He pictured teeth, claws, and a pair of red eyes which might even now be staring at him out of the darkness, waiting for him to get too close. He’d taken a step back nervously. And he remembered Matt laughing, sniggering at the thought of young Ben being sucked in by the cave monster. Or scoffing at the knowledge that his younger brother actually believed the old stories.

Cooper shook his head, trying to clear the memory. He looked around, found he’d taken an unconscious step back from the cave, as if he still believed in that child-eating monster.

‘And he spits their bones into the river,’ he said quietly.

‘What did you say, Ben?’

He turned and saw Carol Villiers had come within earshot. Embarrassed, he pointed at the cave.

‘We need to get this checked out.’

‘How far in does it go?’ asked Villiers.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been inside.’

The controller rubbed his beard. ‘We’ll take a look,’ he said.

Across the trail, a muddy path strewn with dead leaves led up to the remains of the mine itself. Cooper noticed signs along the edge of the trail marking the locations of abandoned shafts. The signs said ‘Danger, please keep out’. They were polite, anyway.

Further up the dale, Lathkill Head Cave was still dry this morning. A few feet inside, the roof lowered suddenly, leaving only space for a tight, muddy crawl over huge boulders. That crawl might be possible for a fit person when the river was dry, but in wet conditions you would probably need breathing apparatus to avoid drowning in the icy cold water pouring over your head.

‘Someone find out what the weather was like in October ten years ago,’ said Cooper.

‘I’ll get right on to it,’ said Irvine, pulling out his phone.

‘I remember,’ said Murfin. ‘It had been chucking it down off and on for a couple of weeks. It was like monsoon season. It was one of the reasons the SIO held off starting a search in Lathkill Dale. She was hoping for the rain to stop.’

‘Superintendent Branagh didn’t mention that.’

‘It would have been a nightmare trying to slide about in the mud on those slopes,’ said Murfin. ‘Our blokes would have been trampling any forensic evidence out of existence in that quagmire. And besides, there was water pouring out of those channels.’

‘The soughs.’

Murfin nodded. ‘Trust me, it was wet.’

‘Thanks, Gavin.’

Right now, you would never imagine that a river emerged here. Yet on that day in October ten years ago, a huge volume of water would have been gushing out over these rocks. There would have been no way of getting to the mouth of the cave without getting your feet wet, and battling across the rush of the water.

Carol Villiers came up and saw Cooper staring at the cave entrance.

‘No, Lacey Bower said it was a cave with a lot of water flowing out of it. She was quite clear about that.’

Cooper bit his lip. ‘This is it. This is the cave the water flows out of. It’s just not flowing now, not at this time of year. Water seeps down into the limestone, and there hasn’t been much rain, so at the moment it’s dry. In the winter, in wet weather, the rock can’t absorb all the water that runs into the dale. So it emerges here, from this cave. That’s why it’s called Lathkill Head. It’s where the River Lathkill starts.’

‘I’ve checked the weather anyway,’ said Irvine. ‘The day that Annette Bower actually disappeared was relatively fine. Rain early in the morning, but it cleared up. The next day was wet, and so was the rest of the week. Gavin was right. The climate was against the inquiry team.’

‘And in favour of Reece Bower,’ said Cooper.