Dead in the Dark

33 Day 6

‘Well done, Ben,’ said Detective Superintendent Branagh. ‘A successful outcome. So the system’s working.’

Cooper grimaced. He couldn’t say it wasn’t working, or it would be a sign of his own weakness. As usual, decisions were taken way above his head and he’d been presented with a fait accompli. He just had to make it work.

‘And did Detective Sergeant Fry help?’ she said.

‘No, we helped her,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s the way it works sometimes.’

‘The case looks sound against the Crowley brothers. EMSOU are happy. The Major Crime Unit are preparing all the paperwork, so that’s a load off our shoulders.’

‘I hope Detective Sergeant Sharma gets due credit.’

‘Of course. I’ve already made sure of it.’

‘Good.’

‘I’m very glad we resolved the Annette Bower case after all these years,’ said Branagh. ‘I have to admit, it’s been a thorn in my side for a long time.’

‘In a way,’ said Cooper, ‘it was taken out of our hands. The Annette Bower case was resolved by others.’

‘The sister-in-law and the new partner. They took their own form of justice.’

‘And the daughter,’ said Cooper. ‘We mustn’t forget Lacey.’

‘The CPS are still deliberating about the charges,’ said Branagh. ‘Joint enterprise murders are difficult to prosecute these days. If we can’t establish who actually committed the act, we’re going to have difficulty getting a murder conviction in court.’

‘Conspiracy to murder?’ said Cooper. ‘Perverting the course of justice?’

‘Those certainly.’

‘It’s funny,’ said Cooper.

‘What is?’

‘That we have a body this time. But we still might not be able to get a murder charge to stick.’

‘Well,’ said Branagh, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s the way it works sometimes, isn’t it, Ben?’

Cooper smiled sadly. He would have preferred a neater outcome than this. And he was sure that Superintendent Branagh would too.

‘The post-mortem on Annette Bower’s remains shows no evidence that she was murdered,’ he said. ‘There’s very little soft tissue left, of course, after ten years. But the pathologist says her skeletal injuries are consistent with a fall of about thirty-five feet on to a hard surface, followed by a rock collapse. She had a fractured arm, several broken ribs, probably a punctured lung. If her initial injuries didn’t kill her, then Mrs Bower would have suffocated under the collapsed debris.’

‘Horrible.’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘And her husband left her there to die. We’ve no way of knowing whether he deliberately pushed her into the shaft, or if it was an accident.’

‘Well, we can’t ask him, so it’s academic now, really, from our point of view.’

‘I would have preferred a tidier solution.’

‘It’s rarely tidy, Ben. You know that.’

Cooper had really been thinking of Annette Bower herself. Would she have preferred a tidy ending, a murder charge that would have succeeded in court and brought Reece a life sentence? Or would she have been happy with the outcome, the rogue vigilante justice that he’d met with, no matter how messy the results?

He couldn’t know. No matter how long he stared at Annette Bower’s photograph, he’d never actually known her in life. He’d only met her in death, a muddy skeleton in the darkness of a disused shaft in Mandale Mine.

‘At least the arson case was simple enough,’ said Cooper. ‘Shane Curtis’s killers will be heading for a youth offenders’ institution.’

‘Will that do them any good?’ asked Branagh.

‘Possibly not.’

Cooper recalled seeing the boys brought into the custody suite. Shane Curtis’s younger brother, Troy, looking shocked and frightened at the prospect of court. Nothing that happened to him now would help Troy. But Dev Sharma had once summed it up perfectly. ‘People are capable of making such a mess of their lives.’

When he finished the call with Branagh, Cooper sat back in his chair, hoping that he might finally get a chance to relax. It had been quite a week. The interviews and re-interviews had taken all day, and the initial reports had been written up. It was late afternoon, now, and he’d sent the members of his team home. They’d already racked up enough overtime for this month.

But this was the way it would be from now on. The caseload at Edendale LPU would never get any lighter. The system would creak at the seams for ever, or at least for the rest of his career. He’d been running from one thing to another like a man fighting fires.

Cooper felt something in his pocket and realised he still had the photograph of Annette Bower. He drew it out, found one corner slightly creased and tried to straighten it. Was it his imagination, or was she smiling more widely than when he first picked the photo out of the file? After these past few days, he felt as though he’d actually met her.

Then there was a knock on his office door and Dev Sharma appeared.

‘Have you got a moment, sir?’

Those dreaded words again. Cooper nodded.

‘Come in, Dev. I thought you’d left with everyone else.’

‘Not quite. I won’t be long. It’s just—’

‘Sit down. What is it?’

‘Well, I wanted to let you know straightaway,’ said Sharma. ‘I’m being transferred.’

‘Oh? Where are you going?’

‘To EMSOU.’

‘The Major Crime Unit?’

‘Yes. I’ll be based in Nottingham. It’s an easy enough drive from Derby. Only half an hour on the A52.’

‘A lot easier than getting to Edendale,’ said Cooper.

Sharma smiled. ‘Yes. Even when it isn’t tourist season.’

‘The Major Crime Unit is what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? You told me that you’d applied for a transfer before.’

‘Yes, I didn’t think I would get in. It’s a stroke of good luck for me.’

Cooper studied Sharma for a moment. ‘Actually, I didn’t know there was a vacancy for a DS at the Major Crime Unit,’ he said.

‘I believe there’s been a promotion,’ said Sharma.

‘Who?’

‘I probably shouldn’t say any more. I’m sure there’ll be an official notice. I just wanted to tell you first, because I’ve really appreciated working as part of your team.’

‘Thank you,’ said Cooper. ‘Though it hasn’t been all that long, has it?’

‘Unfortunately, no.’

But Cooper was thinking ‘Long enough, to get what you needed from us’. He tried to put the thought out of his mind.

‘We’ll have a farewell dinner for you. Remind me — where did we go when you first came to Edendale?’

‘The Mussel and Crab in Hollowgate.’

‘That’s right. It was pretty good, I thought.’

‘Excellent.’

‘We’ll set a date, then.’

‘They haven’t told me exactly when I’ll transfer,’ said Sharma, ‘but it could be soon.’

‘Does Detective Superintendent Branagh know?’

‘Yes. She’s already approved it.’

Sharma stood up. For a moment, Cooper thought he was going to smile, but he rarely did.

‘Have you finished here today, sir?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Do you want me to help?’

‘No, go home,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s been a long week.’

Sharma went back to the CID room, leaving Cooper alone again, contemplating yet more changes. This job certainly kept him on his toes. Like the officer with the notice taped on his back, he’d become a firefighter, a paramedic and a social worker. Not to mention the man who wrote reports and answered emails.

Cooper pushed back his chair and put on his jacket. There was one more thing he had to do before he finished the paperwork on the Bower case.

In his Toyota on the way out of Edendale, Cooper saw a call come in from Chloe Young. He pulled over on Buxton Road in front of the Silk Mill heritage centre.

‘Hi, Chloe. How are you?’

‘Busy,’ she said. ‘I thought you promised me you didn’t have any bodies for me? Suddenly it’s like rush hour.’

‘Are you too busy to see me?’

‘Well...’

Cooper heard the hesitation all too clearly. Had he ruined everything last time? Did Chloe Young think he was too obsessed with his job? She wouldn’t be the first to think that. It was an occupational hazard for police officers.

But Young was only dealing with some business at her end. She was probably as pestered with reports and emails as he was himself.

‘How about tonight?’ she said.

‘Great,’ said Cooper. ‘Where?’

‘Well,’ said Young again, ‘probably not the opera.’

‘Agreed.’

Cooper put the car back into gear and pulled out on to the road with a smile on his face. Out of Edendale, he turned eastwards. It was Saturday, so he took his time, heading down the A623 from Calver to Baslow and driving through the parkland of Chatsworth House, dodging the sheep on the road until he could cross the open expanses of Beeley Moor and work his way through villages towards the M1. He always preferred the back roads if he wasn’t in a hurry and he had things to think about.

After his drive over the moors, Shirebrook hardly seemed like Derbyshire. Perhaps Diane Fry was right and it was really in Nottinghamshire, but the boundary had slipped. The miners here had dug for coal rather than the lead that came out of Lathkill Dale. But both industries were dead and gone.

Fry’s Audi was parked at the back of the shops where Krystian Zalewski had lived. There were three marked police vehicles there too, and a Scientific Support van.

Under the harsh glare of security lights he saw Fry coming out of a back door of a shop, wearing a pair of blue latex gloves. She gave him a brief nod.

‘We’ve been searching the premises of the shopkeeper,’ she said without even a ‘hello’. ‘Geoffrey Pollitt.’

‘How did it go?’

‘He’s in custody. We arrested him last night.’

‘For what?’

Fry began to peel off the gloves.

‘After I spoke to him yesterday, Mr Pollitt headed straight round to one of his rental properties in Shirebrook, which was in multiple occupation by a group of six Lithuanian agricultural workers. He planned to move them out before we could raid the address. But a team of officers was already waiting for him. While he was engaged there, we gained entry to the storeroom at the back of his shop. I said he was a middle man, didn’t I?’

‘For some kind of far-right extremist organisation.’

‘Well, it seems that was just a hobby,’ said Fry. ‘His income came from a share in the proceeds of organised trafficking. He arranged accommodation and provided various other services in this area for the Czech gang I told you about. It was quite a lucrative business.’

‘So will that be a conspiracy to traffic charge? You mentioned the Modern Slavery Act.’

Fry shook her head. ‘That’s for offences that take place outside the UK. No, Pollitt will be charged under the Serious Crime Act with participating in the activities of an organised crime group. There may be money laundering offences under the Proceeds of Crime Act too. The CPS will decide on that. If he’s convicted, Pollitt could get a maximum of five years in prison.’

Cooper looked at her, wondering that she didn’t look happier. But Fry was never satisfied. From her manner, you would think someone had stolen all the glory.

When the glove came off her right hand, Cooper noticed some fresh grazes on her knuckles. They looked raw and had been bleeding quite recently.

‘How did you do that to your hand?’ he said.

She looked down and shook her hand, as if she hadn’t even been aware of it until now.

‘Oh, I think I must have banged it on something during the search. There’s a lot of rubbish stacked in that storeroom.’

‘But you had gloves on,’ said Cooper.

‘Of course I had gloves on. What did you expect?’

Cooper watched her curiously. He prided himself on that sense of knowing when someone was lying, or trying to hide the truth from him. He couldn’t remember getting that feeling with Diane Fry before. She was more likely to blurt out the truth, even if it wasn’t very palatable.

‘So did you bring the information I asked for?’ she said. ‘Or did you just come to do your shopping in Shirebrook market? They do a good burger at the fast-food stall, DCI Mackenzie tells me. But if you’re having fried onions, stay well away from me.’

‘I brought the information,’ said Cooper.

He passed her the folder.

‘Thank you.’

She opened her car door and threw it on to the passenger seat without looking at it.

‘Everything’s working out okay, then?’ said Cooper, raising an eyebrow.

‘I’m sure everything is working out fine for you,’ said Fry.

‘Diane, are you all right?’

‘Oh, I’ve just been having a bad week,’ she said.

Cooper laughed. If it had been him, if he was going through a really bad week, he would have gone for a drive over the Snake Pass, or taken a long walk on the moors, whatever the weather. There was nothing like a good blow to clear the mind and make you feel better. There wasn’t any point in suggesting it to Diane Fry, though.

Fry looked out at the streets of Shirebrook — a few parked cars and a deserted market square, dark but for the lights of the polski sklep.

‘I’m still trying to understand the real nature of this place,’ she said.

‘It’s a bit late now,’ said Cooper.

‘Is it?’

‘You’ll be going straight on to something else, won’t you? You’ll have another case to deal with, somewhere else in the East Midlands. So you’ll soon forget about Shirebrook. There’ll be a new challenge.’

‘True.’

‘Besides,’ said Cooper, ‘you’ve never understood the real nature of any part of Derbyshire.’

Fry was silent for a moment. ‘Or of anything in it,’ she said.

Cooper stared straight ahead. By ‘anything’ did she mean ‘anyone’? It would be a startling admission coming from Diane Fry. But she hadn’t said that, had she? No, not quite.

‘You do understand the way back to Nottingham, though?’ he said.

‘Of course I do.’

‘Have a safe trip, then.’

Fry got into her car and slammed the door. Cooper watched the black Audi drive away. He didn’t need Dev Sharma to tell him who had been given the promotion at EMSOU. The credit for a successful conclusion to the Krystian Zalewski murder hadn’t all gone to Sharma.

Well, that was the way it worked sometimes.