Dead in the Dark

4

‘Zalewski. Krystian Zalewski.’

Detective Sergeant Diane Fry looked at the passport in her hand. ‘You said that well, Jamie.’

‘I’ve been practising.’

DC Jamie Callaghan pulled out his notebook. ‘Mr Zalewski is a Polish national, as we know. He’s been living in this country for more than two years, the last eight months of that here in Shirebrook. He rents this flat from the owner of the shop downstairs.’

‘Our Mr Pollitt.’

‘Right.’

‘Any family that we know of?’

‘Zalewski is apparently unmarried and he lived here alone,’ said Callaghan, with a glance around the tiny flat. ‘Well, you wouldn’t want to bring children up here, would you? There’s hardly room for two people.’

‘True.’

The body had been removed by the funeral directors’ van to the mortuary, and the room looked almost undisturbed, except for the bloodstains on the carpet and on the side of the armchair.

The crime scene examiners had finished with the flat and moved on, leaving traces of their fingerprint powder, steeping plates around the chair, and a bare patch of floorboard where a rectangular section had been cut out of the carpet. A separate team was still working in the alley a hundred yards away, where the attack was thought to have taken place, judging from the evidence.

Fry’s boss at EMSOU, DCI Mackenzie, was still in Shirebrook. He’d been at the scene when Fry and Callaghan arrived, but he’d left them to it and was now at a meeting with local councillors and representatives of other agencies. Apparently, a tense situation was developing in the town in the wake of the murder. But that was Mackenzie’s job to deal with. Fry felt much happier here, at the scene of the death, looking at a bloodstained carpet.

‘Mr Pollitt thinks there was a mention of a brother living in the Derby area,’ said Callaghan. ‘He can’t remember the name, though.’

Fry picked up a diary and flicked through the pages. There was a list in the back that looked like addresses and phone numbers. She couldn’t see a Zalewski, but then you probably wouldn’t enter your brother in your address book under his surname.

‘We’ll have to start working our way through these numbers,’ she said. ‘We’ll need a Polish speaker.’

‘There are plenty of those in Shirebrook,’ said Callaghan.

Fry ignored the comment. She pointed at a pile of papers on top of the bookshelves.

‘And we’ll have to get someone to go through this paperwork. There might be some letters from a family member.’

‘Same Polish speaker, I imagine.’

‘Was Mr Zalewski in employment?’ asked Fry.

‘Yes. When he first rented the flat he was working at the big distribution centre just outside town. But he left there after about four months. He got six strikes against him.’

‘Strikes?’

‘Time-wasting offences, that sort of thing. Since then, he’s been employed in a hand car wash.’

‘We need to talk to his employer then.’

‘Already on it.’

‘And still nothing from the immediate area, I suppose? No witnesses?’

Callaghan shook his head. ‘You know what they always say. No one saw nothing.’

The statuette of the Virgin Mary seemed to be winking at her from the shelves, until Fry realised a fly had landed on the Virgin’s head.

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘we’ll have to make a point of talking to some of the other Polish residents.’

‘But for that—’ began Callaghan.

‘Yes, yes. We’ll need a Polish speaker.’

At West Street, Ben Cooper had stood up from his desk, but found there was no room to pace the carpet. Instead, he leaned against the wall and stared out of the window. From his first-floor office, he was looking out over a corner of the football ground. Edendale FC were doing well in their amateur league, according to the officers who followed football. All that Cooper noticed was the cars clogging up the roads on a match day.

‘There were several things that made the Annette Bower case unusual,’ he said.

‘Oh yes,’ said Carol Villiers. ‘For a start, the victim’s body was never found. And it still hasn’t been found, ten years later.’

Cooper nodded. ‘That was a major problem.’

He knew just how hard it was to get a conviction for a murder without a body. You had to satisfy a jury that someone was definitely dead and not going to walk into a police station next day, looking surprised at all the fuss.

A murder investigation with a missing body followed specific lines of inquiry. The first consideration was to establish when the victim was last known to be alive. From there, officers had to prove that all normal behaviour by the victim had stopped suddenly and completely. No mobile phone use, no bank transactions, no contact with friends or relatives.

Often the irresistible temptation for the killer was to get their hands on the victim’s money. Fraudulent use of a bank account was a giveaway. So were letters claiming to be from the victim. Handwriting experts could examine documents to confirm they were forged. A claim on a pension or an insurance policy were an indication that the subject was considered dead. In many missing body murder cases, the killer attempted to imitate the victim in an effort to prove they were alive. In others, they moved house straightaway, putting distance between themselves and the location of the murder, the burial place of the body.

The body was very helpful if you wanted to learn exactly how someone was killed, or if you wanted to find evidence of the killer. But sometimes the body wasn’t that important, particularly in a domestic crime. There was always a lot of cross-contamination if people were connected. In some cases, finding the actual body didn’t prove anything that wasn’t already known.

‘It didn’t used to be possible to convict anyone for murder without a body at all,’ said Carol Villiers. ‘It was that way for hundreds of years.’

‘The Campden Wonder,’ said Cooper.

‘The what?’

‘A notorious seventeenth-century case in Chipping Campden. When a man disappeared without trace, three people were hanged for his murder. The following year, the alleged victim reappeared, saying he’d been kidnapped and sold into slavery in Turkey.’

‘It was a bit late by then.’

‘Exactly. Convictions without a body became a potential minefield for miscarriages of justice. But the law was changed following a murder case in Wales in the 1950s. The last hanging was in 1964, and capital punishment was abolished a few years later. Now there are a couple of murder cases every year where no body has been found. Of course, the situation is different with modern technology. It’s difficult just to disappear, unless you’re dead.’

Cooper recalled reading about the case of a Polish ex-serviceman who bought a farm in South Wales after the Second World War and went into a partnership. Police who came to the farm to carry out routine foreigner checks found the partner had gone. Despite the Pole’s claim that his other man had returned to Poland, the inquiry discovered complaints of violent behaviour and money left in the victim’s bank account. They became convinced the body had been chopped up and fed to the pigs on the farm.

At the trial, the jury heard evidence of more than two thousand tiny bloodstains found in the farmhouse kitchen. The defendant said they were animal blood from skinning rabbits. In the twenty-first century, there would be no doubt about the origin of the bloodstains. DNA would have identified the victim.

Cooper thought that murder inquiries like this might happen more often, if it wasn’t for the difficulty in disposing of a dead body. It was the main obstacle to committing the perfect murder. In a crowded island it was just so difficult to get rid of a corpse. Most of the time it would turn up. If it didn’t, that was a huge stroke of luck for the killer. In Cooper’s mind, it had been a massive stroke of luck for Reece Bower.

In a town, the police could use CCTV footage to trace someone’s movements and get an approximate time and place for their disappearance. The missing person’s actions could reveal a lot. It could establish whether the disappearance was intentional or not. But cameras were few and far between in this area.

‘Is Gavin in today?’ asked Cooper.

‘I think he’s just arrived.’

‘See if you can tear him away from his second breakfast.’

‘I think it’s his third breakfast by the time he gets to his desk,’ said Villiers.

Cooper laughed. ‘Just brush the crumbs off him, then, and steer him in here.’

While he waited, Cooper looked up the details of the inquiry. The Bower case had occurred only ten years previously. On 29 October that year, Annette Bower had allegedly disappeared while walking her dog on the Monsal Trail near Bakewell. That afternoon, after several hours, she was reported missing by her husband Reece.

A week later Derbyshire Constabulary launched a high-profile public appeal for information. They even issued a statement saying they believed Annette might have been the victim of a criminal act, though the basis for that claim so early in the investigation was unclear to Cooper.

Statements were issued by Annette Bower’s family saying that her disappearance was completely out of character. Was that enough to suspect a crime? Within a few days, the police announced that they were treating the inquiry as a murder investigation.

Searches had already begun on the Monsal Trail and in the nearby industrial estate. Now the garden of the Bowers’ house was dug up. Police said they were anxious to trace the movements of a red Nissan seen being driven by a man near the scene of Annette Bower’s disappearance.

Despite the lack of direct forensic evidence, police believed Reece Bower had killed his wife and hidden her body. In the middle of November, Bower was detained in connection with the disappearance and processed through the custody suite here at Edendale.

Cooper had seen people who hated being shut up in a cell or an interview room so much that they’d do anything to get out, including making a false confession. The fact that it might mean them ending up in prison didn’t come into the equation. It was that need to escape from the immediate situation that blocked out long-term thinking, or any consideration of the consequences.

Reece Bower hadn’t been one of those people. His time in the custody suite had been extended to ninety-six hours before he was charged. The hope had been that he would give away important information under questioning, or that some evidence would lead to the discovery of his wife’s body. Neither of those things had happened.

At the end of the extended detention period, Bower was charged with murder. All the case files had been prepared, and a trial date had been set for the following year, when new evidence came to light.

‘Oh, Reece Bower,’ said Murfin when he appeared. ‘Has that thing surfaced again after all this time?’

Cooper wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the case as ‘that thing’ or to Reece Bower himself.

‘It looks like it,’ said Cooper. ‘Bower himself is missing.’

‘Well, that’s nothing to cry about.’

‘You were on the inquiry team, weren’t you, Gavin?’

Murfin nodded. ‘I was working with DI Hitchens’ team under DS Osborne. Those were the days. Bill Osborne was quite a lad. I remember once—’

‘Yes, Gavin, thanks. I think you’ve probably told us all the stories from the old days.’

‘Oh. Well, they’re all gone, except for me. Bill went on extended sick leave, then retired on health grounds. He’s living in the Channel Islands now. DI Hitchens went off to Ripley, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, to work for RIPA.’

‘Well, that’s it, then. The whole team has gone. Except for me, and I’m only half here, so to speak.’

‘You always were, Gavin.’

‘True. But at least I was building up my pension fund.’

‘Did you meet Reece Bower?’

‘I certainly did.’

‘And I take it you didn’t like him.’

‘I don’t think anyone on the team did. He was a creep. No one was in any doubt that he was guilty. As far I’m concerned, it was written all over him. Right across his forehead.’ Murfin made a scribbling gesture above his eyes. ‘Guilty, it said. Spelled properly with a “u” and everything, so it was official.’

Villiers had brought a file containing Reece Bower’s details. She unclipped a photograph and slid it across Cooper’s desk.

‘That’s the bugger,’ said Murfin, twisting his head to peer at the photo. ‘You can see what I mean from here.’

Cooper had to admit that the smile on Bower’s face looked insincere. It was an expression he’d seen often on people who were guilty, a fake attempt at ingratiating sincerity. But everyone was guilty of something, weren’t they? It didn’t have to be a crime as serious as murder to make you look shifty and evasive.

Bower was in his early thirties in this photograph. It dated from the time of the earlier case and had been taken in the custody suite downstairs. Detention officers weren’t known for their expertise as photographers. They could make any suspect look like one of the Kray Brothers. Even the women.

And it was also quite rare to see someone smiling for the camera as they were processed. Would he still have been smiling after fingerprints had been taken, and a mouth swab for DNA, and a blood sample, and finally the slamming of a cell door?

Cooper was reminded of a famous mugshot of the Hollywood actor Steve McQueen after he was arrested for drunk driving, smirking at the police photographer and giving a victory sign, as if knowing that he would never face the full penalty of the law.

‘Is there a photograph of his wife too?’ he asked.

‘Sure.’

Villiers slipped another photograph on to his desk. Annette Bower looked two or three years younger than her husband. Cooper wouldn’t have put her much above thirty. She had auburn hair, unfashionably long for the time. In the photo she was facing the camera, smiling, with an open, friendly expression that appealed to him straightaway. He could see how anyone might have fallen for this woman, as presumably Reece had.

Cooper felt a cold certainty grip his heart. This woman was almost definitely dead. And no one had found her, or brought her justice. That seemed so wrong that he knew he had to do something about it, if he could. The idea of her lying somewhere, undiscovered, her body turned to bones and eventually to dust... well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

‘Reece Bower is currently a logistics manager for a steel fabrications company in Chesterfield,’ said Villiers. ‘Ten years ago he was working in procurement at Chesterfield Royal Hospital, near Calow. His job was negotiating with suppliers. At that time, Mr Bower was accountable for more than five million pounds of expenditure on clinical supplies each year.’

‘A responsible job. I suppose he lost it when he was arrested.’

‘Well, a murder charge doesn’t do much for your reputation,’ said Murfin.

‘And it was a thorough investigation.’

‘Oh yes. The inquiry team combed through his entire life. They traced his movements, his relationships, his finances. They searched his house and dug up his garden. There was strong circumstantial evidence that made him look guilty. But the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to take it to court. They said the case against him wasn’t strong enough to achieve a conviction.’

‘Why not?’ asked Villiers.

‘Well, they never found Annette Bower’s body, for a start.’

‘It’s possible to get a murder conviction without a body,’ said Villiers, ‘if the rest of the evidence is compelling enough. It has been done.’

‘I know. And it almost went that way. Except...’

‘What?’

‘The inquiry suffered a serious setback,’ said Cooper. ‘Didn’t it, Gavin?’

Murfin nodded.

‘A witness turned up while the case was being prepared for court. He claimed to have seen the victim alive and well, days after she was supposed to have been killed. The statement this witness gave was pretty sound. It undermined the whole case. Reece Bower had maintained his innocence from the start and offered plausible alternative explanations for each item of forensic evidence. Without any proof that his wife was actually dead, there was just too much scope for reasonable doubt.’

Reasonable doubt. Cooper nodded. The great dread of prosecutors and police officers in a jury trial. It was always impressed on jury members that they had to bring a ‘not guilty’ verdict if they felt there was reasonable doubt.

From a police officer’s point of view, some jurors seemed to experience doubt at the slightest prompting from the defence. Sometimes twelve ordinary members of the public turned into a roomful of Doubting Thomases, unconvinced by even the most powerful evidence, refusing to accept anything they were told, dismissing statements made by the police, disregarding the opinions of forensic experts. In this case, the CPS had probably made the right decision. A consistent and convincing witness was hard to ignore.

‘This witness,’ said Cooper. ‘Remind me who it was.’

‘Oh, a very reliable person in the eyes of the CPS. The person who claims to have seen Annette Bower alive was Mr Evan Slaney. Annette’s father.’