Dead in the Dark

8 Day 2

Ben Cooper stepped out of his Toyota. He didn’t need to sniff the air to know what had been burning. The air was still thick with charred embers of straw drifting on the breeze. A shower of black specks were settling even now on the paintwork of his car and on to his face as he turned to look up at the burnt skeleton of the barn. The ground around the building was muddy and running with channels of water from the firefighters’ hoses. The smell of hot steam mingled with traces of acrid smoke that stung his nostrils.

He looked around for the duty DC and found both Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst on the scene. The two youngest members of his team were very different. Irvine could turn a bit bolshie, if he wasn’t reined in. Cooper had overheard political arguments between him and Hurst and Irvine was definitely somewhere out on the right wing. Hurst was like a little terrier, no job too much trouble. She had good instincts too. When Carol Villiers wasn’t around, Cooper often looked for the coppery red of her hair behind a computer screen.

‘Another arson?’ he said.

Irvine nodded. ‘No doubt about it.’

‘Dry straw goes up so easily. It wouldn’t take much to start it off.’

‘And don’t these kids know it.’

‘Kids?’ asked Cooper.

‘Well, it must be, mustn’t it? Some youths who get a kick out of setting fires and watching them burn. They like to see the fire appliances turn up. It’s like they’re watching the telly, but in real life.’

‘There’s no evidence of that, is there?’

‘We just haven’t identified the right suspects,’ said Irvine. ‘Because no one is talking. They never do — even if it’s a murder case.’

Castle Farm stood in a small valley to the north of Edendale, at the end of Reaper Lane. It would once have been remote, lying at the foot of the moorland that separated the Eden Valley from the Hope Valley. But, as the town grew, the housing estates on its northern outskirts had crept nearer and nearer to Castle Farm, filling the bottom of the valley and coming within a few fields of the farm itself.

The mass of housing was visible to Cooper from the gate of the farmyard. The fields, barns and outbuildings were near enough for youngsters from the estates to reach in twenty minutes on their bikes. The old farmer was the last generation of the Marston family to run it as a going concern. Other Marstons had left to take jobs in Chesterfield or Sheffield. When Ron Marston retired or died, the farm would become vacant. The sheep would be sent off to market, there would be another farm machinery sale in the yard, and developers would be competing to get their planning applications in for a series of barn conversions.

‘We’re not classifying this as a murder case,’ said Cooper. ‘Not unless there’s any clear evidence. On the face of it, it seems unlikely to have been a deliberate killing. It was arson, certainly. But it looks as though Shane Curtis was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So manslaughter at most, I’d say.’

‘Of course, he might have been in the right place at the right time,’ said Irvine.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s quite possible he was one of the arsonists, isn’t it? Why else was he in the barn?’

Cooper looked at Hurst, but she shrugged. ‘It’s true we haven’t found any legitimate reason for him to be here.’

‘So Shane and his mates came along to have a bit of fun and set fire to the barn,’ said Irvine. ‘And somehow it all went wrong and he was trapped inside when it went up.’

‘So you think it was his own fault?’ said Hurst.

Irvine was unmoved. ‘Death by misadventure,’ he said.

‘Have you talked to Mr Marston?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes,’ said Irvine. ‘He had the usual complaints about kids trespassing on his property and causing damage, or injuring his livestock. It’s true, too. Some of the incidents are on record. But he didn’t know any of the kids by name. Shane Curtis meant nothing to him. He didn’t see them either, but he doesn’t go outside much after dark.’

‘He lives alone?’

‘Apart from a couple of dogs. Long-haired German Shepherds, and they’re a bad-tempered pair. They’re chained up in a shed across the yard from the farmhouse. Mr Marston heard them barking last night, but he says the dogs often bark at foxes and badgers when they get their scent, so he didn’t go out to see if there was something wrong. Not until he noticed the fire, anyway.’

‘Surely he doesn’t work this farm on his own? He isn’t a young man.’

‘No, he uses a couple of part-time employees.’ Irvine held out his notebook. ‘He’s written the names down for me.’

‘Written them down for you? Have you lost your ability to write?’

‘No, just these names. His workers are both East Europeans.’

‘Where is Mr Marston now?’

Irvine inclined his head towards the farmhouse. ‘He’s watching us round the corner of the barn. You’re welcome to see if you can get anything out of him, boss. I can’t.’

Cooper found the old farmer leaning on a gate. Marston could have been any one of scores of farmers he’d seen leaning on the pen sides at the cattle market in Edendale, or grabbing a handful of fleece on a sheep at Bakewell Show. He wore the flat cap favoured by the older generation, rather than the baseball caps their sons and grandsons had opted for, and a pair of brown corduroy trousers tucked into his boots.

‘Mr Marston? Detective Inspector Cooper.’

‘Are you the bloke in charge here?’

‘Yes, sir. I gather from one of my officers that you have two East European men working here at the farm.’

‘You’re not immigration enforcement, are you?’

‘No, sir. Edendale CID.’

He scowled. ‘Same thing.’

‘I just wanted to ask a few questions about your workers.’

‘Look, those two lads have been helping me out on the farm,’ he said. ‘Feeding the pigs, moving arks, scraping muck off the yard. They’re hard workers and they’ve never been any trouble.’

‘Do you talk to them much, Mr Marston?’

‘Well, not beyond the basics. They don’t speak much English. I show them what to do and they get on with it. We don’t exactly socialise.’

‘So you don’t really know anything about them, do you?’

‘I know all I need to,’ said Marston obstinately. ‘If you want to know more, you’ll have to ask them yourself.’

Cooper saw this kind of obstinacy often. Perhaps it was a characteristic of people living and working in an environment where you needed a powerful streak of stubbornness to survive. No one wanted to admit they were wrong, or give in to what might look inevitable from the outside. He could admire that pig-headedness sometimes. But not always.

He went back to the barn, where Irvine and Hurst were waiting.

‘Keep talking to people,’ said Cooper. ‘DS Sharma will be here soon. He’s dealing with the parents and getting a formal identification. You’ll report to him, okay?’

Irvine and Hurst nodded and Cooper turned away to walk back to his car, stepping over the still smoking remains of a charred lump of straw.

In a field nearby he heard sheep coughing and stopped to listen. In a human, he would have thought they were affected by the smoke. But this was a different type of cough.

‘Lungworm,’ he said.

Irvine heard him, and stared across in amazement, as if he thought Cooper had just insulted him.

‘The sheep,’ called Cooper. ‘They’ve got lungworm.’

Back at his office in West Street, Ben Cooper found a message waiting, asking him to call Detective Superintendent Hazel Branagh urgently. He picked up the phone straightaway.

‘Ben, thanks for getting back to me so quickly,’ said Branagh.

‘No problem, ma’am. What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve just seen a request from you to give priority to a missing person case in Bakewell.’

‘That’s correct, ma’am.’

‘Why do you want pursue it?’ she said. ‘It’s just a missing person report. An adult missing from home, no indication of a crime or any other cause for concern.’

‘Because of the background,’ said Cooper. ‘The history, I mean — the Annette Bower case from ten years ago.’

‘I remember it well, Ben. You don’t have to tell me about it. I was the senior investigating officer.’

‘Of course you were.’

‘I’ve looked at the available information regarding the apparent disappearance of Reece Bower. I don’t think it can be regarded as a priority at the moment. Not with your arson death and the spate of armed robberies and everything else that’s going on in the division. You must see that, Ben.’

Cooper bit his lip. She was right, of course. Without further evidence, it was officially low priority. But still...

‘Understood, ma’am,’ he said.

He heard Branagh hesitate. ‘I wish I was still there in Edendale, you know,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

‘Of course. But it’s sometimes difficult to know when I can use my own initiative and when I need to refer things up the chain of command.’

There was a short silence. Cooper thought he might have gone too far. But it turned out that Superintendent Branagh was thinking something quite different. When she replied, she had lowered her voice to a more confidential tone. Cooper instinctively leaned forward to listen what she had to say. He felt like a conspirator, worrying about electronic bugs in the light fittings of his own office.

‘Between you and me, Ben, I was always disappointed in the outcome of the Annette Bower case,’ said Branagh. ‘It felt like a personal failure for me as SIO.’

‘It was a CPS decision not to go forward with a prosecution,’ said Cooper.

‘Of course. But that just meant the evidence we’d gathered wasn’t considered strong enough. One contradictory witness cancelled out everything we’d done. All those weeks we’d spent working on the inquiry counted for nothing.’

‘They might have been right to make that decision,’ said Cooper cautiously. ‘A jury—’

‘Yes, yes. Perhaps it was right by their criteria. Reasonable doubt and all that.’

Branagh made the phrase ‘reasonable doubt’ sound like a curse.

‘I take it you didn’t agree, ma’am?’ said Cooper.

She was firm in her answer. ‘No, I didn’t. The Bower case was a miscarriage of justice. Oh, I know people usually take that phrase to mean someone who’s wrongly been found guilty. But it applies in these circumstances too. As far I’m concerned, Reece Bower escaped justice.’

‘A lot of people seem to share that view, ma’am.’

‘It’s also important to me personally, Ben. It’s been concerning me for ten years, ever since I saw Reece Bower walk free.’

Even though he hadn’t been on the inquiry team, Cooper could remember the atmosphere in the station when the news came through of a new witness and an apparent sighting of Annette Bower alive and well. At first, the response had been sceptical, even dismissive. It always happened in a missing person case, or in the hunt for a wanted suspect. Sightings came in from all kinds of unlikely people and places. They had to be checked out, but it was rare they came to anything.

In this case, everyone had been so convinced that Annette was dead that the report of a sighting barely caused a ripple. Perhaps they’d all been steered towards that certainty by the confidence of their SIO, Detective Chief Inspector Hazel Branagh.

But, gradually, the faces of the officers assigned to interview the witness told their own story. His statement was consistent; his account couldn’t be shaken; the witness would perform well on the stand under cross-questioning. In the end, DCI Branagh had returned from a conference with the lawyers of the Crown Prosecution Service with a face like thunder. On balance, there was insufficient prospect of a successful conviction against Reece Bower.

Cooper noticed the photograph of Annette Bower sticking out from a folder on his desk. He drew it out and looked at her as he spoke. Her eyes seemed to be trying to communicate with him across a decade. But what was she trying to tell him?

‘Do you think Reece Bower has done a runner, ma’am?’ asked Cooper frankly.

‘Maybe,’ said Branagh. ‘But why would he do that ten years later? If he did kill his wife, he knew long ago that he’d got away with it. Mr Bower has settled down, changed jobs, started a new life with a new partner, and had another child. There’s no reason for him to abandon all that. He hardly sounds the sort of person who’d suddenly be overcome with guilt.’

Cooper smiled as he recognised how thoroughly Detective Superintendent Branagh had kept up to date with what had happened in Reece Bower’s life since the original inquiry. That was more like the senior detective he knew and admired.

‘What if Mr Bower was aware that some new evidence was about to come to light?’ he said.

‘Mmm. Well, that’s possible. But what sort of new evidence? The one piece of evidence we needed most was the body. But if that’s about to turn up somewhere, how come Reece Bower knows about it — and we don’t?’

‘I can’t answer that, ma’am,’ said Cooper. ‘Not without making further inquiries.’

Superintendent Branagh was so quiet that he could hear the voices of people walking down the corridor near her office. Then he thought he heard her laugh quietly.

‘Detective Inspector Cooper,’ she said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you could find the time to come and see me this afternoon. Towards the end of the day, if possible. Shall we say about five p.m.?’

Cooper smiled. Five p.m. A time when most of the office-based staff would be going home.

‘Yes, that will be fine.’

‘And I dare say you might happen to pass through Bakewell on the way here?’

And that was even better.

‘It would be a pleasure, ma’am,’ he said.

After he’d finished the call, Cooper picked up the photograph of Annette Bower, gazed at it for a moment, then slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.