Dead in the Dark

by Stephen Booth

  Lathkill Dale was a part of his life, the way it was for many people. It had a manner of creeping into your consciousness, as if you’d always known it.

  He opened another pocket and took out the photograph of Annette Bower he’d been carrying with him. He felt an odd sort of connection between them. This place had been part of Annette’s life too.

  But was it also the place of her death?

  Diane Fry left Shirebrook and got on to the M1 at Heath. Twenty miles south, she pulled into Trowell Services.

  She preferred the services on the southbound side, because it had a Burger King rather than a McDonalds. For half an hour she sat at a table in Burger King eating a veggie bean burger with apple fries on the side and drinking a tropical mango smoothie.

  People ebbed and flowed around her, staying a few minutes and getting back on the road to wherever they were heading. Two customers came and sat at a table next to her, a large woman in a baggy denim trouser suit, with steel grey hair cut into a severe bob and a girl of about fifteen, in a lime green jumpsuit and a baseball cap, like a contestant in The X Factor. They might have been mother and daughter – but, if so, they bore no physical resemblance to one another.

  Halfway through her burger, Fry’s phone rang and she saw from the display that it was Angie.

  ‘Sis.’

  ‘Hi. What are you doing?’

  ‘Eating. Why?’

  ‘You sound as though you’re in a railway station.’

  ‘Something like that. What do you want?’

  ‘Just to say, you know … keep it to yourself what I told you last night.’

  ‘You know you’re putting me in a difficult position,’ said Diane.

  ‘Well, that’s up to you.’

  Diane pulled the lettuce out of her sesame seed bun and left it on the side of her tray.

  ‘Is this some kind of test?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have told me, you know you shouldn’t. Why didn’t you just hold on to your own secrets?’

  ‘We’re sisters, aren’t we? Family. We ought not to have secrets from each other, Di. We never did when we were growing up in Warley.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. Until you left.’

  She wished she could see Angie’s face. She could never really tell what she was thinking, unless she could look her sister right in the eyes.

  ‘I didn’t want to leave. It was something I had to do.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell me where you were going. You let me think I’d never see you again. You became very good at keeping secrets, Angie.’

  ‘Things have changed. I’m a different person now.’

  ‘Not all that different,’ said Diane, ‘if what you told me last night is true.’

  She heard the baby screaming the background. Zack. Now, that was something that had definitely changed about her sister.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Angie. ‘We can talk about this some other time, if you want. But, Sis – remember. Keep it to yourself.’

  Fry dropped her phone on the table in exasperation. Last night’s conversation with her sister was one she’d been hoping to forget. She’d shared her Yuk Sung Chicken and vegetarian spring rolls with Angie, conscious at first of an unusual silence. Then Angie had sat back and taken a deep breath.

  ‘There’s something I should have told you a long time ago,’ she’d said. ‘About a part of my life I’ve always kept from you.’

  Diane had immediately experienced the sinking feeling in her stomach that her sister was uniquely able to provoke.

  ‘Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.’

  But Angie had shaken her head firmly. ‘You have to listen, Sis. It’s too late to do any harm now.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  She had been convinced her sister was about to tell her some shady truths about her previous boyfriend Craig, the father of Zack. She’d always had suspicions about him, but there were times when it was best not to know.

  But that wasn’t what Angie had in mind.

  ‘It goes back a long way,’ she’d said, ‘to when you first found me – or rather, when your friend Ben first found me.’

  ‘What?’

  That had been a painful part of their history. Diane had been trying to trace her sister for years after she ran away from their foster home in the West Midlands. It was why she’d transferred to Derbyshire Constabulary in the first place, following a trail that suggested Angie had ended up in nearby Sheffield. Yet it had been Ben Cooper, interfering with his usual naïve and clumsy style, who had tracked Angie down and arranged their meeting. It had changed her life, and not always in a good way.

  ‘You don’t need to remind me of that,’ she said.

  ‘No, you don’t understand,’ said Angie. ‘In all this time, you’ve never asked me what I was doing in Sheffield. I know you wanted to skate over all that and go back to the way things were in Warley. But that just wasn’t possible, Sis. Not after everything that had happened to me in the meantime. Didn’t you ever wonder?’

  Of course she’d wondered. Yet Angie was right – it was an aspect of her sister’s life that she’d pushed determinedly to the back of her mind. She’d tried to pretend that Angie was the same person she’d lost sight of years ago, even though the truth was staring her in the face.

  ‘It didn’t seem important,’ she said.

  Angie had laughed then. ‘Liar. You just didn’t want to know, in case it compromised your principles. I kept quiet then, but it had to come out. And there are reasons I have to tell you now.’

  The chicken had lost its flavour by that point in the evening. Diane had felt trapped in her own apartment, with no means of escaping whatever her sister was about to inflict on her.

  ‘The fact is,’ said Angie, ‘I fell in with some very bad people in Sheffield. The worst kind you can imagine. I was an idiot, of course. I was at risk all the time. But then I did something even more dangerous – I got recruited as an informer. That was when Ben Cooper traced me. It almost caused disaster for a major operation the NCA were planning.’

  ‘The NCA?’

  ‘As in the National Crime Agency.’

  ‘I know who they are. But Angie—’

  Her sister had held up a hand to stop her interrupting. ‘I’ve got to tell you now, Di. Because there’s a good chance I’m going to need your help.’

  Sitting in Burger King, Fry sighed at the memory of the previous evening. She pushed her meal aside, finished her smoothie and stood up. Immediately her table was claimed. A young man with tousled hair, sideburns and heavy framed glasses sat down across from a dumpy young woman with a plump face and dark hair.

  In the women’s toilets at the service area the walls were covered with adverts for insurance policies and bladder control products. A poster near the door encouraged her to text a donation to a charity in Africa.

  Fry wondered what kind of adverts were on the walls of the men’s toilets. Something about cars or football, she guessed.

  She walked back outside, pressed her key fob, and saw her Audi’s lights blink. Her car, winking at her in the darkness.

  14

  Ben Cooper felt himself growing calmer on the way to Bridge End Farm. The landscape always helped him to do that.

  The Peak District moors had turned purple in late August, the swatches of heather coming magnificently into flower over acres of apparently empty moorland. Now, down in the valleys, the trees were starting to change colour too. They were still heavily laden with foliage, and they lumbered clumsily over the road in the strong winds. In a few weeks’ time their leaves would be yellow and bronze. Autumn would strip them and scatter the dead leaves across the tarmac surface in golden tides.

  The skeletal bareness of winter would be here soon, thought Cooper. Much too soon. The months when the ground was sodden, paths were churned into muddy quagmires, and the air felt chill and damp. For Cooper, every season had its moods and its appeal. But there was a p
eriod after Christmas and the New Year when even the Peak District felt miserable. He wondered if there was some event from his past that made him feel so down when late January and February arrived. Or did everyone feel that way?

  The fields around Bridge End Farm looked different this year. Ben’s sister-in-law Kate had persuaded his brother Matt to make a change from the traditional black silage bags. Reluctantly, he’d ordered a roll of pink silotite bale wrap and joined the trend for pink bags in support of breast cancer research. The field where the bales were stacked looked much brighter, the pink wrap gleaming in the sun next to the black bags. A couple of tourists had stopped their car up on the road to take photographs.

  The swallows that nested every year in the barns at Bridge End were getting ready to leave. The house martins would stay for a while longer, but the swallows would be heading off on their journey back to Africa. It was hard to imagine something so tiny and fragile making an incredible journey like that, and returning next spring to the exact same spot. What resilience and determination it must take.

  Cooper couldn’t think of many people who had that sort of single-minded determination. You had to need something very badly, didn’t you? What was it the swallows needed? To come back to their home surely. That was something everyone wanted. Had Annette Bower needed it badly enough?

  At the end of dinner at Bridge End Farm that evening, Matt Cooper put down his knife and fork with a clatter on his plate.

  ‘You’re going to what?’ he said.

  ‘The opera,’ repeated Ben.

  ‘The chuffin’ opera? What’s happened to you, brother?’

  Kate frowned at her husband. ‘Watch your language, Matt.’

  The two girls giggled. They weren’t shocked any more. They were teenagers, and they thought their parents were ridiculous.

  ‘Besides,’ said Kate, ‘there’s nothing wrong with the opera. A lot of people enjoy it.’

  ‘We’ve never gone to the opera,’ said Matt.

  ‘Well, perhaps I’d like to some time. Have you ever thought of that?’

  Matt scowled. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  Ben studied his brother for a moment. Matt was never the sunniest of characters, but he’d been in a particularly bad mood all evening. He’d been curt when Ben arrived at the farm, then monosyllabic over dinner, and finally short-tempered over trivialities. Something was definitely wrong.

  ‘I’m sure it will be wonderful.’ Kate began to clear plates off the table. ‘I hope you enjoy yourself, Ben.’

  Ben stood up. ‘I’ll help you with the washing-up.’

  The girls disappeared to their rooms and, as he walked across the passage to the kitchen, he heard Matt switch on the TV. Kate handed him a tea towel, but didn’t seem to want to meet his eye.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t expect that to cause a family disagreement,’ said Ben, though inside he felt as much like laughing as Amy and Josie. ‘What does my brother have against opera?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with the opera,’ said Kate.

  ‘Oh.’

  They worked together silently for a while. Through the kitchen window, Ben could see the outlines of the farm buildings in the darkness, standing out against a clear, starlit sky. Beyond them he could make out the shape of the hill that he’d become so familiar with growing up at Bridge End. He couldn’t even remember the name of that hill now. It was probably something ‘low’, he supposed. But as a family, they’d always just called it ‘the hill’. It was so much a part of their lives that it didn’t need a name. It was their hill.

  Out in the yard, he heard the dog bark. Not a warning of intruders, but a welcoming bark. He guessed that Matt had gone out of the house. He’d left the TV on and disappeared to where he felt most comfortable – out there in the open, with his tractor and his dog.

  Kate looked up. ‘Matt is very worried,’ she said eventually.

  Ben realised she’d been waiting for her husband to go out, so that there was no chance of him overhearing their conversation. She knew Matt so well. Probably better than Ben did himself now.

  ‘Matt always worries,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t be happy unless he had something to worry about.’

  She smiled sadly. ‘This is different, Ben.’

  ‘So what is he worried about this time? Something to do with the farm, I suppose? Are the yields down this year? Has the price of feed gone through the roof? He hasn’t mentioned anything.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing like that.’

  ‘Nothing to do with the farm?’

  ‘No.’

  Now Ben was getting concerned himself. Matt hardly thought of anything, apart from the farm. Well, except his family, of course. His heart sank, and he put down the tea towel.

  ‘Is it one of the girls?’ he said. ‘Is something wrong with Amy or Josie? Because you know I’d do anything—’

  She shook her head. ‘Not that either.’

  ‘Well, it can’t be Matt,’ he said.

  Kate laughed. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, he’s as strong as an ox. He never has anything wrong with him. Not physically anyway. He just needs fuelling occasionally and he keeps going on for ever, like his old Massey Ferguson.’

  Now she looked shocked. ‘What do you mean “not physically”? Are you suggesting your brother is psychologically unstable?’

  ‘No, he’s just a thick-headed bumpkin, like he always was.’

  Kate laid her hand on his arm and gazed out into the darkness. A light was on in the machinery shed, and a figure could just be made out moving around inside, its shadow thrown fitfully against the walls and out into the yard. Ben glimpsed the dog, Bess, wagging her tail at the unseen figure.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Kate. ‘I found a lump. The doctors say it’s possibly a malignant tumour so I’ve had a biopsy done and now I’m waiting on the results.’

  ‘I’m really sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘That’s an excellent prognosis if you catch this sort of thing early enough. I’m not worried. Well …’ She hesitated. ‘I am quite nervous, but I’m sure it will work out okay. Matt isn’t taking it so well.’

  ‘That’s why he’s like a bear with a sore head,’ said Ben. ‘He has no idea how to deal with these things. He never did have. Matt had no idea how to deal with Dad’s death, or Mum’s illness. It’s not his forte.’

  ‘You were right about him being physically strong. But his feelings are a lot more complicated, much more difficult to understand.’

  ‘He definitely has them, though. He just has difficulty finding a way to express them.’

  ‘You know him better than anyone, Ben,’ said Kate.

  ‘Do I? I was just thinking the same about you. Matt and I have grown apart over the years, especially since I moved to Edendale.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Kate, ‘I think you’re still the only one he can talk to about some things.’

  ‘Are you sure, Kate?’

  ‘Certain.’

  She took the tea towel off him. Ben nodded, and left the kitchen. He went down the passage and out of the back door into the yard. It was dark on this side of the house, but he knew every inch of the place. He’d often wandered around these buildings in the dark as a child, and even right out into the fields among the animals. He’d loved the sense of solitude and openness to the sky. It was like stepping into a different world where all the cares of the day fell away from him. He wondered if it was the same for Matt, whether he still did that now to get away from his troubles, if that was what he was doing when he went out to the machinery shed to talk to the dog.

  Ben found his brother sitting on an upturned oil drum, with the dog at his feet. Matt looked up without surprise when he came in.

  ‘I suppose Kate told you,’ he said.

  ‘Of course she did. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Matt shook his head. ‘It seemed too … personal.’

  ‘Well, what a surprise. But I am your brother.’

 
‘I’m sorry. It’s just the thought of losing Kate. I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Lose her? It’s not like one of your cows getting sick, Matt. They’re not going to put her down with a humane killer. They can do wonders these days. If it is malignant, Kate herself says the outcome is generally pretty good for an early diagnosis like hers.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Ben, ‘she needs your support right now. Not having you stomping around in a bad temper all the time.’

  Matt said nothing, but stroked the dog’s head thoughtfully. Ben could see it was an action that calmed him down.

  ‘You’re right, obviously,’ he said.

  ‘I know I am.’

  Ben found another oil drum and rolled it over. They sat next to each for a few minutes in silence. This was the way it had often been between them, even when they were teenagers. It was in these long silences that they felt closest to each other.

  ‘Talk to me about something else,’ said Matt in the end.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You usually have some interesting case going on. A murder inquiry, something like that.’

  ‘You want to hear about a murder? Really?’

  Ben mentally ran through his recent cases. He ruled out the death of Shane Curtis. An arson attack on a farmer’s barn would only send Matt off on another angry rant.

  ‘Do you remember the Annette Bower case?’ he said. ‘It was about ten years ago.’

  That made Matt think. His memory was pretty good for scandalous events in the area. Farmers gossiped about things like that down at the market, or in the village pub.

  ‘Was that the woman whose body was never found?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Was that actually a murder? I seem to remember—’

  ‘Her husband was charged, but it never got to court.’

  ‘That’s it. Somebody claimed to have seen her alive, so there couldn’t have been a murder.’

  ‘Well, perhaps not,’ said Ben. ‘On the other hand, perhaps there was.’

  Matt snorted. ‘That’s what I like. It could be one thing, or it could be the other. No one really knows. It makes my life seem a lot more simple.’