Dead in the Dark

by Stephen Booth

  The interior of the house was overheated. It smelled rank and stale, thick with the stink of cigarette smoke and the sour dregs of beer. Downstairs the walls were a uniform dull grey, with net curtains and roller blinds at all the windows. The kitchen was barely seven feet wide. If he stretched, he could almost have touched both walls at once. Not that he would have wanted to. They looked as though they had absorbed years of grease and food splashes. The smell of cooking practically oozed from the paintwork.

  ‘I’ve been in plenty of houses like this,’ said Cooper. ‘What’s the big deal?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ said Fry.

  The stairs creaked ominously and the carpet was frayed into tattered ribbons, as if by the constant passage of many pairs of hobnailed boots.

  The same smells met Cooper on the landing. Upstairs, heavy floral patterns predominated. Massive red flowers on the wallpaper, even bigger blue flowers on the rugs. In the two first floor bedrooms upstairs, he could hardly see an inch of carpet. Three mattresses lay on the floor of each room, the piles of disarrayed blankets suggesting that they were regularly used. Clothes were hung on rails and behind the door, cardboard boxes were full of shoes and underwear, a yellow high-vis jacket hung over the side.

  ‘Some of these properties have owner-occupiers and have been made really nice internally,’ said Fry. ‘Well, where else could you buy a three-bedroom house for seventy thousand pounds?’

  ‘Not in Edendale, that’s for sure.’

  Cooper thought of the Swanns’ home in Over Haddon. That was a three-bedroom property too. But the difference in price between the two houses was probably somewhere in the range of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. What was it they said about property? Location, location, location …

  ‘But a lot of these houses are rented,’ said Fry. ‘Landlords charge about four hundred and fifty pounds a month. If you can get nine or ten people in them, that’s very cheap.’

  ‘So where’s the third bedroom?’

  She pointed upwards. ‘Attic.’

  The trap door opened to reveal an extending ladder. In the attic, Cooper couldn’t reach the walls, but he had to duck to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling.

  ‘It’s the same in here,’ said Cooper. ‘Mattresses and blankets.’

  ‘This is more than just a house in multiple occupation. These men were being exploited.’

  Cooper came back down the ladder and stood on the landing.

  ‘Why have you shown me all this?’ he said.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Branagh asked us to bring you in and make sure you were up to speed with the operation.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because,’ said Fry, ‘the next house we raid may be in your area.’

  ‘And what do you suggest I do in the meantime?’

  ‘We want LPUs like yours to gather information,’ she said. ‘It’s only by obtaining intelligence on the ground that we can get a complete picture. You and your team are best placed to do that.’

  ‘I suppose we are,’ admitted Cooper.

  Outside, the occupants of the house had been driven away in the police van. As Fry and Cooper left in her Audi, they drove through a new housing development that had been built right next to the Model Village.

  Cooper noticed that the roads were called Sunflower Close, Orchid Way, and The Spinney. Now, that could be in Edendale.

  23

  Back in the marketplace, only the takeaways were open. A car was parked outside the Shirebrook Xpress on the corner of Market Street, someone picking up a pizza or a couple of burgers. Cooper could smell the waft of frying chips from Deep Pan Kid, where the only movement was from two women in orange tabards behind the counter. A solitary black-and-white cat strolled across the empty market square.

  Fry took him round the back of the row of shops and showed him the taped-off stairway.

  ‘This is where your murder victim lived?’

  ‘Yes. We thought Krystian Zalewski might be a slave-trafficking victim,’ she said. ‘One who had tried to escape from his captors and had been punished.’

  ‘A punishment that went too far?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Exactly. But when a knife is involved, it can easily end up worse than you expect.’

  ‘But you’re not sure now that it’s the right explanation.’

  ‘No. He’d been living in this one-bedroom flat for four months on his own. There are plenty of HMOs in the area, but this isn’t one of them. The landlord, who owns the shop downstairs, says he never saw anyone else coming to the flat.’

  ‘But the access is from this stairway in the backyard,’ said Cooper.

  ‘True. And the landlord locks the shop at five o’clock and goes home, so he wouldn’t know who came here in the evening, or during the night for that matter.’ Fry shook her head. ‘In some ways, it’s a classic set-up. Krystian Zalewski had very little contact with anyone else. He was living in a place where people could come and go without being observed for sixteen hours of the day.’

  ‘And he worked at a car wash,’ said Cooper.

  She nodded. ‘A car wash. On the surface, that seemed to clinch it. But his employers say they had no problems with him, never noticed anything to give them cause for concern. Zalewski was a hard worker, always turned up on time. But he showed none of the indications of being trafficked. He was clean, had a change of clothes, didn’t seem ill-treated or malnourished. In fact, he brought sandwiches to work every day and sometimes offered to share them with his co-workers.’

  ‘Sounds pretty normal.’

  ‘Yes, it does. We’ve had officers visit the Polish shops, and the staff at Zabka recognise him. They say he came in regularly and bought groceries. Basic stuff, but enough to keep a single man fed.’ Fry raised her hands in a gesture of futility. ‘No, Krystian Zalewski wasn’t being trafficked. He was just a migrant worker, trying to make a go of it. But because he was such a loner, we couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘I wonder how he was regarded by the local people,’ said Cooper.

  ‘That we don’t know. The landlord is the only person we’ve found who can claim that he knew Zalewski. And he only collected his rent once a week.’

  ‘No other conversation at all?’

  ‘Oh, he spoke to his tenant a couple of times to explain to him what was supposed to go in the wheelie bins. He hadn’t quite grasped the idea of recyclable and non-recyclable.’

  ‘Have any of us?’ said Cooper.

  Fry ignored the remark.

  ‘The owner of the shop was a complication,’ she said Fry. ‘His name is Geoffrey Pollitt and we already had him under observation.’

  ‘You’d been tracking him? Why?’

  ‘It was over quite a different matter. He has far right connections.’

  ‘A known extremist?’

  ‘He’s a middle man. Two years ago he bought a lock-up shop on the marketplace at Shirebrook. The tenant’s lease hadn’t been renewed when its term expired, so the shop was standing empty, with its shutters permanently down. When we went to have a discreet look, we realised there was a large storeroom at the back of the shop, with delivery access from one of the side streets.’

  ‘It must have rung alarm bells when there seemed to be links between slave trafficking and the far right.’

  ‘You’re not kidding. We would have moved in on Pollitt eventually, but we were in the process of gathering information.’

  ‘Which can take for ever,’ said Cooper.

  ‘We have to be cautious.’

  ‘And the death of Krystian Zalewski put a spanner in the works.’

  ‘It meant we had to respond, of course. It gave us a justification for turning over the flat and visiting Mr Pollitt.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. Before he worked at the car wash, Zalewski was employed at the distribution centre just outside Shirebrook. There are thousands of Poles and other East Europeans working there, most of them on zero hours contracts through agencies. Zalewski got into trouble,
broke too many rules about timekeeping, and the agency let him go. There’s nothing in it as far as the slave trafficking inquiry is concerned.’

  ‘You sound disappointed.’

  ‘Not disappointed, but frustrated,’ said Fry. ‘It means we still have no idea who killed him, or why. We’re back to square one.’

  ‘That is frustrating,’ said Cooper.

  Fry looked at him. ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Oh, I was just thinking … I have a murder case with a suspect and a motive, but no body. And you have a body, but no suspect and no motive.’

  ‘And that’s funny?’

  ‘It made me smile,’ said Cooper.

  *

  When Fry had left, Cooper stayed in Shirebrook for a while. Slave trafficking? He knew that slavery wasn’t a new phenomenon in Britain. Far from it. Most people thought of the eighteenth-century slave trade, the trafficking of black Africans to North America and the Caribbean. Yet the British had known slavery many centuries before that.

  There had been a history teacher at Eden Valley High School who loved to cover the early centuries of the British Isles, as if they were somehow simpler and easier to understand than the Reformation, or the Repeal of the Corn Laws. He’d explained how, more than two thousand years ago, the Romans had brought their slave-based economy to their new province of Britannia. Right here in Derbyshire, the lead mines had been worked by Celtic slaves, the famously warlike Britons cowed into subservience and sent to hack out minerals by hand.

  Vikings had begun the slave trade in Bristol, shipping British captives to slave markets in Ireland. And at the time of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, ten per cent of the population of England were recorded as slaves. Slavery had always existed – and according to Diane Fry it was still flourishing right here in his own county.

  He didn’t envy Fry the cases she had to deal with now. The crimes he handled were somehow more normal and made more sense, even the sudden deaths. Organised crime on the level that she’d been talking about was rare in his part of Derbyshire, thank goodness. Not that it didn’t exist at all. Perhaps he just hadn’t found it yet. The thought wasn’t comforting.

  Cooper decided to take a stroll round Shirebrook. At the top of Patchwork Row he found a clutch of important buildings – the library, the Salvation Army hall, the working men’s club. On The Row itself were the Piekarnia Olawa bakery and a bistro for Polish home-made dinners.

  Many of the pubs seemed to have closed. For some reason, the Miners’ Welfare was still open, despite the fact that the pit had closed decades ago. Next to the Miners’ Welfare stood a funeral directors’. You could take that as symbolic, he supposed. The mining industry in Derbyshire was long since dead and buried.

  He turned and looked across the road. The police station seemed disused too, but it wasn’t. Officers were still based there, the Safer Neighbourhood Team who did such a great job out on the streets policing their local community. That must have been where Sergeant Joe Cooper was based back in the day, when he was a beat bobby. It looked the right sort of solid old building, probably rather tatty and gloomy inside. In those days at least. But perhaps it still was.

  In Shirebrook they had Polish-speaking volunteers now to help out on occasions such as the annual Remembrance Sunday parade in November. Derbyshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner himself had been seen in Shirebrook marketplace one day, hearing the views of local people as part of his ‘Listening to You’ campaign. Joe Cooper would have been completely unfamiliar with both of those phenomena. Neither Polish speaking volunteers nor PCCs were part of his policing experience. If he was still alive, Sergeant Cooper would be flabbergasted at the way the job had changed in some parts of the county.

  The new Police and Crime Commissioner had pledged to visit all three hundred and eighty-three towns and villages in Derbyshire during his term of office, promoting his appearances on Twitter with the hashtag #D383. Cooper hadn’t heard of any plans for the Commissioner to visit Edendale yet.

  He breathed in the smell of hotdogs from a burger van parked in a corner of the car park at the Ex-Servicemen’s Club on Carter Lane.

  Cooper supposed pro-EU feeling in Shirebrook must be as rare as a lump of locally produced coal. Some said this neglected corner of the East Midlands acted like a canary in the mine – a warning of what could happen if the mass movement of people into the UK wasn’t controlled.

  Of course, it was only a minority who caused the trouble. There had always been a problem minority, even in the old days when it was a proper community, before the start of the Miners’ Strike. But this minority stood out more. They behaved differently, they spoke differently.

  A Polish man had stabbed another East European in the chest and was later jailed, causing further animosity from people who felt Shirebrook wasn’t safe any more. The rise in antisocial behaviour, street drinking and violent disorder became intolerable for some, prompting a series of street protests from locals who wanted to take their town back.

  Cooper recalled one wet Saturday, when the marketplace here had been full of residents standing in waterproofs and under umbrellas to protest about a spate of violence and antisocial behaviour in the town. Speakers had called for more action by the town council and police over a situation they described as ‘a potential time bomb’.

  Gangs of men drinking in the town centre were said to be frightening women and pensioners. Following the rally in the marketplace, residents had marched to the distribution centre outside the town, where they held another demonstration.

  A lot of the talk was about the loss of jobs after the closure of the pit, leaving a generation without alternatives for employment other than to join the armed forces and risk their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. The BNP sold itself as a party for the working class, as opposed to the politicians of the establishment elite. British Jobs for British workers was a familiar slogan.

  For three years the BNP had run their annual Red, White and Blue Festival near Codnor, an event which had cost Derbyshire Constabulary more than half a million pounds a year to police. It was a relief to everyone when it was cancelled one year and moved away from the county. It was money that could now be better spent, if it was still in the budget.

  Meanwhile, Shirebrook’s population had risen by several thousands. The rest of the East European workforce was scattered around the area in towns like Mansfield and Worksop. Some landlords had taken advantage of the influx to cram beds into old miners’ cottages and rent them out to groups of workers. Groups of men like those he’d just seen could be very intimidating for neighbours.

  Was Shirebrook unique in its transformation? It had changed from a struggling ex-mining town wallowing in a sad nostalgia for its industrial heritage, and it had become this fractured, anxious place that looked so quiet outwardly, but was seething with tensions underneath.

  A juddering noise surprised him and Cooper looked up. A helicopter passed overhead and landed near the distribution centre.

  For a moment, he wondered what job you could do there that would make you wealthy enough to afford your own helicopter. It would have to be a lot more than the minimum wage, even with overtime.

  ‘Polec Lokatora a Otrzymasz.’ Perhaps he could refer a friend.

  But there was no one here in Shirebrook marketplace to ask. Just the sound of a gentle rain, falling on to a hard surface.

  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.