Dead in the Dark

by Stephen Booth

  ‘I can’t see anything. There’s a massive tree root in the way. She must have fallen right through it.’

  ‘It might have broken her fall at least.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  ‘But we can’t get to her. Too much debris has fallen in.’

  ‘Is there another way to get in?’

  ‘We can try to find one,’ the DCRO controller said doubtfully.

  ‘We’ve got to find one.’

  More help arrived, and they began to scour the hillside for yards around the old mineshaft, dragging aside fallen trees and hacking through tangled brambles. Long minutes passed and it was almost half an hour before a rescuer held up a hand.

  ‘Here!’

  ‘Yes, we’ve got something.’

  ‘It looks like the remains of a mine entrance, but it may just be a ventilation shaft, or a drainage channel.’

  ‘If it goes into the same shaft, it’s what we need.’

  Cooper began pulling away the undergrowth, tearing his hands on the brambles. Quickly other people came to his side and began to help.

  ‘Inspector Cooper, there’s something here.’

  ‘What have you got? Is it Carol?’

  ‘I’m … not sure.’

  There was something about the man’s tone of voice that made Cooper’s heart sink, and his skin felt cold.

  ‘Let me look,’ he said.

  ‘Be careful, sir.’

  ‘I’m fine. Stand aside.’

  Cooper pulled out his torch and shone it into the hole they’d made. The light worked its way along the edge of the hole until it hit something white and very still. An officer lowered himself down into the hole.

  ‘It’s a body,’ said the officer. ‘But it’s not DC Villiers.’

  Cooper stared at him.

  ‘Is it the body of a male?’

  ‘Hard to tell, sir. The head and torso are buried under a collapse. The rest of the body is skeletonised.’

  ‘It will have to wait, then. Mark the spot. We’ll come back to it.’

  Cooper joined him in the hole. A passage ran off in both directions, hacked through the hillside by miners, one of the last workings of Mandale Mine.

  He took a moment to get his sense of direction.

  ‘This way.’

  They had to stoop in the passage. The rock walls were worn smooth in places, in others left broken and jagged. A length of rusty chain hung from an iron bolt in the wall. Rotting lumps of timber lay crumbling underfoot. Cooper tripped over a jutting stone and the officer grabbed his arm to steady him.

  After a few minutes they came to a point where the passage took a sharp turn. Rocks had tumbled from the roof here and it was a tight squeeze to get through, but he managed. Ahead was total blackness. He ducked to get the headlamp pointed forward. And his heart sank. The passage ended ten yards further on in a solid wall of stone.

  But wait a minute. There was light coming through from above. Just a single shaft of it, almost hidden by his helmet lamp. Cooper began to move forward again. He was breathing heavily, and not only from the exertion. The air was bad down here.

  He cast his light about the passage as he moved, conscious that he might pass over the opening to another shaft at any second. And then to his left he spotted an opening in the floor, a sloping access into another shaft. What did they call it? A winze.

  The space around him was full of dust now. It swirled in his torchlight and settled on his skin. He could feel himself breathing it in. It formed a sour, rough coating inside his mouth, drying up his saliva. He was beginning to feel a bit light-headed. Any longer and he would have to retreat.

  But there she was. Thank God she was wearing an orange waterproof. It reflected the light at the furthest limit of his torch beam and she was lying halfway down the slope into the next shaft. She was covered in dust and branches and small stones.

  ‘I can see her,’ he called back.

  ‘Is she conscious?’

  ‘I can’t tell. She isn’t moving.’

  Even as he spoke, he saw Villiers stir. She moved her arms, then her legs, and began to sit up. He heard her groan.

  ‘Carol, stay where you are. I’m coming down.’

  She looked up, shading her eyes against the glare of his torch.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘A bit scratched and bruised. I came right through the tree root.’

  ‘What did you land on?’

  She looked at her hands, and wiped a smear of something dark on her jacket.

  ‘Wet mud.’

  ‘You were lucky. It could have been a lot worse. Wait a second, I think I can get down the rest of the way.’

  ‘Careful, Ben.’

  Cooper took another step and found himself slithering the last few feet to the bottom of the shaft. Villiers put out a hand and stopped his descent.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come down.’

  ‘So they told me. Are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ She winced. ‘Well, perhaps a twisted ankle. And some of those bruises are going to be bad tomorrow.’

  ‘We’ll soon have you out when Cave Rescue get here.’

  Cooper shone his torch around. A lot of soil and vegetation had fallen into the shaft and was scattered around their feet. The mud smelled like an accumulation of decades and decades of debris that had ended up in the hole and had lain rotting in thick layers at the bottom. That was what Villiers had fallen on to. Now she smelled the same way as the mud, ripe with decomposition. And so did he, probably.

  He felt the need to support himself against the wall and realised the place they were standing in wasn’t on a level. It sloped slightly downwards into the hillside. In front of him, a great slab of rock formed a kind of roof. Beneath it, a roughly hewn passage vanished into the darkness.

  This wasn’t a carefully constructed tunnel like the Mandale sough with its delicate and beautifully balanced stone arch. Miners had simply hacked their way through the rock here to get to where they hoped the veins of lead would be. They had left only a space wide enough for an average-sized person to walk through bent double.

  A trickle of water ran into the passage from the muddy entrance. More water dripped from the roof, glittering for a second in his torchlight.

  ‘It’s very dark down here,’ said Villiers.

  ‘No one wants to die in the dark.’

  ‘Especially not alone.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Cooper grimly, ‘you weren’t exactly alone, Carol.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think we’ve found Annette Bower. Or what’s left of her after ten years.’

  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 char
ges,’ 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.<
br />
  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.’