Стивен Бут: Dead in the Dark

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.