Стивен Бут - Dead in the Dark

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.’

‘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 charges,’ 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.’