Cooper saw this kind of obstinacy often. Perhaps it was a characteristic of people living and working in an environment where you needed a powerful streak of stubbornness to survive. No one wanted to admit they were wrong, or give in to what might look inevitable from the outside. He could admire that pig-headedness sometimes. But not always.
He went back to the barn, where Irvine and Hurst were waiting.
‘Keep talking to people,’ said Cooper. ‘DS Sharma will be here soon. He’s dealing with the parents and getting a formal identification. You’ll report to him, okay?’
Irvine and Hurst nodded and Cooper turned away to walk back to his car, stepping over the still smoking remains of a charred lump of straw.
In a field nearby he heard sheep coughing and stopped to listen. In a human, he would have thought they were affected by the smoke. But this was a different type of cough.
‘Lungworm,’ he said.
Irvine heard him, and stared across in amazement, as if he thought Cooper had just insulted him.
‘The sheep,’ called Cooper. ‘They’ve got lungworm.’
Back at his office in West Street, Ben Cooper found a message waiting, asking him to call Detective Superintendent Hazel Branagh urgently. He picked up the phone straightaway.
‘Ben, thanks for getting back to me so quickly,’ said Branagh.
‘No problem, ma’am. What can I do for you?’
‘I’ve just seen a request from you to give priority to a missing person case in Bakewell.’
‘That’s correct, ma’am.’
‘Why do you want pursue it?’ she said. ‘It’s just a missing person report. An adult missing from home, no indication of a crime or any other cause for concern.’
‘Because of the background,’ said Cooper. ‘The history, I mean — the Annette Bower case from ten years ago.’
‘I remember it well, Ben. You don’t have to tell me about it. I was the senior investigating officer.’
‘Of course you were.’
‘I’ve looked at the available information regarding the apparent disappearance of Reece Bower. I don’t think it can be regarded as a priority at the moment. Not with your arson death and the spate of armed robberies and everything else that’s going on in the division. You must see that, Ben.’
Cooper bit his lip. She was right, of course. Without further evidence, it was officially low priority. But still...
‘Understood, ma’am,’ he said.
He heard Branagh hesitate. ‘I wish I was still there in Edendale, you know,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure you’ll be fine.’
‘Of course. But it’s sometimes difficult to know when I can use my own initiative and when I need to refer things up the chain of command.’
There was a short silence. Cooper thought he might have gone too far. But it turned out that Superintendent Branagh was thinking something quite different. When she replied, she had lowered her voice to a more confidential tone. Cooper instinctively leaned forward to listen what she had to say. He felt like a conspirator, worrying about electronic bugs in the light fittings of his own office.
‘Between you and me, Ben, I was always disappointed in the outcome of the Annette Bower case,’ said Branagh. ‘It felt like a personal failure for me as SIO.’
‘It was a CPS decision not to go forward with a prosecution,’ said Cooper.
‘Of course. But that just meant the evidence we’d gathered wasn’t considered strong enough. One contradictory witness cancelled out everything we’d done. All those weeks we’d spent working on the inquiry counted for nothing.’
‘They might have been right to make that decision,’ said Cooper cautiously. ‘A jury—’
‘Yes, yes. Perhaps it was right by their criteria. Reasonable doubt and all that.’
Branagh made the phrase ‘reasonable doubt’ sound like a curse.
‘I take it you didn’t agree, ma’am?’ said Cooper.
She was firm in her answer. ‘No, I didn’t. The Bower case was a miscarriage of justice. Oh, I know people usually take that phrase to mean someone who’s wrongly been found guilty. But it applies in these circumstances too. As far I’m concerned, Reece Bower escaped justice.’
‘A lot of people seem to share that view, ma’am.’
‘It’s also important to me personally, Ben. It’s been concerning me for ten years, ever since I saw Reece Bower walk free.’
Even though he hadn’t been on the inquiry team, Cooper could remember the atmosphere in the station when the news came through of a new witness and an apparent sighting of Annette Bower alive and well. At first, the response had been sceptical, even dismissive. It always happened in a missing person case, or in the hunt for a wanted suspect. Sightings came in from all kinds of unlikely people and places. They had to be checked out, but it was rare they came to anything.
In this case, everyone had been so convinced that Annette was dead that the report of a sighting barely caused a ripple. Perhaps they’d all been steered towards that certainty by the confidence of their SIO, Detective Chief Inspector Hazel Branagh.
But, gradually, the faces of the officers assigned to interview the witness told their own story. His statement was consistent; his account couldn’t be shaken; the witness would perform well on the stand under cross-questioning. In the end, DCI Branagh had returned from a conference with the lawyers of the Crown Prosecution Service with a face like thunder. On balance, there was insufficient prospect of a successful conviction against Reece Bower.
Cooper noticed the photograph of Annette Bower sticking out from a folder on his desk. He drew it out and looked at her as he spoke. Her eyes seemed to be trying to communicate with him across a decade. But what was she trying to tell him?
‘Do you think Reece Bower has done a runner, ma’am?’ asked Cooper frankly.
‘Maybe,’ said Branagh. ‘But why would he do that ten years later? If he did kill his wife, he knew long ago that he’d got away with it. Mr Bower has settled down, changed jobs, started a new life with a new partner, and had another child. There’s no reason for him to abandon all that. He hardly sounds the sort of person who’d suddenly be overcome with guilt.’
Cooper smiled as he recognised how thoroughly Detective Superintendent Branagh had kept up to date with what had happened in Reece Bower’s life since the original inquiry. That was more like the senior detective he knew and admired.
‘What if Mr Bower was aware that some new evidence was about to come to light?’ he said.
‘Mmm. Well, that’s possible. But what sort of new evidence? The one piece of evidence we needed most was the body. But if that’s about to turn up somewhere, how come Reece Bower knows about it — and we don’t?’
‘I can’t answer that, ma’am,’ said Cooper. ‘Not without making further inquiries.’
Superintendent Branagh was so quiet that he could hear the voices of people walking down the corridor near her office. Then he thought he heard her laugh quietly.
‘Detective Inspector Cooper,’ she said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you could find the time to come and see me this afternoon. Towards the end of the day, if possible. Shall we say about five p.m.?’
Cooper smiled. Five p.m. A time when most of the office-based staff would be going home.
‘Yes, that will be fine.’
‘And I dare say you might happen to pass through Bakewell on the way here?’
And that was even better.
‘It would be a pleasure, ma’am,’ he said.
After he’d finished the call, Cooper picked up the photograph of Annette Bower, gazed at it for a moment, then slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.
9
Tammy Beresford was first on Jamie Callaghan’s list. A single mother in her late twenties, wearing clothes that smelled of charity shop. She looked from Fry to Callaghan as if they were aliens just arrived from another planet.