The sky was a deep black and you could see the stars clearly here. Thousands and thousands of them — some glittering brightly, some no more than a milky haze across the galaxy. That was something he would surely miss, if he ever had to live in a city. So much light pollution prevented you from seeing the stars and a few minutes standing gazing at the night sky really helped to put things into perspective. He felt so tiny in the face of that infinite universe.
Cooper shivered. In the summer, it might still have been light at this time, or at least illuminated by that peculiar half-light that came with dusk.
But the nights were drawing in. That’s what his mother would have said. She’d said it every year, about this time. You could have filled the date in on your calendar in advance. The leaves were turning brown, and Christmas cards were in the shops. It was already September, and the nights were drawing in.
People thought the weather was the most important part of the seasons. But day length was the crucial factor for nature. Though there were still thirteen hours of daylight at this time of year, the hours were getting shorter by four minutes a day. Cooper had hated that knowledge as a child. It had always felt like his life was slipping away from him, slowly and certainly, an inch at a time.
He shook himself and realised that he’d been sitting here for a long time. He looked at his watch. Dawn would come at about six twenty a.m. He hoped it would bring a bit more light into his world.
15
Day 3
Next day, Stage Three of the Tour of Britain had entered the western side of the Peak District from Cheshire. Hundreds of racing cyclists were right now on the A537 Cat and Fiddle road to the west of Buxton, the longest and highest climb of the race. At the summit, the riders would turn along the A54 and head back down towards the Cheshire Plain, taking them out of Derbyshire.
Ben Cooper had known it was about to happen — it was in the bulletins months ago, but he’d forgotten. At least the race didn’t come as far as Bakewell and Edendale. The traffic chaos would be unimaginable.
Arriving at West Street, he passed a uniformed officer in the corridor, just on his way out to start a shift. Instinct made Cooper turn and look back at the officer. Some joker had stuck a handwritten sign on the back of his high-vis jacket. Instead of just ‘Police’, it said ‘Police, Fire, Ambulance, Paramedic, Care Worker, NHS, Mental Health, Social Services, Samaritan, Parent, Marriage Counsellor, Traffic Warden, Car Mechanic, Livestock Handler’. They’d run out of space for all the other jobs.
Cooper opened his mouth to call to him, but changed his mind. The officer’s sergeant or one of his colleagues would tell him before he went out in public. Jokes like that were for internal consumption.
Last week, Cooper found a printed notice taped to the wall of the men’s toilets. It said:
ACTION TO BE TAKEN IN THE EVENT OF A MORALE ATTACK. The area must be evacuated immediately before any officers catch morale. A senior officer must remove the source of morale as soon as possible. Work can only be resumed when morale has been returned to its normally low level. Be vigilant — morale is a constant threat!
These notices wouldn’t have appeared a few months ago. Now, no one took the trouble to take them down or find out who was producing them. The senior command staff had probably decided it was a harmless way of letting off steam.
At least morale in the CID room seemed to be normal. Or as normal as it ever was.
‘Hey, I have a mate at Bolsover LPU,’ said Gavin Murfin when he saw Cooper. ‘He says Diane Fry and her EMSOU mates have been hanging around all week.’
‘Yes, I saw her in Chesterfield last night,’ said Cooper.
Luke Irvine frowned at the name. ‘Diane Fry? She’s a bunny boiler.’
‘All women are potential bunny boilers, Luke,’ said Murfin. ‘They’re just waiting for the right moment to strike.’
‘I’ll tell your wife what you’ve been saying about her,’ warned Becky Hurst.
Murfin sniffed. ‘It won’t matter. She boiled my bunny years ago.’
‘I happen to know you’re very happily married, Gavin,’ said Cooper. ‘And you have been for twenty-five years.’
‘It’s a façade. You should know better than to believe everything you’re told.’
Hurst smiled now. She knew Murfin better than that too. But she wasn’t about to forgive Irvine.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘what do you know about Detective Sergeant Fry, Luke? You were only the office boy when she was based here.’
‘Get lost,’ said Irvine.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll get promoted to a proper police officer one day.’
Cooper didn’t have time to get involved in this one. That was what he had a detective sergeant for, wasn’t it?
‘DS Sharma, unless there’s anything urgent I’ll be in Bakewell later this morning,’ he said. ‘You can phone me if there are any problems.’
‘We’ll be fine, inspector. There’s just one thing...’
‘Yes?’
‘I’d like to do a media appeal, to see if we can get any information from the public on the robbery suspects.’
Cooper nodded. ‘Good idea, Dev. Go ahead and set it up.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Cooper went back to his office. He forced himself to phone his brother to make sure everything was okay after the previous night. He would rather have spoken to Kate herself, but that might look as though he was going behind Matt’s back. He fully expected his brother to be irritable and bad-tempered. But he was very quiet today.
‘Yes, Kate is fine,’ he said. ‘We’re all fine, thanks.’
It was so uncharacteristic that it sounded to Ben like an apology — or as close to one as his brother was ever likely to get.
‘Kate’s just heard she has an appointment with the consultant on Friday morning for her results,’ said Matt.
‘You’ll let me know how it goes, won’t you?’
‘Of course.’
While he was listening to Matt, Cooper scanned the morning’s updates.
A couple in their eighties had been visited by a man claiming to be a police officer investigating a theft. He’d flashed a photo ID card, which he said was a police warrant card. While in their house he’d stolen a wallet containing cash and various bank and debit cards. The previous day, a man matching a similar description and claiming to be a police officer had visited the home of an eighty-three-year-old man, but was refused entry and left when asked for identification.
Elsewhere, a flood of complaints from residents about cars being parked on grass verges and street corners with For Sale signs on them turned out to be someone running a second-hand car sales business without going to the trouble and expense of buying premises to operate from.
Several small roads around Kinder Scout had been closed temporarily for the filming of a TV motoring show. The crew would be there for about a week. Nothing to do with CID, but it was best to know.
And there were internal problems too. He was alerted by a memo that engineers were currently on site, trying to resolve the problems that callers to the 101 non-emergency number had been experiencing. People had been facing delays in getting through to call handlers, or in some cases had been cut off during their calls. Cooper was very glad he didn’t have to deal with that problem.
Finally he began working his way through the case files from ten years ago. He wanted to analyse the strength of the evidence against Reece Bower. Though it was an old case, Bower’s guilt or innocence might well prove relevant to his disappearance.
Yet there was also that idea suggested by his brother last night, that Bower’s disappearance might be due to some delayed vigilante action by local people anxious to bring justice where they thought an injustice had been done. He didn’t know where to start looking for vigilantes, so the case files seemed the only place to begin.