Cooper walked down the hallway to the front door, then turned to Naomi.
‘Are the boys at school?’ he said.
‘Yes, Daniel and Joshua attend schools here in Bakewell. You’re not going to drag them into this, are you? They have problems enough.’
‘No, that shouldn’t be necessary.’ He paused. ‘We’ll be speaking to Lacey, though.’
Naomi frowned.
‘Good luck to you, then.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know what sense you’ll get out of her.’
‘Does she talk to you, Mrs Heath? Or to her father?’
‘It depends what you mean by “talk”. She’s a teenager. Teenagers lie to their parents all the time. It’s a miracle if they tell us the truth now and then. The only view we get of what’s going on in their heads is the impression we have from the outside. The truth can be something completely different. But I’m sure you know that.’
At the top of the drive Cooper found a middle-aged woman in a red padded jacket standing near his car with a Yorkshire terrier dog on a lead. She didn’t seem to be walking the dog, just standing there as if waiting for it to do something. Or waiting for something else perhaps.
‘Hello,’ she brightly when he approached. ‘You’ve been to see Naomi.’
It was a statement rather than a question. So she must have been watching him for a while.
‘You must be a neighbour,’ he said.
‘Yes, my house is there, across the road. Are you with the police?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s gone off, hasn’t he? Reece, I mean.’
‘That’s right, Mrs...?’
‘Taylor. Evelyn.’
‘Do you know Mr Bower well?’
‘Not that well, I suppose. But they’re a very nice couple,’ she said. ‘He obviously dotes on her and can’t do enough for her. I wish all husbands were like that, actually. And they have that young boy.’
‘Daniel, their five-year-old?’
‘Yes, you see them together. Happy as any family I’ve ever seen.’
Cooper nodded. ‘What about the other children? Naomi has a son a few years older.’
‘Oh, he’s fine. A bit quiet perhaps. The younger boy is very sweet.’
Perhaps this was a woman who just liked small children. But he had to ask her about one more...
‘Oh, and there’s the teenager, of course,’ she said, before he could get the question out. ‘The girl, she’s about eighteen now, I think.’
‘Yes, Lacey. Do you see much of her?’
‘She was here on Sunday. I saw her going down the street when I was walking Henry. That’s the dog, by the way. Other than that, I can’t remember the last time. She has a life of her own, I suppose. You know the way they are at that age. Even when she was living here, she only seemed to use her dad as a taxi driver to get her where she wanted to be and pick her up again at the end of the night.’
‘Do you have any idea how she gets on with Mrs Heath?’
‘Mrs H— Oh, that’s Naomi, isn’t it? We always forget they’re not married. I suppose it isn’t unusual these days.’
‘Very common, in fact,’ said Cooper. ‘Does it trouble you that they’re not married?’
‘Oh, not at all. It’s entirely up to them. But how did Lacey get on with Naomi? I’m not sure they ever did, or they’re ever likely to. Come on, Henry.’
She walked off with the dog and Cooper turned to his car. He felt as though he was being watched from the houses along the road. And perhaps he was. Who knew what lay behind those hedges?
He headed the Toyota back down Aldern Way and Castle Drive, remembering which way to turn at the grit bin to get back on to Station Road.
This had been the site of Bakewell Station when Midlands Railways trains came through on their way from Matlock to Buxton. It was unusual for a station to be built half a mile out of town, and so high on the hillside. The line had begun climbing here towards its summit at Peak Forest Junction. The station building was still there with its four tall stone chimneys, though it was being used as offices for an electronics company. The lines had been removed and the gap between platforms had been filled in to create the Monsal Trail. The goods shed, signal box and cattle dock were long gone. The iron and glass canopies over the platforms were a distant memory. Now interpretation boards had been installed to show what the station used to look like.
So Reece Bower wouldn’t have been leaving by train anyway. The last one had stopped here in the 1960s. The former station forecourt was now a car park for walkers and cyclists using the trail. Bower could easily have been meeting someone here, a friend who’d waited for him to leave the house and picked him up by car.
A small industrial estate had been built on the site of the goods yard. Waste management, cardboard baling, plumbing supplies, an MOT centre. He recalled that one of these units had burned down in a fire a few years ago. He wasn’t sure which one it was, as the units all looked intact now.
Then Cooper remembered that Annette Bower was supposed to have disappeared while she was just a few yards away on the Monsal Trail running with her dog. Officers working on the initial inquiry had conducted a search of all these industrial units, in case Annette had wandered in and been injured, or something worse had happened to her.
Cooper parked on the station forecourt and walked through a passage on to the Monsal Trail itself. The trees were dense on the eastern side of the trail, and the verges of the old track bed were thick with nettles and brambles, overlain with an impenetrable tangle of cleavers.
Officers also searched this area intensively in the search for Annette Bower. For a while, there had been expectations that her body would be found in the undergrowth. He could imagine the curses of the search team as they struggled through the nettles, sweating under their baseball caps, probing the ground with their poles for an obstruction. It must have taken them days. And it had all been in vain.
Cooper looked up and down the trail. In one direction, a bridge carried Station Road over the trail, while in the other the trail vanished into trees beyond the industrial estate. He wondered how far the search parameters had been extended. As SIO, Hazel Branagh would have been very thorough, he was sure of that. But the Monsal Trail stretched for a total of eight and a half miles, from the Coombs Road Viaduct south of Bakewell all the way into Wyedale.
The hill the station had been built on was called Castle Hill, but there were no signs of a castle now, not even any discernible earthworks. Only a golf course.
A golf course? Of course, Bakewell Golf Club. Naomi Heath had mentioned Reece Bower’s golfing buddies. Was this the club Reece Bower was a member of? It seemed likely, since it was so close to his home. Perhaps the names of some of those buddies would be in the address book Naomi had given him.
Gavin Murfin was leaving the steel fabrications company where Reece Bower worked. It was located on a business park just off the A61north of Chesterfield, and he couldn’t find a way directly back on to the bypass, so he pulled into the side of the road to check his satnav.
It was rare to get a bit of peace and quiet without any rushing about, so Murfin took his time over it, even closing his eyes for a few minutes to take a short nap. There was too much dashing backwards and forwards these days, not like when he was a young DC and could spend the afternoon in the pub. At least Ben Cooper trusted him out on his own now and then.
When he opened his eyes again, Murfin wiped a trace of spittle from his mouth, sighed, and put the Skoda back into gear.
Madeleine Betts worked at the Royal Hospital, which meant he had to drive back through Chesterfield, round a couple of roundabouts, and out towards a place called Calow. The route took him past the familiar sight of floodlights and a football ground — the Proact Stadium, home of Chesterfield FC. There had been times in the recent past when Murfin thought his own club, Derby County, might end up playing the Spireites in League One and he’d have to spend more time in Chesterfield than he really wanted to.