‘You sound disappointed.’
‘Not disappointed, but frustrated,’ said Fry. ‘It means we still have no idea who killed him, or why. We’re back to square one.’
‘That is frustrating,’ said Cooper.
Fry looked at him. ‘What are you smiling at?’
‘Oh, I was just thinking... I have a murder case with a suspect and a motive, but no body. And you have a body, but no suspect and no motive.’
‘And that’s funny?’
‘It made me smile,’ said Cooper.
When Fry had left, Cooper stayed in Shirebrook for a while. Slave trafficking? He knew that slavery wasn’t a new phenomenon in Britain. Far from it. Most people thought of the eighteenth-century slave trade, the trafficking of black Africans to North America and the Caribbean. Yet the British had known slavery many centuries before that.
There had been a history teacher at Eden Valley High School who loved to cover the early centuries of the British Isles, as if they were somehow simpler and easier to understand than the Reformation, or the Repeal of the Corn Laws. He’d explained how, more than two thousand years ago, the Romans had brought their slave-based economy to their new province of Britannia. Right here in Derbyshire, the lead mines had been worked by Celtic slaves, the famously warlike Britons cowed into subservience and sent to hack out minerals by hand.
Vikings had begun the slave trade in Bristol, shipping British captives to slave markets in Ireland. And at the time of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, ten per cent of the population of England were recorded as slaves. Slavery had always existed — and according to Diane Fry it was still flourishing right here in his own county.
He didn’t envy Fry the cases she had to deal with now. The crimes he handled were somehow more normal and made more sense, even the sudden deaths. Organised crime on the level that she’d been talking about was rare in his part of Derbyshire, thank goodness. Not that it didn’t exist at all. Perhaps he just hadn’t found it yet. The thought wasn’t comforting.
Cooper decided to take a stroll round Shirebrook. At the top of Patchwork Row he found a clutch of important buildings — the library, the Salvation Army hall, the working men’s club. On The Row itself were the Piekarnia Olawa bakery and a bistro for Polish home-made dinners.
Many of the pubs seemed to have closed. For some reason, the Miners’ Welfare was still open, despite the fact that the pit had closed decades ago. Next to the Miners’ Welfare stood a funeral directors’. You could take that as symbolic, he supposed. The mining industry in Derbyshire was long since dead and buried.
He turned and looked across the road. The police station seemed disused too, but it wasn’t. Officers were still based there, the Safer Neighbourhood Team who did such a great job out on the streets policing their local community. That must have been where Sergeant Joe Cooper was based back in the day, when he was a beat bobby. It looked the right sort of solid old building, probably rather tatty and gloomy inside. In those days at least. But perhaps it still was.
In Shirebrook they had Polish-speaking volunteers now to help out on occasions such as the annual Remembrance Sunday parade in November. Derbyshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner himself had been seen in Shirebrook marketplace one day, hearing the views of local people as part of his ‘Listening to You’ campaign. Joe Cooper would have been completely unfamiliar with both of those phenomena. Neither Polish speaking volunteers nor PCCs were part of his policing experience. If he was still alive, Sergeant Cooper would be flabbergasted at the way the job had changed in some parts of the county.
The new Police and Crime Commissioner had pledged to visit all three hundred and eighty-three towns and villages in Derbyshire during his term of office, promoting his appearances on Twitter with the hashtag #D383. Cooper hadn’t heard of any plans for the Commissioner to visit Edendale yet.
He breathed in the smell of hotdogs from a burger van parked in a corner of the car park at the Ex-Servicemen’s Club on Carter Lane.
Cooper supposed pro-EU feeling in Shirebrook must be as rare as a lump of locally produced coal. Some said this neglected corner of the East Midlands acted like a canary in the mine — a warning of what could happen if the mass movement of people into the UK wasn’t controlled.
Of course, it was only a minority who caused the trouble. There had always been a problem minority, even in the old days when it was a proper community, before the start of the Miners’ Strike. But this minority stood out more. They behaved differently, they spoke differently.
A Polish man had stabbed another East European in the chest and was later jailed, causing further animosity from people who felt Shirebrook wasn’t safe any more. The rise in antisocial behaviour, street drinking and violent disorder became intolerable for some, prompting a series of street protests from locals who wanted to take their town back.
Cooper recalled one wet Saturday, when the marketplace here had been full of residents standing in waterproofs and under umbrellas to protest about a spate of violence and antisocial behaviour in the town. Speakers had called for more action by the town council and police over a situation they described as ‘a potential time bomb’.
Gangs of men drinking in the town centre were said to be frightening women and pensioners. Following the rally in the marketplace, residents had marched to the distribution centre outside the town, where they held another demonstration.
A lot of the talk was about the loss of jobs after the closure of the pit, leaving a generation without alternatives for employment other than to join the armed forces and risk their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. The BNP sold itself as a party for the working class, as opposed to the politicians of the establishment elite. British Jobs for British workers was a familiar slogan.
For three years the BNP had run their annual Red, White and Blue Festival near Codnor, an event which had cost Derbyshire Constabulary more than half a million pounds a year to police. It was a relief to everyone when it was cancelled one year and moved away from the county. It was money that could now be better spent, if it was still in the budget.
Meanwhile, Shirebrook’s population had risen by several thousands. The rest of the East European workforce was scattered around the area in towns like Mansfield and Worksop. Some landlords had taken advantage of the influx to cram beds into old miners’ cottages and rent them out to groups of workers. Groups of men like those he’d just seen could be very intimidating for neighbours.
Was Shirebrook unique in its transformation? It had changed from a struggling ex-mining town wallowing in a sad nostalgia for its industrial heritage, and it had become this fractured, anxious place that looked so quiet outwardly, but was seething with tensions underneath.
A juddering noise surprised him and Cooper looked up. A helicopter passed overhead and landed near the distribution centre.
For a moment, he wondered what job you could do there that would make you wealthy enough to afford your own helicopter. It would have to be a lot more than the minimum wage, even with overtime.
‘Polec Lokatora a Otrzymasz.’ Perhaps he could refer a friend.
But there was no one here in Shirebrook marketplace to ask. Just the sound of a gentle rain, falling on to a hard surface.
24
Day 4
Next morning, Ben Cooper found a video clip waiting for him, an extract from last night’s local TV news. When he clicked to play it, DS Dev Sharma’s face appeared in close-up on his screen.
Sharma was standing outside the Singhs’ shop on Buxton Road, making an appeal for information from the public to help identify the robbery suspects. He gave a clear description of them as far as it was known, and a photograph was shown of a motorcycle crash helmet similar to the distinctive red one worn by a suspect.