A Dark Place to Die
A Dark Place to
Die
Ed Chatterton
Copyright © 2012, Ed Chatterton
To the girl from Neston Street
1
Frank, hunched against a bastard wind knifing in off the Irish Sea, isn't sure at first where the sound is coming from. It's barely light and a soft insistent hiss sits below the whining gale, like white-noise feedback at song's end. He leans a little closer and realises the source is sand rattling against the charred skin stretched tom-tom tight across the dead man's face.
By exacting local standards it's been a while since the last body turned up on his patch, and Frank Keane has been wondering when the next one would arrive, but on this bone-cold Tuesday morning in late October, normal service looks like it's been resumed.
Someone's made a real effort this time, the victim lashed bolt upright to a length of scaffolding pole driven deep into the Liverpool sand and barbecued to a blackened crisp. His back to the still-waking city, the corpse faces seawards, just fifty paces from the turning tide. As a pig of a caffeine headache settles in behind his eyeballs, Frank squints into the melted nightmare that had once been someone's face and sees if he can recognise the corpse as one of the bottom-feeders in his patch.
You never know. Sometimes you get lucky.
The victim's features are a molten mess, the nostrils visible as clotted slits and the teeth bared, the lips peeled away. A horror show. Frank's grateful for the dull light, the details thankfully sketchy. The cold as sharp as Lennon's tongue, Keane rams his hands deeper into the pockets of his useless overcoat and curses his lack of foresight in not coming equipped with better outdoor clothing.
Harris
will have the right clothes; Frank's sure of that, but she hasn't arrived. DI Frank Keane is the first officer at the scene – not through any great zeal on his part; he happened to be on his way in when the dispatcher called – but now he is here, and freezing his bollocks off instead of still being tucked under the duvet with the wonderfully warm-bottomed Julie, he's anxious to be on with the job. Right now, that means waiting for Harris to arrive before laying so much as a finger on the crime scene. The new set of Merseyside Police regulations specifically state that the investigation must be as a team, solo efforts being prone to awkward courtroom arguments about tainted evidence, and – more pertinently in Frank's world – vulnerable to harsh punishment by the brass. Especially from The Fish, the pole-climbing prick. Difficulties in court represent blots on the copybook and The Fish wants his department's record purer than.
Besides, impatient though he is, Keane predicts that they'll discover little from the physical evidence and he's too old to be ferreting around the frozen beach like some new-minted numpty looking for 'clues', a word that in the context of modern-day policing seems almost quaint. Most of the Merseyside Police Major Incident Team cases come home thanks to one thing and one thing only. There's always someone, eventually, who talks. That's one
thing about Scousers: they can't stop fucking talking. Or, it sometimes seems to Frank, slaughtering one another.
So he waits. He walks in a wide slow circle round the victim, wondering which of the likely suspects will turn out to be responsible.
There's no shortage of candidates.
While Liverpool's heavy industry has wasted away to almost nothing, the city's criminals seem to have perfected production of a steady stream of ever more violent and sharp-fanged drug predators. The latest fashion in executions has been for drama and this poor bastard on the beach, another of the gangland killings that have plagued Liverpool for decades, is supplying plenty.
DI Keane knows this victim is, in all likelihood, not someone who'll be mourned by many; certainly not by anyone in uniform. It's a five-course meal to a bacon butty that the vic'll be someone who got in the way of a bigger fish working up the food chain.
Guns or baseball bats, the staple fare of drug beefs, are the usual method of settling scores, although there has been a recent fashion for using M75 military-issue grenades to make a point. Even the battle-scarred Keane sat up and took notice when the fuckers began using grenades.
Compared to that, Keane's victim is positively artistic.
They'll explore all investigative avenues – or at least that's the official line – but there's not a copper on Merseyside worth his salt who'd waste ten seconds seriously considering this is anything other than drugs. They all are.
Keane, his back to the wind again, works his reluctant frozen fingers into a pair of surgical gloves. If Harris doesn't arrive soon he's going to make a start, regs or no regs. It's too cold to be standing out here and it's getting colder with every passing minute. Keane raises his hands
to his mouth to warm them, before remembering, too late, the gloves. With the sour taste of latex on his lips, he contents himself with rubbing his palms together but it's not effective; the talced rubber too smooth to get any decent friction.
Whoever put the victim here chose a suitably miserable spot.
The low-lying city, skulking along five or six miles of heavy docks, sits behind and to the left of the corpse, while directly in front the grey-brown Mersey empties into the Irish Sea with all the enthusiasm of an hungover drunk staggering out of bed. Across the river mouth sits New Brighton, the waves white against its blackened Victorian sea walls. The ships that have carried everything and everyone, from West African slaves packed heel to head in shameful wooden clippers, to sweaty-palmed IRA bombers supping Guinness at the tilting ferry bar, have always needed to be careful coming in and out of Liverpool Bay. Sly sandbanks that guard the entrance to the river lie in wait for the unwary like a late-night stranger in the Lime Street shadows.
Mate, mate, got a cig? I'm gaspin'. Giz yer fucken money
.
It is, as Keane knows too well, a port with form as long as a docker's pocket, and today as cold and unforgiving as a bailiff's smile.
Keane turns away from the water and glances over the victim's shoulder back towards the concrete promenade for any sign of investigative life, and for Harris. Keane swears long and hard but despite his exhortations Harris doesn't appear. Apart from the two plods taking statements from the witnesses who discovered the body – a couple of stunned and shivering art students who got more than they bargained for on their early morning research
trip – the beach is as deserted as you might expect at 7.40 on a dank autumn morning.
It doesn't look it, though, not at first glance.
Motionless life-size figures dot the sand, strung out along a half-mile of the semi-industrial shoreline: sculptor Antony Gormley's iron men, an ambitious piece of public sculpture, once derided, now being grudgingly embraced by the city.
The work takes the form of one hundred slowly rusting, life-size iron figures standing on the beach in the same pose, arms by the side, and positioned at varying distances from the long concrete promenade according to some reasoning of the artist. Several are almost always completely submerged and will only surface as the tide recedes.
Which it will do rapidly. On the wide sand flats, the water sometimes moves faster than a man can run. As a child Keane almost drowned at Ainsdale, a few miles north, when he misjudged the water. It's a real concern for Keane, one that will give added impetus to the familiar process. If the tide comes in before they're done with the body, things will get much messier than they already are. If Harris and the SOC boys don't get here soon, someone is going to be on the receiving end of Frank Keane's legendary temper. It hasn't been off the leash for a while and, fuelled by his building headache, he can feel a legendary vent bubbling up.
To postpone the inevitable, he ducks his shoulder into the wind, flips out his mobile and gives Harris another buzz, his impatient fingers stabbing the buttons. He waits a few seconds for a reply.
Nothing. Fuck it. He might as well make a start.
Keane pockets the phone and turns his attention to the corpse. He reaches inside his jacket to put on his reading glasses and bends to inspect the hands, feeling the creak
in his joints from his workout at the Boxing Club last night as he does so. Just forty and the knees already going. Bending forward, Keane concentrates, and, for the first time, touches the dead man.
The corpse's hands have been tied in place at his side using steel wire, the fingers curved into involuntary claws by the fire that has claimed him – or, if you were being pedantic, her. Keane isn't quite ready to set that in stone just yet, although he'd bet the farm on this one being male. The same steel wire has been used to tie the corpse to a four-inch-diameter steel scaffolding pole, the end of which appears to be firmly embedded in the sand. He gives the pole an experimental shake.
Rock solid. Keane reckons when they eventually dig this mess out of the beach they'll find a large lump of concrete at the base. He registers the scale of effort required to pull this execution off. Distracted and stationary, Keane feels moisture on his feet and looks down to see them sinking an inch or two into the wet sand. Cold seawater slops over the tops of his black shoes. New ones, bought less than a week ago in one of the fancy shops in L1.
'Fuck.'
He half-hops backwards to firmer territory, shaking his feet, conscious of the picture he's presenting to the slowly gathering crowd of gawpers on the prom.
Inspector Bean.
Jesus. Shit. Fuck. Bastard
. It's cold enough out here without going paddling. To make matters worse, Harris chooses exactly this moment to arrive, right on cue, along with the first vanload of Scene of Crime Officers, two of whom begin wrestling a white tarpaulin across the sand, and stifling sniggers at the sight of Keane splashing about in the muck.
'Can you two useless fucking fuckwits get that fucking screen fixed before someone gets this poor bastard up on fucking YouTube?' spits Keane as soon as they get within earshot. The SOCOs' smiles vanish and they bend to their task; a difficult one in the conditions. Keane glares at them, his feet ice, his mood icier. 'Fuckers.'
Back on the promenade, police vehicles are now arriving in larger numbers and Keane spots the white estate car belonging to the photographer. Despite the wet feet, Keane senses a quickening in his blood. The crime scene,
his
crime scene, is, at last, starting to take shape.
'Careful,' says Emily Harris, as she reaches Keane and points at his shoes. 'Don't want to interfere with the chain of evidence, Roy.'
Harris is the second Detective Inspector in Keane's 'syndicate', the current jargon being used to describe the four deployments working under the banner of MIT. She has to raise her voice above the incessant wind to be heard. Unlike Keane, she doesn't seem to be feeling the cold. She's wearing a warm-looking black ski-jacket and a black knitted beanie pulled down over her short hair.