A Dark Place to Die (5 page)

Keane acknowledges Rose's contribution. 'Perhaps, but this is at another level. Haines was all business. This has a
level of sadism we haven't come across before. Someone is upping the ante.'

'Could there be a Colombian connection? It's got that Faraway Place feeling. Sort of Scarface, like.' The bass voice of DC Scott Corner booms out from somewhere up near the ceiling. Corner is the tallest in the MIT team. The 'Faraway Place' was the term used by an infamous Liverpool dealer to refer to Colombia. Fond of using nicknames, the 'Flat Place' had been Amsterdam. Corner is pointlessly using the term to show off and Harris chops him down.

'The old Australia-Colombia connection, eh? I think you're looking in the wrong direction, Scott.'

A few of the team suppress smiles. 'Tim-
ber
,' says someone with a smirk. Scott Corner is a decent enough copper but prone to bouts of pomposity. It's good to see him cut down to size now and again. Corner flushes and looks at his toecaps.

Keane has already moved on.

'It's one of the big boys. I can feel it. This message is being sent to someone about a deal currently in progress – why go to all the trouble otherwise? If it's a new outfit, some thrusting young Turk, I'll be staggered. It's the usual suspects.'

Keane begins counting them off on his fingers. Boyd. The Norris Greens. Kite. Azwallah. 'Maybe the Mancs taking their beef to an away ground, although my feeling is that that's the least likely prognosis.'

There are nods from the team. They all know this is local. It's not Manchester, not unless there's been a sudden acceleration of the cross-city rivalry; something that can be effectively discounted. Manchester and Liverpool are less than forty miles apart but from the drug trade point
of view it might as well be four hundred. Trade is brisker between Liverpool and Amsterdam, between Liverpool and Spain, between Liverpool and half a dozen other markets than it is with Manchester. The vicious local turf wars are just that: local. Everyone at the MIT meeting suspects it's very likely to be one of the three or four really big outfits in the city, such is the scale and professionalism of the killing. But knowing this doesn't move things along very much, not immediately anyway. The code of silence active amongst the serious Liverpool drug movers and shakers would shame a Sicilian. Someone will talk but not so soon, not with this much attention on the case. The press are going to town and that always means additional pressure on the MIT syndicates from above. Liverpool's new status as a shiny tourist spot will not be helped by a drug war played out in public.

'I want some intel from the OCS,' says Keane. The Organised Crime Squad in Liverpool is one of Europe's busiest, but they have a tendency to play their cards close to their chest. Keane knows, however, that his investigation will include them at some point, certainly once a link has been established from the victim to a person of interest to the OCS.

'I'll talk to them,' says Harris. 'I've got a friend who's a DI there.'

She notices one or two of her colleagues exchange the briefest of glances; schoolboy reactions. Harris is gay. She never mentions her sexuality but neither does she hide it and, much to her bewilderment, it seems to be a constant source of fevered adolescent lesbian fantasies for some of the team. Harris contents herself with a cold glare at the offending coppers – their smirks fade under her scrutiny – and turns her attention back to the job.

She's happy to let Frank take the lead in the briefing – he's the senior officer in years if not rank – but she carefully avoids being seen as Keane's assistant. That wouldn't help her, or DI Theresa Cooper and DS Siobhan McDonald, the two other female officers in their MIT section. Not to mention any other ambitious black coppers.

Without letting Keane cut back in, Harris continues by detailing Corner and his usual partner, Peter Wills, to contact the Coastguard and find out why no-one noticed a great big fucking fire on Crosby Beach on the night in question. They are also told to rustle up some uniform plod and do some old-school door-knocking.

'Just the houses facing the sands,' says Harris. 'They're a long way from the scene but they're the nearest. Someone may have seen something. You can also get down to the car park later and see if there are any dog walkers. People with dogs sometimes have a routine. If they're there today, it's conceivable they were there yesterday.'

With a nod to Keane to confirm agreement, she closes out the briefing and the team disperse to their various roles.

The missing persons list has been picked over without finding any Australians who match the victim. A couple of strapping blond backpackers who'd been reported as missing by their worried families in Sydney had looked promising. Keane thought it might have been the break until the two had been turned up by the Met alive and well and earning a living as gay escorts in London.

Two of the team are checking recent Australian arrivals with Immigration. Keane knows there will be an abundance of matches in the list, but unless one of them has been reported missing, it is, very likely, another dead end. He instructs Caddick and Rose, the officers working that angle, to go back no further than three weeks.

'Just three weeks, boss?' says Caddick. At twenty-six and already a detective sergeant, Phil Caddick is rising fast in the force. A bit too fast in Keane's view. There's something about his clean-cut face and studied air of 'professionalism' that irks him, and would have had the same effect on Koop. Keane tries to shake the negative thought, seeing it as his own problem, not Caddick's. The guy's alright, Keane reflects, I just don't like him being younger than me. He wonders if Koop ever entertained similar thoughts about the younger Frank Keane.

'The tan, Phil,' he says, not unkindly. 'Three weeks in England and he'd have been as pasty as any of us.'

'Unless he used a tanning salon,' says Harris. 'Just saying,' she adds, catching the look on Keane's face. She returns to her screen leaving Keane tapping his pen against his drip-ringed coffee cup. The day is draining away and with each passing minute the chance of getting that crucial breakthrough is fading.

Keane looks out across the city skyline. The flat northern light compresses the array of iconic buildings and rain-streaked concrete sixties shitboxes into one jagged grey line of broken teeth. On the road running past the building Keane watches a black bin bag tumbling against a broken-down plastic roadworks barrier. It joins a drift of wet litter and crap two feet deep. A fat teenager, his shaved head almost blue, inspects the line of parked cars for opportunistic bounty as he passes, oblivious to being less than eighty feet from a large police building. And what would we do if he did crack one of the windows and leg it? Chase the little fat fuck? Keane rubs his eyes, feeling the tiredness in his bones. The case is coagulating around him. Too slow.

He turns away from the window and the thief.

When in doubt, do something. He sits down at his desk and opens his computer, the noises of the office surf in his ears. Across the partition Harris is talking on the phone, her voice rhythm businesslike, although Keane can't hear the words, even if he wanted to. She's doing something, though, and Keane gets a tiny spark of irritation and the competitor in him stirs. Partner she may be but Harris is intent on moving up and Keane wonders if she'll leave him behind. She has some obvious advantages.

Keane inwardly chastises himself for the thought. It's not Harris. It's me. He shakes his head and concentrates.

It's all about momentum. Getting momentum and keeping momentum. If you don't keep the revs up the machine can get bogged down all too easily. Forty-eight hours is the perceived wisdom on the length of time it takes for a trail to grow cold and Keane has some sympathy for that point of view. He also knows of plenty of instances where the old saw proved fallible, when patient and diligent police work ground out a result over months and years.

But he's not by instinct a patient man. So he tries something Koop taught him a long time ago. He goes fishing.

He clicks the mouse and accesses the Liverpool in-call log which lists all calls to Merseyside Police from the public. Every call across the county is fed through one central collection point before being assigned geographically by the dispatchers. As with everything now there is a detailed digital record. As always, the list is dominated by noise and public disturbances, domestic violence, petty and not so petty crime.

Keane tunes his antenna to those incidents that smell a little
off
. He couldn't have articulated what that would look like, but he'll know it when he sees it. The bobbing
float dipping below the canal surface, indicating the activity below.

Like when they have a lying suspect. No matter how good they are – and Liverpool is blessed, or blighted, depending on your viewpoint, with a super-abundance of some of the slipperiest liars, con men, cheats, blowhards and out-and-out bullshit merchants ever to walk the face of the earth – Keane always
knows
when they are lying. It is contained in the stories they tell, some detail that, even though it may have nothing to do with the lie itself, alerts him to the fact that lying is taking place. A bum note. A missed beat.

After more than an hour at the list, Keane has narrowed it down to three potentially interesting calls.

He clicks Google Maps up onscreen – the modern policeman's friend – and examines each location in more detail, cross-referencing it with the location of the iron men on Crosby Beach. All three are within a few miles of Keane's crime scene.

The first, and furthest from the crime scene, is a burnt-out Transit van on an upscale golf course to the north. The almost tearful club groundsman phoned it in this morning after finding the Transit smouldering in the middle of his precious eighteenth green.

For Keane, the positioning of the vehicle looks worthy of further consideration. It's something that, as an avowed hater of all things golf and golf-related, he can almost appreciate. Provoking a volcanic reaction by depositing a blazing van in the middle of the pristine green speaks of a twisted sensibility not without humour. Pitch-black, Liverpool humour, but humour. Even so, the flaming Transit feels like the work of kids. But well worth a look.

The second call concerns a rented lock-up garage on the Dock Road. A disgruntled renter at an adjacent garage called to say that a bad smell was coming from the neighbouring property. That in itself isn't particularly interesting, so much as the name of the company listed as renting the unit in question: Gormley Creations. A coincidence that the company has the same name as the sculptor? Keane doesn't believe in coincidence.

The last of Keane's picks is a call from a 'frightened' kid – the dispatcher's word on the log – who had phoned asking for someone to take a look inside a container near the north-western end of the Seaforth Freeport. Besides the location, the nearest to the body, what piques Keane's interest is that the caller would have known it was a risk calling the police: whatever they'd been doing inside the Freeport was illegal.

'Let's go,' he says, picking up his jacket from behind his chair.

Harris, despite her outward appearance of diligence at her keyboard, doesn't need to be asked twice.

They take Keane's car, a silver VW Golf which he's had for almost two years. If cars reflect their owners, the Golf is bang on the money so far as Keane is concerned. Tougher than it looks and moves quickly when it needs to.

For his part, Keane doesn't give his car a moment's thought. Never a petrolhead, the VW is something he'd bought to get around in, no more.

He and Harris cut through Everton Valley and drop down through the red-brick badlands of Kirkdale and Bootle towards the Dock Road, the streets so familiar to Keane that he could have navigated them in his sleep;
something that, in his patrol car days, he'd come closer to doing than he cared to think about.

This area is rich in pickings for policemen. Kirkdale, Keane has read in last weekend's papers, is now officially the most deprived area in Europe. The Halligans, one of Liverpool's largest disorganised crime families, live here, a tangled network of graft, violence and intimidation spread like a cancer through the close-set Victorian-terraced streets and shabby seventies housing projects built on the bomb sites left by the Luftwaffe. Thirty years after the war, Keane can just about remember seeing the acres of rubble, the odd pub left in place; an oasis in the wilderness.

Keane and Harris automatically log incongruities as they drive: a gleaming and unmolested Porsche Cayenne four-wheel drive parked outside a house that cost less than the car's gearbox. Unmolested for a reason. A lone teenager about sixteen, mobile in hand, circles the end of a street on a bike several sizes too small, and notes the traffic.

'Halligan at three o'clock,' says Em Harris. 'Darren.'

Keane's eyes flick towards the youth, his interest piqued at the name. He slows the car a fraction.

'Siobhan had a run-in with him last week on Glassfield. Needless to say, he knew nothing.' Harris is talking about another case on Keane's slate; this one a fairly low-level turf beef between the younger members of two of the north Liverpool 'squads', which ratcheted up a notch when James Glassfield, eighteen, was killed and his body tossed onto the lines at Bootle, not far from the location of the infamous Bulger toddler murder. The theory MIT are working on is that it was an 'of the moment' crime involving a number of youths. As expected, local help from the community in finding Glassfield's killer has been precisely zero.

With good reason.

Despite his youth, James Lee Glassfield was a significant local dealer with a growing rep and people know better than to raise their heads above the parapet. The police have nominal dominion here. A grass is not tolerated. The idea that you may have talked is often enough to bring instant and brutal retribution.

They crucified someone on these streets two years back. Literally. Fixed to a billboard with a nail gun. Keane remembers the guy lost a hand but wouldn't say a word. He didn't blame him. If he lived round here he'd have done the same.