A Dark Place to Die

by Ed Chatterton

  'Whoever did this was making a point,' Keane says.

  'Like the Barry Haines hit,' puts in DC Rose. He's referring to the recent lunchtime assassination of one of the city's biggest drug barons outside a gym in Speke. The word is, so far unproved, that an East European hit man was hired. After the hit he melted back into his homeland without a trace.

  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.

  Keane doesn't live round here. Neither does Harris. No coppers do and haven't done since the late sixties when it all really started going to shit. The bizzies migrated north and south, to outlying suburbs, commuting in to police communities they're no longer part of. Thatcher's blood money poured into the force in the eighties and the cord was cut forever. Now on these granite-hard streets it's dog eat fucking dog and Keane, like everyone else in the force, gets paid to mop up the remains.

  With the Glassfield case, both Harris and Keane have known from the discovery of the body that the answer to finding the killer is, most likely, not going to come from hard police work. It's going to come from an arrest down the line and some toerag rolling over to negotiate a plea deal with the Crown Prosecution Service. At that level, drug murders are almost always cleared up within two years with relatively little connection to the snowdrifts of paper that accumulate round each and every MIT case.

  Keane gives Darren Halligan the eye as they cruise past. Keane is more familiar with the boy's older cousins, Matty and Dean. Darren, a new fish, still has a way to go before he rises to their giddy heights.

  Darren Halligan watches Keane and Harris pass, his eyes sliding off them in the too casual way Keane has seen in thousands of encounters with his 'clients'. Without quite knowing how, the kid has clocked them instantly as filth. The skill – cop spotting – has by now taken on an almost genetic quality. Certainly there are generations of families like the Halligans that Keane and Harris have had dealings with, and they all seem to be ready to do battle the instant they leave the womb.

  But the links with the families are no cosy, local affair; bobbies on their bikes chasing rosy-cheeked apple scrumpers. Darren Halligan, and thousands like him busy spotting for low-level dealers, are the first point of entry for a tidal wave of drugs going in, out, and through Liverpool, the connections reaching into areas as murky as the Colombian Cali cartel, IRA hit squads and th
e seriously scary East European new boys.

  Keane presses the accelerator. Darren Halligan sitting astride his BMX watches them go and Keane turns his attention back to the case.

  The van on the green and the smelly garage both turn out to be useless. There is no guarantee the van hasn't been used by the killers – it has, after all, been reduced to a blackened husk, much like the victim – but once Keane and Harris get a look at the scene they're convinced this has been straightforward theft and mischief. The golf club is missing trophies that have been taken from a display case in the lobby. Keane can't see the type of ruthless killers he and Harris are looking for pausing en route to steal the Rotary Shield trophy. The only detail of possible drug involvement is that two scrambler motorbikes – the light, flexible sort used in motocross – were spotted in the area immediately after the fire. The likely explanation is that they were stashed earlier and used to get away across the sand dunes and walking tracks that criss-cross the area. It's the bikes that catch Keane's ear. The use of this type of machine has become commonplace in drug-related incidents. Several drive-by shootings in recent years have involved scramblers. Invariably, if the police raid a house involved in drugs, one or two or more of the bikes are discovered. Their ubiquity is such that their existence at or near a drug raid is a signifier of guilt, at least to the investigation team. But here it looks like they've been used for exactly what they were designed for: cross-country motorbiking.

  The smell at the lock-up too is a bust. Rotten fish, stolen smoked salmon to be precise, part of a month-old robbery of a refrigerated Sainsbury's truck.

  Which leaves the Freeport call.

  They arrive there just after four and speak to the security guard who calls a second guard to take over at the gate while he directs Keane and Harris to their destination. It takes ten minutes to wind their way through the sprawling complex. Keane pulls the VW behind the security car and they step out.

  It's cold now, properly cold, and Harris is glad she's worn her Berghaus.