Frank squeezes through the gap and tumbles a couple of metres into the shaft. He barks his shin against a rusted iron bar set into the wall of the shaft, and as his feet find solid ground freezing water pours over the tops of his trainers.
'Fuck!' He rubs his leg and moves slowly forward, not trusting the surface underfoot. At the end of the water-filled corridor, there is a brick arch dividing the space ahead. Below the arch, from what little Frank can see, there is another dumping ground for rubbish. Here he can go no further.
Frank looks at his map. One of his possibilities is out.
Ten minutes later he's standing at the entrance to another of his guesses. A maze of small passages seems – on the map at least – to finish in a remote dead end. Frank sees that if he is to access this he must first get through a crawl space only just large enough to fit his frame.
Frank can feel his heart rate leap at the prospect of inserting himself between the two great slabs of brick and concrete but he slides his head and shoulders in and wriggles forward. Lying there, he can almost feel the weight of the earth piled above him pressing down on the two-hundred-year-old structure. If he hears a rat he knows he's going to scream. Just the idea of being in here with a rodent is enough to jerk him into motion and he shuffles manically forward until, thankfully, he slides out into a space large enough to stand upright.
It seems to be a second dead end. Another slope of rubble with a wooden door at the top, propped against the wall. Frank scrambles up and sees that the door has been placed across a rough gap in a wall.
He gets a little lift. Someone's put this there for a reason. He pushes through the gap into a large cavern with a curved roof. There's a metal structure at one end – a box.
Big enough for someone to be inside. Frank feels his stomach lurch.
Drawing nearer, Frank can see it's some sort of industrial container. How it came to be down here he has no idea, but the tunnels are littered with the abandoned detritus of centuries of small industry. The container looks like one of the more recent additions but it's still in an advanced state of dilapidation.
Close to, the box is a solid-looking affair with a rusty locking arm placed through two steel hoops.
Frank slides the lock back and notices the metal is free of rust. It's been opened sometime recently.
It takes him an effort to free the door, and when he pries it loose, it flies back and he loses his footing. Frank's torch clatters to the floor and goes out. In the same instant, the smell hits him and he knows what's inside the container.
The next few minutes are, quite simply, the worst in Frank Keane's life.
He scrapes his hands on the rocky surface of the cavern floor, scrabbling for his torch. Once found he presses and re-presses the switch without success, each passing second alone in the dark sending him ever closer to full-blown panic.
And then he remembers his mobile. He drags it from the pocket of his zip-up and flicks it on.
In the blue-white light he sees what must be the decaying corpse of Nicky Peters lying curled in a corner of the filthy metal container, his back to the door as if, in the final hours and days, he had waited for the end without any trace of hope. He looks very small, and somehow still vulnerable.
Frank's ashamed of himself for being afraid. He's ashamed of himself for not being able to find the lost boy. Most of all, he's ashamed of himself for failing, completely, to protect the innocent.
He turns off the phone, puts his head in his hands and sits in the dark with Nicky, crying.
PART TWO
LOS ANGELES
One
About the size of a labrador, the raccoon scurries out from the trees at the foot of Fern Dell Drive and heads directly for the four lanes of traffic on Los Feliz Boulevard.
Noone, stretching before his run, watches with interest as the animal darts between the cars and trucks without breaking stride. It doesn't look right or left and none of the cars has to swerve. In less than ten seconds the raccoon has reached the safety of the other side and disappears into a thick hedge bordering a mansion on the corner of North Serrano.
A street raccoon, clearly.
Noone, wearing a long-beaked cap pulled low and a pair of dark blue Nike wraparounds, jogs along Los Feliz before turning left on the road heading up past the Greek Theatre. Just beyond there he leaves the road and takes the first of the maze of ochre-coloured hiking trails that criss-cross Griffith Park. He opens up a little on the rising ground, enjoying, as always, how the city – so close – is forgotten so quickly. There's silence up here as Noone steadily climbs through a series of winding trails. After ten minutes the white deco grandeur of the Griffith Observatory starts to appear between the trees. The building gets closer and then recedes as the tracks dance around the canyons. Finally, almost thirty minutes after leaving the city, Noone's running up a track directly below the observatory. He puts in a sprint on the last fifty yards and arrives on the lawn in front of the building breathing hard. It's a Monday morning in July and the weather is warm.
At this time of the morning there are few tourists and Noone walks through those that are here letting his muscles warm down. When his breath is back to normal he walks around to the side of the observatory facing the city. Leaning against the white wall he looks out towards the tall buildings of downtown, misty blue through the haze. To his right, lost from view, is the coast and Santa Monica. It took Noone almost forty-five minutes to drive across from there this morning but it's worth it. Up here the City of Angels is laid out below him and his mind is clear.
Pushing off from the wall of the observatory, Noone walks around to the front of the building and starts jogging down Western Canyon Road. He takes a turn back onto one of the trails and winds down in the direction of the Hollywood Reservoir. Around here the trails are less well used and Noone sees no one for almost ten minutes. With the greenery and the cypress trees and golden light, he could be in Tuscany.
He works his way up past Bugsy Siegel's old house, squatting above Mulholland Drive like a medieval castle, the Hollywood sign incongruous on the hill behind. In more recent years the place had been owned by Madonna but she is long gone too now.
Five minutes later, Noone slows his pace as he jogs past the back of a French chateau-style mansion with rolling grounds tumbling down the side of the canyon. The high, thick stone walls that surround the place have discreet, expensive-looking cameras dotted around the perimeter.
Noone can't see a way in without being seen.
He loops around the property to the front and stoops to tie a shoelace. The double-barred gate is unmarked, and from the street there's not an inch of the house that can be seen. A small sign reads simply: 'Private'. A single camera above one of the gateposts stares unblinkingly.
Noone rises and runs on.
He'll have to find another way.
One of the first things Noone had done when he got back to LA was find an agent. Even with The Tunnels production folding, his experience at being cast and the links with Hungry Head – and the celebrity investor – are enough to get him on the books with a solid outfit; not the best, not the biggest, but respected, and connected with some of the better productions coming out of Hollywood. Noone doesn't want any work from the agent. He wants the agent to give his appearance texture should an investigation head in his direction.
For a few weeks he settles back into the groove as smoothly as if he'd left ten weeks ago and not almost ten years.
The big difference is that now he knows who he is. He knows who his father is. He knows he can kill people.
Most importantly, he now knows exactly what he wants to do with his skills.
He'd got the idea quite suddenly. Going over and over the events of the last few weeks he'd been in Liverpool, it struck him how much effort he'd been putting in. And for what, exactly?
To prove he could kill?
Well, that was something. But the scale of the work needed to get away with killing someone, now that was the thing.
And he'd done it just to kill some fucking suburban dentists and a fucking writer.
It was exhausting. His first thought on leaving Liverpool was to stay quiet, let time take its course and allow everyone to forget that Ben Noone was ever involved. Terry was such a wonderful outlet for blame. A child molester. A kidnapper. With nothing to connect him to the deaths, Noone is sure it will all blow over.
It was halfway over the Atlantic that the thought struck him that if it was really all over, then no one would know how well he'd done it. It was the most criminal thing about it, really. Some of the things he'd done. Jeez. For that never to be known . . .
A confession was out of the question. Confessions stunk of losers. Of failure, when what he'd done was a triumph of quick wits and planning and decisive action.
And then, thinking about the things he'd discovered when his mother died, he knew what he was going to do. It would be truly majestic. The poetry of the thing was staggering. The sweep of it, the grandeur, almost blew him away. No one would ever forget him.
So at JFK he'd made the call to that cop and started the ball rolling.
He needs a witness. Frank Keane fits the bill.
Two
While LA sweats, Monday morning in Liverpool barely staggers past ten degrees. It's raining hard with a chill wind coming in off the river. Almost four weeks since Frank found Nicky Peters' body in the Williamson tunnels and things aren't looking good for his pet theory about Ben Noone's involvement.
If Frank's honest, there's not much looking good about anything right now.
He walks to work at Canning Place from the flat at Mann Island, the much-prophesied desk move to Stanley Road no nearer to materialising. Since the relationship with Em – if that's what it was – sputtered into nothing, Frank hasn't had the heart. The time at Canning Place is time he doesn't have to deal with working alongside her. He's drifting into management by inches but Frank's finding it easier that way.
Discovering Nicky's body broke something in him that hasn't been fixed yet.
There hasn't been an hour since then that he hasn't thought about the boy.
The autopsy showed he'd been dead for less than a week. Suffocation is the cause of death. There is little additional physical evidence apart from more corroboration that places Terry Peters at the scene. There is nothing linking Ben Noone to the crime.
Frank's been through the tunnels many times since and is beginning to get a clear idea of what might have happened. Three days after Frank discovered Nicky, DC Magsi and a couple of uniforms stumble across the space where Nicky had been kept in the immediate aftermath of the Burlington Road killings. It's Frank's theory that Nicky was moved to a more secure location while Terry Peters wrestled with killing him and, perhaps, to prevent the possibility of Noone doing that. If Frank's right about Noone, there's little evidence to suggest that Terry Peters killed anyone, except perhaps Nicky. Frank's idea is that Nicky died because Terry Peters couldn't face killing his nephew directly. Instead, he left him to die of suffocation, thirty-five metres under Edge Hill.
The thing that's nagging at Frank is why Noone tipped him off that the boy was still underground. An attack of conscience? Frank doesn't believe that. The nearest he can get is that Noone wants him to stay interested.
He decides that there'll be no answer to this question while the situation remains as it is.
After getting out of the tunnels – it took almost thirty minutes – Frank had called in the SOC officers to start the investigation and had stayed on site until late in the morning. He and Em hadn't had a chance to discuss what had happened between them until the afternoon. By that time her attitude had hardened. Frank hadn't told her about the message, or about his solo trek to the tunnels. Em reads it as a slap in the face, professionally and personally, and they haven't been together outside work since. Sometimes when Frank closes his eyes he can see her walking naked towards the bedroom and wonders what might have been had he decided to stay.
Since that night Frank's been working out at the boxing club more often. It's the only thing he's enjoying right now. With Jesus gone the place is being run by Val. She's got a nephew in to help her and it's going fine.
He hasn't been to a Thursday at The Phil since finding Nicky's body. He's lost weight, the skin on his face close on the bone. He lashes out too easily, is constantly tired. Work is the raft he clings to.
At his desk, Frank does a couple of hours of emailing and paperwork before heading over to MIT at Stanley. For once his phone remains mute. The Monday briefing is at eleven.
At Stanley Road, there is a full team present for the meeting. Only DC Flanagan is absent, returned to duties at Sefton as the need for extra personnel at MIT is downgraded. Frank's managed to hang onto Saif Magsi and the young cop is showing every sign he could develop into one of the unit's best. It's good for the likes of Scott Corner and Phil Caddick to have some decent competition. Caddick especially is wary of Magsi's apparent rise and Frank has noted a few deliberate attempts by Caddick to show the new arrival in a bad light. Unless it shifts over into outright bullying, Frank won't act. If Magsi's going to do as well as Frank thinks he will, then he'll have to cope with nonsense like that. So far, Magsi seems to have Caddick's measure.
'Good morning,' says Frank. Over the past month he has become much more businesslike at the briefings, preferring Harris to lead, or Theresa Cooper if Harris isn't around. He's found that it helps him keep a distance from the team, something that he's beginning to see as essential. Footballers who make the transition from player to management often find that they can no longer be one of the boys.
He gestures for Harris to start. She nods. There's no underlying heat in their brief exchanges which may, thinks Frank, be the saddest thing of all.
As Harris outlines the various MIT cases, Frank's mulling over his meeting with Searle scheduled for this afternoon. He's going to try and make a case for going to Los Angeles to interview Noone and needs to have more than he's got right now.
There are three routes open to Frank.
The first – and the one that he knows isn't going to work with Charlie Searle, let alone the US authorities – is extradition. To make an application for extradition, Frank needs to show evidence to the court that Noone will face charges if brought back to the UK. Even in his wildest moments, Frank doesn't think he's got enough for that. There's a prickly relationship between the US and UK on extradition. In Frank's experience it's a lot easier for the Americans to extradite a Brit to the US than the other way round. He knows that there are several cases in play right now in the UK – he'd had Magsi do some background work – which have reached a seemingly interminable impasse over extradition.
Frank's second option, and the one he thinks might work, is for him to make a case to Searle that MIT makes an application to the US Justice Department under MLAT, the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. Under MLAT, Frank has a route by which he can go to the US and interview Noone if he can make a case that Noone has evidence Frank needs. MLAT is specifically designed for those investigative situations which fall short of extradition status but in which there is still evidence to be gathered. Frank's had the groundwork for this done already; DC Magsi's drawn up the paperwork and all Frank needs is Searle to OK the application. It's a workable solution but Frank would like another item or two of evidence that helps point towards Noone. So far all he has is the shaky testimony of Niall McCluskey connecting Noone to the Peters case. It might be enough, but it might not.
The last option is simply to interview Noone as a witness in the US. Frank will consider this if his MLAT application fails, but for this to work, Noone must be willing to be interviewed voluntarily. He'd also be chaperoned by the FBI. In the past this approach has worked for MIT in a few cases, the key thing being the depth of research on the witness. Frank's confident they have enough background to proceed and, weirdly, thinks that Noone would relish being interviewed. But it's not ideal.
He tunes back in to the meeting as Steve
Rose is updating them on the evidence from Nicky's computer. Frank's impatient. The computer evidence has, he thought, been sifted thoroughly before now. It's been four weeks for fuck's sake. Why Rose is bringing this up when the whole of MIT (Frank excepted) is working on the assumption that Terry Peters killed his brother, sister-in-law, nephew and wife before topping himself in the fire, Frank isn't sure.
He decides to give Rose a little leeway, bites back the barb that springs to his lips and tries to concentrate on where Rose is going with it.
Although an initial forensic examination had proved fruitless, Rose has made contact with Operation Vector.
'Nicky Peters' computer was clean, as far as we could tell.' He looks at Frank, conscious perhaps that he is on old ground. Rose picks up the pace of his briefing. 'We gave it a pretty good going over. The same went for his phone. As you know, there was nothing of any significance, and Terry Peters' computers were lost in the fire.'
'Come on, Steve,' murmurs Frank. 'Cut to it.'
Rose nods. His voice becomes more urgent. 'This morning I spoke to Nia Saleed at SOCA and she passed on some information they'd got from a third party they're looking at now. The guy they have targeted has links with a North West paedophile group which they suspect Terry Peters to have been in contact with.'
'And?'
'And there's some evidence to suggest two things: one is that Nicky and Terry Peters exchanged information via an internet chat room and via Terry Peters' Hotmail account. That Hotmail account was accessed from Peters' phone after he was dead.'
'We know that,' says Frank. He leans back and puts his hands behind his head.
'But the new information is that Vector can pinpoint the call that accessed the email account and it came from outside the UK.'
Down Among the Dead Men Page 24