A Dark Place to Die

by Ed Chatterton

  A Dark Place to

  Die

  Ed Chatterton

  Copyright © 2012, Ed Chatterton

  To the girl from Neston Street

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Acknowledgements

  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 s
hadows. 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.

  'Crime scene. That's a laugh, Em. This place will be back under water in a few hours' time. And I told you before, less of that "Roy" shite, right? And what kept you?'

  Keane, a Liverpool supporter, doesn't like the nickname he's been given; that of a famously aggressive former captain of Manchester United, Liverpool's despised rivals forty miles down the 62. Emily, from the blue, Everton half of the city, and knowing exactly how deep the hatred runs, makes it a point of honour to use it as often as possible. It doesn't help Keane's cause that he bears more than a passing resemblance to the footballer; insomniac eyes under a brooding brow, cropped grey-black hair, a permanent five o'clock shadow and an air about him of someone who would welcome an argument on any given subject at any time.

  Emily Harris rewards him with a half-smile and holds out her hands in an insincere placating gesture. 'Sorry, Frank,' she says. 'I was in an interview. The Glassfield thing.'

  Harris, a black woman of middle height, and with the solid build of someone with a serious gym habit, cuts a striking figure. It is one of Keane's guilty pleasures to admire that figure on a daily basis. If Em Harris has ever known he's looking, she has never let it show.

  Like Keane, Harris puts her glasses on, shielding the lenses from the sand-flecked wind with her latex-gloved hand, and peers closely at the corpse, all business.

  'No lifeguard on duty, I take it?' she says, without looking up.

  'Very funny. No, no lifeguards. They must have been transferred to California. Or Bondi. And no reports so far of anyone else seeing so much as a fucking dog. Still, early days, eh?'

  Harris, feet smugly protected by the practical rubber boots she pulled from the boot of the car on arrival, moves in close, puts her nose a millimetre or two from the victim's cheek and inhales, seemingly oblivious to the sickening stench of burnt flesh.

  'Paraffin. Or some other accelerant.' She announces this in the tone someone might use to describe the bouquet of a fine wine.

  Keane is only part-listening. Good officer though she is, Em does have a habit of sometimes stating the bleeding obvious.

  As if he'd spoken aloud, Harris looks up and then glances past Keane who turns to see the lumbering form of Callum McGettigan, one of the MIT photographers, trudging towards them. McGettigan, a portly man wheezing like a broken accordion, is rumoured to have once been seen train-spotting on Crewe station, but Keane has always found him first class. If there's something worth recording at a crime scene, you can guarantee that McGettigan will bag a crisply lit image of it, meticulously recorded and cross-referenced. Sometimes you needed the trainspotters.

  McGettigan dubiously sets down his bag of tricks on a patch of dryish-looking sand and rubs his face, sweating lightly despite the cold.

  'You need long, Callum? I'd like to get the examiner in before we need to use a bastard submarine.'

  'Give me a chance, DI Keane.' McGettigan lifts a camera to face level and makes an adjustment. 'I'll do my best, OK?'

  Keane nods and steps aside to give the man roo
m to work. He looks down at the dun-coloured sand around the corpse. 'Shit.'

  Keane's not expecting much physical evidence from the scene, but there isn't a snowball's chance of anything useful still being here. Not after, what, eight, nine hours of being rinsed by the sea and scoured by the wind. Still, they – or more accurately, someone Keane and Harris assign to do the task – will have to run a quadrant search on a large section of the beach, down on their hands and knees, before the next tide.

  'We'll make this quick,' says Harris as if Keane has spoken aloud. After three years working side-by-side, the two of them have developed a shorthand way of communication. It isn't telepathy, but it's close.

  The sand looks firm but, as Keane has just found out the hard way, the application of any weight close to where the pole is sunk into the beach rapidly turns it into a kind of gelatinous porridge.

  'Why couldn't this one have had the good sense to be killed somewhere civilised, like a nice dry warehouse, or somewhere with CCTV at least?'

  'You're getting soft.'

  It begins to rain.

  'Great. Fucking perfect.' Keane retracts his head down into the neck of his overcoat. He glances back at the promenade where the uniforms have begun to get things organised. At either end of the beach, crime scene tape is being strung out to stop anyone getting closer. The small crowd of onlookers is being shepherded to a suitable distance.

  He flips open his mobile and checks on the arrival of the medical examiner. Stuck in traffic. Should be there within the half-hour. He pockets the phone and, leaving Harris and McGettigan with the victim, walks across the sands to where the uniform – Parkes, that was the feller, wasn't it? – is talking to the witnesses. With a jerk of his head, Keane beckons the officer over.

  'They saw it? Like this? Close up, I mean, PC . . .?'

  The uniform nods, his face creased into the wind. 'Norton, sir. Yes they did, sir. They say they didn't go close. They didn't need to. They've got binoculars. Pretty good ones too, so they got a real eyeful.'

  The young officer gestures to where the chastened students sit quietly on the tailgate of a police Land Rover talking to a second policeman in uniform. 'The bloke puked. She seems calmer. Yorkshire lass. Might get a bit more from her, sir. My oppo's looking after them.'