A Dark Place to Die

by Ed Chatterton

  'And there's this, of course,' says Ferguson. He taps his finger on the victim's leg just above the ankle. 'It's what we in the business call "A Clue",' he says, never missing an opportunity to use the alleged lowest form of wit.

  It's a tattoo and Keane gives a silent thank you to the god of police work. Tattoos have become a kind of short cut amongst victims. Those aged under forty mostly. Almost every investigation involving body identification since Keane has been on the MIT has been helped in some way by a tattoo.

  'It's a strange one, though,' says Harris, who takes out her iPhone to snap a picture of it.

  The tattoo is, compared to most, understated, even a little dated. It consists of a small banner with the words 'Fortius Quo Fidelius' written in an ornate script across an unfurling scroll in the centre. It's hard to read because a great discoloured bruise has distorted the image.

  'Military?' says Keane. 'A football team motto?'

  Ferguson shrugs. 'Your field,' he says.

  'Might be a non-league team, I suppose,' replies Keane in a voice that clearly suggests he finds it difficult to believe anyone could have an allegiance to a club outside the Premiership. He does know a couple of Tranmere fans in the city but, like those people who claim to understand opera, or rugby, or camping holidays in the Dordogne, he thinks it's probably an affectation.

  Harris holds up her iPhone. 'Praise be to Google,' she says. 'Fortius Quo Fidelius is the club motto of St Kilda Football Club.'

  'St Kilda?' says Keane. 'Irish?'

  Harris shakes her head.

  'You were right about this one not being from round here. St Kilda are an Aussie Rules team. He's Australian.'

  4

  'The name Jacques Derrida mean anything to you? No? Deconstruction? "No text is discrete"? Ringing any fucking bells? Didn't think so. Hit the cunt again, Sean.'

  Sean Bourke faces the naked man bound to the iron pole in the centre of the container and, like always, does exactly as he is told. And immediately. It doesn't pay to hesitate around Mr Kite. He bunches his fist and drives it hard into the man's stomach. The man pukes and makes a sobbing, strangled sound.

  'The reason I'm telling you about Jacques fucking Derrida, you Australian convict gobshite, is not that I expect a maggot like you to have even heard of Jacques Derrida. He's not a cricketer, or a fucking rugby player, is he?'

  Keith Kite spits out the words staccato, his brick-thick nasal Liverpool accent crackling the consonants and stomping the vowels flat. He paces slowly to one end of the bare metal container, the heels of his polished boots sending a reverberating boom around the space. Evil swirls around him, thick as oil.

  'Fucking terrible acoustics in these containers, isn't there? But then, I suppose there always is in art galleries.'

  'Galleries?' the man on the pole croaks.

  'Kick him, Sean,' says Kite, his little eyes glittering. 'In the leg, hard, and make sure it hurts. He's interrupting me train of thought.'

  Bourke lashes out and kicks the naked man full in the side of the ankle with the toe of his boot. The man screams and Kite puts his hands over his ears. 'Oi, oi, keep it down, Rolf! Fuck me.'

  As the sound dies away, Kite comes closer and the man flinches.

  'Doesn't seem like a gallery, I know. But that's what it is. And you know why? Because I said so. Because Jacques says that art is whatever the artist says it is. Or some such bollocks. It's so hard to make sense what any of them fuckers are saying, isn't it? Don't speak straight, always using fancy words. Mind you, I like fancy words. Like "conceptual". You are my conceptual piece, Australian. It might not have a large or particularly appreciative audience right now.' Kite gestures behind him to include the other four men in the room. Besides Bourke, there are two men standing back against one end of the container and another operating a professional-looking video camera mounted on a tripod. The white beam from the camera is the only light in the container. 'Just Sean,' continues Kite, 'who you've already met, Mr Halligan operating the camera, another Mr Halligan against the wall along with Mr North. You'll get to know Mr North a lot better very soon; in fact, it was his suggestion that we turned this little lesson into an art piece. Him being a naughty ex-art student once upon a time, ain't that right, Mr North?'

  'Very naughty indeed, Mr Kite,' says North in a soft Irish accent. 'A bit Gilbert and George.' He's carrying a Tupperware box, and dressed in a protective white suit, such as might be worn by a worker in a toxic chemical lab.

  'Now, where was I?' says Kite.

  'Audience, Mr Kite,' puts in Bourke, eager to please.

  Kite smiles. 'Very good, Sean. You was listening, you great big dumb prick. Yes, Australian, there's not much of an audience now, but in a few hours you are going to be the centrepiece in our very own work of art. We're calling it "Dead Australian Cunt". What do you think?'

  'Please,' the naked man whimpers.

  'I'll take that as a yes,' says Kite.

  'Let me go please I won't say anything I'll disappear I'll just go you'll never see me again please . . .'

  Kite puts a hand over the man's mouth.

  'Shh, shh. There there. No need for all that crap, Australian,' he says quietly. 'Have some dignity.'

  'I'm just the messenger I don't know a fucken thing mate not a thing Jimmy just said . . .'

  'Tape his mouth, Sean,' says Kite, stepping backwards. Bourke produces a roll of duct tape and winds it tightly around the man's mouth. He jerks spastically, his eyes wide and white.

  'I know you are just the messenger, Aussie,' says Kite. 'I know that because, despite what you fucking crocodile-hunting convict wankers obviously think, I am not a stupid man. The thing is, this Jimmy wanker must be working to some long out-of-date code of fucking criminal chivalry or something, thinking he could send you halfway round the fucking world, coming into my place of work and having the weird idea that you could just say whatever you liked without there being significant consequences. Very, very significant consequences, for you personally, as it's going to turn out.'

  Kite spins on his heel and holds his arms out in a theatrical gesture. 'Now you're gonna become the message. You see? It's sort of poetry, really. Post-modern. Deconstruction. Or some fucking thing. Mr North would explain it better but, as you've noticed, I do like the sound of me own voice. Whatever it is, you might as well get used to the fact that you are already not who you once were. You are already something bigger than that now, something powerful, something wondrous. You are doubling up, son! You are the messenger and the message, the dead and the undead. Fucking beautiful. Ain't that so, Mr North?'

  'I couldn't have put it better myself, Mr Kite.'

  Kite takes out a cigar from a case in his jacket pocket and lights it. He bends towards the cigar, drawing the flame. He exhales and blows smoke in the naked man's face.

  'And I like to make my messages very very clear, Australian. I'm not going to lie to you; you are going to die a horrible and violent death and that's going to happen very soon. No use shaking about like that, I'm just explaining my artistic intentions. In a few minutes I'll be handing you over to Mr North who will be doing the actual "hands-on" part of the piece. None of yer real modern artists do anything themselves now, you know. Jeff Koons. Damien Hirst. All of them hand it over to craftsmen these days. Look it up. They don't have to paint or draw or any of that nonsense, dear me, no. Mind you, saying that, I'm not giving Mr North the credit he deserves. Am I, Mr North? This was your little idea, wasn't it?'

  North dips his head fractionally, the artisan to patron. 'Makes things a little more interesting.' North looks at the Australian. 'I think this will work very well.'

  The terrified man moans and Kite steps back from him, a moue of disgust on his lips.

  'Soiled yourself? That's not pleasant, is it, Australian? Still, understandable in the circumstances, I suppose.'

  Kite turns towards North.

  'Mr North?' he says. 'Over to you.'

  North snaps a paper face mask over his mouth, places
a pair of goggles over his eyes and walks towards the naked man who begins to tremble uncontrollably. North peels the duct tape from the man's mouth.

  Behind him, the door to the container swings open and Kite steps out into the thin, early evening light. He pauses on the threshold and looks back towards the naked man.

  'Sorry this didn't work out,' he says with a leery smile. 'Better luck next time, eh?'

  The door clangs shut behind him and North turns back to the Australian. He reaches inside the Tupperware box and produces a scalpel.

  'Ready?'

  5

  Koop doesn't shave today and still gets a small rebellious thrill after the years on the force. He brushes his teeth and runs his hand over his thatch of grey hair. 'Salt and pepper', Zoe calls it but Koop can't see it as anything other than grey. He turned fifty a few months back and everyone told him it was the new forty. Koop didn't buy that line, but he's trying not to get too wound up about the numbers. Reflexively, he checks himself in the mirror. Not too bad, he thinks. For an old codger. Tall, but not stooped, his shoulders wide from swimming, his stomach still as flat as could be reasonably expected, Menno Koopman gives silent thanks for his Dutch genes. So many of his old colleagues now look like bloated parodies of their former selves while he, through no great effort, remains essentially how he was at twenty-five. Koop pulls on jeans and a white t-shirt and, dressed, walks across the courtyard to Zoe's studio.

  As he opens the door, Zoe and Melumi are kissing. Koop stops in the doorway and watches them appreciatively. It's only after they pull apart that they notice him.

  'Don't stop on my account. Should I come back later when you and the cunning linguist have finished?'

  Melumi picks up her bag. 'Pervert,' she says. 'I was just going.' She strokes Zoe on the hip, a gesture Koop finds oddly erotic, and moves to the door. Koop stands aside as Melumi passes. She pauses, pecks him on the cheek and grabs his crotch playfully.

  'Slut,' says Koop, smiling.

  Melumi blows him a kiss and walks out towards her car, parked, as always, at a sloppy angle to the house, one wheel canting awkwardly atop a tree root. Koop sees that its balding tyre needs replacing. Thirty years in the force means that Koop still notices those sorts of details.

  His current job, distributing organic coffee from the plantation which borders their property, is one he enjoys, getting him out and about and helping him and Zoe to put down some roots, but there's no denying it doesn't have the salty tang that his old life had. And living amongst the hill-dwellers and hippies means he keeps his old job quiet. Even so, the news has leaked out somewhere, and Koop has had more than one sticky encounter with a member of the alternative community.

  Still, he reflects, as images of himself and Zoe and Melumi come to mind, the alternative life does have compensating factors. Mel's Prado chugs painfully down the long gravel track towards the road and Koop closes the studio door.

  He walks over to Zoe, pulls her close and kisses her, tasting Melumi on her lips.

  Every time Mel, or one of Zoe's previous girlfriends, stays over he wakes horny, no matter what the three of them have done the night before. This morning is no different. And Zoe, he knows, will be the same. It will only take the tiniest push from him for them to be rolling around the floor of the studio in a breathless heated muddle of clothing and sweat.

  Intertwangling, Zoe had called it once. She has a habit of putting accidentally mangled words into her speech; one of the many things Koop loves about her. Zoe slips her tongue into his mouth and Koop pushes himself closer. She pulls away slightly and smiles at him.

  'Not now, Koop,' she says. 'Tempting though it is. I've got that GOMA presentation thing next Tuesday, remember?'

  Koop stifles a childish impulse to argue the point. But Zoe is right. Why be greedy? They have the whole weekend coming up and Friday is one of his busy days.

  Zoe returns to her desk and clicks the Mac into life. Koop stands behind her rubbing her shoulders and looks at the designs onscreen.

  'Excellent,' he says, meaning it.

  Zoe is a good designer, turning everything she works on into clean and clever solutions. There is an unfussy elegance and sly wit about her work which Koop, while not fully understanding, is fiercely proud of. For the past six months, one of Zoe's best clients has been the shiny new Gallery of Modern Art – GOMA – two hours north in Brisbane. She started with small jobs for them and has rapidly expanded her influence until the point has come when she's close to being handed sole design responsibility for next year's prestigious BritArt show.

  She has no illusions that being English helped her as much as her design skills. She's found that, in many ways, Australia still has an often unwarranted, but highly useful, respect for English design and English designers. Her arriving at GOMA's door at the same time the BritArt show was being mooted was also serendipitous.

  She isn't complaining. Twenty-five years in the design business has taught her that while not everything is about timing and fortune, when things fall into place for you, it's best to just accept it as part of the package.

  And it isn't like she hasn't made it happen. She and Koop arrived in Australia on a business visa. In addition to putting up money, they pledged to run a company employing Australians, Zoe leasing a small office in Brisbane and installing two young Australian designers along with a secretary. She called the new practice Boomerang and allowed the sexy young Aussies to look as though they ran the place. A designer to her boot heels, Zoe knew that dressing the shop window was the way to get customers through the door. So far, so good.

  Koop kisses the back of her neck and pushes himself away with an exaggerated sigh.

  'Well, if there's nothing on offer, I might as well go deliver coffee.'

  Zoe waves over her shoulder, already concentrating on the details of the project.

  'Go,' she says. 'Deliver.'

  Koop leaves her to it, pats Ringo's head, gets into the ute and starts the engine. He turns around the great fig tree which spreads across fully thirty metres of their garden and sets off down the track, disturbing a noisy flock of rainbow lorikeets who fly chattering across the paddock and down towards the creek.

  Another day in paradise.

  6

  After the autopsy, Frank returns to Stanley Road and by lunchtime has assembled a crime wall that, by his exacting standards, is starting to resemble something that might produce results. The wall is an integral part of all MIT's investigations. Frank Keane and Emily Harris's syndicate – one of four operating under the Mersey-side Police MIT remit – occupies the fourth floor at the Stanley Road base. The place is nothing special: generic office space, indistinguishable from thousands of others apart from the cork boards which line three walls of the room. These boards are divided into neat sections, each a current active case.

  The wall is not the haphazard collection of 'clues' beloved of television detectives. Instead it is carefully produced to serve as a central information point for the inquiry. Daily updated sheets will be printed, each of which relate back to the internal MIT server which is the case's official hub.

  There is, in fact, no real reason for the crime wall to still exist, not with modern police work being encouraged to become ever more digitally driven.

  But the wall, Keane is pleased to note, is proving stubborn to change. They have already successfully resisted several Stanley Road 'initiatives', most of which involve reducing paper consumption; a laudable concept in the context of the grotesque spume of paper which spews out of MIT and all other police departments on a daily basis.

  The reason for the survival of the crime walls is simple: officers, or at least most of the more effective ones, like them. Keane believes they serve the same purpose as a village campfire. In a day which seems to be filled with an almost unending list of online police procedures to fulfil, the walls are somewhere that the officers can congregate without fear of being seen to be 'not working'.

  Today, though, the thin pickings on the burn
t-man case are proving resistant to progress. An abundance of medical evidence from the examiner's office is beginning to make its way into the system and up onto the wall, but of the core of the case – the identity of the victim – there is still precious little.

  Harris has posted what she's discovered about the tattoo in a thorough online file, limiting her wall to a single A4 sheet detailing the various lines of inquiry that require following up.

  To Keane, Aussie Rules football is not something he has any knowledge of other than as a game that seems inexplicably popular in Australia. He's looked at some clips on YouTube and has not come away with any feeling as to why anyone could get excited enough about it to get a club motto tattooed on their leg. An Australian thing, clearly.

  Harris has discovered some potentially useful stuff. St Kilda is a seaside suburb in Melbourne, the support for Aussie Rules being particularly virulent in that part of the country. That helps narrow things down a little but, as Ronnie Rimmer, another of the detective constables in Keane's syndicate, points out, it only narrows it down to the male population of Australia.

  'And there's nothing to guarantee he's an Aussie,' says Em Harris. 'Could be an immigrant wanting to fit in? A South African? English?'

  Keane shakes his head. 'An Englishman wouldn't get a tat like that. I just know it.'

  Harris looks unsure, but Keane knows he's right.

  'We need to talk to an Australian,' he says to no-one in particular.

  At the morning briefing, Keane and Harris, while being clear to the team that they are to keep an open mind, express the view – one shared by everyone in the room – that this is a drug case. It isn't a giant leap of intellect to make the assumption and the officers greet the notion with well-worn sarcasm.

  Keane still feels it's worth going through the reasons why. The level of violence used, the logistics involved in transportation, in bedding the pole in the sand, all point one way. This case isn't a domestic, or a crime of passion, or something that has been covered up. It is cold and it is public.