A Dark Place to Die

by Ed Chatterton

  Koop remembers entering a suspect's house to find every room filled floor to ceiling with looted goods from the containers – so much so that the family were living like lab rats in tunnels carved through teetering stacks of TVs, stereos, boxes of sportswear and the like. In one place, the back wall of a semi-detached house had been replaced by garage doors which turned the entire house into a makeshift auto chop shop by a moonlighting docker with a penchant for selling modified Bentleys to the Middle East.

  Higher up the criminal food chain, organised gangs controlled entire areas of the docks and systematically skimmed both the imports and exports, as well as having a finger in every corrupt union deal or management scam. But with the arrival of the bonded Freeport, the security has been cleaned up substantially. Which raises the question of how the killers in this case had a seemingly free run at this container. Koop checks: Keane and Harris have quizzed the relevant security people, so far without making headway. Another confirmation that someone big is behind this.

  Koop scrutinises the photos of the lens cap found in the container. As Em Harris spotted, it is from a video camera.

  Koop, like Keane, knows what that indicates and he has to fight a fresh urge to weep.

  Instead, he checks his notes and comes to a conclusion.

  Stevie's murder was not intended to be covered up. It was intended to send out a powerful message to someone. And someone very powerful and very sadistic enjoyed doing it.

  Koop gathers the file carefully together and places the papers back inside the envelope. He puts the envelope inside his suitcase, undresses and gets into bed. He is as tired as he can ever remember being, and falls asleep instantly.

  Six hours later he wakes with a start and sits up in bed, a name at the front of his mind.

  Hunter.

  28

  The film clip has messed with Jimmy's head. There's no way round it. He didn't sleep last night. Not a second. Left Ella at Q1 and went home late. Watched some shit on the box, the sound low with the rest of the family asleep. Anna's got some sleeping pills in the bathroom cabinet but Jimmy doesn't want them. He's not sure why but he'd like to stay wired for longer. Alert. There's a shark in the water.

  By dawn Jimmy knows he has nowhere to go with it. He's considered making a trip himself to Liverpool but has decided against it. It's trickier for him than it was for Stevie, what with him being a Pom. It meant Stevie could travel freely, not many awkward questions asked. Stevie had a record, but not a long one, and nothing that would spark off too many nasty sessions at Immigration or Customs. And even if it had sparked questions, there was no debate about allowing him in on his UK passport.

  Jimmy Gelagotis, on the other hand, is an entirely different concern. Jimmy tries to imagine himself landing in Liverpool and, even assuming he got through without incident, wading into Kite and his team.

  It just isn't going to happen. He'd be too far from home and outgunned, outmanned, outmuscled. No, let them come over here. Then we'll see what's what.

  Jimmy lets the scheming drift for the time being and concentrates on the job in hand. He tamps down the coffee in the machine and pulls the steam. Making a perfect coffee is something he can focus on. This morning Jimmy is doing barista duty at Café Stone in Surfers. With the barista on holiday, he decides to step in himself. It never does any harm to keep his hand in any of his businesses.

  He rounds off the coffee and traces a heart into the head. It's a touch the customers enjoy. He places the cup on the counter and rings the bell for the waiter.

  'Regular flat.'

  Jimmy picks up the next order and starts working on the coffee.

  Thank fuck the shipment is at this end. If the coke was still in transit, Jimmy'd be left whistling in the wind. Liverpool would have control and he'd be nowhere. Then again, killing Kolomiets and sending Stevie over was timed to coincide with the arrival of the drugs. Jimmy knows that possession of the goods is everything. It gives him power.

  Which makes the 'Stevie Wonder' clip all the more disturbing. That shows real balls. He almost admires the move. And other than the torture which has never been Jimmy's style, the killing of Stevie is beginning to make a twisted kind of business sense. The nuclear option, right?

  Jimmy warms the coffee cup with a blast of steam from the wand. He places it under the dripping spigot and gets the milk frothing. Coffees made, he pings the bell.

  'Long black. Half-shot latte.'

  Control. It all comes back to that.

  And with the coke at his end he has the big bargaining chip. Everything else is details, even Stevie. This thing is moving up to another level, and sending the clip is the next stage of whatever is going to happen. Jimmy changed the playing field by killing The Russian, and now Kite is trying to regain it; first with Stevie, and now by sending the footage of Stevie.

  Jimmy thinks Kite might be making a mistake emailing the mpeg. It's too showy, too Hollywood. He warms to the notion that it's an error of judgement and the thought gives him strength.

  He thinks: Kite is underestimating me.

  Just like Kolomiets. And if he's right about Kite going nuclear, then the response has to be the same. Whoever they send over will have to be killed and killed quickly and brutally. The next chess move.

  When there's a lull in the orders, Jimmy sits on a tall chair behind the counter and calls Tony Link.

  'We need to move the cats.'

  Link is silent for a moment before replying. 'Sure. Where?'

  'I'll text you the place. Tell Stefan.'

  'OK,' says Link, but Jimmy Gelagotis has already hung up.

  Warren Eckhardt just walked into the café.

  29

  Keane gets the momentum his case needs the day after Menno Koopman arrives.

  And, as usual, the breakthrough comes because someone blabs.

  This time it's Sean Bourke who's singing.

  He hasn't deliberately talked, hasn't turned informer. It's much more prosaic than that. It was Bourke who vomited at the crime scene. He's seen some things, done some things, but what happened to the Australian is beyond anything Sean Bourke has ever experienced. He puked quietly in a corner as North went about his work.

  Since then, Sean hasn't stopped drinking. And snorting. Keith Kite has given him tacit permission to take a short break. It never pays to have the crew hanging around after something like this, no matter how untouchable you are.

  If Sean wants to blow off some steam, that's fine. He knows better than to talk.

  At least when sober.

  On the tail end of a three-day bender, Bourke winds up in Walton A&E getting his stomach pumped. Security personnel hold him while an Asian doctor Bourke is racially abusing in a savage torrent of spittle and bile saves his life. Afterwards, tearful and disoriented, Bourke babbles and Dr Sulami calls it in. The burnt man case has been all over the Echo for days and the doctor diligently writes down everything Sean Bourke says until he passes out. It's all inadmissable but the information is enough for the MIT unit to go to work on Sean.

  Harris takes a sheet of paper and pins it to the crime wall. Behind her, Caddick, Rose and Corner look on. Caddick's wearing a smarter suit than he should. Or at least smarter than Keane thinks is appropriate. Keane gives him an appraising look. He wouldn't be the first or last pole-climber to pass through MIT.

  'Kite?' says Rose. 'Is it solid?'

  Keane is already shrugging on his jacket. 'Solid enough to pull him in.'

  Harris purses her lips.

  They've been arguing about this since the intel came in. Her view, forcefully expressed in the privacy of Keane's car on the way back into Stanley Road, is that they should keep a watching brief on Kite.

  'We're making a mistake, Frank. Bourke's info isn't worth a thing. I can almost hear the DPP asking us what we were thinking of. Not that it'll get to court on the basis of this crap.'

  'Sometimes you have to just see what happens. We haven't got the manpower to wait forever in the hope Kite gets caught
with his pants down. This is something solid to go on, something we can work with.'

  What he leaves unsaid is that, as the ranking case officer, it's his decision to bring Kite in and she can like it or lump it.

  Which puts Harris in a difficult place.

  Frank, in her view, is starting to make some bad choices. He's too close to Koopman and Koopman is bad news as far as she's concerned.

  And now this. Unless a miracle happens, Kite will be out just as soon as his lawyer arrives. There isn't a scrap of corroborating evidence and Bourke's blabberings are drug-induced hearsay. She has no doubt that Kite is their man, but bringing him in will accomplish nothing except tip him off to their suspicions. And it will almost certainly also bring the OCS into the case.

  They regard Kite as their pigeon; a fat juicy one that, handled properly, could make or break careers. If MIT blunders in, Perch will be bent over the table at Canning Place and, as sure as night follows day, Keane and Harris's syndicate will find themselves in a shit storm . . . and still with no case. The information from Bourke is helpful but this isn't the way to do it.

  Harris thinks Frank is allowing the arrival of his ex-boss to cloud his judgement.

  Fucking men.

  She broods, arms folded, as Keane briefs the team. Caddick and Rose get the nod to come with them to pick up Kite. Keane anticipates no resistance and on this point Harris is in agreement. Kite will not feel threatened enough to do anything rash. His case will be that he's an innocent businessman. He's not about to start a firefight. Still, Keane assigns four support DCs as back-up. They are to remain visible but are not expected to have to do anything. Harris types a memo registering her disagreement and sends it to Frank. It's not much but it could be important down the line if it comes to an investigation. Right now it doesn't alter the most important fact.

  Kite is coming in.

  30

  Hunter.

  The name jerks Koop awake. He props himself up in the unfamiliar bed and switches on the bedside lamp. Three-thirty. Jesus. He knows instantly that sleep will be impossible.

  Capitulating to the inevitable, he swings out of bed and cracks the synthetic fabric curtains. Outside, across the ink-black river, are the lights of New Brighton. They are about all he can see but the weather seems dry enough and Koop pulls on a pair of running shoes. He dresses in tracksuit pants, t-shirt and thick hooded sweatshirt, picks up a woollen beanie along with his room key and a ten-pound note, and heads downstairs.

  In the lobby a bored night clerk looks at him a little suspiciously. Koop lifts his room key and waves it reassuringly as he walks to the main door. The clerk buzzes it open and Koop steps out into the city.

  A light mist drifts in from the river across deserted roads. Koop takes a pedestrian walkway from the hotel and drops down onto the riverside promenade, trying to walk some of the stiffness out of his joints. At the river, he jogs south towards the newly scrubbed Liver Buildings, lit brilliantly from below.

  Koop picks up the pace and works his way past a futuristic building and a canal, neither of which were there when he left town, before finding the more familiar territory of the pathway that loops around the riverfront of the Albert Dock.

  He passes no-one and settles into a nice rhythm, enjoying the feeling of reconnecting with his city. His breath billows from his mouth in great white clouds and some of the edginess that's been niggling him since leaving Australia begins, fractionally, to ease.

  Feeling like the last man in Liverpool, Koop runs past the end of the Albert Dock and the curving façade of the new Arena before passing through a whole series of residential developments carved from what was recently derelict land. Across the river, the shipyards still look as though they're operational. Koop spent a short time at Cammell Laird before signing up for the force.

  Lurching out from a side road some fifty metres ahead, a stumbling drunk gives Koop pause. In a thin white shirt and scuffed black pants, the man would surely have been freezing if not for the buffer of alcohol. As they pass each other under a street lamp, Koop sees the drunk is young, eighteen or less, his gelled hair flattened, his still-chubby face showing a small red scuff mark on his cheekbone.

  Koop slows, worried that, with the roiling Mersey protected only by a nominal iron rail, the drunk's night could end in disaster.

  'You OK, son?' he says, jogging to a stop.

  'F'CKOFF!' The drunk flails wildly and Koop steps away from him. The young man begins screeching obscenities, spittle flying from his mouth, his eyes unfocused. Then, as abruptly as he started, the drunk switches to maudlin. 'Sorry, mate, fucken sorry, like . . . I'm fucken bevvied, like.' Then he begins singing.

  Koop's forgotten what it's like. Dealing with this. He feels rusty and all too aware of being a visitor. Backing off, he starts jogging again. The drunk will be fine; and if he isn't, it's none of Koop's business and the river will take him as it has taken many before.

  Evolution, Koop's old sarge once called the process. 'Survival of the fittest', which, coming from Sergeant Gittings, was a bit rich.

  Koop leaves the white-shirted man attempting a rendition of 'New York, New York'.

  After working up a sweat he reaches the end of the riverside path and turns back towards the hotel. Nearing the point where he saw the drunk, Koop feels a tiny surge of adrenaline, his fight or flight instinct being readied, but the drunk has gone.

  Home or into the river, Koop has no way of knowing.

  He runs back into the city, the morning still black, the roads only marginally less deserted. He lets himself into the hotel using the security swipe and, once inside his room, showers and dresses.

  Five am.

  He emails Zoe with a long update that contains little actual information and gives Koop a curious homesick feeling, and spends another twenty minutes blankly channel-hopping before the hotel restaurant finally opens and he goes gratefully down for breakfast.

  After the worst cup of coffee he's ever tasted and a plate of what might as well have been fried wood, Koop walks through the waking city to a car-hire place at the top of Dale Street. Twenty minutes later he's behind the wheel of an anonymous Ford. There are no signs on the vehicle that it's a hire car, a step being taken by more and more companies to deter opportunistic thieves looking for fat tourist pickings. Koop is glad; with the people who are involved in this, it wouldn't pay to stand out in any way.

  He steers the familiar roads north, no need for the map of Merseyside the hire company has provided, his years of policing engraving the geography of the city on his brain forever. The traffic is still quiet, not yet into rush hour, and, in any case, he's heading against the flow, out of the city. He selects the Dock Road deliberately, surprised at the changes that have happened in the two years or so since he left. Everything that could be cleaned has been cleaned. Smart street signs, new paint, sandblasted industrial buildings are creating a shiny new corridor through some of the most benighted urban areas in Europe. Behind the scrubbed main road the estates still look like places nobody lives in through choice.

  Koop drops off the Dock Road at Seaforth, leaving the sickly chemical smell coming from the industrial dock complex behind, and passes the end of the Freeport.

  It's beginning to rain when he sees the first brown tourist sign guiding him left towards the Antony Gormley sculptures on Crosby Beach. He follows the road around the marine lake and parks behind the meagre dunes.

  Koop turns off the engine and listens to the rain thrum against the roof. Koop remembers his mother's insistence that this particular rain was 'the sort that gets you wet'.

  After a couple of minutes he picks up the bunch of flowers he'd bought in Liverpool and steps from the car. Although not particularly cold by Liverpool standards, it's enough for Koop. He shivers and yanks the zipper of his North Face jacket up to his throat and hunches his chin into his chest. The Northern Rivers rain he'd left behind in Australia was straightforward, honest weather; great heavy sheets rattling straight down and bouncing o
ff the earth. This sneaky stuff seems to soak into your bones.

  Maybe his mother had been on to something.

  He walks across the dunes, the claggy sand sticking to his shoes, the front of his jeans rapidly becoming sodden. As he crests the top he gets a faceful of wet sand, whipped off the top of the rise by the wind. Ahead of him, Crosby Beach stretches to his right, the Gormley figures disappearing into the distance.

  Koop lopes down onto the concrete promenade and then down once more onto the sands. His first thought is that the beach is busy, before he realises almost all the people are simply sculptures. It's eerie being the only moving figure.

  Koop knows the crime scene location from Keane's file. He trudges towards it now, past the flying saucer roof of the local swimming baths looking like something dropped in from a Tim Burton movie, until he reaches a point about twenty metres from one of the sculptures. The tide is out and Koop is certain he's close to the point where his son died.

  There is no visible sign left that a man met a violent death at this spot.

  The pole and concrete base have been taken away and successive days of tides have flattened any trace of what happened. Koop hadn't been expecting any. This is a pilgrimage.

  Now he is here he feels unsure of himself. Perhaps even a little silly. He wonders – a classic Catholic reaction – if he's guilty of wallowing in an affair that he has no right to be involved with. What is it that makes Stevie his son? A hot flash of lust thirty-odd years ago?

  Koop self-consciously places the flowers down on the sand and looks out to sea, waiting for an emotional response to come. Out in the grey haze, an enormous container ship drifts past, looking as though it's floating in a few inches of water, an optical illusion caused by the lie of the shore and the size of the craft.

  The rain grows heavier and Koop turns away, disappointed with himself not to be feeling something more. He isn't sure what, but he expected more than this.

  A woman with a small dog struggles down the steps onto the promenade. She carries a polythene bag containing the dog's crap in her hand.