A Dark Place to Die (12 page)

'Menno Koopman,' says Keane. 'My old boss. He'd taken an early before you arrived.'

Em Harris makes a gesture of encouragement for Keane to keep talking.

'Well, despite the clog-hopper name, he's as Scouse as me and you. And a good copper, really good, a pit bull when it came to the job. Once Koop got the sniff of something, he was on to it and wouldn't let go. A networker, before the word existed. He knew everyone and everything worth knowing. We worked on a lot of cases together and
Koop took me under his wing. I was already a copper with a solid ten years, but he turned me into something else. You know what I mean.'

'Yes,' says Harris. Most decent DIs have had some sort of similar mentoring experience, sometimes good, sometimes bad, that has turned them moment by moment into the policeman or woman they've become. The arrival of The Fish at the Canning Street HQ signalled an unwelcome change to that tradition. The Fish might get results but he is never going to be asked out on the monthly MIT Friday night sessions; a throwback to the good-old/bad-old glory days of boozing bizzies in the swashbuckling seventies and eighties that is proving highly resistant to the cultural shift. Even Harris goes along sometimes.

'And his son? Stevie?'

'I had no idea. Not until Eckhardt told us. He certainly never mentioned him, but why on earth would he? He was only seventeen, and then the kid was taken to Australia. And that was back when Australia was a long way away. Not like now.'

'It hasn't drifted closer, Frank.'

'You know what I mean. Faster planes, cheaper tickets. The internet. Globalisation. Blah blah. Everything's nearer.'

The team have done a bit of digging and discovered that Steven White, just as Eckhardt had said, had been born Steven Brendan Koopman, and his place of birth listed as Liverpool, England. It hadn't taken very long to discover that the Menno Koopman named as 'father' was the same Menno Koopman who had gone on to become a Liverpool copper. Like there'd be two fuckers with a name like that in the city.

'And now his kid's turned up kebabbed. What a fucking mess.'

'He hasn't seen him since 1975, Frank. How do you think he's going to react?'

Keane takes a drink and lifts his eyebrows. 'Good question.'

He leans forward. 'I told you he was a good copper, right? Well, there was another side to Menno Koopman. You can decide for yourself if it's a good thing or a bad thing.'

'What happened?' said Em.

'It was a long time ago,' says Keane. 'Well, it seems like it to me, anyway.'

1996. The summer of the European Championships and England in the semi-finals. Oasis in the charts. Britpop. The Spice Girls. The corruption-riddled Tories teetering at the edge of eighteen years in power. It is a rare flowering of optimism for a country almost addicted to misery.

In Liverpool the body count is rising.

A savage new breed of criminal has entered the water. Brazen assassinations, the more brutal the better, are becoming, if not commonplace, certainly more frequent than they'd ever been. The city, the criminal part of it, is awash with money. The drug business is booming; ecstasy outstripping alcohol as the chosen Saturday night special for millions. The drug has leapt from the hardcore club scene into the mainstream and the consequent rewards for those who don't mind getting their hands dirty are astronomical.

Guns begin to be used as never before, and with little discrimination. Small-time dealers, who once would have been warned off with a going-over in the pub car park, are found bound, gagged and tortured on wasteland.
Exotic gestures borrowed from half-digested movies are added to their corpses: bags of excrement, flowers, dead fish. Keane remembers one case – not a murder this time – in which a stubborn club owner, unwilling to let a rival install a new 'security firm' on the doors, woke in bed to find, not just a horse's head as a warning, but an entire horse. It is the logistics of the operation that appals and amuses the investigating team in almost equal measure: the horse stolen, not without difficulty, from a local stud. The hooker paid to slip something in the club owner's drink to ensure an unconscious state while the dead horse is placed in his bed.

By a forklift no less.

But that sort of effort is rare. In the main, the new gangsters model themselves on fictional and non-fictional Americans who use extreme violence as a brutal business tool. It's an escalating cock fight that is rapidly turning Liverpool and nearby Manchester into the Wild Wild North. Keane, freshly promoted to DC, is assigned to one of the top-level initiatives designed to damp down the volcano. Gangs are opening up hitherto undreamed of connections to the Colombians, even getting so cocky as to start double-crossing them. Links with the post-Troubles IRA are becoming worrying, especially the rumoured hook-up with the paramilitary group's feared 'Cleaners', a hit squad rumoured to have been involved in at least twenty drug deaths in the city. It is in this atmosphere that Operation Footfall is launched in 1996 and Menno Koopman becomes a DI in charge of a section.

Like The Fish, he's very clear what he wants from his team: results. Unlike The Fish, Koop sets about achieving this through turning his team into a single body, unified by a common will. It's simple, Koop tells them. We are the
good guys. The gangsters are the bad guys. He wants every bad guy off the streets. Zero tolerance. A clear idea.

And equally clearly impossible.

But they give it a good try.

Koop brings in the video tape of
The Untouchables –
the one with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery – and makes the section watch it late one night in the briefing room. When Connery delivers the famous 'They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue,' line they all cheer. It's corny as hell but it works. Over a period of months Koop slowly turns them into a formidable force and is ruthless in his pursuit of the stated objectives.

He gives no quarter to the 'enemy' as he calls them and never, ever, stops chasing. If he can't get someone picked up for the big stuff he picks them up for the little stuff.

And then he does it again. And again.

It is a war which Koopman convinces them all they are fighting for the soul of the city, a romantic notion that doesn't sit naturally with the cynical, seen-it-all city cops. But such is Koop's conviction that Keane is sure it was embraced on some level by everyone in the section. Koopman is a crusader. He pushes his team harder, pays more attention to detail than any other copper in the city. He cuts corners but never, so far as Keane can remember, over-steps the mark. It's a heady time.

The team wades into the criminal fraternity, the extended feral families on wasteland estates in Halewood and Kirkdale and Netherley, or the semi-organised collections of city centre dealers, thugs and killers. An embryonic drug network is spreading out from Liverpool, into Amsterdam, Marbella, Turkey, and beyond to Colombia. The money is
incredible – simply astonishing – and, as in past centuries, Liverpool is handily placed to act as a distribution hub. Police estimate that the world cocaine trade alone is worth over two billion pounds a year with an abnormally large percentage of that money flowing through the hands and pockets of Liverpool operators. Men who have grown up selling £5 bags of weed to schoolfriends at the sprawling comprehensives dotted around the city are now multimillionaires. Apocryphal stories abound. In 1998 Dutch police raid the villa of one of Liverpool's big players and recover four hundred kilos of cocaine, fifteen hundred kilos of cannabis, sixty kilos of heroin, fifty of ecstasy, as well as guns, ammunition, cash and crates of CS canisters. The entire haul totals £125 million. The police also estimate this particular entrepreneur owns more than three hundred UK properties, as well as casinos, discos, vineyards, and has interests in football clubs in Spain, Turkey, Bulgaria and the Gambia. The guy makes
The Sunday Times
'Rich List' in 1998.

And he is only one.

A crop of hustling likely lads on the make emerge from Norris Green, Croxteth, Netherley, Speke, Bootle, Kirkdale, The Dingle, and from outlying towns like Skelmersdale and Kirkby. Operation Footfall logs them into a database and uses the information in a fast-moving effort to stem the flow.

'It wasn't working,' says Keane. 'But Koop didn't give a shit. He was enjoying it, in a funny kind of way. It was why he'd gone into policing; why most of us did. It couldn't last at that pace, though, and the unit was moved on, reassigned in a shake-up in 2000. Koop went into MIT and the rest you know.'

Keane drinks his beer.

'So is there anything else about Koopman?' says Harris.

Keane looks at his partner coolly.

'Well, there is one thing,' says Keane. 'There's Carl.'

17

'You're what?'

Zoe is as angry as he's ever seen her. Koop almost smiles as he imagines cartoon steam coming out of her ears but doesn't allow himself to so much as twitch a muscle. Had he done so, he is sure she'd hit him.

'I'm going back, Zoe. You knew I would.'

'To Liverpool?'

'Of course to Liverpool. Where else would I be going back to?'

'I don't know!' she says, throwing her arms in the air. 'Zambia makes as much sense as fucking Liverpool! Why not stop off at Minsk, or Potsdam, or fucking Helsinki while you're at it!?'

At the raised voices, Ringo puts his tail between his legs and heads for the safety of the area behind the couch. Koop watches him, a wistful look in his eye. He wishes he could join him. Zoe in full flow is like a cyclone. You just had to strap yourself to the mast and let the thing blow past, hoping not to get physically injured in the process.

As she rages around the house, it doesn't help Koop that she's right.

What business does he have in Liverpool? Stevie was his son, but only technically. What does he think he'll achieve?

Nothing. That's almost certainly going to be the result. Koop is enough of a pragmatist to know that even a couple of years out of the loop will probably have rendered him, to all intents and purposes, useless.

But that doesn't mean he won't try.

Zoe pauses, leaning on the kitchen island, looking out across the garden. Her breathing is heavy and Koop stays silent. Then he notices a tear trickle down her face and he moves solicitously forward, his expression stricken.

'Don't you fucking dare!' Zoe angrily wipes her cheek with the back of her hand and begins noisily emptying the dishwasher.

'Zoe,' says Koop. He opens his mouth but doesn't know what else to say.

'I'm alright.' She clatters some plates into a cupboard and bends back to the dishwasher.

'This isn't about us,' says Koop. 'It's nothing to do with . . . you know.'

You know.

There it is, out in the open. A part of their lives they have tacitly agreed not to air.

'Yes it does,' says Zoe. 'Of course it's got something to do with you going to Liverpool. It's got everything to do with it, Koop.'

Koop hangs his head and lets out a long slow breath.

He and Zoe had tried. God knows they'd tried and they'd had plenty of fun trying. But no baby had been forthcoming. At first it was almost a relief. Neither of them 'wanted' a baby in the way that they saw amongst their friends who, seemingly overnight, became mindless
breeding machines, their world boundaries marked by prams and nappies and baby names and sleepless nights and stretch marks. They'd been glad not to take part in endless discussions on breast v bottle.

And then in 1995 Zoe had 'fallen' pregnant. A strange expression, 'fallen', but that described it very well. And, like clouds lifting, the two of them discovered for themselves the obsessive and claustrophobic world of expectant mothers. Zoe was welcomed back into the fold like an erring daughter who had seen the error of her ways. A nursery was painted. Hospital visits undertaken. Scans. Tests. Saturday visits to Mothercare.

On September 21st their daughter, Sarah, was born. Perfect in every detail save one. Sarah died in the birth canal.

It had almost finished them both. Koop can still recall with appalling clarity the terrible months that followed and the tests that confirmed what Zoe somehow knew in her bones: there would never be any more Sarahs.

'I'll stay,' says Koop. 'You're right. It's stupid.'

Zoe cries now. She holds her arm out straight, palm up to stop him coming close. She finishes crying and blows her nose on a sheet of kitchen roll. Then she looks at him and opens her arms. They embrace and Zoe whispers in his ear.

'If you have to go, Koop, then go. It's fucking pointless, but if you think you have to do it, then do it.'

'No, I'm being stupid, you're right.'

Zoe's words are hardly the ringing endorsement Koop might have hoped for and, like husbands down the ages, he now finds himself arguing against that which he'd been arguing for only a few minutes earlier. But Zoe wins out, as she usually does.

'Stevie
was
your only son. You didn't know him and he turned out bad, but you weren't to know that. Blood is blood, I guess.' She stops suddenly and looks at Koop, conscious she may have said too much.

Blood. People always say things like that. Blood is blood. Blood is thicker than water. Koop knows better than anyone that blood is nothing but blood. He's seen enough of it to last him a lifetime and he knows himself well enough to understand that it's not the full reason he's about to fly round the world on a wild goose chase.

Koop realises that the death is being investigated – perhaps even by someone good, someone like Keane – but it may not be given priority. Another drug argument, that would be the outcome. It's the intel value that the department would be interested in. Why was Stevie in Liverpool? Who did he see? What fresh advantage can MIT get from the new corpse?

Koop wants to find out all those things too, but it's not the only reason he's making the long trek home. He's not going to Liverpool just for closure, whatever that means.

He's going to Liverpool to see if this has anything to do with Carl.