A Dark Place to Die (6 page)

Keane doesn't live round here. Neither does Harris. No coppers do and haven't done since the late sixties when it all really started going to shit. The bizzies migrated north and south, to outlying suburbs, commuting in to police communities they're no longer part of. Thatcher's blood money poured into the force in the eighties and the cord was cut forever. Now on these granite-hard streets it's dog eat fucking dog and Keane, like everyone else in the force, gets paid to mop up the remains.

With the Glassfield case, both Harris and Keane have known from the discovery of the body that the answer to finding the killer is, most likely, not going to come from hard police work. It's going to come from an arrest down the line and some toerag rolling over to negotiate a plea deal with the Crown Prosecution Service. At that level, drug murders are almost always cleared up within two years with relatively little connection to the snowdrifts of paper that accumulate round each and every MIT case.

Keane gives Darren Halligan the eye as they cruise past. Keane is more familiar with the boy's older cousins, Matty
and Dean. Darren, a new fish, still has a way to go before he rises to their giddy heights.

Darren Halligan watches Keane and Harris pass, his eyes sliding off them in the too casual way Keane has seen in thousands of encounters with his 'clients'. Without quite knowing how, the kid has clocked them instantly as filth. The skill – cop spotting – has by now taken on an almost genetic quality. Certainly there are generations of families like the Halligans that Keane and Harris have had dealings with, and they all seem to be ready to do battle the instant they leave the womb.

But the links with the families are no cosy, local affair; bobbies on their bikes chasing rosy-cheeked apple scrumpers. Darren Halligan, and thousands like him busy spotting for low-level dealers, are the first point of entry for a tidal wave of drugs going in, out, and through Liverpool, the connections reaching into areas as murky as the Colombian Cali cartel, IRA hit squads and the seriously scary East European new boys.

Keane presses the accelerator. Darren Halligan sitting astride his BMX watches them go and Keane turns his attention back to the case.

The van on the green and the smelly garage both turn out to be useless. There is no guarantee the van hasn't been used by the killers – it has, after all, been reduced to a blackened husk, much like the victim – but once Keane and Harris get a look at the scene they're convinced this has been straightforward theft and mischief. The golf club is missing trophies that have been taken from a display case in the lobby. Keane can't see the type of ruthless killers he and Harris are looking for pausing en route to steal the Rotary Shield trophy. The only detail of possible drug involvement is that two scrambler motorbikes – the light, flexible
sort used in motocross – were spotted in the area immediately after the fire. The likely explanation is that they were stashed earlier and used to get away across the sand dunes and walking tracks that criss-cross the area. It's the bikes that catch Keane's ear. The use of this type of machine has become commonplace in drug-related incidents. Several drive-by shootings in recent years have involved scramblers. Invariably, if the police raid a house involved in drugs, one or two or more of the bikes are discovered. Their ubiquity is such that their existence at or near a drug raid is a signifier of guilt, at least to the investigation team. But here it looks like they've been used for exactly what they were designed for: cross-country motorbiking.

The smell at the lock-up too is a bust. Rotten fish, stolen smoked salmon to be precise, part of a month-old robbery of a refrigerated Sainsbury's truck.

Which leaves the Freeport call.

They arrive there just after four and speak to the security guard who calls a second guard to take over at the gate while he directs Keane and Harris to their destination. It takes ten minutes to wind their way through the sprawling complex. Keane pulls the VW behind the security car and they step out.

It's cold now, properly cold, and Harris is glad she's worn her Berghaus.

'That must be the one,' says the security guard. 'If your information's right. Probably just some little fucker making trouble.'

'Most likely,' says Keane. 'Stay here.' Silencing the man's meek territorial protests with a glance, he and Harris begin walking towards a relatively new-looking red container standing on its own about twenty metres from the Freeport boundary fence. Behind the mesh, the river runs west to
east with Crosby Beach to the north. The container squats almost directly beneath a wind turbine, silent and still. The word 'STENZER', the logo of a shipping firm, is painted onto the side of the container in a deeper red colour.

Even before they go in, Keane knows this is the place.

He can taste it. Something bad has happened here. Keane has sensed it at other crime sites before. Not always, but often enough to recognise the sensation when it arrives.

The traffic noise diminishes as they approach; two banks of containers at right angles form a wind and noise shield. In the lee of these protective boxes there is dead air in the space occupied by the red container. Above them, off to one side, the turbine blades rotate.

Keane notes that the red container can't be seen from the city side of the Freeport and is only partially visible to anyone on the wasteland bordering the site.

The killers didn't have far to travel to place the victim amongst the iron men. Through the metal slatted fence, beyond an expanse of wasteland and beyond that the rock wall, Keane can see some of Gormley's figures.

It's high tide and several of the sculptures nearest to the docks are already almost fully covered. In the cold grey light, they contain a powerful energy that Keane isn't altogether surprised by. He doesn't think of himself as an art lover. Like most locals, he was instinctively dismissive of the Gormley installation. Modern rubbish. Cost as much as a hospital wing. He remembers going out there with Julie one sunny Sunday. They parked behind the dunes next to the lake and asked for directions from a shaven-headed man with a dog and wearing the obligatory shiny nylon football shirt – this one the royal blue of Everton – which bulged over his substantial belly.

'Don't waste yer fuckin' time, mate,' he snarled in an accent so pronounced as to render it a foreign language if he'd been speaking to anyone not born in the city. 'They're absolute fuckin' shite.' And then, to make sure they fully understood the absolute fucking shiteness of the sculptures, he jabbed a finger back towards the beach and spat out the words again. 'Ab-so-lute. Fuck-ing. Shite.'

He and Julie giggled about the art critique all the way to the beach, imagining it being used word for word in
The Observer
'Sunday Review' section.

Gormley Piece 'Absolute Fucking Shite'
.

And, in all honesty, at first Keane didn't see exactly what all the fuss was about. It was an unusual sight, that had to be admitted; the figures staring blindly out across the water. Keane kept noticing details that got in between him and the art. Bits of litter. Dog shit. A group of youths milling around a couple of younger boys on the promenade. And Keane's policeman core had been moderately outraged by the local additions to the figures.

He'd seen another Gormley piece over at Gateshead when he'd been there for a training course with Newcastle Police. The magnificent and moving 'Angel of the North' looked out over the confluence of the A1 and A167 roads, the landscape grim, industrial. The sculpture, its sail-like iron wings embracing and defying the wind, had shocked Keane by its scale, its span wider than the Statue of Liberty is high. He'd found that out because he'd parked and gawped up at it, temporarily reduced to childhood again by the sheer confidence and beauty of the thing, the first and only time an artwork had literally stopped him in his tracks. Like the figures on Crosby Beach, the Angel was constructed of the stuff of northern England – iron and steel – yet it appeared light, and was possessed of so much
latent energy that Keane wouldn't have been surprised to see it take flight across the north-eastern landscape – steam-driven and belching smoke, naturally.

But until today, standing outside the container that Keane is sure was the killing place, he hadn't 'got' the Liverpool artworks in the way he had the Angel. Gradually, though, the power of the work begins to emerge. And, in a way that he doesn't want to examine too closely, an echo of what Ferguson said in the mortuary, something about the murder being 'artistic', reverberates with him.

'Ready?' says Harris. She touches him on the arm and he realises he's been standing motionless.

He nods and Harris puts a gloved hand to the container door.

7

Koop's first call is the distribution shed at the plantation, a ten-minute drive from his place. He backs the ute to the open doors of the building and gets out. He pauses for a few seconds and looks at the neat rows of net-draped coffee trees rolling down the side of the hill into the valley before going inside.

Koop passes a minute talking about nothing in particular with Annie, the spike-haired company office manager, and a couple of the boys on the packing tables, before he loads up the tray and leaves on his rounds.

Zoe was right calling him a delivery boy; that's exactly what he is, and exactly how he likes it. After a lifetime working at the sharp end of things, Koop figures he is due a little ordinariness.

In the truck he punches in The Abyssinians and the reggae loops out, sounding as fresh-minted as the day it was recorded. If this is what ordinary feels like, he can take a bucketload. He turns up the volume and snakes down the hill towards Byron and the first delivery of the day.

Strictly speaking he doesn't need the work. He holds a fifteen per cent investment in North Coast Coffee, and
could easily bring in another driver on the wages they pay locally. But after spending the first six months of his new Australian life lazing around watching his gut grow, he knew he had to find an outlet for his energies other than swimming and drinking coffee, or his brain would have started dribbling out of his ears.

The deliveries keep him in close touch with the business. Working the deliveries is the ideal way to protect his investment. As a copper, Koop had known the value of attention to detail and he is no different when it comes to delivering coffee.

A café owner who had found the last batch a little bitter is given a new order free of charge, no questions. Another who confides in Koop that several other coffee companies are prowling his café is offered a discount on subsequent orders, with the discount increasing in direct ratio to the size of the order.

A café whose barista has gone absent without leave (a common problem on the cruisy North Coast) gets a couple of names from Koop of people who might be able to help them out.

Each wrinkle, each detail, is dutifully recorded on the voice recorder app on Koop's phone. At the end of each day he sits in the cab and listens, wincing at the sound of his nasal Liverpool accent, and noting down anything usable in a black notebook before gladly wiping the soundbites.

By lunchtime he has all but completed the run and stops for something to eat at a café next to a pub. A velvety flat white in front of him, and an order of bacon on Turkish to come, he sits in the café garden and hopes his face doesn't look as smug as he feels.

Koop has just taken the first sip when he becomes aware he's being watched.

He glances up and sees two men aged around thirty sitting at the bar which divides the pub from the café. Rangy and dishevelled, the pair wear the
de rigueur
hemp clothing and white-boy dreadlocks common to this area of the shire. Koop thinks there must be a way station on the Pacific Highway where the clothes are handed out to metropolitan refugees on arrival. Somewhere between Ballina and Byron maybe.

They turn their faces away but there's something familiar about one of them. Koop struggles for a moment before getting it: he's a neighbour of sorts who Koop has seen behind the wheel of a smoky ute rattling past his property now and again. The two bend their shaggy heads together over their half-empty beers, and one of them mutters something which causes the other man to snigger.

Koop feels the blood quicken in his veins, sure he's the subject of their laughter, but he contents himself with drinking his coffee. Dickheads all over. Forget it.

And then he catches Zoe's name and feels something dormant inside him begin to uncoil. This could go south, he thinks, and tries to ignore the evolutionary instincts triggering his anger. Good coppers don't get angry, they just get even. He's not going to react. He's been called everything before.

But family. That's a different matter.

Koop looks up again and this time there's no mistaking that Zoe is being discussed. The two men, growing in cockiness with each swallow of their beer, are openly snickering.

Koop sighs, takes another sip of his coffee, sets it down carefully and walks across. He's been in this situation a million times and knows exactly how it will play out. He is – was – a professional.

'I know you?' he says conversationally to the guy he thinks might live nearby, making sure his face is just that bit closer than is usually comfortable, an old copper's trick. The man leans away a fraction, as Koop knew he would. 'Because you look familiar. And I thought I heard you mention my wife's name?'

The guy glances at his mate and smirks, gains a jolt of confidence. 'Don't think so, mate. You must be goin' deaf, or something. Happens to fellers your age, I heard.'

His mate splutters and the two high five. 'Fucken classic, Thommo,' says the mate.

Koop smiles, outwardly patient. 'And your mention of my wife? I heard you say something about Zoe.'

Thommo, on a roll now, nudges his mate before replying. 'Couldn't have been the same woman, mate,' he says, eyeing Koop, weighing him up, seeing him as too old, too thin. Here it comes, Koop thinks. He's decided I haven't got the juice. 'The only Zoe I know about, I heard she was a Jap-licking pussy-muncher. That couldn't be your missus, could it?'