Down Among the Dead Men (13 page)

'What's it like, Koop?'

'What's what like? Are we still talking about your job?'

'No. Australia. Your place. Where are you now?'

'What the fuck is this? Do you want to know what I'm wearing?' Koop lowers his voice seductively. 'Want me to get more comfortable, Frankie?'

'Please don't ever let me hear that voice again, Koop. I'm begging you. You can't unremember that stuff. I just wondered, that's all. It's a fucking miserable Monday on Stanley Road, I've got a desk that's bending under the weight of shit that's piled up and I'm calling you from a room that looks like how I imagine purgatory. Not to mention a few choice developments in the Keane personal life which are better left out of this conversation. Do I have to explain it?'

Frank doesn't have to explain a damn thing. Koop knows that feeling well enough. The dull ache in your gut and behind your eyes, the feeling that the job, the city, the crumbling old island, are all too grubby and overcrowded and mean, that the weather's shit all the time and the roads are crowded and there's litter every fucking where. Cabin fever.

'It's great, Frank,' Koop says. Right now it's what Frank wants to hear. That someone made it past the sentries and the searchlights.

'Beaches?'

'You wouldn't believe it, mate. White sand. Blue seas. Paradise.'

There's a silence on the line. Koop can imagine Frank gazing through the grime-caked window at the frayed edges of the city and he's not wrong. Frank's remembering an incident three weeks ago. He'd been across the river checking something out on an overlapping case in Seacombe with the Wirral Serious Crime Squad. It had been a cold day with little sun, and the location was facing the city. Frank could hardly hear himself think thanks to a road crew operating a jackhammer on the esplanade. Less than three metres from the work crew was a scrap of gritty beach covered in bricks, bottles, litter, broken glass and dog shit. The brown-grey Mersey was slopping at the muddy edges while a family of four – tattooed skinhead father sucking on a doobie, fat teenage wife gobbling from a KFC bucket, two toddlers swigging Coke from an oversized bottle – sat on towels as if it was St Tropez. Frank didn't know if he shouldlaugh or cry. In the end he'd settled for embarrassment.

'Paradise, eh?'

'You got it, son,' says Koop gently. 'Speak soon, eh?'

Frank replaces the phone on its cradle and sits back. He wishes he could have told Koop about Harris and all that, but he didn't. Men don't.

'Shit,' he says to the empty room.

Twenty-Five

Menno Koopman slides his phone back into his pocket and drains the last of his beer.

He's at a pub on the corner of Mary Street. He's spent too long talking to Frank Keane already. Zoe will be wondering what he's doing.

Koop sits for a few moments thinking about his old job and all the stuff that had happened last year. It had been a mistake calling Frank. Just made him feel more shit, not less.

'You using this, mate?' A standing drinker is patting the spare chair at Koopman's table.

Koop stands and gestures. 'All yours.' He puts his hands in his pockets and weaves through the crowd, much thinner on a Monday than it would be at the weekend.

Outside it's cold. Koop still gets caught out by the chill at this time of year.

The apartment they're staying in is only a few hundred metres away. Koop slides the key card over the reader and heads to the lifts. At the twentieth floor he steps out and finds their room.

He waits for a second or two before opening the door.

Inside is a modern, trendy-looking apartment. The place is in darkness and Koop can see the lights of the Brisbane apartment and office towers through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

To one side is the bedroom. Soft yellow light spills from there onto the living room floor. Although he really doesn't need another drink, Koop pours one from the bottle of red wine on the kitchenette counter and moves to the doorway.

Zoe's blonde hair is the brightest thing in the room.

Koop stands and watches her head bob up and down in the candlelight, her shadow and those of the other two people on the hotel bed moving across the walls and ceiling more or less in time to the dull thump of the muted drum and bass music in the background.

Zoe is on all fours. A younger man is fucking her from behind, while she has her head between the legs of a woman stretched back on the bed. Zoe glances up and catches Koop's eye, her face slack with desire.

It's eight months since Zoe had been kidnapped and almost murdered. Her girlfriend, Melumi, had died. Badly.

Perhaps that is it, reflects Koop.

And then: no 'perhaps' about it. He closes his eyes momentarily and listens to the noises from the bed. Soft thumps, low groans, whispered dirty talk combining in an ancient rhythm. Zoe has been fixing up these meetings online more frequently during the past few months and they've been getting successively more and more anonymous. Koop doesn't know the people she's talking to, is not involved in the process, and has tried to do what he can to change Zoe's mind. She's having none of it. Koop can be part of it or not. Koop's been here before, done this before, even
liked
this before, once or twice, but never like this, never with so little passion or humanity. With Mel and with Zoe's other girlfriends, the process was organic, warm. This feels all wrong. What was merely kinky has become bent out of shape. He suddenly knows he can't be in the room.

'I'm going,' he says. 'Home, I mean.'

Zoe looks up again and hesitates. Then Koop sees the cloud pass across her face before she nods.

'It's not you,' he says.
It fucking is
.

'You OK, man?' asks the guy. His partner – Koop can't remember her name – stares at him curiously. Koop doesn't reply. He only came along to keep Zoe safe. Now that feels like a mistake.

'OK, then,' says Zoe. Now she's said it, Koop wants to stay but there's a harsh note to Zoe's voice, one that's become too familiar over the past six months, that doesn't sit right with him. She is drifting out of reach like a tourist in a rip-tide.

Koop turns and slips from the apartment.

Back outside in the bland corridor he leans back against the wall and lets out a long sigh. From inside the apartment he can hear the three on the bed increase their pace. Zoe makes a high-pitched noise, louder than previously, and Koop wonders, with a vicious stab of resentment, if it's done for his benefit.

'Fuck it,' he mutters and walks towards the bank of lifts.

Waiting, Koop checks his watch. Only twenty minutes have elapsed since he left the bar. It seems like days.

The doors open and Koop steps into the empty lift and presses the button.

Once outside in the soft Brisbane night, Koop stands uncertainly outside the block and looks up and down Mary Street.

It's over. He can't do this any more.

Twenty-Six

It's gone twelve on Monday by the time Harris pulls up in front of a red-brick Victorian semi, not quite as grand as the one in Burlington Road, two streets away, but big enough. There are two cars parked in front of the garage and she sees movement behind one of the bay windows.

Harris takes a few moments to compose herself and checks her appearance in the rear-view mirror. By the time they'd finished at the crime scene early on Sunday Frank reckoned it was too late to do a decent interview with Terry Peters, so this is really the first crack at putting some detail in the file. Theresa had done some initial notes last night before accompanying Terry Peters yesterday to formally identify his brother. Although there's a high probability that the dead woman in Burlington Road is Maddy Peters, the victim's face is too disfigured for a visual. A uniform is at the dental surgery with a technician going through the records. It may be days before the official word comes through.

Throughout Sunday, while MIT have been setting up the investigation at base and coordinating the nuts and bolts in Birkdale, there's been no sign of Nicky Peters. Door-knocking radiating out from the murder house will continue this morning. There are no plans for searches to be made anywhere. With the deaths not yet public there is only a trickle of information coming in, mostly from those neighbours who have been questioned.

Harris steps out of the car and walks to the door. She presses the bell and hears the tone echoing through the house. A few seconds pass and then a shape looms through the stained glass. A tall middle-aged man appears, his face showing the strain. He opens the door and Harris notes the micro-second adjustment as he sees the colour
of her skin. To her vague disgust, she imagines she catches too just the smallest flicker of sexual interest. Or maybe she's just tired.

'Mr Peters? DI Harris, Merseyside Major Incident Team. My office called earlier?'

'Yes, right. Come in. Please.'

Terry Peters shakes her hand and Harris steps into a high-ceilinged hallway. Peters, good-looking in an outdoorsy way, seems to be holding himself together well enough despite the events of the past twenty-four hours. According to Theresa's notes, he's younger than his dead brother by eight years, although Harris knows this experience will age him fast.

'I am so sorry for your loss, Mr Peters,' says Harris. 'And I hope we can get as much information as possible to help us without causing you too much distress.'

'Whatever you need,' says Terry Peters.

'I understand you went with DS Cooper to identify your brother on Sunday?'

Terry Peters nods. 'He looked better than I thought he would. Sounds stupid.'

'Not at all,' says Harris. 'It's always traumatic and anything that gets you through it is good.'

'Do you have any news? Have you . . . got anyone? Has anyone seen Nicky?'

'I'll get any information to you as soon as I can, Mr Peters. There's not much to report on at the moment, I'm afraid. Hopefully later we might have something.'

Peters closes the front door behind them and motions Harris along the hallway and into the kitchen. It's a pleasant room but she can feel the misery caused by the deaths seeping through like damp. A woman is busy in front of a serious-looking cooking range and Harris realises she hasn't eaten a thing since a snatched coffee at six this morning.

'Smells good,' says Harris and the woman turns. Unlike her husband, Alicia Peters doesn't seem to register Harris's colour. Alicia's eyes are red-rimmed but she seems calm enough, considering. She wipes her hands on a kitchen towel and shakes Harris's hand.

'DI Harris. As I said to your husband, our deepest sympathies.'

'Alicia. Thank you.'

'What are you cooking?' says Harris.

'I know it seems like I shouldn't be doing this, but I have to do something or I'd go mad.' Alicia Peters turns to the stove. 'It's fish pie. A Jamie Oliver. Would you like some? I mean, is that OK? Are you allowed . . .?'

'To eat?' says Harris. 'Yes, they let us eat.' She smiles back. 'You know, I'd love some if there's enough to go round.'

'There's plenty. Liam's out. Gone round to friends.'

When Harris raises a quizzical eyebrow, Alicia Peters nods as if she'd spoken. 'Yes, I know, not great, in the circumstances, but teenagers . . . well, they can be like that. Not that we've ever . . . well, you know. Anyway, he's out and that means more to share. You must think it's odd, cooking, I mean, but, well . . .' Alicia Peters lets the sentence trail off and for a moment looks as though she may start crying again.

'It's not odd,' says Harris. 'I've seen people do lots of things far stranger than cooking in these situations.'

Alicia Peters wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and begins to serve the meal.

'We'll have to speak to Liam too,' says Harris. 'Your son, right?'

Alicia Peters nods but doesn't look up.

Terry Peters looks uncomfortable, as though there's some sort of Home Office police protocol about eating fish pie while conducting interviews. Even so, he sorts out plates and cutlery and they sit at a large wooden table bearing the scars of thousands of meals. Terry Peters starts to pour a glass of white wine but Harris puts her hand over the rim. She notices the wine bottle is half-empty. She can't blame them. It's what she'd have done in the circumstances.

Harris eats some of the pie. It's excellent, and for a couple of minutes she sits in a silence which, if not completely comfortable, is at least bearable. Alicia Peters is too young to be Harris's mother but there's something so compassionate in the way she looks at the policewoman that Harris relaxes completely. This is how I want to live, she thinks, luxuriating in the idea of herself in this environment with someone like Alicia. It's with real effort that she brings herself back to the job and chastises herself for doing the very thing
she'd mentally accused Terry Peters of doing when he'd answered the door.

'Tell me about your brother's family,' she says to Terry. 'Just a little background.' She takes her notebook from her bag and puts it beside her plate.

Terry Peters shrugs. 'They're nice people. We were close, me and Paul. Pretty close anyway.' He too looks tearful but coughs and stays in control. 'Lives around the corner. We see them regularly. Not in each other's pockets but enough. Go on holidays together sometimes, and the kids get along.'

'Nicky's their only child?'

Alicia Peters nods. 'Thank God,' she says. 'In the circumstances.' Then she brightens. 'You'll need a photograph of him,' she says. 'I'm sure we have a good one.'

'Thank you, but we have all we need, Mrs Peters. There were some family portraits at your sister-in-law's house we are using.'

'Oh, OK.'

'What sort of a boy is Nicky?' Harris finds she hesitates over using the word 'is'. Alicia looks up sharply but doesn't react. She's quick, thinks Harris.

'He's a nice kid,' says Terry Peters. 'I mean he has the usual teenage things going on but nothing that would cause anyone any problems. Paul or Maddy never said anything otherwise, did they?' He looks at Alicia for confirmation and she shakes her head.

Harris knows the next one is going to hurt.

'So there's nothing that you can think of that might make Nicky want to harm his parents?'