Down Among the Dead Men (2 page)

Frank doesn't think he'll be training at Breeze Hill much longer. There are plenty of hardcore faces at the club who don't like him being around. Big men, hard men, who congregate around the weight area. Bouncers. An enforcer for the Halligans. These men tolerate Frank on account of his history with Jesus, but no more than that. Coppers don't mix with the boxing world. As the newly promoted head of the Merseyside Major Incident Team, DCI Frank Keane is particularly unwelcome with those connected to the Halligan brothers, both sent away by MIT last year in the Stevie White case.

'You all right, mate?' says Chrissy.

His voice is one that might be used when talking to a confused elderly relative who's having trouble getting out of a parked car, and Frank realises he's been daydreaming.

He taps the kid with a solid right to teach him some manners and it catches Chrissy square on the shoulder, spinning him sideways. He dances back and lifts an amused chin in Frank's direction.

'OK, Frankie,' says Chrissy.

Now the boy steps in close and Frank concentrates on keeping himself mobile. Even so, the blows hurt. Fuck, do they hurt. Chrissy's got steel, no question, and Frank's arms are beginning to wilt under the onslaught. He's blowing. Frank makes a big effort with a combination but his opponent drifts out of range, no effort involved.

'Concentrate!' Jesus shouts. 'The here and now, Frankie. That's all there is, son. Get your fucken head out of your arse and concentrate.'

The 'here and now'. Frank's heard it a million times from Jesus.

While Frank is coated in a fine sheen, his breath hot and ragged in his lungs, the kid's not even sweating. This won't last much
longer. Frank hooks the thumb of his glove under the brow of his headgear and brings it back into position. The watching boxers sense Frank's vulnerability.

'He's gone, bruv!'

'Do 'im, Chrissy, lad!'

The kid shifts smoothly into a higher gear and drives Frank back onto the ropes, the older fighter's arms turning to lead under the blows. Frank's puffing badly now and a lethal right takes out his gumshield, opening him up to anything the kid has got.

Enough. It's only training. Not enough to lose any teeth over.

Frank jumps in close and wraps his arms around Chrissy. 'I'm cooked, son,' he pants.

Two taps to the back of Frank's headgear and Chrissy pushes him away.

Chrissy turns and pats his glove against the outstretched palm of one of his mates reaching through the ropes.

Jesus lifts the ropes for Frank and he steps down from the ring as the small knot of onlookers drift back to their training stations. 'Thanks for that, Frankie. Good to see him coping with some crafty old fucker.' Jesus speaks like words are expensive, biting them out in short measure. He has an intense way about him.

'Crafty?' Frank shakes his head. 'There was nothing crafty about that, Jesus. I was surviving.'

Frank takes off his headgear and Jesus hands him a fresh towel from a neat stack in a plastic container. Frank's still got a boxer's build, although his face shows none of the damage that those who stay in the game have. His sweat-coated hair is short, cropped, the speckled grey winning against the black. He looks like he needs a shave – something of a permanent condition.

Frank wanders to the benches and sits down, takes his gloves off and unwraps the bandage looped around his knuckles, the movements smooth from muscle memory. Jesus wanders over and pats Frank on the shoulder.

'Good work, Frankie. Ta.'

'You rate the boy?' Frank picks up the towel and wraps it round his neck, rubbing sweat from his face with the ends.

'He's all right, like, Chrissy. Fucking did you, hey?'

'No argument there.' Frank gets to his feet and has to brace himself against the wall. 'He's got a bit of Izzy Sulah about him.'

Jesus makes a noncommittal grunt. 'Yeah, maybe. We'll see.' Sulah was one of Jesus's hopes – after Frank – who made a bit of a splash.

'You doing OK?' says Jesus without looking at Frank. 'Work good? All that?'

Frank knows there's only one answer Jesus needs to hear.

'Yeah, all fine.'

'Good. Sound. As long as you're happy, hey?'

He walks over to Chrissy, leaving Frank to stretch off.

Frank showers and leaves around eight without speaking to anyone else. He takes his time. Since he and Julie split in January there's no one waiting for him at home.

Two

All Quinner wants, when it comes down to it, is five minutes' peace and quiet to go over the runsheet and tweak the dialogue for the three scenes they'll be shooting – or attempting to shoot – today.

That shouldn't be too much to ask, should it? Not after six years eating a pile of shit the size of the Mersey Ferry to get the cunting thing in front of the cunting cameras.

But here it comes again.

'Quinny! Quinny, you poof! Oi, softlad!'

Dean Quinner tries not to look up but it's tough when the voice is less than ten metres away, has an accent sharp enough to slice concrete and is coming out of the mouth of your knuckle-dragging cousin, Big Niall. Shaven-headed Quinner, thirty, wiry and wired, sharp city eyes red-rimmed with fatigue, has got a million fucking things to do before fucking lunchtime. But Niall won't be denied.

Quinner puts down his script, bulging with loose notes and unfinished edits, for the third time that morning and stalks across to the wooden barrier the location crew have placed across the top of Huskisson Street to talk to Niall. It's almost ten and the day's schedule is already behind. Fucking Noone, the American gobshite, late again. No apologies, just shows at seven, throwing that gleaming smile around like coins to the poor.

Ben Noone's got it, though, Quinner can't deny that and he's glad they got him before anyone else. Tall, dark-haired and blue-eyed, he moves like an athlete, confident in his own skin. He radiates sex. Speaking with him is like being undressed. The American reminds Quinner of a less androgynous David Bowie. There's something simultaneously beautiful and reptilian at work there.

The industry rumour mill is grinding, even while the movie's
being shot, and the buzz is that Ben Noone is going to be big – very big – and that can only be good news for their movie. Casting the unknown looks like a stroke of genius. Even Quinner admits Noone's dead right for the part. And, like so many things that have changed since the Hungry Head production money came on board and the movie stepped up a couple of levels, Quinner hadn't had much to do with casting. His film is now their film.

The production is still a relatively small one, an independent production funded by a ragbag of Euro grants, small investors, the Liverpool Film Office and – most recently and most importantly – Hungry Head. Quinner doesn't care, just so long as it means
The Tunnels
gets made.

The movie is built around the Joseph Williamson tunnels: an apparently useless network of brick-lined, pre-Victorian engineered tunnels that sprawl under the Edge Hill part of the city. Some big, some small, most dilapidated, a few restored. Williamson, a rich eccentric, constructed them over two hundred years ago, apparently for no better reason than to give employment to locals. Teams of men stacked curving vaults on top of each other and toiled on winding shafts of brick-lined corridors and echoing caverns.

There's a peculiarly Liverpool mindset at work that Quinner wants to acknowledge in the construction of the vast, pointless labyrinth. He sees in Williamson's folly a complex metaphor for the city and its history.

Big Niall doesn't know a metaphor from a meat pie.

'Quinny!'

'Niall, you have to stop shouting, man. It's fucking up the sound.' Quinner doesn't mention how much it's fucking up his work. Niall doesn't count what his cousin Dean does – writing – as work. Explaining to Niall how his words make the transition from brain to screen would be like outlining the concept of infinity to a duck.

'Oh, right, yeah, soz, man.' Niall makes a zipping motion across his moon face. 'Me lips are sealed.' Niall has someone with him. A thin guy with a narrow forehead and a zoned-out expression. He looks at Quinner with an odd combination of sneer and fascination. He's wearing a baseball cap and Quinner immediately wants to punch him. He has one of those faces.

'What is it, anyway, Niall?' Despite the determinedly languid appearance of the crew, Quinner knows there's tension building with the next shot. It's going to be a difficult one and they all know it. The production only has the street until twelve and so far there have been problems, the latest being a recalcitrant wheel on the tracking dolly. Quinner needs Niall to stop hanging around.

'You know what I want, Quinny.' Niall does his puppy face and Quinner sags.

'Not again, Niall. I explained to you how it works. I can't just get you a job on here, mate. I'm working for them.' Quinner waves a vague hand in the direction of the shoot.

'I thought it was your film, like?' This is from Small Forehead.

Quinner looks at him and raises his eyebrows. 'It is, Niall's Mate Who I've Never Met, but I sold it. Sold the idea and script to the production company. Now it's
their
film. Was mine. Now theirs. Y'see how that works?'

Niall's mate nods. 'Yeah, right.'

Niall's eyebrows knit together and he points at a passing teenager wearing a location laminate around his neck and carrying a can of WD-40. 'That kid's workin' on the film. Who the fuck's he?'

Quinner's about to answer when he realises he's forgotten. Suddenly, the idea of going through all this again with Big Niall assumes the proportions of Hercules in the Aegean Stables. 'He's one of the actors, Niall,' Quinner lies. 'Fucken great kid. Big star soon. Huge.'

'Yeah?' says Niall, his expression brightening. He nudges Small Forehead with an elbow. 'D'yer reckon you could get me 'is autograph, like?'

Quinner nods. 'Sure, man. On one condition.'

Three

Nicky doesn't know if his job has a name but he doesn't care. He is on the set of a
movie
and the fairy dust is strong enough to lend everything he does a crackle of Hollywood electricity, even if all he's doing is lugging stuff from one place to another.

Being on location in Liverpool is a right buzz too, doubly so when Nicky walks past the small crowd of onlookers behind the wooden barriers marking out the filmmakers' territory. He's only grabbing a can of WD-40 from the camera truck but, striding purposefully through the temporary village of support vehicles camped out like an invading army in his home city, the crew laminate around his neck, it feels like it means something, makes what's been happening the past few years fade.

Nicky's black hair is cut short at the back and sides and is fashionably peaked at the front. He's on the small side, and thin, but not painfully so. He dresses sharp, his taste in clothes altering subtly over the past few weeks as he strives to fit in with the crew. Today he's wearing the new waxed biker jacket he picked up from Superdry. It cost a fortune but Dean wears something similar. The Superdry feels good on Nicky but it makes him feel conspicuous. Although no one has made any comment he's still young enough to worry about that kind of thing. He's got his own rolled-up script in the inside pocket of the new jacket, and the edges of it keep catching his skin through his T-shirt, a reminder to him of how cowardly he's been in not showing it to Dean Quinner. All the articles Nicky reads about the movies – and he reads them all – emphasise how important it is to seize any opportunity in the business. So far, he hasn't done a thing other than show up and he's getting nervous that the shoot will finish before he plucks up the courage.

Can in hand, he heads back to Terry Peters, Nicky's uncle and the sole reason Nicky is on set. Terry's the movie's go-to man: the gaffer. He gets plenty of work; the city is second only to London for movie and TV production. Big Hollywood multiplex stuff as well as smaller scale indies like
The Tunnels
.

Nicky hands over the can of WD-40 without saying anything.

'Cheers,' says Terry and uses the lubricant to free up a reluctant roller on the camera track. Terry gives the cameraman the thumbs up and the preparations for the take can begin again. Terry looks very like his brother, Nicky's dad: tall, loose-limbed, with grey, close-cropped hair and an air of capability. He's a man who would not look out of place fronting a house renovation TV show.

'Positions, please,' says Susie, the assistant director. 'We'll try for a take in two.'

Nicky slides back, well out of shot, hyper-conscious of his lowly status, and watches as the crew click into place around the two actors in the scene. Dean Quinner takes up a position next to Nicky, a script thick with loose sheets and Post-it notes dangling from his left hand.

'What's your name again?' It takes Nicky a couple of seconds to realise Quinner is talking to him. Quinner's tone is neutral.

'Nicky Peters, Mr Quinner,' says Nicky. 'Terry got me the job.'

'Terry?'

Nicky points at his uncle. Quinner grunts. 'Oh, right, yeah. I knew that. Shouldn't have had to ask. Lot of things on my mind, y'know?'

Nicky shuffles uncertainly. It's the longest conversation he's had with the writer since the shoot started. A corner of Nicky's script scrapes against his nipple, another gentle reminder from the god of ambition.
Show him
.

Quinner takes out a sheet of paper and a pen and hands it to Nicky. 'Listen,' he says, embarrassed, his tired eyes not meeting Nicky's. 'Sign this for me. Pretend you're signing an autograph.' Quinner turns and gives Big Niall the thumbs up.

'Shall I just sign my own name?' says Nicky. Susie glares at him and he lowers his voice as Quinner nods an answer. 'What's it for?'

'Long story,' whispers Quinner and takes the signed sheet. He
walks across to the large man behind the barrier and, after a quick word, comes back to watch the take. He stands next to the kid, both of them caught up in the scene. When it's over, Quinner turns to Nicky.

'What do you think?' Quinner's pointing in the direction of Ben Noone and Jon Carroll, the actors standing in the pool of light.