Down Among the Dead Men (28 page)

And: 'Imagine dying of a heart attack at the gym. I thought you were supposed to fucken get fit at them places?'

As far as Frank's aware, Val's never been to Jesus's gym once. He wonders what will happen to it now.

Around three, Frank hangs up the towel.

'I've got to go back to work, Val.'

Val breaks off and wraps her arms around Frank. She smells of whisky, strong perfume and cigarettes. 'Make sure you eat more,' she says. 'There's not a fucken pick on you. You're skinnier than a Chinaman's knob.'

'I thought you said Jesus was too fat?'

'Don't be fucken cheeky.' Val plants a wet kiss on Frank's cheek and holds him close. 'Go on, see you, Frankie. Next time it'll be my funeral.'

'Or mine.'

A woman comes in with another stack of plates and Val resumes her duties. 'Fuck off then,' she says, her back to Frank.

He weaves his way out of the house and goes back to Stanley Road because he doesn't know where else to go. He spends an hour shuffling paper and staring out of the window. Frank hadn't given Jesus much thought until he died. Now it feels like an unexpected hole in the road has opened up in front of him.

Eagles, Noone's lawyer, calls just as Frank's considering getting drunk. The lawyer tells Frank that Noone's going back to the US tomorrow.

'He will, of course, be available for any further witness statements.'

Frank hangs up without saying another word and looks at his watch. It's late. Too late to be here, that's for sure. He looks across the almost deserted MIT office to where Harris is typing. Frank catches her eye and she mimes lifting a glass to her mouth.

'It's Thursday,' says Harris.

Frank could kiss her.

'Did you ever consider you just might be wrong, Frank?' Harris says as the two of them are walking towards the Albert Dock. Parking's easy there and Frank can always leave his car if he's had a few. The rest of MIT are at The Phil but neither Frank nor Harris feels like going. She doesn't talk about the funeral.

'I think I might be.'

Harris looks at him. 'Seriously?'

Frank nods. 'Could be.'

'Wow. This could be a first.'

'I didn't say I
was
wrong,' says Frank. 'I said I could be.' He opens the door to the pub. Inside they get their drinks at the bar and find a seat. The place is busy with drinkers but most of them prefer to stand.

'Cheers,' says Harris and clinks her G & T against Frank's beer.

For a while they just sit quietly and drink. Eventually Harris asks how the funeral was and Frank tells her about Val Penaquele and the washing-up.

'You hear much from Julie lately?' says Harris. The pub as always is neutral territory. Here Keane and Harris are Frank and Emily.

'Mm,' says Frank. 'Yes. She's OK. I spoke to her yesterday.' He looks up at Harris. 'She was fine. Worried about me. And she'd been watching the news.'

'Had you told her your theories?'

'No. But she must have known something was wrong. I'd say it was intuition but you'd probably kick me.'

'Why don't we leave it as sensitivity and that way I can keep my feet on the ground? Maybe Julie just knows you well.'

Frank lets it go. A teenager comes to the table and collects some empties. The boy is around Nicky's age.

'You still think I'm wrong about Noone, don't you?' says Frank after he's gone.

Harris sucks her lower lip. 'On balance, yes. I think you got a feel about him. Maybe he's naughty on some level, I don't know. But I think you might be wrong about him being connected to the case. There's not much we can make stick, is there?'

Frank's thinking about the encounter in the toilets at Bean.

'He has been untouchable, hasn't he?'

'Because he's not guilty?'

'Well, maybe.'

Frank looks round the pub. He spots a couple of people he'd rather not see. A perennial policeman's problem. Harris is looking at him.

'You want to go?'

'Not really,' says Frank. 'We were here first.'

Harris puts a hand on his arm. That's not what she means. 'Your flat's just down the road,' she says. Frank could fall into those brown eyes if he let himself. 'You want to go there?'

Frank looks at his drink. 'But we're not drunk.'

Harris stands up. 'That's one of the reasons I'd like to go.'

It's better the second time.

Richer somehow.

They shower and get into Frank's bed.

This time there's no booze and no weed and, while Em's lovemaking is intense, there's no repeat of the pain and game-playing. It's different and Frank feels something give.

Afterwards they do talk, freely for once, about Julie and Linda, and about how things aren't simple. They talk about the disconnection between the person they are and the labels used to describe them. Cop. Lesbian. Married. Frank talks about the
funeral. Nothing gets resolved but that feels OK too. There's something about the mood they're in, about the experiences they've gone through, that make anything feel rich in possibilities. Frank can't speak for Em but he hasn't had enough of those times in his life. The feelings that people have, and the things they say to one another at times like this, are inevitably clichés. Frank couldn't care less. I don't want this to stop, he thinks.

Fifty-Seven

From the bedroom Frank hears the vibration of his phone. One ring only – a message or an email notification. He checks his watch. It's just after two and Em's lying next to him. He doesn't need to answer the message but he wouldn't mind a cup of tea.

Careful not to disturb Em, Frank eases out of bed and pulls a pair of shorts on. He pads into the living room rubbing his face, tired but with a looseness in his shoulders that hasn't been there for a long time. This thing with Em, he doesn't know what it is or where it might go, but he likes it.

He closes the bedroom door and switches a lamp on next to the sofa. Sitting down, he picks up his phone and opens the message. It's an email notification from his public MIT account: the address he has on the card he leaves with witnesses and other officers. The address and card are new and seldom used. Until this message he hadn't even known the system pushed the notifications his way.

Frank leaves the phone on the table and puts the kettle on. As the water begins to hiss he sits down and accesses his MIT email account on his laptop.

The email is from an address with a long list of letters and numbers and has one word in the subject line:
Exeunt
.

The message is a single line:
When the players are all dead, there needs none to be blamed
.

Frank looks at it blankly. Seriously? He thought this nonsense only took place in the pages of crime fiction. He closes the laptop and leans back on the sofa, his eyes closed. It can wait until morning.

He knows it won't.

At the click of the kettle switching off, Frank gets up and makes a cup of tea. By the time he's back on the couch he's more alert.

Players
.

Frank flips open the computer and looks at the email again. He opens Google and types the line into the search box.

The first answer that comes up tells him it's Shakespeare.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
.

The line's spoken by Theseus.

Frank's wide awake now.

Noone sent the email. It's as clear to Frank as if Noone were there speaking to him directly. Who else beside an actor would quote Shakespeare?

Frank looks at the email address. He'll get Rose and the computer forensics onto it in the morning, but he's willing to bet he'll draw a blank. Then he remembers that Steve Rose is pulling an all-nighter. Worth a shot.

Frank calls Stanley Road and gets put through.

'DC Rose,' says Frank, keeping his voice low.

'Boss.' Rose can't keep the surprise from his voice. 'Working late?'

'Something like that. Listen, can you see if you can trace this email address for me?'

Frank reads out the sequence of letters and numbers, Rose repeating them as he speaks.

'Give me a call when you've had a chance to take a look,' Frank says. 'I don't think there's any rush –'

He stops as Rose interrupts. "I don't need to look it up,' he says. 'I know whose address that is. It's a Hotmail account used by Terry Peters. Seen it so often over the past week I know it off by heart.'

Frank doesn't say anything.

'Boss?'

'Yeah, OK, Steve, ta. Just something that was nagging at me. You're sure it's Peters' email?'

'Just checked, DCI Keane. It's his. That's the email most commonly used from his phone.'

'Thanks, Steve.' Frank hangs up.

Terry Peters has been dead a little more than a week.

Frank considers waking Em but thinks better of it. Instead he Googles 'Theseus'.

When the first Wikipedia page loads, Frank knows what this is about. As he reads the myth of Theseus descending into the labyrinth he knows what the email's telling him.

Nicky's in the tunnels.

Fifty-Eight

It was risky keeping hold of Terry's phone but there's no denying that it had been worth it. Just thinking about the look on Frank Keane's face as he read that bullshit message makes Noone smile.

This is the fun part. Like a movie but better because it's for real.

Noone taps some keys in New York and moves the pawns around the board in Liverpool.

He's at JFK waiting for a JetBlue connecting flight to Los Angeles and the airport's still busy with commuter traffic. Once he's sent the text to Keane, Noone carefully deletes all numbers and messages on Terry's phone and takes it into the bathroom. In a stall he places the phone under a wad of toilet paper and puts the weight of his heel on it. He wraps the pieces in the toilet paper and flushes what he can down the pan. The rest he puts into the washroom trashcan, making sure the pieces are pushed down deep.

The text should do the trick. What's the point of a performance if nobody knows it was you up there on stage? If Keane's as smart as Noone thinks he might be, then this will be enough. It doesn't occur to Noone for a second that Keane will ever be in a position to pin this thing on him.

Nothing sticks to Ben Noone. Nothing.

The whole episode on the other side of the Atlantic is already taking on the feel of a fairy tale. A spectacularly grim one, but still a fairy tale. Here, surrounded by the absolute concrete reality of America, even the idea of Liverpool seems ridiculous somehow. The messy killings belong to somebody else, a Noone trying on clothes for size. Noone's always had this capacity to separate the events in his life into neat bundles. He's pleased to see that he's not
experiencing any of those post-event psychological meltdowns. If anything he's sleeping better. Fuck that
Macbeth
shit.

And he's full of ideas.

The killings have sparked off something that – now it's been dragged into the open – has been squatting at the back of his mind since his mother died. Since he found out.

It had only been the fear of taking that final step; he can see that clearly now. All the thefts, the sex games, the crap he'd been filling up the space inside with, had been swept away that night in Nicky's house.

The thing with Terry and Nicky hadn't been planned, although Noone knew the moment he bought the taser – a spontaneous decision – he was going to kill somebody. There are things he did during the killings which he was proud of in the immediate aftermath – planting the e-receipt at Burlington Road, muddying the car plates, keeping himself out of the forensics – but here in New York some of those 'clever' touches are starting to seem like the work of an amateur. The receipt, thank Christ, was charged against a PayPal account a long-departed druggie girlfriend had set up in Berlin. The girl had died – an overdose, nothing to do with Noone – and he'd used the account from time to time. This was just as well since it's obvious that with a taser being used in the killings, Frank Keane would have gone over the receipt in depth. If there'd been any link back to himself, Noone would have heard by now. But it had still been a dumb risk.

That is something that is going to change.

Noone looks at his watch. He still has more than an hour before his plane leaves. He leans back on the airport bench and goes over the killings – the first ones – in his mind.

It's Friday after the end of the third week's filming and they're all at Maxie's. They're down in the tunnels again next week and Noone's already bored out of his mind with the movie. Filming is nowhere near as much fun as he'd hoped. All that waiting around. Everyone impressed because he can act. Like it's hard.

The plain truth is that he's been acting all his life. Other than when having sex, or asleep, Noone can't recall a time when he hasn't, even for a moment, not been playing a role of one sort or another.

Child. That was one.

Isolated teen. He'd tried that for a while and then discarded emo angst for a country club tan and popularity. In his travelling twenties he'd found a skin he could live with, for a while at least, and then that too had come to a halt with the death of his mother and the secrets that had spilled out.

At the club they did some coke that Lomax had come in with. New stuff. It had been Nicky's first time and it had given the kid a serious jolt. It was fun watching him until that Aussie fuck of a barman had been giving them a hard stare and Terry got worried the guy might get an attack of conscience. Noone remembers thinking about making the barman the first one but the guy looked like he could handle himself.

Instead they leave early, in Noone's car, Lomax having already gone elsewhere. Nicky's parents are out late and he's supposed to be staying at Uncle Terry's. They'll have the place to themselves for a few hours. Terry's keen to take some photos of the fun but Noone's not going to let that happen.

He's got the taser in his pocket. Along with the receipt. A psychiatrist would say Noone knew then what was going to happen. They could go to Noone's flat but they choose to go to Southport. Did he know then? Noone's not sure. He could make the case that Nicky and Terry live in Southport so it's easier for them to go north, but when was the last time Ben Noone did someone a favour?