A Dark Place to Die (2 page)

'Crime scene. That's a laugh, Em. This place will be back under water in a few hours' time. And I told you before, less of that "Roy" shite, right? And what kept you?'

Keane, a Liverpool supporter, doesn't like the nickname he's been given; that of a famously aggressive former captain of Manchester United, Liverpool's despised rivals forty miles down the 62. Emily, from the blue, Everton half of the city, and knowing exactly how deep the hatred runs, makes it a point of honour to use it as often as possible. It doesn't help Keane's cause that he bears more than a passing resemblance to the footballer; insomniac eyes under a brooding brow, cropped grey-black hair, a
permanent five o'clock shadow and an air about him of someone who would welcome an argument on any given subject at any time.

Emily Harris rewards him with a half-smile and holds out her hands in an insincere placating gesture. 'Sorry,
Frank,'
she says. 'I was in an interview. The Glassfield thing.'

Harris, a black woman of middle height, and with the solid build of someone with a serious gym habit, cuts a striking figure. It is one of Keane's guilty pleasures to admire that figure on a daily basis. If Em Harris has ever known he's looking, she has never let it show.

Like Keane, Harris puts her glasses on, shielding the lenses from the sand-flecked wind with her latex-gloved hand, and peers closely at the corpse, all business.

'No lifeguard on duty, I take it?' she says, without looking up.

'Very funny. No, no lifeguards. They must have been transferred to California. Or Bondi. And no reports so far of anyone else seeing so much as a fucking dog. Still, early days, eh?'

Harris, feet smugly protected by the practical rubber boots she pulled from the boot of the car on arrival, moves in close, puts her nose a millimetre or two from the victim's cheek and inhales, seemingly oblivious to the sickening stench of burnt flesh.

'Paraffin. Or some other accelerant.' She announces this in the tone someone might use to describe the bouquet of a fine wine.

Keane is only part-listening. Good officer though she is, Em does have a habit of sometimes stating the bleeding obvious.

As if he'd spoken aloud, Harris looks up and then glances past Keane who turns to see the lumbering form of Callum
McGettigan, one of the MIT photographers, trudging towards them. McGettigan, a portly man wheezing like a broken accordion, is rumoured to have once been seen train-spotting on Crewe station, but Keane has always found him first class. If there's something worth recording at a crime scene, you can guarantee that McGettigan will bag a crisply lit image of it, meticulously recorded and cross-referenced. Sometimes you needed the trainspotters.

McGettigan dubiously sets down his bag of tricks on a patch of dryish-looking sand and rubs his face, sweating lightly despite the cold.

'You need long, Callum? I'd like to get the examiner in before we need to use a bastard submarine.'

'Give me a chance, DI Keane.' McGettigan lifts a camera to face level and makes an adjustment. 'I'll do my best, OK?'

Keane nods and steps aside to give the man room to work. He looks down at the dun-coloured sand around the corpse. 'Shit.'

Keane's not expecting much physical evidence from the scene, but there isn't a snowball's chance of anything useful still being here. Not after, what, eight, nine hours of being rinsed by the sea and scoured by the wind. Still, they – or more accurately, someone Keane and Harris assign to do the task – will have to run a quadrant search on a large section of the beach, down on their hands and knees, before the next tide.

'We'll make this quick,' says Harris as if Keane has spoken aloud. After three years working side-by-side, the two of them have developed a shorthand way of communication. It isn't telepathy, but it's close.

The sand looks firm but, as Keane has just found out the hard way, the application of any weight close to where
the pole is sunk into the beach rapidly turns it into a kind of gelatinous porridge.

'Why couldn't this one have had the good sense to be killed somewhere civilised, like a nice dry warehouse, or somewhere with CCTV at least?'

'You're getting soft.'

It begins to rain.

'Great. Fucking perfect.' Keane retracts his head down into the neck of his overcoat. He glances back at the promenade where the uniforms have begun to get things organised. At either end of the beach, crime scene tape is being strung out to stop anyone getting closer. The small crowd of onlookers is being shepherded to a suitable distance.

He flips open his mobile and checks on the arrival of the medical examiner. Stuck in traffic. Should be there within the half-hour. He pockets the phone and, leaving Harris and McGettigan with the victim, walks across the sands to where the uniform – Parkes, that was the feller, wasn't it? – is talking to the witnesses. With a jerk of his head, Keane beckons the officer over.

'They saw it? Like this? Close up, I mean, PC . . .?'

The uniform nods, his face creased into the wind. 'Norton, sir. Yes they did, sir. They say they didn't go close. They didn't need to. They've got binoculars. Pretty good ones too, so they got a real eyeful.'

The young officer gestures to where the chastened students sit quietly on the tailgate of a police Land Rover talking to a second policeman in uniform. 'The bloke puked. She seems calmer. Yorkshire lass. Might get a bit more from her, sir. My oppo's looking after them.'

'Get them back to the office,' says Keane, not unkindly. 'I want these people off the beach before they start
"remembering" things they didn't see. This is a crime scene, Parkes, not a day at the seaside. They'll be wearing kiss-me-quick hats next and asking for donkey rides.'

From the blank look that flickers across the young policeman's face, Keane sees that the man has no idea what a kiss-me-quick hat is, or was. It's things like that that are starting to make Keane feel his age. He also realises that he'd got the man's name wrong.

Keane turns away from Norton, trying to commit the name to memory by silently repeating it to himself three times. He'd once been told repetition helped with this kind of thing. It's a failing of Keane's – not remembering names – that is beginning to worry him more with every advancing year. Ever a hypochondriac, the word 'Alzheimer's' hovers in the ether. Phil Donnelly, one of Keane's first section bosses, and one of the sharpest coppers Keane had ever known, went that way early and went hard.

Leaving Norton talking into his radio, Keane checks with the various new arrivals and spends the next twenty minutes attending to the organisation of the crime scene, waiting for McGettigan to finish his photography and Em to get acquainted with the corpse and make her customary extensive notes. Eventually, the delegating done to Keane's satisfaction, the machinery working as it should be, he moves back towards the beach, meeting the photographer halfway.

'Should have everything online for you inside the hour,' puffs McGettigan. With the incoming tide there is a real reason for McGettigan to hurry the photographs. If he's missed something, getting the images turned around quickly may give him the chance to come back and shoot again. Keane gives him an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

'Cheers,' says Keane, and leaves the photographer waddling through the rain towards his car.

As McGettigan drives away, Keane sees the medical examiner pulling up and he hurries back towards the corpse. He wants to check that he and Harris present the victim to the ME in the way that will help them most effectively; mainly by stressing the importance of
their
case so that it leapfrogs other bodies on the examiner's slab. Liverpool isn't quite Johannesburg or Baghdad, but there are still enough cadavers for a queue to form. Most of them will be domestics or Saturday night specials, the victims no less important than Keane's guy, but certainly less rich in possibilities. Spinning the case as a crucial one, or, if Keane wants to be cynical, one likely to attract publicity, is a possible method of bumping it up the ME's list.

Keane looks back along the length of the beach and is struck once more by the resemblance of the corpse to the iron men strung out along the sand. Facing the same way. At the same height. Whoever has done this has even made sure that the victim's hands have been tied at his sides in the same posture as the sculptures. It shows an attention to detail, thinks Keane, even a twisted sense of humour.

Or a love of art.

Anything is possible.

He'd read recently about an art exhibition that consisted of dismembered corpses preserved in resin and positioned in allegedly artistic poses. Austria, was it? God help us.

'Look at this,' says Harris before Keane can speak.

Harris carefully raises the legs of her trousers to minimise the damage to the crease and squats to the height of the corpse's knees, her rubber boots squeaking as she does so. Keane tries and fails to avoid peeking down the sliver of cleavage that is visible at the front of her jacket. With
a silver pen, Harris indicates several areas of seemingly untouched skin that begin just below the victim's knee and run down to his feet.

'I noticed,' says Keane, remaining upright and staying on the slightly drier sand away from the base of the scaffolding pole, 'there's bruising, cuts, some discolouration.'

'But no burning,' says Harris.

'Which means . . .'

'That this poor sod had already been in the water long enough for the tide to rise when he was set alight. He's been brought out here, tied to the pole and covered in petrol –'

She stops and looks at Keane.

'And then someone's put a match to him.' Keane finishes off her story.

'Jesus,' says Harris. 'I hate this town sometimes.'

'Sometimes?'

Harris doesn't smile. Which is fine, it wasn't a joke.

'The ME's here,' says Keane. He nods back in the direction of the promenade. Three white-suited figures are walking across the sand.

'Right, Em,' says Keane. 'Let's get this wrapped up before they arrive, eh?'

Harris smiles without humour. 'And back home before
X-Factor?
No problem.'

Keane looks at the corpse's bare shins now exposed by the falling tide.

'There was one other thing,' he says. 'Did you notice?'

Harris raises her eyebrows in a question.

'The tan,' says Keane. 'This one's not from round here.'

2

Menno Koopman sits up in bed, stretches his lanky frame and blinks, momentarily unsure of his surroundings.

He's woken this way many times during the past two years.

Koop – no-one except his mother calls him Menno – shades his eyes from a bright shaft of sunlight splintering through the wooden blinds and it all clicks into place. Sunlight.

Not England.

He sinks back against the pillow, yawns and lifts his watch. Almost six-thirty. Mid-morning, if you were going on Australian country time. Which, since the move, Koop has been. Two years and a couple of months and he – they – have adjusted to that at least. In bed by ten as often as not, and up around six.

Back in the squad room in Liverpool, Detective Chief Inspector Koopman would have laughed long and hard if anyone had suggested that that would be the pattern of his days.

Eyes closed once more, he rolls over and puts his arm around Zoe, pressing his groin against her. His hand cups
her breast, his fingers brush a nipple. She stirs and glances over her shoulder.

'Koop?' says Melumi.

'Oh, sorry, Mel,' says Koop. 'Zoe there?' He opens his eyes, raises his head and looks over Melumi's shoulder. The other side of the bed is empty, the covers thrown back.

Melumi shakes her black hair. 'She's working, I think.' She stretches and sits up. 'You want a coffee or something?'

Koop nods. He watches Melumi swing her feet out of bed and pad across the floor to the door. His eyes follow her all the way, enjoying the fall and rise of her smooth buttocks. He'd forgotten Mel was coming over. She and Zoe must have come to bed after him.

They have a big bed.

Ringo, the dog, takes advantage of the bed's size by jumping up and settling down in the hollow Mel has vacated. He looks so ridiculously happy about it that Koop doesn't have the energy or inclination to push him off.

A couple of minutes later Mel comes back in with a cup of coffee. She places it on the table next to the bed and stands unselfconsciously petting Ringo, her trimmed black pussy in Koop's direct line of vision.

He feels his cock stir beneath the sheets. Koop can see why Zoe would go for her. She always did have a taste for the exotic.

Not that Melumi would be particularly exotic in Osaka, or Tokyo, thinks Koop, but for Zoe, from Bootle, it was different.

'Thanks, Mel,' he says, propping himself up on one elbow.

'Dou itashi mashite
, your Highness,' says Melumi. She bows sarcastically before bending coquettishly with a little
bob and picking up a t-shirt. She slips it over her head and leaves the room.

'I'll take a cup in to Zoe,' she offers over her shoulder before she and her perfect behind disappear into the kitchen.

Koop sips his coffee which, as usual, is excellent.

Definitely
not England. He shivers as he recalls the bucketloads of acrid swill he'd slugged down in canteens and greasy spoons for more years than he cared to think about. The Majorca off Hardman Street springs to mind as a particularly vile brew.

From the kitchen he hears the sounds of Mel clanking cups.

Melumi Ato, a linguistics lecturer at the local university, has been on the scene for a year, the latest in a series of friendships – is that the right word? – that Zoe has had for almost as long as Koop has been with her.

She's never made any bones about her bisexuality. It's been something that Koop could accept as an integral part of life with Zoe, or object to and live without her. It isn't just the sexual side, it's part and parcel of the complete Zoe package.

Not that he's complaining. Every man's fantasy, isn't it? And he was so often included in Zoe's sexuality that, for them, a threesome – and, on more than one occasion, a foursome – is no big deal.