A Dark Place to Die Read online

  '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 uni
versity, 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.

  He knows it isn't for everybody but it suits them. He and Zoe, and Zoe's girlfriends, live in the hills tucked away at the top end of the New South Wales coast, an area Koop had never so much as heard of three years ago and yet which now feels as much a part of him as Liverpool ever had, their nearest neighbour a few thickly forested acres away. For Koop and Zoe, brought up in the terraces of north Liverpool, this lush green rolling landscape is paradise. There is no other word for it. Koop sips his coffee and tries not to look as smug as he feels.

  If he knew what the day was going to bring, he'd have savoured the moment a little longer.

  3

  The police mortuary in the Royal – the Royal Liverpool University Hospital to give it its full, never-used name – is not high on the list of places Frank Keane would have chosen to be at any time. At 7.30 on a blustery, rain-swept Wednesday morning, in an October that is so far delivering more than its usual quota of barometric misery, it's close to being the absolute lowest. After spending the rest of Tuesday setting up the investigation and allocating staff, Frank wants to hit the ground running today. The autopsy's a good place to start.

  The staff at the mortuary have worked hard to convey the idea that this is just a shiny new medical facility by the addition of bright prints on the walls and pot plants along the corridors.

  Keane knows better. It's like putting make-up over a lesion. The atmosphere of the place leaches through the cream-painted walls. Perhaps it's the hush after the pandemonium of the rest of the hospital. Or maybe it's the sight of the waiting-room chairs that nobody ever sits in. The occasional muted whine from the surgical saws doesn't help.

  Keane signs in and walks towards the examination room. Harris is already there, her feet encased in bright blue paper bootees. Their body from the beach – Keane is already thinking of it as their body – is lying stiffly on the slab between Harris and Ian Ferguson, the medical examiner, a middle-aged man with the build of a marathon runner, which is exactly what he is almost every minute outside working hours.

  'Shoes,' says Ferguson. He jabs a pencil down towards Keane's feet.

  'And a very good morning to you too,' mutters Keane. 'Bloody miserable Manc twat.'

  'I heard that,' says Ferguson.

  Ignoring the Scot, Keane goes back through the doors, finds the bootee dispenser and, suitably clad, re-enters the examination room carrying with him an air of an Edwardian gentleman having been impossibly inconvenienced by an impudent footman.

  'Better?' says Keane.

  Ferguson grunts. It's all Keane's going to get out of him.

  'Morning, Frank,' says Harris.

  'Em,' Keane looks at the medical examiner. 'Morning, Fergie.'

  'Two-nil,' says Ferguson, deadpan, a man of few words, almost none of them pleasant. His team, Manchester United, managed by his red-faced namesake, are playing Liverpool later that day. Keane's six-thirty briefing included a reference to the measures the police at Anfield will be taking to keep the rival supporters apart. He imagines that he and Ferguson will manage without coming to blows.

  But it could be close.

  'In your fucking dreams,' says Keane. 'Three-one, to us.'

  Harris rolls her eyes. 'Can we get on with it?'

  Keane looks down at the body on the slab, feeling his stomach lurch as it always does in the autopsy room. He's never told anyone this still happens. It wouldn't be advisable for a senior MIT officer to admit something like that.

  'Always makes my stomach turn,' says Harris. She clearly doesn't share his reticence. It's something he admires about her. Em was Em and you took her her way or you didn't. It was all the same to her. Or maybe she knew more about Keane's dirty little secret than he thought?

  'Anything?' says Keane.

  Ferguson pauses and looks at Keane directly for the first time since he's arrived.

  'Well, he's definitely dead.'

  Keane gives a sour smile at the old joke and turns his full attention to the body on the table. The corpse has been worked on overnight. Ferguson, Keane knows, would have been here most of the time. The dead man lies on his back, a ragged red slash jarring against the blackened skin, running from the thorax to the sternum. The untouched, unburnt shins and feet lend the corpse a blackly comic and surreal aspect. Although not an art lover, Keane is reminded of a painting by Magritte he once saw at The Walker of a pair of battered boots morphing into feet.

  'I haven't closed him up yet in case there's something you want to check, although, quite frankly, I don't think I've missed anything. Nothing you'd spot anyway,' says Ferguson. He picks a clipboard up and reads. 'The victim was a male, height one hundred and eighty-one centimetres, aged somewhere between twenty and thirty-five, in excellent physical shape – until his death, obviously – and the cause of that death was asphyxiation.'

  'Drowned?' says Harris.

  Ferguson shakes his head. 'No oxygen. He was alive when he was set alight, but couldn't breathe due to the flames. He may have been unconscious through shock, or possibly already unconscious when the fire was lit.'

  'I hope so,' murmurs Keane. An imagined picture of the flaming man springs to mind. It's a striking image. Horrifying, yes, but striking too.

  And a question. Why had no-one seen it? Despite the relative isolation of the crime scene, a fire at night would have been visible for miles around, wouldn't it? He makes a mental note to check.

  'Either way,' continues Ferguson, 'it was the fire that killed him.'

  Keane nods and rubs his upper lip. It helps to block a little of the stench of charred flesh and chemicals that saturates the room. Keane had read once that the sense of smell is simply nerve endings responding to molecules of whatever you smelled drifting into your nasal cavity. Which means, if what he'd read is accurate, that bits of the dead man are inside his nose. He forces himself not to retch.

  'Anything else?' He barks this out, anxious not to let his fear become apparent.

  Ferguson eyes Keane curiously and hesitates before speaking.

  'He'd been tortured before he died. Badly too. Although I guess there's never a good way to be tortured, eh?'

  'In what way exactly?' says Harris, studiously ignoring Ferguson's weak joke.

  The medical examiner's eyes brighten. He's animated. Perky.

  'Quite ingeniously, actually. He'd been peeled.'

  For a moment Keane thinks he must have misheard.

  'What?'

  'Peeled,' repeats Ferguson. He mimes the action of peeling a banana. 'Although it was closer to peeling an orange. And it was restricted to his head.'

  DI Harris swallows and coughs quietly.

  Keane leans closer to the body, not because he wants to see anything but because it gives him an excuse to support himself on the slab. He pauses for a moment and then looks at the victim, the fresh horror of Ferguson's observation bringing the case rushing up Keane's unofficial priority list.

  'Peeled? How can you tell?'

  Ferguson points at the framed medical certificates that can be seen through an internal window sitting in a row above a desk.

  'How can I tell? That's how I can tell, Detective.' The Scot gives an almost imperceptible shake of the head, picks up a pair of stainless steel tweezers and bends close to the corpse. Keane and Harris lean in too.

  'The fire has charred the skin, blackened it, that's obvious. But petrol burns out reasonably swiftly. It was more than enough
to kill him, but you can see that the skin, or what's left of it, has lifted away from the tissue in an unusual pattern.' Ferguson delicately pulls up a flap of blackened skin from the victim's cheek and Keane feels his stomach lurch. He feels something else too, another tick upwards in his interest in the case. Even by recent local standards this victim has come in for some unusually florid treatment. 'See?' Ferguson continues. 'It's been sliced cleanly. I didn't do that – it wasn't part of the examination.'

  He drops the flap and moves his hand a few centimetres down the face. He lifts another strip of charred skin in a clear line running from under the jawline to somewhere near the top of the forehead. Ferguson lets it flop down and waves a rubber-gloved hand over the victim's head.

  'It's the same all the way round. Someone has taken their time with this one.' Ferguson is almost purring. 'You have to admire it in a way. Artistic.'

  'Artistic?' says Keane. Another flicker. Harris gets it too and they exchange a glance.

  'It would have taken some time,' says Ferguson. He straightens and walks to the other end of the slab. 'Your boys knew what they were doing.'

  'Boys?' says Harris. 'So there were more than one?'

  'It's not for me to say, but if I had to do something like this then I'd need someone's help. If only to keep him still.'

  'That's a point,' says Keane, looking up. 'How was he restrained? Anything on that?'

  Ferguson purses his thin lips and waggles a hand from side to side. 'Possible signs of a secondary ligature around the neck but nothing conclusive.'

  It's only eight and Keane feels like he's been on the job for hours. Not for the first time since Menno Koopman retired, the weight of his responsibility sits heavily on him. When Koop had been his boss, Keane could remember coveting the older man's job like he'd wanted nothing before; not even the arrival of Christmas as a ten-year-old.

  Now he has it, he isn't sure he wants it.

  Not on days like this. He pushes away from the slab and his eyes slide towards Harris. How does she look so crisp all the time?