A Dark Place to Die Page 9

  Kite sits back, vibrating with fury, still smiling. For a moment Stevie thinks of running, such is the violence contained in the man opposite him. Then, in an instant, Kite is ice. He sips the last of his brandy and looks at Stevie. Stevie's mind is flashing one phrase over and over again: get out, get out, get out, an adrenaline-fuelled instinctive scream. Jimmy made a mistake with this guy. A great big fucking grade-A mistake and Stevie's left in the middle of it.

  'I'll pass along your . . . thoughts to Jimmy,' says Stevie. He pushes his chair back from the table and begins to rise. 'I'm sorry it hasn't worked out, Mr Kite.'

  'Sit the fuck down, Australian,' says Kite. 'You're going nowhere.' He glances at North. Stevie follows the direction and sees North has a gun. North holds it casually under a linen napkin, its ugly snout poking straight at him.

  'I know you might be thinking that Mr North wouldn't kill you, Mr White, not here in front of all these lovely people eating their lovely dinners, but let me tell you that Mr North will do whatever is fucking necessary. Even if that does get very messy, understand? And it would get very messy, trust me. Mr North doesn't want to kill you here, but he will, if you so much as fart. For all I know, he may kill you anyway. He has a dislike of people generally that I sometimes find hard to accommodate.'

  Stevie nods and sits down.

  'There's no need for guns, Mr Kite,' says Stevie. Under the circumstances his voice is steady but he can feel a wetness in his eyes. 'This is just business, right?'

  'Just business is right,' says Kite. 'Only we do things a bit differently over here in the mother country. Which you're about to find out.'

  This is heading south in a hurry. Stevie feels sweat trickle down his spine and he has an overpowering urge to go to the toilet. He tries to catch the eye of a passing waiter but the waiter looks away, suddenly busy.

  At a nod from Kite, Matty Halligan leaves the restaurant.

  'When Mr Halligan arrives with the car,' says Kite, 'you're going to get up, walk across the room and get in it without any fuss. You're a big lad, and you look like you've been in a few nasties, but don't think that's going to help you here. Right?'

  'Yeah, yeah, OK, Mr Kite, but there's no need for any of this, none at all. And I'll need to get the message back to Jimmy.' Stevie can't keep the panic out of his voice.

  'Here's the car,' says Kite. 'Now stand. There's a good lad. If you can. Jimmy will get the message.'

  Stevie rises unsteadily and Kite walks him towards the door, a genial nod to the head waiter, the bill put on the tab. Kite drapes an arm over Stevie's shoulder, every inch the genial host. With North following close behind them, they reach the door and Dean Halligan holds it open, the Liverpool wind cutting through Stevie's jacket.

  'Tell me, Mr White,' says North, the Irishman's lilt low in Stevie's ear as the car door is opened. 'Are you in the way of being an art lover?'

  16

  It's lunchtime. Keane and Harris pull up their collars against the rain and splash across the wet cobbles from the car and into Ye Cracke.

  The old pub stands halfway down a side road leading off Hope Street; only one street from the site of Stevie White's last meal. There are photographs of musicians drinking in there, and the walls are hung with drawings produced by artists who'd gone on to (sometimes) better things, their bar bill paid by art, or maybe just left there. The area's stiff with artists, the art school round the corner spewing out a steady supply. The ceiling is low and coated in a thick patina of nicotine, a memory of the days when smoke was as much a part of a pub as beer and casual violence. The walls don't seem to have been repainted, the decor not altered much in the twenty-odd years Keane has been drinking there, the dead hand of modernity not reaching this far up the city, or at least not into this patch, not just yet. It's one of the reasons Keane prefers it.

  He bags a seat in the corner, back to the wall as always, in a booth that gives him and Harris privacy. Keane would have preferred a seat in the courtyard, a tiny, secluded bolt-hole at the back of the pub. But the rain puts paid to that and they'll have to stick inside. The downside of being a copper is that people recognise you everywhere you go. The kind of recognition that comes when you haul someone out of bed at 4 am and arrest them.

  Experiences like that tend to sour a person's view of you, Keane has always found.

  Another reason for choosing the pub: to Keane's knowledge the pub is 'clean'. No history of drugs, no known gangland connections, no ex-cons working security. It's also the closest decent boozer to the police HQ at Canning Place where he's due for a meeting with his boss after lunch; The Fish himself, DCI Eric Perch, the coldest man Keane has ever encountered – and that includes a serial killer currently undergoing treatment at Ashworth. Perch is missing the tips of two fingers after an accident with a lawn-mower – at least that was the story. Keane prefers the canteen gossip that Perch is a zombie who got peckish one night.

  Perch's promotion from outside MIT had been greeted with the enthusiasm usually reserved for prostate exams. But, despite the misgivings, The Fish does at least get results, Keane has to give him that. He achieves this in a very simple way: by cracking his teams hard and ruthlessly. Officers who don't produce find their careers mysteriously stalled, leave requests denied, their transfers to unpopular postings hastened.

  But the man gives Keane the heaves, plain and simple. If meeting The Fish for a case status update doesn't warrant a lunchtime bevy, Keane doesn't know what does.

  Harris comes back from the bar with the drinks. Cranberry juice for her, Becks for him. Faces following her as she passes.

  'Thanks,' says Keane and takes a guilty pull. He's never been much of a lunchtime drinker but lately finds himself drifting into having the odd one here and there. Ever attentive, and seldom slow to criticise himself, Keane has dryly noted the shortening gaps between the 'odd ones'. He'll have to watch that.

  Right now, though, the beer tastes good.

  'Koopman,' says Harris, raising an inquisitive eyebrow. It's both a question and a statement. She takes a small sip of her drink and looks at Keane over the top of the glass. Keane tries not to let his lust show. There is, as always, an element of sexual tension crackling between them. Just enough to help the working relationship along; not enough for it to spill over into anything messy. Keane is very happy with Julie and has been for the past three years. Harris is in a long-term relationship with a theatre nurse at Broad-green. Keane knows Harris isn't covering up her sexuality – it's simply nobody's damn business except hers – but he also has a suspicion, never to be voiced, that Harris strays from time to time with men. He isn't sure what the lesbian community's feelings are on things like that, and he sure as shit doesn't intend to have a cosy discussion on sexual politics with DI Harris to find out. Not if he wants to keep both his testicles.

  'Menno Koopman,' says Keane. 'My old boss. He'd taken an early before you arrived.'

  Em Harris makes a gesture of encouragement for Keane to keep talking.

  'Well, despite the clog-hopper name, he's as Scouse as me and you. And a good copper, really good, a pit bull when it came to the job. Once Koop got the sniff of something, he was on to it and wouldn't let go. A networker, before the word existed. He knew everyone and everything worth knowing. We worked on a lot of cases together and Koop took me under his wing. I was already a copper with a solid ten years, but he turned me into something else. You know what I mean.'

  'Yes,' says Harris. Most decent DIs have had some sort of similar mentoring experience, sometimes good, sometimes bad, that has turned them moment by moment into the policeman or woman they've become. The arrival of The Fish at the Canning Street HQ signalled an unwelcome change to that tradition. The Fish might get results but he is never going to be asked out on the monthly MIT Friday night sessions; a throwback to the good-old/bad-old glory days of boozing bizzies in the swashbuckling seventies and eighties that is proving highly resistant to the cultural shift. Even Harris goes along sometimes.

  'And his
son? Stevie?'

  'I had no idea. Not until Eckhardt told us. He certainly never mentioned him, but why on earth would he? He was only seventeen, and then the kid was taken to Australia. And that was back when Australia was a long way away. Not like now.'

  'It hasn't drifted closer, Frank.'

  'You know what I mean. Faster planes, cheaper tickets. The internet. Globalisation. Blah blah. Everything's nearer.'

  The team have done a bit of digging and discovered that Steven White, just as Eckhardt had said, had been born Steven Brendan Koopman, and his place of birth listed as Liverpool, England. It hadn't taken very long to discover that the Menno Koopman named as 'father' was the same Menno Koopman who had gone on to become a Liverpool copper. Like there'd be two fuckers with a name like that in the city.

  'And now his kid's turned up kebabbed. What a fucking mess.'

  'He hasn't seen him since 1975, Frank. How do you think he's going to react?'

  Keane takes a drink and lifts his eyebrows. 'Good question.'

  He leans forward. 'I told you he was a good copper, right? Well, there was another side to Menno Koopman. You can decide for yourself if it's a good thing or a bad thing.'

  'What happened?' said Em.

  'It was a long time ago,' says Keane. 'Well, it seems like it to me, anyway.'

  1996. The summer of the European Championships and England in the semi-finals. Oasis in the charts. Britpop. The Spice Girls. The corruption-riddled Tories teetering at the edge of eighteen years in power. It is a rare flowering of optimism for a country almost addicted to misery.

  In Liverpool the body count is rising.

  A savage new breed of criminal has entered the water. Brazen assassinations, the more brutal the better, are becoming, if not commonplace, certainly more frequent than they'd ever been. The city, the criminal part of it, is awash with money. The drug business is booming; ecstasy outstripping alcohol as the chosen Saturday night special for millions. The drug has leapt from the hardcore club scene into the mainstream and the consequent rewards for those who don't mind getting their hands dirty are astronomical.

  Guns begin to be used as never before, and with little discrimination. Small-time dealers, who once would have been warned off with a going-over in the pub car park, are found bound, gagged and tortured on wasteland. Exotic gestures borrowed from half-digested movies are added to their corpses: bags of excrement, flowers, dead fish. Keane remembers one case – not a murder this time – in which a stubborn club owner, unwilling to let a rival install a new 'security firm' on the doors, woke in bed to find, not just a horse's head as a warning, but an entire horse. It is the logistics of the operation that appals and amuses the investigating team in almost equal measure: the horse stolen, not without difficulty, from a local stud. The hooker paid to slip something in the club owner's drink to ensure an unconscious state while the dead horse is placed in his bed.

  By a forklift no less.

  But that sort of effort is rare. In the main, the new gangsters model themselves on fictional and non-fictional Americans who use extreme violence as a brutal business tool. It's an escalating cock fight that is rapidly turning Liverpool and nearby Manchester into the Wild Wild North. Keane, freshly promoted to DC, is assigned to one of the top-level initiatives designed to damp down the volcano. Gangs are opening up hitherto undreamed of connections to the Colombians, even getting so cocky as to start double-crossing them. Links with the post-Troubles IRA are becoming worrying, especially the rumoured hook-up with the paramilitary group's feared 'Cleaners', a hit squad rumoured to have been involved in at least twenty drug deaths in the city. It is in this atmosphere that Operation Footfall is launched in 1996 and Menno Koopman becomes a DI in charge of a section.

  Like The Fish, he's very clear what he wants from his team: results. Unlike The Fish, Koop sets about achieving this through turning his team into a single body, unified by a common will. It's simple, Koop tells them. We are the good guys. The gangsters are the bad guys. He wants every bad guy off the streets. Zero tolerance. A clear idea.

  And equally clearly impossible.

  But they give it a good try.

  Koop brings in the video tape of The Untouchables – the one with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery – and makes the section watch it late one night in the briefing room. When Connery delivers the famous 'They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue,' line they all cheer. It's corny as hell but it works. Over a period of months Koop slowly turns them into a formidable force and is ruthless in his pursuit of the stated objectives.

  He gives no quarter to the 'enemy' as he calls them and never, ever, stops chasing. If he can't get someone picked up for the big stuff he picks them up for the little stuff.

  And then he does it again. And again.

  It is a war which Koopman convinces them all they are fighting for the soul of the city, a romantic notion that doesn't sit naturally with the cynical, seen-it-all city cops. But such is Koop's conviction that Keane is sure it was embraced on some level by everyone in the section. Koopman is a crusader. He pushes his team harder, pays more attention to detail than any other copper in the city. He cuts corners but never, so far as Keane can remember, over-steps the mark. It's a heady time.

  The team wades into the criminal fraternity, the extended feral families on wasteland estates in Halewood and Kirkdale and Netherley, or the semi-organised collections of city centre dealers, thugs and killers. An embryonic drug network is spreading out from Liverpool, into Amsterdam, Marbella, Turkey, and beyond to Colombia. The money is incredible – simply astonishing – and, as in past centuries, Liverpool is handily placed to act as a distribution hub. Police estimate that the world cocaine trade alone is worth over two billion pounds a year with an abnormally large percentage of that money flowing through the hands and pockets of Liverpool operators. Men who have grown up selling £5 bags of weed to schoolfriends at the sprawling comprehensives dotted around the city are now multimillionaires. Apocryphal stories abound. In 1998 Dutch police raid the villa of one of Liverpool's big players and recover four hundred kilos of cocaine, fifteen hundred kilos of cannabis, sixty kilos of heroin, fifty of ecstasy, as well as guns, ammunition, cash and crates of CS canisters. The entire haul totals £125 million. The police also estimate this particular entrepreneur owns more than three hundred UK properties, as well as casinos, discos, vineyards, and has interests in football clubs in Spain, Turkey, Bulgaria and the Gambia. The guy makes The Sunday Times 'Rich List' in 1998.

  And he is only one.

  A crop of hustling likely lads on the make emerge from Norris Green, Croxteth, Netherley, Speke, Bootle, Kirkdale, The Dingle, and from outlying towns like Skelmersdale and Kirkby. Operation Footfall logs them into a database and uses the information in a fast-moving effort to stem the flow.

  'It wasn't working,' says Keane. 'But Koop didn't give a shit. He was enjoying it, in a funny kind of way. It was why he'd gone into policing; why most of us did. It couldn't last at that pace, though, and the unit was moved on, reassigned in a shake-up in 2000. Koop went into MIT and the rest you know.'

  Keane drinks his beer.

  'So is there anything else about Koopman?' says Harris.

  Keane looks at his partner coolly.

  'Well, there is one thing,' says Keane. 'There's Carl.'

  17

  'You're what?'

  Zoe is as angry as he's ever seen her. Koop almost smiles as he imagines cartoon steam coming out of her ears but doesn't allow himself to so much as twitch a muscle. Had he done so, he is sure she'd hit him.

  'I'm going back, Zoe. You knew I would.'

  'To Liverpool?'

  'Of course to Liverpool. Where else would I be going back to?'

  'I don't know!' she says, throwing her arms in the air. 'Zambia makes as much sense as fucking Liverpool! Why not stop off at Minsk, or Potsdam, or fucking Helsinki while you're at it!?'

  At the raised voices, Ringo puts his
tail between his legs and heads for the safety of the area behind the couch. Koop watches him, a wistful look in his eye. He wishes he could join him. Zoe in full flow is like a cyclone. You just had to strap yourself to the mast and let the thing blow past, hoping not to get physically injured in the process.

  As she rages around the house, it doesn't help Koop that she's right.

  What business does he have in Liverpool? Stevie was his son, but only technically. What does he think he'll achieve?

  Nothing. That's almost certainly going to be the result. Koop is enough of a pragmatist to know that even a couple of years out of the loop will probably have rendered him, to all intents and purposes, useless.

  But that doesn't mean he won't try.

  Zoe pauses, leaning on the kitchen island, looking out across the garden. Her breathing is heavy and Koop stays silent. Then he notices a tear trickle down her face and he moves solicitously forward, his expression stricken.

  'Don't you fucking dare!' Zoe angrily wipes her cheek with the back of her hand and begins noisily emptying the dishwasher.

  'Zoe,' says Koop. He opens his mouth but doesn't know what else to say.

  'I'm alright.' She clatters some plates into a cupboard and bends back to the dishwasher.

  'This isn't about us,' says Koop. 'It's nothing to do with . . . you know.'

  You know.

  There it is, out in the open. A part of their lives they have tacitly agreed not to air.

  'Yes it does,' says Zoe. 'Of course it's got something to do with you going to Liverpool. It's got everything to do with it, Koop.'