A Dark Place to Die (3 page)

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?

'And there's this, of course,' says Ferguson. He taps his finger on the victim's leg just above the ankle. 'It's what we
in the business call "A Clue",' he says, never missing an opportunity to use the alleged lowest form of wit.

It's a tattoo and Keane gives a silent thank you to the god of police work. Tattoos have become a kind of short cut amongst victims. Those aged under forty mostly. Almost every investigation involving body identification since Keane has been on the MIT has been helped in some way by a tattoo.

'It's a strange one, though,' says Harris, who takes out her iPhone to snap a picture of it.

The tattoo is, compared to most, understated, even a little dated. It consists of a small banner with the words 'Fortius Quo Fidelius' written in an ornate script across an unfurling scroll in the centre. It's hard to read because a great discoloured bruise has distorted the image.

'Military?' says Keane. 'A football team motto?'

Ferguson shrugs. 'Your field,' he says.

'Might be a non-league team, I suppose,' replies Keane in a voice that clearly suggests he finds it difficult to believe anyone could have an allegiance to a club outside the Premiership. He does know a couple of Tranmere fans in the city but, like those people who claim to understand opera, or rugby, or camping holidays in the Dordogne, he thinks it's probably an affectation.

Harris holds up her iPhone. 'Praise be to Google,' she says. 'Fortius Quo Fidelius is the club motto of St Kilda Football Club.'

'St Kilda?' says Keane. 'Irish?'

Harris shakes her head.

'You were right about this one not being from round here. St Kilda are an Aussie Rules team. He's Australian.'

4

'The name Jacques Derrida mean anything to you? No? Deconstruction? "No text is discrete"? Ringing any fucking bells? Didn't think so. Hit the cunt again, Sean.'

Sean Bourke faces the naked man bound to the iron pole in the centre of the container and, like always, does exactly as he is told. And immediately. It doesn't pay to hesitate around Mr Kite. He bunches his fist and drives it hard into the man's stomach. The man pukes and makes a sobbing, strangled sound.

'The reason I'm telling you about Jacques fucking Derrida, you Australian convict gobshite, is not that I expect a maggot like you to have even heard of Jacques Derrida. He's not a cricketer, or a fucking rugby player, is he?'

Keith Kite spits out the words staccato, his brick-thick nasal Liverpool accent crackling the consonants and stomping the vowels flat. He paces slowly to one end of the bare metal container, the heels of his polished boots sending a reverberating boom around the space. Evil swirls around him, thick as oil.

'Fucking terrible acoustics in these containers, isn't there? But then, I suppose there always is in art galleries.'

'Galleries?' the man on the pole croaks.

'Kick him, Sean,' says Kite, his little eyes glittering. 'In the leg, hard, and make sure it hurts. He's interrupting me train of thought.'

Bourke lashes out and kicks the naked man full in the side of the ankle with the toe of his boot. The man screams and Kite puts his hands over his ears. 'Oi, oi, keep it down, Rolf! Fuck me.'

As the sound dies away, Kite comes closer and the man flinches.

'Doesn't
seem
like a gallery, I know. But that's what it is. And you know why? Because I said so. Because Jacques says that art is whatever the artist says it is. Or some such bollocks. It's so hard to make sense what any of them fuckers are saying, isn't it? Don't speak straight, always using fancy words. Mind you, I like fancy words. Like "conceptual". You are my conceptual piece, Australian. It might not have a large or particularly appreciative audience right now.' Kite gestures behind him to include the other four men in the room. Besides Bourke, there are two men standing back against one end of the container and another operating a professional-looking video camera mounted on a tripod. The white beam from the camera is the only light in the container. 'Just Sean,' continues Kite, 'who you've already met, Mr Halligan operating the camera, another Mr Halligan against the wall along with Mr North. You'll get to know Mr North a lot better very soon; in fact, it was his suggestion that we turned this little lesson into an art piece. Him being a naughty ex-art student once upon a time, ain't that right, Mr North?'

'Very naughty indeed, Mr Kite,' says North in a soft Irish accent. 'A bit Gilbert and George.' He's carrying a
Tupperware box, and dressed in a protective white suit, such as might be worn by a worker in a toxic chemical lab.