A Dark Place to Die by Ed Chatterton Read Free Book Online

eighteenth green.
    For Keane, the positioning of the vehicle looks worthy of further consideration. It's something that, as an avowed hater of all things golf and golf-related, he can almost appreciate. Provoking a volcanic reaction by depositing a blazing van in the middle of the pristine green speaks of a twisted sensibility not without humour. Pitch-black, Liverpool humour, but humour. Even so, the flaming Transit feels like the work of kids. But well worth a look.
    The second call concerns a rented lock-up garage on the Dock Road. A disgruntled renter at an adjacent garage called to say that a bad smell was coming from the neighbouring property. That in itself isn't particularly interesting, so much as the name of the company listed as renting the unit in question: Gormley Creations. A coincidence that the company has the same name as the sculptor? Keane doesn't believe in coincidence.
    The last of Keane's picks is a call from a 'frightened' kid – the dispatcher's word on the log – who had phoned asking for someone to take a look inside a container near the north-western end of the Seaforth Freeport. Besides the location, the nearest to the body, what piques Keane's interest is that the caller would have known it was a risk calling the police: whatever they'd been doing inside the Freeport was illegal.
    'Let's go,' he says, picking up his jacket from behind his chair.
    Harris, despite her outward appearance of diligence at her keyboard, doesn't need to be asked twice.
    They take Keane's car, a silver VW Golf which he's had for almost two years. If cars reflect their owners, the Golf is bang on the money so far as Keane is concerned. Tougher than it looks and moves quickly when it needs to.
    For his part, Keane doesn't give his car a moment's thought. Never a petrolhead, the VW is something he'd bought to get around in, no more.
    He and Harris cut through Everton Valley and drop down through the red-brick badlands of Kirkdale and Bootle towards the Dock Road, the streets so familiar to Keane that he could have navigated them in his sleep;something that, in his patrol car days, he'd come closer to doing than he cared to think about.
    This area is rich in pickings for policemen. Kirkdale, Keane has read in last weekend's papers, is now officially the most deprived area in Europe. The Halligans, one of Liverpool's largest disorganised crime families, live here, a tangled network of graft, violence and intimidation spread like a cancer through the close-set Victorian-terraced streets and shabby seventies housing projects built on the bomb sites left by the Luftwaffe. Thirty years after the war, Keane can just about remember seeing the acres of rubble, the odd pub left in place; an oasis in the wilderness.
    Keane and Harris automatically log incongruities as they drive: a gleaming and unmolested Porsche Cayenne four-wheel drive parked outside a house that cost less than the car's gearbox. Unmolested for a reason. A lone teenager about sixteen, mobile in hand, circles the end of a street on a bike several sizes too small, and notes the traffic.
    'Halligan at three o'clock,' says Em Harris. 'Darren.'
    Keane's eyes flick towards the youth, his interest piqued at the name. He slows the car a fraction.
    'Siobhan had a run-in with him last week on Glassfield. Needless to say, he knew nothing.' Harris is talking about another case on Keane's slate; this one a fairly low-level turf beef between the younger members of two of the north Liverpool 'squads', which ratcheted up a notch when James Glassfield, eighteen, was killed and his body tossed onto the lines at Bootle, not far from the location of the infamous Bulger toddler murder. The theory MIT are working on is that it was an 'of the moment' crime involving a number of youths. As expected, local help from the community in finding Glassfield's killer has been precisely zero.
    With good reason.
    Despite his youth, James Lee Glassfield was a significant local dealer with a growing