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

rep and people know better than to raise their heads above the parapet. The police have nominal dominion here. A grass is not tolerated. The idea that you may have talked is often enough to bring instant and brutal retribution.
    They crucified someone on these streets two years back. Literally. Fixed to a billboard with a nail gun. Keane remembers the guy lost a hand but wouldn't say a word. He didn't blame him. If he lived round here he'd have done the same.
    Keane doesn't live round here. Neither does Harris. No coppers do and haven't done since the late sixties when it all really started going to shit. The bizzies migrated north and south, to outlying suburbs, commuting in to police communities they're no longer part of. Thatcher's blood money poured into the force in the eighties and the cord was cut forever. Now on these granite-hard streets it's dog eat fucking dog and Keane, like everyone else in the force, gets paid to mop up the remains.
    With the Glassfield case, both Harris and Keane have known from the discovery of the body that the answer to finding the killer is, most likely, not going to come from hard police work. It's going to come from an arrest down the line and some toerag rolling over to negotiate a plea deal with the Crown Prosecution Service. At that level, drug murders are almost always cleared up within two years with relatively little connection to the snowdrifts of paper that accumulate round each and every MIT case.
    Keane gives Darren Halligan the eye as they cruise past. Keane is more familiar with the boy's older cousins, Mattyand Dean. Darren, a new fish, still has a way to go before he rises to their giddy heights.
    Darren Halligan watches Keane and Harris pass, his eyes sliding off them in the too casual way Keane has seen in thousands of encounters with his 'clients'. Without quite knowing how, the kid has clocked them instantly as filth. The skill – cop spotting – has by now taken on an almost genetic quality. Certainly there are generations of families like the Halligans that Keane and Harris have had dealings with, and they all seem to be ready to do battle the instant they leave the womb.
    But the links with the families are no cosy, local affair; bobbies on their bikes chasing rosy-cheeked apple scrumpers. Darren Halligan, and thousands like him busy spotting for low-level dealers, are the first point of entry for a tidal wave of drugs going in, out, and through Liverpool, the connections reaching into areas as murky as the Colombian Cali cartel, IRA hit squads and the seriously scary East European new boys.
    Keane presses the accelerator. Darren Halligan sitting astride his BMX watches them go and Keane turns his attention back to the case.
    The van on the green and the smelly garage both turn out to be useless. There is no guarantee the van hasn't been used by the killers – it has, after all, been reduced to a blackened husk, much like the victim – but once Keane and Harris get a look at the scene they're convinced this has been straightforward theft and mischief. The golf club is missing trophies that have been taken from a display case in the lobby. Keane can't see the type of ruthless killers he and Harris are looking for pausing en route to steal the Rotary Shield trophy. The only detail of possible drug involvement is that two scrambler motorbikes – the light, flexiblesort used in motocross – were spotted in the area immediately after the fire. The likely explanation is that they were stashed earlier and used to get away across the sand dunes and walking tracks that criss-cross the area. It's the bikes that catch Keane's ear. The use of this type of machine has become commonplace in drug-related incidents. Several drive-by shootings in recent years have involved scramblers. Invariably, if the police raid a house involved in drugs, one or two or more of the bikes are discovered. Their ubiquity is such that their existence at or near a drug raid is a signifier of guilt,