The Tattooed Man (14 page)

‘I’m sorry to intrude but it’s urgent. The commissioner needs to know.’

‘Does he?’

‘That’s what I said.’

Again a pause.

‘How’s your boy, mate?’

‘What?’

‘Your boy. Sean. Didn’t he just go over to Perth with his wife and kids? He upped and left overnight. Surprised everyone.’

‘Sean’s doing very well over there, as you’d expect. Marie and the children are happy. Why are you asking?’

‘I just wondered why he felt like a change of scene so quickly.’

Harrigan listened to the silence. Marvin didn’t even seem to be breathing.

‘What’s your point?’ he finally asked.

‘You spent some time this morning giving my inspector grief. You tried to get the both of us dumped from this investigation. You keep pushing your nose in where no one wants it. I don’t think you should try any of that again if you know what’s good for you and your boy. I think you should take a very hands-off attitude from now on. Because if you don’t,’ Harrigan twisted the knife, ‘maybe you won’t ever get to be commissioner. Because maybe you and your boy will be looking for new jobs together.’

Again, silence.

‘What are you talking about?’ Marvin said eventually.

‘What fell into my hands today from Freeman. He had it in for you, mate. Even more than he did
for me. He wanted to get you and your boy and he thought I might help.’

‘Tell me what you’re talking about.’

‘A tape and a bunch of photographs. Your boy doing business with some people very well known to Jerry Freeman and having a good time with some very lithe sex workers. You’d better hope his wife doesn’t see those pictures, because if she does she’ll be packing her bags.’

‘Does your companion know anything about what’s on the tape or those photographs?’ Marvin asked.

‘She knows nothing, mate. Freeman gave them to her to give to me and she knew better than to look at them or ask him any questions. I’ve told her to keep her mouth shut. And before you ask, no, I don’t have them here. I’m not that stupid.’

‘Have you listened to the tape?’

‘I haven’t had time yet.’

When Marvin spoke again, there was a new edge to his voice. He sounded like a man who felt in control of events.

‘Why haven’t you given these things to your people, Harrigan?’ he said. ‘Surely they’d be relevant in some way. Is there a reason why you can’t? Is there something there that incriminates you. If Freeman was involved, it would be the right people. There’ve been enough rumours.’

‘You’re forgetting something, Marvin. I’m not the one in the pictures. From what I’ve seen, they’d make the commissioner’s last few hairs stand on end.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to leave my people alone. You try anything like you tried this morning and you’re fucking gone, mate. And something else. Maybe one
day I do want to climb the ladder to the commissioner’s office. If I do, then you’d better not get in my way. Do we understand each other?’

‘We do. Good night, Harrigan. I expect I’ll see you at the next budgetary meeting.’

I am my own stalking horse, Harrigan thought, replacing the handset in the cradle. Someone was running Marvin. Harrigan was certain of it. Someone had waved the photographs under his nose and said, ‘Do what you’re told.’ Even now Marvin would be on the phone to his handler, telling him exactly what Harrigan had just said. Whoever the gunman was, he wouldn’t go after Grace; he would come after him.

In the silence the phone rang again. This time Harrigan did recognise the number. Harold.

‘Harry. What can I do for you?’ he asked.

‘Maybe you can help me out, mate,’ Harold said reluctantly. ‘I’ve got a problem.’

‘Do you want to tell me what it is?’

There was a short silence.

‘I have to say it, mate. I’m frightened. Frightened what might happen down here. I didn’t think I’d ever say that. I wanted to ask if you could get down here.’

‘Probably I can. Can you tell me a bit more first?’

‘It’s Stewie. He’s put this construction on the property. I call it the Cage. The people who got shot up at Pittwater—they were out here not much more than a week ago. Sitting with Stewie in my living room. They’re growing something out in that Cage. Not what you’d expect it to be from the looks of it. Whatever it is, it’s dangerous.’

‘Is this a personal invitation from you, Harry?’

‘If you want to put it that way. Why?’

‘Do you need your brother’s permission to have guests on the farm?’

‘Of course I don’t. What are you talking about?’

‘Because one day you might have to say that in a court of law. I’m making sure old Stewie can’t play any legal tricks if you do. I’ll be there sometime tomorrow. I’ll make the arrangements and I’ll be in touch. You stay by your phone tomorrow morning.’

‘I might not be able to do anything else,’ Harold said.

‘What do you mean? What’s happened?’

‘I’ll tell you when you get here. It’s nothing special. Thanks, mate. I appreciate this.’

‘Before you go, how’s Ambro?’ Harrigan asked.

‘She’s got something on her mind and she’s not telling me what. You might want to talk to her as well.’

‘Tell her I’ll be there tomorrow.’

Harrigan hung up and sat in the silence of his house. By now it was dark and he realised how tired he was. The weight of the day’s actions, the dangerous place he’d put himself in tonight, made him wonder if he still carried the death wish that had made him go after the Ice Cream Man all those years ago. Was he inviting the gunshot Mike had never fired? Marvin’s runner would have no reason not to pull the trigger.

Harrigan needed company, but it was getting late and there was still no sign of Grace. Maybe one day she would make up her mind if she was staying or going.

He went into his bedroom where he made the bed and tidied up a little. There was a hint of her perfume still in the air. Otherwise, it was hot and airless. He opened the doors onto the veranda and stepped forward, almost as if he was stepping into the firing line, daring fate. Outside, it was only peaceful. He looked at the empty street, wondering
if her car would appear. Then he remembered that it was in the police garage. How could he forget their public argument? No taxi appeared. Finally he turned back inside. It was a drab room to entertain a woman in, he thought. Tonight, it wouldn’t matter. Grace would not visit him. Tonight he had gambled and lost.

He went back into his study where he looked at Goya’s prints on his walls. He remembered the first time he’d encountered Goya’s work. It had been a few years after his near murder, while he was on secondment to the Australian Federal Police and stationed in London. Everyone went to Spain for their holidays; he’d tagged along and found himself in the Prado in Madrid for no other reason than that it was in the tourist guide.

He remembered walking into a room lit with a pale light where Goya’s Black Paintings were on display. It had been like walking into a room full of nightmares. He’d read the story of how these paintings were made, of the aged and sick artist nursed back from death by his doctor. Out of this sickness, Goya had turned his gifts to painting these works directly onto the walls of his own house,
Quinta del Sordo,
the House of the Deaf Man, then just outside of Madrid. Violent, shadowy mobs following each other in the dark. A dog with just its head visible in the empty landscape, staring in strange appeal at the sky. Two men sunk in mud, flailing at each other uselessly. Most terrible of all, Saturn devouring his own child. When he saw this painting, Harrigan had thought: yes, this is what we do to each other. We are like that, we eat each other.

Daily in his work, Harrigan watched the deterioration of people into strange madness, cleaned up after them when they had finished doing
what they did to each other. Almost two hundred years after they had been painted, these hallucinatory works spoke to his demons and gave material form to his own nightmares. Nightmare, as he knew from his own experience, was as real in people’s waking lives as in their sleep.

He took down from the shelf his facsimile edition of Goya’s
Los Desastres de la Guerra
and opened it to print number
69,
a print Goya had etched out of the futility of war. He studied the image of a corpse that was lying partially out of its grave, its head turned to the side, its mouth open in death. Its bony fingers held a pen. On a sheet of paper it had scrawled a single word:
Nada.
Other shadowy etched figures, one holding the scales of justice, surrounded the corpse, staring at the message. The caption Goya had originally written was:
Nothing. That’s what it says.
The publishers of the 1863 edition had changed it to:
Nothing. We shall see.
The artist’s version had been too bleak for his first publishers.

More usually, Harrigan had seen himself as the figure holding the scales of justice, as useless as he knew this to be. It was still an ideal he held on to in his mind. Tonight he questioned it. He thought of the young boy, Julian Edwards, dead at the scene in Pittwater with Cassatt’s grinning corpse beside him. What did he, Harrigan, achieve? Exactly what was written on the paper:
Nothing. Nada.
Tonight he became the corpse in the picture looking back at himself. His heart was dead. Even the emotional pain he felt was curiously dry, as if this too had no life force.

He was deep in these thoughts when he felt two hands pressing gently on his shoulders. He knew that touch and looked up. Grace was standing
behind him. He leaned back against her. Her body was warm through her singlet T-shirt.

‘Didn’t you hear me come in? I called out.’

‘I was lost in my head. I wasn’t expecting you to be here.’

She looked down at the image on his desk. ‘So you were sitting here looking at pictures from the end of nowhere instead,’ she said.

‘It helps to pass the time. Where were you?’

She sat down in the spare chair, dropping her shoulder bag onto the floor. Her hair was loose on her nearly bare shoulders. He closed the book.

‘At the laundromat,’ she said. ‘I would have got here sooner but the dryer broke down.’

‘You were doing your washing? Why?’

‘I always do when I get depressed and I want to think things through. Have you ever sat in a half-empty laundromat on a week night when it’s getting dark? It’s a sad place. You can see things clearly in a place like that.’

‘You decided you’d rather be here with me than there?’ He had to grin. ‘I’m flattered. What does this mean? You don’t want to say goodbye after all? Or is this just a temporary reprieve for us?’

‘I don’t want us to think about that right now. All I want us to do is be in the here and now. When this is all over with, we can work out where we’re going. If you can live with that arrangement.’

‘You decided that sitting in a laundromat?’

‘Is it any worse than sitting here looking at pictures from the grave?’

Harrigan laughed. She smiled and rolled her shoulders the way she did when she was relaxing. The more she relaxed, the longer she stayed, the better the chance of persuading her to keep staying. Or so he hoped.

‘I’ve got to tell you something that will probably make you want to walk right out of here again,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go to Coolemon tomorrow. Whatever Stewie and his mates were up to, it’s happening on his and his brother’s property.’

To his relief, she laughed. ‘I should have known there’d be something like that. How long will you be away?’

‘A couple of days. We’ve still got a little time now.’

Grace was about to speak when the phone on his desk rang. Again he didn’t recognise the number.

‘Harrigan,’ he said.

‘Commander Paul Harrigan?’ a female voice asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m Dr Elena Calvo. Please forgive me for ringing you so late. I believe you’ve heard of me. We have a mutual acquaintance in Senator Edwards.’

Harrigan switched on the speakerphone.

‘Yes, we do,’ he said cordially. ‘The minister mentioned you to me in very positive terms. It’s not so very late, Dr Calvo. What can I do for you?’

‘Please, call me Elena. I know from our mailing lists and also from Allan that at one stage you were interested in investing in my corporation, Life Patent Strategies. I wondered if you still wanted to pursue that.’

‘Do you think it would be a good thing for me to do?’

‘I think it would be very worth your while, yes.’

‘In that case, I had thought seriously about it.’

‘Good. I always think it’s important to look after individual investors as well as the large institutional ones. Would you like to come and visit our research facility? I think you’ll find it very impressive.’

‘I can be there as soon as tomorrow morning if you like,’ Harrigan replied. ‘I’ll have a few spare hours if that suits you.’

‘That would suit me perfectly. I should warn you it’s quite a drive. We’re out at Campbelltown.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘Then we’ll expect you.’ She gave him directions for what would normally have been a journey to the end of the city. Tomorrow it would be a small diversion from his preordained route. ‘I have you down for our launch tomorrow night as well. I think you’ll find a visit to Campbelltown will be a very useful background to that occasion.’

‘As it happens, Dr Calvo, I have to be somewhere else tomorrow night,’ Harrigan said. ‘Can I send someone along in my place?’

He looked at Grace who nodded.

‘Certainly. Who would this person be?’

‘A friend of mine. Grace Riordan.’

‘Yes, of course.’ There was a faint edge of disappointment in her voice. ‘Are you sure you can’t be there yourself?’

‘I’m afraid it’s impossible.’

‘I’ll put her name down in that case. She will be able to understand what this is about?’

‘I don’t think she’ll have any trouble.’

‘Then we’ll expect her in your place tomorrow night and we’ll see you tomorrow morning. Good night.’

The room went silent.

‘Do you mind going to the launch?’ Harrigan asked Grace.

‘No, it’ll give me a chance to get frocked up. If you’re down at Coolemon, I can do something up here. How did she get your number?’