The Tattooed Man (5 page)

‘Oh my God,’ Grace said. ‘You had to succeed under that kind of pressure, didn’t you?’

‘I had no choice.’

She lay there without speaking.

‘Have you put me together?’ he asked.

‘Maybe a little,’ she said, her voice drifting in the soft light. ‘It’s time to sleep on it.’

She curled up and slipped away. He turned out the light and lay awake a little longer. In the dead hours of the night, he woke. Some dream was troubling him, some half-remembered image that faded from his mind as soon as he opened his eyes.
Nothing. Nada.
His first whispered thought while he stared into the shadows. Instinctively, he touched Grace to see if she was still there or whether he had washed up on some blank shore in the land of the dead. He felt her ribcage rising and falling with her breathing, imagined he could hear the sound of her heart. He slept again.

I
n the partial darkness of his kitchen, Harold Morrissey picked up his telephone and dialled a number he rarely called unless he had to. While he listened to it ring, he glanced out of the window. Dawn was beginning to break along the low undulating skyline, a clean transparency edging against a darker, fading blue. Once more it would be a clear, fine day. Finally his call was answered.

‘Yeah?’

‘Stewie. It’s Harry. You’re still alive.’

‘Of course I’m fucking alive. What the hell is this? Don’t you know what time it is?’

‘I just heard on the radio there’s been a shooting up at Pittwater. Four people dead. They didn’t say who they all were, just that one of them was Natalie Edwards. I wondered if maybe one of the others was you. Wasn’t she the woman who was here with you and that other bloke last week?’

‘Let me tell you something, Harry. If anyone asks, none of us were there including Nattie. If you tell anyone we were, I’ll say you’re fucking hallucinating. I’ll take you to the law. Then you’ll lose everything you’ve got. So keep your mouth shut.’ Stuart put the phone down.

Harold hung up, thinking that he should have expected as much. In its own way, the early morning call had summed up the relationship of the two brothers to perfection.

Harold left his farmhouse to start the day’s work, stepping into a still faintly cool air. An oleander bush bloomed a hot summer pink near the back door, while the house fence was covered with gnarled wisteria and thick-trunked grape vines planted by his grandmother eighty years ago. These days, the vines were almost leafless, some of them already dead. Like the land around him, they had been stripped bare by the drought and the heat. The only green came from a stand of old well-grown pepper trees stretching along the south-western side of the rambling wooden farmhouse, their bright foliage almost shocking in the dryness. On the north-eastern side, the sole shade was given by a self-sown sugar gum growing too close to the veranda, its white trunk arching over the bull-nosed roof.

In the pale light, Harold walked out the gate into the main yard, heading towards the kennel where his dog, Rosie, had spent the night chained up. Her enclosure was sheltered by an old moonah bush that was still holding out in the drought. Some twelve years ago his father had walked this same distance, unexpectedly falling into infinity when his heart had stopped mid-step. Since then Harold had supposedly shared the management of their property, Yaralla, with his older brother, Stuart. Almost as soon their father’s will was read and they were pronounced joint owners, Stewie had said, ‘We can mortgage the place now.’ ‘Like fuck we will,’ Harold had replied instantly, knowing through bitter experience that whatever money they raised jointly, Stewie would never repay his share of it.
Instead the money would disappear on one of his scams. It would make money; Stewie’s scams always did. It was just that neither Harold nor the farm would see a cent of it.

Since that first day, he and his brother had grappled each other to immobility. Nothing could be done on the property without the agreement of the other. There had been no improvements other than those Harold had been able to pay for out of his own cash flow or smaller personal loans. Without sufficient credit, no substantial work could be done. Everything cried out for repair but now, in the drought, there was no money at all.

Harold opened the gate to Rosie’s enclosure and unchained her. She didn’t need feeding, there was still some dried food in her bowl. Meat she got in the evenings. Right now, she was anxious to stretch her legs. She trotted after him to the machinery shed where he parked his ancient white ute and leapt up into the cabin beside him.

Harold started the engine and drove out onto his property, some ten thousand acres on the edge of the Riverina. The landscape was so stripped of its vegetation, it had become an X-ray of itself. Out on the horizon, scattered trees shimmered in a dark line between the soil and the immense sky. This morning, Harold was following his routine of hand-feeding his stock. He was heading towards his north-eastern boundary across the paddocks that stretched around him as a barren patchwork. There was still water in the dams in that part of his property and he was pasturing his stock there before he faced the question of what to do when even this water ran out. The tray of the ute, where Rosie usually rode, was loaded with feed he could barely afford to buy. When worked, the red soil on his property broke down into
dusty clumps; it varied in colour across the landscape from a pale dirt-pink to a dark and hot iron-red. For three years, he’d had no crops out of any of it. The future was as bleak and unending as the blue skies that rolled above him every day. He had stopped believing it would ever rain again.

After Harold had been driving for a short while, a structure came into view. It was the Cage, as he called it, a construction built by his brother six months ago along their most distant boundary. Its alien glass and steel glittered in the early light for some time before its outline hardened against the sky. The Cage was Harold’s sole failure to keep Stewie at bay. This singularity didn’t count for much. There could have been few failures more significant or more heartbreaking to him than this one.

On impulse, Harold drove over for a closer look. Always when he came out here, he hoped that somehow the Cage might have miraculously disappeared overnight. Always it was still there. With this woman’s death, maybe something had changed. The trees Stuart had cleared to build the thing still lay in heaps next to the high steel fence enclosing the broad acreage where they had once stood. Their dry leaves rattled in the early morning breeze. Other than the raucous calling of the crows, it was the only sound in the landscape. Harold came to a stop outside the locked gate and got out of the cabin. Rosie followed him and began to nose along the base of the steel fence. As always, there was no way in for either of them. He had no key to the gate. From the beginning, he had been locked out.

Harold remembered vividly the day six months ago when he had arrived here to see the bulldozers clearing the old-growth grey box eucalyptus trees that had once covered this low slope. When he’d
tried to stop them, the drivers had ignored him. The man in charge had threatened him if he didn’t get out of their way. ‘This is my property, mate!’ Harold had shouted. ‘That’s not what we’ve been told,’ the man had said. ‘I’m taking my orders from Stuart Morrissey.’ He told his workers to keep going; the trees crashed down.

Harold had driven back to the farmhouse and rung Stuart. They had argued furiously. By the time Harold hung up, he’d realised he could only stop the bulldozers by going back with his shotgun and taking the law into his own hands. He wished he had. Daily he’d watched while the fences went up, the greenhouses were built, and then the water tanks had arrived and were filled with water trucked in from outside the district. Who had pockets deep enough to finance this? Not Stewie. Stewie’s own money was never spent on anyone except himself.

Once the Cage was finished, they had planted one crop in the open, which they had covered with netting, and presumably others in the greenhouses. Unlike his desolate harvest, these unnaturally irrigated crops had flourished. Away to Harold’s right was the wide access road the bulldozers had cut the first day they had come in. It ran along his fence line, connecting the Cage to the Coolemon Road, an all-weather gravel road that served as one of Yaralla’s boundaries. The gate between this private road and the public highway was always kept locked. It was something else for which Harold had no key. Despite this, other people came and went along this private road regularly. He often saw them late in the evenings, speeding against the horizon in their four-wheel-drives. Stewie had never told him what they did inside. When Harold asked his brother questions, he received threats in reply.

The little Harold knew about what went on inside the Cage he had found out by eavesdropping. Once this would have disturbed him, but Stewie had given him no other choice. These days he was glad to find out any little detail however he did it. It was this subterfuge that had allowed him to link Natalie Edwards to Stuart in the first place.

Less than a week ago, he had looked into his living room to see three unannounced visitors sitting there: Stuart, an older man with glasses and a middle-aged woman with artificially fair hair. Both these people had been strangers to him. All three were drinking his whisky, talking. It was late afternoon and the curtains had been drawn against the western sun. Seated in the shadows, they hadn’t noticed him, had kept talking.

‘Well, Jerome,’ the woman said, ‘from what we’ve seen today, we’re all ready to go. Everything’s come along nicely. Mind you, it’s a god-forsaken spot. Why would anyone want to live here?’

‘It’s the best place for it, Nattie,’ Stuart said. ‘How many people are going to see it on that boundary? The property next door’s run by a manager for some agribusiness. He won’t care.’

‘Stuart’s right. It’s a good spot. It’s working better than I’d hoped.’ Jerome spoke with a guttural accent Harold didn’t recognise. ‘We’ll sign the contracts in the next few days at the latest and then I’ll send the staff out to harvest. I want it all shipped to Jo’burg before the end of the month. They’ll find a location for the testing over there. Once we’ve signed, I’ll courier them their copy of the contract. But first I have to let the old man know we’re on schedule.’

‘Your people will have to get a wriggle on, mate, if we’re going to meet that deadline,’ Stuart said.

‘I’ve already got the shipping lined up,’ Nattie said. ‘When I told them they were dealing with Natalie Edwards, they sat up and paid attention. They’ll move quickly.’

‘My people will do it anyway, don’t you worry,’ Jerome replied. ‘I want to replant with a new round of crops as soon as we can. We have to move this program along. The whole setup here took too much time.’

‘Who’s that?’

Nattie spoke. She had seen Harold standing in the doorway.

‘That’s Harry,’ Stuart had replied, frowning.

‘How long has he been there?’ Jerome asked.

‘Don’t know. How long have you been standing there, Harry?’

‘I just got here. How long have you been here?’

Stuart ignored him.

‘Don’t worry about Harry,’ he said to the others. ‘He’s harmless. He never does anything.’

Rather than be shut out of his own living room, Harold walked in and sat down. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

This was greeted with silence. Stuart made no introductions. All three had stared at Harold as if he was the intruder. The wind was shaking at the curtains while heat and dust hung in the air. Jerome glanced at Natalie and Stuart and then got to his feet.

‘Time to get out of this dump. We’ve got a plane waiting on the airstrip.’

‘Don’t forget your keys, Jerome,’ Stuart said. ‘You don’t want to leave those behind.’

Jerome laughed. He picked up a complicated set of keys attached to a keyring in the shape of a heavy bronze football. Nattie and Stuart stood up too, also collecting their wallets and keys.

‘Dinner at Pittwater for the contract-signing, people,’ Nattie said. ‘I’ll get it catered. I think we should celebrate.’

‘Turn on the champagne,’ Stuart said. ‘It’ll be worth it.’

‘You can pay for that, Stewie. Your share will stretch to it.’

After pocketing his keys, Jerome had picked up the whisky bottle and screwed the lid back on. He made to walk out with it. Harold reached over and pulled it out of his hand.

‘That’s my whisky, mate. I’ll keep it, thanks.’

‘Keep it,’ Jerome said. ‘It’s rotgut.’

‘You’re a possessive little man considering all you own is dirt,’ Nattie said in passing.

Now, some six days later, this woman was dead but for what reason Harold couldn’t know. He looked at the Cage’s high fences, strung along the top with electrified wires marked by signs that read
Danger.
There were no strangers here to warn off, just the birds who couldn’t read and whose bodies lay scattered at intervals along either side of the fence. There was nothing he could do about this. He called Rosie to him and drove away.

T
he sound of Harrigan’s mobile penetrated his sleep. He woke to the sense of Grace’s body curled next to his. Otherwise, the room was airless, oppressive. Already it had started to grow hot. He fumbled for the phone.

‘Commander Harrigan?’ He recognised the voice of Chloe, the commissioner’s personal assistant. ‘The commissioner has sent you an email, one that’s been generally distributed to the public. He would like you to look at it and call him back.’

Harrigan glanced at the clock. It was later than he normally slept; the room was bright with morning sunlight. Grace turned towards him, smiling, sleepy-eyed, her hair falling in thick, dark strands across her bare shoulder.

‘I’ll call within the hour,’ he said.

‘The commissioner said as soon as possible.’

‘Wait for the call.’

‘What is it?’ Grace asked.

Harrigan lay back on his pillows. ‘The commissioner’s sent me an email. He wants me to look at it.’

‘You’d better do what he wants in that case,’ she said dryly.

That was the worst of mobile telephones. They let people like the commissioner invade the privacy of your bedroom. If Harrigan had still been a smoker, he would have lit a cigarette. Instead, he pulled on a pair of shorts and went down to his study. Grace appeared in the doorway behind him while his laptop was firing up, wrapped in her red kimono.

‘Why don’t you come in and have a look?’ he said. ‘I don’t think this is just “Good morning, how are you?”’

‘I’ve never been in here before,’ she said. ‘It’s always looked too private.’

‘This is where I keep myself to myself. Come in. Take the weight off your feet.’

‘Do you mind if I open the window?’

‘Go ahead.’

The morning air carried into the stuffy room the sweet smell of jasmine from an ancient vine that covered the length of the garden fence. Harrigan’s study was upstairs at the back of the house. At night, from the window, he could see the lights of Louisa Road reflected in the water across the bay. His study was a bare room, the furniture spare and the floorboards covered with a worn imitation Persian rug. His bookcases lined one wall; his safe, two chairs and his desk, which was made of old dark wood and had come with the house, made up the rest.

Grace sat in his spare chair. In the morning light, her skin was shadowed to a soft pearl. She studied the contents of his bookcases. Journals on law and policing, digests on forensic medicine and psychology, mixed with Norman Mailer’s
The Fight
and
The Executioner’s Song.
Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
and Ellroy’s
My Dark Places
shared
space with
Crime and Punishment, The Devils.
Histories of racing and boxing stood next to them. On a shelf not completely full were a pair of Harrigan’s own boxing gloves, from a time when, as a twenty year old, he had tried unsuccessfully to make a career as a boxer. Even if the attempt had been a failure, he still remembered it as a gap in his life when his time had been his own.

‘Do you only ever read books on crime?’ she asked.

‘Of course not. I read the form guide as well.’

He saw her looking at the wall above his desk. His law degree hung beside a collection of prints, reproductions of works by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya that Harrigan had bought overseas years ago. Savage satire from
The Caprichos
mixed with horrors from
The Disasters of War.
He watched her look at these representations of bizarre human folly hung alongside those showing useless fighting, massacre and the dead. Facsimiles of the original nineteenth-century Spanish publications of Goya’s collected series of prints were visible on the shelf beside his desk. Beside them was an outsized book titled simply
Goya.

‘You’re a fan,’ she said.

‘He’s an obsession of mine. I’m like that. Once I decide I want something, I hang on to it.’

She got up from the chair and went to look at the prints.
‘And still they won’t go!’
she said aloud, reading the title of one. Misshapen yet human creatures desperately held up a monolith about to crush them while nonetheless staying huddled beneath where it would fall.

‘Don’t you think people are like that?’ he said.

‘It’s grotesque.’

‘It’s people who are grotesque. He’s showing us what we are.’

‘What about this one?’ she asked.

One can’t look.
Unseen soldiers thrust bayonets in from the right of the print, towards huddled people waiting in terror on their summary and bloody massacre. Pity had been expunged from the etched shadows.

‘You have to look,’ Harrigan said. ‘That’s the point.’

‘You don’t think it’s sadistic?’

‘No. It’s about sadism. It’s a voice for all the people who die like that. The man who drew that is bringing them back to life. That’s an accusation.’

‘It’s a fine line. Why did he draw things like this?’

‘It’s what he saw in his own life. He lived through a civil war. He put it down on paper.’

‘They’re all so bleak,’ she said. ‘Except when you get to her. What’s she? Rest and recreation?’

Separated out from the rest was a print of one of Goya’s paintings,
The Naked Maja.
She seemed to smile out of the picture, looking directly at the watcher, both an enigma and a challenge.

‘I like her,’ he said. ‘She’s beautiful. Like you.’

She gave him a half-smile that was slightly self-deprecating. He often thought Grace didn’t seem to know how lovely she was. When they had first met, he’d been harsh towards her, too harsh. At the time, he’d said it was the fault of the pressure of his work. He regretted it now and hoped he had made up for it since, even given the time his job took out of their relationship. What do you see in me? A question he wasn’t going to ask her. Just keep seeing it.

‘Why do you have these on the wall? Why do you need to look at them?’ she asked.

‘I don’t look at them all the time. Sometimes I take them down and put them away because I don’t want to see them for a while. I just need to know
they’re there. They take the pressure out of my head.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I see things like this all the time in my job and I can’t pretend I don’t. This is what we do to each other every day. I know what that means. Someone else knew that as well. They knew enough to put it down on paper like this so it has some meaning.’

‘Someone else knew how we get a real thrill out of hurting each other,’ she said softly. ‘That won’t ever change.’

He wondered what lay behind her words. Perhaps, since he was opening himself up to her like this, he should have asked her. He knew that she had grown up in New Guinea, a childhood that was still a vivid and beautiful dream in her mind. The dream had been shattered when her mother had died suddenly of cerebral malaria when Grace was fourteen. Her father had brought them all back to Australia where Grace had spun off into a cycle of wildness that hadn’t ended until she was in her twenties. For a few years she had been an alcoholic, although no one would have ever guessed that now. Somewhere along the way she had also acquired a faint scar that ran like a silken thread down the length of her neck. He had never asked her and she had never told him who had put it there or why. All the times they had made love, he’d never once intentionally touched it or put his mouth to it.

‘I’d better see what the commissioner wants.’

She looked over his shoulder as he opened his inbox. Three emails, all with the same subject line and attachments, were waiting for him. Two had been forwarded: one from his son, the second from the commissioner. The third had been sent directly
to his personal address from an unknown source. The time identified them as being sent sometime after midnight. The subject line read:
They gather for the feast.
Harrigan opened the one addressed to him first. The message consisted of a URL followed by the words:
Ex-Detective Senior Sergeant Michael Cassatt leaves his grave and arrives at Natalie Edwards’ table at Pittwater for dinner.

Three pictures had been attached to the email. Harrigan didn’t look at these immediately but went to the website. The words
They gather for the feast
flashed on screen again. The first image took his breath away. In sharp colour, the dead sat at the table on the patio at Pittwater, assembled for a meal they would never eat, Cassatt at the head as if presiding over them. He heard Grace draw her breath in sharply.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Is that what you saw? How did you recognise him?’

‘Intuition. We looked at his left shoulder, he had a tattoo there. Why send this out? What’s the point?’

‘Is that man with the glasses Jerome Beck?’

‘Yeah, that’s him. Will anyone else recognise him now? Is that the point?’

He went to the next photograph. Cassatt lay in his unidentified grave, recently dead. In the narrow trench, his face and body, just recognisable, were shockingly marked.

‘Someone worked him over before he died and they weren’t gentle,’ Harrigan said. ‘What did they want? And why tell the world like this? If you’re going to splash it all over the net, why not tell us where his grave was as well?’

‘They can’t want you to know. It’s like advertising,’ she said. ‘Or reality TV. They want us
to think it’s real life. Except that it’s artificial from the beginning.’

‘Whoever did that to Mike must have buried him as well. They have to know where his grave was. Whoever that person is, they’ll know someone was looking over their shoulder while they were doing it.’

‘Why wouldn’t this be from the person who killed him?’ Grace asked.

‘I think it’s more likely it’s not,’ he said after a few moments’ thought. ‘This is someone telling us what they want us to know. Someone wants us to see a connection between the killings at Pittwater and Mike’s murder. Killers usually keep things secret. These people want this out there.’

‘Then it’s also a message for Cassatt’s killers, whoever they are. Someone’s on to them.’

The third photograph showed Cassatt in this same grave in the mummified state he’d been in at the table at Pittwater. The narrow confines cradled him like a child.

‘Before and after,’ Harrigan said. ‘We saw you bury him and now we’ve dug him up and taken him to Sydney for a meal with the dead. Who are these people?’

‘Twisted,’ Grace said. ‘You’d have to be. I’m going to have a shower. I need to wash seeing that away.’

Harrigan opened the other two emails. Each was identical to the first. The commissioner’s came with the concise message:
Please phone.
His son had written:
Isn’t this where you went yesterday, Dad? These pix are everywhere, they’ve been posted all over the place. People are putting them up on their own websites. Sicko.

Thanks, mate,
Harrigan typed in return.
Sorry about yesterday, see you today if I possibly can.

He picked up the phone and made his call.

‘Paul,’ the commissioner said, dispensing with greetings. ‘Have you seen the email?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s gone to every media outlet in the country. Some newspapers have managed to get those pictures out on the street already. That’s bad enough. But if you check the
Sydney Morning Herald
online, you’ll find there’s media speculation this investigation may already be compromised as a result of Cassatt’s body being found at the scene.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘According to them, the Ice Cream Man may have had evidence implicating a serving senior police officer in the Edward Lee murder. This senior officer may wish to protect himself by impeding the investigation.’

‘Is this alleged senior serving police officer named?’

‘Of course not. The paper isn’t planning on being sued. The journalist is very clearly referring to the various rumours connecting you to Cassatt—’

‘There is no truth whatsoever in those rumours,’ Harrigan snapped, wondering why fate had to do this to him.

‘I didn’t say there was. But I won’t have it said that, under my command, this service is subject to the same degree of corruption that existed with Cassatt.’

‘I’m not aware anyone is saying that.’

‘I don’t intend to give them the chance. I discussed the matter with the special assistant commissioner. Marvin advises that you should stand down from your position as commander during this investigation. However…’ The commissioner drew breath. Harrigan, awaiting the axe, sensed a
reprieve. ‘Senator Edwards phoned a short while ago. He wants to meet with the senior officers managing this investigation, including you. You impressed him yesterday. He was very insistent that you be involved. Can you be here in an hour?’

Harrigan smiled mordantly to consider that, purely by circumstance, he’d managed to avoid one of Marvin’s more outrageous gambits.

‘I’ll be there,’ he replied. ‘Are you asking me to break my leave?’

‘Not as such. I’m asking you to make yourself available as needed. I would expect that from all my executive officers. You will be conducting yourself as though you have nothing to hide.’

‘I have no reason to do otherwise, Commissioner.’

There was a pause. ‘There’s something else you need to know. I received an anonymous parcel this morning. It contains a dossier that appears to be from an intelligence-gathering organisation. It’s relevant to this case.’

‘Someone sent this to you?’

‘With a note that says:
Read this and it will explain who Jerome Beck is.
I’ve discussed it with Marvin. He thinks it’s a hoax. I don’t share that opinion. It appears the senator also received a copy of this same dossier but a day sooner than we did. That’s what he wants to discuss with us.’

‘Strange happenings, Commissioner,’ Harrigan replied.

‘Yes, unfortunately. In an hour.’

Harrigan put the phone down, reflecting that there was no mistaking the commissioner’s priorities. He went and found Grace in the bathroom where she had finished showering and was brushing out her hair.

‘They want you to go in, don’t they?’ she said.

‘In an hour. They want me to talk to the minister. I don’t have a choice. I have to go.’