Tropic of Death

by Robert Sims

  ‘It’s wonderful to have your company,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for the hospitality,’ replied Freddy.

  ‘No thanks are necessary. It’s our duty to offer sanctuary. As our Lord said: When I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in. ‘

  ‘Matthew,’ noted Rita.

  ‘Ah, a detective with spiritual interests,’ said Ignatius, delight in his eyes.

  ‘Psychological interests,’ Rita corrected. ‘As a profiler I need to be familiar with a wide range of symbols, including biblical myths and metaphors.’

  Ignatius couldn’t help smiling at her. ‘And what does the word psychology mean but a science of the soul?’

  ‘If you equate soul with mind,’ said Rita.

  It was obvious he was fascinated by her presence. The way he looked at her was intense and not entirely flattering. It was as if he were observing a rare sight which, in his confined environment, in a sense she was. Her novelty value wasn’t lost on Rita as she watched him watching her, but there was genuine empathy in his manner as well.

  He was wearing a plain cheesecloth shirt and cotton trousers and he didn’t look much like a monk, but more like a teacher or doctor with an alert, engaging face behind black-rimmed glasses.

  Although pushing forty, he retained something of an adolescent’s eagerness, a wide-eyed simplicity bolstered by the innocence of faith. To Rita’s sceptical mind he also embodied a surrender to ambiguity. Many monks, she suspected, managed to remain devout and sin-obsessed at the same time, trapped in a spiritual contradiction and locked in a constant battle with their demons of repression. Whatever his inner secrets, Ignatius possessed a cheerful disposition.

  ‘What’s your religious background?’ he asked.

  ‘Dutch Protestant,’ she answered. ‘In my childhood.’

  ‘Ah, Calvinism. A heavy cross to bear.’

  ‘Well, I dismantled that piece of lumber years ago.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Ignatius folded his hands. ‘The Freudians say we never erase the influence of our early years.’

  ‘Is that Freud you’re quoting,’ she parried, ‘or your namesake Loyola?’

  ‘Wonderful. A debate with an ex-Calvinist. You’ve made my day.’

  ‘My pleasure. But changing to a less righteous topic, what on earth’s your connection with Freddy?’

  ‘He was a little chorister when I was an altar boy,’ chuckled Ignatius. ‘A cherub with a naughty attitude. As you can see, he slipped through the Jesuits’ fingers.’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Freddy.

  Rita turned to him, amused. ‘You were a Catholic choirboy?

  What happened?’

  ‘I lapsed.’

  ‘More like a sabbatical from the faith,’ said Ignatius. ‘Freddy’s a bad boy with a good spirit. In the end he does the right thing.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Rita.

  ‘And, of course, he did a great service to the monastery when he and his friend Stonefish got us online. They designed our website and keep a check on our internet services - all gratis and much appreciated.’

  Freddy gave Rita a dry look. ‘That should knock a few centuries off purgatory.’

  She laughed and clinked her goblet against his. ‘You’ll need all the brownie points you can get.’ She raised the glass to her lips, swallowed a mouthful of wine, and gave a nod of approval.

  ‘A full-bodied shiraz,’ explained Ignatius. ‘Product of a monastic vineyard.’

  ‘This monastery?’

  ‘No, one that’s inland. We’re a very small community these days, down to just a dozen brothers. No new recruits. We’re self-sufficient, but that’s about it. The life of a monk is losing its appeal in our increasingly secular world.’

  ‘What you’ve got here is very peaceful and civilised,’ said Rita.

  ‘Though I’m not sure what I’m doing here, other than sharing Freddy’s refuge. I should be getting back to Whitley.’

  ‘Relax, Van Hassel,’ said Freddy. ‘You’re marooned here until the next low tide.’

  ‘Then I’d better phone DSS Sutcliffe.’ She pulled out her mobile and looked at it. ‘No signal.’

  ‘It’s erratic,’ said Ignatius. ‘But you might want to hold off on that call anyway.’ He gestured at a fourth canvas chair, currently unoccupied, that he’d placed beside the table. ‘There’s someone who wants to meet you - someone you need to talk to.’

  Rita was puzzled. ‘Okay. I seem to have plenty of time on my hands. Who is it?’

  Ignatius gestured. ‘Here he comes now.’

  She turned to see the figure of a man emerging from a shadowed archway in a corner of the cloisters.

  Rita didn’t recognise him, but Freddy did.

  ‘Stonefish!’ he shouted.

  It took Rita a few moments to absorb the implications. She was sitting in a monastic retreat, sharing bread and wine with a monk, a hacker and a man who held the key to murder. The three of them were close friends and, in different ways, subversive - Ignatius perhaps merely by association, although his gleeful sense of humour betrayed an underlying irreverence towards anything other than his vocation. Petty crime, felonies and defrauding the state were problems for the secular authorities. If they didn’t bother God, they didn’t bother him.

  ‘Between the two of you,’ he told his friends, ‘you’ve got a backlog of confessing to get through.’

  ‘I’m doing penance enough,’ joked Stonefish, ‘shacked up in a monk’s cell, like a stud with his balls in a clamp.’

  ‘Or a mongrel in a kennel,’ laughed Freddy.

  ‘Either way, no dogging around.’

  ‘No wonder I couldn’t find you,’ said Freddy. ‘I thought you were holed up in Whitley.’

  ‘You and every other arsehole.’

  ‘A lot of people want to talk to you. Not only Van Hassel here, but a bunch of heavies from the base. Billy Bowers too. He wants the disk you’ve got.’

  Stonefish, suddenly serious, held up a hand to cut him short.

  ‘Quiet, dude. It’s a bad subject for you and Iggy to hear about.’

  With a sombre expression, he turned to Rita. ‘I suggest you and I take a walk together. Leave these two Holy Romans to finish their lunch in peace.’

  ‘Okay,’ she agreed and got up from her chair.

  ‘Let’s take in the sights.’ He showed her the way out of the cloisters. ‘I think I know every square metre of St Cedd’s Island by now. I’ve had so much time to meditate around it.’

  ‘Resulting in any revelations?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m safer here than anywhere else. If I leave the island, I’m dead meat.’

  Stonefish wasn’t quite what Rita had expected. Tall, with a shrewd, amiable face and a physique worthy of a footballer, he was an odd mixture of sensitivity and hooligan profanity.

  In his Charlie Don’t Surf T-shirt, baggy shorts and sandals he seemed self-conscious as he walked beside her, but despite a gentle demeanour, she reminded herself, this man possessed black-market expertise, criminal connections and inside knowledge about brutal killings.

  ‘Are you going to tell me your real name?’ asked Rita.

  ‘That’s one secret I plan to keep,’ said Stonefish.

  ‘Surely not out of modesty.’

  ‘Out of self-preservation. Too many skeletons in the case files.

  No one even knows my current passport name.’

  Rita guessed he was on the wanted list in more than one country and under more than one identity. He didn’t sound strictly New Zealander, more trans-Pacific, his original accent overlaid with an American West Coast drawl. For all his casual attitude, he wasn’t someone to be taken lightly. It made her wary.

  ‘I’m not interested in your history,’ she said.

  ‘Good. You might not act or look like a cop, but you’re still a cop.’

  They followed a path from the chapter house and refectory wing past garden sheds, vegetable plots and through a melon
patch.

  ‘You know you’re in trouble, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Trouble? I’d call it deep shit. That’s why I’ve been lying low, out of sight of everyone.’

  ‘Then why come out for me? There was no need to show yourself today.’

  ‘Brother Iggy told me how you helped Freddy. And, like it or not, at some point I’m going to need the cops onside.’ He gave her a wry look. ‘Anyway, I’ve been keeping up with your progress from a distance. From what I hear, you’re treading dangerously yourself.’

  ‘How’d you hear that?’

  ‘Electronic inquiries, contacts, the grapevine.’

  ‘Eve Jaggamarra?’

  ‘Among others.’ Stonefish pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket. ‘I think we have common enemies.’

  They were strolling through an olive grove that filled a gully on the island.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,’ Rita told him, ‘if you want me onside, as you put it.’

  ‘I know. But no matter what Iggy says, as far as Whitley goes I’m more sinned against than sinning.’

  He stopped in the shade of an olive tree, selected a ready-rolled joint and slid the bag back in his pocket.

  ‘I try not to smoke indoors,’ he said, lighting up. ‘Don’t want to get the monks high. Want a drag?’

  She shook her head. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘If I tell you stuff off the record,’ he went on, ‘can I trust you to keep it that way?’

  ‘There are a couple of conditions.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I need to know you’re not involved in murder.’

  ‘Fuck no! I’m the one who could be walking around with a death sentence passed against me. Not by any court, either. I would’ve thought you’d figured that out for yourself.’

  ‘It fits one of my theories, yes.’

  ‘Bully for you.’ He sucked the smoke into his lungs and held it, taking a hit from the dope before slowly releasing it through his nostrils. ‘What’s your other condition?’

  ‘You tell me everything you know about the disk.’

  ‘No problem. I was planning to do that anyway. I can’t get off this island till all the crap about the disk is sorted out.’

  ‘What makes you think you’re safe here? Why not put more distance between yourself and Whitley?’

  ‘If there’s a contract out on me, it’d be pointless to run. I’m better off staying on St Cedd’s. There’s one way in and out, with the brothers providing a perfect shield and cover. Anyway, I’ve got business to attend to. I need to stay local.’

  ‘So you do go into town?’

  ‘Only if I have to. I hide in the back of the kombi when one of the brothers drives in. Great camouflage - a monk-mobile.’

  Stonefish took another drag on the joint. ‘There’s another reason to use this as a bolthole. The monastery’s out of Panopticon’s range. It’s beyond the ten k sector. Those freaks at the base can’t spy on me here, and they don’t know where to look.’

  ‘Panopticon. That’s the crux of the case. It started with Dr Steinberg, didn’t it?’

  ‘Dear old Konrad.’ Stonefish puffed out a stream of smoke. ‘He was more than a whistleblower. He wanted the project scrapped, wanted the whole edifice of Whitley Sands to come crashing down.

  You realise that would make him a traitor to those at the top - to someone like that jack-booted oberleutnant Maddox.’

  ‘Actually, he’d see Steinberg as an enemy operative, a valid target. And Maddox wouldn’t be alone.’ Rita folded her arms.

  ‘Why you? Why did Steinberg give the disk to you?’

  ‘Beer. German beer.’

  ‘Am I supposed to make sense of that?’

  ‘He and I shared a taste for the imported brew at the Whitley Bierkeller, the only bar in town with the real thing from the Deutscher Brauer-Bund. We met when he beat me in a drinking contest - very impressive for an egghead. Steinberg by name, Steinberg by nature. From that moment on we raised our steins together.’

  ‘He breached national security because you were drinking buddies?’

  ‘We bonded over beer. It’s a male thing. Women don’t get it.’

  Rita sighed. ‘And the disk?’

  ‘He talked about the base when he got pissed - Fortress Whitley, Camp Paranoia, that sort of thing - and how Panopticon would do more harm than good. The guy was under a lot of pressure. I don’t know how much it affected his judgement, but he wanted the campaigners to know they were right to protest. He was the one behind the leak last year when he told me a hi-tech weapon was being developed at the Sands for deployment against militants.

  I passed it on to Rachel Macarthur, who put it on the net. After that he decided to help them more.’

  ‘So he compiled his report and burnt it onto the Rheingold disk.’

  ‘Which he handed to me at the Bierkeller to give to Rachel.’

  ‘But you didn’t, did you?’ said Rita. ‘You decided to hang onto it for your own purposes, downloading from the disk and providing Rachel with a printout, like a sample of merchandise.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Stonefish stared out to sea where a bulk freighter rode heavily in the water. ‘I saw an angle in it for myself. But Steinberg was a Wagnerian oddball. Not playing with a full string section, if you know what I mean. It’s another reason I liked him.

  With his rambling preface on the disk he sure sounded like a crank. All that guff about electromagnetic waves, brain chemistry and subarachnoid haemorrhages. I didn’t know if it was genuine shit or a stressed-out hophead fantasy.’

  ‘Brain haemorrhages?’

  ‘Steinberg reckoned the same thing that made Panopticon a technical success - the EM pulses or whatever - also increased the risk of brain haemorrhages in the population by a factor of five.’

  ‘Have you got that right?’ Rita frowned.

  ‘He pulled figures from local medical records and said they showed a fivefold increase in the number of brain haemorrhages within the sector since Panopticon was up and running. It sounded like mad boffin city to me, but I could see the propaganda value for the campaigners.’

  ‘And the desperate need to suppress it by those running the base,’ added Rita. ‘My God. The Steinberg report is a bigger threat to the project than terrorism.’

  ‘And a pretty strong motive for murder.’

  ‘And completely justified, if you think purely in military terms.

  It’s not murder, it’s part of warfare. Taking down the enemy.’

  Stonefish flicked ash away. ‘But it’s not a military issue, is it?’

  ‘No. It’s contempt for the law, for democratic principles, the worst violation of human rights. What makes it even worse, Steinberg would have got his facts right. Others are dying. Random members of the public. That makes it a crime against humanity.’

  ‘Collateral damage.’ Stonefish cleared his throat thickly. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  Rita bowed her head, pacing back and forth. ‘So. Steinberg’s death was an illegal execution. I can lay that at the base’s door. But the other murders - the decapitations - how do they fit in?’

  ‘You don’t swallow that bullshit about a deranged serial killer?’

  ‘No, though I’m meant to. They’re professional hits. But why?

  What’s the agenda?’ Rita was thinking aloud. ‘Like the Grail knights there’s a question the Maoists ask about any given incident: whom does it serve? That’s what I don’t have a clear answer to.’

  There was a momentary silence between them. Rita watched a mob of cockatoos settle in a stand of tea-trees along the shoreline below. Stonefish finished his joint, dropped it and ground it under his heel.

  ‘Well, between the two of us we can take a crack at it,’ he said. ‘What do you want to know?’

  Rita refocused her attention. ‘The man in the mud,’ she said.

  ‘Who was he?’

  Stonefish gave a half-hearted laugh. ‘I don’t know exactly.
Drug dealer. Mr Mystery.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That’s what we called him - “Mr Mystery”. He travelled around South-East Asia on a French passport out of New Caledonia under the name Jean-Paul Mistere.’

  ‘What was he doing in Whitley?’

  ‘He turned up a few months ago looking for action. I liked him and he supplied good dope. I put a few business errands his way. Of course I recognised the e-fit picture of him after the body parts floated ashore.’ Stonefish raised his eyebrows. ‘When I heard you’d been drafted into the investigation I guessed why.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was with him at the Diamond when he wrote your name on a beer coaster and stuck it in his boot for future reference.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Blackmail, maybe. He was always working an angle, asking questions, making connections.’

  ‘How’d he get my name?’

  ‘When he and I went up to the office at the Diamond, to do a bit of business, one of the Monotti boys was there - dope supplier, big talker. He regaled us with stories about how Billy beat a bestiality rap in Melbourne and was still putting on live sex shows at his villa - hookers with his dogs. Billy grinned but looked uncomfortable, especially when your name came up. Mr Mystery wrote it down when we went back to the bar, thinking it might come in handy.’

  ‘Was it you who told the Whitley Times reporter about Billy’s past?’

  ‘Damn right.’

  ‘And that Bowers threatened Rachel?’

  ‘Yep. She had a lot of guts. There was just a handful of us at the club when Rachel burst in on her own and confronted Bowers.

  He’s a bully and a psycho. For all I know he killed her and Mr Mystery, then did the reporter too.’

  ‘The Homicide detectives say he did.’

  ‘He deserves to go down for being the celebrity scum he is.’

  Stonefish grimaced. ‘But there’s something else. I didn’t just hand the reporter the dirt on Bowers. I also delivered a download from the Rheingold disk. She was working on both stories.’