THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER

by Michael Smith

  Pubs, clubs, casinos, tobacconists, barbers, newsagents, dress shops, tailors, market traders, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone owed and everybody paid. Ronnie Prince’s organisation even extorted the Police. He took a hefty cut of the incoming bribes paid to the constabulary by local criminals in return for their very best Ray Charles impression. That meant he was robbing them blind as he paid them off. That takes quite the pair of chestnuts.

  I looked up to Ronnie Prince. Everyone did. In years to come, he would posthumously be called “the Last Gentleman Gangster of the Cross”. He was an incredible businessman who owned half of the area, which was itself a business made up of hundreds, maybe thousands of smaller businesses. Harris was amongst his chief enforcers.

  Harris was working the rackets that morning in November, the day that would alter the city’s fate forever. Driving around in his clapped-out old car, he made his way to Woolloomooloo, a rough and ready suburb that lay to the north of Darlinghurst. Years later it would be sterilised by gentrification, but back then it was a colourful place. He pulled up outside a factory nestled within a row of similar-looking factories. Peering through the steamed-up windows, he ascertained that this was the place. Through the gathering condensation on the glass, he could see it was full of brewing equipment. Imagine that, extorting the people who made our beer, that was about as bloody un-Australian as it could get.

  Walking inside, he admired the inner workings of the brewery. It wasn’t the biggest of Sydney’s breweries but it was fast making its name as one of the best. It was manned by at least half a dozen employees who performed busy work across the shop floor. I know more about the drinking than about the making of beer, but I assume they had the best bleeding job in the world. Toiling amongst the intoxicating smell of fermenting hops and malts as it filled the air, rose through the chimneys and spewed into the Woolloomooloo sky. Harris was met at the door by the brewery’s owners. A pair of bookish-looking fellows who scuttled towards him as soon as they saw him enter. “Mr. Harris, we didn’t expect you.” In credit to the men, they managed to muster more bravery and subsequent niceties than some of Sydney’s nastiest individuals might have in the presence of the notorious standover man.

  “Lads…You should know by now. You don’t pay Mr Prince his dues, you can expect a visit.” Harris looked around, admiring the industry of the workforce. “I’ve never been inside a brewery before.”

  “We need a week,” one of the owners demanded, rather foolishly.

  “I’m told you said that last week.” Harris looked the man in the eye. He was assessing the pair. He had a talent for knowing when people could pay but wouldn’t, and when they simply couldn’t. There was a big difference, and there has never been any point flogging a skint horse.

  “This too shall pass.” One of the owners shook their head and looked down at the floor in frustration.

  “I watched two trucks full of beer heading out before I came in.” Harris noted sceptically. “Looks like you’re packing another two by the loading bay.”

  “One more week, we’ll make it right. You know we’re good for it.” They weren’t lying, they were struggling.

  “I know no such thing. I’m not paid to know things.” Harris hammed up the dumb brute act that he played with such panache, “Listen, if you’re gambling, I can’t help you.” Though his savage reputation suggested otherwise, Harris could be a reasonable man. He liked the pair; he’d drunk with them, or at least adjacent to them, on Darlinghurst Road on several occasions.

  “We’re not gambling. It’s a matter of cash flow,” one said.

  “There’s what we pay Mr Prince…” the other began. Harris’s stony face told him to watch his words. He would do well not to complain, “And that was fine. No problem at all. Until we started having to pay George Watson too.” The man finished.

  “You fucking what?” Harris couldn’t believe his ears. George Watson was a young up-and-comer on the criminal scene. He had a despicable reputation given he’d formed a habit of cosying up to war widows looking for a break from their ongoing grief. He’d put his feet under their kitchen table, their food in his mouth, and their few remaining pennies in his pocket. Dozens of them. One or two of them, who had a little money in the bank, died in rather suspicious circumstances. They left their children to the state. They left their bank balance to Watson. He wasn’t well liked for that.

  A shrewd young man, he’d taken that money and invested it in buying off racing officials and local bookies. He’d given up the widows and moved into a more respectable brand of criminality, but his reputation as a two-bit con man remained. He was a clever bastard, and he was making a lot of money down the track; but he should have known better than to move in on Mr Prince’s rackets.

  “He said Woolloomooloo was his territory now?” The owner was caught halfway between a statement and a question. He clearly wanted to take no ownership of the words he spoke. Too often is the messenger punished. And you really didn’t want to be the one bearing bad news in those days. That was a good way to get yourself free dentistry.

  “I ought to clatter your fucking heads together.” Harris found a well-placed threat often bought him the time he needed to consider his next step.

  “Regardless, with the money we’ve been paying him and what we owe Prince… We’re going out of business unless we can work something out.” The brewer was clearly feeling the pressure, but he was thinking on his feet. He was turning his problem into Harris’ problem.

  “That’s easy, you keep paying Prince, stop paying Watson.” What Harris was suggesting was a lovely idea, but these were regular working men. They couldn’t say no to people who would, they knew, come after their families.

  “Cashflow’s going to kill us either way. We can’t fill the orders we have. We’ve fallen behind. We’re losing customers.” The man was waiting for Harris to suggest something.

  “Then you give Mr Prince a piece. Proper. Put his name on the door.” This was where Harris made his money, he lived in the grey spaces between black and white. He’d charm you, he’d strongarm you, whatever he did, he’d get his way.

  “We thought you’d say that, so we prepared our books for Mr Prince to take a look at. We’ll make him an equal partner, 30% of the business if he sorts out our cash flow, and accepts net profit dividends rather than his usual… Gross profit deductions.” Harris smiled as he listened. Ordinarily, he was one step ahead of those he extorted, but these boys were savvy. “He’ll also need to speak to Watson for us.”

  The pair breathed a sigh of relief as they finished their pitch. It was a good pitch. He looked down at the numbers in the books, which might as well have been in Mandarin. “You clever bastards.”

  Chapter 3

  Back at Darlinghurst Road, with his feet up on his desk, Harris tried to make sense of the numbers. He couldn’t. It just wasn’t his wheelhouse. He threw the books into his desk drawer in annoyance. Harris was a lot of things, but he could not have been further from a chartered accountant.

  The office bored him. There was nothing to do, and no one to talk to. Whenever he did spend any time in the office he’d look around and strategise how he might fight the other detectives, if it ever came down to it.

  DC Jennings had a barely noticeable limp. Harris placed it as an old injury to his right knee, maybe down to rugby. He’d take Jennings out by a swift kick to the inside of his weak joint. Once Jennings’ kneecap had dislocated, and he’d dropped to the floor, Harris would place his foot on his rival’s neck. DS Bryant wore glasses, Harris would grab them, and put his sightless victim down with a palm to the underside of his nose as he scrambled in blind panic. Harris was a scary bastard who, in later decades, would be more likely have to have spent his days under psychiatric watch, than on duty as a police officer. His combat planning came to an abrupt halt as a massive bang interrupted his thoughts.

  On Darlinghurst Road, nine stories below, a car had just broken down. Steam hissed from under the bonnet. Black smoke poured out of th
e exhaust. The car was fucked. Shame really, it being a top of the line, imported British, racing green Rolls Royce and all. At the time, most three-bedroom houses in Darlinghurst cost less. The driver was nowhere to be seen, having seemingly fled the scene. A passer-by began to scream. Then another. Then another.

  Back in Major Crimes, many of the detectives had left their chairs. They’d gathered by the windows to inspect the scene. It was the most police work they’d done that week. Something wasn’t right. The sound of more than one blood-curdling scream was ringing through the street. This was no mere broken-down car. Something was horribly wrong; the men could sense it. They looked towards each other in trepid hesitation. “Should we go down there?”

  Harris couldn’t help but get up to see what all the commotion was about. He was a curious sort of man. He walked through the desks towards the detectives. They were practically hanging out of windows at this point, scrambling to get a better view. Harris attempted to peer over the crowd of colleagues, but it was three deep. One by one, they silently made their way towards the exit, clearing his view.

  20/10 vision is all well and good, until you’re nine floors up peering down onto the street hundreds of yards away. There he saw a broken-down car under a cloud of smoke and steam. He could see the gathering crowd huddled shoulder to shoulder, given its number it was hard to miss. Directly below, police swarmed out of the station. They were attempting to form a blockade around the car. Whatever was going on, it was serious. It had captured the street’s imagination.

  It was also none of Harris’ business, no doubt he would hear several differing accounts from drunks in the pub later that evening. So, he put it to the back of his mind, he sat back down at his desk, and once again he opened the brewery’s books. For a moment, he imagined what life might have been like as a trained accountant.

  He’d barely started to ponder the vast and terminal dullness of a life in numbers when Livingstone walked into the office. He saw Harris at his desk and a smile crept across his face. Everyone else on that street was in a panic. Livingstone, like a snake, remained emotionless, “DC Harris… You’re needed downstairs.”

  Why did the sneering Detective Chief Inspector put quite so much emphasis on Harris’ rank? It was unmissable. It did not bode well.

  After an awkward, enduring silence lasting the entire descent of those nine damn flights of stairs, the unlikely companions stepped out of the building and assessed the pandemonium. Livingstone had a head start over Harris. He clearly had something of a handle on the situation and began the walk over to the broken-down Rolls Royce. Harris, on the other hand, was unprepared for what met him. It was a confronting and bewildering mess.

  The street had been closed down. A mob of policemen had gathered around the car. Each and every one of them looked deathly white and quite sickened. Their faces were the very absence of colour. They did their best to steady themselves as they lined up on the perimeter, but they were struggling. Still, they held on grimly, side by side, to form a cordon. They could take a little solace in knowing that every man and woman within that cordon was going through hell. Harris’ eyes were drawn to a crime scene photographer who framed a shot inside the car. So foul was the sight inside, he couldn’t bring himself to push the trigger before he broke to spill his guts on his camera and onto the pavement. This was big and it was ghastly.

  The entire street had filled with a nervous atmosphere, an uneasy tension that everybody could physically feel. The very space between the crowds had filled, it had been made mass. That mass was sheer terror. The crowd looked on with ashen expressions. This was a day that would darken the history books forevermore.

  Livingstone led Harris towards the car. As the barrier of police officers parted for them, Harris could smell it. Death. Old death. A scent that should never be experienced by the living. An odour that should have been trapped under six feet of dirt. Livingstone stopped on the inside of the cordon, holding a handkerchief to his nose and mouth. He turned to Harris. “I hope you’re in possession of a strong stomach?”

  “I’ve seen some stuff I’ll never unsee…” Harris stopped when he noticed Livingstone hanging back as far from the car as he could, while still on the inside of the cordon. “But I’ve got little desire to see anymore of it.”

  “Your desires don’t interest me, Detective.” There it was. Again. Livingstone’s peculiar emphasis on Harris’ title. Livingstone gestured for Harris to walk on towards the car, “I’ll wait here.”

  Harris reluctantly pushed his way through the crowd and towards the car where a forensic team busied themselves by inspecting the outside of the vehicle. The windows had been covered in what looked like children’s bedding. Patterned across the soiled linen were rainbows, dinosaurs and ballerinas. Harris grabbed at a handle on one of the car’s rear doors. He took a breath. His heartbeat slowed to a standstill. He opened the door.

  Before it was even halfway open, before he caught a glimpse of what lay within, the smell hit him like a freight train straight out the guts of hell. A putrid waft of something entirely ripe with repugnance hit his nostrils and would remain therein for weeks to come. It was death. But it was finality mixed with something quite vile. The overwhelming smell of decay was coupled with the scent of chemicals. A wicked combination of scents reminding him of a time, and of a place that had kept him awake at nights ever since 1945. He took a second to ready himself for what was to come before he opened the door fully.

  As the back seat of the car revealed itself, a chill passed over skin and ran through his bones. Surprisingly he didn’t recoil as the others had. He was strangely enchanted, and he couldn’t bring himself to look away. After a moment, he snapped out of his trance. The full strength of the smell hit him. It was then that he physically recoiled. The nearby crowd were shocked to see a police detective vomiting by the side of the vehicle. Harris took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and placed it over his nose and mouth. He went back to the open door. The smell stung as it hit his eyes and caused them to water.

  The memories of Bergen-Belsen hit him harder again. Riding in on tanks like they were heroes from the fairy tales of old. Expecting fanfare, only to be met by despair, death and the remnants of an inhuman regime. That smell… A mixture of lingering decomposition and the chemicals that had been used to experiment upon the subjects they found there. The back seat of the car in Darlinghurst that day was little different. Absolute and final death mixed with the chemical cruelty of a madman.

  Sitting on the back of the seat was a pair of festering children. It was difficult to tell, given that their skin had turned greyish blue as the warmth had left it, but he believed them to be Aboriginal. Though there had been clear efforts to preserve them in a mummified state, their flesh had started to shrink in decomposition, leaving it peeling away from their bones.

  Harris didn’t inspect them too closely, but it was clear they’d been dressed and posed after death. Their hands were bound together with twine to give the appearance that they were praying. Their joints protruded oddly and showed signs of posthumous tampering, their faces were caked in make-up, they looked just like children trapped inside the cold, unloving exterior of a porcelain doll. It was their eyes that unsettled him most. They looked sad, glassy, and devoid of life. It was a dark day in the city. This was a crime too far; even in a city of villains.

  While mass hysteria took hold of the population in the coming weeks, children would not be allowed to play on the streets. Little Sally couldn’t practice her leg breaks in the street, little Johnny couldn’t rob his rhubarb and custards from the confectionary store on his way to pick up his mother’s cigarettes. This would be life-changing for the children of Sydney. Or at least, it should have been.

  Harris had seen enough. He staggered back over to Livingstone, “I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

  Harris had no experience of investigative policing. He was a career criminal who barely attempted to masquerade as an officer of the law. He didn’t know h
ow to handle the responsibility of something so ghastly.

  Livingstone remained stern. “This is the sort of case a detective can make their name with. It’s the sort of case a detective can prove their worth by working on. I’m giving you a chance to do exactly that. It’s time for you to show me that you can be trusted to work for me.”

  Harris was aghast at the prospect and went to open his mouth in protest.

  Livingstone could see he was about to make a scene. “It’s an open and shut case. There’re two eyewitnesses. We’ve got the man in custody. We’re rounding up an ID parade, we’ll get a positive ID on the suspect and it’s all over. He hangs, you get promoted, you go back to collections, I know you can toe the company line.” Livingstone left to go back inside the station before Harris could protest.

  Harris made his way over to Cooky, a pathologist, who shook Harris’ hand warmly and offered a friendly smile that did little to hide the sadness in his eyes. He was an odd kid. He was, perhaps, the only person on the street that day whose stomach remained unaffected by what had unfolded. Death was his business.

  Cooky was a short, skinny guy with dark, receding hair. His ethnicity was difficult to determine. He was some kind of white, but it was clear he wouldn’t have been invited to any of Adolf’s private dinner parties. Something else had got into his genetic make-up somewhere. Whether that was Kiwi, or Jew or Mediterranean, Harris was unsure; but then, Harris placed little importance on such issues. “Cooky.”

  “Closest I’ve ever been to a Rolls Royce.” Cooky looked down at the vehicle in awe.

  Harris noted the unrest of the crowd beyond the cordon, “I think it’s best we make this quick.” The pair covered their faces with their handkerchiefs and looked inside.

  “Two subjects, both children, both Aboriginal. The first subject appears to be a nine- or ten-year old boy.” Harris wrote notes on a pad while Cooky inspected the inside of the car. “The second subject… Girl… Similar age.”