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

by Michael Smith

  “Excuse me.” The Desk Sergeant impatiently held the phone out to Lescott.

  “Hello,” came the sound of Cooky’s faint voice through the receiver.

  Lescott silently apologised to the men in front of him, men not used to being made to wait. He went to speak but stopped himself. This wasn’t a conversation he’d planned to have in front of Alan Livingstone. “Sorry Mum. I’ll have to call you back.”

  “Mum?” Cooky’s confused voice was audible to each member of that group. Lescott broke out his best smile to smooth the strange situation over.

  “Detective Sergeant Fred Lescott. These fine men are benefactors of the New South Wales Police Force. It’s safe to say they’ve done more for Australian Law Enforcement than you and I could do in a dozen lifetimes each.” Ironically, given Livingstone’s corruption and Lescott’s failings, that was probably true. “Left to right, they are…

  “Norman Greenwood of Northern Cattle, Richard Beaumont of the Beaumont Pilbara Iron, Gold and Salt Company and, unless I’m mistaken, Jack Thompson of Thompson’s Metropolitan Bank…” Lescott reeled off the names as he ran his eyes across the line-up. The men were impressed. “It’s always good to know who it is you’re actually working for.” Lescott pushed out a fake schmoozy laugh which the group reciprocated appreciatively.

  “That’s very impressive, Frederick.” Even Livingstone couldn’t help but give credit where it was due. It was the kind of trick that he, himself, would have pulled from his sleeve earlier in his career. The group’s interest in Lescott was growing by the minute.

  “Missing Persons? That must keep you busy.” Lescot’s eyes were drawn to Jack Thompson and he had to stifle an unavoidable laugh behind a fake cough. Jack looked like he had modelled his appearance on Rich Uncle Pennybags. He was short and portly with a full, round face. His top lip was covered with a thick white moustache. He wore a bowler hat. He even carried a damn cane.

  “Frederick here is somewhat notorious around the place. As a promising young detective, he made some rather large and totally unfounded allegations of corruption. Everyone’s a little wary of him now.” Since their encounter, Livingstone had done his homework. “But make no mistake, if we can get his head down and carry on with the work he is doing to secure a conviction against Howard Frost… Well, his rising star will take flight once more.” Yes, Alan Livingstone was brazen enough to bribe a subordinate in front of civilians. Lescott smiled and shook his head humbly. He had little interest in taking the applause that Livingstone was trying to throw his way.

  “Howard Frost? The children?” Lescott’s eyes moved to Richard Beaumont of The Pilbara Iron, Gold and Salt Company. Lescott recognised Beaumont the moment he saw him. He breathed rarefied air as one of the single richest men in Australia, if not the world. His family had been involved in the running of Sydney since the time of the first fleet. He was something of a celebrity and national treasure. But he was strange to look at. Tall, gangly, dark haired and pale skinned. He clearly hadn’t seen much sunlight in years. His skin was almost translucent. That’s money for you. Never having to leave your damn mansion. His facial hair was what stood out the most, it was a work of art. It was meticulously groomed into something you only saw otherwise in the black and white, silent, swashbuckling films of the 1920s.

  The Desk Sergeant spotted an opportunity and jumped in, “I’m sorry to interrupt, DS Lescott. Ben Cook from the morgue is returning your call.”

  Lescott grabbed the phone and went to speak but the eyes of the men were burning into him. “This could take a little while, Alan.”

  “I don’t think it will take long at all,” came the pointed response from the Head of Major Crimes.

  “Ben, this is DS Lescott. I’ll be down shortly, get your notes out for me.”

  “Which notes?” Cooky responded over the phone.

  “THE notes…” Lescott murmured, he was on thin ice and Livingstone was watching him closely. Putting the phone down, turned back to the men. “Where were we?”

  “The Rolls Royce… You were going to recant your part in the story for us.” Beaumont spoke excitedly from behind dark beady eyes, glinting at the prospect of insider knowledge on this crime that had captured the public’s fascination.

  Lescott looked at him and shook his head. “DCI Livingstone takes all the credit for the success of the investigation.”

  “Your humility is commendable, but you…” Norman Greenwood’s words were white noise and they trailed off to nothing. A flurry of panicked thoughts ran into Lescott’s mind. His addiction was taking hold. Mr Greenwood was a sunburnt man who looked like he was still involved with the cattle conglomerate he had founded before the war. His skin was leathery and brown like battered leather. His hands looked calloused. His voice was gruff. The guy was country through and through. The other two were private school boys. This bloke had been born in the fields. “…How do you deal with that kind of darkness?”

  Lescott had been drifting in and out of concentration as he felt his empty stomach tying itself in knots. It was time to take his medicine. “You fellows sure are interested in me…” Lescott’s attempts to smile off his sickness fooled no one. They all watched as the colour drained from his face. “They’re not Internal Affairs, are they Alan?” Lescott made a half-hearted joke. It wasn’t funny. He felt sickened as they politely laughed along.

  “Excuse me, Chief Inspector, is now a good time to get a picture?” A photographer who had been waiting patiently jumped in, sensing the conversation was drying up.

  “Right, of course.” Livingstone rubbed his hands together. A picture of him and three of the most powerful men in Australia. It would find its way into the papers. He’d frame it and it would take pride of place upon his desk. Perhaps it would replace the photo of his children. It couldn’t replace the photo of his wife; he’d already swapped that out for a picture of him shaking hands with the State Premier. “Let’s take a photo, shall we?” Livingstone smiled as he saw Lescott taking the opportunity to slip away. “DS Lescott. Why don’t you join us?”

  Lescott stopped in his tracks and once more made use of the best fake smile he could muster. It wasn’t great. In fact, it would ruin what would otherwise have been a very nice photo. While the four men smiled for the photographer, Lescott looked down the camera lens like a man facing a firing squad. When the picture was taken, the men slapped each other on the back like they’d just made history. Lescot couldn’t make eye contact with any of them. The coffee had disagreed with him and withdrawals were wringing his digestive system like an old towel. He didn’t know which way it was coming, but that coffee was about to explode out of him.

  “I think we’ve kept the young detective long enough, don’t you, gentleman? There’s a rather nice bottle of Kentucky bourbon, waiting for us in my office” Livingstone smiled his sickly-sweet smile.

  “You must be busy; all those missing people won’t find themselves.” Thompson laughed.

  “God bless you, young man.” Beaumont was concerned. He could see Lescott was unwell.

  “Let’s go and see where your money goes shall we?” Livingstone watched as the three men shook hands with Lescott and left.

  Lescott collapsed into a nearby chair. On top of his nausea, his fever and his cold sweat, he felt the disgust of a bad handshake. He couldn’t tell whose it had been, but someone had offered a soft, loose grip that sent a shiver of distrust through him. He sat there for a moment looking at his right hand; willing away a lingering feeling of disgust.

  Chapter 18

  ames Harris had moved into an office at Harrington’s Brewery when he’d turned his hand to sleuthing. It was an uncomfortable draughty space, but it kept him out of his bedsit and it removed the temptation to dip into his little black medical box while the sun was still up.

  It was there that he waited for the knock upon the door. He knew it would come sooner rather than later. The door would swing open and George Watson or Elsa Markle, maybe both, would come and they would twist the
dagger they had left in his gut. His guess was it would be Watson; come to gloat. He would come armed with a smug expression and his usual air of superiority. Harris assumed he had seen the last of Markle.

  He was wrong. When the knock came, her silhouette gave her away. The perfect silhouette that had once made his heart sing, now made his gut churn.

  She walked straight in. Elsa Markle waited for no man to invite her into any room. If she wanted to enter, she did so with her own permission. “I tried to call, there’s something wrong with your phone.” She looked at Harris’ brooding face and then down at the handset which lay out of its cradle, on the desk. The room was filled with the monotonous dirge of the howler tone.

  “I didn’t want to talk to anyone.” Harris sulked behind the glowing embers of a cigarette. When he looked up at her, his hypothesising went out the window. She looked back at him with an expression he hadn’t been expecting. To say she looked concerned would be an overstatement; but there wasn’t the slightest hint of antagonism on her face. She had no idea what he’d seen. So, Harris thought, it was Watson who set him up for his humiliation. Though she may not have conspired to embarrass him, it didn’t change the fact she had broken his heart. “I went to Woollahra earlier.”

  Elsa’s tone shifted, “I go to Woollahra all the time. What’s your point?”

  Harris glowered and removed his feet from his desk.

  “If you’ve got something to say, say something. But do it fast. I have to head over to the TCN-9 studios.” Else spoke boastfully, she was incredibly proud of her burgeoning fame. “We’re filming a Christmas special.”

  “It’s February.”

  “And this would be the first time the media fed a lie to the public, would it?” Elsa was prone to cynicism and she had a sharp way with words. Harris had liked that about her.

  “I saw you… With him. I thought we…” As Harris spoke, he realised he didn’t know as much about Elsa as he should to start making assumptions. He wasn’t sure whether she was cheating on him with Watson or cheating on Watson with him.

  “How did that make you feel? Did that bruise your fragile male pride?” She wasn’t about to attempt to apologise or justify her actions.

  “Well it didn’t feel good.” Harris shrugged. He’d run through this scenario in his head several times over, it hadn’t once gone like this.

  “Stop pouting, James. My career is important to me. I see George Watson because he knows people. He can introduce me to people.” Elsa’s matter-of-fact tone was making him feel like a child.

  “I can introduce you to people…” Harris grasped.

  “If I wanted a job in your brewery, or in one of Prince’s brothels, you would be the first person I would speak to about my career. But I don’t.”

  “I know other people,” Harris grumbled pettily. “If you’ve got him, why do you need me?”

  “He’s for my career. You’re for other things.” She shrugged and wore a coy expression.

  “It’s the sex, isn’t it?” Harris allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation.

  It was misguided. “The heroin. I see you for the heroin.” She corrected him.

  “Don’t talk like that, you sound like a whore.” Harris snapped. He wanted to hurt her. Her seeming lack of dependence on him broke his heart. He had come to see her as something of a connection to the world, as such he needed her.

  “If you ever speak to me like that again… We will be done. If you even so much as think like that ever again… We will be done. Now, can you live with the situation we find ourselves in? Can you be a grown -p?” She was so in control. He felt like some teenage boy who had fallen head over heels for a woman who felt little in return for him. It seemed he was no more than a drug dealer to her, and their relationship was little better than transactional.

  “I don’t know.” He considered it. He didn’t see himself as a possessive type, but she’d corrupted him.

  “That’s a shame, James. Because I enjoy the time we spend together. I do that for me. But if you make me choose between my career and you… You won’t like my answer. If you can get your head around the fact that you don’t own me, and I won’t try to own you… We’ll be just fine.”

  Harris cursed the way the conversation was going. She was right, she didn’t owe him anything, they hadn’t promised each other anything. There had been no conversation about marriage proposals, joint bank accounts, or a child. It was just… Watson. Why him?

  “If it had been anyone else but him this wouldn’t have been a problem.” Harris grimaced. He’d begun to see the funny side of the situation.

  “What were you even doing there? Were you following me? You’re not one of them, are you?” She asked mischievously. She’d been stalked before. She was the kind of woman who men obsessed over. More often than not, it became a crazed devotion. She joked, but it was no laughing matter.

  “He sent a woman to my office. She paid me to look into her husband. I turned up at an address. I got there, climbed a drainpipe, and I found you two… Doing…” He stopped himself. “He and I have some history. He’ll be taking a great deal of pleasure in knowing that I now know you two are sleeping together.”

  “I don’t know what you think you saw, but we don’t sleep together.”

  “What?” After what he’d seen he found that hard to believe. They’d been in bed together. Naked.

  “I don’t really want to say too much, but we don’t sleep together. Not in the traditional sense.”

  Harris’ jaw had dropped. “What?”

  “He doesn’t… That sort of thing doesn’t stimulate him.”

  The mood in the room had completely altered. Harris was now enjoying the situation and was beginning to see that it could actually work to his benefit. But Elsa read him like a book. “What happens between he and I is private. How would you feel if I started to tell him your secrets?”

  “It’s no secret that I’ve got a distinctly average-sized cock and a below-average sex drive. What happens between you two stopped being private when he paid me to climb up a drainpipe to see it.” Harris smiled. He could sense something was coming. Something he could use against Watson later.

  “He doesn’t like sex. Normal sex that is. He likes… He likes it when I hurt him.”

  Harris’ eyes widened as she spoke words of liquid gold straight into his ears. “Say more.”

  “I can’t!” She protested a good honest protest, but staring down the twinkle in Harris’ eye, she was powerless.

  “But you must, dear Miss Markle. For the good of Sydney.”

  “You cannot tell anyone.” She paused. “I guess you’d call him a fetishist. It started off kind of small, I’d choke him or whip him while he pleasured himself. It was kind of seedy, but it was ok. Then it just got downright weird. He started asking me to put cigarettes out on his junk…”

  Harris’ jaw dropped once more.

  “He made me wear stilettos and dig the heel into his ballsack.” She winced as she remembered.

  Harris’ eyes watered a little with that one, too.

  “A couple of months ago, I had to drive him to hospital…”

  “Why!?” Harris waited with bated breath.

  “He made me take a cheese-grater to his nipple and half of it came off.” She cringed, “It’s fucked up.”

  Harris put his hand to his open mouth as he processed the information he had just learned. You have to remember, this was 1963. The spectrum of acceptable sexual activity was practically puritan. Anything other than missionary with your socks on, and your slippers at the foot of the bed, with the evening news playing over the radio to cover the silence emanating from your underwhelmed wife was considered downright deviant. It’s only in more recent times that people have realised sexual activity is a buffet filled with exotic flavours. Back then we had to make do with what equated to little more than a ham sandwich on old bread.

  “Lately, we haven’t even really done any of that weirdness. I think he tired of me. Now we
just lie in bed while he talks about you and Ronnie Prince. Sometimes he talks about his childhood. He cries.”

  Chapter 19

  Lescott didn’t like morgues as a rule. They made the fleeting nature of human existence far too real a prospect for him. Finality is the deepest and darkest of abysses, one does well to avoid it at all costs. Lescott’s way of dealing with the darker side of the human condition was to drink, to drug himself and to compartmentalise. The morgue made the darkness hard to push to the back of his mind.

  The morgue at Darlinghurst Road, well he had all the more reason to dislike that one. Rumours had been going around for years that something wasn’t quite right down there. What likely started off as an innocent wind-up, or the drunken ramblings of a burned-out detective had snowballed. It was said that the dead came back to life down there.

  Does that sound ridiculous? Of course it does. Because you haven’t spent time in the dark, damp shadows of that huge sprawling basement. You haven’t happened upon the corpses that have seemingly wheeled themselves out the morgue and down the long corridor to the elevator, holding an arm out towards the button as though they were making a bid to escape. You haven’t heard the tales of the station workers who, upon losing their way down there, caught a glimpse of a pair ballroom dancing at the other end of the long corridor, only to enter the room and find two corpses lying quite lifeless and entirely without rhythm. That’s if the misplaced corpses were found at all. Many went missing, it was said these were the lucky ones who had escaped to wreak havoc on the streets above. These are stories I’ve heard from the horse’s mouth in pubs up and down Darlinghurst Road. I realise they’re to be taken with a pinch of salt, and a vodka chaser. I’m not the superstitious type. I don’t believe in ghouls. I don’t believe in goblins. But I do believe that when the sun went down, there was no place I would rather not be than the basement of Darlinghurst Road station.