The drunks didn’t. They’d moved over to the bar near Ned. Their mood had changed. Their boorishness had dissipated. Ned was accosted by drunks all the time, they’d demand another “last drink” and either try to hit him if he said no, or kiss him if he said yes.
But this was different.
These drunks didn’t even look drunk anymore. In fact, they looked like they were in full possession of their faculties. They looked like they had a job to do. When one of the men’s hands reached into his tuxedo jacket, the other followed suit. Ned dropped his drink and reached into his belt to pull his magnum out. It wasn’t there. Harris had taken it. “I’m just an accountant.”
The two men pulled pistols out of their pockets, they were small and they’d have been no match for Ned’s magnum which was now in the boot of Lescott’s car, travelling west out of Sydney. The hitman whistled to get the barman’s attention. “Message for your boss from George Watson… There’s a new Prince in Sydney.”
The assassins fired six shots apiece into Ned’s head and torso, the poor bastard was dead after the first and before he’d hit the floor, but this wasn’t an execution. It was a deadly message composed in blood.
Chapter 26
Harris and Lescott left Sydney under the cover of darkness. The Englishman chain-smoked as he drove, nervously tapping ashes all over the car much to Lescott’s chagrin. Lescott held his tongue, he’d noticed Harris kept looking in the rear-view mirror to see if they were being tailed. Every time a car passed alongside them, the standover man tensed up and put his hand on the butt of a sawn-off shotgun in the foot well. It occurred to Lescott that Harris was liable to blow his feet off at the first pothole they hit, but perhaps that was a risk worth taking.
As Harris drove, the Head of Missing Persons ran his eyes over photos of the Death Car. Using a magnifying glass and a torch, he was reading the articles that appeared in the copy of The Bulletin that had been found, and subsequently gone missing from the impounded Rolls Royce. The photographs were small, and it made much of the content of the paper difficult to read.
The front page showed a picture of some of Sydney’s rich and famous gathering to cut the ribbon on a new children’s wing at St Vincent’s hospital. Page two was some nut bag investigative journalist suggesting that Al Capone was secretly alive and had ordered JFK’s murder due to the former President’s plan to break up America’s crooked trade unions. Page three suggested that Matilda Devine had made a move to become Australia’s premier heroin importer by striking up a relationship with an opium baron in Burma. Page five was an article about a man who’d been saved from drowning by his dog. And so it went, on and on. Journalism wasn’t up to much in Sydney at the time.
Perhaps the most concerning article was about a spate of car bombings in Melbourne. The city was enduring a deadly battle for control of its underworld. A brand of madness that was threatening to break out in Sydney. Lescott looked up suddenly. “What’s that rattling sound?”
Harris smiled for the first time in their young journey, it sounded to him like Lescott was spooked by the sound, like he thought it could be a car bomb waiting to go off. “A case of beer.”
A moment later, they’d stopped and were back on the road. Lescott had hauled the crate onto the back seat where his little arms could reach it. The road shed its inner suburb surroundings like a snake shedding its skin. They made way for the leafier, roomier outer suburbs which were replaced, in turn, by the bushy environment of the hinterlands. As they hit the Blue Mountains, the city shrank in the rear-view mirror before it was nothing more than a few specks of light in the middle of the black ocean behind them. The roads were quiet. Harris threw the sawn-off onto the back seat.
Lescott examined the note that had been left on the body of the old man. Questions ran around his head. What did the killer mean when he said collection? A collection of dead bodies? How many? Was he exaggerating? The one thing clear to Lescott was the killer’s motive for leaving the note behind. “Take a look at this…”
Harris took the scrap of paper and held it above the steering wheel. When he was done, he looked over at Lescott. “Mouses? Who the fuck speaks like that?”
“It’s broken English… Or, at very least, contrived to appear as such.”
“Mouses…” Harris repeated before taking a swig of beer from his right hand, and a drag of cigarette from his left. “Like cat and mouse?”
“This war of his. Inspired by the genocide of the Amalekites… To him, it got all the more interesting the moment his car broke down on Darlinghurst Road. We don’t know how long it’s been going on. But we know he’s beginning to want the credit for it. He likes the attention.”
“So?” Harris asked flatly, having failed to decipher Lescott’s loaded statement.
“So, he’s going to make a mistake, and when he does… Have you ever seen Tom and Jerry?”
Harris didn’t know how to answer. “I know a couple of Toms in Darlinghurst, I met a lot of Jerrys during the war.”
“It’s a cartoon, it’s about a mouse that gets the best of the cat that hunts it.”
“Well that’s a relief,” Harris frowned. The premise seemed far-fetched. Their chances… They felt slim.
‘Green Onions’ by Booker T and the MG’s crackled through the car as they snaked their way through the Blue Mountains. A beautiful twanging instrumental that advertised the recent advances in rhythm and blues guitar. It was the music of Lescott’s generation. That night, to him, it sounded something like the sound of opportunity.
Harris, whose preferences in music were somewhat more traditional, fucking hated it. But radio stations were infrequent back then, and radio stations that played Holst and Elgar were more infrequent again. So he kept his mouth shut, and suffered in silence as the music grated at him.
Chapter 27
It was a cold wet night in 1961. Detective Constable Fred Lescott was drunk. It had been raining steadily for days. That night, the winter sky lashed down a thick icy rain that felt like it could tear flesh from bone. Lescott was home alone, as he had been for some time, but he couldn’t get a moment’s peace nor quiet. Heavy droplets played a chaotic tune on the roof of his house, that percussive cacophony was almost too much to bear. Every single drumbeat exploded against his ear drums, before slipping and sliding across the grooves of his grey matter. There, they wrapped a cold, dead hand around his mind, squeezing any kind of cogent thought out of him. Panic was the word.
He paced the floorboards in front of a wall of mounting evidence. Lescott was building a monster of a case. He’d put together a wall of photographs, neatly spaced and joined together with that ghastly red string. This was a family tree. Only this didn’t detail a family’s lineage, it was a picture that painted dozens of police officers as corrupt.
At the bottom of the pyramid were the beat cops. They used their badges to extort pennies from vulnerable criminals they’d caught red-handed. Moving up a layer, you’d see the dogsbody detectives who worked the rackets. They fed off the scraps that more senior detectives threw at their feet. Beyond that, it started becoming more and more troublesome. The men whose likenesses sat at the top of the tree were the decision makers, those with their crooked fingers wrapped around New South Wales policing policies. Those who moulded the future of the city. They were Chief Inspectors, Superintendents, a couple of Assistant Commissioners and right at the top, waiting for his chance to sit in the big seat, the Deputy Commissioner. Lescott had gathered intelligence on all of them in an investigation that had taken three years of his life from him.
Word had gotten out. Everybody had figured out what he was doing. Alarm bells had rung in the heavens when he’d refused to share in ill-gotten gains. His digging and poking around had been met with deathly silence. But even so, no one had taken him seriously, he was young and he was a drunk. They overlooked the fact that he was a very gifted, and unusually determined investigator. They’d left him to his own devices, believing that their closed ranks would shut him out
, and he would burn out eventually.
He’d leant on underworld figures, ex-cops, secretaries, wives, local bartenders and doormen. He even took the statement of a Darlinghurst street sweeper. There had been some ebbing and flowing where the investigation was concerned. Thinking they were clever, detectives came to Lescott with tidbits of information. When Lescott brought them into the fold, it invariably turned out their information was no better than a McGuffin, and pretty soon after, an existing piece of evidence would go missing, or a witness would hastily retract their statement. It set him back, but it also put a bullseye on the human impediment that had come to him as a friend. Overall, it had worked in his favour.
One man who remained conspicuously out of the spotlight was Lescott’s superior; John Barstow. Barstow was known throughout Darlinghurst Road as the Iron Fist of Internal Affairs. He was said to be a good man in a bad world. He was a massive specimen who’d been a senior sergeant within IA for the best part of a decade. Prior to joining the force, he’d been a career soldier. The word was that he had personally sent fourteen Japanese soldiers to the afterlife on the Kokoda Track.
When it became certain to Lescott that the case was beyond his ability or experience, he turned to Barstow for guidance. But all that glitters is not gold. It had not occurred to Lescott that Barstow’s apparent righteousness was nothing more than a reflection of his absolute control over his reputation.
When the knock came, Lescott stopped pacing. Looking over at the silhouette that moved lingered behind the frosted glass of his door, he reached down and pulled a snub-nosed revolver from the side of the sofa. Before he walked over to the door, he opened the cylinder and checked the weapon was loaded. He’d gone to Barstow out of absolute necessity rather than absolute faith. He was paranoid and he had a strong feeling he could have been signing his own death warrant by reaching out. “Who’s there?”
“It’s Barstow. Let me in. It’s fucking lashing down.” Barstow’s voice was gruff. It was the voice of a strong man who’d spent decades ruining his vocal cords with heavy drinking, constant smoking and loud yelling. Lescott double-checked through a gap in the blinds, he didn’t even trust his own ears at this point. Barstow looked straight back at him wearing a look of disbelief. “Do we have to have this conversation though the fucking door?”
Lescott’s outstretched hand hesitated before it reached the door handle, he watched it shake for a moment and attempted to steady it. It was an exercise in futility. He looked over at the wall of evidence and then back towards the door. He placed the gun into the back of his trousers and opened the door slowly. “Barstow.”
“Freddy…” Barstow smiled. “Call me John.”
“Come in.” Lescott showed Barstow inside. The more senior of the two men followed Lescott into the front room. He was immediately hit by the wall of evidence that confronted him. His face dropped when he looked around. It was worse than he’d first thought. Lescott saw the distress upon his face. “Can I get you a drink? There’s definitely whisky, there might be some coffee, but if there is, it’s stale.”
“Coffee. Make it strong” Barstow wiped sweat from his top lip and brow with a pressed handkerchief. “It looks worse again when you see it all laid out.”
In the kitchen, Lescott filled a kettle at the sink before placing it on the stove. He could hear Barstow shifting through a stack of papers in the living room. “Are your family around?”
“No, they’re… They’ve been…” Lescott didn’t know how to answer. He tried to think back to when he last saw them. Had Charlotte mentioned they were visiting family in Melbourne? When the hell was that. The past twelve months were a blur. “Did you manage to have a look through my report?” Lescott changed the subject to distract from an uneasy feeling that accompanied the thought of his wife and child.
In the living room, Barstow looked at the wall. More than half of the police who darkened the doorways of Darlinghurst Road were on that wall. Some had pictures, others were just names. Arson, Burglary, Vice, Murder, Internal Affairs, Major Crimes, the consorting squad and so on, they were all there. He stood up and moved over to the doorway into the kitchen and watched Lescott waiting for the kettle to boil. “This thing you’re doing. It’s going to put an indelible stain on the very soul of the New South Wales Police Force.”
“And?” Lescott turned to find Barstow standing in the doorway.
“Are you sure you want to go ahead with it?” Barstow was solemn. He always was. “It’s going to end a lot of careers. Likely your own. No one will work with you after this, decent and indecent alike.”
Lescott shrugged.
“Is this everything? You left nothing out?” Something about the way Barstow asked the question didn’t sit right with Lescott. It felt like Barstow knew for a fact that there was more to find.
“It’s everything.”
Barstow couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief. He tried to hide it. He couldn’t.
Lescott, having seen his superior’s tell, turned to look at the kettle on the stove, it was making a strange rattling noise. An unnatural sound it had no obvious reason to make.
“You came to the right place.” Behind Lescott, Barstow was shifting uncomfortably. He wanted to squeeze as much from Lescott as he could, but he didn’t want to give the game away. He was in two minds as to whether he ought to just finish the godawful situation on the spot.
“What do we do now?” The kettle had begun to whistle. It was releasing steam. The rattle had become a constant clatter. Lescott looked troubled as he looked down at it.
“There’s something wrong with your kettle.”
“It seems that way.” Lescott was drunk. He couldn’t remember why he’d thought the kettle was a good hiding place for his gun. The gun was now quite unattainable as it swam in boiling hot water.
“Have you shown anyone else?” Barstow uttered the fateful words. The words that confirmed to Lescott that his superior had come to put a stop to his investigation, and likely his life.
“Why does that matter?” Lescott kept his eyes on the kettle and cursed his stupidity. If Barstow pulled, he was fucked. What a mess his drunkenness and paranoia had pulled him into.
Barstow didn’t answer. Lescott heard the sound of material on material as the man behind him reached into his belt and removed his gun. Barstow knew Lescott was onto him. Lescott in turn knew. All that was left was for Barstow to put a bullet in the back of Lescott’s head. But he didn’t. Lescott waited for the blast of a gunshot to burst through the room. Instead there was silence. “Turn around Lescot,” Barstow spoke calmly, he was the kind of man who liked to look a man in the eyes as he pulled the trigger. “Turn around, you fucking dog,” Barstow growled this time, in their state of mutual enlightenment, there was no longer a need for pretence.
Fred Lescott dropped his head and exhaled deeply. Then he turned around. Not the slow pivot of a man turning to face his impending death. When he turned, it was the swift spin of a man fighting for his life. Barstow’s desire to look Lescott in the eyes as he emptied them of life was his undoing. Before they made eye contact, Lescott had flung a kettle full of boiling water straight at his superior’s face. Barstow’s gun had been firmly pointed at Lescott’s head, but his survival instinct betrayed him as that vessel full of scalding water flew through the air at his head.
Many sequences of events are best described in images, some are better served by smells, rarest of all are the sequences that can only best be described by sounds. What followed Lescott’s quick spin was a sickening series of sounds. In the panic that ensued Barstow managed to get a shot off. The bullet breached the barrel with a room-shaking bang. It whizzed through the air in a split second before rupturing the flesh on the side of Lescott’s flesh with a tear and rattled around behind his knee before displacing his kneecap with a hollow pop. Lescott fell to the ground with a thud and wailed as he held his leg. The cast iron kettle hit Barstow’s forehead with a sickening concussive thump. As its boiling contents spille
d out, they sizzled over every inch of skin they hit. When the kettle hit Barstow, it stuck to his molten skin, only for gravity and weight to peel the flesh off, falling to the floor with a metallic clanging while the pistol within rattled once more. Barstow, blinded and completely disabled, screamed with all his might.
Lescott, having achieved what countless Japanese soldiers on the Kokoda track had tried and failed to do in incapacitating Barstow, hauled himself up against the kitchen’s cabinetry. Searing pain throbbed behind his knee. Blood poured from the wound and was fast pooling under his leg. It was luck and luck alone that the blind gunshot had hit his knee and not his neck; he’d live to fight another day, but he’d never walk straight again.
Barstow writhed on the floor in a pathetic, whimpering mess. He clutched at his ruined face and foolishly called out for help where no help was to be found. Fred Lescott had never witnessed fourth degree burns before, he hoped he would never see them again. Barstow’s skin had melted away in places; muscle, jawbone and ligament were visible. What’s more, they were irreversibly damaged. As Barstow flailed around on the floor, he miraculously placed his hand onto Lescott’s pistol which had rattled its way out the kettle and onto the floor. Realising what it was, he grasped at it blindly. Though the spilled water had lost much of its heat as it hit the cold floor, the metal of the gun’s trigger had not cooled so quickly. It seared his finger as he fired the six shots in the cylinder. Three went into the roof, a fourth through the kitchen window, the fifth into the brickwork of the wall and the sixth into the cupboard just beside Lescott’s head. To say Barstow was a hard man to stop would do him a great injustice. His face had been scorched to the bone. The hot steel of the trigger had damn near burned his finger clean off. Still he was still trying to put Lescott in the ground. It was commendable.
Lescott dragged himself across the floor towards the living room, as he passed Barstow, he grabbed the man’s dropped gun and kicked at him viciously with his one good leg. To his surprise, Barstow kicked back a great deal harder. In the living room, having left a trail of blood behind him, Lescott grabbed at the phone cord, there was little slack on the line so he snatched it violently to pull the cord from the brackets that held it to the wall. Now, with a little more slack on the cord, he picked up the handset and dialled.
THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER Page 23