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

by Michael Smith

  Hangings were incredibly infrequent in those days. We’d caught on to the fact that capital punishment was barbaric and that it was better to keep the worst of mankind under lock and key for decades; rent, board and medicines paid for by the tax payer. Sitting there, I tried to remember the last hanging I could recall in Sydney. It dated back to before the war. Though infrequent, they weren’t unheard-of in Victoria. These strange events wouldn’t be outlawed for another ten years.

  I felt quite ill but completely unable to look away as a crowd began to gather. To a man, and a woman, they wore expensive mourning wear. Fine black suits, crisp white shirts, immaculate black ties, and heavy overcoats. The hand-stitched silk handkerchiefs they held to their mouths and noses to better breathe in Melbourne’s filthy air cost more than the average man earned in a month. The ruling class had gathered to witness the consequences of the actions that arose as a result of the decisions they made. I remember being impressed at the fact that they appeared so solemn. It was the first time in my life I’d seen anything like humility from that type. Perhaps they had an idea of what was proper after all.

  When all eyes moved to a door several floors below me, my view was obscured. I didn’t need to see to know what they were looking at. They were leading a man out to his death. When he did enter my line of sight, I thought him to be distinctly average, other than the black hood over his head. I remember thinking it was a tragedy. I could feel the refreshing sensation of rain hitting my skin. He was deprived of that sensation by that hideous hood. It might have been the very last enjoyable feeling of his miserable life.

  As he trudged towards the hangman with his hands bound behind his back, the eeriness of the situation was not lost on me. I don’t believe in heathen gods coming together to send us a message. But I know what I saw. There was something else in that courtyard. Something beyond the well-to-do, the pristine white chairs, and the prying eyes of prisoners just like me. Something intangible. A sense of sorrow coming from a presence neither seen nor heard.

  Whether they were virgins to execution, or this was simply the last in a long line of such events, everyone in attendance knew the gravity of the situation as it unfolded. Not least the man who was about to hang. He shuffled towards the gallows at a glacial pace. He sobbed under his hood. He pissed his pants as he reached the structure. I didn’t know what his crimes were alleged to have been, but I felt that no-one with such a profound, debilitating fear of their own death could possibly have committed crimes that deserved hanging.

  The doomed prisoner stood upon the gallows. Standing there, crying his eyes out. Had that damned sack not obscured his face, you’d have seen him desperately willing the crowd to help, they offered him nothing like a scrap of sympathy. You’d have seen he looked like a kindly man. There was no darkness in this man’s eyes. There was only desperation. He waited there hoping against hope that some influential person in attendance might come to his rescue and make all this go away. Nothing. He let out a long and sorrowful wail.

  The hangman kicked at the back of the old man’s knees and his legs crumpled beneath him. The executioner roughly fastened the noose to the man’s neck and raised him to his feet once more.

  It wasn’t the foul atmosphere in the courtyard that put the sickening lump in my throat. It was the fact that I was certain that this man didn’t deserve it. Some would recognise the work of a higher power in my surmisal, divine intervention or something of that ilk. Call it what you will, I knew this was an injustice. Like him, I scanned the crowd, hoping against hope that I could catch the eye of someone with the power to stop this damn tragedy. I recognised many of them as newspaper men and women. Both the Victorian and New South Wales Police Commissioners were present. I spotted the State Premiers. I thought I caught sight of the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, but I couldn’t be sure. I spotted someone I knew, too. Someone I’d clashed with back in Darlinghurst. He was far too far away to be able to see me through those bars on my window, but I could have sworn Detective Chief Inspector Alan Livingstone gave me a mocking wave from his spot in the front amongst a row of police officials and politicians.

  “Howard Frost…” An official opened a folder and began to read from a script inside, “You have been found guilty of crimes including murder, rape, molestation, improper interference with a corpse, auto theft, resisting arrest, and the assault of two police officers causing actual bodily harm. Your prior criminal history and your several failed attempts at rehabilitation have been considered and you have been sentenced to death by hanging. Your crimes were deemed unholy and inhumane. You have been deemed to be beyond hope. May God have mercy upon your soul.” A nearby priest prayed as the official concluded his reading.

  Gone was the silence that had preceded the official’s statement. An uneasiness had come over the crowd and they were murmuring amongst themselves. Voices from cells overlooking the courtyard expressed the unanimous disagreement of Pentridge’s inmates. Dissent that was quickly followed by the rattle of truncheons on the bars of jail cells and gruffly voiced demands for silence in the wings. It was too late. Whatever it was, wherever it had come from, it had now escaped. There would be no putting it back.

  The crowd in front of the gallows could feel the tension rising. The air was thick with the sound of torment. It has been said that criminality arises from a broken society, rather than the other way around. These people in attendance had shaped society in no small way. They had forced poverty, ill health, malnutrition and immorality on the masses. And those who darkened those corridors were amongst the most afflicted. Now their abusers had forced their way into the hellish place that kept them prisoner, and they were going to kill a man. For nearly everyone in that crowd, it was a terrifying place to be. The only bastard down there who showed no fear was DCI Livingstone. You see, he didn’t see this event as a man’s demise. He saw this as his own ascension to bulletproof invincibility.

  The crimes for which Howard Frost had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death concerned the Darlinghurst Death Car. Of course, he’d supposedly committed these crimes in Sydney, where the death sentence was a thing of the past. Had it been tried there, he’d have likely been sentenced to life, not death. And that just wouldn’t do. The powers that be didn’t want anyone pulling at loose threads. So, it was convenient when, according to the narrative spun by the police, Frost fled across state lines and into Victoria. A state where the death penalty was still available to the institution. When Frost allegedly resisted arrest in Victoria, all the crimes in the tenuously-contrived “spree” could be brought before a Victorian court. It was flimsy at best, but it didn’t need to be bulletproof or watertight. He argued against it, until he was blue in the face. But no one listened. His own lawyer was likely on the payroll of Alan Livingstone.

  “Have you any last words?” The official asked.

  “I’ve haven’t been to Sydney in five years,” Howard Frost muttered inaudibly through tears streaming down his face. From under the hood came one last mournful wail from a man whose only crime was being in the wrong place, at the wrong time. That place was in Detective Chief Inspector Livingstone’s swollen black book of patsies.

  When the hangman pulled the lever, the boards beneath Frost folded away. He dropped several feet below the platform. It was a short drop, not the kind that breaks a man’s neck. The kind that lets them hang there while the breath leaves their body. The crowd gasped with each tragic and involuntary shake of the dying man’s body as it fought valiantly against finality. He kicked and writhed desperately, while we all watched on.

  Then he was dead. The outrage of the prisoners peaked. Every one of them felt disgust at having witnessed one of the vilest moments in history. An incidence of evil overcoming good, the immoral corrupting the chaste, the institution killing someone it was meant to protect. And then a deathly silence fell over the courtyard once more, broken only by the whistling of the wind. A sudden, constant breeze that soothed weary heads and began to blow the smog from over the
city. Some prisoners would swear they saw Frost’s spirit leaving his body and drifting up to the heavens. I didn’t.

  With Frost still hanging there, they checked his pulse and he pronounced him dead. The hangman was ceremonially placed in handcuffs, arrested for murder, and led to a holding cell. He would later be granted a pardon by the State Premier. The whole thing had turned my stomach. Criminality was fine when it was done with the permission of those in charge.

  I moved away from the window and went to the barred door that held me and my bunkmate in. I banged on that door as hard as I could and screamed at the top of my voice for as long as it held. I’d had enough, I had learnt my lesson. No one answered to begin with; they were busy trying to extinguish a riot that would go on for three days and claim two lives. When I screamed out that I would pay what I owed, well the doors opened then. I was freed. I never returned to Melbourne.

  Chapter 30

  As Lescott’s feat of German engineering swallowed the road heading north of Adelaide, it left a cloud of red dirt in its wake. They had not yet left South Australia, but they had long since left any sign of urban development behind. They were closing in on the Northern Territory. And they were doing so at speed. It would be a matter of hours.

  When Harris had insisted on being behind the wheel as they took leave of Sydney, Lescott assumed he just liked the car. Maybe it was a security thing. Either way, he didn’t argue because it was a long journey, there was plenty of road ahead. But after two days and nights behind the wheel, with no sleep, Harris was still insistent on driving. It was a distraction. He was itching for a fix.

  It was Harris’ intention to make it as far as Coober Pedy, some ten hours North of Adelaide. His plan was to drive a couple of hours outside of the town and dispose of poor old Walter McCoppin. It was a tiny place, there was little chance the man would be dug up by humans before the dingoes got to him.

  Coober Pedy was named by the Antakirinja or Arabana locals who’d walked the lands in that region for thousands of years. It means White Man’s Hole. You see, it lies in the middle of an opal field filled with the finest and rarest gemstones known to mankind. Included the feted black opal. To the Aboriginals, the hole represented both the cause and effect of the white man’s greed. The greedier they got, the deeper they dug, the more they found, the more they ravaged the landscape.

  There was quiet in the car as they drove through a beautiful span of country littered by the saline lakes that make the region famous. Lescott looked over at Harris. He was smoking. Again. He was always smoking. Lescott wondered how many packs he went through in a day, however many it was, it wasn’t healthy. He seemed to smoke roughly once every fifteen minutes and he struck Lescott as the type who’d sleep no more than four hours a day, although that didn’t include periods of slumber or inactivity when he was under the influence of heroin. One smoke every fifteen minutes was four an hour, if he was awake for twenty of the day’s hours, he’d smoke eighty. That was a lot by anyone’s standards. The thought of it made Lescott feel queasy. The air in the car was heavy with smoke, it was stifling. He needed fresh air. He reached to the handle to wind down the window.

  “That’s a mistake. You know that.” Harris warned him.

  “I need air.” Lescott did it anyway, he lowered the window and gasped. and waited for the refreshing effects of the fresh air filling his lungs. What hit him was disappointment, that and a wall of unbearable heat that felt like he’d swallowed a hairdryer on hot. In a panic, Lescott fumbled with the lever. It was too late though, that hot arid air had got into every inch of his lungs, they felt like they were about to burst. He quickly set about replacing the desert air in his alveoli with Lucky Strike smoke. Strangely, it helped. He quickly put the window back up and began fiddling with the knobs of the air conditioning system.

  “Bad dream?” Harris asked.

  “I keep expecting them to go away… Or at least to get used to them.”

  “Nineteen years mine have been following me around.” Harris paused, sensing that Lescott wanted to ask a question, but he’d obviously thought better of it. “The war… Bergen Belsen specifically. Did you serve?”

  Lescott sensed that the hangover effect of the Second World War had hit Harris harder than many. “I took out a regiment of Japanese soldiers from my tree house… with a broom handle.” Lescott, just a few years younger, had very different memories of the war.

  “That’s good.” Many people judged those who hadn’t served, or held them in a lower regard to those who had. Not Harris. He saw no merit in war. The way he saw it, what happened during the war, and in Germany in the years leading up to it was just another cruel fuck-up in humankind’s already blotted existence. “You know the truth? The worst thing to happen to humankind over the last million years or so, is humankind.”

  “You need to be careful who you say that kind of shit to. There’re asylums from here to Birmingham filled with people who think they know the truth. Popular opinion is that they’re mad.”

  “Popular opinion? The very thing that saw Galileo imprisoned as a heretic, had women burnt at the stake in Salem. Are you old enough to remember 1933? When popular opinion gave power to a little angry Austrian named Adolf Hitler.”

  “I’m going to need coffee if I’m going to have to endure this bullshit all the way to Alice Springs.”

  “We’ll stop in Coober Pedy in four hours.” Harris blinked his eyes wildly to try and keep himself awake.

  Lescott noticed. “I can’t hold out that far. I need to stretch my legs.”

  Harris looked up for a road sign. There were vast distances between road signs in that place, he’d have to be patient. Twenty minutes or so passed before they saw a fucking thing. When they did, they saw they were near a town called Woomera. Harris recognised the name, but he couldn’t place it. Once they really hit their stride in the desert there would be hundreds of kilometres between stops. This place seemed like as good a place as any to take in what civilization had to offer before they left it. Before they found themselves in an older place where an ancient culture and modern life were still struggling to coexist.

  Woomera, as it happened, wasn’t the best of places to stop. You see, Woomera wasn’t so much a town. It was more an exercise in human destruction. Like Coober Pedy, it was aptly named, given that ‘Woomera’, in the Dharug language of the local Eora people, is the implement that launches spears. Woomeran spears were not made of wood. Not anymore.

  When they turned off the freeway and drove several kilometres without seeing a single house or business, they realised something wasn’t quite right. It was strange that a town should be so far off the beaten track, generally they were built around freeways, not away from them. Then, over the horizon they saw it. What looked like a small town to begin with, soon became something different. Something worse.

  Harris slowed the car as they approached. When Lescott felt their speed decrease, he looked over and saw Harris had come to understand what manner of place they were approaching. This collection of buildings, and the impenetrable fencing around them had been built for the sole purpose of servicing the military base within. They would have to try their luck at a sentry post if they were to get in.

  “I think we should turn back,” Lescott spoke quietly, as if the guard manning the sentry post a hundred feet away could hear them. He wasn’t desperate for a coffee, he could wait a couple of hours until they hit the next town.

  Harris looked down at the fuel gage, it was nearing empty. “No such luck.”

  The car rolled up to the barrier and Harris lowered the driver’s side window. As a cloud of cigarette smoke poured from the car, the guard waved it away from his face. He didn’t know just what the hell he was looking at. His job generally consisted of checking the identification and clearance documents of those entering the town. He had admitted enough people to know that these men were not in possession of security clearances, before he had even spoken to them. Every so often he would have to turn civilians back from t
he entrance and request that they make a stop at the nearest town instead. Woomera’s proximity to the freeway meant it was an ideal spot for people to refuel their cars and their stomachs, but they couldn’t have people entering and leaving the base all day. They needed to run a tight ship. He’d turned enough confused citizens away to know that these two men weren’t quite that either. “You’re aware that this is a functioning military base, sir?”

  “I am, Private.” Harris responded.

  The soldier didn’t like Harris using his rank to address him. It was his lowly. The only time anyone used it was when superior officers informed him he had been scheduled to clean the latrines the following week. He’d enjoy turning this intruder away. “I’m going to need to see some identification and your security clearances… Sorry, I didn’t catch your rank.”

  “I was a Private in ’42 when my blood spilled on the sands at El Alamein. When I was discharged in ’45, having been part of the force that liberated Bergen Belsen, I was a corporal with the Royal Marine Commandos. I’d have made it as high as sergeant but I don’t do well with authority and rules.” Harris knew the man was entirely sure that they didn’t have clearance to enter the base, he’d decided gaining the soldier’s respect was likely their best way in.

  The guard straightened his posture. “I’m sorry, Corporal. But that was a long time ago. I will need to see identification and clearances before I let you in.”

  Harris had won his respect. He could work with that. “Listen, Private…”