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

by Michael Smith

  It was dark inside the garage. The shelter of the carport was allowing little light inside but not much. The floor there was damp and mossy, it squelched underfoot. Lescott was relieved to notice a string hanging from the ceiling. It looked like a gentle tug would illuminate the place. It didn’t. As he tugged the cord, the strip lighting overhead came crashing down around him.

  Lescott cursed and pulled a torch from his pocket. He hadn’t checked the batteries on the thing in months. He was in luck, it created a weak beam of light. It wasn’t quite strong enough to wash the place entirely in light or make him feel comfortable in that festering pit, but it was strong enough for him to slowly take it all in, bit by putrid bit.

  The garage was covered in dust and cobwebs. Tools were fixed to the walls. A push bike stood in the corner. This had once been a family’s home. There were packing boxes at the back and a wardrobe leaning against one of the walls. It had all the hallmarks of any other garage. Where it differed from others was bloody children’s clothes that dangled from the roof like they were left there to dry.

  Harris walked into a filthy kitchen. He went to flick a light on in the pantry only to find the electricity had long since been cut off. He could see the food rotting away on the shelves. He could hear the squeaking of rodents. That was quite enough.

  The benches of the kitchen looked as though someone had scarpered while preparing a Sunday roast. A joint of meat sat there squirming with life as flies and maggots feasted upon it. with flies and maggots all over it. Harris had a pretty strong stomach, but the sights and the smells of this place were becoming harder and harder to handle. Harris paused as he heard a crashing sound coming from somewhere outside the house. Looking out the window, across the disordered garden, and towards the open roller door into the garage, he waited. After a moment, he sighed a deep sigh of relief when he saw Lescott emerge unharmed.

  Lescott moved through a brown and green sea that hadn’t been touched in years. It was a drying jungle. The trees and plants that had previously been growing there had died some time before. They looked like ashen, lifeless husks that peppered the yard. The hardier weeds had taken over the area, only to die themselves. They’d made it above waist height and simply perished. There were burned patches of black within the thick of the yard. Lescott could smell petrol. This place had played host to several bonfires recently. Within the tangle of dead plant life, Lescott’s eyes were drawn to an assortment of half-burned children’s clothes and shoes. There was blood on more than one piece.

  He sniffed as a foul smell hit his nose. A scent that would linger in his nasal cavity until the day he died. Harris, all too familiar with the smell given his tormented time at Belsen, had smelled it the moment he’d stepped foot in the house. It seemed to Lescott, as he moved closer to the granny flat at the back of the property, the smell grew in strength.

  Charlie did as he was asked. He did a lap of the block. But that was quite enough. He stopped the car on the road outside the house and pushed through a throng of gathering locals. None of them would get too close to the house. It had garnered a reputation as a place of darkness and cruelty in its recent history.

  Harris moved along a corridor, entering bedroom after bedroom. Each more disgusting than the last. The bathroom in the middle of the corridor, he could scarcely step foot inside. With his gun drawn he continued moving down the corridor towards a sound coming from the final bedroom. A scratching.

  He exhaled as he entered the final room and found a scraggly old possum sitting on the bed, chewing through the mattress. Above its head, a widowmaker was poking through a smashed window pane. Glass was scattered around the room, but other than that, nothing looked sinister.

  Having cleared the house, he strode back along the corridor towards the large living area where he found Charlie poking around. “Fuck’s sake man. We told you not to come inside.”

  At the door to the annex, Lescott took several short sharp breaths. He felt certain he knew what awaited him inside. It wasn’t something he particularly wanted to see. But that was much of the job. He nudged at the door with his foot, but it failed to move. He grabbed at the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. The door was locked. Lescott put his elbow through the glass by the doorframe, reached inside, and opened the lock.

  As the door creaked open that stomach-churning odour burst through the crack. He walked in with his nose in the crook of his elbow, but the scent found its way to his eyes.

  What he saw inside shocked him. Unlike the rest of the property, inside this tiny flat was pristine. It was neat and in order; nothing was out of place. From the layer of dust, he could see no one had been there in weeks, but otherwise it was quite immaculate. Nothing was out of place, except for the burned body of a child on the bed.

  Harris was scolding Charlie for entering the house when Lescott called out, “He’s here. The boy’s here.”

  Harris stopped speaking and wearily sat down. He was tired. He needed to sleep. It was something in his fight-or-flight programming. He’d just had enough of this saga. Lescott’s voice was filled with disappointed resignation. Harris knew at once what he had come across.

  Charlie heard it too. The hope he had clung onto since that day threatened to simply drift away in an instant. If that left him, all he would have left would be profound guilt. He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t. He needed to see with his own eyes to believe.

  Harris saw Charlie lunge towards the back door before it happened. The boy didn’t need to see whatever it was Lescott had found. Harris wearily jumped up to grab Charlie, in the hope of consoling him but the Englishman’s tired feet caught on each other and sent him flying. He landed heavily on a filthy coffee table. Under his weight, glass shattered and wood splintered. “Charlie… Don’t go out there.” He gasped to refill his winded lungs. Charlie was gone.

  Lescott was similarly exhausted. A find like that sucks the life out of you. He sat down in the red dirt, amongst the railings and lit a cigarette. Though his body was spent, his mind was racing. He didn’t know how they would break the news to Charlie. He needed to find a phone to report this to Hawke. And why had he not protected his own family from the increasingly dark world in which he found himself? Once more those apparitions haunted him. The mother and her daughter, standing hand in hand before him. Lescott began to cry. With his head in his hands, he didn’t even notice as Charlie burst past him.

  None of the houses on that godforsaken street had phones. Lescott had to walk two blocks over before he found one. The owner had demanded that the distressed detective crossed his palm with copper before he permitted him inside.

  Charlie was crestfallen as he sat upon the wall of the property. His body had gone into something of a catatonic shock. He could neither hear nor see what was going on around him. The boy’s burned remains had burned onto his retinas and would haunt him for some time to come.

  “You can’t sit here, Tiddalik. You need to get on the other side of the cordon with your people,” A local policeman said.

  “His people, ‘' Lescott answered from his spot sitting at the base of the wall under Charlie. He didn’t look at the officer, he was too busy staring at the apparitions across the street. It seemed the longer his wife and child were missing, the more terrifying these visions were becoming. He could see the deep black rings around their sunken, dead eyes. Their sallow, cracked skin. “It’s a bit late for you boys to start giving a shit where his people are.”

  “It’s protocol, sir.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Harris’ tumble through the coffee table had been costly, he’d paid in blood. His torso, arms, and legs were sporting gushing wounds. As a doctor cleaned and stitched one such lesion on his midriff, Harris watched as a pair of officials wheeled a gurney out the house. He raised a cigarette with blood-soaked hands and despaired.

  The boy was on it. The men were careless. They’d allowed the sheet that was meant to shroud him to get caught on a wheel, it had pulled down to lay bare the torture to all tho
se in the vicinity. So busy were they, fighting through the crowd, that they simply didn’t notice their calamitous mistake. But the crowd did. And anger spread. Rage. They grabbed stones from the floor, bricks from walls, and then the locals began hurling them at police representatives and vehicles. A riot threatened to break out when those outside the cordon stormed inside. Harris cracked an aggressor across the head with a right hook when the man began to shove the doctor attending to his stitches.

  “We need to get you out of here and to the clinic.” Harris looked down at the kneeling medic, obviously not enamoured by the suggestion. “You need stitches. I need to give a tetanus jab, diphtheria too.” Harris remained unmoved. “Hold on, I’ve got some shots in the van, we’ll do it here.”

  Harris grabbed the man’s arm as he went to leave. “What else do you have in the van?”

  The aggression, like temporary waves on permanent rocks, suddenly broke. Their external rage turned to internal grief and guilt. And that went for those on both sides of the cordon. Many of those on the outside, had used Hoskin for their own purposes while he had used them right back. Those in the inside of the cordon had allowed him to run free and give birth to havoc unfettered, likely for financial gain. There was a good deal of soul-searching to be done in the wee hours that night. People would ask themselves the seldom-posed question each of us ought to ask more often: “Is our way of life, our society’s hunger for money, and our chase for that which sustains us, putting the world around us in jeopardy?”

  Few, on either side of the law, can say no.

  Charlie, in deep soul-twisting torment, dropped from the wall and walked off without a word.

  Chapter 50

  When dark clouds began to follow James Harris around, an overdose was on the horizon. Harris called it getting the black dog off his back. He’d cook up a dosage he was pretty sure his body couldn’t cope with. He’d roll the dice in what was essentially a cry for help directed towards the universe.

  He didn’t take a great deal of enjoyment from everyday life. It always felt harder than it should have been. Tears lasted too long. Laughter was all too brief. Over the years, his overdoses had been becoming more and more severe. It was simply a matter of time before his luck ran out. It could well have run out that night. You see, overdoses vary in extremity. None are pleasant, all are avoidable, some you can survive, and others are a flip of the coin.

  That night, the coin toppled as it landed and came to rest on neither heads nor tails, but on the third side. It teetered there for a moment until DS Fred Lescott came and saved his life.

  Lescott needed a drink. That’s not to say he hadn’t had several, but they were solemn, lonely drinks. He needed company. So, he went to Harris’ room and he knocked at his door. No answer. The drunk began to lose his patience and pounded harder and harder. He called his partner’s name. He tried to goad him into answering by calling out that dreaded slur, “Pom!” Still, no answer.

  The lady who owned the hotel came out in her fluffy woollen nightgown to see what all the commotion was about. Lescott couldn’t help but drunkenly laugh as she went about admonishing his drunken behaviour and told him to go to bed. “You’re disturbing the other guests…”

  Lescott soon stopped laughing when he noticed the light coming from under the door. When he pressed his ear to the wood, he could hear the sound of a radio coming from inside. It dawned on him then, exactly who his friend was. It was in that moment, he remembered the nature of that which ailed Harris. And panic struck.

  “Do you have a key for this door?”

  “Of course,” The woman said, noticing a distinct change in Lescott’s demeanour.

  Lescott got onto his knees and peered through the keyhole. The key was in the lock on the inside. If they were to gain entry, they needed to displace the key from the lock. “Do you knit?”

  “Have you seen my husband? It isn’t him keeping me warm during long cold nights in the desert.”

  After a moment fumbling around the woman’s knitting basket, Lescott returned to Harris’ door with a needle and the key. He rattled the needle in the hole for a moment before he felt the key give, and heard it fall to the floor on the other side. When he unlocked and opened the door, he was met by the sight he had expected.

  Harris was fully clothed on the bed, with a needle sticking out of his arm. When Lescott heard Johnny Cash ‘Ring Of Fire’ faintly buzzing through the old portable radio, his heart skipped and he tore towards the bed.

  Lack of consciousness. Check. A failing pulse. Check. Coldness of the skin. Check. Discolouring of the skin with a blue tinge. Check. Faint, laboured breathing. Check. Lescott was no doctor, but he could see his friend was fighting a losing battle with his demons for his very life.

  “We’re not done here, James. Not by a long way,” Lescott berated his stupefied partner as he attempted to resuscitate him. “Come on.”

  He pounded on the Englishman’s chest more and more desperately with each push until tiredness and frustration got the better of him. Until finally he delivered weakening blow after weakening blow with his fists. What he needed was naloxone, the recently patented wonder drug which was, at that time, going through clinical trials. It was showing startling efficacy at blocking opioid receptors in the brain, and thus reversing the effects of overdoses. But naloxone didn’t hit the market until 1971, so Harris was shit out of luck.

  As he gave up and slumped on the floor by the side of the bed. Lescott began to cry and plead with whatever was left of James Harris. “Don’t leave me here. I’m so alone.” Tears poured down his cheeks. “I’ve lost so much. I had everything. Now I’ve got nothing. The drink doesn’t help. The drugs make it worse. And they’re always on my mind. They won’t leave me be. I see them everywhere. On every street. In every cloud. I feel so old and tired. And you’re the only friend I’ve got left. As ridiculous as that sounds. I don’t have enough strength left to go on alone. Please come back.”

  Silence. Broken only by the faintest of rasping whispers. “Get me on my feet. Need to walk it off.” That was a heroin overdose to James Harris. It was like a dead leg or a stubbed toe to you or I. Crazy fucking bastard.

  Lescott wiped his tears away and turned to see Harris pathetically trying to lift his head. “Can I do anything?” the troubled proprietor asked from the doorway. “Should I call a doctor?”

  “Cup of tea might be nice,” Harris murmured as Lescott helped him to his feet.

  “I thought you were a goner.”

  “Not my first overdose. Won’t be my last.”

  Chapter 51

  The night sky above Alice Springs and the Simpson desert was beginning to show signs of a gathering storm. From somewhere in the distance, a thick black blanket was rolling in. It covered the vastness of the desert in a shadow which traversed the land at a startling pace.

  What remained of the displaced Anangu tribe sat around the campfire that night and mourned their loss. A funeral would be held in the coming days, but before then, they would comfort each other by telling stories that made sense of what they called “Sorry Business.” Stories of those who walked the lands before, coming and going, joining the ancestral line in the space between spaces of the desert and in the night’s sky.

  The men of the group remained conspicuous in their absence. Their journey back to their spiritual homeland was underway. Those who remained behind, had done so either in the hope that the boy would come back unscathed, or for the closure of learning his fate once and for all. The boy was now gone.

  What little cause they had to stay was gone. It was time for them to join those who had already left that place in the pilgrimage back to their ancestral lands. Lands they looked after long before the likes of Harris, Lescott, Hawke and Hoskins had shown up.

  Losing the boy to the evil brought forth by modern society was just the latest in a long line of atrocities to befall the Anangu. It was symptomatic of their life in that spot of desert they felt little connection to. They were being oppressed.
Their culture, their language, their beliefs and their very identity were being systematically wiped out. The further the twentieth century unfolded, the worse they fared.

  What happened to the boy was bigger than one missing child. The events of the Death Car and the Old Man on the bench, were similarly part of a larger, more harrowing narrative. They were a foreshadowing, a harbinger of the bleak future that lay ahead, unless something was done to right the wrongs that had haunted the indigenous people of Australia since that day in 1788. The day the white fella showed up.

  The constellation of the Seven Sisters featured heavily in their beliefs. And as Mowan fought through fits of coughing to retell the story he had told countless times before, a story that hadn’t changed in generations, it took on new meaning.

  The Greeks of old said the seven stars of the Pleiades were the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas who was forced into holding the weight of the heavens on his strong shoulders. Zeus, in a rare moment of compassion, sent him his seven Daughters as stars in the sky, to comfort him, and to lighten his immense task. There, he could protect them from Orion, the hunter, who mercilessly followed them each evening.

  The commonly held Aboriginal belief, and the story that Mowan had told over and over, was that the Seven Sisters were chased each night, over the land and across the sky by a man of another nation. A man who wanted them as his wives but who their Tjukurpa would not allow them to marry. And so, they ran.

  But that night, it seemed to Mowan, those Seven Sisters were something altogether different. They were all that was good and chaste in the world. Each day they were relentlessly preyed upon, at each setting of the sun, by that trailing star. A celestial body that represented all that was wrong and unjust in the world. That heavenly light-show was the inevitability of human cruelty, it was the powerful victimising the weak. To Mowan, that night, the trailing star looked closer than it had ever been.