His time in Missing Persons had been lonely and it had been meaningless, but he wasn’t doing any damage in that unsupervised purgatory. Burglary was hell, and he had the Devil breathing his hot putrid breath down his neck.
The average day consisted of Lescott staggering into the office either on a come-down from something or just hungover. Then, he would do this strange little dance with his secretary. He’d walk over to her desk, he’d pick the ringing phone up, disconnect the call, and leave the hand set out of the cradle. She would look up at him as if to say, “What the fuck is your problem?”
He would shoot a matching glare back in her direction that said: “My life is hell. Stop making it worse.”
When Livingstone insisted that the Burglary Squad, consisting solely of Lescott for a short time, hired a receptionist of his own choosing, Lescott had protested. He had no interest in being monitored by some hag who was living in Livingstone’s pocket and would willingly run back to her master and report on his movements. Nor did he have much interest in attempting to tap the girl up for information on Livingstone’s comings and goings. He wanted to be left alone. His protestations went unnoted. Livingstone hired Yvonne, a girl Lescott could only assume to be a distant relative or a family friend who needed a job, and any job would do. Her lack of passion for the work seemed to rival his own.
A couple of weeks into their incredibly unproductive working relationship, Lescott drunkenly let slip that he hated Livingstone. It wasn’t so much a situation where a misplaced word or two escaped his lips. He ranted at length about the man’s racism, corruption, and general cruelty. He verbally swore a bloody oath to bring Livingstone to justice. Once he was quite done, he looked at the girl in panic. She called the man ‘Uncle Alan’, for God’s sake. She didn’t react the way he had expected. She didn’t pack her things and scarper straight to Livingstone. She didn’t warn him of this blood feud that seemed to be brewing away in Lescott’s banishment. Quite the opposite. She pushed him back onto his chair, and climbed aboard. Lescott’s hatred of dear old Uncle Alan was all the convincing the girl needed to engage in a rather carnal, physical affair with him.
They shared a bond entirely down to hatred. Livingstone, it seemed, had taken a shine to Yvonne when she had been a pre-teen. She’d developed beautifully, and she’d developed young. Livingstone was far too respectable to perform any manner of physical child abuse, but he had leered at her beauty and youthful pertness through her teen years. He had done his best to groom her for a vacant spot in his bed. Yvonne, wise beyond her years, had seen straight through his compliments, his presents, the thinly-veiled threats. His hiring of her was just the latest attempt to get her to owe him ‘one.’
After a brief and inglorious fling that amounted to several drunken fumbles and several liaisons in which Lescott simply failed to lift off, it fizzled out. She had enjoyed his drunkenness for a short time, she’d taken some of the drugs he had on his person at all times. But there are only so many times you can listen to a person having a conversation with people who simply aren’t there, while holding on to any level of attraction for them. Madness can be quite off-putting and that’s where Lescott was headed.
“They’re not going to stop calling. And you’re going to make him angry.” Yvonne looked over at Lescott as he dropped into his chair and took his own phone off the hook.
“Who? Uncle Alan?” Lescott mocked.
She shrugged her shoulders curtly, she was losing patience for the man now that the amusement had worn off. “Suit yourself. It’s your life he is ruining.”
Lescott wasn’t too out of it to feel guilty for speaking rudely, “I’m sorry, Yvonne. I’m not quite feeling myself today.” He wasn’t. He was tired. His eyes were heavy, his limbs too. His stomach was unsettled and his mouth was suffering from a dryness no drink could slake.
“That’s your problem, Detective Inspector. I think you’re feeling quite yourself.”
Lescott looked down at his desk. It was a mess of files and reports. But it was his mess, and as such he recognised something out of place immediately. Something he hadn’t left there. “What’s this?”
“I believe it’s a scrap of paper,” she answered. “It’s a tree product used to write upon. With a pen. On that particular scrap of paper someone, me, has written a note to someone else, you. You can tell by the way I address it to your name at the top, and sign off with my name at the bottom.”
“Very droll, dear.” Lescott tried to read the note, but her handwriting was terrible and his vision was somewhat bleary. “What’s the message?”
“You need to go to the address in Dover Heights, there was a B&E there last night.”
“Tell one of the lads in uniform to swing by. I have plans.” Lescott reached for a bottle of Scotch inside his desk.
“I’m afraid I can’t. They asked for you specifically. Something about a report for an insurance claim.”
“Oh, Uncle Alan.” Lescott sank into his chair pitifully. He was feeling quite sorry for himself. Livingstone’s appetite for torment knew no bounds. Once every so often a call would come through, and it would tell Lescott to turn up to a nice house, in a rich part of town. Livingstone was horse-trading for influence, and he was using Lescott as a pawn. The Head of Burglary would get to the address and be met by someone noteworthy, a lawyer, a judge, a businessman, or a politician.
It was a con. They’d stage a robbery; Lescott would file a phoney police report. On more than one occasion, Lescott had subsequently done some digging around and found storage facilities with contracts in these people’s names. He broke into one such facility and found every single missing item accounted for. But knowing it was a con and doing something about it were two very different things.
He’d considered resigning from the force, selling up, and moving to the country. But being a policeman was all he had left. If he was left alone in a big country house with nothing but his addictions and mental ailments, he wouldn’t see out a month. He knew that. So, it turned out, the only thing that kept him clinging to life, was the thing that was killing him.
Lescott looked over to the forms of Emma and Charlotte in the doorway. His eyes welled up. What had once been a passing psychosis was now quite constant. They followed him around everywhere, and they looked at him in bitter disappointment, judging him to have become a shell of the man he was. “Call Charlie, have him meet me there.”
Yvonne picked up the phone and dialled, as Lescott walked past her on his way to the door, she handed him a pair of envelopes. “These came for you. They’re marked as urgent.”
By 1965, Charlie had come into his own. Having travelled back to Sydney with his new friends, he moved in with Lescott for a short while. But witnessing Lescott’s slide up-close and on a daily basis had left Charlie drinking more than ever. It was hard to be around, Fred was a good-natured man; he didn’t deserve the torment he was going through. Charlie subsequently became James Harris. That’s to say, he took over Harris’ sleuthing business, he moved into the Englishman’s hovel in the heart of Darlinghurst, and he even drove that horrible scrapheap of a car around. Before he left, Harris wished Charlie better luck with the life he was leaving behind, and Charlie hadn’t looked back since.
He helped Lescott out here and there. Mainly when Lescott wanted to do some digging around but didn’t want to be seen to do so. But the bulk of his business was from locals. Those who could get past the shock and disappointment of hiring an Aboriginal, and there were many who could not, received a service far better than Harris ever provided. You see, Charlie could get into places without being noticed in a way Harris, the known standover man, never could. People paid little attention to Charlie, and those who did tended to throw a racial epithet in his direction and carry on with their business. They’d verbalise their nefarious plans in front of him without registering him as any kind of threat. They were quite wrong.
The guilt Charlie felt at the passing of his nephew had never truly subsided. Hoskins’ death had done
little to provide him with anything like closure or quench his thirst for justice. As such, by 1965, Charlie was the only man still searching for the Death Car killer. Lescott, best intentions aside, had little to offer and often got in the way. So, when Charlie made his trips into Redfern to converse with the locals, he left Lescott behind. He spent a great deal of time in that part of the world, where he could move amongst the impoverished with far greater ease than Lescott or Harris. There were whispers. There were half-leads. But never been anything concrete. Many said a Rolls Royce still prowled the area at night, others said they could identify the driver. These claims always turned out to be unsubstantiated. But Charlie would not stop. He could not stop.
Charlie waited in the driver’s seat of his car as Lescott, clearly having one of his worse days, bickered with an unseen presence in the passenger seat. They were meeting at a staggering seafront mansion. Luxury had never looked quite so luxurious, from the kerb at least. Three floors, high ceilings, tall windows and water features in a garden shielded by immaculately pruned hedges. No doubt there was a swimming pool out the back. The owners and builders had likely conspired to flatten virgin bushland that played home to dozens of species of flora and fauna, to put a concrete monstrosity of a swimming pool right next to the fucking sea.
Charlie watched in his rear-view mirror as Lescott took a bump of something, likely an amphetamine, and got out of the car. No doubt if he was being made to perform his part in this travesty, he would do it stoned in protest.
“Do me a favour will you…? Stay in the car.” Charlie overheard Lescott speaking to his immaterial escorts as he stuck his head back in the open door. When the man turned towards the garden path, he looked dismayed, “Did you hear what I just said… Stay in the fucking car.”
It was heart-breaking just how far gone Lescott was. To Charlie, it was only a matter of time before it caught up with him. He’d end up dead or dribbling on himself in some institution. They met upon the footpath and shook hands.
“How are you doing over there, Lezza?”
“Let’s just get this over with.” Lescott was in no mood for niceties as he began his traipse up the garden path.
The large ornate door swung open to reveal a weaselly little man and his Goliath of a minder. “Detective Inspector Fred Lescott, I assume? How nice to make your acquaintance. Can I take your coat?”
Lescott placed his head in his hands. This man was the Deputy State Premier. There was no man nor woman whom Livingstone couldn’t corrupt. Lescott looked past the man, down the hallway and into the house. Either this man lived a spartan existence, or this was the most elaborate staging of a robbery yet. The house was empty. Completely empty.
“This shouldn’t take us long.” Lescott went to move inside, but the politician stopped him with an outstretched hand.
“I’ll have to ask you to leave your…” The homeowner’s eyes moved to Charlie. “Friend outside.”
Lescott lit a cigarette in open frustration. “And why is that?”
The man lowered his voice and leaned in towards Lescott, speaking quietly, “Well, I’m not racist, you see, I just don’t trust the look of him. I don’t want him to run off with anything.”
Lescott looked inside at the entirely empty house. “And what is it he is going to run off with? The floorboards? The bricks in the wall?” Silence. “My… ‘friend’ is a private investigator and he represents your best chance at retrieving your stolen items.” Lescott was adamant, if Charlie didn’t come inside with him, he wouldn’t go inside.
“I’m afraid I really must insist,” the politician said – he really wouldn’t budge. “No one does more charity work in the Aboriginal Community than me, but to have one in my home… That’s just too much.”
Lescott looked over at Charlie, who was clearly angered, but nothing like shocked at this reaction to his presence. “I’m going to go. I’ve got better things to do with my time than wait outside like some sort of fucking porch monkey.” And with that, Charlie left.
“I’m really not racist,” the politician continued to completely miss the point of what racism actually looks like. “Now, how would you like to proceed?”
Chapter 63
When Lescott called Charlie, no more than an hour after the young man had walked away, he sounded troubled. This wasn’t uncommon. Lescott had no one left, and when he went through the lows of depression or the highs of mania, he turned to Charlie. Charlie had come to recognise these episodes. This sounded different. He was edgy about saying too much on the phone, and he asked Charlie to meet him not far from where he had left him.
When Charlie arrived at Dudley Page Reserve, Lescott was sitting on a park bench, alone and quite still. That grassy flat in one of Sydney’s nicer areas had the very best views of the city’s ever-changing skyline. It was a marvel, but Lescott was doing anything but marvelling at it. He was catatonic, his eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance.
“What’s so urgent?” Charlie asked.
Lescott said nothing, he just handed Charlie a mucky old envelope addressed as urgent. When Charlie tipped its contents into his hand, he couldn’t quite figure what he was looking at. It looked something like a small walnut, but it felt more like a dried bush plum. As he lifted it towards his nose, a strange smell gripped at his nostrils. “What the fuck is this?”
Lescott slowly turned towards Charlie, still quite silent, and handed him a note. The paper had that same grubby look as the envelope, it felt oily and gritty, the kind of texture that sends an involuntary shudder from your fingertips to the rest of your body.
WHY HAVE YOU EYES, IF NOT TO SEE?
“This is uncomfortable.” Charlie spoke hesitantly.
“What is?”
“I don’t read…” Charlie spoke quietly.
Something about Charlie’s response felt off, Lescott couldn’t quite put his finger on it… “What, you’ve got some kind of moral objection to reading the written word?” Until the words left his mouth and the frustration appeared on Charlie’s face. He understood his insensitive blunder.
“I can’t fucking read. Ok… Mowan and all the uncles and aunties taught me a lot of things. But reading English wasn’t one of them. They said it was dangerous.”
Lescott felt guilty for putting his friend in that position, “What about the place in Darwin? Didn’t they teach you?”
“They didn’t teach me a fucking thing.” There was a good deal of bitterness in Charlie’s voice and on his face. That place, those people charged with bringing him into the new world, they had simply taken him from his old one. They had given him few tools to use in modern life. “I know there’s a bit in my head. Enough to go by even. But if I’m going to make something of myself, I need an education. I thought maybe Harris could teach me to read. He loves books.”
“Fuck that.” Lescott laughed. “That’s the last thing you want. The shit he reads will send you over the edge. It’s miserable and pretentious. No. I’ll teach you to read. When all this is done. No Nietzsche. No Poe. We’ll read Blyton and Carroll. No themes of self-pity and pessimism. We’ll read about the magic that still exists in the world, in us. I always wanted to read that sort of stuff to…” Lescott paused having run down a path of regret, rueing not spending more time with his daughter.
“You teach me to read. I’ll help you find them.” Charlie stuck out his hand to make a deal.
Lescott shook, not believing for a second that their arrangement would come to fruition. Still he shook.
Charlie looked inside the envelope and tried to gather his thoughts “That’s… Is this what I think this is?”
“I can’t be certain… Because of the state it’s in… But I think it’s a human eyeball. Or rather, it used to be.” Lescott shrugged, he was somewhat perplexed.
“What’s it mean?” Charlie was similarly perplexed.
“This alone doesn’t tell us much…”
Charlie pursed his lips as he mulled the strange package over, “Funny thing about ey
eballs. They tend to come in pairs…”
Lescott exhaled in exasperation “Do you know where he is?”
Chapter 64
Lescott hadn’t heard from Harris since the day he left Sydney. It wasn’t a conscious falling-out, but neither man was looking to reminisce over a failed investigation which had brought them little but misery and feelings of inadequacy.
In the months following the Englishman’s disappearance, the Darlinghurst rumour mill went into overdrive. Lescott, spending more than his fair share of time drinking alone in pubs, had heard some colourful stories. Some said George Watson had killed him in cold blood, others that he had succumbed to a heroin overdose. Some had it on good authority that his life of crime had caught up with him, and he was being subjected to round-the-clock solitary confinement in Long Bay Jail. The least believable theory, given what Lescott knew of Harris, was that he had found God, travelled back to England, and become a man of the cloth.
The reality was much less interesting. Harris had entered self-imposed exile. Charlie, who like Lescott spent far too much time in pubs, had heard stories of a pub in Newcastle. The only reason the pub was noteworthy was its barman, said to be a down and out heroin addict with an English accent; a man who quoted German philosophers and English poets before losing consciousness behind the bar. No story spreads through pubs amongst drinkers like the story of the pub where you can just walk behind the bar and serve yourself without so much as a word from the passed-out barman. It was something of a long shot but perhaps Harris had done just enough to be considered disappeared, yet not so much that he couldn’t be found.
Newcastle was something of a hardy shrub growing in the shadow of a great tree. Just a hundred miles up the coast from Sydney, the town has a long history of coming second to its more esteemed neighbour since its settlement at the end of the 18th century. A few short years after Europeans first invaded the continent, Sydney was booming. It was growing in numbers, and in wealth. But they faced a problem. Sydney was the future, that was clear, but it was filled with ghastly convicts. This just wouldn’t do. So, the Crown sent explorers up and down the coast looking for a dark spot in which they could dump Sydney’s scarier lags.
THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER Page 46