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

by Michael Smith

  “What were you going to do? Arrest him for being a creep?” Harris shrugged, “I met him too. He was at Darlinghurst Road on the day of the Death Car. In the observation room, there to watch the ID parade. We couldn’t have possibly known.”

  “Maybe not. But if I had been just a little cleverer in trying to clean up Darlinghurst Road, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe those protecting this… Thing and other men would be rotting behind bars. I had a chance to make things better. I failed. I’m going to live the rest of my life with blood on my hands.”

  “You know… My people tell a story, they’ve told it for thousands of years. It’s about the Mala and the Wintalka who walked our lands long before we did. I forget the story. There was an inma, and the Kurpany - a devil dog.” Charlie was deep in thought, he was quite troubled by something. “I was never a good listener. But our stories, they all have morals. That’s how we teach our children how to behave. Whenever Mowan told this story, I’d wake up from a snooze with the heat of the fire on my chest and face, and I’d hear Mowan say… ‘That’s why we always finish what we start.’”

  The men sat in silence for a moment before Harris stood and gave his face a rub to get some life into tired eyes. “Freddie, I need to borrow your car keys.”

  Chapter 68

  Harris hadn’t planned on returning to Darlinghurst where he knew he was a wanted man with a price on his head. But that night he had business that could not wait. And so, he slipped behind the wheel of Lescott’s car and he headed back into the city’s centre of sin. To his mind, it was likely the last time we would do so.

  He pulled his cap low as he drove through the winding streets. They were alive with the sights and sound of a carnal carnival. Drag queens, prostitutes, drug dealers, thieves and assorted ne’er do wells on every corner. He recognised many, but a year had passed, many faces were unfamiliar to him. Buses and trains pulled into Sydney every day, filled with young hopefuls with a dream and a naive temperament that would soon find itself exploited.

  The main streets were too busy for Harris’ comfort, so he steered into back lanes and alleys in the hope of making use of the lonesome dark. It was a misjudgement. For the back lanes were filled with those who go bump in the night, those who wouldn’t think twice about pointing the gun, pulling the trigger, and dragging his corpse to George Watson to claim the generous bounty.

  Harris hit something of a speed bump as he idled down a one-way road and saw men obstructing the path ahead. Two men, hats pulled low, were dragging a body across the road. Before he could turn his head to see whether he could reverse back the way he came, headlights flashed in his rear-view mirror. He was quite trapped. To make matters worse, these two men were no average Joes. There weren’t Tom, Dick, nor Harry. Harris recognised them as Lenny and Stan, George Watson’s trusted lieutenants, clearly they had already killed that night. They could just as easily kill again. What was one more corpse in the abandoned quarry or in the harbour? Lenny and Stan peered into the car in front of them as they dragged that poor deceased bastard and they paused. Witnesses had a low life expectancy in Darlinghurst.

  As he sat in the dark of the car, in the dark of the back street, in the dark of the city, he reached, and placed his hand on the pump action shotgun in the footwell, there his hand shook restlessly. He needn’t have worried. 1964 had not been kind to Harris, it had eaten away at his soul, and it had ravaged his appearance.

  The two men peered and a one-eyed, greasy haired monster peered back at them. They simply didn’t recognise him and they weren’t about to get into a gunfight with an unknown entity while they were transporting such nefarious cargo. Instead, Lenny simply held a finger to his lips, and the men carried on with their sinister work in the dark.

  Harris arrived when he reached one of Darlinghurst’s nicer residential streets. He parked the car under the shadow of a large, drooping tree. Fred Lescott would throw a fit if Harris returned his car covered in pigeon shit but that was preferable to being spotted outside the particular house he was visiting that night.

  The house was much like those to its left and right, along with the rest of the street. Its front hedge and lawn were immaculately groomed. The stucco and the filigree finishing were pristine, you could see the influence of the continent’s native flora and fauna throughout. Unlike most streets in the King’s Cross-Darlinghurst area, these houses had been renovated. They were well kept. An unmistakable augur of the gentrification that would engulf the area in years to come.

  Harris rapped his knuckles upon the door and took a couple of steps back. The house was dark. It was an ungodly hour in which any respectable inhabitants of Darlinghurst would ordinarily sleep through. But their sleep would have to wait. He continued to knock.

  A light turned on inside the house as someone entered the hallway. The door creaked open. Detective Sergeant Chuck Read of Internal Affairs stood there suspiciously in a dressing gown. “My family are sleeping.”

  “Then you ought to keep your voice down,” Harris answered.

  “How did you find me?”

  Read wasn’t in the mood for fucking around, this was where his family lived. “What do you want?”

  “Just five minutes of the forty million that your life has in store for you.” Harris tapped at the cover of the red ledger in his hand. “Five minutes to change your life.

  “Are you carrying?” Reed looked the known criminal up and down.

  “There isn’t a trigger man in Sydney who isn’t acutely aware of the ridiculous price on my head. So… Yes, I’m carrying.”

  Reed looked up and down the street once. He grabbed a dustbin from by the door, removed the lid, and held the bin up. “My children are asleep inside. You’re not bringing a gun in here.”

  Harris considered the notion. He didn’t leave the house without his Colt Detective Special. He hadn’t in years. When he showered or bathed, he placed it in the damn soap tray. The idea of disarming himself was unappealing. That said, he needed to get off the street; even the quieter, more affluent streets of Darlinghurst were connected to the seedy underworld that lay just a few streets away.

  “We’ll go to my office.” Read ushered Harris down the hallway towards a room at the rear of the house.

  Harris looked around and whistled quietly. “Nice house this… I thought you were an honest policeman?”

  “My wife’s family are in the business of importing high-end building materials. Italian marble, Asian wood, British bricks. I don’t fucking know but she earns a fortune. Means I can stay straight,” Reed spoke quietly, mindful of his children upstairs.

  Harris followed Reed into his dimly lit study. Reed sat at his desk while Harris lay on the sofa at the other end of the room. He was in no rush. He was enjoying looking at a wall covered in photographs of what he assumed were targets of Reed’s corruption investigation. He pointed at one, “Tony Starkey is clean. Always was.”

  Reed rifled through a desk drawer and looked up to see who Harris was referring to, “Not anymore. Expensive divorce…”

  Reed found what he was looking for, a folder buried deep in his desk. He threw it over to Harris who gave it a glance.

  JAMES HARRIS

  DETECTIVE CONSTABLE - MAJOR CRIMES

  It seemed that Reed, or perhaps a Private Investigator in his employment, had been following Harris for some time. There were pictures of Harris taking a package from Ronnie Prince on the street. A photograph of Livingstone and Harris in the middle of a heated argument in Major Crimes. There was a photograph of Harris kicking two Asian women out of Prince’s casino. The next picture was taken in the middle of the bar brawl that he and Lescott had enjoyed in Alice Springs. Then there was a picture of Harris comatose behind the bar of the Rochester Hotel, Newcastle.

  He hadn’t moved in the last year without Reed knowing about it.

  “Does my hair really look like that?” Harris threw down the folder and smoothed his parted hair back over his head. “Well, I guess you’ve shown me your
s. Time for you to take a look at mine.”

  Harris tossed the ledger over to Reed who began to skim through it.

  “Do you know what you’re looking at?”

  “I almost can’t believe what I’m looking at.”

  “That’s records of the payments made by Ronnie Prince, through me, to corrupt police officers during my eighteen months in Major Crimes. Names. Dates. Numbers.” Harris paused as he saw Reed’s eyes light up. “It alone won’t be enough to get a conviction against anyone, but it should be enough to take to a few weak links. When they know you’re in possession of that, they’ll turn and testify to save themselves.”

  “Will you testify?” Reed asked.

  “No. You’re the horse I’m leading to water. But I can’t, and won’t, do the drinking for you.”

  “I can’t offer you immunity if you won’t testify.”

  “Don’t offer me immunity. I don’t deserve it. I’m at the heart of all of this. It’s time for me to take my medicine.”

  “I don’t understand.” Reed was suspicious. Harris was known as a self-serving bully. The man in front of him, and his actions, seemed anything but.

  “Are you a religious man?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. But for the last year or so, I’ve been reading the Bible compulsively, trying to make sense of it. I can’t, it all feels like a beautifully imagined, masterfully written con. But I keep reading it cover to cover. And there’s one line from that ocean of bullshit that just won’t leave my head. ‘Blessed be they who hunger and thirst only for righteousness. They shall have their fill’.”

  “What? And that’s you now? You’ve turned over a new leaf?”

  Harris shook his head, “It’s you. Fighting a fight worth fighting It’s Fred Lescott, who gave up everything to try and bring righteousness to a police force designed to protect those in need of protection. If I have to forgo my life so his sacrifice means something. I will. The likes of me, Ronnie Prince, George Watson, Alan Livingstone, Richard Beaumont… We need to be consigned to the annals of history, so the country can move into the future.”

  “Richard Beaumont? What the fuck has he got to do with any of this?”

  “He’s the Devil in the red dirt. We all are.”

  Chapter 69

  The three men left the city with fear in the pits of their stomachs. A two-hour drive, which in other circumstances might have been so pleasant, was two hours in hell. With nothing but their sin-begotten guilt for company. Though they were a company of three, each man was quite alone. They were going into this dark soul’s country. They knew nothing of what lay ahead, but they were certain death was hanging in the storm clouds overhead.

  Lescott drove, Harris was in no fit state. He’d done little to no sleeping. He’d been gorging on that grotesque brown powder all night and into the morning. Charlie did his best to read the map book. But it was a losing battle given he couldn’t read.

  Any other day, Lescott would have driven slowly so that he might marvel at a region which is surely God or science’s finest creations. The Blue Mountains are unparalleled in terms of their natural, physical beauty. It took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. At the time of Gaudi’s death, the Sagrada Familia had been under construction for forty-four years, and still it remained half finished. If time spent sculpting a masterpiece somehow acted as a measure of beauty, then the Blue Mountains makes a mockery of both the aforementioned masterpieces. Mother Nature, Our Lord and Father, or whatever gnome, hobgoblin, or leprechaun god you believe to be the creator has spent millions of years carving the beauty of that mountainous paradise. Still their work is not yet done.

  The area boasts a million hectares of lush forest, awe inspiring peaks, fear prompting sandstone cliffs, vast canyons that have been forming since the start of time, and thunderous waterfalls. In the winter, fog rolls over the peaks and down the mountain sides. The rain only serves to add to the atmosphere. Even the cold is manageable. It’s a good reason to light a fire. And there is no moment more fitting for contemplation than man in nature gazing into flames.

  Every time I find myself living in the watchful gaze of the law, I go to the Blue Mountains. I chop wood. I light a fire. I remember that life extends beyond the mucky city streets that I call my office. If there was more of a market for powder out there, I’d move permanently, in a heartbeat. I’d miss the cricket for all of ten minutes, but aside from that I’d miss little else about the rat race we call life. Unfortunately for me, I’m a victim of capitalism. Quite brainwashed by it, a life spent doing anything other than earning money feels like a life without purpose. How very sad it is that I am one of a cohort that represents the malformation in human evolution. I have entirely lost sight of what actually matters, and tragically I’m acutely aware of it.

  None of the three appreciated their picturesque surroundings that day. At first, they were distracted by the nature of the business that brought them to that sleepy part of the world. But that subsided when they found themselves quite lost. The towns and hamlets upon the mountain side were spread out, road signs were sparse, and Charlie was struggling with written place names. Still, he was better than Harris who was quite loaded on the backseat. They made a group decision to stop at one of the mountainside estates to ask for directions towards Dismal Hill. They knew it was nearby, but they’d been travelling in circles for the best part of an hour. Each time they passed a familiar tree or rock formation in the mountain, it mocked them.

  “There’s a property up ahead.” Lescott said as he spotted an imposing sandstone wall. It joined the slopes of neighbouring inclines, cutting an entire mountain pass off from the outside world. The wrought iron gates were impressive. They were held up by imposing sandstone pillars that were withering under the rigors of time and nature. The gates, the pillars, and the wall that ran along the property were covered in creeping vines and moss. They could barely see through gaps in the gates which disguised the property behind a wall of thick vegetation.

  As they got out of the car in front of the gates, Charlie pressed his face up to a gap and let out a whistle of sheer admiration, “Who lives in a place like this?”

  “There’s old money in these mountains. The kind you or I couldn’t earn in millennia. Don’t get any ideas.” Harris laughed in that spot deep in the shadow of the mountain that laughter had long since abandoned.

  It took the three men to heave one of the moss and vine covered gates open. Judging from the rust of the construction, the gate had been forgotten years before. “Maybe we ought to go somewhere else. I get the feeling this place hasn’t been lived in for a century,” Lescott suggested.

  “We’re here now.” Harris shrugged, sentencing one of the three men to near certain death.

  Those climbing plants and that aggressively colonising vegetation had been left so unchecked for so long, that they had all but engulfed the sign for the manor that lay ahead. They ought to have spent just a moment investigating it. A sign which once read ‘Beaumont Manor’ had been vandalised. It had been hammered and scratched. It had been painted over. Some vandal, perhaps from a nearby town, or perhaps from inside the estate itself had changed the sign to read:

  THE DOLLSHOUSE

  But they didn’t investigate the sign. They got back in the car, and they drove inside the property.

  Just beyond the gates was a driveway, the likes of which is rarely seen. It spanned miles of shadowy mountain pass. The path was in dire need of attention. Perhaps once it had been a pristine patch of sandstone cuttings, over the years it had become the embodiment of the road not taken. Weeds had invaded and grown through the dirt path. Long grass lay all around, so high it grew that it blocked any visibility below the windows of the car.

  The driveway was situated between parallel columns of trees. Trees that had lived too long without sunlight. Their trunks and branches had warped in writhing to search for any light they could in that dark forgotten spot. Their roots had gnarled and twis
ted above ground, leaving the impression the trees had tried and failed to heave themselves from the ground and leave that place.

  To the left of the driveway lay the thick gum forest for as far as the eye could see. Not very far considering the density of the damp undergrowth. Amongst the thick of the vegetation, the dark eyes of fauna watched the car as it did battle with the slippery ascent.

  To the right lay glistening green, but overgrown lawns. The property had stood there over a century. It was like someone had taken the grounds of an 18th century French château, placed it in New South Wales and left it there to moulder. Gargantuan hedges and bushes were scattered throughout the lawns. Perhaps once they had been well groomed and ornate, but now the wild had crept in and taken ownership. It was a wasteland.

  Lescott went to stop the car when he saw something, but the slippery surface of the incline meant the car slowly began to slide backwards. In the middle of the lawns was an expansive lake. Lescott could have sworn he had just seen a figure standing on the banks fishing. As the car moved, his line of sight became obstructed by a thicket of bushes at the roadside. When they ran out, the man was gone. Lescott had suffered grief and chemically-induced bouts of psychosis and hallucination for years. Generally, he knew when his mind was playing tricks on him, but this didn’t feel like that.

  Thunder rolled through the sky, the greying atmosphere began to blow a gale, and the dark skies above the estate meant day appeared as night. “I’ve been here before!” Harris shuddered at the thought, “Or… I’ve seen this dark shadowy sunlight. Once in ‘45 when we rode into Belsen. And then more recently. In a dream.”

  Charlie and Lescott turned to the back seat, Harris looked quite lost. Like he’d been possessed with hopelessness. “I’m going to put the fucking radio on. Might lighten things up.” When Charlie turned the radio on, Brenda Lee’s ‘The End of the World’ filled the car with its morose message. Before the verse was done, he’d turned it back off. But the music lingered. It lay somewhere between their memory and their present reality. It left them quite haunted.