The Tattooed Man hag-2

by Alex Palmer

  Harold was sitting out on his front veranda having a late morning tea after feeding his stock. As well as its view of the landscape, the front veranda looked directly onto the ruins of the gardens Harold’s mother had cultivated when he was a boy. Once these gardens had bloomed in a profusion of roses and exotic flowers. All that remained of them now was a sundial, stretches of subsiding, antridden paving and stands of well-grown red flowering coral gums, one of the few native plants his mother had liked. They had self-seeded and spread, and were now encroaching into the pepper trees on the south-western side of the house. The other plants were either dead or dying and stood as bare sentinels between the farmhouse and the house paddock. Even if Harold had had the time for a garden, these days there was no water to spare for it.

  Rosie was beside him; as usual she sat up and started to bark as soon as she heard the van coming up the track. ‘Quiet, girl,’ he said, and got to his feet. With Rosie trotting after him, he walked down the side of the house to meet the courier. It was cooler here in this broad avenue shaded by the pepper trees. They stretched in a line down to the main yard, forming a barrier against the sun and wind. This avenue had once been intended as a driveway. Now it was partially blocked by the house water tank, which stood as an obstacle to be skirted between the pepper trees and laundry. Harold reached the yard just as the van came bumping into sight over the uneven ground. It was a private firm he’d not heard of before: Everyday Express.

  ‘Harold Morrissey,’ the courier said. ‘Sign here.’

  Harold took the small square parcel into the kitchen and opened it. Nestled on a piece of paper was a set of keys attached to a heavy bronze keyring, a football with Juventus written across it. The last time he had seen these keys, they’d been sitting on the coffee table in his living room; the man called Jerome had picked them up and put them in his pocket. Harold took the piece of paper out of the small box and unfolded it.

  Go and see what’s inside your brother’s fence. Take some specimens. Get them tested at a laboratory. Tell the police. Find out what’s really growing on your property.

  Harold looked at the parcel again. There was a return address along with a telephone number. He rang it only to hear a recorded message telling him the number he had dialled was not connected. The return address must be equally false. After a few moments’ thought, he searched around for his Stanley knife and a number of plastic bags. Then he picked up his own keys and walked outside, disturbing Rosie where she had settled on her blanket on the back veranda.

  ‘Come on, girl. We’re going for a drive.’

  When he reached the Cage, it looked no different from how it had always been. He tried the keys in turn until one fitted. The gate swung open easily on well-balanced hinges. Rosie came up behind, about to follow him inside. ‘Stay,’ he ordered. ‘I don’t want you in here. Stay out!’ She sat for a few moments, then got to her feet and nosed off in another direction.

  As soon as he was inside, Harold searched until he found the enclosure’s generator, the squat node of a locked steel cabinet. Once he had unlocked it, he turned the switch from On to Off. If nothing else, no more birds would electrocute themselves on the high fences. Then he looked around more carefully. Once inside the fence, there was an odd stillness to this place, a more profound silence and a sense of detachment from everything else around it.

  A snaking complexity of irrigation hoses reached every plant in the enclosure. He walked up to the metal hut that housed the automatic watering system and unlocked this door as well. Nothing so sophisticated watered his pastures. Underfoot, the red ground was still dusty. This dust stained the windows of the three greenhouses built in a row. Inside the tightly sealed glass structures nothing seemed to be living except the plants. Each greenhouse was dedicated to a single crop and each crop was labelled. Two, he had recognised immediately: Nicotiana tabacum, tobacco; and Oryza sativa, rice. The third crop was unknown to him: Dioscorea rotundata, white yam. The tobacco had a faintly moist, almost slimy touch on his hands. He took specimens from each and dropped them into the plastic bags he had brought with him. All the greenhouses had showers and protective overalls hanging from pegs. One contained a set of basic living quarters: bed, hot plate, an alcove with a composting toilet. The bed had been used recently but there was no indication of who had been there.

  The fourth crop, growing in the open under white netting, was one he had used to grow himself before the drought. Triticum aestivum, common bread wheat. Other than for small tears here and there caused by the wind, the netting covered the crop like a tent. He took out his knife and slit it open.

  Inside, there was a faint residual dampness on the ground from a recent watering. Walking along a pathway cut through the centre of the field, he saw on the ground birds-parrots, corellas-which had escaped the fence and got in through the tears in the netting. They were starved images of themselves, heaps of pale bones dully shining through dirty feathers. He knelt to look at them. Around about, the heads of the wheat were well grown and heavy, ready for harvest. He stood up and crushed some of the wheat in his hand. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary about it. It should have been good feed for any stray birds. Still, he decided against tasting it. Halfway along, he found a small mouse, its tiny feet curled up to its chest in a tight circle of dried fur and bone. He picked it up, caught by its dead perfection. It came apart in his hands, the pieces falling to dust. Harold decided it was to time to leave.

  He locked the gate behind him and called to Rosie. She came to him, jumping up onto the tray of the ute. He tossed the plastic bags on the passenger seat in the cabin and then drove back across his pastures to the farmhouse. At a distance, he stopped and let Rosie jump down from the tray. ‘Off you go,’ he said. As thin and swift as a greyhound, she raced him back home across the dry fields, her black coat shining in the sun.

  Following her, he passed the shearers’ quarters on the edge of his yard. Inside this unused building, wasps built their chambered nests out of red dirt. Outside, welcome swallows nested under the roof line. He drove past the machinery sheds, then the broken-down poultry yards, empty now except for his few chickens. By the time he reached the house gate, he felt a prickling sensation in the skin of his hands. When he got out and looked at them, he saw they were tinged red. He collected his specimens and went inside the farmhouse. Rosie followed him to the back door where she stopped to drink from an old ice cream container before settling down on her blanket once again.

  By now, the prickling sensation in Harold’s hands had begun to feel like a slow, deep burn. He dumped the crop specimens on his kitchen table and went to wash his hands in cold water. It made no difference. His skin had turned a dark and inflamed red while the pain continued to grow. He walked slowly back to the kitchen staring at them. The burning sensation grew to such an intensity he believed he wouldn’t be able to stand the pain. Then as mysteriously as it had started, it began to fade. By this time, his work-hardened hands were badly blistered and covered with weeping inflammations. Even though the surface sensation was less strong, he still felt the deep burn in his skin so powerfully he didn’t think he’d be able to drive.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said softly, staring at them. His gaze moved from his hands to the crop specimens that lay on his table where he’d thrown them. He remembered the touch of the tobacco, that faint oiliness. Nothing else came to mind as a possible cause.

  As carefully as he could, he took the keys to the Cage out of his pocket and threw them on the table. They landed on the note they had come with. They were a dead man’s keys, surely. If the woman, Natalie Edwards, had been shot dead, then one of those unnamed bodies up at Pittwater must be the man who had been here with her, Jerome. For whatever reason, Stuart hadn’t been with them when they were shot. That was Stuart. A survivor.

  Don’t tell Stewie you have these keys or these specimens. That was an imperative. Harold got to his feet and went to ring a neighbour to ask if someone could drive him to the local hospital. For the fi
rst time in years, he would have to see a doctor. Go to the police, the note had said. There was someone he could call on but he needed time to think the matter through and make that decision. Always Harold needed time, even when it felt like life and death.

  10

  On Bondi beach, swimmers body-surfed the bright water, sunbathers gleamed with lotion on the sand. Grace sat on her beach towel. She thought about her life, her own happiness (whether such a thing was possible), and Harrigan, his moods, the way they made love. His mouth on hers, the impression of each of their bodies to the other’s. Grace cradled her arms about herself in the hot sun, reliving last night’s memory, balanced on the tightrope between joy and heartbreak.

  She had decided years ago there was only a thread between life and death. Live with this belief on a daily basis and happiness becomes a possibility you respect. A conundrum for you, Gracie. Are happiness and Harrigan each other’s contrariety or are they indivisible? Or both, a paradox?

  Gently, she touched the dressing on her arm where the splinter of broken glass had nicked her skin. All that violence trapped in your head, Paul. Those black moods you have. The way you wake up thrashing at night. All those nightmares hung on the wall of your study where you sit in solitude and think. How do I deal with it? How do I stop it hurting me?

  Even before she had met him, people had told her he was driven. In the short time that she worked for him, she had seen how he drove everyone else just as hard. He was still consumed by his work. She had thought it was an addiction, now she was sure. Stop working and he would die because he had nothing else to do. Where did she fit in? In the margins of exhaustion at the end of the day, a space between midnight and dawn. It was no place to live.

  ‘Gracie. I was hoping I might see you down here today. Mind if I sit down?’

  Grace looked up to see Jerry Freeman, a pale figure in a yellow shirt patterned with huge orange and green pineapples, lowering himself down beside her on the sand. He dropped a worn sports bag between them and adjusted a scrappy straw hat. His shapeless polyester trousers and plastic sandals were grey against the sand.

  ‘What do you want? Get away from me.’

  The words came out as a softly spoken visceral rejection. Her aversion and anger at his intrusion were equally mixed. The sole time Grace had met Freeman had been one morning eighteen months ago in a side street near Central station where a young sex worker, Gina Farrugia, and her petty dealer boyfriend had been found murdered. The girl had been Grace’s informant; they had met only the night before. In the grey wash of the winter dawn the two had lain against the alleyway wall while Freeman, one of the investigating officers, had grinned at Grace and quizzed her. Harrigan, waiting impatiently in the background, had later spoken to her with unconscious intensity. Leave it alone, he’d said. Whatever else she did, she should stay away from Freeman. The implication had been that he wasn’t just involved but responsible. But if that was true, he wasn’t only their murderer. As Harrigan himself had told her, Freeman had almost been his killer as well.

  ‘Jesus, mate, don’t look at me like that. I just want to talk to you. You can’t be frightened of me. Look at me. I’m too fucking sick!’

  Fear was the last thing on Grace’s mind, her anger was stronger. But she knew he had been sick. About a year ago, Freeman had been invalided out of the force with heart disease. Frenzied rumours about his activities had followed him out the door. Three months ago, he had been hospitalised again. Grace remembered a bulky man. He had lost weight, his skin was translucent in the sun. It was a body like a curtain barely in place. He seemed so frail you could push him over with a single touch. It was hard to fear someone who looked so broken-down.

  ‘I don’t care if you are or you aren’t,’ she said. ‘Why should I talk to you?’

  Freeman glanced around at the sunbakers, then leaned forward and spoke in a low, gravelly voice.

  ‘Because if you don’t, Paulie’s going to be in shit up to his neck. He’ll be out on the street looking for a new job. Unless you want that to happen, you’ll listen. If you care, that is.’

  There were few hooks more effective than this one. She did care, more than she remembered caring for anyone else. However much she read her heart, there was no way around it. She and Harrigan were too entangled. He mattered to her too much. She felt the same sharp fear she had felt last night, that something could happen to wreck his life.

  ‘Talk to him yourself.’

  ‘You think he wants to talk to me? You think he wants to sit in the same room as me and listen to what I’ve got to say?’

  She understood Harrigan well enough to know this would make him sick in mind and body. If Harrigan was back on the job, Grace decided she could be as well, at least for as long as it took to find out what Freeman had to say. He could be any other slimebag she might have to deal with in her usual line of work. The field work she had done for the organisation she worked for, Orion, had brought her into contact with people just as bad as Freeman. Like him, they all had information you needed even if they were dangerous.

  ‘How did you know I’d be down here?’ she asked.

  ‘I didn’t. But after I watched the news on TV this morning, I thought maybe I’ll go down to Bondi on the off chance. You’re usually around this stretch of the beach somewhere sometime.’ Freeman squinted in the sun. ‘Did you know I used to see you here pretty often before I went into hospital? Don’t worry, I wasn’t watching you. I’ve lived around here all my life. I’ve come down here whenever I could this last year. Just to be here. I’m dying, you see. I’m supposed to be in a hospice but I came home a few days ago. I’m not going to die in a place like that. I’m going to die in the house I was born in. Now look at this. Not the front page. Open it to where it’s folded.’

  He handed her a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. A small photograph was pinned to the inside page. The angle showed it had been taken with a secret camera. A group of men were sitting around a table in a house somewhere. Grace recognised Marvin Tooth’s son, Baby Tooth; the Ice Cream Man himself; Stuart Morrissey; and the man she had seen on the net that morning, Jerome Beck. The table was covered with the remains of a meal. The used plates and empty wine glasses had been pushed out of the way and what looked like a marketable quantity of tablets had been placed in the centre. Ecstasy, she assumed. There was a time and date stamp in the right-hand bottom corner from about five months ago.

  ‘That’s our syndicate, mine and Mike’s,’ Freeman said quietly. ‘You know, peddling the usual shit. Ice, E, a bit of coke, all that. Baby Tooth was our man on the job. Stewie used to clean the money for us. Him and Nattie Edwards. The man with the glasses is some arsehole Stewie brought along called Jerome Beck. Maybe you know the name, maybe you don’t. But I bet you’ve seen him before. A man who looks an awful lot like him just had his picture splashed all over the net, dead as a dodo.’

  ‘Why aren’t you in the picture?’ Grace asked.

  ‘I was too busy taking it. You can keep that. I’ve got the disk in my bag here. There’s a lot more where that came from, let me tell you.’

  Grace refolded the paper and dropped it in her beach bag.

  ‘What’s this got to do with me or Harrigan?’

  ‘It’s the icing on the cake, mate. I’ve got tapes of all our meetings tucked away back home. He didn’t know it but Baby Tooth was our fish. We had him by the balls. So when Marvin got to be commissioner, we’d have him by the balls too. With what I’ve got, Paulie can hang Baby Tooth out to dry and take old Fang with him as a bonus. That’s an offer you don’t get every fucking day.’

  ‘That’s a bribe,’ she said. ‘You want Harrigan to do your dirty work for you. You don’t want to do it yourself.’

  ‘I’d look at it this way if I were you. If Fang gets to be commissioner, Paulie’s going to be fucked for good and all. He knows that. Now it’s going to work the other way around. You can make a choice which way you want it to go.’ He spoke lower. ‘And it’s not just Baby Tooth on t
hose tapes, mate. Paulie’s there as well. You’ve heard about Eddie Lee? Well, Mike talks about him on my tapes. Him and Paulie and everything that happened that night Eddie got shot. You want that to go public? Up to you. But if it does, Paulie’s fucked.’

  ‘Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?’

  ‘This is about Mike, Gracie. Who worked him over like that and why. Because I’ve got good information that’ll help you find that out.’ Freeman looked out to sea like someone waiting for the angel of death. ‘Paulie found Mike’s body yesterday in that house up at Pittwater. I’m glad. He’ll get a decent burial now. You might hate him but he was my mate. That’s why.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

  ‘First off, come back to my place.’

  ‘I’m not doing that.’

  ‘Fucking Christ, mate, I’m not going to hurt you. There’s nothing there waiting for you but a bunch of tapes. I want to talk about things I can’t talk about here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look.’ He leaned forward again, talking as softly as possible. ‘I’ve got a gun, okay? A.38. You can have it to protect yourself. I know you can shoot. It’s in my bag right here. I’ll give it to you.’

  ‘Not on Bondi beach!’

  ‘No, take the bag. It’s got the disk in it. Take it all.’ He shoved it into her hands. ‘There’s no one left but me, Gracie. I’m going to tell you what I’ve got to say and die. That’s it.’

  ‘I’ll ring Harrigan.’

  ‘What do you think he’s going to say? Yeah, just hop in the car with Jerry, I don’t mind. If you don’t come back with me, I’m sending everything I’ve got to the papers. If I do, Paulie’s gone.’