The Tattooed Man

by Alex Palmer

  ‘What did he sound like?’ Harrigan interrupted.

  ‘He was South African. You know how they talk. I said, “Fuck you. No way.” I was just waiting. Water’s coming out of my body anywhere it can, I’m pissing myself. He turns me around, wants to know my name. “This man wanted to kill you. You don’t care what happens to him, do you?” I said, “I don’t give a shit and I know how to keep my mouth shut.” He takes out his wallet and it’s thick. Puts ten hundred-dollar notes in my hand. “Get your brats, get your car and get out. Don’t come back until you’ve spent every cent of that money.” I didn’t look back. I was out the door.’

  ‘What kind of car did he have?’

  ‘It turned out he’d been at the house waiting for us and Mike before we got back. He’d put it in the shed so we didn’t see it. The kids did though, when they were running away. It was some big, black four-wheel-drive. My kids heard me driving along the creek. They came out and we drove away as fast as I could. I told Laurie to keep watching just to see if that black thing was behind us. But he didn’t come after us. But that’s not the end of it.’ She stopped and poured herself more whisky. ‘About three weeks later, one night out of the dark, the guy walks in the door again with a gun in his hand. We’re dead. Laurie goes for him and he hits him so I call him a fucking bastard. He laughs and he grabs me. “You don’t want to die. You don’t want your shitty little kids to die. You just keep your mouth shut. Because I can watch you. I’ve got my own dirty copper. If you tell anyone about this, you’re all dead.” Then he lets me go and walks out the door. We can hear him driving away. My poor kids. They were so afraid, they were all twisted up. You know why he didn’t kill us? It was just too messy. If he had, one way or the other you and your mob would come crawling all over this place and who knows what you’d have turned up. But he was going to come back for us one day, I knew it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?’

  ‘He said he had his own bent copper. How did I know it wasn’t you? That guy was after Mike. I thought maybe you were getting your own back.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Harrigan snapped. ‘You had no reason to think that.’

  ‘Didn’t I? There’s enough fucking rumours about you and him. Jesus, mate, we’re talking about Mike! What the fuck did it matter if he was dead? I was so fucking paranoid, I didn’t know who I could trust. Me and my kids slept in the same fucking bed for weeks afterwards. Every time we heard a noise, we freaked! I don’t know how many times I’ve lain awake at night thinking, we’ll just get in the car and go. But I knew if we did, one day we’d walk into a shotgun somewhere else. I didn’t have any money anyway.’

  ‘Did you find anything in the house when you came back?’

  ‘My kids did. Laurie got up in the roof space one day, he was playing around. He found some ropes and a shirt with blood on them. Mike’s, it had to be. Then Jen was playing outside and she found this funny-looking thing in the dirt. Some little metal stud with a logo on it.’

  ‘Did it look like this?’ Harrigan asked, showing her his own LPS badge.

  ‘Yeah, but it was metal, not gold. Where’d you get that?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s a tracking device. I know Mike had one. The gunman would have tracked him here using it. What did you do with it?’

  ‘I put it up in the roof with all the other stuff Laurie found up there. Then I told the kids to forget all about them.’

  ‘That’s why our friend burned your house down,’ Harrigan said. ‘He was making sure no one would find anything he’d left behind, accidentally or otherwise.’

  ‘It’s all gone now. Anyway, about a week after we got back, Jen comes running in. She says she’s found something in the creek about half a kilometre away. We went down there and it was a grave, you could see it. I thought, yeah, that’s Mike. After all these years, he’s finally fucking dead. I told my kids, whatever you do, you don’t tell anyone about this. It’s just between us. It’s got to stay that way.’

  ‘Did you ever see any other cars along here?’

  ‘Just the cars you always see, the farmers and that. Except we heard someone down here about a week ago. Really early in the morning last Thursday. It woke us up and freaked us out. I thought it was that South African guy coming back. But whoever it was, they just drove away. I didn’t see them or their car.’

  ‘What did the South African guy look like?’

  ‘This is him. I did this while I was waiting for you to come and talk to me. I’ve drawn you a couple of them.’

  She pushed the pieces of paper across the table towards him. Harrigan found himself looking at the man he’d fought with tonight. An ordinary face. Square-featured, black hair, trimmed moustache. It was a good likeness. He would get it faxed to Trevor as soon as possible.

  ‘We’ll put this out in the media,’ he said.

  ‘Are you going to pay me for it?’

  ‘No, mate. This is information received.’

  ‘What are you going to do for me and my kids now, Harrigan?’

  ‘I’ll put you on the witness protection program as soon as possible.’

  ‘Like last time?’

  ‘You’ll be safe this time. I’ll make sure of it.’ She looked at him suspiciously and then kept drawing. He watched her work. Images filled the sheet of paper she drew on, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to pull them out of its whiteness. She had almost no schooling. Laurie’s father, a tattooist himself, had taught her to draw when he’d taught her to tattoo. He was dead now, shot by a bikie gang when he wouldn’t pay his protection money.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘You working. You’ve got a real talent.’

  ‘You might not say that when you see this.’

  It was a drawing of Harrigan at the kitchen table surrounded by a tattooist’s icons of death. Old clocks, skulls on the bench with small worms crawling out of the eye sockets, flies and dying flowers on the table, an owl roosting on the window ledge. His face stared out of the paper. His hands were on the table in front of him, clasped tightly together. The gaze startled him. It was almost hungry, at once intense and detached.

  ‘You can chuck it out if you want,’ she said.

  ‘Why would I do that? You’ve got a cold eye.’

  ‘I just draw what’s there.’

  ‘Mummy.’ Jen was standing in the doorway, twisting a bare foot behind her leg. ‘Little Man’s awake. He won’t stop crying.’

  ‘I’ll come down, baby. We’ll go to sleep together. How’s that?’

  She walked out, taking the little girl by the hand, leaving everything behind her on the table: the cigarettes, the ashtray, the sheets of paper, the empty whisky glass. More out of concern for Harold than anything, Harrigan tidied the mess away and decided it was time he got some sleep as well. He kept two constables to watch the house and sent the rest home, giving them Ambrosine’s sketch of his attacker to send on to Trevor. Finally, he went to look for Harold. He found him sitting on the front step, smoking.

  ‘Your face, mate,’ Harold said when Harrigan appeared. ‘You must be feeling that.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ Harrigan asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m all right. She was a good dog. It’s a waste, that’s all.’

  There was silence.

  ‘What made that racket in the trees out there?’ Harrigan asked. ‘Did you hear it? I thought it’d wake the dead.’

  Harold almost grinned.

  ‘One of my chickens. She got out of the chook yard a while back and she’s been roosting over there ever since. There’s hardly any foxes around here any more. Things are that bad.’

  ‘I don’t know about the foxes. She almost got me,’ Harrigan said. He looked at his watch. It was the graveyard shift, getting on for dawn. ‘Why don’t you get some sleep?’

  ‘I will in a while. I forgot to tell you—I’ve put you up in Dad’s room. Tomorrow I’ll take you out on the property and show you what
I think this is all about.’

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning, mate. Try and sleep.’

  Harrigan went back into the badly lit house. In Bob Morrissey’s old bedroom, the dead man’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe. A photograph of his two sons in their Geelong Grammar uniforms stood on the tallboy. Stuart at seventeen and Harold at fifteen, both smiling. Grit blown in through the cracks in the house covered the surface of the glass, the furniture. Stillness and dust hung in the air.

  Harrigan took off his gun and shoulder holster and put them under the pillow. He put Ambrosine’s sketch of him on top of the tallboy. It made him look like the death carrier, the person you least wanted to see knocking on your door. He didn’t remember choosing the role willingly. He lay on the bed fully dressed and slept almost immediately. Everything else could wait until the morning.

  18

  Out on the harbour, a dark blue sky arched in a massive curve over the bridge. A strong easterly wind had whipped the water into white tops and brought some relief from the heat. Ferries dipped in the swell. The sails of the Opera House gleamed like cracked eggshells in the late sun. Over Port Jackson, the seagulls screamed and shat on the old prison, Pinchgut, a hard nub of angular sandstone in the water. The sky was alive with the bright clarity of the Australian light; light cut with the transparency of pure glass, hard as ineffaceable emotion and with just as much edge.

  On the Quay, crowds of tourists watched the buskers against the backdrop of the ferry wharves. Grace, dressed in ultramarine blue, her dark hair curled on her bare shoulders, her stilettos clicking on the steps, made her way up to the entrance of the Museum of Contemporary Art. At the door, her name was checked and found to be acceptable. With a smile, the penguin-suited doorman ushered her in. ‘Nice to see you here,’ he said in his smoothly professional tones.

  Inside, lights illuminated the terrazzo floor and the pale green and white marble pillars of the function room. A large area had been taken up by an array of seating facing a podium. An ornately worked acronym of the corporation’s name, LPS, was displayed on a large screen, dominating both the podium and the room. Some people were already seated, others crowded around the buffet. The murmur of voices was loud. A string quartet played light classical; waiters offered trays of drinks and finger food.

  The party from LPS stood waiting to welcome people as they arrived. Elena Calvo, immaculately dressed and smiling, handed out glossy named and numbered prospectuses. Beside her was Senator Edwards in black tie, his face pale, shaking hands mechanically. A third man was with them, tall in a white suit with a ruined, almost shocking face. At the sight of him, Grace stopped herself from drawing too sharp a breath. What kind of injuries would have caused that scarring? Others were less circumspect in hiding their reactions. When corporations put themselves on public display, almost everything was sanitised. On perhaps her most important night, Elena Calvo’s welcoming committee included a man whose face would unsettle if not shock almost everyone he greeted.

  Behind all three were two well-built men whom Grace guessed were bodyguards and, also in white, Sam Jonas. She saw Grace walking towards the group and smiled in a strange way.

  ‘Yes, Grace Riordan.’ Elena straightened a little when Grace appeared in front of her. ‘Commander Harrigan’s companion. We’re pleased to have you here. Is it true you’re in the same line of work?’

  ‘Perhaps not any more. I am a trained police officer but I work in another line of business now.’

  ‘Did you do it for the excitement?’

  ‘No, it was to see if I could make a difference.’

  ‘That’s my motivation,’ Elena said. ‘I want to make a difference. Let me introduce you to my chief scientist, Dr Daniel Brinsmead. He is the head of our signature project, which is into burns research. He gave Commander Harrigan a tour of his project this morning.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Grace said, shaking hands while at the same noticing the fingerless left hand, the bulk of medical dressings beneath Dr Brinsmead’s clothes. He was taller than her by a head. Once he must have been a good-looking man, fit and strong. Seen so close, the texture of his skin was like some reworked foreign material, almost unnatural. She fought the urge to look away.

  ‘Are you pleased to meet me?’ he replied.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll take you at your word. Not everybody is, as I’ve noticed tonight. Yes, I met Harrigan out at Campbelltown today. Have you spoken to him since?’

  ‘No,’ Grace said, feeling it.

  ‘So he won’t have had the chance to tell you what happened. You can see from my face why my project is to do with burns,’ Brinsmead said. ‘I’m speaking later on tonight. That’s why I’m here at the door. I want everyone to see me now instead of being shocked when I step out into the light.’

  ‘As soon as people hear what you have to say, I’m sure you’ll have their complete interest. They won’t be thinking about anything else.’

  ‘I told Daniel that same thing myself,’ Elena said. ‘Grace, this is Senator Edwards. Grace Riordan. She’s standing in for Commander Harrigan.’

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you. You look very charming.’

  The senator’s eyes were bloodshot, his hands trembling slightly. There was a scent of mouthwash about him. Grace, who had once started drinking as soon as she woke up in the morning, recognised the symptoms. The first thing you did was look for ways to hide your breath.

  ‘Harrigan’s working, is he?’ the senator said.

  ‘Yes, he has to be somewhere else.’

  ‘He must trust you if he’s asked you to stand in for him.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ Elena interrupted. ‘Grace, this is one of my security people, Sam Jonas. I’ve asked her to look after you tonight. If there’s anything you want, just ask her for it. We’ll talk to you later.’

  Grace smiled and walked away. Sam followed. Grace stepped to the side, out of the way of the moving crowd where she could talk to Sam with some small privacy.

  ‘Where would you like to sit?’ Sam asked with a grin. ‘You can consider me your personal servant. Do you want a glass of champagne? It’s good quality.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Grace said. ‘I can find my own seat. You don’t have to look after me. You can tell Dr Calvo I asked you not to bother.’

  ‘We can still talk to each other. You and I are in the same business.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Aren’t you in the security game one way or another? You used to be a police officer.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Are you telling me you left all that behind just like that? From what I read in the newspapers, you were handy enough to walk away from a very nasty situation at Jerry Freeman’s house the other day. They left your name out of the press release but you must have been there.’

  ‘That was mainly down to him,’ Grace said.

  ‘It didn’t read that way in the papers. He’s the one who took three bullets, and one intrepid journalist reported there was a fourth shot through the door. Was that aimed at you? But you managed to get the door shut just in time. Now that’s dancing with death.’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I told you. It’s my job to keep an eye on things for Elena.’

  ‘Why were you there?’

  Sam smiled. ‘To quote you, if you won’t answer my question, I’m not going to answer yours.’

  ‘You knew what was going to happen. You walked away and left me and him to get shot.’

  ‘No. I warned you loud and clear if you were listening. After that, it was up to you to look after yourself.’

  ‘Did you know who was going to be there?’ Grace asked sharply. ‘Or why they’d be coming after Freeman?’

  ‘Why should I know any of those things? A man like Freeman must have had plenty of people who wanted to get their own back on him, even if it was at the last minute.’

  ‘You didn’t care,’ Grace said. ‘It didn’
t matter to you that two people might end up dead.’

  ‘Am I supposed to care? Why? No one else does.’

  ‘Maybe I care if I get shot,’ Grace said, turning to walk away.

  ‘You’re standing in for Harrigan,’ Sam said. ‘That means you’re here to observe and report back. He thinks you can do that for him usefully. So whatever you say, I’m very sure we’re in the same business. Which is something I wanted to ask you. Is it good or bad having a lover in the same line of work?’

  Grace turned back. Sam was watching her with a distant look, one that reduced her to a cipher.

  ‘Why ask me?’

  ‘I just wondered what you think. Do you go to bed at night worrying what’s happened to Harrigan? Does he wonder what’s happened to you? Do you gnaw at your fingernails hoping you’ll both be okay?’

  ‘Why are you trying to be offensive? You talk to people this way for fun?’

  ‘I’m just interested in you. There’s a saying that love is as strong as death. Do you think it is?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I do as it happens, but I’m more interested right now in what you think. Maybe you’ll get to find out if it’s true.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Nothing in particular. If you don’t want me to look after you, better take a seat. There’s a good turnout.’

  ‘Who’s here?’

  ‘Financial institutions, research institutes, university bigwigs, politicians, punters, thieves, rip-off merchants. And you. The innocent bystander.’

  ‘You are just so in your face,’ Grace heard herself saying. ‘You just hit people with it, don’t you? Does anything frighten you? Keep you in line?’

  ‘No,’ Sam said with a broad smile. ‘I can say with complete honesty that I’m not frightened of anything.’

  ‘You just do and say what you want.’

  ‘Try reaching the point where you can, Grace. It’s very liberating.’

  Grace took a seat, glancing back in time to see Sam rejoin Elena’s entourage. Sam spoke a few words to Elena who nodded. Scarcely a debrief. Presumably if Sam was going to report their conversation to her boss, they would go somewhere more private.