The Tattooed Man

by Alex Palmer

  ‘Beck still had to get a visa,’ Grace said. ‘How was that arranged?’

  ‘It was more subtle than I’m making it appear. In fairness to everyone, including me, the full extent of Beck’s criminality wasn’t known, nowhere near it. In fact, it was very effectively hidden. My entrepreneur put Beck forward as a man reformed.’ He laughed a little too loudly. People leaving the function glanced in his direction. ‘I didn’t sponsor him myself, of course. I organised for someone else to do that—obviously a well-respected individual in the community. But I spoke to the then Minister for Immigration on his behalf myself. She was a long-standing acquaintance of mine; she took me at my word. I told her a very significant development was at risk. Which means the only person who can be blamed for Beck being here is me. You can see what it’s cost me.’

  ‘What about the entrepreneur?’

  ‘He can deny everything, but my involvement is on file at the Department of Immigration. The fact that I received the inducements I did is also recorded in my financial affairs. There’s nothing in those purchases that implicates the giver. It’s only me. Recently, before my son’s death, there had been intimations that I might be asked to provide more assistance to Beck in the future. How could I say no when I was already compromised? My son came to warn me that Beck wanted my help. He didn’t believe I could possibly be corrupted.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this, Senator? Have you received threats?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Threats? No. Should I have? I’m telling you this for the same reason that I’ve done everything since I found Julian. I want everything out in the open.’

  He stopped speaking. His eyes were bright and focused on some unknown point in the distance.

  ‘When I received that dossier on Beck at my electoral office, I can’t tell you what I went through. I thought, I brought this man into the country and my ex-wife has brought him into my son’s life. The day I went to see her, that day I found them all, I was going to take Julian out of that house no matter what. My only comfort was, he was somewhere in Tasmania where no one could get to him. Except he wasn’t. He’d come home. Whatever happened in my ex-wife’s house in Pittwater that evening, I set that situation up. That’s what I can’t live with.’

  ‘You have to make a full statement, Senator. My advice is that you should also be very careful about your own safety, even if it’s only as a precaution. Have you spoken to Dr Calvo about any of this?’

  He smiled. ‘I spoke to Elena about it just before the launch.’

  As he said this, Grace saw one of Elena’s bodyguards appear in the doorway to the function room. He saw her talking to Senator Edwards and went back inside.

  ‘Are you sure you should have done that?’ she asked.

  He laughed again, more softly. ‘I hope so. I hope I can rely on her. I asked her what she knew. Her reaction was strange. She said she’d come here because she had hoped it would be the new world. A long way from the many things she’d wanted to leave behind. But they’d followed her. I think she was trying to tell me that Beck had been foisted on her, possibly by her father. I almost asked her, did she have a choice? But I couldn’t. She was too distressed. It’s the first time I’ve seen her come close to losing her self-control.’

  ‘She seems to have regained it since,’ Grace said.

  ‘She does, doesn’t she? In there, she was more like the Elena I know. I don’t want to think about the implications of her relationship with Beck, whatever it was, if she even had one. I can’t bring myself to believe she could be implicated in my son’s death in any way. But I do intend to make a full statement; in fact, I plan to sign an affidavit. Most of it’s already written. I’ll make sure Commander Harrigan gets it as soon as possible.’

  ‘In the meantime, Senator, I think you need personal protection.’

  ‘Allan. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’ Elena had appeared, her two bodyguards either side of her. ‘Can I interrupt you? I need to introduce you to someone before they leave.’

  ‘Of course, Elena. I was just passing the time of day here with Ms Riordan.’

  ‘You were deep in discussion. What were you talking about?’

  ‘Julian. She was kind enough to listen to me.’

  Elena looked at Grace but didn’t speak directly to her. ‘I thought Ms Riordan had left some time ago. I seem to find her in conversation with people wherever I look.’

  ‘I’m on my way now,’ Grace said.

  ‘Yes, you are.’ There was a faint pause. ‘The next time you see Commander Harrigan, please give him my regards. Presumably, whenever he gets back safely from wherever he is now and makes up his mind how he will invest.’

  ‘When do you think that will be, Dr Calvo?’

  ‘Why ask me that? Don’t you know? I could have no idea. Good night.’

  Elena’s voice held a finely elegant malice, seeming to spell out the opposite of what was said. It implied expectation of harm, not good wishes. Already, she was on her way back to the function room, Edwards with her. Grace walked away into the night without looking back.

  Harrigan had said before he left that he wouldn’t call her; he would be focused on what he was doing. No news was good news; she wasn’t to worry. He hadn’t said, don’t ring him. As soon she was home, she called and got his voicemail.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘I’m back from the launch. Edwards gave me some important information. He’s confirmed the connection between Beck and LPS and identified it with another organisation called Abaris. You need to talk to him as soon as you can and make it clear that he needs protection. Just ring me. I need to know that you’re okay,’ she finished abruptly.

  She sat down at the table. There was something badly wrong wherever he was, she felt it powerfully. If anything did happen to Harrigan, would they tell her? Would she hear it on the radio first? Her tiny flat closed in on her. She couldn’t breathe. Most times like this, she would have called her friends, met them somewhere and gone dancing. Instead, without changing her clothes, she found paper and a pen and began to write up what had happened tonight.

  Almost, she set down as the opening words: I’m waiting to hear if you’re dead. But no such words from the heart appeared on the page. Her usual disciplined report filled the blank space. She wrote in detail. Anything to fill in the time until she heard that Harrigan was alive, or if anyone called to let her know otherwise.

  19

  Voices at a distance woke Harrigan. He opened his eyes to the sensation that he didn’t know where he was. Time was dislocated; fleetingly, the room was an unknown precinct. Then he heard a shout: ‘Watch out!’ It was Harold’s voice. Events slipped back into place. He thought, I have work to do. Pulling himself up off the bed, he put on his gun. Then he went outside to see what all the fuss was about.

  The parched landscape brought Harold’s words back. Wait till you see it. It’ll break your heart. Clear and overarching, the blue sky offered no possibility of rain. Harrigan saw Harold and the two constables at the edge of the old garden beds, standing near the snagged ute. With one back wheel hanging just above the ground, it looked like some bizarre dead bug. Harrigan went to join them.

  ‘Morning,’ Harold said. ‘Do you want to give us a hand? I can’t help out too much because of my hands. This is why I almost overturned us last night. I got too close to the paving.’

  The garden’s ornamental paving stones had subsided over time and last night they had given way under the weight of the ute. The ground beneath had collapsed into a series of deep cracks, revealing an extensive network of ants’ nests. With its right wheel caught in one of these cracks, the ute had overbalanced on its side, then become lodged. In the hot morning sun, ants were swarming out of their nests and over the ground, climbing up on the ute’s body in an angry mass.

  Using the police car, one of the constables towed the ute out of the crack while Harrigan and his colleague righted it from the back. It hit the ground with a thud. Even more agitated and angry, the ants flowed in
to the cabin and onto the tray. The constable towed the vehicle away from the nests to open ground where Harold ruthlessly sprayed the ants with what looked like homemade insecticide.

  ‘Have you had any breakfast?’ he asked Harrigan. ‘We can go out to the Cage whenever you’re ready.’

  ‘In this?’ Harrigan watched ants falling to the ground in dead clusters while others disappeared into the ute’s bodywork. ‘I don’t think so. I’ll get us a car. I’ll drive and give your hands a break.’

  He couldn’t take his own car; it had to be examined by the forensic team to see if it had been tampered with. Still, there had to be some advantages to being the boss, including asking for another car to be made available for him as soon as possible. He went back inside to shower, to sustain the body. On his way to the bathroom, he looked in on Ambrosine and her children. They slept in what had once been Stuart’s and Harold’s bedroom: Ambrosine with her smallest son on one bed, her other two children side by side on the second. Harrigan closed the door on them quietly. Peace. Order. It was a wild ambition he had. As rare out here in the remote countryside as in the heart of the city.

  A replacement car arrived later in the morning with the senior sergeant from Coolemon. He drove into the yard followed by a contingent of uniformed police drawn from other towns around the district. Harrigan sent them down to secure the remains of Ambrosine’s cottage, then search along the creek bed for a makeshift grave. The other two constables, relieved from their night shift, went home.

  Following Harold’s directions, Harrigan drove out across the property in the opposite direction. Their drive took them along a pathway of open gates and, in some places, gaps in Harold’s fences where the gunman had simply cut his way through the wire on his way to the farmhouse.

  ‘He did come in on Stewie’s private road,’ Harrigan said, when they’d stopped to look at another hole in a fence.

  ‘But how did he know what direction to take across my fields?’

  Harrigan reached into his pocket and took out his LPS badge.

  ‘This,’ he said. ‘It’s a tracking device.’

  ‘That thing? Is it working now?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. But I don’t think our gunman will be anywhere near here given the number of police around. And I’m still armed. I was given this yesterday. I was played for a fool.’

  ‘We still got the better of him when it mattered, mate.’

  Harrigan drove on until in the near distance they saw the glint of steel fences. He drove past piles of dead trees and pulled up outside an open gate. Harold was out of the car even before Harrigan had stopped.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘All that water. What a waste.’

  It was a scene of devastation. A wide gap had been punched in the high steel fence. Every structure inside the enclosure had been demolished. The tanks against the far fence had been torn open and their tens of thousands of litres of water had poured out, turning the ground just outside the fence into a swamp.

  ‘Is this what you wanted to show me?’ Harrigan asked.

  ‘It wasn’t like this the last time I saw it. I don’t know when this happened.’

  They walked past heaps of debris. Broken glass sparkled in the sun.

  ‘I’ll never be able to use this piece of land again,’ Harold said.

  ‘Take it back to the beginning, Harry. What used to be here?’

  ‘Before? Seven months ago, this whole area was covered with grey box. Those are the trees lying outside the fence. If you mean what Stuart put here, there were three greenhouses in a line, right there. Big ones.’

  Harrigan saw the indentations in the ground, now filled with smashed glass and twisted steel, where the structures had stood.

  ‘Over there,’ Harold turned and pointed to a bare area behind them, scraped clean, ‘that was a small field of wheat, the kind I used to grow myself. Everything’s gone. They’ve even taken the soil. Over there is the access road they put in. The road was fenced off from my paddocks and there was a locked gate where it met the Coolemon Road. That fence is gone now, and my guess is the gate has too.’

  Harrigan looked along the broken fence line that had once marked the dirt road. Deep serrations were scored in the ground where the bulldozers had come in.

  ‘When were you last here?’ he asked.

  ‘Two days ago. It must have happened the night after I burned my hands. I knocked myself out that night. I wouldn’t have heard a thing.’

  ‘It’s a fair distance over to here from your place.’

  ‘They would have had their lights on. With that and the racket they’d have made, I would have noticed something.’

  ‘Lucky you didn’t,’ Harrigan said grimly. ‘Otherwise, you might have ended up face down in the dirt.’

  He looked around. Torn and twisted pieces of irrigation equipment lay broken into the ground. Near the fence, he saw the generator that had once driven the system smashed to pieces.

  ‘Did you ever see people come out here?’ he asked Harold.

  ‘All the time. People would come in from the Coolemon Road. I never spoke to them, never really saw them close up. There was a place to sleep in one of the greenhouses so they must have spent time out here.’

  ‘This must have cost a fortune to build. Whoever did this put a bulldozer through it without thinking about it.’

  In the debris, Harrigan saw the carcasses of small animals and birds.

  ‘Have you told anyone you took those specimens or that you’ve still got them?’ he asked.

  ‘No one but you, mate.’

  ‘I think we should keep it that way for the time being. My officers are going to take your statement sometime today. Bring them out here and show them this. Give them the keys. Tell them everything you’ve told me since I got here. But don’t tell them that one small detail.’

  ‘What do I tell them about my hands?’

  ‘That you went in there, you looked it over, you handled what you found,’ Harrigan said.

  ‘Can’t you trust your people, mate?’

  ‘Some I can and some I can’t. I’m not sure which is which at the moment.’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I’m not. I don’t want any more people dead, including you or me. Let’s go and see where they came in.’

  They followed the indentations in the ground until they reached the Coolemon Road. The gate that had once secured the private road from intruders was smashed and lay half across the road, while a gap had been torn in Harold’s fence. Working together, they managed to drag the gate out of the path of any traffic. Harrigan stopped to look down the empty road. In the distance, he heard the sound of a crow.

  ‘The gunman had to know there was an entry point here. Otherwise, it’d just be any other gate,’ he said.

  ‘How was this planned?’ Harold asked. ‘Did they know you were coming here yesterday?’

  ‘They couldn’t have known beforehand. Once I left the city, they had the means to track exactly where I was going.’ Harrigan grinned. ‘He wasn’t following me, he was in front of me. I wasn’t looking for him there. But that means they organised this demolition separately to me coming here. They must have put this in motion as soon as they heard those people at Pittwater were dead.’

  ‘How am I going to get all this fixed? I don’t have that kind of money.’

  ‘Can you borrow it?’ Harrigan asked.

  ‘I don’t dare do that, mate. Stewie’s been trying to get me to raise a mortgage on Yaralla ever since Dad died. We both have to agree to it. I won’t do it. Because I know as soon as I do, he’ll take the money and run and I’ll never see a cent of it again. I haven’t been able to do any improvements for years because I can’t trust him enough. I could lose everything. I used to think having the property was better than nothing. That was before the drought.’

  They drove back to the farmhouse in silence. About halfway, Harold asked Harrigan to stop.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘J
ust about here, I’d stop and let Rosie off the ute. She’d race me back to the house. She was quick.’

  ‘Did you get her buried?’

  ‘I had to burn her. I’ve got a pit where I put my carcasses. I did it there.’

  ‘I’m sorry about what’s happened, Harry.’

  Harold shrugged. ‘It’s not your fault. Do you want to get going now?’

  Harrigan glanced at his passenger but there was no sign of emotion in Harold’s face. He drove on.

  At the farmhouse, more people were waiting for Harrigan. Members of the task force and the forensic team who had just arrived on the early plane from Sydney; the local police who wanted to know what they were expected to do next.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Harold said. ‘I’ve got to organise for someone to come up here and feed my stock.’

  He walked back inside the house. Surrounded by demanding people, Harrigan watched him disappear almost with envy.

  Harrigan most wanted to see what his people had found in Naradhan Creek. As soon as he’d given his orders, he asked to be driven down to the Creek Lane. Several kilometres along the dirt road, he stopped to look over the remains of Ambrosine’s cottage. Surreal in the sunlight, a bathtub with a shower attached and the kitchen stove stood upright in the ash and ruins. Next to them, an old shed was also a pile of ash and burned boards. They drove about half a kilometre further on. After climbing down a steep incline into the creek bed, he was shown a shallow and narrow grave dug into sand.

  Harrigan looked into the open trench and then at the cracked and eroded banks around him, which exposed a tangle of tree roots to the air. In the creek bed itself were young trees and scrub, stressed in the drought. In the early afternoon heat, he heard the sound of insects, the occasional bird call. Otherwise, it was deeply quiet. He imagined a human scream falling into a silence much deeper and more intensely still than this one. If the gunman had got the better of him last night, this could have been his grave and his scream falling into silence. This time, that wasn’t his fate.