The Tattooed Man

by Alex Palmer

  ‘If you end up shot in a situation like this, who knows who shot you? Come on. He’s gone. Let’s see if we can open that door from the inside.’

  They reached the main corridor again but heard shots down the stairs. Harrigan dragged Grace to the ground as one cracked past them. There was the sound of footsteps running down the stairs towards them.

  ‘Back this way,’ Harrigan said urgently. ‘Let’s find a place to hide.’

  They turned and ran down towards the animal house. Running into the dark. It was no way to die.

  33

  A small shadowed creature sat in front of them near a floor light. When it saw them it shrieked and ran back towards the animal house.

  ‘Was that a monkey?’ Grace asked.

  ‘The cages must have been locked open as well,’ Harrigan said.

  They ran into a huge and cavernous room lit by pale lights spaced at intervals high up on the walls. The lower half of the room was in deep shadow. On three sides, two tiers of glass cells rose up to the ceiling. A set of ladders and walkways gave access to these enclosures. The wall lights were reflected in the glass. Faintly visible in the centre of the room was a long and wide stainless-steel bench, set crosswise. The wall lights glimmered on its surface in the dark. There were no windows; no means of external light. A strong animal smell filled the room, a stench of urine and sweet rotting fruit. All the doors to the glass enclosures were open. The monkeys had climbed down into the room. Several sat on the steel bench, darker shapes against the shadows. They scattered when Grace and Harrigan ran into the room. There was the sound of rustling, of animal movement and hissing.

  ‘Get down behind the bench,’ Harrigan whispered. ‘It’ll give us some cover.’

  They crouched down. Very soon afterwards they heard shrieking from just outside the doorway. ‘Fuck you,’ a voice muttered softly, angrily, followed by more shrieking and then silence. The door was lit more strongly than the rest of the room, the lights casting a square of low yellow light around it. DP appeared, shaking his head angrily. Immediately, he crouched down in the shadows out of their sight. There was a short pause, then words echoed bizarrely around the room. ‘I’m waiting. You come to me, man.’ The acoustics of the room were such that any sound carried clearly to all listeners. The words were followed by a deeper silence, as if the speaker realised quiet was his only option.

  Harrigan hoped DP couldn’t know they were there. They stayed still and silent as the room slowly filled again with the soft sounds of animals moving, small hissings, occasional shrieks. Harrigan tapped Grace on the shoulder. He wanted the gun; she gave it to him. She didn’t need to be told he was going after DP. Still crouching, he moved to the end of the bench. Seen from Harrigan’s perspective, DP was somewhere to the left of the doorway. In the darkness, Harrigan saw a fine blue light that shifted slightly while he watched. DP would be intent on that tiny bit of light. Harrigan knelt and aimed at the deeper shadow.

  Suddenly there were running footsteps along the corridor. Before Harrigan could fire, Elena, seen briefly in the yellow light, the contract clutched in her hand, rushed inside the room at full speed. There was shrieking as Elena fell heavily to the floor, then more shrieks. She had collided with at least one monkey. Harrigan could not fire; she was between him and DP. There was a flurry of movement as several monkeys leapt up onto the bench and then down on the other side, climbing up the ladders and walkways that led to their cages.

  ‘Get to the back,’ DP hissed.

  Elena scrambled to her feet and ran behind the bench. Harrigan was already there. Elena was about to call out when Grace got her in a hold, pressing her down on the floor with a hand over her mouth.

  ‘What’s that? Who’s back there?’ DP called, but there was no answer from Elena who was pinned to the floor by Grace.

  Harrigan was back at the end of the bench but the blue light was gone. There was a brief waiting silence, then a shot flashed across the room in their direction. It cannoned into the glass, filling the room with a shattering sound, then further clatter as the broken glass hit the floor. Elena began to wrestle hard with Grace, scrabbling to get to the end of the bench. She made enough noise to be heard.

  ‘There is someone. I know where you are, man. I’m coming for you.’

  You do that, Harrigan thought. I’m waiting for you.

  Intent on DP, he then realised that another figure was entering the room at speed, disappearing into the dark. A bright flashlight raked across the darkness above his head. It caught DP in its beam. Harrigan fired from a crouching position, almost with no time to aim. There was darkness again. DP gasped. Harrigan heard a clatter. DP had dropped his gun. Brinsmead was outlined against the door, then gone.

  ‘Fuck you, man,’ DP said.

  ‘Danny, get down!’ Sam shouted.

  The two voices clashed.

  ‘We’ve got a fish, Danny,’ Sam called out. ‘One you’ve wanted for a while. He’s your protector, Elena. We’ve got him. You’re screwed even with a gun. I’m going to see him burn like the others.’

  ‘Jesus, man. You’re not going to do that.’

  Sam laughed.

  Behind the bench, Elena stopped wrestling with Grace. She lay on the floor, breathing hard. She didn’t have the contract with her. When she fell, it must have dropped from her hands and been lost in the dark. A monkey landed lightly on the bench just above their heads, peering down. In the shadows, there was the gleam of its eyes. By now Harrigan’s vision was accustomed to the darkness. He saw moving shadows near the door.

  ‘Crawl,’ Brinsmead’s voice said.

  ‘Come on, man.’

  ‘Crawl!’

  ‘You take it all so fucking personally. It could have been any of us in there.’

  In the dark, Harrigan moved close to Grace. He didn’t trust Elena to be on their side if he took out either Brinsmead or Sam.

  ‘We need to get DP’s gun,’ he whispered to Grace.

  ‘I’ll get it. I can shoot,’ Elena said. ‘My father taught me.’

  ‘You’ll shoot us,’ Grace said softly.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘We can hear you back there,’ Sam called in a slightly sing-song voice. ‘Here we all are in the dark. You can’t see us and we can’t see you. Isn’t that fun?’

  Yes, I can, Harrigan thought. Again he was moving to the end of the bench when there was a struggle near the door, then a cry of pain from Brinsmead. DP was scrambling away in the dark.

  ‘Get him!’ Brinsmead shouted.

  The torchlight flashed again, followed by a shot. DP was seen rolling away but not quickly enough to dodge a bullet. Sam was in outline to the side. Harrigan saw DP’s gun in the centre of the floor. He had been reaching to it when the bullet hit. His blood was highlighted blue in the light against the floor. Harrigan fired at Sam but she had hit the ground. The room plunged into darkness again.

  ‘Dead as a door nail,’ Sam said, catching her breath. ‘I wanted to drag it out.’

  Harrigan fired in the direction of her voice but to no effect.

  ‘Door, Danny! Now! Keep low.’

  There were quick footsteps in the dark.

  ‘What do we do?’ Grace asked. ‘Rush them?’

  ‘They’re probably planning to rush us. Let’s get either side of the door. All of us. No point in anyone staying back here now. Someone get DP’s gun.’

  They moved forward in the shadows. A sustained flurry of shots from the door cracked over the benchtop. The monkeys shrieked and ran. Harrigan heard the crack of glass above his head; it fell to the floor beside him, splintering.

  Sam appeared as a tall shadow in the dark, running towards him, the flashes from her gun lighting the room into disjointed sequences. Harrigan felt the bullets whiz past his head, he hit the floor. All the lights came on in one glaring burst. At the same time, a monkey landed full on Sam’s face, panicking. It clung on.

  ‘Get it off me,’ Sam yelled, dragging at it with one hand.

  El
ena ran past Harrigan, grabbed DP’s gun and shot Sam in the chest several times. Sam crumpled to the floor, the monkey still clinging to her shoulder. It was dead too.

  Blinking in the light, Harrigan looked for Grace. She lay face down on the floor behind him, blood seeping from her head.

  Suddenly, Brinsmead was in front of Elena, staring at her. He walked towards her slowly. She kept the gun on him. He had his own gun but was holding it by his side. She backed away, then stopped.

  ‘You’re not going to frighten me,’ she said.

  Harrigan turned Grace over. Her face was intact. A cut was scored along the side of her head through her hair but she was breathing. His terror subsided.

  ‘What are you going to do, kill me?’ Brinsmead was saying. ‘I don’t care. You’ve just killed my only true friend.’

  ‘In self-defence,’ Elena said. ‘She was a cold-blooded murderer.’

  ‘So are you.’

  He was very close to Elena now. Slowly she kept moving backwards.

  ‘Brinsmead, get away from her,’ Harrigan shouted. He was on his feet but he was too late.

  ‘Watch this, Elena. Live with this. Dream it for the rest of your life. You can’t hide from this.’

  Brinsmead fired, not at Elena but at himself. She staggered back, screaming. His blood stained her face and her clothing. Then he was falling to the floor with the rest of the dead.

  Elena threw away her gun. She scrabbled at Sam’s clothing. She had the flash drive. She looked around and found the contract against the wall.

  Harrigan had turned Grace on her side so she could breathe and was trying to stop the bleeding from her wound. ‘Never mind that,’ he shouted at Elena. ‘Help me here.’

  But Elena was scrabbling at du Plessis, then she was gone.

  34

  Harrigan had no choice: he went after Elena. He wasn’t going to have her lock them in the animal house while she cleaned up around her. Outside, at the juncture of the corridors, he couldn’t see which way she had gone. Then something occurred to him. He ran upstairs to the laboratory. She was there, standing in front of a wall furnace. The lights and the thermostat indicated it was on at a very high temperature. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away.

  ‘You can’t open it,’ she said. ‘It’s locked and I’m not going to open it for you. It’s very hot in there. If you could open it, you’d burn yourself badly.’

  He looked around. Not only had she burned the contract, she had cleaned up the cage with its dead mice and pieces of grain and presumably thrown them in there as well.

  ‘You’ve won,’ he said. ‘Even if you had to kill a string of people to do it.’

  She turned on him. Her hair and clothes were still covered in blood. ‘I killed one woman in self-defence because I had to. What have I supposedly won? I’m a businesswoman with assets to protect. That’s all I’ve done.’

  ‘When we were down in that animal house, you didn’t tell us those lights were going to come on. You would have let us die in there to protect yourself.’

  ‘I saved all our lives by removing a killer.’

  ‘You tried to alert your own paid killer to where we were. What was du Plessis doing here?’

  ‘Wasn’t he with them? I don’t know him.’

  ‘When you got away from Sam, why didn’t you reverse the lockdowns? Was it because you knew DP was coming and you wanted to give him a chance to get on with the job?’

  ‘I had to hide in the dark. If I’d gone to my office, she would have found me.’

  ‘How did he get past the front gate, let alone open the emergency exit from the outside? Sam said you were the only one who could do that.’

  ‘No, Daniel could have set that up. Maybe he was trapping that man as well as us. Anyway, how do you know he got in that way?’

  ‘I saw it happen. I bet you’d reached breaking point. When was it? The day I was here and Daniel told me loud and clear the kind of information I would find in the Pittwater contract? I bet you told DP to get after him as soon as he could. What did you do? Tell the guards at the gate that no matter what happened, they were to let him in? What did you take off DP just now? His mobile? You gave him the code to open the door. You said, get Brinsmead out of my life once and for all, I don’t care what it involves. Get rid of his body. This wouldn’t be the only furnace in this place. Or maybe he was supposed to make it look like suicide.’

  ‘If you repeat what you’ve just said in public, I’ll sue you until you have nothing left to stand up in. Now leave me alone.’

  ‘I need a phone. I need to call an ambulance and I need backup. This place will be swarming with police and you’ll have to put up with it.’

  ‘Believe me, I’ll cooperate. I always cooperate with the police. You can use my office.’

  They walked in silence down to her office, each withdrawing from the other’s presence. She took a mobile phone out of a drawer in her desk and threw it to him without looking at him.

  ‘Where’s your other phone?’ he asked.

  ‘Still in her pocket.’

  The her was said with detestation.

  ‘We’ll take it in and examine it for evidence.’

  ‘Go ahead. I don’t care if you do.’

  Of course she didn’t. If she had received a cryptic message from her hired killer, it would be sourced to someone or something innocent.

  He started to make his calls. She sat at her desk and began to work on her computer.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Reversing the lockdowns.’

  ‘Leave the doors open in this sector.’

  ‘I have to close the animal house.’

  He leaned over her desk. ‘Grace is in there. Leave it open. If you close that door, you’ll regret it. Now, I’ve got people on the way, they’ll need to talk to you. Just sit here. Don’t worry, I won’t come anywhere near you if I don’t have to. Believe me.’

  He walked out without looking back. Then he stopped. Nothing was happening the way it had when Sam had made Elena do the lockdowns the first time around.

  ‘What were you really just doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’ve just wiped out Brinsmead’s personal files, haven’t you? Just in case there’s something in there that incriminates you.’

  ‘I’m going to reverse the lockdowns now. This is my office. Get out.’

  He ignored her and waited while she continued to work on her computer. This time, the lights briefly went out and came on again, the air conditioning changed. The doors stayed open. She didn’t look at him. Once she’d finished, she picked up her phone to make a call. Even without washing the blood off her face, she was putting the essentials in place. Harrigan leaned forward and took the phone out of her hand.

  ‘You owe me your life,’ he said.

  ‘You owe me yours.’

  ‘No. I told you it was a suicide pact. I gave you the time to manipulate the lockdown. Upstairs, I dragged you out of the way of Sam’s bullet. I would have saved your neck in there if you’d bothered to cooperate with us. Because you didn’t, someone I care about almost got killed. You have something I want. You’ll remember. You tried to use it once to blackmail me. If you have any decency at all, you’ll send it to me.’

  ‘Decency!’

  ‘If you don’t, I’ll walk out of here thinking you’re nothing but a piece of rubbish, Dr Calvo. I thought you told me you always fulfilled your business obligations, no matter what.’

  He left without looking back.

  By the time the paramedics were wheeling her out to the ambulance, Grace had woken up. She moved her head one way and then stopped.

  ‘Don’t move,’ the paramedic said.

  ‘I can’t, my head hurts too much.’ She looked at Harrigan. ‘You’re blurry. Is it really you?’

  ‘I’m still here, believe me,’ he said. ‘I’ll come and see you in hospital as soon as I can.’

  ‘You have work to do,’ she said to him
in a soft, drifting voice.

  He did have work to do. By the time the police got there, Elena had called in her lawyers. They arrived before the forensic team and were escorted in by one of the security guards from the front desk. Harrigan didn’t speak to her again. He organised the crime scene, directed the allocation of jobs. Throughout this, the police left the emergency exits open, moving in and out. As a result, numbers of the monkeys made their escape out of the building. Others were dead. The forensic team marked where their carcasses lay. Harrigan watched as the human dead were taken away. This is futile, he thought. It means nothing. Nada.

  He left the scene as soon as he could. At the main gate, the media was assembled en masse. He drove through the crowds, heading for Liverpool Hospital where Grace was. Several crews followed him. There were uniformed police on duty at the hospital. Harrigan told them to keep the media out whatever else they did. Grace was in Emergency. She managed faintly to raise an eyebrow at him.

  ‘You got here,’ she said. ‘They’re talking about scanning my brain. I told them it’s probably peasized but they should be able to find it if they look hard enough.’

  ‘You’re alive. I didn’t have to see you with a bullet in your head. I don’t care about anything else.’

  ‘Not even about the job?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’

  He realised that for the first time in his working life, this was probably true.

  35

  The medical staff moved Grace to Royal North Shore Hospital and told Harrigan she would be there for several weeks while they assessed any possible damage. He visited her every day. For the rest of the time, he worked at his job with one aim in mind: setting up the investigation so it could run without his daily involvement. He spoke to ASIO, made statements, worked through the evidence with Trevor and his senior people. Any information concerning Falcon’s operations was classified, they were told. It could only be presented in a closed court and now there was no one left alive to try. After consultations with all parties, the commissioner’s directive was to close the Pittwater case as soon as possible and let the dead bury the dead. The investigation into the murder of Senator Edwards, his adviser and a police guard remained in the hands of the AFP and was continuing. Harrigan looked at the bald facts and knew they would not even get close to Elena Calvo.