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

by Michael Smith

  “I can’t divulge my sources if that’s what you’re asking.” The man still hadn’t bothered looking Harris in the eye. He was on the lookout for detectives sneaking into the station.

  “Stay quiet and keep looking straight ahead.” As soon as Harris said this, the reporter turned to look at him. “Don’t make a scene. Look straight ahead.” Harris waited for the man to turn his head before he continued, “I’m the detective working the case.”

  “You’re…” The reporter began rifling through his notes, “Detective Chief Inspector Alan Livingstone?”

  “He’s my superior.”

  The reporter couldn’t hide the disappointment on his face as he looked back down at his notes, “Then you’re Detective Constable James Harris?” He looked Harris up and down. “You don’t look like a detective.”

  “I can’t deal with this rabble but there’s some stuff I need printed. It will help with the investigation.” Harris lied. He had other plans for the man.

  The man stared back at him blankly.

  “It will sell papers.” Harris sighed.

  “Are you offering me an exclusive?”

  “I’m offering you the chance to help bring a murderer to justice.” Harris corrected him.

  “By giving me something to print?” The man corrected Harris. Harris nodded “Exclusively?” Harris nodded again as he looked around at the crowd to ensure no one was listening. The man’s desperation for circulation meant he wasn’t as discrete as Harris had hoped. “What have you got for me?”

  “Not here… Follow me.” Harris pushed his way through the back of the crowd and made his way around the side of the station. The reporter followed Harris to the back of the station. It wasn’t as grand or as imposing as the steps out the front, but it was more private. It was a back alley and no one was around. “Here’s fine.”

  “Aren’t we going inside?” The reporter asked with a trembling voice. Harris was one of those blokes you really didn’t want to happen upon in a back alley, following him there of your own accord was downright foolish. The reporter felt like a child who’d been led away from the playground with the promise of confectionery.

  Harris’s friendly demeanour switched out for a more aggressive display. “Who spoke to you?”

  “Do you know what happens to a reporter who doesn’t protect his sources?” The guy deserved credit. A lot of criminals and business owners around Sydney gave up to Harris without ever protesting. This guy had nerves; or at least, he had something to hide.

  Harris put his hands on the man’s biceps and gave him a rough shake. “Who made the fucking call?” He asked through gritted teeth.

  “It’ll be my job.”

  Harris reached down and grabbed the man by his crotch. The man gasped. “This is a trick I learned back home in Salford, if a bloke doesn’t want to talk. Grab, squeeze, twist and pull. Doctors call it torsion. Anyone who’s been through it, well they call it bloody murder.” The man whimpered in response, so Harris squeezed. The reporter gasped loudly. Tears streamed down his cheeks, the grab was uncomfortable, the squeeze was painful, he wasn’t about to let it go any further, the twist sounded unnatural.

  “DCI Livingstone…”

  Hearing that, Harris eased up, not so much that the reporter felt relieved of his pain, but just enough to encourage him to keep talking. “They’ve got the guy. Some Abo apparently. He’s going to be charged with the murder of the two children. Livingstone was the arresting officer.”

  Harris was trying to process what he was hearing but he sensed that the man was holding back. “What else?” No reply. Poor bastard must have needed reminding. Harris squeezed.

  “He gave me something on you…” The man gasped as Harris clenched his fist, “He says you’re dirty and the subject of an internal investigation.” The reporter spoke between pained gasps. “He told me I wasn’t to print anything until after today.”

  Harris let go, he’d heard enough. “I trust you’ll keep this conversation to yourself. You know what happens to reporters who don’t protect their sources… What’s your name?”

  “Tommy Clarke.”

  “And where do you work, Tommy Clarke?” Harris asked as he straightened the man’s tie and collar.

  “The Bulletin.”

  “Excellent. Now I know where to find you.” Harris took off. Clarke fell back against a wall and put his head in his hands.

  That settled it. Harris realised he was little more than a stranded fly, attempting to navigate the web that Livingstone had laid out. The Detective Chief Inspector was a shrewd operator. He was making it a question of race. An Aboriginal driving around Sydney in a Rolls Royce? It was unthinkable at the time. They weren’t provided the opportunities to accumulate that manner of wealth. No one was. You were born with it, or you weren’t. No, Livingstone knew the country had a grotesque apathy towards its indigenous people. He knew this would dampen the public’s interest in the case. After all, he was simply proliferating the lie that the Western world had spread for centuries. Anyone who didn’t have white skin was closer to an animal than a human. Does that not make your blood boil? It ought to.

  And it seemed Livingstone had pre-emptively discredited Harris, in case he should choose not to follow the path laid out for him. If Harris bungled the investigation, the suspect walked free, and the next day Harris ended up on the front page of the paper accused of corruption. Well, he wouldn’t miss the job, but saying goodbye to the steady salary would be less than ideal. Clever, clever, clever, Detective Chief Inspector.

  Harris headed down the dimly lit staircase towards the basement. The further he went, the colder the building became. It was, both physically and metaphorically, the station’s ugly underbelly. He was travelling to where the New South Wales Police hid their dirty secrets. It was mainly a collection of old filing and storage rooms; although there had always been a rumour that a covert arm of Internal Affairs was also operating from the basement. He didn’t see it.

  When Harris reached the bottom floor, he couldn’t help but feel like he was contracting tuberculosis just by standing there. The air had some unrecognisable quality that made his throat itch and his eyes sting. He headed through a door and looked around the gloom of the morgue.

  Cooky was sitting at his desk with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand and a yo-yo hanging from the other. Harris had always thought the guy was an odd chap but seeing him there, with his corned beef and his kids’ toy, surrounded by a mob of dead people; it really brought it all home.

  “I wasn’t expecting company.” Cooky remarked through a mouthful of sandwich.

  “I can see that.” Harris looked at him expectantly. “What’s happening?”

  “Lunch.” Cooky shrugged.

  “Please tell me you’ve got something for me, Cooky?”

  “Come and have a look.” Cooky was still chewing at his sandwich as he led Harris over to the slab where the two children lay. “I hope you don’t mind the smell.”

  “It’s just bleach covering the smell of damp.”

  “No… That’s the smell of death.” Cooky was oddly theatrical as he spoke. Harris realised he’d never visited Cooky in the morgue before. The feeling he was quickly developing was that he wouldn’t be making too many more visits to the pathologist. The dim light and the dark shadows painted a very different picture of the pathologist in his mind.

  “No… It’s bleach,” Harris insisted. “I can assure you that death smells quite different to this.” The men stood over the bodies upon the slab.

  Cooky continued chewing and began to run through what he had found. “The hyoid bones are both fractured, the windpipes are severely compressed and there’s signs of scratches on both necklines.” Cooky pointed a pen at the marks on the bodies. “Safe to say they were strangled to death.” Harris scratched at his stubbly chin. Cooky continued, “He hasn’t left any clue that might give his identity away. Not so much as a partial print on the bodies or the car.”

  “What about them, anythi
ng that might help us identify them?”

  “Fingerprints burned clean off.” Cooky pointed at one of the hands.

  “Right.” Harris should have seen it coming.

  “Teeth have been removed.” Cooky pointed inside one of the children’s open mouths. “They’re going to be impossible to ID unless we match their faces with something on file.”

  “Which I’m guessing we won’t.” Harris was exacerbated.

  “I called social services.” Cooky spoke while fiddling with his yo-yo. “They were useless.”

  “If they don’t have them on file, they don’t have them on file. And they won’t have them on file. So, what can they do?”

  “So, unless someone comes in and claims them…”

  “Like a lost wallet.” Harris’s mind was racing but, ultimately, failing.

  “In this state of decay, I’d say it’s unlikely… It’s unlikely a concerned parent is going to turn up having not yet made a complaint. If they were going to, they would have done so by now.” Cooky was clearly saddened by the situation. “Also, they might not be from round here.” This grabbed Harris’ attention. “I found this.” Cooky held a petri dish to the light; it held a reddish substance.

  “Red dirt?”

  “Between the time of their death and now… They’ve been somewhere in Australia’s red centre. It was on the back of his scalp.” Cooky studied the red dirt closely. “Dragged by the feet?”

  “I guess that’s something.” Harris despaired. It wasn’t a lot.

  “Also, the tag from inside the boy’s blazer… It’s from a tailors in Alice Springs.”

  “He’s carted them across the country. Like this?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “And wherever they came from… There could be more?” Harris speculated, thinking back to Lescott’s suggestion that this was no isolated incident. “I’m due upstairs but I’ll come down tomorrow morning.”

  “Meaning you want me here all night? By myself… With the dead bodies. I could have a date, you know? It’s Friday.” Cooky clearly didn’t want to do an all-nighter in the morgue. Who could blame him?

  Chapter 9

  Lescott wasn’t used to days spent on the cobbles. His dark, dank file room was unpleasant, but it was as good a place as any to drown his torment in alcohol. It was rare he saw daylight and rarer still that he subjected himself to Sydney’s summer sun. He’d broken his no whisky through the working day rule. It had left him feeling nauseous. The heat and the humidity meant his pores were gushing old sweaty booze. It left him clammy and his skin stinging. As he drove back towards Darlinghurst, he embraced the binge and drank straight from a bottle of cheap whisky.

  He was drunkenly belligerent. He felt as though he’d been dragged away from normalcy, from a pattern of behaviour that he could call a comfort zone. His equilibrium was off balance, he was unable to control his ghastly urge to drink. To balance himself on that precarious keel, he was overdoing the cocaine. They were following him around. That woman and her child from the street, he couldn’t shake them. In every doorway and window, on every street, and around every corner, there those dark tormenting apparitions loitered.

  Missing Persons was cold, damp and musty. It was his safe haven in the middle of an unbearably hot day. It wasn’t far, but it would be a struggle. Lescott had been driving erratically from the moment he had shakily turned the key to turn on the engine. He couldn’t concentrate. The biting point had taken several attempts to find. So, he turned to the comfort of another substance. Diazepam, “Mother’s Little Helper”, would level him off and calm the rattling of his fraying nerves. Yes, I hear you. Why didn’t he simply stop the car and take a nap until the booze, the drugs and the effects of sun exposure had worn off? Have you ever taken drugs? They bring out the stupidity in us. Wise choices are just about as far as they can be from one’s mind when scaling the majestic peak of a self-destructive stupor.

  But the bottle of diazepam was nowhere to be seen. Frustratingly, he could hear the rattling of the pills on the floor around every turn and over every pothole. Stop the car Lescott, pull over, have a calm look around. He wasn’t about to do that. Instead, he reached down to grab them. At first, he had the presence of mind to keep his eyes on the road. But he was only a little fellow, and his arms weren’t long enough to reach. He inched further down, to the point where his eyes barely met the top of the dashboard. He was a hazard on the road, veering and swerving. Just as he finally managed to get his slippery fingertips on the unforgiving sheen of the bottle of pills, he lost contact immediately. Upon bumping into the curb, his cold clammy hands recoiled as self-preservation kicked in. But his substance dependency was a far greater force than his need for survival, so once more he reached down with every cell in his body struggling to grasp his medicine. Such was the intensity of his effort that his fingers were succumbing to pins and needles. The longer this went on, the more dangerous it was. He couldn’t stop. The moment he pulled over would be the moment they stood outside his window, peering into his soul with their deathly black eyes. He was desperate. Tears began to pour from his eyes as every inch of his body tensed in pain. Those tears only served to hinder his vision, and disorientate him further. He needed relief.

  Once more, he ducked down in a desperate last-ditch effort. Once again, he lost sight of the traffic. As his hand moved closer to his goal, that pharmaceutical manna from the gods, his car left its lane and moved onto the wrong side of the road. By the time he straightened up with the pills in his hand, a horn belonging to an oncoming vehicle was blaring. He snatched at the wheel. His car over-corrected. It mounted the curb, penetrated a hedge and demolished the flowerbed of an expensive property. That was a close shave, he told himself. He popped a few pills, washed them down with whisky, and pulled away calmly. He’d learned nothing.

  At Darlinghurst Road, Harris walked into Major Crimes where he was met by dozens of pairs of watchful eyes that ushered him inside in a guard of dishonour. These were Livingstone’s people. They’d closed ranks, they knew what was going on. No one spoke for fear of the house of cards falling down, but they all looked at Harris with a mixture of contempt and curiosity. Could Ronnie Prince’s man toe the line?

  Harris looked up at the clock, it was just before 5pm. It was time for the identity parade, there were a dozen sweaty detectives between him and the parade room. He walked through the crowd, feeling every eye in the room follow him.

  Lescott staggered down the abandoned corridor towards Missing Persons. If he could just get inside, he could get himself together. The diazepams were really starting to take hold. He was wasted, but he could tell he had overcompensated. He was drowsy. Saliva was beginning to pool in his mouth, flood over his lower lip and spill onto his shirt. He was really riding both sides of the see-saw that day. The only way to counteract the coma he was approaching? A stimulant. He dropped his jacket on the ground and fell into his desk chair. Through blurred vision, he looked up at the clock. It was on the cusp of 5pm. At that exact moment, Harris was walking into an ID parade. Given what he had just learned about the Englishman, Lescott couldn’t trust he would do the right thing. A possibility that could lead to an innocent man being framed for the foulest of crimes. The killer would go free, and some poor helpless pleb would be hung in his place. Lescott had to get upstairs to Major Crimes. He had to make sure Harris did the right thing.

  The only way he was getting up those stairs was in his breast pocket. A wrap of cocaine would balance out the downers currently dominating his body chemistry. He pulled the wrap of newspaper out and placed it on the desk. Pulling at the material, he realised his hands were numb and he had little control of his fingers. He fluffed it. Cocaine ended up all over his desk. He dropped his nose to the desk and he began to vacuum the powder up greedily.

  The cocaine hit his bloodstream in seconds. Relief washed over him. How else to celebrate other than to grab at the half-finished, entirely room temperature beer on his desk. He sank it and exhaled deeply. He�
�d been seconds away from something much like a drug induced coma, that was the fine line he walked every day, it was a constant struggle. He went to stand up, knowing he had just minutes to get to the ninth floor.

  But as he stood, his legs buckled below him. He fell down, flat on his face. He was in a deep state of unconsciousness before he had hit the ground. The stimulus he’d felt had been little more than a placebo, the cocaine was yet to hit his blood. He’d be out for some time. Harris was on his own.

  When the Englishman walked into the observation room, he was quite unsure what was about to happen. He couldn’t quite believe the situation he’d found himself in. You have to remember he was not a policeman. He was as far out of his depth as any individual has ever been. He’d never even entered the observation room before. The only time he’d previously stood behind two-way glass was when Prince had him doing so with a camera in his hands. Beware large mirrors in the boudoirs of brothels, you never know who is watching you from a secret corridor, on the other side. Police Officers, Lawyers, Judges, and Politicians, I’m talking to you. We see you.

  But in spite of his unpreparedness, he could feel something on the air. It was palpable. This was the pebble being cast in the calm water, the ripples it caused would go on to affect him for the rest of his life. They would come to define him, for better, for worse.

  He had two clear choices. Do Livingstone’s bidding, and he would fall down the rabbit hole of corruption to new and more depraved depths. Do the right thing, and… Well, he couldn’t see too far down that particular road. But he had a feeling that it would be his life brought into question. He asked himself, did he like his life? What exactly was he doing with it, that made it so worth protecting at the expense of innocent lives. James Harris could turn just about anything into an existential crisis.

  The moment he entered the room, his old friend Alan Livingstone was all over him. “James. Good to see you.” He bellowed, presumably for the benefit of someone other than he or Harris. As he shook Harris’ hand, he moved in and lowered his voice to a whisper. “People on the street saw the mess in that car. That means we need a swift resolution. We need to bring the killer to justice, immediately. Show me I can trust you James…” Something about the way Livingstone spoke served to offer further confirmation that he was full of shit. He had no interest in justice.