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

by Michael Smith

  “Listen Miss…” He paused, not knowing her name, but upon deciding that he didn’t care he just kept talking, “I don’t want to dance. I don’t want a drink.”

  “What do you want, Mr Harris?” She knew his name. This happened from time to time. Sydney’s villains would be seduced by women with ulterior motives. The next thing they knew, they’d be persuaded to batter someone’s abusive or philandering husband. It was a common transaction of sorts.

  “I want to go home; I want to fill a needle, and find a vein. No drinking, no dancing, no fucking Nat King Cole. I’m afflicted, and the only medicine is heroin. So afflicted am I, that I need a tonic of the greatest potency. Within minutes I will be in an abyss. Who knows if I will make it back out?” Once he was done, he looked up. She was gone.

  Harris shrugged his shoulders and finished his drink. He placed his glass down on the window ledge and turned to leave “How far is your place?” That voice, again. This time, Harris found himself staring into Markle’s eyes. She wasn’t a woman. She was Aphrodite, Venus, and Freyja all rolled into one. She was beauty incarnate. There she was standing before him, buttoning the buttons of a black trench coat that hung from her oh-so elegantly. Harris was shell-shocked.

  “Elsa Markle…” She held out a slender hand for him to shake. He was sure he’d heard that name before. She worked The Cross, a dancer, a high-end working girl, or something of that ilk. He couldn’t place her.

  “I hope you don’t have a misguided notion of romance in your head. This isn’t pretty.”

  “I’ll light some candles. Open a nice bottle of wine and run you a nice bath if you need a little romance.” She was mocking him. He couldn’t have cared less. The confident smile on her face was putting him into a trance.

  “Come on then, Elsa Markle.” They were a striking couple. They turned heads as they walked down Darlinghurst Road. She placed her arm through his. She placed her head on his shoulder. All of a sudden, his life felt quite exciting.

  He was so distracted by the excitement somersaulting in the pit of his stomach, that he failed to notice that eerie feeling. A pair of eyes were still burning into him. Not hers. In the shadows behind the window of the bar where Harris had stood, George Watson smirked.

  Chapter 13

  That day, the gears of change had been placed into motion. The debauched party raged once more under the silver moonlight that slivered through the suffocating smog blanketing the sky. The electric buzz of Darlinghurst echoed through every watering hole. Again, it spilled onto the streets outside. A man wearing a priest’s garments stepped over a pair of drunks who grappled with each other animalistically on the floor. Unlike the night before, his clothes were no longer pristine. They were dirtied, midnight black had given way for dusty grey and muddy brown. His collar was nowhere to be seen, it was likely clogging a drain somewhere nearby. The former righteous child of God drank straight from a nasty bottle of red that had been brewed in a local outhouse. Drinking his toilet wine, he chortled the chortle of a drunken mess. Welcome to the Cross, Holy Man. Your God has forsaken this place.

  That night, the Cross was George Watson’s. He’d have his pick of tables in the most exclusive of venues. He’d drink the best champagne and snort the finest cocaine. Harris was off the street that night, and Prince was out of town. The neighbourhood was his to do with what he pleased.

  Somewhere on the Gold Coast, Ronnie Prince was doing the rounds of his illicit gambling operations. It seemed they had all decided to turn off the cash tap. This just would not do. He had to find out what had brought on this unexpected lack of compliance, and teach the proprietors a lesson they would not soon forget. He watched on from behind the manager’s desk of one such establishment as his two bodyguards went to work on the man. One holding him down, the other using pliers to pull the man’s fingernails out. It wasn’t pretty. But my god, it was effective. When the man had taken just the right amount of punishment, Prince asked where the money had gone. Before the torturee passed out, he whimpered, “George Watson.”

  That night, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Livingstone did the devil’s work in the gloom of his dimly lit office. He had made a habit of staying late when he noticed his wife’s looks beginning to fade with age. He usually spent the night drinking heavily while plotting his ascent up the nefarious food chain. That night he plotted a man’s downfall. He flicked through mugshots of previously convicted sexual deviants. He’d pick a face, seemingly at random, and he would pin it to the board in front of him. In thick black lettering the board read: “Death Car Suspects.”

  Sometime after Harris left him, Lescott’s eyes opened. He stood and grabbed at a nearby wall to stop himself swaying. His eyes were drawn to the ceiling and the scratching sound. The sound had irritated him for months, but at this point it cut him to his core. He screamed in a furious rage.

  The stairs were a struggle. His feet were numb, his legs weak, his eyes stung and the room spun slowly. He had to stop halfway up the stairs to vomit. It felt horrendous. He hadn’t eaten in quite some time. As his stomach turned itself inside out, booze, bile and blood rushed up, out and onto the carpeted stairs.

  At the top of the stairs, he unbuttoned his collar and struggled with the clasp of a chain that sat around his neck. It had been weighing him down all day. At the end of the chain was a key. The key to the locked door. Lescott clumsily placed the key into the lock. He opened the door and stepped inside.

  Harris really was no kind of detective. As he had explored that shrine to a life that once was, he hadn’t come across a child’s bedroom. Had he been standing there in the hallway as Lescott opened the door, he’d have seen a mobile hanging from the ceiling; crocheted characters from Alice in Wonderland spinning idly on a breeze coming in through an open window. He’d have seen the net curtains rising on the breeze, as though some unseen entity was entering the room. He’d have seen the rich earthy mahogany of the infant’s cot in the centre of the room. He would have been terrified at what lay within that room, any human in their right mind would be.

  “I’m home,” Lescott drunkenly mumbled as he closed the door behind him.

  Harris found himself walking down Darlinghurst Road once more. This time, he was quite alone. It was empty. The hour was hard to distinguish. It lay somewhere between day and night. The street had something of a shimmer. It was somehow ethereal, in a way one only sees in the most vivid of dreams. Ahead, the Rolls Royce lay there smoking and steaming. He walked towards it. He watched as a tall, thin man sprinted from the car. He had inches on Harris and he was lean. Somewhat disturbingly, his face was covered in dripping blood. Inexplicably, he wore no clothes. His nakedness allowed Harris to note the rib cage that protruded from his lean frame. This man was a ghoul. Harris tried to give chase but as he did, his feet were swallowed by the melting tarmac on the road.

  The villain escaped into the haze of smoke and steam that bellowed under the hood of the car. Its foul-smelling vapours shrouded the street. The gathering cloud blocked out the light in the sky above. And thus, day appeared as night. Harris dragged his feet through the viscous surface, slowly inching his way over to the vehicle. When he peered through the cracks in the children’s bed linen lining the windows, he saw that the interior of the car was aflame. He’d placed his hand on the roof to lean down, and he removed it quickly as it burned through the top layers of his flesh. Those flames flooded out of the car and lapped their way across its exterior. Within seconds it was entirely engulfed. Inside the car, the two children prayed. He could hear their words of desperation. They prayed to some godly entity to save them. But no one was coming. No god roamed these lands. Not Bunjil, not Bagadjimbiri, nor Barraiya. It was just Harris and those children on that street.

  The children slowly turned their heads to look at Harris and they let out blood-curdling screams.

  When Harris awoke from a spine-chilling nightmare, he tried to remember the sequence that had so disturbed his unconscious mind. But it was gone. He left the mattress on t
he floor and moved over to his favoured spot on the windowsill. She remained on the makeshift bed. She was a beautiful sight. He had excitedly taken her in the palm of his hand like a flower. Little did he know, in all of his excitement, he had closed his fist and crushed her. Though she was as strong as she was intelligent. No strength could defy the pull of heroin once it had its talons within you. No intelligence could think its way out of the knot that heroin tied one’s soul into. He felt dirty, he had taken something so special and he had introduced it to something so filthy.

  He grabbed at a black medical box and pulled out a rubber tourniquet. He tied it around his arm. He pulled out a metal spoon and hesitated before he began to concoct his second fix. It was rare that he allowed himself to be so indulgent. His soul had blackened that day and the only tonic which could soothe his pain, was the tonic that worsened his disease.

  He poured a wrap of golden-brown heroin into the spoon and held his lighter below it. The powder began to melt and then bubble into the transparent poison that had, for some time, been the only thing that made sense to him. The tourniquet had gone to work on the circulation of his arm. He felt the familiar, reassuring feeling of pins and needles in his fingertips. His veins had risen to the surface of his skin, his body was welcome to receive the bounty. He expertly located a vein, and without so much as a grimace, he punctured the skin. Without hesitation, he pulled the syringe’s plunger up. The clear heroin mixed with the burgundy blood filling the chamber. He had to take one last look at her. And he did. She was heaven. Then he plunged the concoction of bloody opiate into his veins. His head slumped back and hit the wall behind him.

  Beauty had met the beast that night.

  If God hadn’t wanted us to sin, he wouldn’t have put all of these delightful temptations in front of us. Had he wanted righteous men, he would have made the intoxicating nature of sinning less enjoyable. I’m sure there are still places on the earth where light overpowers darkness. But this was Sydney in 1963.

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  Part Two.

  The Devil in the Red Dirt.

  Chapter 14

  1963 dutifully gave way to 1964. Summer would give way for autumn. The warm, still air turned cold and blustery. The dry environment’s thirst was quenched with prolonged bursts of heavy rain. Long days were replaced with long nights. Summer dresses and short sleeves were neatly folded up, packed away and stored under the bed. Dusty, moth-eaten overcoats were brought out, along with scarves and thick cloth caps. Whereas summer in Sydney was a thing to experience, winter was a thing to endure: long, cold and lonely. But not before an Indian Summer in mid-autumn bestowed a grim parting gift upon the city.

  When Harris read in the papers that a recently convicted paedophile had admitted to the murder of the two Aboriginal children, he turned the page of the newspaper. It wasn’t his business. Livingstone had made sure of that. His hands were tied, so he turned his attention to his work, if you could call it work.

  Along with his criminal activities, and attempting to make his way as a legitimate businessman, Harris had found a voyeuristic way of passing time, by working as a private investigator. Don’t let your head fill with ideas that he was making a difference. He wasn’t bringing down big, shadowy criminal conspiracies. His main request was to search for missing pets. He made most of his money tailing unfaithful spouses. He took pictures and provided his clients with the incriminating evidence they needed to untangle their messy domestic situations. It was boring, but it paid well and fitted in with his schedule. But, being the self-loathing, existence-questioning nihilist that he was, he yearned for something greater. Indeed, Harris questioned why he bothered waking up in the morning. It wasn’t a life worth living; it was barely an existence worth questioning.

  When that Indian Summer arrived, we couldn’t have been less happy about it. We had had enough. The summer of ‘63/’64 had been as long as it was hot. It was the kind of heat that sank into the pavements, the walls, and all the crumbling masonry that made up a city fast falling apart. It was a soul-sucking, sweat-inducing heat that hit you from all sides. There was no relief at night; the oppressive warmth rising from the streets tainted the night air and choked you as you lay there naked, drenched with sweat.

  But it was good for business. The hotter the summer was and the longer it went on, the more people came knocking at his door. The heat got to people, it made them impulsive and broke down their inhibitions. It turned model husbands and wives into little better than effusive hoses and hospitable buckets, respectively. You could smell the chlorine stench of come on every street corner.

  The heat had made life in the city unbearable. Rubbish festered on the streets, while the garbage collectors took afternoon snoozes in front of rattling fans. Rats feasted upon their rotting banquet of maggot riddled waste. The sewage that stood in the city’s underground bowels began to cook; as it bubbled away and heated up, it metamorphosed into vapour and came flooding from the drains as foul-smelling odours. Even the sweaty smell of the people who walked the pavements had intensified, they smelled pungent and sour. It made for a hellish landscape. Fresh air was at a premium and the city was stifled by its own stink.

  You’d have been forgiven for walking through Hyde Park and not even noticing a smell that should have been out of place there. It was fouler than the others. An old smell that, once inside your nose, sticks with you for a lifetime. The smell of old death under a hot sun.

  The businessmen who strolled through the park to get into the central business district didn’t notice. They were too busy thinking about their lunchtime rendezvous with their receptionists. The police, taking a leisurely stroll through the park to avoid an ongoing bank robbery on an adjacent street, didn’t notice. They were too busy creating an acceptable lie that would excuse their lack of courage in the line of duty.

  A homeless woman, foul smelling and worse looking, she noticed. No one would listen of course. She was a half-mad, fully drunk cretin. She wasn’t to be taken seriously. The businessmen, they wouldn’t listen to the poor lunatic. The police, after the summer they’d had, wouldn’t listen to anyone who wasn’t throwing them a substantial bung. Not even the kind, elderly Aboriginal man who sat on the bench, reading a Bible, would listen.

  That old man had come to the park every day for the past week to read the Good Book. He kept his head down, and minded his own business as he immersed himself in Scripture. At least, that’s what it would have looked like to the passer-by. If you’d looked closer, you’d have noticed the man hadn’t moved in days, not even a fraction of an inch. He hadn’t gone home at night, he hadn’t come back in the morning. He hadn’t so much as blinked. If you’d bothered to look closely, not that anyone did, you’d have noticed the greyish-blue spreading across his skin.

  Fred Lescott’s life remained a miserable affair. When he wasn’t drinking himself to death in the Missing Persons department, he spent his time slouched against the wall of a pale nursery that lay behind a locked door. An empty cot gathered dust in the middle of the room, the saddest sight known to man. This was Lescott’s morning ritual. He’d visit his daughter’s bedroom and he would talk to her. It was sacred to him, and it was the only time of the day when he would never reach for a bottle.

  Oftentimes, he was joined by a large mother brushtail possum that clambered from a tree in his backyard and climbed onto the ledge outside the nursery’s window. Whenever it found a window open, it came into the house to scavenge food and escape the heat.

  Missing Persons remained his obsession and his distraction alike. He hadn’t heard from Harris since that day in November. Unlike Harris who had switched off to the whole affair, Lescott felt as if the events of that day had left him with unfinished business. He’d put feelers out across the uniformed ranks, in the hope that some honest copper might unearth something, anything that gave him something to investigate away from prying eyes. If any suspicious corpse was found, posed, manipulated or semi-preserved, then he was to hear abo
ut it first. He’d distributed a lot of money through various departments for the privilege, but he didn’t expect to hear anything. He assumed Livingstone’s handle on the puppet strings was just too strong. Then the call came through.

  A raving homeless woman had been screaming bloody murder for the last two days. When a uniformed policeman finally investigated, he found the dead body of an elderly gent. The man had been dressed, made up and poised upon a park bench.

  Lescott promised the investigating officer a generous payoff if he could have ten minutes alone at the crime scene before the lad called it in. He drove to Hyde Park at a startling pace. He took photos. He wrote notes. He made up his mind quite quickly. The killer had struck again. There was no doubt in his mind that the first incident had been the work of blind chance. But in this instance, the killer was taking control of the story. This time he had left the body there to be found. Perhaps, the killer had enjoyed his brush with danger. Perhaps, he had liked the attention his work received. He’d placed this body and waited for the ensuing hysteria. Was he watching Lescott as he investigated the scene of the crime? Lescott looked around Hyde Park. Several individuals were paying attention to him, none of them looked out of the ordinary.

  Lescott quickly, but expertly, examined the corpse. He looked for prints, fibres, anything that might constitute evidence or a lead. As expected, he found nothing. Whoever it was had been careful not to give anything away. The fingers had been cauterised to remove the prints; the victim’s teeth had been pulled out. It was the same brand of careful cruelty that had been evident in the Death Car. The victim wore a tailored suit which no Aboriginal could have possibly afforded at the time. The tags were missing, but Lescott could tell the black tweed came from London. Either this recently deceased man, or the killer, was rich beyond the average person’s wildest dreams.