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

by Michael Smith

  “Jennings, sir.”

  “Private Jennings. I’m not going to try to lie to you. We don’t have clearance. I don’t really want to show you my ID. We’re detectives with New South Wales Police. Against the wishes of our superiors, we’re on our way up to Alice Springs to investigate a spate of murders. Something of a fact-finding mission, if you will. We just want to come in to refuel and get something to eat. We’ll be gone before you know it.”

  The guard looked around. No one was watching. “You could be Japanese spies for all I know.”

  “Quite an imagination you’ve got there,” Harris laughed. The man didn’t laugh back. “Do I fucking look Japanese?”

  “If you’re police, you’ve got warrant cards?”

  Lescott passed Harris his warrant card, who in turn passed it to the soldier with a couple of notes on top of it. He wasn’t about to hand over his own expired warrant card for fear he wouldn’t get it back. The guard looked at Lescott’s warrant card, then the bribe. He spent more time looking at the bribe, then placed the notes in his breast pocket. “And your warrant card?”

  “I think you just placed it in your pocket.” Harris smiled awkwardly.

  The guard nodded. He was catching on. Letting a couple of policemen into the base to refuel and get a feed could be overlooked. The money he had been handed, however, could not be. He had a young family at home. “Ok, if I let you in, I need you driving back out through this gate in forty-five minutes before the shift change.”

  “That seems reasonable enough, Private Jennings,” Harris said.

  Lescott breathed a sigh of relief. He breathed it too soon.

  Before Harris could turn the key in the ignition, the guard spoke again, “I just need to check the car first.”

  Lescott’s heart dropped six inches inside his ribcage. He placed his face in his hands. Harris had played with fire and they were about to be burnt. “We need to turn around.”

  Whether Harris had forgotten the body of the dead rapist in the boot of the car is uncertain. He was unnervingly nonchalant about the entire thing. “I’ll handle this.” Harris said as he lit a cigarette and grabbed a sleeve of Luckies from the back seat of the car. Then he did the unthinkable and stepped outside.

  The guard had left his booth. “What’s in the car?”

  Harris looked inside before answering. “A drunk but very talented Missing Persons detective stewing in two days’ worth of cigarette smoke and farts.”

  The guard got on his hands and knees to inspect the underside of the car; he poked around with a mirror on a stick to determine whether anything had been tucked under the rim of the body. “Anything beneath the car?”

  “Red dirt and polluted air,” Harris answered plainly.

  The guard made his way around to the boot of the car. “Can you open the boot for me?”

  “I’d really rather not.” Harris’ no-frills approach to the conversation kept catching the young private off guard. He was surprised further when Harris handed him a sleeve of cigarettes. It was half-smoked, but still. It was better than nothing.

  “Listen… Shy of a bomb or automatic weapons… Whatever is in your boot won’t be a concern to me.” The guard spoke with absolute certainty, he would not budge. “But I can’t let you in without checking first.”

  Harris sucked air in through his teeth.

  “What have you got in the boot, sir?”

  Ok, Harris thought. He asked for it. “Dead rapist.” His face was void of expression as he opened the boot.

  The guard couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “What?” he asked, in shock, then nervously chuckled. Harris didn’t. The young guard looked down and sure enough, crammed into the boot was the dead body wrapped in an expensive Persian rug.

  Harris placed a large hand on the man’s shoulder. “How he died is unimportant. Safe to say, he got what he deserved.” Harris took a cigarette out the packet in his breast pocket and placed it in Private Jennings’ open mouth and lit it.

  The guard found himself caught in two minds. Something in him, call it his better judgement, told him he ought to shoot the Englishman on the spot. But he had taken the man’s money, and rapists are hard to sympathise with. “It’s a nice rug.”

  “I bet it would look great in your front room,” Harris responded.

  “If I went home with a rug like that, my wife would be very, very happy.” Jennings scratched his jaw and looked around.

  “I reckon, with a bit of a scrub, most of the blood would come right out. It’s mainly on the underside anyway.”

  “You can barely see it.” The man nodded at Harris.

  “Good lad.”

  As the two men behind the car were striking an accord of sorts, Lescott sucked on a bottle of warm beer. He needed it. Harris was going to be the end of him. He was sure of it. He fought the strong urge to angle the rear-view mirror so he could watch them struggling to remove the body from the rug without removing it from the boot. It was no easy task. Lescott just kept looking straight ahead, straight into the military base beyond the barrier. He’d be ok if he just ignored it. He was sure he could simply block the entire farce from his mind. He was wrong. He let out a sudden and involuntary groan when he noticed a group of soldiers marching. The direction they were marching in, it would lead them straight past the front of the car. They would be no more than twenty feet away, with nothing but a flimsy barrier between them. If they came over to inspect what was going on, or even to help the struggling pair behind the car, it was likely Harris, Lescott and young Private Jennings would do twenty years in jail. That’s if they avoided a gunfight they would lose. Lescott began sweating.

  Each uniformed step taken by that well-trained, thirty-headed killing machine rattled Lescott. As they passed, several members of the troop cocked their heads to one side and looked over. Lescott smoked his cigarette furiously. He gave them something of a hurried and undignified salute only to strike himself in the eye halfway through the motion. He tried to hide the nervous movement by continuing up and sweeping his hair back. But he looked no less ridiculous. He thought he was going to throw up. They were saved by the army’s incredible training and discipline. A sergeant at the back of the unit noticed several heads not conforming to the uniformity of the group. He barked a savage reprimand at the curious soldiers and once more they were all looking straight ahead.

  Harris got back into the car as Jennings dragged the Persian piece of art into the sentry box, where it would remain until his shift ended. As the barrier went up, Harris and the Private nodded at each other in silent understanding. That could have ended in a sticky situation for both men. As it turned out, they both came out of it a little better off.

  “What the fuck was that?” Lescott seethed

  “My old man used to say ‘honesty is the best policy’.” Harris shrugged

  Lescott scoffed in disbelief. “Funny that. My old man used to say, ‘whatever you do, don’t get caught with a dead body in your car boot.’”

  Given it was a military base, there wasn’t what you or I would call a petrol station. There was a set of bowsers in the middle of a courtyard, but nowhere to pay. Once Harris realised the fuel was free to anyone inside the base, he filled the car until it was damn near overflowing.

  They’d expected to find some manner of bakery or pub in which they could eat. Again, this just wasn’t the case. They happened upon the officer’s mess and though it had been closed in preparation for the evening meal later on, Harris convinced a cook to rustle up a couple of sandwiches. The cook looked them up and down knowing full well they weren’t military, but they were making the place look messy. He deemed it entirely necessary to get rid of them. She gave them a pair of black coffees that came out piping hot and bitter to the taste. It was life affirming manna.

  They took their hastily thrown-together sandwiches and sat against the wall on the pavement outside the mess. It was an impossibly warm, dry day in the desert, but the veranda provided them a shady kind of refuge. They too
k off their shoes and rolled up their sleeves in the hope that it might cool them down a degree or two. They were without doubt the least respectable and most poorly presented pair in that square mile or two.

  What they felt in that moment, as they tasted the desert sand that blew on the soft breeze, was something of an absence of feeling. It was like they forgot themselves. They were just two men, sipping coffee and enjoying the shade. For Harris, gone were all thoughts of the war, heroin, Elsa Markle, and Ronnie Price.

  Lescott too. For a brief part of that one day in 1964, he forgot his ruined career, his missing family, his broken relationship with his father, his dependence on alcohol and other substances and the chronic pain in his knee.

  The pair even forgot about the dead body in the car.

  The cook might not have looked like much but by Christ she made a mean bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. The white bread bun was soft and floury on the outside but chewy and sweet as they reached its doughy middle. It had been generously smeared in salty butter that melted in the heat and dripped down their hands. The bacon was still hot as it had been freshly fried to order; it was crispy, savoury and meaty. The lettuce was crunchy and refreshing. The plump, ripe cherry tomatoes burst as they bit into their mouth-watering meal. You know their lunch was good because they didn’t say a word until there was nought left but crumbs.

  “I’ve read about this place.” It was Lescott who broke the silence.

  Harris grumbled in response. He’d had his fill of military facilities. He’d come to hate them.

  “You lot set up here just after the war.”

  “My lot?”

  “You know, that rare breed of crumpet-eating, tea-swilling Queen lovers.”

  “Not my lot. My lot were down the mines and in the shipyards. They weren’t here.” Harris protested, and he had a good right to do so. His family had never been looked after by the Crown or the country’s government.

  “Anyway, it’s a testing site that stretches all the way up to the west coast; two and a half thousand kilometres of country to test the latest advances in warfare technology. Black Knights they called them. I think.”

  “Men are always imagining new and improved ways of killing each other.” Harris despaired quietly.

  “It’s a bloody tragedy. The land was given to displaced Aboriginals in perpetuity. Mainly because it was fucking useless. We couldn’t farm on it; we couldn’t build on it. Why not send all the black fellas up there once we’d taken all the rich useful land around the coast? Then of course we find a use for it. And it’s ours again. I doubt they had much say in the matter. Now we’re battering the land with missiles and God knows what else.”

  “You can only hope they evacuated the land first.” Harris suggested.

  “Big area to try and clear out. They built shelters and bunkers for the few white landowners out here, extended the telephone lines so they could notify them of impending strikes. But the real locals out here don’t exactly have access to telephones, or the postal system.”

  Harris shook his head. To him, it was just another reason to dislike and distrust the human race. “Someone needs to put a punctuation mark at the end of the sentence this country has been writing ever since 1788. Even then it might be too late. The world keeps moving forward for better, for worse. I don’t think there’s much arguing that the 20th century was a bad one for mankind. I dread to think what the 21st will look like.”

  This time, Lescott took the wheel. In his experience, the devil found work for his idle mind. As they’d driven over the past couple of days, he had seen familiar faces in foreign places on the roadside. It was his turn for distraction. Unfortunately, that tipped Harris over the edge. Instead of lighting a cigarette every fifteen minutes, he was now chain-smoking. As one Lucky Strike became spent, he lit the next one off its glowing stub.

  Lescott suggested that Harris ought to try and get some sleep in the back seat but the Englishman declined. He said he’d sleep after they’d disposed of the body somewhere outside Coober Pedy. Harris looked exhausted. He was displaying all the traits of nervous energy. He drank three coffees in Woomera, one after the other. He was now shaky and increasingly agitated. He needed to sleep but he simply wouldn’t without a fix.

  “Listen. You don’t look good,” Lescott said. “If you need to… Rest on the backseat for a while. I get it.”

  “After we get rid of him.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Here? The ground looks dry and hard. Probably about three hours if we dig in shifts.” Harris pulled out a map book and began to inspect it. “If we pull off in maybe a couple of miles and head north east towards Lake Eyre or a smaller body of water on the way. We find moist, soft ground, we can dig a hole deep enough in an hour. We’ll get to Alice just after midnight.” Harris noticed that Lescott looked impressed by Harris’ handle on the job at hand, “Doesn’t take much to be good at what I do, just a willingness to do what turns others’ stomachs.”

  They did the seemingly impossible and managed to take the wrong turn on what was essentially a straight road. When they should have been seeing signs for Coober Pedy, they saw only nature. As they drove through the vastness of the Lake Eyre Basin, the ground became more fertile. There was more life here than they had seen for many miles on the road. Plants, trees, shrubs, a heap of kangaroos, wallabies and the odd lizard. Tellingly, there were birds flying overhead and roosting in the trees. They were near water.

  “You know, they have doctors now who talk people through their trauma. Didn’t work for me, but it could for you,” Lescott blurted out to cut through the silence. He was trying to be helpful, but it wasn’t a welcome topic.

  “I spoke to headshrinkers on a couple of occasions in the 40’s and then again in the 50’s.” Harris looked over in an attempt to deter the line of questioning. “One of the first things those overqualified quacks said to me, on both occasions, was that the war didn’t need to be the end for me. That I could get past it.”

  Lescott looked around as if to suggest they were surrounded by desert. All they had was space and time to talk through the contents of their unhappy heads. “What’s the problem with that?”

  “I don’t want to get past it. What kind of human being allows themselves to live a happy life amongst other humans when they’re acutely aware of the depths we can sink to? Bad people. Ignorant people.”

  Lescott went to speak but he stopped himself.

  Harris could feel the unasked question hanging in the air between them. “You want to know about my war? About the things I saw? The day I turned eighteen, I signed up. I wasn’t looking for glory. I didn’t sign up to best a vile enemy. I just needed to get away from where I was. I remember rattling around in the back of a troop carrier in the desert as heavy artillery landed all around us. I remember the smell of shit and piss as lads soiled themselves. I was just numb. I jumped off the back of the carrier and I saw about six seconds of action at El Alamein. The desert swallowed me whole. The sand my feet sank into was covered in blood. The heat was paralysing. That six seconds lasted an eternity. When I collapsed, I thought fear had sucked the wind out of me. Turns out I was hit by mortar shrapnel.”

  “How bad?” Lescott asked. Harris patted the left side of his ribcage.

  “Worse pain than I’d ever experienced before, but I was a lot better off than many others that day. Punctured lung, broken ribs, internal bleeding, and a severe myocardial contusion… A bruise to the heart. The shard that hit me was about the size of a playing card. The doctors said that’s what saved my life. It got stuck on my ribcage. If it had been a little smaller it would have squeezed through my ribs and cut me in half. They guessed it might have gone through another lad before it got to me. I didn’t see much of El Alamein, what I did see, I saw from the field hospital.”

  “You played your part, though… In the battle that began the end of the war.”

  “The end of the beginning…” Harris corrected Lescott. “I didn’t play much of
a part.”

  “Well… Who’s to fucking say…? Imagine if you hadn’t been standing in that exact spot when that shrapnel hit you. If it hadn’t hit you, it might have hit someone else… Someone important. Monty could have been standing behind you for all you know.” Harris laughed, no one had ever managed to put a positive spin on that incident in the past twenty-two years.

  “What about Belsen?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Belsen.”

  Salt. Bringer of taste, killer of slugs, tossed over the shoulder to ward off evil spirits, and strangely enough, it was the currency upon which one of the greatest empires known to man had been built. A lesser known fact about salt: it is the painter of several of nature’s most beautiful landscapes. Lake Eyre being one of them.

  When the lake is at its fullest, it’s a vast body of salt water surrounded by a sea of desert emptiness meeting the horizon in a perfectly straight line. In itself that’s quite a sight. But after a long hot summer has evaporated the pooled water and left it as a hypersaline brine, that’s when the magic happens. That environment is perfect for several kinds of bacteria and algae which, for some reason beyond my comprehension, spend their days secreting a red substance. The red of the secretion mixes with the white of the dissolved salt. The lake becomes a vivid shade of pink.

  Australia and specifically its central deserts are without a shadow of a doubt among of the most heartbreakingly beautiful places on this planet of ours. Rivalled only maybe by the picturesque fjords of Norway and the barren fells of Northern England. I won’t mention the Blue Mountains, not just yet.

  Should you die having never seen Australia’s great pink lakes in the midst of its vast red deserts, then yours was a wasted life. If ever you find yourself there, you will be confronted by your insignificance. Truly the most freeing feeling of all. On those infinite flats, under that towering sky, nothing will matter other than the unrivalled beauty of the moment.

  Just don’t displace too much earth beneath your feet, it’s a fragile environment and you might unearth the remains of poor old Walter McCoppin, the man who simply could not keep his dick in his trousers. There’s nothing like the smell of ancient putrefaction to ruin a perfectly good view.