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

by Michael Smith

  Livingstone was doing what he did best, manoeuvring chess pieces around the board. Tying a bow on a mess of his own creation. First, Constable Mulhern. Next, the homeless woman who had screamed blue murder for days. She had insisted, to anyone who would listen, that death lingered in the park in which she lived. Livingstone’s plan for her was to prove her right.

  He drank heavily in the office until nightfall. He was quite overcome by what lay ahead. The feelings he felt are difficult to voice. It would be untrue to state he wasn’t excited. Adrenaline filled his body, every time he ran through his plans in his head. But there was more than a passing hint of dread hanging over him. He wasn’t stupid, he knew there would be no coming from this.

  When the darkness of night had cast out the last light of day, and not a moment after, the Detective Chief Superintendent went to the coat stand in the corner of his office. His body tingled and his mind swarmed as put on his overcoat and pulled his fedora low over his face. He needed stealth that night. The cover of darkness provided a natural advantage, but he would run no risks. This was no public relations stunt. He wanted no one to know what was to occur. He folded a pair of leather gloves inside his coat pocket and wrapped a scarf around his neck. Finally, he reached onto a shelf and pulled a revolver from a locked box.

  Somehow using the lift seemed like a bad idea. It was likely the fact that Warrin, the operator, was still on the clock. Livingstone didn’t want to look a black fella in the eyes with a smile as he went to kill one of the man’s race. Livingstone’s hypocrisy, it seemed, knew certain bounds. So, he took the stairs. A moment that perfectly captured his rapid descent into immorality. Like walking downstairs, it’s always much easier to slide the helter-skelter of impurity than it is to ascend to the purest layers of the moral stratosphere. That invisible force scratches and claws at king and pauper alike, whether they feel it or not. After one small step of your own volition, momentum and gravity will take over and drag you into the depths.

  The walk to Hyde Park was ideal. It gave him a few moments in which he could run through possible scenarios in his head. It didn’t, however, give him long enough to overthink it. Death is much like life. Do it with hesitation and you will fuck it right up. Do it with the courage of your convictions and you might just make it through with a smile on your face.

  Hyde Park was a marvel. It still is. It dates back to before Australia became a country. Neatly manicured lawns, tree lined paths and unrivalled views were common the whole country over. From various points in Hyde Park, though, you could view the remnants of an older time, a time lost to us.

  St James’ Church: a century old place of worship built by the hardened hands of Sydney’s convict past. The Hyde Park Barracks, which in its first life had housed convicts in the employment of the government, then served as an asylum for female immigrants. Sydney Hospital lay to the north, those old buildings and steady hands had been fixing up Australian men and women for two centuries. Then there were the Supreme Court, the Australian Museum, Sydney Grammar, and last but not least the harbour, its Bridge, and the rapidly forming Opera House. It was a place where old and new wealth combined. A wealth that the working man could not comprehend. A wealth that consisted of the riches of an entire nation, and the spoils of colonisation.

  Livingstone did several laps of the park. Lurking in the dark while he assessed any patterns of behaviour that might get in his way. He noticed a couple of policemen walking their beat of the perimeter. But scarcely anything else. Perhaps this would be easier than he could have hoped. He kept his head low and his hat brim dipped as he veered off the path that ran along the edge of the park, and began moving deeper amongst the trees and hedges. He stayed in the shadows. Some police officers you could pay off, others you could scare. But there was always going to be an element who, through a misguided love of the law and a passion for protecting the innocent, would spoil it for everyone.

  Across the possum-littered lawns, he saw the shape of a woman sleeping against the base of a large palm tree. At first, he thought it was some kind of growth protruding from the trunk, but no. It was the woman he had come to fix. She was surrounded by shadows in the centre of the park. It was perfect. As he walked across the moist grass, wind rustled through the palms and the animal life began singing a mournful song of groans and clicks.

  He stood no more than six feet from the snoozing woman and looked around. The lights were bathing small, contained sections of the park in their dim glow, but there were none nearby. He was anonymous. What warmth lay within him was escaping on the cold night air as steam.

  He watched her sleeping there for a moment as he tried to straighten out his thoughts. She would die sleeping soundly. Perhaps dreaming pleasant dreams of a life lived in a comfortable bed in a warm house, a life in which she knew where her next meal would come from. Worse deaths occurred every day. Then why was he crying?

  His hand was resting on the gun in his pocket, it felt cold. He’d never fired a weapon before, but the noise of her snoring brought to his attention the fact that the gun would be loud. It would draw the scrutiny of the patrolling coppers. So, he took his hand off his weapon and pulled his gloves from his pocket. He needed a silent alternative.

  He kneeled down in front of her. He pinched her nose between his thumb and forefinger, and he quickly pushed his palm down over her mouth. There was no escape for that poor woman. She had been caught in a vulnerable moment. Which isn’t so surprising, given her entire life had been a long line of vulnerable moments. She opened her eyes wide as she awoke in fright. She went to scream, but could not muster a sound through the thick leather of his gloves.

  Livingstone had made an unavoidable mistake. He had looked upon her as an unfortunate. Nothing more. Surely, given her low standing, she had no reason to live and no fight left. He didn’t see the efforts she had made to simply stay alive for decades. Her struggles with poverty, hunger and mental health. He didn’t see her resilience in the face of the abuse she was subjected to, everyday living on the street. She was strong. While there was life in her, there would be a will to live.

  They rolled over and onto the ground where she kicked and squirmed. She grabbed and she clawed. He had to stifle a yelp as she gouged the skin from his neck. He beat and he beat, slamming her head into the ground. Even when the physical fight in her had begun to fade, her mental guile took over and she raked at his groin. Their fight lasted only a moment, but her untimely death would haunt him for a lifetime.

  She’d be buried in an unmarked grave. No one would wish her a fond farewell at her funeral, nor celebrate her life at her wake. No one knew her name, nor where she had come from. Her two children, who had been taken in by the authorities some time earlier, would never know what became of their mother. Such impersonal send-offs occurred all too often back then.

  Chapter 60

  Harris knew his cards were marked in Sydney. He needed to get away. Immediately. A knock was coming at his door. If it wasn’t George delivering a bullet, it would be Livingstone delivering a long-term jail sentence. He was without hope and without purpose.

  He took one last walk through those streets, upon the cobbles on which he had wasted a perfectly good life. Rain poured down and washed the grub and the muck from the buildings, down the streets and into the gutters that led, through an extensive sewerage system, out to the sea. But it would take more than a little rain to wash Harris clean. His sins, it seemed, had caught up with him.

  As he passed a Woolloomooloo sly grog shop, he paid a few pennies for a bottle of ‘shine. It had likely been distilled in a bathtub of a nearby terrace house using rotten potatoes and old onions. People think entrepreneurship began in the cocaine-fuelled days of the ‘80s but back then people could turn nothing into something, and take it to market.

  He drank and walked until he drank and stumbled. He walked slowly, as though he was giving the world one last chance to dole out the punishment he had coming. It didn’t. And so, he went looking for it. Drunken men who go l
ooking for a fight are a dangerous breed; they simply want to share their hurt with the world, however they can.

  Harris decided that the best place to share his hurt was in a church. It was the first time he’d stepped foot inside a place of Christian worship since his teens. He staggered through the naves and amongst the pews until he settled on a spot in which to sit. That feeling alone, the cold of the wood on his arse and its hardness on his back, it was so familiar.

  He watched a choir singing by the altar. They were kids: so young and so innocent. Just as he had been all those years ago when his mother and father had taken him to that church in Ancoats. It was then that his life had become unliveable. He became one of the broken many who drift through existence tormented by the damage they cannot shake off. His damage that day, coupled with a belly full of moonshine, manifested as vomit rising from his stomach and flying out of his mouth with force. The sound of it splattering on the marble floor echoed through that lofty room.

  The congregation, which consisted of a few doting parents sitting at the front, turned around in disgust. A priest stormed down the aisle to exorcise that demonic wretch from God’s house. He shouted, he screamed, and he cursed that Harris had degraded consecrated ground.

  The poor old bastard should have consulted his all-seeing, all-knowing Friend before he did that. He could have avoided feeling the full force of Harris’ forehead being driven into the bridge of his nose. Such was the force of the impact, both men went tumbling to the floor. As Harris lay there, dizzied by the blow and the drink, he didn’t care that he’d dished out vengeance to a man who perhaps didn’t deserve it. The priest worked for the church, and the Church had broken him.

  Having picked a stray tooth from his forehead and dusted himself off, Harris wandered back towards Darlinghurst Road. He mustered something of a weak smile when he saw that his car had been parked outside his building. Presumably investigative journalist Thomas Clarke had left it there. The keys were on the front tyre, it could so easily have been stolen, but then it was worth less than a bag of sweets. Its windscreen wiper had been stuffed with notices of parking violation and its windows had been smashed in. Still, that was a happy moment. He loved that sorry excuse for an automobile.

  People poured out of the pubs and clubs having had a skinful and they filled the streets. Harris’ aura of hardness had gone. Where once crowds parted for him like Moses and the Red Sea, people now bumped into him as they passed. They turned and cast curses and threats in his direction but he simply staggered on.

  His former sanctuary, the nastiest bedsit in the most slum-like building in Darlinghurst had been settled by a pair of squatters. Junkies by the looks of it. They were living in squalor. The electricity and running water had been shut off. The flat stank of bodily fluids. These addicts were not like Harris. The functioning heroin addict is generally a myth. Through sheer force of determination, Harris had been an exception to that rule. They were anything but. They weren’t functioning on any level other than to rob, to score, to cook and to fix.

  As he looked upon them in their stupor, Harris didn’t pity them as once he might have. He feared them and what they represented for his future. They didn’t even know he had entered that bedroom-shaped toilet. They’d end up in jail, dead, or both. It was a matter of time. And time makes slaves of us all.

  The flat was bare. Anything of value had been stolen. Markle had left the door open when she’d left. In that part of town, that was asking to be robbed. Everything was gone. Light bulbs, cutlery, taps, all of it was gone; regardless of how little it was worth. The only thing that remained as a reminder of the life he had once wasted there, was a pair of horrid junkies, and a set of notebooks that had been deemed worthless.

  “James Harris, I presume?”

  Harris, suffering the idiocy of inebriation, inspected the addicts. He couldn’t quite work out how they had spoken when they were quite so profoundly unconscious. When a man cleared his throat in the doorway, Harris turned to see a smartly-dressed, well-groomed, handsome young chap. “How can I help you, Detective?”

  “Detective?”

  “Your suit’s cheap, but you wear it well. You’ve polished over the scuff marks on your shoes. You want to look pristine, but unlike the criminal element around here, you don’t have the cash. So, I think you’re an honest cop.”

  “They told me you were clever.” The detective smiled in bemusement. He’d heard of Harris, and what he was looking at didn’t correlate to the stories. “They told me you were not to be fucked with. I don’t see it.”

  “What do you want?”

  “The name’s Reed. I’m a DS with Internal Affairs. I’ve been watching you for some time.”

  “Internal Affairs?” Harris sat down on the floor and lit a cigarette. He was tired and fed up. “You missed the boat. I got kicked off the force months ago.”

  “And ever since, you’ve been treating this town, this country, like your own personal frontier. Robbing, bullying, murdering your way through…”

  “Are you going to arrest me, or are you going to talk me to death?”

  “I’m not here to arrest you. I’m working on something much bigger than you. I’m going to clean up Darlinghurst Road.”

  Harris snorted in derisory laughter, “You and whose army?”

  Reed smiled. “I’m working with the Commonwealth Police under orders from the State Premier.”

  Harris shrugged, unimpressed. “I’ve seen enough Westerns to know, if you suck the poison out of a wound, it might just heal. But sucking the poison out of the snake itself isn’t going to do a whole lot of good for anyone. It’s just going to fill with more poison.”

  “Very poetic. You should think about writing a book.”

  “All the best ones have already been written. Why are you here?”

  “Like I said, Harris. I’ve been watching you. I know what you and DI Lescott have been doing. It seems, in spite of all your worst efforts, you two crazy bastards might actually be two of the better men in this town.”

  “Get the fuck out of here.” Harris made his position clear. It seemed to him, that the moment he’d put his dishonest duty as a criminal to one side, in favour of his more honest instincts, misery and failure had followed him at every step. He’d had enough. “But if you’re serious about cleaning up Darlinghurst Road,” Harris stopped Reed as he was walking out the door. “You need to speak to Fred Lescott.”

  Chapter 61

  Reed felt his introduction to Harris had gone as well as he could have expected. These things were never straight forward. Turning a criminal into a criminal informant was difficult at the best of times. Turning a hardened criminal like Harris into Queen’s Evidence was near impossible.

  But Reed had planted that seed, and he was ready to sit back and watch it grow. He had time, he was playing the long game. Upon leaving the building, he crossed the street and waited in the shadows. He wanted to see how Harris reacted to the conversation. If he’d been hoping the Englishman would clean himself up and take himself straight to Darlinghurst Road, he’d have been disappointed. Harris ran out of the front door with a set of red ledgers under his arm, jumped into his car and drove off.

  Reed heeded Harris’ advice. He went back to Darlinghurst Road, and when he did, he went there with the purpose of speaking to DI Fred Lescott. Reed knew of the former Internal Affairs detective by reputation. When Lescott, as a fierce anti-corruption campaigner, had been the solitary shaft of silver light peeking through the corrupt storm cloud that was NSWPOL, Reed was in uniform.

  Though he had never met the young man with the formerly illustrious career, he’d assumed they were kindred spirits in their simultaneous quests for justice. Perhaps Lescott could provide him some insight.

  Then again, perhaps not. When Reed tracked Lescott down to an empty Burglary department, he was met by a sorry sight. Lescott had been commiserating, and he’d been commiserating hard. The newly promoted DI was inebriated. His desk was buried in ash, cigarette ends,
spilled sambuca, and more than a generous dusting of cocaine. The man himself was drunkenly muttering. To Reed, it looked like he was having a conversation with his wife. From the one side of the nonsense dialogue he could hear, it sounded angry.

  “DI Lescott?”

  “Who’s asking?” Lescott’s head swung up as his concentration snapped away from his maddening discourse and onto the rude intrusion. His crazed eyeballs looked around, but they couldn’t seem to find Reed.

  “Detective Sergeant Reed, Internal Affairs.”

  Lescott looked up at the intruder wearily, he looked at him the way he had looked at James Harris when they had met all those months ago. “If you’ve come to finish it. Just finish it.”

  Reed remained silent while he tried to work out what the sorry excuse for a man was saying.

  “No?” Lescott dipped his head to the desk and mistakenly snorted a mound of cigarette ash. “Then get the fuck out of here, cunt.”

  Part Three.

  Divided in Life. Unified in Murder.

  Chapter 62

  When, in February of 1964, Harris had told Lescott he didn’t believe in the concept of pets, Lescott laughed. Harris felt humankind’s reasons for owning pets had perverted over time. He reasoned that once, before the Industrial Revolution and the population boom, pets made sense. They hunted and helped with tasks on farms. They provided comfort for those people living in the sticks without so much as a postman’s fleeting visit for company. He said that now, humans kept animals for their amusement and that, to him, it seemed weak, needy and indulgent. Lescott had vocally disagreed. Until, that is, Lescott became DCS Alan Livingstone’s pet.