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

by Michael Smith

  In their travels, they found a place the locals called Malubimba. A place rich in coal deposits. So, they did what all good colonisers do. They kicked the locals off the land they had lived on for thousands of years. The Awabakal and Worimi peoples were replaced by rapists and murderers. Their sacred sites were replaced by mineshafts and latrines for workers. Their care and custodianship of the land was replaced by its destruction and upheaval. A sad story, made sadder by the fact the lion’s share of the profits from the mines went back to the motherland, or down the coast to Sydney.

  The Rochester Hotel had been built towards the back end of the 19th century and it had barely been touched since. It was in dire need of refurbishment. Back then, pubs weren’t the luxurious places that they are now. The furniture was without upholstery, the barmaids without teeth, the beer without flavour, and the drunkards who frequented those places were, more often than not, without scruples.

  When Charlie and Lescott walked in, they found the place empty save for a shifty-looking fellow pouring a beer behind the bar. He had a strange manner, he jumped when the door swung open and they walked in. There was something about him that reminded Lescott of a frightened squirrel, worried about losing its acorn.

  “G’day fellas,” the man spoke, judging from his accent, he wasn’t the barely conscious barman they were looking for. “I’d offer you a drink. But I don’t work here. It’s kind of an honour system.”

  “We’re looking for an English bloke who works the bar. Loves big words and pretentious ideas. Might go by the name James Harris,” Lescott said.

  The man shook his head, he hadn’t heard the name. “Barman’s over there.” The man pointed towards the back corner of the pub. “He’s English alright, but I know him as John Hemmingway.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Lescott exclaimed as he turned to see a man sitting in the corner. The end of 1964 through the beginning of 1965 had been unkind to Harris. If indeed it was Harris he was looking at. Lescott could scarcely believe it.

  The man was tall with long limbs, but unlike Harris as Lescott remembered him, he was scrawny and in need of a good meal. He looked quite weak. The greasy hair on his head was long, coming down to his shoulders, the fringe partially covering his face. Which was just as well, because the man’s face was grey, and he was clearly suffering a horrible skin condition which was leaving him peeling all over. Bits of dry loose skin had fallen and got stuck in a beard which looked to be at least seven or eight inches long. This couldn’t be Harris, could it?

  “Harris?” Charlie asked, “Is that you?”

  The man’s head, which had been slumped limply on his own chest, lifted slightly. What Lescott saw made his jaw drop. And suddenly, the sinister contents of the envelope in his jacket pocket began to weigh him down. They had come searching for Harris under the impression that perhaps he had been delivered an eyeball of his own. Instead, they found him sporting an eye patch. “I’m going to throw up.”

  “I knew you’d come.” Harris wheezed through a weak breath before losing consciousness completely.

  Charlie reached down and grabbed a long thin wooden pipe from the floor. He gave it a quick cautious sniff. “Opium.”

  When Harris came to, hours later, he looked up at Charlie and Lescott and let out a heavy sigh. “I knew you’d come. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Lescott, sitting across the table, placed the envelope down in front of Harris and bit his lip in trepidation. He didn’t know quite what to say. It’s quite hard to describe how it feels to hand a man what you believe is his own eyeball, it’s beyond unsettling.

  Harris laughed quietly, “You think that’s mine? It’s not.” Moving his hair out of his face and taking his eyepatch off, he revealed a scar that ran from just above his brow down to his cheekbone. To Lescott’s relief, his eyeball was still in its socket. But unfortunately for Harris, it was quite dead. It had taken on a greyish milky colouring.

  “I thought I’d had a bad year,” Lescott grimaced.

  “I haven’t had a bad year. I’ve barely had a year. I’ve had a haze. You look at me with pity. You shouldn’t. I’ve always been like this, only now the outside has come to match the inside.”

  “This is what drugs do to a man?” Charlie asked.

  Again, Harris laughed a soft, tired laugh, “This is what life does to a man. Not this.” Harris gestured to his scar and dead eye. “That was something different.”

  “Yeah?”

  Harris sighed once more. “It was a couple of months ago. I think. I don’t really know what month it is now to tell you the truth.” Harris placed the eyepatch back on his face, much to the relief of Charlie and Lescott, and he grabbed a cigarette as he tried silently to recall the event. “I don’t remember if it was day or night. I remember thinking it was day, but that the sunlight was black. Which was strange. But… Heroin.” He shrugged, acknowledging the oddity. “A guy came into the bar. I don’t remember his face, but I remember the shadow he cast on the wall, not how it looked, but how it moved. He didn’t walk. He pranced. It was like Faust on the stage. Or at the ballet maybe.” Again, he shrugged, he was pretty far gone, but not so far gone that he couldn’t hear how strange his own words were. “He danced his way behind the bar. I remember light from somewhere flashed on a blade. I remember words.” Harris once more went silent as he thought to himself, he was trying to figure out what was memory and what was dream. “Then I woke up.”

  “The words?” Lescott pulled the note from the envelope, “Were they ‘Why have you eyes, if not to see?’”

  Harris withdrew as he went deep into his memory, his face gave little away while he contemplated the question, “I think so. It sounds familiar.”

  “Guys…” Charlie was looking down at the grim souvenir, rolling it around his fingers. “I don’t think this is the message…”

  “What are you talking about?” Lescott furrowed his brow.

  “Has anyone…” Charlie picked at the eyeball with his fingernails, “Have either of youse two got a knife?”

  “Charlie, I don’t carry a knife around with me. I’m not Davy Crocket…” Lescott turned to Harris to share a secret smile over Charlie’s naivety, but when he did, he saw Harris pull a switchblade from his pocket.

  “I started carrying it recently… You know. In case he came back. I really can’t afford to lose another eye. I’m down to spare parts here,” Harris spoke bluntly as he handed the blade over.

  Charlie cut into the eye, but it was tough from whatever it was that had been pumped into it. He had to carve at it.

  Lescott looked at Harris, “You better hope a public health inspector doesn’t turn up.”

  “Bruzzas… I think this is the message.” When the men turned back to Charlie, he was holding a tiny piece of paper.

  “What does it say?” Harris asked.

  Lescott, meaning to save Charlie from the embarrassment he clearly felt earlier on in the day, held his hand out to take the note. “Front says ‘158 Vere Street’. Back says… ‘So close, yet so far.’”

  “158 Vere Street.” Lescott knew the address. He couldn’t remember where from. But he knew he’d been to the address, the mention of it brought a disgusting odour into his nostrils and a funky taste to his mouth. How strange memory is.

  Harris had no such trouble. He’d been quite sober the day he and Lescott visited the house at 158 Vere Street. “It’s Redfern. Enzo Rosetti lives at that address. We tried to question him last year. We got little from him. What we did get was nonsense.”

  Lescott stood. “Redfern it is.”

  Charlie quickly got to his feet as well.

  Harris didn’t. “Good luck with that, lads. I hope it works out for you.” The pair looked at Harris in surprise, he looked anywhere but straight back at them. “I can’t go back there. Besides, I’m done playing detective. I was never any good at it. I bring nothing to the table.”

  “You once told me that someone needs to ‘put a punctuation mark at the end of the sentence this co
untry has been writing ever since 1788.’ That’s us. We need to do that.”

  “Freddy…” Harris smiled. “Where are Charlotte and Emma standing right now?”

  Lescott paused. He considered lying. Perhaps something in his behaviour had given him away.

  “Are they, by any chance, sitting at the table next to us? Because you keep looking in that direction and I can’t see anything but empty space. You’re not up to this. Maybe you were a year ago, maybe not. But you’re not now.”

  Lescott hung his head shamefully. Harris hadn’t meant to upset him, but harsh words were required to bring everyone back to the reality facing them.

  “We need to stop him,” Charlie jumped in passionately.

  “And how do you do that, Charlie? Given this guy seems to have an entire country aiding him.” Harris didn’t wait for a response. “You kill him. That’s the only way he loses. What do you two know about killing?”

  “I think the question is, what do you know about killing, James?”

  “What?”

  “That’s precisely what you bring to the table…” Lescott smiled, Harris had talked until he’d dug himself into a hole so deep he couldn’t argue his way out of it.

  Harris knew it too. “He’s telling us to come to him. It’s on his terms. He’s laying a trap. If we do this, we’re taking our chances jumping into it. We could end up dead. Or worse… We could end up part of his collection.”

  “What are you doing with your life that makes it so worth clinging on to?” Charlie asked. “I’m only asking you what I asked myself just five seconds ago. I don’t have an answer yet.”

  “I don’t fear dying. I’ve smiled in death’s face every day since 1942. Sometimes I think it might make a nice change from all this. But I don’t want to die for nothing. And I certainly don’t want to become a specimen in some madman’s sideshow.” Harris began chewing at the cuticles on his thumb as he shook his head. It was a bad idea. But neither Lescott nor Charlie was going to argue with that. “Redfern then. Are we all going to fit in the car?”

  “It’s a five-seater.” Lescott didn’t fully understand the question, given there were three of them at the table.

  “Good. There’s a seat for everyone then.” It was somewhat reassuring for Lescott to see some of Harris’ dark wit remained. Perhaps there was a shadow of the former man left behind. A shadow, Lescott reasoned, might be enough.

  The journey back to Sydney was anything but an uncomfortable couple of hours. Charlie felt a little funny sitting in the back seat after Harris’ dark joke. Whenever he noticed Lescott glancing in the rear-view mirror, he would shift closer towards the car door as if worried that he hadn’t left enough space for the girls. Of course, he knew they weren’t there but he didn’t know Lescott knew that. It was a strange sight.

  Harris, in the front, kept shifting uncomfortably. He would often itch at his wrists compulsively. He complained it was too hot. Then it was too cold. He needed fresh air. The wind coming through the open window was making it impossible to smoke his cigarettes. He was difficult to be around. When he reached into the footwell and pulled out his opium pipe, Lescott almost just let him smoke it for some peace and quiet.

  And for Lescott, it was the smell that bothered him. He didn’t know who the culprit was, the heroin addict or the Aboriginal lad who had lived most of his life without running water, but someone needed a shower.

  Perhaps conversation would distract him. “What happened to the whole, ‘no heroin until the sun goes down’ thing?”

  “This isn’t heroin. It’s opium. Very different. This is the drug of Dickens. Of the romantics during their jaunts to the lakes. This is the drug of Thomas De Quincey.”

  “It’s really not that different.” Lescott wasn’t having it.

  “Well, either way. That rule’s great, but it’s never enforceable for very long. My addiction goes in cycles. Sometimes I get clean for a while, other times it feels like I’m using but I’m under control, and then there’s now. This is pretty much rock bottom. If you hung me out to dry for a couple of days without access, I’d probably end up in a public toilet doing… Well let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “What does it feel like?” Charlie asked. He’d come across plenty who’d used heavy drugs, but he’d never quite understood the appeal. The times in between using seemed far too painful to make the effort of it all worth it.

  Harris cleared his throat as he considered the question and how to answer, “It’s like being wrapped in the smoothest silk and the softest cotton. It warms your body from the neck down, but it cools your head. All of the weight you carry around, all of the worry and the stress just drifts off and you just fucking float, man.”

  Harris spoke with affection in his voice. It was perverse. Lescott, who had never heard Harris speak so positively about anything, shot him a scolding glance.

  Harris straightened his face. “But you know. It’s got its downside too. I haven’t had an erection in fucking months.”

  Nothing in their investigation had ever been straight forward. Nothing had ever seemed to go to plan. That’s why they were unsurprised to find 158 Vere Street had been levelled along with much of the street around it. What lay there, where Enzo Rosetti once lived, was a construction site, closed off to the world behind ply board fencing that bore logos for The Beaumont Institute and McCaskill Construction.

  Charlie got out of the car and approached a builder on his smoke break, Lescott watched with a smile. Some people just have an innate ability to get people chatting, and Charlie was most definitely one of them. In another life, he’d have made an excellent police detective, but the world wasn’t quite ready for that.

  “This eye and the address… Is that him claiming responsibility for Rosetti’s disappearance?” Harris asked.

  “That’s certainly what it looks like. I called Child Protective Services before we came to get you. The child’s still in a group home, she’s safe and sound. No one has seen or heard from Enzo Rosetti since she was taken in.”

  Charlie walked back and jumped back into the car, “The houses were condemned and then demolished about six months ago. The land was sold to the Beaumont Institute under the agreement they would open a home for the blind.”

  “A home for the blind?” Lescott asked in disbelief. “Why have you eyes, if not to see?”

  “That’s got to be the strangest coincidence in the history of fucking coincidences.” Harris remarked. “Is it just me or is this Beaumont Institute everywhere?”

  “Livingstone’s in bed with them. He introduced me to someone with that name, Richard I think.”

  “The gold guy?” Harris asked.

  “Iron,” Lescott sniffed. “But when you’ve got the money he’s got, I think you’re into a bit of everything.

  “He’s the guy who approached Mowan about my people going up to Newcastle Waters.

  Lescott was troubled. He didn’t believe in coincidences. Harris was right, but it seemed he didn’t even realise the weight of his words. The Beaumont Institute was in the desert, displacing the Indigenous. It was in the city, moving civilisation forwards. It funded the police who turned a blind eye to crime, hospitals that lost bodies, and schools that brushed over a continent’s history.

  An idea was forming somewhere in the depths of Lescot’s mind. He wasn’t yet ready to verbalise what, without sufficient evidence, felt like a giant leap. But a feeling was growing. He couldn’t shake it. The Beaumont Institute was everywhere.

  “What now?” Charlie asked.

  “St Vincent’s Hospital.” Lescott turned the key in the ignition, “We’re going to do what we should have done last year. We’re going to take Enzo Rosetti’s claims seriously. We’re going to speak to someone about what happened to his wife. Then…” He paused as he silently formed a plan, “Then we’re going to break into Missing Persons and steal the Rosetti case file.”

  “Break into Missing Persons?” Harris had missed a lot in his absence. “Don’t yo
u work there?”

  “I’m in Burglary now.”

  Harris cringed, even he knew that Burglary was a road to nowhere, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Chapter 65

  It was nightfall by the time they reached the hospital. The respectability of the institution that treated much of Sydney’s population had disappeared with the fading of light. Schedule patients with regular illnesses had gone home. Now the place was filled with emergency cases, overdosing addicts, police escorting criminals injured during a brutal arrest, and battered women getting their noses reset while their abusive partners drank in the carpark. It was hellish.

  As they walked towards the entrance of the Accident and Emergency department, past a group of vagrants, they flicked their cigarettes aside.

  “Let me do the talking.” Lescott was careful to look at both men as he spoke, but his words were for Harris, “You have a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way.”

  The Triage Nurse raised her eyebrows when the three men walked in side by side. The hospital was used to seeing all sorts after dark, but she’d never seen such a motley crew of misfits.

  “We’re looking for Margaret West,” Lescott spoke with a smile.

  The nurse looked at the trio like they were insane. “You’ve walked off the street, into A&E, and you want to speak to the hospital’s Chief Executive?”

  “Correct.” Lescott’s smile faded.

  “What world do you live in?”

  Lescott pulled out his badge. “A world in which police brutality is all too common.”

  So much for Harris rubbing people up the wrong way.

  The woman regretted her sardonic tone, she was coming to the end of an exhausting double shift. She’d made a mistake. “She isn’t here. She’s in the administrative building.”

  The Administrative building’s reception was vacant, no doubt the building was a strictly nine-to-five type of affair. “No one’s here. We’ll come back tomorrow.” Lescott went to leave the way they came, Charlie followed.