Harris did not. He walked straight behind the desk and began rummaging around until he found a phone and the directory of the hospital’s employees. “Did you say her name was Margaret West?”
“No one’s here. Let’s go. Before someone sees us.” Lescott gestured for Harris to hurry.
“Don’t be so easily discouraged. It’s unbecoming.” Harris ran his eyes across the directory. “Eighth floor. Let’s go have a look.”
The corridor was pitch black. The hospital’s team of administrators, accountants, and middle managers had gone home as the clock hit five. But someone hadn’t left. A dim glow meekly trickled from within an office at the far end of the passage, where it fought a losing battle with the dark of the night.
Sure enough, it was Margaret West’s office. She was buried up to her neck in paperwork, there would be no home-cooked meal nor early night in bed with a cup of cocoa for this woman. She was the hospital’s beating heart. Not the doctors. Not the nurses. Certainly not the anonymous army of orderlies. It was Margaret West who kept the lights on, the doors open, and the drugs flowing.
Before they walked in, Lescott took one last look at his accomplices, “All of this happened a long time ago. It’s all too easy for those involved to just say they don’t remember anything. We need to finesse this, she’s a professional woman, we need to treat her as such. With respect.” The one-eyed crime figure and the dishevelled native looked back at him blankly. “Don’t say anything, just stand there and look… Scary.”
“Can I help you gentlemen?” West’s voice made its way into the corridor before they crossed the threshold. She was alert. She gave off an air that said little went on in her hospital without her knowledge. Given the three individuals now darkening her doorway, and their motives, she would come to regret it.
“You’re working late, Mrs West,” Lescott remarked as he sat across from her.
“It’s Miss West.” The woman, apparently a feminist, looked up from her paperwork and clocked the men, sensing immediately that something was off. “Someone needs to. The frailty of the human condition stops for no shift change.” She was a respectable woman, likely nearing retirement age. Her hair was cut short, not out of some shallow aesthetic goal but because it was low maintenance. Her navy suit was immaculately pressed, but her sleeves were slightly rolled up. She was a picture of industry. “How can I help you gentlemen? Are you lost?”
“No,” Harris growled a guttural growl which shook the room.
Lescott did his best to mask the wince at his friend and colleague’s lack of tact, “I’m DI Fred Lescott, with New South Wales Police.”
“You don’t look like a police detective,” She observed as she looked across her desk, “You’re all sweaty and your suit’s dirty.”
“It’s been a hard… life.”
“And your friends. They’re certainly not police detectives,” West looked at Harris and Charlie nervously. Her eyes darted to her phone. No doubt she was considering whether she could call security before these ruffians descended upon her.
“This is… Jim Hemmingway.”
“John,” Harris corrected.
“John Hemmingway and Charlie…”
“Tiddalik,” Charlie jumped in. Lescott shot him a questioning glance, Charlie simply shrugged. It was a mean epithet given to him by bigots, but it was better than the name given to him in the institution he’d grown up in.
“These men are private investigators. They’re helping me look into a series of crimes including but not limited to murder, and potentially grave robbing… of sorts.”
“That’s interesting.” West peered at Lescott suspiciously, she wasn’t sure he wasn’t entirely full of shit. “Because from the way you don’t know their names, it makes it seem like you hardly know each other at all.”
“That’s neither here nor there.” Lescott was beginning to feel embarrassed. He’d been drinking. He’d taken an assortment of pills. He wasn’t at his best. “We’ve come for a very informal chat regarding Carla Rosetti. Her husband claims her body was snatched from out of your morgue following her death. When he reported it to the police, their investigation led to the conclusion it had been a clerical error. That she was cremated in the place of someone else.”
As Lescott made his intentions clear, West’s body language changed. Her confidence escaped her. The blood from her face drained and left it an ashen shade of pale. Most tellingly of all, she picked up the telephone and began to dial quickly.
Lescott was bemused by this sudden development, “What are you doing?”
“I’m calling the hospital’s legal aide,” West fumbled with the dial. “If we’re going to have this conversation, we’re going to have it in the presence of a lawyer.”
“Put the fucking phone down,” Harris growled.
“I won’t be intimidated into forgoing my rights.”
Charlie looked down and noticed the cord of the phone hanging off the desk, onto the floor, and over to where it ran along the wall. While Harris and West remained in a standoff, Charlie followed the lead to a socket and ripped it out. The dial tone of the phone faded. They were alone. Given the time of day, they would remain undisturbed through the duration of the conversation. West knew this. She was paralysed with fear.
“We just want to have a conversation.” Lescott threw the nervous administrator his cigarettes having lit one of his own. “Nothing more sinister than that.”
After they had poured West a large gin and allowed her nervously to suck on a cigarette for a moment, West was feeling much more like herself. “First off, I moved to Sydney in ‘62 from Canberra. That’s when I started this job. Anything I tell you regarding the events of 1961, I myself have been told after the fact.”
West was shrewd; her disclaimer and her desperate attempt to contact her lawyer were constructed with the sole purpose of protecting herself and the organisation she worked for. But they did something altogether different. They told the men they had struck pay dirt.
“We just want the truth,” Lescott calmly soothed the poor woman’s nerves. She kept casting uncomfortable glances in the direction of Harris and Charlie, both smoking furiously at the back of the room. He ignored it.
“Carla Rosetti, I am told, was a nurse in the children’s ward. Her husband Enzo, was a floating orderly. She was very well thought of, he was known to be erratic and unreliable, but a good man all the same. He had problems with alcohol and gambling. He was battling the demons of a difficult childhood in which he’d been displaced from his home and brought up in an institution and then a foster home.
“A child was brought in suffering from a respiratory condition believed to be asthma. Carla was a member of the team that treated the child. Unfortunately, the girl had been misdiagnosed. She had tuberculosis.”
Lescott placed a hand on his forehead in shame. “When we visited Enzo at the start of last year, he was displaying signs of suffering consumption.”
West nodded sadly. “He likely contracted it from Carla, the bacteria can enter your system and remain dormant for years. In ‘61, when the child was misdiagnosed, the proper precautions weren’t taken and Carla picked up the disease. No one knew until it was too late. She was terminal. As you know, after a short stay in hospital, she passed away. There was a mistake made by an orderly, who vehemently denied it, then at the morgue, where they, too, denied any knowledge of the incident. Her remains were disposed of. It was put down to the disorganised running of the hospital. Or at least, that’s the official story. That’s what you will read in the hospital files.”
“But you don’t believe that?” Lescott probed.
“There’s a lot of employees in a place like this. A lot of people who enjoy passing wild speculation down the grapevine. Rumours of strange presences wandering the halls at night. Heading down to the morgue, playing around with the bodies, wheeling them to where they ought not to be.”
“We’ve got those same stories at Darlinghurst Road.”
“Generally,
that’s all it is. Stories. But my predecessor, Arthur Quarry, he committed suicide after all of this mayhem. He left a note that vaguely alluded to Carla’s disappearance as being something more sinister at work.”
“Did he give details?” Lescott was on tenterhooks as the woman spoke.
“What I’m about to tell you, very few are privy to…” West finished her drink and poured another. This was nothing like a cathartic unburdening of the indelible stain on her soul, she was frightened. “Arthur Quarry suggested Carla Rosetti was just one of many… That corpses had gone missing on a regular basis. He said some of the corpses that went missing, in fact, weren’t corpses.”
“What?”
“That’s where his assertions ended. I was brought in to try and fix the hospital, in doing so, I looked into his claims. I found nothing solid as such. But rumours persisted to swirl around the Bereavement Relief Scheme that was in place at the hospital at the time.”
“Excuse me?”
“It was a charitable fund put into place by hospital benefactors to help the families of unfortunates who passed and left their loved ones with funeral expenses they could ill afford. The bodies that were said to have gone missing were all recipients of a grant from the scheme.”
“Who paid for the scheme?” Lescott asked, he knew the answer before he’d asked the question. He was sure of it.
“The Beaumont Institute. When Carla Rosetti was diagnosed as terminal, given her husband’s spiralling debt, the family applied to the scheme. Within a day, Richard Beaumont was at the hospital. He came to meet her. He handed a cheque over to Enzo. And he left. Then it happened. The orderlies, who Enzo knew well, swore they had no knowledge of her death.”
“Who pronounced her dead? Was there a death certificate?”
“There was when I looked into it. It was clearly forged after the fact. The doctor who pronounced her dead? He’s missing.”
“Sorry,” Charlie spoke from within a cloud of smoke at the back of the room. “I’m struggling to keep up… What’s the go?
“Carla Rosetti didn’t die of tuberculosis. Or maybe she did. But it wasn’t here. It was wherever she’d been taken by the Beaumont Institute,” Harris answered.
West nodded slowly.
“You didn’t report any of this?” Lescott asked.
“As far as I can tell this was investigated prior to my time. There wasn’t much I could do by way of law enforcement. Instead I put my efforts into stopping the Bereavement Relief Scheme, and breaking off our partnership with the Beaumont Institute. We unveiled a new building in December of ‘63, the Beaumont Wing, and we’ve had nothing to do with them ever since. The rumours have stopped.”
“Who carried out the investigation?”
“I believe it was a detective named Alan Livingstone.”
“How do we find Beaumont?”
“I think he mentioned he lived somewhere in the Blue Mountains. But you don’t find him. He finds you. We had a phone number for him, but it was disconnected.” West paused, “He isn’t right. If you’re going to go looking for him, be prepared, and don’t turn your back on him. You could just see from his eyes how dangerous he was.”
Lescott took a sip of West’s gin. It was good stuff. He needed it. “Can I borrow your phone?”
West had turned her back on him to gaze out the window. She ever so slightly nodded.
Lescott breathed deeply as he waited for someone to pick up the phone. “DI Lescott. I need the last known whereabouts of Enzo Rosetti, formerly of 158 Vere Street.”
The men wished West well and went on their way. Perhaps she hadn’t done enough to protect people, but she had done what was in her power. All too few of those involved in this mess could claim that.
“Livingstone is fucking knee-deep in all of this,” Harris snarled as they walked the dark corridor. “I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
“No,” Lescott shook his head firmly. “He’s our lead. He’s how we get this guy. If he is as involved as it appears, he’s got information on Beaumont. I’d wager it’s hidden away in his office at home or at Darlinghurst Road.”
“Need me to break into Major Crimes? Have a snoop around?” Charlie asked. He was picking up the trade quite nicely.
“No. I’ll do that. Harris will take his home study. You’ve got a much more fun task.”
“What’s that? Do you want me to grab him and stick him in the back of a van? If we give him a beating, he’ll talk.” Charlie rubbed his knuckles eagerly. He’d never met Livingstone, but he’d heard all about him. He didn’t care for him.
“All in good time, Charlie.” Lescott smiled. “First off, we’re going to go speak to Enzo Rosetti. Let him know we’re going to make this right.”
“Bit late for social calls? No?”
“He won’t mind.”
Rookwood Necropolis was said to be the oldest and largest operating cemetery in Australia at the time. A short drive from the city, it was built sometime in the 19th century when Sydney’s first burial site began to overflow. The scale of the place is quite hard to comprehend. A century and a half’s worth of corpses is an army of the dead. It requires quite a barracks.
It was long after dark, so the three men hopped over a wall to gain access to the internment site. They couldn’t see any obvious signs of security patrolling the graveyard, but they needn’t have worried. No minimum wage pay packet would convince any security guard to approach those three amongst a sea of graves in the black of night.
It took quite some time to find the grave but once they did, they stood in silent contemplation. Both Harris and Lescott felt a certain amount of guilt towards his death. He’d been on a slippery path at the start of 1964. Perhaps if they’d taken his claims seriously when no one else had, they could have pulled him to safety. Perhaps not.
“Was it tuberculosis that got him in the end?” Harris asked as he held his flat cap to his chest in respect for the dead.
Lescott shook his head. “After they took his child, he got deeper into heroin. His heart literally broke.”
“Not literally?” Charlie asked. “You mean like in the fairy tales?”
“No sorry, I’m not being clear. It wasn’t sadness that got him. Maybe it played a part, I don’t know. It was the drugs. The damage to his heart was such that it disintegrated right there in his chest. By the time he died it was about the size of a golf ball.”
Harris ignored the cautionary tale against heroin use in favour of self-loathing. “We could have helped. We wanted to stop this cycle of apathy. Turns out we are just another spoke in the wheel.”
“The spoke that breaks, more often than not takes the entire wheel down with it. Take comfort in that at least.” Lescott had stepped away from the grace and was scanning the area for something.
“So, what exactly is it we are doing here?” Harris asked warily. Every time he and Lescott joined forces, it seemed to end in catastrophe.
“Looking for a shovel.”
“Thought as much.” Harris took off his jacket in preparation, lit a cigarette and sat on Rosetti’s gravestone. Behaviour you’d condemn as disrespectful if the man wasn’t about to exhume the departed’s place of rest. Given that, sitting on his grave seemed like a mere trifle.
It was Lescott’s idea, so you’d expect him to take some ownership of its execution, but he was suddenly hit by the gravity of what they were about to do. He stood sucking on his hip flask, quietly muttering to himself. Harris on the other hand, well, he refused to look out of quiet protest. He was quite sure the job of digging would fall upon him, so he sat on that gravestone, quietly snorting heroin, and cursing the day he met Lescott.
That left Charlie. He was strangely enthusiastic about the task. He said it would be simple. He said that having grown up in the darkness of the central desert and then Darwin, his eyes were used to surveying the gloom. He was full of shit. He walked off and the graveyard rang out with his cries as he stubbed his toe on a headstone, banged his on a bench, a
nd finally when he took a tumble and landed with a heavy thud. “Argh. Me fucking face.” When he wandered back moments later, he was covered from head to toe in dirt. “I found one.”
“Where?” Harris laughed.
“Some arsehole left a grave unfilled.”
“That must have been horrible.”
“I can honestly say I would not recommend it.”
Harris was not the same man who dug Walter McCoppin’s grave that day in 1964. Much of his physical strength had abandoned him as he sank further into heroin’s clammy embrace. His lungs could barely process oxygen quickly enough to keep him going. Halfway through he asked Lescott to throw him his jacket. He wanted to take yet another microdose of heroin. When Lescott refused, Harris went to climb out the grave and hit him with the shovel. The drama subsided when Lescott handed the addict a wrap of cocaine. If he was going to take drugs, he would take drugs that would improve his industry, not harm it. This is before Hollywood taught us the dangers of speedballs.
Harris dug like a mad man, wheezing every time he threw the spade down into the dirt. He seemed to bounce between states of morose languidity and euphoric mania.
“Is he alright?” Charlie asked, taking a small snort of the discarded wrap of cocaine.
“No. He’s very much not ok. Are you Jim?”
“Nope.” Harris offered little more than a demented grunt as he carried out his sacrilegious work.
“This reminds me… What did you end up doing with that rock you found outside Coober Pedy?”
“It’s under my mattress. Wait. You know about that?”
“You weren’t discreet.” Lescott turned to Charlie, “Harris here is one of the richest men in Sydney based on one gemstone alone. It’s priceless.”
Harris, in a rare moment of calm lucidity, slammed the spade into the dirt and leaned on it as he shook his head, “I take it out sometimes and look at it. I get lost in it. It’s beautiful. You can see the entire universe in its glimmer. The idea of turning it into something as grotesque as money, I don’t think I can do it. It’s to blame for all of this, you know… Money. Lives defined by its pursuit leave us corruptible. When we get it, we’re corrupted. Those without it are cattle. Not me. Not this stone. It’s better than that. It’s meant for something more. It’s the last pure thing I have left. So, to me. It’s worthless.”
THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER Page 48
