“You know, I’ve never understood the appeal of this shit,” Charlie rubbed the remains of the drugs into his gums. He’d never done cocaine before, but he’d seen it taken many a time. “Holy fuck. My mouth. I can’t feel my mouth. It’s wonderful.”
It was hours before they heard the sound they were waiting for, spade on cheap wood. When it came, they breathed a sigh of relief.
Harris threw the spade to Charlie, “You better take over. If you don’t, you’ll need to dig a second hole.”
“What is it we’re looking for?” Charlie asked as he broke through the roof of the coffin with a pickaxe from the grave nearby.
“It seems he drew us here. Maybe he left a clue on the body. Something that tells us where to find him.”
Charlie began to claw dirt away from the opening. He ripped at the wood with his bare hands until they could see inside the coffin. When the hole was large enough, he took a step back and held out his hand to Lescott who passed him a torch.
“You know, there’s a lot of avoidance practices around death in my culture. But Mowan and the others never really said much specifically about digging up a body.”
“I think it probably goes without saying…” Harris suggested.
“Yeah, this completely breaks my Tjukurpa.” Charlie shone the light inside the hole and the three men peered inside. “Then again, maybe not.”
The grave was empty.
Chapter 66
Harris jumped into a taxi and left. The plan was that he would break into Livingstone’s home without disturbing anyone inside. It wasn’t the most realistic of plans. Yes, he was an accomplished home invader, but the drugs had left him in quite imperfect form.
Lescott would dig around in Livingstone’s office. A man like Livingstone, Lescott reasoned, wouldn’t be so deep in this rabbit hole of corruption and cruelty without an escape plan. He was sure that somewhere in the filing cabinets that ran around the perimeter of Livingstone’s office, he would find something.
But to get into the office, he needed a diversion. It needed to be a good one. The layabouts Livingstone surrounded himself with in Major Crimes were famed for sitting on their fat arses doing as little as they possibly could. Those chauvinistic arseholes cared for two things and two things alone: their personal wealth, and their cars. The latter being the key to Lescott’s plans.
While Lescott hid himself away in Burglary, Charlie hopped over the wall to the gated parking lot behind Darlinghurst Road station with a sloshing jerry can filled with petrol. Lescott and Harris had told him to seek out the most ostentatious car in that place, the car that screamed big ego, small manhood, fat wallet. It didn’t take long to find it. A brand new, immaculately polished Jaguar stood out amongst a chorus of Holdens like a ballerina in a strip club. It just didn’t belong there.
Charlie was almost sad to clench his fist and jab the car window to smash it. Almost, but not quite. With the glass smashed, it was time for the fun to begin. He doused the dashboard, the floor, and the seats; he covered the entire interior. Cars are a funny thing. Considering they move at such high speeds, and they’re so prone to fiery wrecks, they really ought to make them less combustible. Cheap burnable carpets, incendiary soft plastic casing, and the flammable foam within the seats and dashboard, he doused it all.
Once the car was soaked, he pulled a crowbar from inside his coat and pried open the fuel cap. A fire in the interior of the car would burn for minutes before it spread to the engine compartment of the car. That wasn’t good enough. He wanted an instant inferno. Taking off his wool tie, Charlie doused that too. Then he threaded it down into the fuel tank. Then he poured what was left on the petrol on the anonymous Holdens nearby. He struck two matches, one he threw through the shattered window, one he held to the tie.
Then it was time to run. Within seconds, the car was all ablaze. Without so much as a backwards glimpse to witness his fantastic work, Charlie hopped back over the wall and waited. From that dark, sheltered spot, he listened as the fire consumed the car. He heard the cracking of the fuel tank giving way to the furnace inside it, the hood exploding into the air and landing with a crash nearby. He crouched there enjoying his work, almost completely unaware that he had lit fire to his own foot.
Livingstone was working late that night, gaining a reputation for hard work while he was hardly working was important to him. So, he would spend the evening in his office behind closed blinds while he napped, and then masturbated, and then napped once more. That was his usual nightshift. He never came out the other end without a significant amount of shame. Did the men in the bullpen know that he’d befouled himself behind those blinds? Did he care? Should he care? He absolutely did not care. Why then did he feel that empty, shameful feeling?
When a knock came at his door in the wee hours of the night that evening, he barely heard it. He was done napping, he was done pulling on his rotten and near gangrenous member, the damn dirty onanist. He was sitting at his desk doing a spot of nasal grooming while the drama of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture filled the room. That’s to say he was taking a pair of tweezers to the thick black forest of hair protruding his unusually thin nostrils, snake-like they were. He took deep breaths, clamped the utensil around a patch of hairs, and then yanked before letting out ungodly involuntary sneezes. When the young police officer walked into his office, he was a picture of mucus, tears, and stray hairs.
“You better come and see this Chief.”
“Whatever it is…” Livingstone looked up, past the intruder and towards the thick black smoke outside the ninth storey window. For that much smoke to be that high up, well there must have been quite a blaze somewhere nearby.
“It’s your car, sir.” This caught Livingstone’s attention, even by his own excessive standards of flashy gluttony, that car cost more than he was truly comfortable paying. It had meant months sleeping on the sofa when his wife had found out what he had spent on it. It was his pride and joy. In fact, when a young hoodlum had keyed it recently, Livingstone had coerced a pair of detectives into framing the lad for possession with intent to supply. That sixteen-year old’s silly mistake meant he wouldn’t taste freedom until his early thirties.
Livingstone rushed from the office, and his army of sycophants rushed with him. They were so damned predictable. As they stormed out the doors of Major Crimes like chivalrous Knights-errant of old, they didn’t notice Lescott slip through the entrance behind them. When he’d heard the explosion, he’d moved up the levels of the building and waited patiently.
Lescott needed to be quick. A distraction such as this would capture the imagination of the work averse police for a matter of moments and moments alone. They would stamp their feet, they’d bemoan the lack of respect shown towards the police by common vandals, and they’d make their way upstairs to call their insurance brokers.
Lescott approached Livingstone’s office with a lock-picking kit in hand. Breaking through locks was a skill he’d picked up recently after finding the kit in the abandoned Burglary department. Within seconds he was in. It’s a shame he was so deep into a battle with his demons, if he’d dedicated his life to good, he’d have made a terrific police detective.
He headed for the filing cabinets and began to search through them in quite desperate but entirely calm haste. Livingstone had stored files away on everyone from beat cops to members of parliament. Lescott kept his blinkers on and scoured the cabinets for anything pertaining to the Beaumont Institute. Every so often he peered over his shoulder to check the office was still empty. On one such glance, he noticed the black smoke still billowing from below and had to stifle a laugh.
The longer it took, the higher the chance he’d get caught, and the prospect of getting caught was quite unthinkable. Not for fear of his already ruined career. It was Livingstone’s ability to cover his tracks he worried about. If Livingstone was as involved with their prey as he believed, he could send the man to ground indefinitely.
When Lescott found nothing under the name ‘Beaumo
nt’ he lashed out at the filing cabinet, punching and kicking it in a furious rage. Hammer blow after hammer blow, the cabinets shook the room. Finally, he dropped to the floor and slumped there. Maybe this entire thing was ill-devised. Maybe he, Harris, and Charlie were simply impotent in the face of this unmovable rock. They could dash against it all they like, but each time they did, they seemed to break. Lescott lit a cigarette and began softly banging the back of his head on the cabinets in frustration.
As he struck the cabinet, he heard something dropping in the gap behind the drawers. It was strange. The filing cabinet was immaculate. Nothing was out of place. It sounded like something had been stuffed into the space at the back to keep it hidden. He paused, looked over at the doorway into Major Crimes once again, and began pulling the drawers out of the cabinet. Sure enough there it was, a single manilla folder, covered in tape that had come loose from the interior wall. There was no label on the folder, but it was thick, filled with documents that Lescott had no time to inspect.
The expertly polished enamel of Livingstone’s teeth took a battering as he ground his teeth watching hapless officers scurrying around in an effort to put out the flames that had engulfed the car park. They desperately threw the suspicious contents of their coffee cups onto the flames that lapped at the vehicles. It was clear the fire had started with his Jaguar, given the jerry can’s position on the ground next to it.
The Head of Major Crimes stood there and watched as the flames engulfing his treasure subsided. What remained there afterwards was an annihilated lump of burned rubber and warped steel. But the searing temperatures of the smouldering wreck could scarcely compare to the heat of Livingstone’s fury.
Where he walked, he left a trail of indignation in his wake. “Straighten your tie, you reprobate, you look like a fucking beatnik,” he said to a detective as he left the car park. “You’ll never find a husband looking like that,” he brought a young secretary to tears as he entered Major Crimes. “To think you were the fastest of five million sperm your drunk father hosed your whore of a mother with…” he spat at a uniformed officer avoiding work in the Major Crimes bullpen.
All of these cheap jibes paled in comparison to the spite of the words he uttered when he unlocked and entered his office. Nothing was out of place to the naked eye, but he could not shake the feeling that this palaver was contrived to empty Major Crimes and clear a route to his office. The door was locked when he walked in, which offered some reassurance, but not enough.
It was his nose that was leading his investigation. The room was filled with an odour that stung his nostrils, an odour that had not been there just moments before. Livingstone opened his desk drawer to check the bottle of whisky inside, perhaps it had been damaged or leaked. No, it hadn’t. Besides, this smell was different. It was an older, grubbier scent. It was that of alcohol gushing from a drunk’s pores only to hang over them like a putrid cloud.
Livingstone went to sit in his desk chair but noticed a dent in his filing cabinets as he did. So instead he walked over, opened the top drawer and reached into the back of the storage unit. What his hand was searching for, was simply no longer there.
So, he walked to his phone, he dialled a number he recalled from nothing more than a well-worn memory and he spoke those bitter words, “They know. Kill them all.”
Chapter 67
When Lescott arrived back at his Bellevue Hill mansion, Charlie and Harris were waiting for him there. As was the smell of burned leather. He traced it to a severely decimated shoe in the shoe rack. “Well that’s just plain odd.”
Charlie and Harris had heard the door swing open and slam shut. When he entered the lounge, Charlie was pacing the fireplace, Harris had his hands cupped over his mouth and nose. They were nervous.
Lescott had inspected the contents of the folder as he walked through the dark of Sydney’s night. He wasn’t quite ready to break that palpable tension of expectation. “Did you get in and out without being noticed?” He asked Harris to procrastinate, to put off the conversation that would mark the beginning of the end.
“First off, he’s got a twelve-foot wall around his property. Maybe next we reconnoitre a place before we send the one-eyed junkie unto the breach.”
“Did you get in?” Lescott asked, looking over at Charlie, he saw clearly that he was hearing the story for the first time. No doubt the two men had been sitting waiting for Lescott in baited silence.
“I did.” Harris sighed. “He doesn’t have a study in his home.”
Lescott noted a particular look of shame on Harris’ face “What’s with the…” he gestured to the strange expression.
“When I got into the master bedroom, I just stood there for a minute, watching Mrs Livingstone sleep. She’s a really beautiful woman. Did you know that?”
“I don’t like where this is going.” Charlie rubbed his brow nervously. “You can’t just stand over a woman in her sleep.”
“I thought we bonded back there in the desert? I thought you’d have my back? It’s been a long time since I… Felt the warmth of a woman.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ on a cross.” Lescott slumped in a chair.
“She woke up. She didn’t scream or anything. She didn’t get angry. She was just sad. It’s like she didn’t blame me at all. She blamed him. So I told her, her husband’s an awful man and that I’m looking for documents that might help bring him down.”
“So much for the element of surprise.” Lescott shook his head in disbelief. The Harris that he had come to know, and at times tolerate, had been some of a liability. But this? This was too much. “So, you found nothing? You left the house?”
“Well yeah… But after I fucked his wife.”
“What?” Charlie asked.
“You can’t be serious?” Lescott turned to Charlie, “He can’t be serious.”
“When I said I wanted to stop him. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. So, yeah. I fucked her. Or it was more, her fucking me to be honest.”
Lescott didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Charlie on the other hand was just straight up impressed. “How was it?”
“Pretty fucking good. I’m a bit shaken up by it all. Obviously, I’m disappointed I found nothing. But it certainly wasn’t a wasted trip.”
Lescott turned his attention to Charlie, “What about you? What with the shoe in the hall?”
Charlie laughed, “Stepped in petrol. Set fire to myself.”
“Course you fucking did.” Lescott smiled. He was stuck in the middle between a clown and a jester, he wouldn’t have changed places with anyone in the world at that moment.
“How did you get on? Did you find anything?” Charlie asked expectantly.
“We’ve got him,” Lescott nodded. “We’ve fucking got him.”
As Lescott laid out documents on the floor, it became clear that Livingstone’s connection to this case was a cut and dry case of finance corrupting the soul. The folder was a paper trail of Livingstone’s involvement with more than one Richard Beaumont-owned-and -operated organisation. It held payslips from the Beaumont Institute, the Beaumont-Pilbara Iron, Gold and Salt Company, the Beaumont Blue Mountains Logging Company and the Beaumont Foundation, each of which Livingstone was involved with directly in roles from Head of Security to Non-Executive Board member.
In the battle for Livingstone’s soul, money had won. No wonder he wanted these crimes covered up. If it got out, if these Beaumont-fronted companies’ share prices dropped, Livingstone stood to lose a fortune.
And while the aforementioned documents gave a clear sense of Livingstone’s involvement in the entire thing, personal correspondence between the Head of Major Crimes and Richard Beaumont illuminated things further. Each piece of correspondence originated from,
THE DESK OF RICHARD TIBERIUS TITAN BEAUMONT
BEAUMONT MANOR
DISMAL HILL
NEW SOUTH WALES
“Where the fuck is Dismal Hill?” Charlie asked.
“It’s a ghost town in the B
lue Mountains.” Harris answered, he knew it. “The place is fucking weird. It’s a fading memory. It was built on logging money sometime in the nineteenth century. The more money it made, the more trees they felled. They wrecked the diversity of the environment. Then there wasn’t a great deal left. The landowners left. The workers left. What remains is an underclass of no-goods. It’s bandit country. Maybe a couple of hours out of Sydney.”
“So, we go? To Dismal Hill? Right now?” Charlie was eager, he had every right to be so, but Lescott and Harris didn’t quite share his fervour.
“We wait until morning. Until first light. The darkness won’t do us any favours.” Lescott was quite resolute.
“You’re not afraid of the dark are you, Lezza?” Charlie laughed, but his smile broke when he saw Lescott’s face.
“In this instance, I’m terrified of it.”
Given their plans for the following day, any normal person in their position would have crept up to bed and tried to get some rest. These three broken men were anything but normal. So, they drank, and they drank heavily.
“I can’t shift this idea that I could have put a stop to all of this earlier,” Lescott spoke over a glass of whisky and a cigarette.
“How’s that?” Harris asked.
Lescott sighed as a ripple of shame ran through him. “Well, I met Beaumont at the start of last year. Livingstone brought a photographer into Darlinghurst Road to take a picture of him and several of the force’s benefactors. Rich and powerful types, you know the sort. I shook his hand. I knew there was something off about him.” Lescott gazed blankly into space as he recalled that day in ‘64, “His hand was cold and clammy, his grip was soft, but the look in his eye… I should have known something was off.”
THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER Page 49
