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

by Michael Smith

  “I’d expect nothing less.”

  Livingstone poured two drinks and slid one across the antique wood in the direction of Harris. The Head of Major Crimes was quite sombre. “Is he dead?”

  “Oh yes. So very dead. His estate was razed to the ground in an unfortunate fire.”

  “I see.” Livingstone placed his head in his hands. Harris watched closely. He couldn’t quite see what emotion Livingstone was masking, he assumed it to be stress. But when Livingstone surfaced again, he saw that it was, in fact, relief. “That’s good. That… Is very good.”

  “How much do you know?” Harris smiled in bemusement; he couldn’t quite figure out Livingstone’s game.

  “Enough to know he needed to meet that fate. But not enough to keep me awake at night. How bad was it?”

  “Hundreds of bodies…”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m being serious, without the slightest hint of exaggeration. Hundreds of bodies, dressed, posed and pumped full of shitty homemade preservatives. The locals called the place the Doll’s House, apparently. Over the years he turned it into a museum of death and cruelty. Black. White. Man. Woman. Adult and child. I don’t know how many he killed and how many he salvaged from their graves… I shot him in the face with a shotgun before he could tell me.”

  Livingstone placed his head in his hands once more. He had either been unaware of the scale of what he was hiding, or he was doing a good job at pretending.

  “What the fuck did he have on you?” Harris asked. “We know you were embedded in his organisations. This can’t just have been about money?”

  “Do you know what hunger is James? I mean real hunger. When you haven’t eaten for days and when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from? Do you know what it’s like to be so cold, that no matter how many layers of clothes you put on, you don’t warm up. Because the cold is in your bones? And you wake up with frost on your skin? That’s my lasting memory of childhood. I was there when my father beat my mother to death. But I don’t remember it. I remember the cold and the hunger.”

  “That’s a sad story, but you’re going to have to fill in some blanks for me. You had a horrible childhood. You barely made it out? So, what? Look at yourself now. You’re one of the most powerful, and apparently richest men in Sydney.”

  “The Beaumonts are the blank. They’re how I got from A to B. Well… Elizabeth Beaumont.” Livingstone poured another drink. “You see, Charles was not a good man. Shady business dealings, mistreating employees, philandering, beating his wife, abusing his son with the help of his godly mistress. He was a vile megalomaniac. She put the wrath of God into him. Elizabeth was a kind woman, but she was weak. He spent decades torturing the free will out of her. When she couldn’t protect her son, she brought me into the house to distract herself. She gave me an education and raised me off my knees.

  “Richard’s escape from the abuse was a Doll’s House. He acted out his revenge on his toys. Then he took his revenge on his father. I was a young police officer. I helped cover it up. I felt sorry for him. Over the years I’ve protected him. Even when the favours started getting stranger. I haven’t been back to that house in decades. Because, I think somewhere deep down, I knew all along.”

  Livingstone fell silent. The pair drank silently. Each of them relieved that their respective ordeals had ended.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  Harris turned to see what Livingstone was referring to. Detective Sergeant Reed of Internal Affairs had breezed into the office with an army of Commonwealth Police and a cohort of Darlinghurst Road’s honest coppers. “Don’t mind them. They’re just a spot of insurance.”

  “Insurance?”

  “I thought maybe I’d die confronting that man. I didn’t realise quite how meagre an opponent he would turn out to be. So, I handed an ambitious young Internal Affairs Detective the keys to the kingdom. Ledgers detailing payments made by Prince to the police force. A lot of people are going to lose their jobs. Some will probably go to jail.”

  “I’ll cooperate.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not an option. At least, not for you. That was the only stipulation I put on helping their investigation. I didn’t ask for immunity for myself. I asked that you not be offered it.”

  “You’ve condemned us both.”

  Harris shrugged. Maybe the time was right for their condemnation. Their age was passing, a new one was being ushered through the doors.

  “The things I know,” Livingstone went on. “The people I have dirt on. You don’t even know how high this goes. I can help bring them down.”

  “You see…” Harris was disappointed but unsurprised, that even in the face of certain doom, Livingstone would seek to barter for power. “This is precisely why you need to go down. You’re the acceptable face of apathy. Of greed. Of cruelty. Of selfishness. You’ve no doubt been sitting on an ocean of information that could have helped protect people. And you offered nothing until it became of benefit to you. All the while, under that visage of respectability, a monster was hurting those you were charged to protect. There’s no way out for you, Alan.”

  Livingstone slumped in his chair, defeated.

  It was a rare sight. From the moment he’d walked into that station, he’d been a political animal. He’d beaten all comers. But like the greatest boxer, he was only as good as his last fight. And the opponent that had beaten him was time itself. “This is Fred Lescott’s doing, isn’t it? I don’t see him out there. Enjoying all of this chaos.”

  Harris stared out at the commotion. Reed and his colleagues were reading rights to those nearby. Even the dirty IA detectives were joining in, being too scared of implicating themselves by refusing to cooperate.

  Though he wasn’t there, Harris could see Lescott standing in the doorway smoking a cigarette and sipping at a glass of whisky. He could see him enjoying himself, content in the knowledge that the work he had dedicated his existence to, and sacrificed his life for, was being done.

  “Beaumont got to him.”

  Livingstone cringed. He felt no warm feeling nor respect for Lescott, but that would come back and hurt Livingstone, he knew it. “Is he dead?”

  Harris shook his head. “As good as. The doctors say. He’s in a clinic in Dismal Hill. They’re moving him to St Vincent’s tomorrow. That’s if the Beaumont loyalist locals don’t get to him first. If they do, they’d be doing him a favour. He lost a lot of blood. So much so that his body couldn’t get oxygen to his brain for a spell. He’s trapped between a pair of cloudy, vacant eyes.”

  “He won’t recover?”

  “Do I look like a fucking doctor to you?” Harris stood up and watched. Grown men were brought to whimpering tears as the extent of their corruption caught up with them. No policeman wanted to do time in that day and age. To say the Boys in Blue weren’t popular inside the country’s jails would be an understatement. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll bunk together in Long Bay.”

  “I can’t go to jail.” Livingstone downed yet another drink and wiped at his mouth. His head was spinning. Though his voice was no longer pleading, he was looking within himself for a way out. “What do I do?”

  Harris turned to see Livingstone muttering to himself. “Do you know much about ancient Rome?”

  “What?”

  “It has always been an interest of mine. Ancient society, its politics, its philosophy, the leaders. You can tell a lot about a leader’s character by how he acts when it’s all coming to an end. Nero, as the plague swarmed and the fire raged, he fiddled. Then when it came to the end, he lost his nerve. He made one of his advisors perform the fatal stabbing of the sword. He was as despicable in death as he was in life. Brutus… He was my kind of man, he ran into his own sword willingly when his vision for Rome broke down. Ended it then and there, sparing everyone a lot of pain. The Samurai, too, come to think of it. When they brought dishonour on themselves and their family by failing the Shogun, they restored it through Seppuku, or Hara-kiri.”
>
  “I don’t speak Japanese…”

  “It’s a form of ritual suicide through disembowelling.”

  “You want me to disembowel myself.”

  “God no. I think that’s far too good for you. I want the boys in Long Bay to treat you like a fleshy pin cushion.” Harris shrugged as he walked over to the door, but before he left, he removed his tie and placed it on a cabinet near the doorway. “Goodbye Superintendent.”

  Still handcuffed, Harris sat down at his own desk. For the very first time, he was enjoying Major Crimes. The room was filled with the sound of pleading and crying. It was a tragedy, he thought, that Lescott was not there to see it.

  “Make yourself comfortable. We’ve got a lot of people to arrest.” Harris looked up to see Reed grinning at him. “We’ve got a lot of people to arrest, and too few people to do the arresting. This could take a while.”

  Harris pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk, he’d run out of cigarettes and he remembered that he’d always kept a sleeve in there. No luck. Whoever had taken his desk had filled it with smutty magazines. “You don’t, by chance, have a cigarette I can pinch, do you?”

  “I don’t.” Reed smiled as he watched Major Crimes fall before his eyes.

  “I’ve been thinking about quitting anyway.”

  “I don’t think today’s a good day to quit. Not where you’re going… Like I said, this is going to take a while. I suggest you head to the coffee cart downstairs. They sell moody cigs.”

  Harris looked over at Reed. He wasn’t quite sure what the man was suggesting. Whether he was being literal or figurative. Either way, he wouldn’t make eye contact with Harris.

  “If you’re not back in, what, twenty minutes… I’ll come looking for you.” He watched as Harris, in quite a state, picked dried blood from his face before getting to his feet and leaving Major Crimes. “What a fucking character.” Reed reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, while Gerry ‘The Hard Man’ Pryce, an especially nasty piece of work, started crying as a dirty friend of his from IA led him away in handcuffs. “What a day… What a fucking day.”

  Reed walked over to Livingstone’s office, where two uniformed officers were struggling with the lock. They shook their heads, unsure of what was going on inside the blacked-out office. “Something’s wrong in there.”

  “Break it down,” Reed nodded to the bigger of the two men. The officer put his fist through the glass panel of the door like it was made of wet bog roll. As the door opened, the three men stood aghast. “Cut him down. He doesn’t get off that easily.”

  Chapter 73

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  Buying cigarettes from the coffee cart while still wearing those Darlinghurst bracelets felt uncomfortable for Harris. The proprietor couldn’t have cared less. A half-blind, and fully bloody, cyclops in handcuffs barely scraped the top ten strangest people he would serve that day. Harris’ cash was as good as anyone’s.

  As the sun set, the streets of Darlinghurst were unusually abandoned. This tended to be the golden hour for local vice peddlers but that night, Darlinghurst had stopped. It was eerie that such a vibrant hub of life and excitement could completely switch off, seemingly for no reason.

  Harris enjoyed the freedom of anonymity by wandering through the gloom of the witching hour towards the El Alamein memorial fountain. He’d sat there, staring into the waters, many times before. Every time he had done so, the sights and sounds of the water had soothed the fire inside him. That night, during the witching hour, when things ought to have been going bump, he felt content.

  For years he had questioned his own existence, his place in the world, and his reason for getting out of bed in the morning. But then, in that clearing in Fitzroy Gardens, under those acerifolia trees, with their long thin leaves rattling in the soft breeze, he felt contentment. Though the journey had been long and arduous, and it had created its casualties, he could sit there at its end and just be.

  His time in Sydney was done, he knew it. But before he could stand up and leave, a pair of men jumped out of a vehicle, rushed across Fitzroy Gardens, and descended upon him. One placed a potato sack over his head. The other battered him with a cosh.

  Harris had once been untouchable in Sydney, especially at that time of night, but in his time away from Darlinghurst, the world had changed. This was George Watson’s turf now, and Watson did what he liked, when he liked.

  When Harris came to, in the back seat of a stationary car, the sack was still over his head. This kind of kidnapping was a common practice at the time. Criminals would grab other criminals, and hold them to ransom. It didn’t always stop there. If a criminal kidnapped your friend, you might kidnap his family.

  I once kidnapped a safecracker’s dog when he held out on me. At least, I’d been told it was a safecracker’s dog. My source had given me the wrong address. I actually ended up stealing a King Charles Cavalier belonging to a Detective Inspector in the New South Wales Police Narcotics department. He was surprisingly ok with it. When I returned the dog, unharmed and well fed, he pointed me in the direction of the safecracker’s house, just down the road from his.

  Harris recognised the voices of his captors at once. He’d forgotten all about George Watson. In the grand scale of things, that former petty thief and current King of Sydney’s underworld had seemed unimportant. That was an oversight.

  “What’s with the fucking handcuffs?” Stan asked.

  “You just helped me escape police custody…” Harris mumbled through the hessian sack. “Thank you for that.”

  Bang. Stan had quite a punch on him. Harris’ head had taken too many blows that day. Under the sack, his eyes began twitching involuntarily.

  “Nice to see you again, James,” George spoke from the front passenger seat. “Perhaps you can help us.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not in the most helpful of moods, George.”

  Watson nodded to Stan, who once more sent a fist into Harris’ battered temple.

  “We’re looking for Prince’s stash. We’ve been looking for months. We can’t fucking find it anywhere. We’ve tossed the casino. His house. The pubs he held under his name. Fucking nothing. I know that old cunt didn’t die broke. And I know, if anyone was to know where X marks the spot, then it’s you.”

  “Stan, someone with sense, please step in. Do I look like an accountant?”

  “Well,” Stan was proud of himself before he had even delivered the line… “You do look like you have an eye for numbers.” Crickets… “Get it?” Tumbleweed… “Because… he’s only got one eye?”

  “Stan,” George answered. “Fucking hit him.”

  “Brewery Lane,” Harris mumbled. The sack prevented the men from understanding.

  “What? Take that sack off, Stan.”

  “Brewery Lane, Ronnie Prince’s treasure is on Brewery Lane.” Once the sack was removed, Harris repeated himself. He almost requested the sack go back over his head when he took a deep breath of what he had hoped would fresh air. In reality, it was a car full of Stan and Lenny’s wretched gases. “Fucking hell, will someone crack a window, it smells like a tramp’s shoe in here.”

  Watson nodded once more. Stan clenched his fist.

  “Not the head,” Harris protested. “I’ll take you there. It’s this nursing home on Brewery Lane. It’s called little acorns, or old squirrels or something. I’ll point it out. Just not the fucking head.”

  Shady Oaks, Mrs Emily Prince’s nursing home was indeed on Brewery Lane, just down the street from Harris’ old doss house.

  Stan, a beast of a man, dragged Harris around to the boot of the car where Lenny and George were arming themselves with pistols in their pockets and shotguns in their coats.

  “Fucking hell, lads,” Harris laughed. “We’re going into a nursing home, not taking back the Rhineland.” Harris looked down into the car boot to inspect their armoury. Who should he see in there, bound and gagged, none other than yours truly?

  “What t
he fuck have you got Joe Manson in the boot of your car for?” Harris asked. I ascertained quickly that he was suffering from severe head trauma. He smiled down at me and gave me a strange friendly wave with his cuffed hands.

  “He’s been selling on The Cross. He’s refusing to kick up.” Watson also looked down upon my agitated form, crammed into that damn boot. I offered him a few choice words, but my gag prevented him from hearing them.

  “Manson doesn’t kick up. Never has. Didn’t to Prince. Won’t to you.” Harris shook his head and laughed, having realised the mistake that Watson had made.

  “Why not?”

  Harris blew air between his teeth. I sensed he was going to say something flattering about me. “He’s a fucking loon. A mad man. Certifiably so. Last year he tried to burn down the army barracks in Paddington… While the troops were inside. They poured out and he tried to take them all on with a truncheon he’d stolen off a uniformed policeman earlier in the day.”

  “What the fuck did he do that for?” George asked, looking decidedly red-faced.

  “Well, there’s two schools of thought on that one. Some say he volunteered for clinical trials back in the Fifties and they pumped him so full of the dreaded lysergic that he was never quite the same again. But I know for a fact he’s been stealing his old mum’s schizophrenia medication for years. It could be that. Basically, he’s constantly fucked up on hard drugs. The kind that make you weird, not docile.” Harris smiled down at me as he pushed on, revealing my darkest secrets, “You must have heard about the Chinese Navy ship that sank in the harbour a few years ago?”

  George nodded. “Everyone heard about that.”

  “The story goes, Joe snuck on the ship with nothing but a book of matches. Hours later, millions of dollars of the latest and greatest technology dreamed up by the cleverest communist minds that country has to offer, was unsalvageable at the bottom of the harbour. He’s a wrecking ball. He’s single-handedly tried to go to war with both the Australian Army and the Chinese Navy… And you’ve put him in the boot of your car? For the sake of a bit of snow? Good luck with that.” Harris laughed as he walked towards the entrance of the nursing home.