by Alex Palmer
‘Grace, I can’t give you the details of a confidential investigation. You know that. You can’t tell me about your work either.’
‘I’m not asking for anything you have to keep confidential. Just enough information so I know where you are and what’s going on. That way I can protect myself.’
‘You can rely on me to protect you. Don’t forget that.’
‘I still want you to make me this promise. If I’m going to deal with this, I need to know what’s happening.’
‘Then you’ve got my word. I promise.’
It had always been like this. She wrung things out of him no one else could; their relationship kept surviving by a whisker. Harrigan thought that survival in these terms must have been his particular gift. It was the story of his life.
Later, in the quietness, she lay in bed beside him with her head against his shoulder.
‘How did you get away from them?’ she suddenly asked. ‘Your twin nightmares. Your father and the Ice Cream Man. You escaped. How?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’m putting you together in my head. Am I allowed to do that?’
‘It was my aunt,’ he replied after a short silence. ‘She was my father’s sister. She hated him. She used to tell my mother there was no way I was going to end up like Jim. I always did well at school without trying too hard so she decided I was going to St Ignatius Riverview whether I wanted to or not.’
‘Why there?’
‘Because she thought it was the only school in Sydney. She paid the fees to get me in, which was pretty much all the money she had. Then my mother worked two jobs day and night for the next six years to keep me there. She was a pantry maid at Balmain Hospital in the morning and a cleaner in the city at night. She started work at 6 a.m. every day. She got up at four in the morning. It didn’t matter what else she had to do, she always left me a clean uniform, ironed to an inch of its life, waiting for me to wear.’
‘Oh my God,’ Grace said. ‘You had to succeed under that kind of pressure, didn’t you?’
‘I had no choice.’
She lay there without speaking.
‘Have you put me together?’ he asked.
‘Maybe a little,’ she said, her voice drifting in the soft light. ‘It’s time to sleep on it.’
She curled up and slipped away. He turned out the light and lay awake a little longer. In the dead hours of the night, he woke. Some dream was troubling him, some half-remembered image that faded from his mind as soon as he opened his eyes. Nothing. Nada. His first whispered thought while he stared into the shadows. Instinctively, he touched Grace to see if she was still there or whether he had washed up on some blank shore in the land of the dead. He felt her ribcage rising and falling with her breathing, imagined he could hear the sound of her heart. He slept again.
5
In the partial darkness of his kitchen, Harold Morrissey picked up his telephone and dialled a number he rarely called unless he had to. While he listened to it ring, he glanced out of the window. Dawn was beginning to break along the low undulating skyline, a clean transparency edging against a darker, fading blue. Once more it would be a clear, fine day. Finally his call was answered.
‘Yeah?’
‘Stewie. It’s Harry. You’re still alive.’
‘Of course I’m fucking alive. What the hell is this? Don’t you know what time it is?’
‘I just heard on the radio there’s been a shooting up at Pittwater. Four people dead. They didn’t say who they all were, just that one of them was Natalie Edwards. I wondered if maybe one of the others was you. Wasn’t she the woman who was here with you and that other bloke last week?’
‘Let me tell you something, Harry. If anyone asks, none of us were there including Nattie. If you tell anyone we were, I’ll say you’re fucking hallucinating. I’ll take you to the law. Then you’ll lose everything you’ve got. So keep your mouth shut.’ Stuart put the phone down.
Harold hung up, thinking that he should have expected as much. In its own way, the early morning call had summed up the relationship of the two brothers to perfection.
Harold left his farmhouse to start the day’s work, stepping into a still faintly cool air. An oleander bush bloomed a hot summer pink near the back door, while the house fence was covered with gnarled wisteria and thick-trunked grape vines planted by his grandmother eighty years ago. These days, the vines were almost leafless, some of them already dead. Like the land around him, they had been stripped bare by the drought and the heat. The only green came from a stand of old well-grown pepper trees stretching along the south-western side of the rambling wooden farmhouse, their bright foliage almost shocking in the dryness. On the north-eastern side, the sole shade was given by a self-sown sugar gum growing too close to the veranda, its white trunk arching over the bull-nosed roof.
In the pale light, Harold walked out the gate into the main yard, heading towards the kennel where his dog, Rosie, had spent the night chained up. Her enclosure was sheltered by an old moonah bush that was still holding out in the drought. Some twelve years ago his father had walked this same distance, unexpectedly falling into infinity when his heart had stopped mid-step. Since then Harold had supposedly shared the management of their property, Yaralla, with his older brother, Stuart. Almost as soon their father’s will was read and they were pronounced joint owners, Stewie had said, ‘We can mortgage the place now.’ ‘Like fuck we will,’ Harold had replied instantly, knowing through bitter experience that whatever money they raised jointly, Stewie would never repay his share of it. Instead the money would disappear on one of his scams. It would make money; Stewie’s scams always did. It was just that neither Harold nor the farm would see a cent of it.
Since that first day, he and his brother had grappled each other to immobility. Nothing could be done on the property without the agreement of the other. There had been no improvements other than those Harold had been able to pay for out of his own cash flow or smaller personal loans. Without sufficient credit, no substantial work could be done. Everything cried out for repair but now, in the drought, there was no money at all.
Harold opened the gate to Rosie’s enclosure and unchained her. She didn’t need feeding, there was still some dried food in her bowl. Meat she got in the evenings. Right now, she was anxious to stretch her legs. She trotted after him to the machinery shed where he parked his ancient white ute and leapt up into the cabin beside him.
Harold started the engine and drove out onto his property, some ten thousand acres on the edge of the Riverina. The landscape was so stripped of its vegetation, it had become an X-ray of itself. Out on the horizon, scattered trees shimmered in a dark line between the soil and the immense sky. This morning, Harold was following his routine of hand-feeding his stock. He was heading towards his north-eastern boundary across the paddocks that stretched around him as a barren patchwork. There was still water in the dams in that part of his property and he was pasturing his stock there before he faced the question of what to do when even this water ran out. The tray of the ute, where Rosie usually rode, was loaded with feed he could barely afford to buy. When worked, the red soil on his property broke down into dusty clumps; it varied in colour across the landscape from a pale dirt-pink to a dark and hot iron-red. For three years, he’d had no crops out of any of it. The future was as bleak and unending as the blue skies that rolled above him every day. He had stopped believing it would ever rain again.
After Harold had been driving for a short while, a structure came into view. It was the Cage, as he called it, a construction built by his brother six months ago along their most distant boundary. Its alien glass and steel glittered in the early light for some time before its outline hardened against the sky. The Cage was Harold’s sole failure to keep Stewie at bay. This singularity didn’t count for much. There could have been few failures more significant or more heartbreaking to him than this one.
On impulse, Harold drove over for a closer look. Always when he c
ame out here, he hoped that somehow the Cage might have miraculously disappeared overnight. Always it was still there. With this woman’s death, maybe something had changed. The trees Stuart had cleared to build the thing still lay in heaps next to the high steel fence enclosing the broad acreage where they had once stood. Their dry leaves rattled in the early morning breeze. Other than the raucous calling of the crows, it was the only sound in the landscape. Harold came to a stop outside the locked gate and got out of the cabin. Rosie followed him and began to nose along the base of the steel fence. As always, there was no way in for either of them. He had no key to the gate. From the beginning, he had been locked out.
Harold remembered vividly the day six months ago when he had arrived here to see the bulldozers clearing the old-growth grey box eucalyptus trees that had once covered this low slope. When he’d tried to stop them, the drivers had ignored him. The man in charge had threatened him if he didn’t get out of their way. ‘This is my property, mate!’ Harold had shouted. ‘That’s not what we’ve been told,’ the man had said. ‘I’m taking my orders from Stuart Morrissey.’ He told his workers to keep going; the trees crashed down.
Harold had driven back to the farmhouse and rung Stuart. They had argued furiously. By the time Harold hung up, he’d realised he could only stop the bulldozers by going back with his shotgun and taking the law into his own hands. He wished he had. Daily he’d watched while the fences went up, the greenhouses were built, and then the water tanks had arrived and were filled with water trucked in from outside the district. Who had pockets deep enough to finance this? Not Stewie. Stewie’s own money was never spent on anyone except himself.
Once the Cage was finished, they had planted one crop in the open, which they had covered with netting, and presumably others in the greenhouses. Unlike his desolate harvest, these unnaturally irrigated crops had flourished. Away to Harold’s right was the wide access road the bulldozers had cut the first day they had come in. It ran along his fence line, connecting the Cage to the Coolemon Road, an all-weather gravel road that served as one of Yaralla’s boundaries. The gate between this private road and the public highway was always kept locked. It was something else for which Harold had no key. Despite this, other people came and went along this private road regularly. He often saw them late in the evenings, speeding against the horizon in their four-wheel-drives. Stewie had never told him what they did inside. When Harold asked his brother questions, he received threats in reply.
The little Harold knew about what went on inside the Cage he had found out by eavesdropping. Once this would have disturbed him, but Stewie had given him no other choice. These days he was glad to find out any little detail however he did it. It was this subterfuge that had allowed him to link Natalie Edwards to Stuart in the first place.
Less than a week ago, he had looked into his living room to see three unannounced visitors sitting there: Stuart, an older man with glasses and a middle-aged woman with artificially fair hair. Both these people had been strangers to him. All three were drinking his whisky, talking. It was late afternoon and the curtains had been drawn against the western sun. Seated in the shadows, they hadn’t noticed him, had kept talking.
‘Well, Jerome,’ the woman said, ‘from what we’ve seen today, we’re all ready to go. Everything’s come along nicely. Mind you, it’s a god-forsaken spot. Why would anyone want to live here?’
‘It’s the best place for it, Nattie,’ Stuart said. ‘How many people are going to see it on that boundary? The property next door’s run by a manager for some agribusiness. He won’t care.’
‘Stuart’s right. It’s a good spot. It’s working better than I’d hoped.’ Jerome spoke with a guttural accent Harold didn’t recognise. ‘We’ll sign the contracts in the next few days at the latest and then I’ll send the staff out to harvest. I want it all shipped to Jo’burg before the end of the month. They’ll find a location for the testing over there. Once we’ve signed, I’ll courier them their copy of the contract. But first I have to let the old man know we’re on schedule.’
‘Your people will have to get a wriggle on, mate, if we’re going to meet that deadline,’ Stuart said.
‘I’ve already got the shipping lined up,’ Nattie said. ‘When I told them they were dealing with Natalie Edwards, they sat up and paid attention. They’ll move quickly.’
‘My people will do it anyway, don’t you worry,’ Jerome replied. ‘I want to replant with a new round of crops as soon as we can. We have to move this program along. The whole setup here took too much time.’
‘Who’s that?’
Nattie spoke. She had seen Harold standing in the doorway.
‘That’s Harry,’ Stuart had replied, frowning.
‘How long has he been there?’ Jerome asked.
‘Don’t know. How long have you been standing there, Harry?’
‘I just got here. How long have you been here?’
Stuart ignored him.
‘Don’t worry about Harry,’ he said to the others. ‘He’s harmless. He never does anything.’
Rather than be shut out of his own living room, Harold walked in and sat down. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
This was greeted with silence. Stuart made no introductions. All three had stared at Harold as if he was the intruder. The wind was shaking at the curtains while heat and dust hung in the air. Jerome glanced at Natalie and Stuart and then got to his feet.
‘Time to get out of this dump. We’ve got a plane waiting on the airstrip.’
‘Don’t forget your keys, Jerome,’ Stuart said. ‘You don’t want to leave those behind.’
Jerome laughed. He picked up a complicated set of keys attached to a keyring in the shape of a heavy bronze football. Nattie and Stuart stood up too, also collecting their wallets and keys.
‘Dinner at Pittwater for the contract-signing, people,’ Nattie said. ‘I’ll get it catered. I think we should celebrate.’
‘Turn on the champagne,’ Stuart said. ‘It’ll be worth it.’
‘You can pay for that, Stewie. Your share will stretch to it.’
After pocketing his keys, Jerome had picked up the whisky bottle and screwed the lid back on. He made to walk out with it. Harold reached over and pulled it out of his hand.
‘That’s my whisky, mate. I’ll keep it, thanks.’
‘Keep it,’ Jerome said. ‘It’s rotgut.’
‘You’re a possessive little man considering all you own is dirt,’ Nattie said in passing.
Now, some six days later, this woman was dead but for what reason Harold couldn’t know. He looked at the Cage’s high fences, strung along the top with electrified wires marked by signs that read Danger. There were no strangers here to warn off, just the birds who couldn’t read and whose bodies lay scattered at intervals along either side of the fence. There was nothing he could do about this. He called Rosie to him and drove away.
6
The sound of Harrigan’s mobile penetrated his sleep. He woke to the sense of Grace’s body curled next to his. Otherwise, the room was airless, oppressive. Already it had started to grow hot. He fumbled for the phone.
‘Commander Harrigan?’ He recognised the voice of Chloe, the commissioner’s personal assistant. ‘The commissioner has sent you an email, one that’s been generally distributed to the public. He would like you to look at it and call him back.’
Harrigan glanced at the clock. It was later than he normally slept; the room was bright with morning sunlight. Grace turned towards him, smiling, sleepy-eyed, her hair falling in thick, dark strands across her bare shoulder.
‘I’ll call within the hour,’ he said.
‘The commissioner said as soon as possible.’
‘Wait for the call.’
‘What is it?’ Grace asked.
Harrigan lay back on his pillows. ‘The commissioner’s sent me an email. He wants me to look at it.’
‘You’d better do what he wants in that case,’ she said dryly.
That wa
s the worst of mobile telephones. They let people like the commissioner invade the privacy of your bedroom. If Harrigan had still been a smoker, he would have lit a cigarette. Instead, he pulled on a pair of shorts and went down to his study. Grace appeared in the doorway behind him while his laptop was firing up, wrapped in her red kimono.
‘Why don’t you come in and have a look?’ he said. ‘I don’t think this is just “Good morning, how are you?”’
‘I’ve never been in here before,’ she said. ‘It’s always looked too private.’
‘This is where I keep myself to myself. Come in. Take the weight off your feet.’
‘Do you mind if I open the window?’
‘Go ahead.’
The morning air carried into the stuffy room the sweet smell of jasmine from an ancient vine that covered the length of the garden fence. Harrigan’s study was upstairs at the back of the house. At night, from the window, he could see the lights of Louisa Road reflected in the water across the bay. His study was a bare room, the furniture spare and the floorboards covered with a worn imitation Persian rug. His bookcases lined one wall; his safe, two chairs and his desk, which was made of old dark wood and had come with the house, made up the rest.
Grace sat in his spare chair. In the morning light, her skin was shadowed to a soft pearl. She studied the contents of his bookcases. Journals on law and policing, digests on forensic medicine and psychology, mixed with Norman Mailer’s The Fight and The Executioner’s Song. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Ellroy’s My Dark Places shared space with Crime and Punishment, The Devils. Histories of racing and boxing stood next to them. On a shelf not completely full were a pair of Harrigan’s own boxing gloves, from a time when, as a twenty year old, he had tried unsuccessfully to make a career as a boxer. Even if the attempt had been a failure, he still remembered it as a gap in his life when his time had been his own.
