The Tattooed Man (18 page)

Harrigan wondered if Sam realised how much antagonism she was showing. For whatever reason, her self-control was fraying at the edges, had been
throughout his time here. Maybe she didn’t like being bought. Maybe this strange locked-up building disturbed her. It would disturb him if he had to work here.

They had arrived back at the entry to the car park. He collected his mobile and beeper. Sam saw him out to his car.

‘Your e-tag will get you out of the grounds. Once you leave, it won’t get you back in again. Like your badge, it’s dead as soon as you drive away from here.’

‘I’ll learn to live with the disappointment.’

She laughed and then her face went hard. ‘You never know when someone’s after you, Harrigan. Maybe you should keep an eye on your back. Bye now.’

He drove out of the car park, relieved to see the garage door slide open for him, the main gates swing back as he approached them. Out on the public road, he breathed free air. ‘I know a great deal about you,’ Elena Calvo had said. To Harrigan, this was an insult. She knew nothing about him. But what did he know about her?

In one way, she had told him a great deal about herself. None of it made her any easier to pin down. He could envisage much of what she had said being repeated by a lawyer in a court of law as an excuse for actions otherwise apparently incriminating. And she was a murderer: Cassatt’s murderer if no one else’s, and someone with the motive and the capacity to remove Beck and his cronies if only because they threatened her business. Her grief for Julian Edwards didn’t mean that she wished the result undone.

The visit had only complicated matters. He put her out of his head. What he needed was solitude
and space to think. Right now, he didn’t have time for needy, controlling rich women and their ambitions, whatever they might be, whatever schemes they were juggling. He had a long drive ahead of him. There were other lives to protect.

I
t was well after midday, later than Harrigan had hoped it would be, by the time he was on the road to Coolemon. His first stop had been the underground car park at the Macarthur Square shopping centre at Campbelltown. While he was driving around, a parked car flashed its lights at him. He pulled into the nearest empty bay and walked over. Ralph got out of the car to meet him.

‘Hi, boss. It’s all ready to go.’

They swapped keys. Harrigan slid into the driver’s seat of the new car. Ralph took the suicide seat. He opened the glove box and took out a shoulder holster and a gun.

‘Here you go,’ he said, handing them to Harrigan.

‘Just call me the fashionista,’ Harrigan said, covering the whole kit and caboodle with his light summer jacket.

Ralph grinned. ‘Marvin knows nothing about these arrangements, boss. Trevor kept him out of the loop like you asked.’

‘What about putting a guard on my son?’

‘He’s got that in motion. Shouldn’t be a problem.’

This was more a precaution on Harrigan’s part than the expectation of a real threat. He was being
careful. Cotswold House was a secure environment; no one could just walk in there off the street. Harrigan’s family had been threatened more than once in his career and Toby had had guards put on him before. Trevor had been obliging; doing what Harrigan had asked of him without asking too many questions.

‘Tell him thanks from me. I’ll be in touch as soon as I get to Yaralla.’

‘How’d you go with Elena Calvo? What’s she like?’

Harrigan had already spent time considering how much of his meeting he should conceal and how much reveal.

‘Tough and ruthless,’ he said. ‘She won’t be easy to deal with. She’s got her own agenda. Keep her in view. Everything you can find out about her—her corporation, her father, their connections—dig it up. She’s a significant player.’

‘We’ll handle her. Okay, boss. See you later. Good luck.’

Ralph would wait another half-hour, then leave. Harrigan drove out, the tinted glass of the car’s windows providing him with some anonymity. He hit the road with a sense of freedom.

Coolemon was in the south-west of the state. Grey nomads travelling through the town were sometimes heading south-west to Adelaide and then across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth; or turning north to Broken Hill and from there, going north or west into the red heart of the continent. Their caravans trundled along the desert tracks as if they were native to the landscape.

Harrigan followed the Hume Highway south, stopping for fast food not far past Yass. Not long after, he turned off the highway onto the back roads
and began heading west into the sun. The road was a single carriageway lined with old eucalyptus trees, their leaves gleaming in the hot afternoon light. Cattle trucks and local farmers were the only hazards. He drove through the old rural towns that had followed on white settlement, their main streets making up the highway: vistas of old courthouses, abandoned bank buildings and closed stores. Silent pubs stood with their doors open and their high verandas shadowing the footpath. In these towns, the war memorials stood in the main street, silent stone soldiers mourning over their guns.

As the hours passed, the road grew more straight. Flocks of grey apostle birds foraged in the red dirt either side of the bitumen. Crows, their densely black feathers glistening in the sun, settled on the roadkills. The dry, empty pastures were sapped by the drought, reduced to a scraped and pale gold marked by scattered trees and low bush-covered hills against the horizon.

The kilometres passed without incident. Despite this, he felt a sense of unease. It had been too simple, almost effortless, swapping cars and getting out on the road. But even if there was something wrong, all he could do was drive on.

Some five hours after he had left Campbelltown behind, Harrigan drove into the large, straggling town of Coolemon. He stopped at the police station. The duty sergeant had known him during his time there and was welcoming. The backup was on standby; they would be waiting for his call whenever they were needed. Harrigan accepted the sergeant’s invitation to a meal and spent the occasion talking about the cricket.

By the time he left the station, it was growing dark. About a kilometre out of town, a state forest lined the
roadside, the casuarinas closing in like thinned-out human figures. Eventually open pastures took their place. Harrigan opened his window to the quiet outside. Stillness stretched to the horizon. There was a full moon, scorching the surrounding paddocks to an incandescent ash. Driving in this solitary moonlit darkness, Harrigan felt a free man. In a rare moment of equilibrium, he was at ease with himself.

Eventually, he turned off the bitumen road onto dirt. Pausing at the turn, he thought he heard a car in the distance ahead of him. A farmer on his way home. He went on, his headlights illuminating the roadside scrub. Ahead, he saw the shadows of the red gums lining Naradhan Creek. He crossed the narrow bridge and drove through Yaralla’s open gate, startling an owl roosting on a fencepost. It disappeared into the scrub with the slow, silent beat of its powerful wings, its pale feathers luminous in the white light.

Harrigan drove up the track and into Harold’s yard. A frantic barking greeted him when he got out of the car. A light was shining brightly above the farmhouse’s back door. Harold was standing on the veranda, washing his knives at an outside sink.

‘Quiet!’ Harold ordered the dog and she sat down. ‘Don’t mind Rosie. She gets excited.’

‘She doesn’t bother me. How are you, mate? It’s good to see you.’

‘Could be better. My hands are a mess. I just killed a lamb. I’ve had this fella in the shed for a couple of days, calming him down. I was going to share the meat with Ambro, but I thought you might want a roast dinner while you’re here.’

‘What’s wrong with your hands, Harry?’

For an answer, Harold held them out, palms upwards. They were still covered with the
transparent antiseptic dressings. Even where partly hidden by the lamb’s blood, they were badly burned and blistered deep into the skin.

‘How did that happen?’

‘It’s what Stuart’s growing here. The tobacco did that to me. Come inside and I’ll show you. I’ll just wash the blood off and get cleaned up.’

‘Can you work with those hands?’

‘The doctor gave me some tablets. They help. I didn’t do anything much today. I took some sleeping pills the doc gave me last night. They knocked me out till almost midday. Killing the lamb was okay. It’s quick, and I’ve just taken some tablets. Driving’s not fun.’

‘Your tatts, mate.’

Harold had taken off his bloodstained shirt and was standing naked to the waist. The bright light intensified the deep colours and intricate patterns marked on his skin. Harrigan hadn’t known that Ambrosine was using Harold’s body as a canvas.

‘Do you like them?’ Harold asked.

‘You could win a few awards with those. She’s signed them. Ambrosine only signs her best tattoos.’

Harold put on another shirt and the tattoos disappeared. He wrapped his slaughtering and butchering knives in a leather pouch.

‘She likes working on me. I don’t have much bare skin left now. Come on, girl.’

He led Rosie out across the yard to her enclosure. Once inside her kennel, she settled down on her blanket.

‘Do you want to put your car in the garage? Who knows? Maybe it’ll rain.’ Harold laughed.

‘Times are bad, Harry.’

‘Wait till you see the place in the daylight. It’ll break your heart. Come into the kitchen once
you’ve put your car away. Have you had anything to eat?’

‘Yeah, I ate back in town.’

‘We’ll have a beer then.’

The farmhouse at Yaralla had the sense of time stopped. The kitchen was a large room with a window that looked out to the north-east. An ancient wood stove stood next to an electric one, now almost as much a museum piece as its companion. When Harold’s mother, a woman from a family of wealthy Victorian graziers, had cooked here she had always had others to help her do it; sometimes young Aboriginal girls sent from the home at Cootamundra, sometimes white girls from other homes. They had slept in the room beside the washhouse and spent the rest of their time cleaning the house and washing basketloads of dirty laundry.

Harold put his knives away in a drawer. He opened two beers and then sat at the table without speaking. Harrigan had come to know Harold well during his years out here and he knew there was no point in rushing him. Tonight, he was tense, fatigued.

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do really,’ he said at last. ‘Every day you wake up, there’s no rain. You wonder if it’s ever going to end. Then something like this happens.’

He looked at his hands. Harrigan could only sidestep something so uncontainable as despair.

‘What’s going on out here, Harry?’

Harold’s tobacco lay on the table. He picked it up, rolled a cigarette and lit it.

‘Come with me. I’ll show you something.’

They walked through to the front of the house. Pale incandescent lights lit the hallway. Worn carpet runners covered the floor. Harold led him to the
front sitting room where he turned on the light. The furniture in this room was old and in its time had been expensive, from the years when the property had been profitable. The windows looked onto the veranda and, beyond, to the gardens that Harold’s mother had once cultivated but which were now mostly dead.

‘You see this room.’ Harold looked around as if peopling it. ‘This is my house. I’ve lived here all my life. A bit more than a week ago, Stuart was sitting in this room with this Jerome and that Edwards woman, drinking my whisky and treating me like I was dirt. They were going to do things with my property without even talking to me about it. Next thing I hear, they’re both dead.’

He went to an old writing desk and opened it. He took out four plastic bags containing crop specimens and put them on the coffee table.

‘I thought this was as good a place as any to keep them,’ he said.

‘Is this the one that burnt your hands?’

‘I’m pretty certain it was. Be careful. I put some air holes into the bags. Make sure you don’t touch it.’

Harrigan could see nothing out of ordinary about any of these four crops, among the most commonly grown food and cash crops in the world.

‘Where are these being grown?’ he asked.

‘In this enclosure Stewie had built—I call the Cage. It’s huge. It’s got greenhouses, water tanks, fences around it you can’t climb over. Stewie even had his own access road put in right up to the gate.’

‘He didn’t tell you about it?’

‘He just went and did it. After that it was too late. It was built and there was nothing I could do unless I went to the law. I can’t afford to do that and he knows it. He never let me in that Cage, not once.
People would come and go all the time. But not me. He’d locked me out. Then the same day I hear on the news that those people are dead, this comes to me by courier.’

He handed Harrigan the small box containing the keys and note. ‘That’s that Jerome’s keyring,’ he said. ‘I saw it on the table the day he was here. The people who killed him sent me this stuff, didn’t they?’

‘They must have done. They would have taken it off him when they killed him. Did these people know what touching that tobacco would do to your hands?’

Harold could only shrug. He rubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray already dirtied with ancient stubs.

‘Come outside. I’ll show you something else.’

Yaralla stood at the top of a low rise in the lightly undulating landscape. They walked through the silhouettes of what had once been ornamental trees and shrubs, then through the gate and into the house paddock. The night noises were muted, the silence all pervasive. The scattered trees in the landscape were dark shadows, the distant houses small nubs in the moonlight.

‘It’s quiet,’ Harrigan said.

‘Too quiet. It feels like everything’s dead. Sometimes I think there’s only me and Rosie left alive out here. And Ambro and her kids of course.’

Harrigan looked upwards. The moon was at the high arc of the sky, bright and small, the stars dimmed by its light.

‘That’s the Creek Lane down there,’ Harold was saying. ‘Standing out here, you’d say everything you could see was peaceful. About fifteen minutes before you got here, Rosie started barking. She’d
heard a car. Whoever it was, they didn’t come across the creek the way you did. They kept going along the Coolemon Road. Now that road crosses the creek about three miles further on from here and then goes on around the back of my place. At first, I thought it was you. Then I knew it wasn’t. For one thing, they were going too fast. This is what’s happening to me, mate, and I don’t like it. You hear a car at night. Why shouldn’t it be someone going home? People live out on that road. Why should it make me so fucking nervous just to hear a car?’

‘Did it come back?’

‘No. It’ll be miles away by now, the way it was travelling.’

‘Did you hear or see any other cars come along here this evening?’

‘I saw Barry on his way home about seven. That’s it.’

‘It’s lonely out here, mate,’ Harrigan said after a pause. ‘Ambro’s cottage is over in that direction, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. You can see her.’

Harold pointed across the moonlit darkness to the hard and dark outline of a small cottage on the Creek Road. A faint light gleamed from one of the windows.

‘Did you tell her I was coming?’

Harold grinned. ‘Yeah, mate. I’m not going to repeat what she said in reply. She uses a few words I don’t.’

‘I can guess. Harry, I don’t feel right about this. I’m going down there now. I want to get Ambro and her kids back to Coolemon as soon as I can. I’ll feel safer when I do.’

‘Let me take you in my ute. We’ll go across the
paddocks. It’ll be quicker. You don’t want to take your car over there. It’s too rough.’

‘If the man in that car you heard just now is who I think it could be, he’s a killer. He shot dead an ex-policeman yesterday. I ought to tell you now, I’m armed.’

‘Then I’ll get my shotgun. I’m sick of people walking all over my property doing what they want to do. They can pay attention to me for a change.’