Alex Palmer - The Tattooed Man

‘Do you? I knew when you went up there today, it wasn’t just going to be for one afternoon. What did you say? We’ll be on leave together. Nothing will get in the way.’

‘You heard the news. There’s a federal government minister involved. I can’t just walk away.’

‘But you can walk away from us.’

‘No, it’s not like that.’ Harrigan took Sam Jonas’s card out of his wallet and handed it to Grace. ‘Something else happened today. She was waiting for me when I left the house at Pittwater. She works for a company with a connection to the minister. She asked if I’d be prepared to take a bribe.’

‘Did she? Personal security manager. Doesn’t that mean bodyguard?’

‘She talked like she was more into intelligence gathering.’

‘For who?’ Grace asked.

‘The CEO of that company. This is who they are.’

He took the LPS brochure out of his diary and handed it to her. Grace flicked through the pages.

‘This is very high powered. I can see why this Elena Calvo would have guard dogs. She’s got a lot to protect. Why is she worried about these murders? How do they affect her?’

‘That’s a question worth asking. Meanwhile, her guard dog can go home and tell her she’s wasting her time.’

‘What were you doing with this brochure?’ Grace asked.

‘I was thinking of investing. Maybe it could help Toby. Maybe not.’

‘It’s always worth trying,’ she replied with a touch of gentleness. She handed it back. ‘Here we are again. A week into our holiday and you’re already back at work. Why am I here with you when you’ve always got something better to do?’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Why not? Where are we going with this? Between your past and your work, there’s never any space for us.’

‘There’s no other person in the world I could have told that story to. Not even Toby. I can’t be myself with anyone else the way I can be with you. I know you, Grace. You don’t drop your guard with anyone else the way you do with me.’

‘But you still can’t make more time for us even when you say you will.’ She stubbed out her cigarette angrily. ‘God, this is all so messy, so dangerous. You could lose everything over this.’

‘That doesn’t have to include us. Let me put this tape back in my safe. Then we can call it a night. We don’t get much time together. Let’s take the times we can. They’re the best part of my life.’

‘Then why do you ration them?’ she asked, raising that eyebrow again. ‘You can promise me something before we do anything, Paul.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t lock me out of this. You said it yourself, this information is dangerous to know. Well, I do know it now and you’re right, it is dangerous. You can tell me what’s going on from now on. Especially if you’re in there watching it.’

‘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.

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.