Alex Palmer - The Tattooed Man

‘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.

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 was 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.

‘Do you only ever read books on crime?’ she asked.

‘Of course not. I read the form guide as well.’

He saw her looking at the wall above his desk. His law degree hung beside a collection of prints, reproductions of works by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya that Harrigan had bought overseas years ago. Savage satire from The Caprichos mixed with horrors from The Disasters of War. He watched her look at these representations of bizarre human folly hung alongside those showing useless fighting, massacre and the dead. Facsimiles of the original nineteenth-century Spanish publications of Goya’s collected series of prints were visible on the shelf beside his desk. Beside them was an outsized book titled simply Goya.

‘You’re a fan,’ she said.

‘He’s an obsession of mine. I’m like that. Once I decide I want something, I hang on to it.’

She got up from the chair and went to look at the prints. ‘And still they won’t go!’ she said aloud, reading the title of one. Misshapen yet human creatures desperately held up a monolith about to crush them while nonetheless staying huddled beneath where it would fall.

‘Don’t you think people are like that?’ he said.

‘It’s grotesque.’

‘It’s people who are grotesque. He’s showing us what we are.’

‘What about this one?’ she asked.

One can’t look. Unseen soldiers thrust bayonets in from the right of the print, towards huddled people waiting in terror on their summary and bloody massacre. Pity had been expunged from the etched shadows.

‘You have to look,’ Harrigan said. ‘That’s the point.’

‘You don’t think it’s sadistic?’

‘No. It’s about sadism. It’s a voice for all the people who die like that. The man who drew that is bringing them back to life. That’s an accusation.’

‘It’s a fine line. Why did he draw things like this?’

‘It’s what he saw in his own life. He lived through a civil war. He put it down on paper.’