Alex Palmer - The Tattooed Man

Harrigan smiled mordantly to consider that, purely by circumstance, he’d managed to avoid one of Marvin’s more outrageous gambits.

‘I’ll be there,’ he replied. ‘Are you asking me to break my leave?’

‘Not as such. I’m asking you to make yourself available as needed. I would expect that from all my executive officers. You will be conducting yourself as though you have nothing to hide.’

‘I have no reason to do otherwise, Commissioner.’

There was a pause. ‘There’s something else you need to know. I received an anonymous parcel this morning. It contains a dossier that appears to be from an intelligence-gathering organisation. It’s relevant to this case.’

‘Someone sent this to you?’

‘With a note that says: Read this and it will explain who Jerome Beck is. I’ve discussed it with Marvin. He thinks it’s a hoax. I don’t share that opinion. It appears the senator also received a copy of this same dossier but a day sooner than we did. That’s what he wants to discuss with us.’

‘Strange happenings, Commissioner,’ Harrigan replied.

‘Yes, unfortunately. In an hour.’

Harrigan put the phone down, reflecting that there was no mistaking the commissioner’s priorities. He went and found Grace in the bathroom where she had finished showering and was brushing out her hair.

‘They want you to go in, don’t they?’ she said.

‘In an hour. They want me to talk to the minister. I don’t have a choice. I have to go.’

‘Of course you don’t have a choice. You can’t ring them up and say I’m not coming in, my girlfriend won’t let me.’

‘You’re a lot more to me than just a girlfriend.’

She put her hairbrush back down on the vanity. Small items indicating her presence had begun to appear in his house. A bottle of her perfume on the dressing table in his bedroom; a cream silk chemise tossed over a chair; a brightly coloured packet of tampons in his bathroom cabinet.

‘But you’re still going in. You still don’t have a choice. It’s not whether either of us likes it. It’s the fact that you don’t have a choice.’

He didn’t like where she was taking this.

‘According to God, those pictures are everywhere,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘They’ve even made it to some of the newspapers this morning. It’s too much for his sensibilities.’

‘I’ll get dressed and go and get them. We should see this.’

By the time Grace came back from the corner store, he had showered, shaved and dressed and was eating a quick breakfast. She spread the papers out on the table. The headlines were ghoulish enough: Ice Cream Man’s body found in House of Death. There were photographs of Harrigan as the head of the task force together with colour pictures of Nattie Edwards’ gaudy house at Pittwater. A school photograph of Julian Edwards when he could have been no more than thirteen covered the Daily Telegraph’s front page. Harrigan could almost hear the sub-editors salivating.

‘The Australian talks about Stuart Morrissey,’ Grace said. ‘They say he had a number of business connections with Natalie Edwards. Is he involved in this?’

‘He had a deal going with Edwards and Beck. The three of them were meeting to sign a contract on the night of the murders. He didn’t turn up. I’m waiting to find out why.’

‘Beck’s just an unidentified body in these reports. No one’s even speculated about him. They’re all more interested in the Ice Cream Man.’

Harrigan glanced at his watch.

‘I have to go. What are you going to do today?’

‘What am I going to do?’ Suddenly, she couldn’t hide her disappointment. ‘I think I’ll go over to Bondi, go for a swim. I was going to cook dinner for us tonight. Is that still going to happen?’

Grace was a very good cook. It relaxed her, she said, to put food together at the end of a working day. The kitchen in her tiny flat, small as it was, was packed with cooking utensils and foodstuffs whose existence had previously been unknown to him. She did this kind of thing, took care with how they ate and drank. With her, he had dressed himself up and gone to restaurants he would otherwise never have looked inside, found himself at films, cabaret nights and concerts. He thought she was trying to civilise him. He enjoyed this, it relaxed him. Whether it was having the intended effect was another question. On the rare nights when his time was his own, he still went to the boxing. When the fighting was good, he came home feeling clean.

‘I’ll be there, if that’s what you want.’

‘Then I’ll see you.’

He tried to take her in his arms but she shrugged away from him. He went after her anyway and held on to her. They leaned against each other.

‘You don’t have to put distance between us,’ he said.

‘You don’t have time for us. You have to see the commissioner. That’s the way it always is.’

‘Just for now. You don’t have to look so sad.’

‘For now and always. You have to go. I’ll see you tonight,’ she said, this time slipping away and succeeding in putting air between them.

I’ll be there. He had said it to her, he had said it the commissioner. Always, people demanded things from him.

At his father’s funeral, Jim Harrigan’s mates had agreed there was something to be said for going out the way old Jimbo had. Propped up against the bar of the William Wallace with a half-drunk schooner of Tooheys New in front of him. As usual, Harrigan the son had different ambitions. He had no wish to live out his old age in an empty house with only a bottle of whisky for company or to be like the other men he saw in pubs, watching Fox Sports and eating alone. He had hoped Grace might be persuaded to move in one day. So far, things could not have gone worse.

Always careful with his appearance, Harrigan dressed smart casual, eschewing a tie. There had to be some benefit to supposedly being on leave. In the clear sunlight, he drove to Victoria Road and joined the city-bound traffic. Is this what I want? He had always avoided giving much time to this question. This morning it forced its way into his mind. Vehicles flowed slowly across the Anzac Bridge; traffic fumes shimmered against the concrete bulwarks lining the roadway. Through the bridge’s steel web, the sky rolled above him in a blue curve.

He felt a sense of revulsion, he couldn’t help it. Everything in him wanted to stop his car, to get out and leave it where it was; to start to walk and to keep walking; to disappear into the fabric of the city as if he had never existed, to sleep in the open with the derelicts where no one knew him. It was an instant as powerful as it was brief. He kept driving.

In the commissioner’s office, four men were waiting for him. Rumpled in a suit and tie, the minister had the same shell-shocked look as yesterday. He fidgeted with sharp and jerky movements, causing Harrigan to think of the walking wounded. Why don’t you scream at the walls? Howl? His adviser sat with him, a nondescript man who listened intently and didn’t say a word.

Opposite them was the commissioner, his thoughts impenetrable as always, his agenda beyond anyone’s surmise. An older man with an unreliable temper, he had survived the countless scandals that had plagued the force over the last thirty-five years to reach this pinnacle. Noted for being without much mercy, he had a long memory for perceived insults and past injuries, real or imaginary. Harrigan looked at his unhealthy face, his balding hair, and wondered if he would look like this when he was sixty.

The fourth man was Marvin Tooth. Unlike the others, Marvin smiled at Harrigan when he walked into the room. It was the assassin’s smile. At the sight of it, the skin between Harrigan’s shoulderblades began to itch. The media were inclined to present Marvin as a friendly grandfather, silver-haired and avuncular. Godfather would have been the more accurate description. There was nothing coy about the Tooth’s ambitions. Barring earthquake, floods or acts of God, he would be sitting in the commissioner’s chair almost as soon as it was vacated. It was fair to say he had never wanted anything else so much.