Alex Palmer - The Tattooed Man

As carefully as he could, he took the keys to the Cage out of his pocket and threw them on the table. They landed on the note they had come with. They were a dead man’s keys, surely. If the woman, Natalie Edwards, had been shot dead, then one of those unnamed bodies up at Pittwater must be the man who had been here with her, Jerome. For whatever reason, Stuart hadn’t been with them when they were shot. That was Stuart. A survivor.

Don’t tell Stewie you have these keys or these specimens. That was an imperative. Harold got to his feet and went to ring a neighbour to ask if someone could drive him to the local hospital. For the first time in years, he would have to see a doctor. Go to the police, the note had said. There was someone he could call on but he needed time to think the matter through and make that decision. Always Harold needed time, even when it felt like life and death.

On Bondi beach, swimmers body-surfed the bright water, sunbathers gleamed with lotion on the sand. Grace sat on her beach towel. She thought about her life, her own happiness (whether such a thing was possible), and Harrigan, his moods, the way they made love. His mouth on hers, the impression of each of their bodies to the other’s. Grace cradled her arms about herself in the hot sun, reliving last night’s memory, balanced on the tightrope between joy and heartbreak.

She had decided years ago there was only a thread between life and death. Live with this belief on a daily basis and happiness becomes a possibility you respect. A conundrum for you, Gracie. Are happiness and Harrigan each other’s contrariety or are they indivisible? Or both, a paradox?

Gently, she touched the dressing on her arm where the splinter of broken glass had nicked her skin. All that violence trapped in your head, Paul. Those black moods you have. The way you wake up thrashing at night. All those nightmares hung on the wall of your study where you sit in solitude and think. How do I deal with it? How do I stop it hurting me?

Even before she had met him, people had told her he was driven. In the short time that she worked for him, she had seen how he drove everyone else just as hard. He was still consumed by his work. She had thought it was an addiction, now she was sure. Stop working and he would die because he had nothing else to do. Where did she fit in? In the margins of exhaustion at the end of the day, a space between midnight and dawn. It was no place to live.

‘Gracie. I was hoping I might see you down here today. Mind if I sit down?’

Grace looked up to see Jerry Freeman, a pale figure in a yellow shirt patterned with huge orange and green pineapples, lowering himself down beside her on the sand. He dropped a worn sports bag between them and adjusted a scrappy straw hat. His shapeless polyester trousers and plastic sandals were grey against the sand.

‘What do you want? Get away from me.’

The words came out as a softly spoken visceral rejection. Her aversion and anger at his intrusion were equally mixed. The sole time Grace had met Freeman had been one morning eighteen months ago in a side street near Central station where a young sex worker, Gina Farrugia, and her petty dealer boyfriend had been found murdered. The girl had been Grace’s informant; they had met only the night before. In the grey wash of the winter dawn the two had lain against the alleyway wall while Freeman, one of the investigating officers, had grinned at Grace and quizzed her. Harrigan, waiting impatiently in the background, had later spoken to her with unconscious intensity. Leave it alone, he’d said. Whatever else she did, she should stay away from Freeman. The implication had been that he wasn’t just involved but responsible. But if that was true, he wasn’t only their murderer. As Harrigan himself had told her, Freeman had almost been his killer as well.

‘Jesus, mate, don’t look at me like that. I just want to talk to you. You can’t be frightened of me. Look at me. I’m too fucking sick!’

Fear was the last thing on Grace’s mind, her anger was stronger. But she knew he had been sick. About a year ago, Freeman had been invalided out of the force with heart disease. Frenzied rumours about his activities had followed him out the door. Three months ago, he had been hospitalised again. Grace remembered a bulky man. He had lost weight, his skin was translucent in the sun. It was a body like a curtain barely in place. He seemed so frail you could push him over with a single touch. It was hard to fear someone who looked so broken-down.

‘I don’t care if you are or you aren’t,’ she said. ‘Why should I talk to you?’

Freeman glanced around at the sunbakers, then leaned forward and spoke in a low, gravelly voice.

‘Because if you don’t, Paulie’s going to be in shit up to his neck. He’ll be out on the street looking for a new job. Unless you want that to happen, you’ll listen. If you care, that is.’

There were few hooks more effective than this one. She did care, more than she remembered caring for anyone else. However much she read her heart, there was no way around it. She and Harrigan were too entangled. He mattered to her too much. She felt the same sharp fear she had felt last night, that something could happen to wreck his life.

‘Talk to him yourself.’

‘You think he wants to talk to me? You think he wants to sit in the same room as me and listen to what I’ve got to say?’

She understood Harrigan well enough to know this would make him sick in mind and body. If Harrigan was back on the job, Grace decided she could be as well, at least for as long as it took to find out what Freeman had to say. He could be any other slimebag she might have to deal with in her usual line of work. The field work she had done for the organisation she worked for, Orion, had brought her into contact with people just as bad as Freeman. Like him, they all had information you needed even if they were dangerous.

‘How did you know I’d be down here?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t. But after I watched the news on TV this morning, I thought maybe I’ll go down to Bondi on the off chance. You’re usually around this stretch of the beach somewhere sometime.’ Freeman squinted in the sun. ‘Did you know I used to see you here pretty often before I went into hospital? Don’t worry, I wasn’t watching you. I’ve lived around here all my life. I’ve come down here whenever I could this last year. Just to be here. I’m dying, you see. I’m supposed to be in a hospice but I came home a few days ago. I’m not going to die in a place like that. I’m going to die in the house I was born in. Now look at this. Not the front page. Open it to where it’s folded.’

He handed her a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. A small photograph was pinned to the inside page. The angle showed it had been taken with a secret camera. A group of men were sitting around a table in a house somewhere. Grace recognised Marvin Tooth’s son, Baby Tooth; the Ice Cream Man himself; Stuart Morrissey; and the man she had seen on the net that morning, Jerome Beck. The table was covered with the remains of a meal. The used plates and empty wine glasses had been pushed out of the way and what looked like a marketable quantity of tablets had been placed in the centre. Ecstasy, she assumed. There was a time and date stamp in the right-hand bottom corner from about five months ago.

‘That’s our syndicate, mine and Mike’s,’ Freeman said quietly. ‘You know, peddling the usual shit. Ice, E, a bit of coke, all that. Baby Tooth was our man on the job. Stewie used to clean the money for us. Him and Nattie Edwards. The man with the glasses is some arsehole Stewie brought along called Jerome Beck. Maybe you know the name, maybe you don’t. But I bet you’ve seen him before. A man who looks an awful lot like him just had his picture splashed all over the net, dead as a dodo.’