Alex Palmer - The Tattooed Man

He studied the brochure for several moments. The photographs of two individuals smiled out at him: the minister he had just met, and Dr Elena Calvo, an attractive, fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties. Her biography gave an impressive list of achievements. It identified her as born in Switzerland and having lived in various countries in Europe and the United States before making London her home. Now she intended to establish her business in Australia. A habitual questioner, Harrigan’s first thought was, why come here, all the way to the other side of the world? Aren’t we out of the way? What do we have that you want?

He read further. The brochure highlighted LPS’s signature project: wide-ranging research into the regeneration of the human body following major burns, carried out under the direction of an English-born scientist, Dr Daniel Brinsmead. Harrigan glanced over Brinsmead’s resume, an imposing list of academic qualifications including a stint at the British army officer-training academy at Sandhurst. There was no picture of Brinsmead but judging from the dates attached to his qualifications he must have been in his early forties. Harrigan closed the brochure, returned it to his diary and put both back on the passenger seat.

Knowing that she was genuine didn’t dispel the sense of unease Sam Jonas had left him with. Unwillingly, he found himself comparing her to Grace. Grace Riordan was ten years younger than he was and, to Harrigan’s mind, an unlikely woman to find in his profession. A trained police officer, she had walked into his life eighteen months ago when she had briefly worked for him on his homicide squad. Usually he was too ruthless to become involved with someone in these circumstances; it could have meant death for his ambitions. But fate was kind to him, giving him an out, removing them both from each other’s workplaces. At almost the same time, he had been elevated into his current position and she had got a job working in a joint state-federal task force called Orion, supposedly dealing with intelligence coordination. In reality, Harrigan was fairly certain it was an anti-terrorism unit although he had never asked Grace if this was so. Their occupations built walls of secrecy into their relationship whether they liked it or not.

With no disrespect to Grace’s talents, which he admired, he had wondered if it had been her father’s name that had swung that job in her favour. She was the daughter of a retired brigadier, a man who had fought in the Vietnam war and been awarded the Military Cross. In the present, Kep Riordan was best known for writing sharply perceptive columns on defence matters for various newspapers and magazines. He was more a dove than a hawk these days but it was still the type of pedigree people in the intelligence business valued.

It had taken Harrigan some time to get past Grace’s particular armours-the face paint, the dull suits she wore to work-to find the other woman, the one who liked to dress up in party frocks and go out and enjoy herself. The one he had just left standing once again to come up here. This time, even he knew he was pushing it.

With her guard on, Grace was calm. Without the guard, her emotions were powerful. In contrast, Sam Jonas seemed cold; she had brushed off his questions, and him, as if both were small, blind flies. ‘I’ll check you out,’ he said to her absent presence. ‘I’ll find out who you really are and what you really want.’

He drove away, noticing from the gauge on the car’s dashboard that the temperature outside was 37 °C. It needn’t concern him; secure in his air-conditioned car, he could discount the weather as an irrelevancy. He reached the main road south quickly, merging into the stream of traffic. The grey bitumen had become silver, the colour of solidified water. Around him, burnished car bodies glinted in the sunlight.

Sam Jonas couldn’t stay in his head; neither could Grace. The Ice Cream Man erased them both. Rumour had it that when Cassatt had joined the force back in the early seventies, his first commanding officer had ridiculed both his background (said to be French, from New Caledonia, a generation or two back) and his wog name, and had introduced the new boy to everyone as the Cassata. Over time, the Cassata became the Ice Cream Man, the man who gave out the sweets. By then, people had stopped laughing at him for any reason.

Harrigan turned off his mobile phone. White external light burned the road ahead. The scene in his mind was night-time in a back alleyway in Marrickville those ten days after his father’s funeral, where he had gone supposedly to meet an informant. The arrangement had been a trap. Around him, out of the dark, three other policemen had appeared: Jerry Freeman, Joe Saba (dead years ago, found shot, slumped over his steering wheel one Sunday morning early) and Mike Cassatt.

Their punches hit home into his ribcage, knocking the air out of his lungs. With a crack to his head with a nightstick, Saba sent him to the roadway barely conscious. His attackers pitched into him with ferocious, incessant kicks, all three laughing, high as kites. Cassatt was almost choking with glee. He spoke: ‘Get him up.’ Saba and Freeman dragged Harrigan onto his knees, standing either side to hold him upright. He swayed in their grip, wondering why he kept blinking, only later understanding that his blood had been pouring down his face. Cassatt pulled his head up by the hair.

‘The joke’s on you this time, Paulie. You’ve fucked me around once too often. You’re going to do this to yourself. You’re going to paint your brains on a paling fence.’

There was shrill laughter from one of the men holding him, he still didn’t know who. Cassatt squeezed Harrigan’s hands around his own gun and pushed it against Harrigan’s clenched mouth, his clenched teeth, with all the obscenity of a cock.

‘You’re dead, mate.’

Words spoken with utter joy. Through his blinking eyes, he had seen Cassatt’s face up close. His eyes were half-closed, his mouth was set in a strange half-smile. Transfigured with ecstasy on the edge of the single moment when he would see the back of Harrigan’s head shatter.

There had been a glitch in time in which Harrigan felt his body dissolve and a black pit open underneath him. Then all at once they were dazzled by car headlights turned on them at high beam. For whatever reason, pinned in this light, Cassatt had not forced a shot from Harrigan’s own hand. He smashed his jaw with the gun instead. ‘Run!’ he shouted. They threw him forwards onto the laneway and were gone, all three, while he lay there in atrocious pain, astonished to be alive.

Harrigan, driving through the strip of shops fronting Collaroy beach, found himself in slow traffic. He turned into the parking area next to the surf club, fluking a spot vacated by someone else. Leaving his car there, he walked the short distance to the beach. It was crowded with sunbakers in luminous costumes. The hot wind carried the sound of their laughter, of people’s small screams when they ran into the water. Swimmers dotted a blue sea too flat for surfers; mothers held their tiny naked children by the hand on the edge of the immense Pacific. With pink plastic bubbles wrapped around their arms, the toddlers danced in the docile waves. The sea and the sky had the shining sticky liquidity of melted ice cream.

Harrigan sat down in the sand. With his index finger, he traced the slightly uneven line of his reconstructed jaw, feeling the old ache come to life like a twist of hot wire in the bone. His life had teetered in a fragment of time, perhaps no longer than the blink of his eye. In that instant, his fear had peeled him to the bone. Bare-headed in the heat of the late sun, he was cold with the memory. Handfuls of hot sand slid through his fingers. He thought of Cassatt’s death mask. The man’s preserved skin, his shrunken face, merged into one with the colour of the sand.