Alex Palmer: The Tattooed Man

‘We can hear you back there,’ Sam called in a slightly sing-song voice. ‘Here we all are in the dark. You can’t see us and we can’t see you. Isn’t that fun?’

Yes, I can, Harrigan thought. Again he was moving to the end of the bench when there was a struggle near the door, then a cry of pain from Brinsmead. DP was scrambling away in the dark.

‘Get him!’ Brinsmead shouted.

The torchlight flashed again, followed by a shot. DP was seen rolling away but not quickly enough to dodge a bullet. Sam was in outline to the side. Harrigan saw DP’s gun in the centre of the floor. He had been reaching to it when the bullet hit. His blood was highlighted blue in the light against the floor. Harrigan fired at Sam but she had hit the ground. The room plunged into darkness again.

‘Dead as a door nail,’ Sam said, catching her breath. ‘I wanted to drag it out.’

Harrigan fired in the direction of her voice but to no effect.

‘Door, Danny! Now! Keep low.’

There were quick footsteps in the dark.

‘What do we do?’ Grace asked. ‘Rush them?’

‘They’re probably planning to rush us. Let’s get either side of the door. All of us. No point in anyone staying back here now. Someone get DP’s gun.’

They moved forward in the shadows. A sustained flurry of shots from the door cracked over the benchtop. The monkeys shrieked and ran. Harrigan heard the crack of glass above his head; it fell to the floor beside him, splintering.

Sam appeared as a tall shadow in the dark, running towards him, the flashes from her gun lighting the room into disjointed sequences. Harrigan felt the bullets whiz past his head, he hit the floor. All the lights came on in one glaring burst. At the same time, a monkey landed full on Sam’s face, panicking. It clung on.

‘Get it off me,’ Sam yelled, dragging at it with one hand.

Elena ran past Harrigan, grabbed DP’s gun and shot Sam in the chest several times. Sam crumpled to the floor, the monkey still clinging to her shoulder. It was dead too.

Blinking in the light, Harrigan looked for Grace. She lay face down on the floor behind him, blood seeping from her head.

Suddenly, Brinsmead was in front of Elena, staring at her. He walked towards her slowly. She kept the gun on him. He had his own gun but was holding it by his side. She backed away, then stopped.

‘You’re not going to frighten me,’ she said.

Harrigan turned Grace over. Her face was intact. A cut was scored along the side of her head through her hair but she was breathing. His terror subsided.

‘What are you going to do, kill me?’ Brinsmead was saying. ‘I don’t care. You’ve just killed my only true friend.’

‘In self-defence,’ Elena said. ‘She was a cold-blooded murderer.’

‘So are you.’

He was very close to Elena now. Slowly she kept moving backwards.

‘Brinsmead, get away from her,’ Harrigan shouted. He was on his feet but he was too late.

‘Watch this, Elena. Live with this. Dream it for the rest of your life. You can’t hide from this.’

Brinsmead fired, not at Elena but at himself. She staggered back, screaming. His blood stained her face and her clothing. Then he was falling to the floor with the rest of the dead.

Elena threw away her gun. She scrabbled at Sam’s clothing. She had the flash drive. She looked around and found the contract against the wall.

Harrigan had turned Grace on her side so she could breathe and was trying to stop the bleeding from her wound. ‘Never mind that,’ he shouted at Elena. ‘Help me here.’

But Elena was scrabbling at du Plessis, then she was gone.

Harrigan had no choice: he went after Elena. He wasn’t going to have her lock them in the animal house while she cleaned up around her. Outside, at the juncture of the corridors, he couldn’t see which way she had gone. Then something occurred to him. He ran upstairs to the laboratory. She was there, standing in front of a wall furnace. The lights and the thermostat indicated it was on at a very high temperature. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away.

‘You can’t open it,’ she said. ‘It’s locked and I’m not going to open it for you. It’s very hot in there. If you could open it, you’d burn yourself badly.’

He looked around. Not only had she burned the contract, she had cleaned up the cage with its dead mice and pieces of grain and presumably thrown them in there as well.

‘You’ve won,’ he said. ‘Even if you had to kill a string of people to do it.’

She turned on him. Her hair and clothes were still covered in blood. ‘I killed one woman in self-defence because I had to. What have I supposedly won? I’m a businesswoman with assets to protect. That’s all I’ve done.’

‘When we were down in that animal house, you didn’t tell us those lights were going to come on. You would have let us die in there to protect yourself.’

‘I saved all our lives by removing a killer.’

‘You tried to alert your own paid killer to where we were. What was du Plessis doing here?’

‘Wasn’t he with them? I don’t know him.’

‘When you got away from Sam, why didn’t you reverse the lockdowns? Was it because you knew DP was coming and you wanted to give him a chance to get on with the job?’

‘I had to hide in the dark. If I’d gone to my office, she would have found me.’

‘How did he get past the front gate, let alone open the emergency exit from the outside? Sam said you were the only one who could do that.’

‘No, Daniel could have set that up. Maybe he was trapping that man as well as us. Anyway, how do you know he got in that way?’

‘I saw it happen. I bet you’d reached breaking point. When was it? The day I was here and Daniel told me loud and clear the kind of information I would find in the Pittwater contract? I bet you told DP to get after him as soon as he could. What did you do? Tell the guards at the gate that no matter what happened, they were to let him in? What did you take off DP just now? His mobile? You gave him the code to open the door. You said, get Brinsmead out of my life once and for all, I don’t care what it involves. Get rid of his body. This wouldn’t be the only furnace in this place. Or maybe he was supposed to make it look like suicide.’

‘If you repeat what you’ve just said in public, I’ll sue you until you have nothing left to stand up in. Now leave me alone.’

‘I need a phone. I need to call an ambulance and I need backup. This place will be swarming with police and you’ll have to put up with it.’

‘Believe me, I’ll cooperate. I always cooperate with the police. You can use my office.’

They walked in silence down to her office, each withdrawing from the other’s presence. She took a mobile phone out of a drawer in her desk and threw it to him without looking at him.

‘Where’s your other phone?’ he asked.

‘Still in her pocket.’

The her was said with detestation.

‘We’ll take it in and examine it for evidence.’

‘Go ahead. I don’t care if you do.’

Of course she didn’t. If she had received a cryptic message from her hired killer, it would be sourced to someone or something innocent.

He started to make his calls. She sat at her desk and began to work on her computer.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Reversing the lockdowns.’

‘Leave the doors open in this sector.’

‘I have to close the animal house.’

He leaned over her desk. ‘Grace is in there. Leave it open. If you close that door, you’ll regret it. Now, I’ve got people on the way, they’ll need to talk to you. Just sit here. Don’t worry, I won’t come anywhere near you if I don’t have to. Believe me.’