Alex Palmer: The Tattooed Man

The dead sat at the table like those who are about to eat but never will. Dinner plates set before them contained a meal left untouched. Their rested mouths, their closed eyes, the unshifting weight of their bodies, had a finality beyond waking. A middle-aged woman sat between an older man and a teenage boy. She wore a diamond pendant that caught the glittering rays of the sun. Her sideways-tilted head, its artificial honey curls, leaned towards the teenage boy across a short but unreachable distance. The boy looked the most peaceful of them all. His head hung downwards and his black hair shone in the sun. His stained T-shirt was emblazoned with the word Nature in letters formed out of intertwined trees. In contrast, the older man had been caught out in the most unexpected surprise. He leaned backwards, mouth open, arms loose at his sides, his glasses opaque in the white light.

The fourth guest, seated at the head of the table, was naked. This corpse was mummified, its skin wrinkled, its face and body withered almost past recognition. One of its dry hands rested on a thick bound document placed beside its table setting, the blue cover stained with blood like the white cloth beneath.

Paul Harrigan thought he must be the only living person left in existence. Somehow he had walked unaided into the land of the dead, a stony landscape that gave no relief from the heat. With a movement that might have seemed an act of grieving, he squatted down beside the fourth and naked body. In the white glare of the sunlight, it grinned nothingness at him. Gently Harrigan reached forward and with his gloved hand extracted the bound booklet from beneath the dead man’s hand.

He stood up. These motionless figures created a pool of silence, but there was no quietness, only the anticipation of further violence waiting its turn. Whichever way he turned, they drained his energy out of him. They seemed to reach up and tug at his sleeve, to draw him down to sit at their table in their permanent stillness. The air carried the stench of a powerful insect repellent; he could not breathe. This was breaking point. The job did not call for more than this, not even from him.

‘Get on with it,’ he said, and stepped out of the way of the watching forensic team. They moved past him in a small crowd to resume their jobs, their footsteps clattering on the paving stones. Blue police ribbons hung lifeless in the hot air.

Harrigan turned to his 2IC who had come to stand beside him. Trevor Gabriel was a big man, round-headed and broad-shouldered with almost no neck. Harrigan was as tall but without Trevor’s bulk.

‘How long have they been here?’ he asked.

‘A bit less than twenty-four hours,’ Trevor replied. ‘That’s exactly how we found them, down to the last detail.’

‘Jesus,’ Harrigan said softly, feeling the impact rock him. ‘Come to dinner, pay with your life, and you don’t even get to eat. Take me through it one more time. Who are they?’

Trevor ran his hand over his close-cut black hair, a gesture that was the equivalent of a shrug.

‘The body at the end. Who knows? It’s got no ID, nothing. According to his credit cards, the man with the glasses is Jerome Beck. He’s not known to us. The woman is Natalie Edwards. Definitely known to us and this is her house. The boy is her son, Julian. He’s nineteen. I doubt he was an intended target. I’m told he came home early from a camping trip. Poor bloody kid. It was wrong place, wrong time for him.’

Harrigan said nothing at first. He hated this, walking in on scenes where all he could do was clean up afterwards. When did he ever stop anything like this from happening?

‘Who gave you that information?’ he asked.

‘His father. He’s sitting in the government car outside. Senator Allan Edwards, the federal Minister for Science and Technology. He’s the one who called us.’

Harrigan drew on his extensive store of Sydney scuttlebutt. The senator and Natalie Edwards, a well-known businesswoman with a dubious reputation as a money launderer, had been divorced for more than fifteen years after a short, stormy marriage. Back then, the senator had been Allan Edwards, businessman. His political ambitions had been realised only after his marriage had died.

‘I saw him when I went out to talk to the press just now,’ Harrigan said. ‘What was he doing here? His ex-wife didn’t pick up the phone and say drop by and see me.’

‘He had an appointment. It’s in her diary. He says he wants to tell us why he was here but so far he can’t put two sentences together. Can’t say I blame him.’

Harrigan looked around. This was a private place for a killing: a large house in the leafy, far northern waterside suburbs of Sydney. The patio was a contained circle surrounded by the thick barrier of a tall silver-green hedge. A narrow archway gave a view onto Pittwater, dotted with yachts and pleasure craft on this hot Sunday afternoon in early December. The place would not stay so self-contained for long. The dead had become a public exhibit to be dissected with a painstaking scrutiny. An enthusiastic audience in the shape of the media was already outside on the street, beating at the front gate.

‘How did they die?’ he asked.

‘Leaving out our man on the end there, one shot only to the back of the head for each of them sometime between eight and eleven last night. It was very clean shooting by somebody who knew how to do it. It was all over in a few seconds.’

Clean wasn’t a word Harrigan would have used just then. He had been dragged out here during the first days of his summer leave, travelling the distance across greater Sydney to see this grotesquery.

‘How many killers? One, or more than one?’ he asked.

‘Impossible to say. Could be just one person. We’re looking at a teenage boy and two middle-aged people, all soft targets.’

‘Is this a ritual killing, or an execution, or both?’

‘Whatever it is, it’s professional and they must have used silencers. Otherwise they’d have woken up the neighbours.’

‘Considerate bunch, aren’t they?’ Harrigan grinned blackly. ‘And they brought the mummy at the head of the table with them?’

‘Had to have. He wasn’t lying around the house for them to use.’

Harrigan couldn’t prevent a harsh, short laugh. ‘Who are these people? Why do this?’

He became aware that he still held the bloodstained booklet in his hand. He began to leaf through the thick bound document. It was a detailed and complex scientific specification fronted by an equally complex-looking contract. Each page, the cover included, was marked with the same identifying number.

‘Is this the only copy? When you’re signing a contract like this, aren’t there usually two of them?’

‘That’s the only one we’ve found so far. You’d have to say they wanted us to find it. It couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d nailed it to the fucking front door.’

Harrigan read over the preamble. Agricultural produce grown according to the attached scientific specification was to be supplied by the International Agricultural Research Consortium to an organisation called World Food and Crop Providers. The address on the contract placed the latter’s offices in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their CEO had already signed; a name unknown to Harrigan. In contrast, the spaces beside the printed names of the three principals for the Consortium were blank. Two of the unsigned names were only too well known to him.

‘Jerome Beck, Natalie Edwards and Stuart Morrissey, all directors of this consortium,’ he said. ‘Head offices, York Street, Sydney. That’s Morrissey’s business address. What would Edwards and Morrissey be doing involved in agricultural research?’