6
The sound of Harrigan’s mobile penetrated his sleep. He woke to the sense of Grace’s body curled next to his. Otherwise, the room was airless, oppressive. Already it had started to grow hot. He fumbled for the phone.
‘Commander Harrigan?’ He recognised the voice of Chloe, the commissioner’s personal assistant. ‘The commissioner has sent you an email, one that’s been generally distributed to the public. He would like you to look at it and call him back.’
Harrigan glanced at the clock. It was later than he normally slept; the room was bright with morning sunlight. Grace turned towards him, smiling, sleepy-eyed, her hair falling in thick, dark strands across her bare shoulder.
‘I’ll call within the hour,’ he said.
‘The commissioner said as soon as possible.’
‘Wait for the call.’
‘What is it?’ Grace asked.
Harrigan lay back on his pillows. ‘The commissioner’s sent me an email. He wants me to look at it.’
‘You’d better do what he wants in that case,’ she said dryly.
That was the worst of mobile telephones. They let people like the commissioner invade the privacy of your bedroom. If Harrigan had still been a smoker, he would have lit a cigarette. Instead, he pulled on a pair of shorts and went down to his study. Grace appeared in the doorway behind him while his laptop was firing up, wrapped in her red kimono.
‘Why don’t you come in and have a look?’ he said. ‘I don’t think this is just “Good morning, how are you?”’
‘I’ve never been in here before,’ she said. ‘It’s always looked too private.’
‘This is where I keep myself to myself. Come in. Take the weight off your feet.’
‘Do you mind if I open the window?’
‘Go ahead.’
The morning air carried into the stuffy room the sweet smell of jasmine from an ancient vine that covered the length of the garden fence. Harrigan’s study was upstairs at the back of the house. At night, from the window, he could see the lights of Louisa Road reflected in the water across the bay. His study was a bare room, the furniture spare and the floorboards covered with a worn imitation Persian rug. His bookcases lined one wall; his safe, two chairs and his desk, which was made of old dark wood and had come with the house, made up the rest.
Grace sat in his spare chair. In the morning light, her skin was shadowed to a soft pearl. She studied the contents of his bookcases. Journals on law and policing, digests on forensic medicine and psychology, mixed with Norman Mailer’s The Fight and The Executioner’s Song. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Ellroy’s My Dark Places shared space with Crime and Punishment, The Devils. Histories of racing and boxing stood next to them. On a shelf not completely full were a pair of Harrigan’s own boxing gloves, from a time when, as a twenty year old, he had tried unsuccessfully to make a career as a boxer. Even if the attempt had been a failure, he still remembered it as a gap in his life when his time had been his own.
‘Do you only ever read books on crime?’ she asked.
‘Of course not. I read the form guide as well.’
He saw her looking at the wall above his desk. His law degree hung beside a collection of prints, reproductions of works by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya that Harrigan had bought overseas years ago. Savage satire from The Caprichos mixed with horrors from The Disasters of War. He watched her look at these representations of bizarre human folly hung alongside those showing useless fighting, massacre and the dead. Facsimiles of the original nineteenth-century Spanish publications of Goya’s collected series of prints were visible on the shelf beside his desk. Beside them was an outsized book titled simply Goya.
‘You’re a fan,’ she said.
‘He’s an obsession of mine. I’m like that. Once I decide I want something, I hang on to it.’
She got up from the chair and went to look at the prints. ‘And still they won’t go!’ she said aloud, reading the title of one. Misshapen yet human creatures desperately held up a monolith about to crush them while nonetheless staying huddled beneath where it would fall.
‘Don’t you think people are like that?’ he said.
‘It’s grotesque.’
‘It’s people who are grotesque. He’s showing us what we are.’
‘What about this one?’ she asked.
One can’t look. Unseen soldiers thrust bayonets in from the right of the print, towards huddled people waiting in terror on their summary and bloody massacre. Pity had been expunged from the etched shadows.
‘You have to look,’ Harrigan said. ‘That’s the point.’
‘You don’t think it’s sadistic?’
‘No. It’s about sadism. It’s a voice for all the people who die like that. The man who drew that is bringing them back to life. That’s an accusation.’
‘It’s a fine line. Why did he draw things like this?’
‘It’s what he saw in his own life. He lived through a civil war. He put it down on paper.’
‘They’re all so bleak,’ she said. ‘Except when you get to her. What’s she? Rest and recreation?’
Separated out from the rest was a print of one of Goya’s paintings, The Naked Maja. She seemed to smile out of the picture, looking directly at the watcher, both an enigma and a challenge.
‘I like her,’ he said. ‘She’s beautiful. Like you.’
She gave him a half-smile that was slightly self-deprecating. He often thought Grace didn’t seem to know how lovely she was. When they had first met, he’d been harsh towards her, too harsh. At the time, he’d said it was the fault of the pressure of his work. He regretted it now and hoped he had made up for it since, even given the time his job took out of their relationship. What do you see in me? A question he wasn’t going to ask her. Just keep seeing it.
‘Why do you have these on the wall? Why do you need to look at them?’ she asked.
‘I don’t look at them all the time. Sometimes I take them down and put them away because I don’t want to see them for a while. I just need to know they’re there. They take the pressure out of my head.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I see things like this all the time in my job and I can’t pretend I don’t. This is what we do to each other every day. I know what that means. Someone else knew that as well. They knew enough to put it down on paper like this so it has some meaning.’
‘Someone else knew how we get a real thrill out of hurting each other,’ she said softly. ‘That won’t ever change.’
He wondered what lay behind her words. Perhaps, since he was opening himself up to her like this, he should have asked her. He knew that she had grown up in New Guinea, a childhood that was still a vivid and beautiful dream in her mind. The dream had been shattered when her mother had died suddenly of cerebral malaria when Grace was fourteen. Her father had brought them all back to Australia where Grace had spun off into a cycle of wildness that hadn’t ended until she was in her twenties. For a few years she had been an alcoholic, although no one would have ever guessed that now. Somewhere along the way she had also acquired a faint scar that ran like a silken thread down the length of her neck. He had never asked her and she had never told him who had put it there or why. All the times they had made love, he’d never once intentionally touched it or put his mouth to it.
‘I’d better see what the commissioner wants.’
She looked over his shoulder as he opened his inbox. Three emails, all with the same subject line and attachments, were waiting for him. Two had been forwarded: one from his son, the second from the commissioner. The third had been sent directly to his personal address from an unknown source. The time identified them as being sent sometime after midnight. The subject line read: They gather for the feast. Harrigan opened the one addressed to him first. The message consisted of a URL followed by the words: Ex-Detective Senior Sergeant Michael Cassatt leaves his grave and arrives at Natalie Edwards’ table at Pittwater for dinner.