‘I’m finished here, mate,’ he said to Trevor, who had stopped with him. ‘I’ll go now.’
‘Boss,’ Trevor said, ‘are you running this investigation? Or are you on leave? Because if you’re not here, it’s Marvin in charge.’
Grace couldn’t have asked the question better herself. The way things were, the commissioner had left it to Harrigan and Marvin to fight it out in the mud.
‘Consider me in charge,’ Harrigan said. ‘I may not be here all the time but when I said nothing is going to happen I don’t know about, I meant it. You map out your main lines of investigation and then we work out where this investigation goes together. You take direction from me, not Marvin. If he gives you grief, you call me. I’ll put him back in his coffin with a stake through his heart.’
Trevor laughed. ‘No worries. It’ll be good to have you on board. Did you get on to Ambro?’
‘I couldn’t make contact last night. I’ll try again today. You’ll hear from me as soon as I do. A word of friendly advice before I go. Edwards was right. Watch your back. I don’t know what’s Marvin’s up to but be very careful what you say to him from now on.’
‘He’s just an arsehole. For all I know, he wants to big-note himself in front of a federal government minister.’
‘Maybe. Just don’t let him bait you.’
There was more to this than Marvin’s ego, unbridled as it was, but Harrigan kept this judgement to himself. The tension and strain about Trevor was deepening. The Tooth was good at pressuring people; the ultimate aim always being to drive them out of their jobs. In Harrigan’s opinion, this time it was personal as well as political. Marvin was indulging in a very private antagonism towards Trevor. Probably it added spice to the exercise.
Driving out of the car park, Harrigan contemplated a world that existed outside of his job. Maybe one day he would discover how to inhabit it. He should try to contact Ambrosine but right now he needed to feel human. He rang Cotswold House to see what Toby was doing.
‘Come over,’ Susie said. ‘Have a late lunch.’
Harrigan had turned off his phone just before he had gone into the commissioner’s office to meet the minister. There were messages waiting for him but he ignored them. He turned the phone off again. He needed an hour in which no demands were made of him. Like Grace, Toby was someone he could talk to. A relief from being always locked inside that dark enclosure in his head. There were times when his own thoughts were the worst kind of solitary confinement.
9
In the clear late morning, Harold could see the courier coming from a distance. Glinting in the sun, the van crossed the bridge over Naradhan Creek and drove across the Creek Lane into his open gate directly opposite where the bridge met the lane. It sped up the track that led to the farmhouse drawing a plume of red dust behind it.
Harold’s weatherboard house had been built almost a century ago on a low rise where it had a view of the country for miles around. From the house, a long, low slope led down to the Creek Lane, a dry-weather dirt road which, like a length of discarded snake skin, followed the path of Naradhan Creek, a now dry watercourse that made up Harold’s southern boundary. Here, the old Creek Bridge formed a junction between the Creek Lane and the Coolemon Road, which didn’t cross the creek bed there but continued along on the opposite bank, crossing at a wider and newer bridge several kilometres away. After crossing this bridge, the road did a dog’s leg around the back of Yaralla before heading across country. When the strangers who visited the Cage trespassed on Harold’s property, they always drove in via the Coolemon Road to Stuart’s locked gate. Other people, like the approaching courier, came in through the open front gate to the house.
Harold was sitting out on his front veranda having a late morning tea after feeding his stock. As well as its view of the landscape, the front veranda looked directly onto the ruins of the gardens Harold’s mother had cultivated when he was a boy. Once these gardens had bloomed in a profusion of roses and exotic flowers. All that remained of them now was a sundial, stretches of subsiding, antridden paving and stands of well-grown red flowering coral gums, one of the few native plants his mother had liked. They had self-seeded and spread, and were now encroaching into the pepper trees on the south-western side of the house. The other plants were either dead or dying and stood as bare sentinels between the farmhouse and the house paddock. Even if Harold had had the time for a garden, these days there was no water to spare for it.
Rosie was beside him; as usual she sat up and started to bark as soon as she heard the van coming up the track. ‘Quiet, girl,’ he said, and got to his feet. With Rosie trotting after him, he walked down the side of the house to meet the courier. It was cooler here in this broad avenue shaded by the pepper trees. They stretched in a line down to the main yard, forming a barrier against the sun and wind. This avenue had once been intended as a driveway. Now it was partially blocked by the house water tank, which stood as an obstacle to be skirted between the pepper trees and laundry. Harold reached the yard just as the van came bumping into sight over the uneven ground. It was a private firm he’d not heard of before: Everyday Express.
‘Harold Morrissey,’ the courier said. ‘Sign here.’
Harold took the small square parcel into the kitchen and opened it. Nestled on a piece of paper was a set of keys attached to a heavy bronze keyring, a football with Juventus written across it. The last time he had seen these keys, they’d been sitting on the coffee table in his living room; the man called Jerome had picked them up and put them in his pocket. Harold took the piece of paper out of the small box and unfolded it.
Go and see what’s inside your brother’s fence. Take some specimens. Get them tested at a laboratory. Tell the police. Find out what’s really growing on your property.
Harold looked at the parcel again. There was a return address along with a telephone number. He rang it only to hear a recorded message telling him the number he had dialled was not connected. The return address must be equally false. After a few moments’ thought, he searched around for his Stanley knife and a number of plastic bags. Then he picked up his own keys and walked outside, disturbing Rosie where she had settled on her blanket on the back veranda.
‘Come on, girl. We’re going for a drive.’
When he reached the Cage, it looked no different from how it had always been. He tried the keys in turn until one fitted. The gate swung open easily on well-balanced hinges. Rosie came up behind, about to follow him inside. ‘Stay,’ he ordered. ‘I don’t want you in here. Stay out!’ She sat for a few moments, then got to her feet and nosed off in another direction.
As soon as he was inside, Harold searched until he found the enclosure’s generator, the squat node of a locked steel cabinet. Once he had unlocked it, he turned the switch from On to Off. If nothing else, no more birds would electrocute themselves on the high fences. Then he looked around more carefully. Once inside the fence, there was an odd stillness to this place, a more profound silence and a sense of detachment from everything else around it.
A snaking complexity of irrigation hoses reached every plant in the enclosure. He walked up to the metal hut that housed the automatic watering system and unlocked this door as well. Nothing so sophisticated watered his pastures. Underfoot, the red ground was still dusty. This dust stained the windows of the three greenhouses built in a row. Inside the tightly sealed glass structures nothing seemed to be living except the plants. Each greenhouse was dedicated to a single crop and each crop was labelled. Two, he had recognised immediately: Nicotiana tabacum, tobacco; and Oryza sativa, rice. The third crop was unknown to him: Dioscorea rotundata, white yam. The tobacco had a faintly moist, almost slimy touch on his hands. He took specimens from each and dropped them into the plastic bags he had brought with him. All the greenhouses had showers and protective overalls hanging from pegs. One contained a set of basic living quarters: bed, hot plate, an alcove with a composting toilet. The bed had been used recently but there was no indication of who had been there.