‘Did it look like this?’ Harrigan asked, showing her his own LPS badge.
‘Yeah, but it was metal, not gold. Where’d you get that?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s a tracking device. I know Mike had one. The gunman would have tracked him here using it. What did you do with it?’
‘I put it up in the roof with all the other stuff Laurie found up there. Then I told the kids to forget all about them.’
‘That’s why our friend burned your house down,’ Harrigan said. ‘He was making sure no one would find anything he’d left behind, accidentally or otherwise.’
‘It’s all gone now. Anyway, about a week after we got back, Jen comes running in. She says she’s found something in the creek about half a kilometre away. We went down there and it was a grave, you could see it. I thought, yeah, that’s Mike. After all these years, he’s finally fucking dead. I told my kids, whatever you do, you don’t tell anyone about this. It’s just between us. It’s got to stay that way.’
‘Did you ever see any other cars along here?’
‘Just the cars you always see, the farmers and that. Except we heard someone down here about a week ago. Really early in the morning last Thursday. It woke us up and freaked us out. I thought it was that South African guy coming back. But whoever it was, they just drove away. I didn’t see them or their car.’
‘What did the South African guy look like?’
‘This is him. I did this while I was waiting for you to come and talk to me. I’ve drawn you a couple of them.’
She pushed the pieces of paper across the table towards him. Harrigan found himself looking at the man he’d fought with tonight. An ordinary face. Square-featured, black hair, trimmed moustache. It was a good likeness. He would get it faxed to Trevor as soon as possible.
‘We’ll put this out in the media,’ he said.
‘Are you going to pay me for it?’
‘No, mate. This is information received.’
‘What are you going to do for me and my kids now, Harrigan?’
‘I’ll put you on the witness protection program as soon as possible.’
‘Like last time?’
‘You’ll be safe this time. I’ll make sure of it.’ She looked at him suspiciously and then kept drawing. He watched her work. Images filled the sheet of paper she drew on, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to pull them out of its whiteness. She had almost no schooling. Laurie’s father, a tattooist himself, had taught her to draw when he’d taught her to tattoo. He was dead now, shot by a bikie gang when he wouldn’t pay his protection money.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked suddenly.
‘You working. You’ve got a real talent.’
‘You might not say that when you see this.’
It was a drawing of Harrigan at the kitchen table surrounded by a tattooist’s icons of death. Old clocks, skulls on the bench with small worms crawling out of the eye sockets, flies and dying flowers on the table, an owl roosting on the window ledge. His face stared out of the paper. His hands were on the table in front of him, clasped tightly together. The gaze startled him. It was almost hungry, at once intense and detached.
‘You can chuck it out if you want,’ she said.
‘Why would I do that? You’ve got a cold eye.’
‘I just draw what’s there.’
‘Mummy.’ Jen was standing in the doorway, twisting a bare foot behind her leg. ‘Little Man’s awake. He won’t stop crying.’
‘I’ll come down, baby. We’ll go to sleep together. How’s that?’
She walked out, taking the little girl by the hand, leaving everything behind her on the table: the cigarettes, the ashtray, the sheets of paper, the empty whisky glass. More out of concern for Harold than anything, Harrigan tidied the mess away and decided it was time he got some sleep as well. He kept two constables to watch the house and sent the rest home, giving them Ambrosine’s sketch of his attacker to send on to Trevor. Finally, he went to look for Harold. He found him sitting on the front step, smoking.
‘Your face, mate,’ Harold said when Harrigan appeared. ‘You must be feeling that.’
‘Are you okay?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Yeah, I’m all right. She was a good dog. It’s a waste, that’s all.’
There was silence.
‘What made that racket in the trees out there?’ Harrigan asked. ‘Did you hear it? I thought it’d wake the dead.’
Harold almost grinned.
‘One of my chickens. She got out of the chook yard a while back and she’s been roosting over there ever since. There’s hardly any foxes around here any more. Things are that bad.’
‘I don’t know about the foxes. She almost got me,’ Harrigan said. He looked at his watch. It was the graveyard shift, getting on for dawn. ‘Why don’t you get some sleep?’
‘I will in a while. I forgot to tell you-I’ve put you up in Dad’s room. Tomorrow I’ll take you out on the property and show you what I think this is all about.’
‘I’ll see you in the morning, mate. Try and sleep.’
Harrigan went back into the badly lit house. In Bob Morrissey’s old bedroom, the dead man’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe. A photograph of his two sons in their Geelong Grammar uniforms stood on the tallboy. Stuart at seventeen and Harold at fifteen, both smiling. Grit blown in through the cracks in the house covered the surface of the glass, the furniture. Stillness and dust hung in the air.
Harrigan took off his gun and shoulder holster and put them under the pillow. He put Ambrosine’s sketch of him on top of the tallboy. It made him look like the death carrier, the person you least wanted to see knocking on your door. He didn’t remember choosing the role willingly. He lay on the bed fully dressed and slept almost immediately. Everything else could wait until the morning.
18
Out on the harbour, a dark blue sky arched in a massive curve over the bridge. A strong easterly wind had whipped the water into white tops and brought some relief from the heat. Ferries dipped in the swell. The sails of the Opera House gleamed like cracked eggshells in the late sun. Over Port Jackson, the seagulls screamed and shat on the old prison, Pinchgut, a hard nub of angular sandstone in the water. The sky was alive with the bright clarity of the Australian light; light cut with the transparency of pure glass, hard as ineffaceable emotion and with just as much edge.
On the Quay, crowds of tourists watched the buskers against the backdrop of the ferry wharves. Grace, dressed in ultramarine blue, her dark hair curled on her bare shoulders, her stilettos clicking on the steps, made her way up to the entrance of the Museum of Contemporary Art. At the door, her name was checked and found to be acceptable. With a smile, the penguin-suited doorman ushered her in. ‘Nice to see you here,’ he said in his smoothly professional tones.
Inside, lights illuminated the terrazzo floor and the pale green and white marble pillars of the function room. A large area had been taken up by an array of seating facing a podium. An ornately worked acronym of the corporation’s name, LPS, was displayed on a large screen, dominating both the podium and the room. Some people were already seated, others crowded around the buffet. The murmur of voices was loud. A string quartet played light classical; waiters offered trays of drinks and finger food.
The party from LPS stood waiting to welcome people as they arrived. Elena Calvo, immaculately dressed and smiling, handed out glossy named and numbered prospectuses. Beside her was Senator Edwards in black tie, his face pale, shaking hands mechanically. A third man was with them, tall in a white suit with a ruined, almost shocking face. At the sight of him, Grace stopped herself from drawing too sharp a breath. What kind of injuries would have caused that scarring? Others were less circumspect in hiding their reactions. When corporations put themselves on public display, almost everything was sanitised. On perhaps her most important night, Elena Calvo’s welcoming committee included a man whose face would unsettle if not shock almost everyone he greeted.