When Harrigan arrived home, he found Menzies curled up on the kitchen window ledge, snoring happily, shedding fur with the rise and fall of his rib cage and radiating the indefinable odour of old cat. He decided he would try his luck at sleeping as well and went to bed with some journalist’s much hyped expose of a well-known Sydney racing identity. The book was more entertaining for what it had wrong than any other feature and he could have written a fairly acidic, laugh-a-minute review along those lines if the information had not been so dangerous. Perhaps it did relax him. When, sometime before dawn, he was woken out of a deep sleep by the sound of the telephone, his bedside lamp was still on and the book was lying dropped on the coverlet. His first thought was for Toby; his second was for Lucy Hurst.
‘Harrigan.’
‘It’s Grace here. I’m sorry to wake you up so early.’
She was the last person he was expecting to call him at this or any other hour. He sat up, the book falling to the floor with a light thud.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘I’ve just had a call. From someone on the job I’ve never heard of before. They’ve found Gina. And her boyfriend.’ She stopped and seemed to be gathering breath. ‘They’re both dead. They’re in Surry Hills just off Foveaux. I’ve been asked to go down there. But I’ve been asked to go alone and without telling anyone I work with. He said just come by yourself and we’ll work out the rest later. I don’t see why it has to happen like that.’
‘Who is this?’
‘Jerry Freeman. Do you know the name?’
Shit! Harrigan thought.
‘Yes, I do happen to know Jerry. Why did he call you?’
‘Gina had my card in her pocket. He said it made him curious.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘I’m still in my flat.’
‘Give me twenty minutes. I’ll meet you there. Don’t get there before me. Okay?’
‘Yeah, okay. But who is this person?’
‘Ask me that question later, Grace.’
If Freeman was up to his old tricks, then this slotted in under the heading of Murphy’s law at work and the unpleasant odour Harrigan had detected last night had just got a lot nastier. As he showered and dressed, he wondered if his old sparring partner had even bothered to call in the pathologist or the crime scene people. He drove through Birchgrove up to Darling Street in the strange quiet between sleeping and waking. It was still raining, the roads were slippery with oil. He approached the city, the lights of the tower blocks were distant in the darkness of the early morning, slurred with the rain.
When he reached Foveaux, his car lights illuminated an inner city landscape of factory outlets selling cheap clothing and dark shop windows barred up against the street. Racks of clothes, ranged like the outlines of people, disappeared into the shadows. Bright lights surrounded a small crowd of police cars and people near the entrance to a short dog-legged alley several blocks up from Central Station. A few bystanders, derelicts and alcoholics were watching from a distance, dark figures gathered on the edge of the light. At least there were other people on the scene and it wasn’t only Freeman leaning against a car, waiting for Grace to show up. Harrigan parked his car and then introduced himself to the sergeant in charge. From a distance, he looked briefly at the bodies on the other side of the ribbons, before standing aside to wait, having no desire to be involved. Freeman, a big man who was fifty plus, overweight and balding, appeared from out of the crowd.
‘Good morning, mate,’ he said, ‘haven’t seen you for a while.
Thought you’d still be in bed. I was looking for your girl. She must be the careful type if she went and called you up. Unless you were there when I rang. What happened? You get lucky, did you?’
He guffawed and slapped Harrigan on the arm.
‘No, mate, I was home alone,’ Harrigan replied, shaking the man off. ‘But good morning, Jerry, it’s nice to see you too. What do you want her for?’
‘Just a couple of questions, my friend, nothing else. Easy as pie for her. Why not? I hear she’s a good-looking woman. I’m looking forward to meeting her.’
‘I might have a few questions of my own first. What did this girl have to do with you?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Let’s just say her and her boyfriend have been helping us out with our inquiries on a range of matters lately, but they’re not going to be doing that any more, are they? What was she doing for you?’
‘She was our witness. Just by chance. She happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For her that is, not for us.’
‘Not for that chinkie who got shot? She won’t be singing for you now, mate. Bit of bad luck for you.’
Someone called out to Freeman before Harrigan could reply and he took the opportunity to walk away while the man was distracted.
Grace was later arriving than he had expected. Then a taxi came to a halt on a nearby corner and she got out.
‘What happened to your car?’ he asked, walking up to her.
She was dressed for work, with her hair braided over one shoulder, but her face was clear of its usual pancake.
‘The alternator’s gone, I think. It’s going to be one of those days.’
She glanced towards the flashing blue lights where the incident team was going about its work. ‘That’s where they are — over there?’
‘Yeah. Neither of them look very nice. Are you up to dealing with it?’
‘Yes, I can deal with that. I’ll follow you.’
Under the flicker of the ultraviolet lights and the more distant glare of the street lamps, Gina Farrugia sat against a mossy brick wall on the corner of an alleyway, side by side with her boyfriend and leaning against his shoulder. Patches of bright and dark red covered his yellow T-shirt. Kenneth McMichael had finished his examination and was packing his bag. Harrigan watched the incident team gather like circling sharks while Grace hunched down and looked into Gina Farrugia’s face. Her head drooped forward like a stone carving of wilted flowers, tied about the stem with red string.
‘Don’t quote me just yet but not much more than a few hours at the most for the both of them.’ McMichael was adjusting his dirty coat like a flasher. ‘She was raped beforehand, I’d say, very likely more than once. That looks like ordinary plastic rope to me, the kind you can buy in any supermarket. So I would say her first, then him. I think that was probably the point. He got to watch. There is a question of how long it took. Let’s hope it was quicker than it seems. It’s all over now anyway.’
Harrigan watched him shamble away into the dark, his brown polyester trousers flapping at half mast, and felt a powerful sense of relief that he had not been found like this ten years ago.
‘Dumped, were they?’ he asked a young officer with close-cropped hair and a face like a choir boy.
‘Looks that way. It didn’t happen here and they didn’t walk here afterwards.’ Freeman reappeared, elbowing the choir boy out of the way. ‘This your girl, is it, mate? Aren’t you going to introduce me?’
‘Don’t call me a girl,’ Grace said.
‘No need to be like that. I just want to have a friendly chat. Put a face to the name. Nothing for you to get upset about.’ Freeman studied Grace’s face at his leisure while he got out his notebook. ‘If you want to give me a few details. Where and when you last saw her. What you talked about. That sort of thing.’
‘Jerry,’ Harrigan intervened, ‘we’ve got a tape of all that. You can have a transcript if you want.’
‘What about the tape?’
‘You don’t need that. A transcript’s just as good.’
‘Just let me talk to your girl, mate. Let’s not have any fuss, okay?
Just let me get this out of the way.’
‘Do you mind?’ Harrigan asked Grace.
‘I don’t care. I don’t think we said anything to each other that couldn’t be in the paper today if someone wanted to print it.’
Freeman only grinned.
Harrigan stood by and listened irritably as Freeman tried on Grace all the tricks, traps and travesties of truth that he would have tried if he had been interviewing her. There was no joy in having it known that he had sent one of his people into a minefield where Jerry Freeman was also tramping around. If nothing else, the story made him look a fool in the telling. Finally the man closed his notebook and strolled off, grinning again as he said goodbye. By then, Gina and her boyfriend had been lifted away and the incident team had packed up their wares. All that remained were the patches of slightly darker stains on the wet bitumen and police ribbons flapping in the wind.
Grace stood silent for a few moments, looking at the wall and the dark stains. Out on Foveaux, the small group of watchers stood by for a few moments longer before disappearing into the streetscape.
‘Do you want a coffee?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Where can we get a decent one at this hour? Yes, I would. And a cigarette. I think I must have smoked more in the last week than I usually do in a month.’
‘This isn’t relaxation, Grace, it’s work. We’ve got a few things to talk about. I know a place that makes the best coffee in Sydney and it never closes. You can smoke in there as well. I’ll drive. It’s not far.’
Harrigan was feeling guilty. It was a rare emotion. Protecting his officers’ backs was one thing; concerning himself with their personal feelings was another.
It was an older-style cafe, like a milk bar, long and thin, the air stale, with cardboard boxes stacked beside the back exit. The man behind the counter had his silver and black hair tied back in a ponytail and greeted Harrigan by his first name. He drew on his own cigarette before he put saucers on the counter top.
‘Mind if we use the room?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Sure, mate. I just cleaned it up. Go on through.’
‘Why are we in here?’ Grace asked, leaving her coat on against the cold, looking around at a wood-panelled room hung with photographs of soccer teams. Ashtrays on individual stands had been placed around a small and rickety card table. She sat down. Harrigan turned on a heater and the smell of burning dust competed with the faint sharpish smell of old cigarette smoke. He took off his jacket and sat opposite her.
‘We need the privacy,’ he replied as the coffee arrived. The counterman looked Grace over as he left the room. Harrigan waited while she lit a cigarette and she looked at him expectantly, a little wary.
‘How do you know about this place?’ she asked.
‘I come here and play cards from time to time. When I can afford to lose the money. I’ve got to ask you this. Was that the whole truth, like they say? Or were you being economical when you were talking to Jerry?’
‘No. That’s what happened. Why would I lie about it? It’s all on the tape.’
‘Because I have to be sure. When you get back in, you write this up.
Exactly what you told him. Give it to me and I’ll sign it. You get a transcript of the tape to go with it. You get one copy hand-delivered to Freeman, you put one on file, you give one to me, and you keep one in your bottom drawer. When you’ve done that, you don’t talk about this to anyone unless you have to. You keep it to yourself and then you forget about it. Whatever else you do, Grace, you do not take this on.’
Grace blew smoke into the air.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Or do I get to work that one out for myself?’
‘You get to work it out for yourself. That’s all I want to say about it.’
She was silent for a few moments.
‘Why don’t we just give him a copy of the tape?’ she asked.
‘Because I want it to stay pristine. I don’t want any imaginative recreations floating around out there where they might do us all damage.’
She put her cigarette down and looked at him for a few moments.
‘What about that girl? If this is what you’re saying it is, then what happens about her?’
‘She’s someone else’s problem now. You let them worry about her.
You don’t want to know, Grace. Believe me. You do not want to know how or why that girl and her boyfriend ended up dead.’
‘Why don’t I want to know? It might matter to me.’
‘My advice to you is that it doesn’t. We leave it where it is. And we didn’t talk about this. I don’t want this conversation to go any further.’
Grace’s mouth was set in a thin, angry line, a momentary disfiguration.
‘So probably no one’s ever going to know how or why they got killed? And we just forget about something like that.’
‘From where we sit now, we don’t have any choice. If someone else wants to chase this, it’s up to them.’
‘She matters as little as that? Just a little prostitute?’
‘I don’t like this either. I don’t like seeing dead girls or anyone else in an alleyway like that. But there is only so much you can do. Do more and you end up history yourself. It’s as simple as that.’
She shook her head with disbelief.
‘No, Grace,’ he said, before she could speak again, ‘you leave it.
End of story.’
Watching him, she asked herself why this was so urgent for him and wondered how much of it might be his own piece of history.
‘She knew this was going to happen,’ she eventually replied, with an intense and competitive cynicism. ‘Do you know what she was doing when I was out with her last night? She was going through her last rites. A hamburger and coffee and home-made baklava and cigarettes and a walk through the Cross and a bit of company. That was all she wanted.’
‘You did her a favour then, didn’t you? You were there to give them to her. No one else was going to do that for her.’
‘But she couldn’t have known they were going to do that to her.
You couldn’t walk into something like that if you knew that’s what they were going to do.’
‘She was trying to buy their way out of whatever it was they’d got themselves into,’ Harrigan said. ‘$25,000. It wasn’t enough.’
‘Is Jerry greedy, is he?’ Grace asked innocently.
‘I’ve never asked.’
His reply was quiet. Grace’s cigarette had gone out. She picked up her cup and took a sip. ‘The coffee’s cold,’ she said, more to the air than to him, a neutral comment not a complaint. Harrigan hit a button on the wall behind his chair. Shortly afterwards the counterman reappeared.
‘Could we get a refill, Con? Thanks.’
‘Do we have the time?’ Grace asked as the door closed again.
‘Why shouldn’t we? We can take some time off the job. Anyone can find me if they want to call.’
She leaned forward with her chin on her hands. Her face was drawn and tired.
‘I don’t want to do that,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to leave it just like that.’
‘Grace, just listen to me. Let it go. Protect yourself.’
The door opened and the counterman came in with two fresh coffees. He glanced at them both and walked out again. They sat in silence for a few moments, drinking.
‘Days like this I almost wish I’d stayed a singer and that’s saying something,’ she said.
No, you’re not cut out for this shit job, Harrigan thought. You shouldn’t be doing it. You’re not cold-blooded enough. You think too much, you feel too much. ‘What made you stop?’ he asked.
‘It sucks you dry. Performing, I mean. With singing, it’s so personal.
It’s you all alone up there on the stage and the audience just wants to eat you alive. There’s nothing left of you by the time you’re finished.
That’s how I felt anyway.’
‘This job’s not like that for you?’
‘No, it’s different. I can do this. It doesn’t drain me like that.’
‘Boxing is like that,’ he said, after a pause, ‘the way you described singing. It’s personal like that.’
‘Do you box?’
‘I used to. I made my living at it for a while. Not a very good one, I’ve got to admit. That was when I was young. Nineteen, twenty. It was good for me, it got me through a bad time.’
‘When did you start?’
‘When I was about eleven. My father took me up to the police boys club, as they called it back then.’
‘Isn’t that really young?’
‘No. You can’t do yourself any damage at that age, you don’t hit each other hard enough.’ He grinned. ‘That happens later.’
‘But you didn’t stay with it,’ she said. ‘Why not?’
‘They don’t say “float like a butterfly” for nothing. You have to know how to dance. I wasn’t as light on my feet as I needed to be. But I liked it. There’s a lot more to it than people think there is. People don’t understand what’s involved in a fight. In the ring, it’s just the two of you. Until the bell rings. It’s just you and personal survival.’
‘You liked that?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘You still go to fights?’
‘When I get the chance. Haven’t you ever been to a fight?’ he asked.
‘No, I’ve never wanted to. Do you ever go to concerts? Listen to music?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘What I know about music could be written on the back of a postage stamp.’
‘How can you live without music?’ she asked, smiling.
‘I don’t know. I do.’
No music. Maybe you could be persuaded to want it in your life.
Grace had not noticed that her hand was soothing down the scar on her neck. He watched her begin to stroke that faint line, unaware, he thought, of what she was doing.
‘That scar,’ he asked, ‘is that the reason you taught yourself to shoot?’
She stopped touching it at once.
‘No. It’s got nothing to do with it.’
‘Why do you shoot? Do you mind me asking you?’
‘No, I don’t mind. It’s a fact about me, I don’t pretend it’s not there.
I used to be an alcoholic. My hands used to shake a lot.’ Her hands were carefully manicured and without jewellery. She might have been telling him she used to be a girl guide. ‘I took up shooting because it taught me how to focus again. My father suggested it — he knows how to shoot, he used to be in the army. He said it was one way of getting my hand-eye coordination back. It worked too.’ She smiled with a faint mockery. ‘I don’t do it that much any more. I don’t think I ever really liked it. Shooting holes in a target is pretty boring when you get down to it. Why do you want to know?’
‘I don’t like guns very much.’
‘But you use them in your job, you have to.’
‘When I have to. I avoid them if I can.’
The room was quiet as they looked at each other.
Your father was in the army. But he wasn’t a nobody, was he? Mine ended up a petty crim. ‘You stopped drinking,’ he said, ‘just like that.’
After I woke up in hospital one day, in detox, with cuts all over my legs and couldn’t remember how I’d got there or what my name was, yes, I stopped. ‘I didn’t have much choice,’ she replied.
‘No one would ever know it, Grace, looking at you now.’
She smiled in reply, with that odd, sad smile she had.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s you. You look so different without your make-up.’
‘No mask,’ she replied. ‘I haven’t put it on yet. I can be myself for a little while.’
‘Let me touch your face,’ he said.
‘That’s stepping way over the line, Paul.’
‘Well, let’s do that, then.’
He stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers, bringing his hand to rest lightly under her chin, touching her neck before tracing up into her hair and stroking the loose strands at the edge of her plait.
She leaned into his hand and then reached up and took hold of it. He wound his fingers into hers, stroking her skin. They were leaning across the rickety table towards each other when, with the perfect timing he had come to expect in his work, Harrigan’s phone rang, bringing them both back into working hours. They let go, drawing back. He answered his phone and then took hold of her hand again, massaging it slowly.
‘Harrigan. Good morning, Trev. No, mate, I was just waiting for the call. Where? Have you got the patrol on to it? I’ll meet you there, I’m on my way. I’ll see you.’
They separated, he cut the connection. Grace had already stashed away her cigarettes, he reached for his jacket.
‘We’ve got an address. Let’s go,’ he said.
‘How much for the coffee?’
‘Nothing. It’s on the house.’
She looked at him.
‘They don’t charge me, Grace, they never have. They owe it to me for the money I lose here on the cards. Don’t worry about it.
‘Thanks, Con,’ he said as they passed the counter.
‘No worries, Paul,’ said the man, looking after Grace as they went out into the street.
Dawn had begun to light the steep, narrow hill down to Central Station in a pale wash, touching on the litter in the gutters.
‘Can I drive?’ Grace asked.
‘Go for it.’ He threw her the car keys.
‘How’d they get the address?’ she asked as they got in.
‘A Doctor Andrew Matheson from Hornsby rang the hot line. He says he’s sure he saw her at a house in Berowra Heights yesterday afternoon. He’s treating a man there for terminal cancer. The man’s name is Hurst and he used to be a butcher,’ Harrigan said.
‘Berowra Heights. That’s a long way from the city.’
‘We could have her. We could have her in half an hour.’
She glanced at him. He was punching his fist lightly into his other hand. Take it easy, Paul. Don’t let’s assume too much just now.
Meanwhile, she would have to deal with the speculation that would be rife after she was seen arriving at work in Harrigan’s car first thing in the morning.