THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER Page 18

  Lescott was met at the door to the morgue by Ben Cook. Immediately the detective pegged the pathologist as a strange man. Maybe he’d spent too long with just dead bodies for company. He’d developed odd behavioural traits. For one thing, he wasn’t good with eye contact. He barely looked up at Lescott as he led him further into the morgue. For another, he was covered from head to toe in what looked like bloodstains. It proved to be something quite different when Lescott followed Cooky to the slab and the pathologist picked up a paintbrush and stood behind an easel.

  “Do you mind?” Cooky asked, “I find it relaxes me.”

  “No, go ahead.” Lescott looked at a body that lay upon the slab, then at the painting on the easel, then back to the body, then back to the painting. He couldn’t quite determine what he was looking at. The corpse of a little old lady lay there. She looked quite calm as the pale overhead lights washed her in cool tones of white, as though she’d enjoyed tranquillity in her death. The painting, on the other hand, was as abstract as it was hellish. In thick, demented brushstrokes, the pathologist had painted reds and blacks. How he had drawn inspiration for that particular painting from his subject was beyond Lescott’s comprehension. Still, he clearly had quite the talent for a haunting image. “I just wanted to have a conversation about the Rolls Royce murders.”

  “The two kids… Sure. How can I help?” With a brush in each hand, Cooky flicked and spattered paint angrily across the canvas. Without taking his eyes off his strange artwork, he nodded towards a large cork noticeboard.

  Lescott looked over at the board to find it was an accumulation of articles and cut-outs pertaining to the Death Car case. “Is it normal for a pathologist to follow a case so closely? That’s quite morbid.”

  “Is death not a perfectly morbid end to life?” Quite inexplicably, Cooky took his paintbrush and gave his subject a prod in the ribcage before getting back to painting.

  Lescott looked down at the woman. She lay there devoid of any warmth, or any soul. There was no sign of any of those intangibles which make a human, human. She was inanimate.

  “Where are your files?”

  “We don’t keep files.” Cooky continued his work with a peculiar smile upon his face. Lescott didn’t dare look down due, to the squishing sounds coming from Cooky’s hands as they squelched around the canvas.

  “You don’t keep files?”

  “This is a morgue, not a file room. We store dead bodies, bad smells and bugger all else. The files regarding each subject are moved on when the body in question is moved on. A chap called Wild Bill…”

  “Wild Bill?” Lescott interrupted in disbelief.

  “That’s right. Wild Bill comes. He takes the bodies. He takes the files. Where? I could not tell you. We’ve got logbooks over on that shelf. They might.” Lescott took that as a cue to go through the logbooks. They were a disgrace, there was no recognisable filing system, details were left out along with dates. They were useless. Lescott had noticed such antiquated systems throughout his time in the various departments he had worked in. It was malpractice at best, and it created an environment in which careless mistakes were made.

  “It’s a shame DC Harris got shit-canned.” Cooky looked up.

  “Was it?” Lescott didn’t know Cooky all that well, their past dealings had always left the Detective Sergeant keen to get out of his company. “I heard he was corrupt.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Good point.” Lescott muttered under his breath as he looked through the stack of logbooks. “There’s no sign-out date.”

  “What do you mean?” Cooky itched his nose with his wrist to avoid getting blood red paint all over his face.”

  “I see they were signed in on 29th November… But I don’t see when they were signed out. It’s blank.” Cooky wiped his hands on his apron as he walked over to take a look. Lescott was unimpressed and refused to hand the logbook over to a man whose hands were covered in paint, or just have easily the juices of human death. After a brief, and uncomfortable tug of war over the book, Lescott snapped, “Wash your fucking hands, man!”

  Having been through the logbooks, the men stood in silence. The morgue was a shambolic operation. Cooky was about as incompetent a person as Lescott had come across, the pathologist kept mumbling that he’d left a half-eaten pork pie somewhere.

  “They must have gone somewhere,” Lescott broke the silence.

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” Cooky was embarrassed. “I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen that I need an assistant. I don’t have time for the paperwork.”

  “You seem to have time for scrapbooking.” Lescott looked over at the noticeboard, it appeared Cooky had become fixated by the case, everything that had been published in local papers was up there. It was a gigantic shrine to the children. “Bodies don’t just disappear.”

  “I agree in principle. It takes years for them to go through the change that means they simply cease to exist. Especially when they’re pumped full of formaldehyde…”

  “But?”

  “But it takes little more than a moment for them to go through the change that means they go from the state of being here… To the state of being somewhere else.” Lescott looked over at Cooky to make sure he was hearing him correctly, it sounded like he was suggesting someone had taken the bodies. “Oh yes. Seriously, somewhere out there Burke and Hare are back.”

  “Who’s got access to this place?” Lescott questioned.

  “Did you see locks on the doors when you came in?” Cooky shrugged. “I can access this place, you can access this place, anyone who walks in off the street can access this place.” Cooky was ramping up the theatre in his speech as he walked over to a back door. He gave it a soft, but deliberate nudge with his foot. To Lescott’s horror, it came open to reveal a dirty, cramped courtyard some distance beneath the street level. “Those rats out there eating that dead pigeon… They can access it.”

  “So, we can safely say this place isn’t Fort Knox.” Lescott sucked at his teeth as he considered the fate of the two children’s bodies. “You’ve reported this, right?”

  “To everyone who will listen.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Absolutely no one. The force is too busy failing to protect the living to think about protecting the dead.” Cooky shut the door and leant on it with his entire body weight to ensure it clicked shut. After that he headed to the gigantic cabinet that covered the length and height of the largest wall in the morgue. He ran his finger along the cards that catalogued the rows of slide-out shelves housing the morgue’s silent population. Once he’d found what he was looking for, he nodded for Lescott to come over. “People have no respect for the dead anymore.”

  As Cooky slid open the shelf, Lescott had no idea what to expect. Had you given him a dozen guesses, he wouldn’t have come close. The old shelf rattled its way out. A pair of cold grey feet became visible, followed by a wrinkled old body. What he didn’t see emerging from the depths of the drawer, was a head. It was missing. He looked up to Cooky, who looked like he’d really just drilled his point home. But Lescott didn’t get it. “Car accident?”

  “John Burrell.” Lescott stared back at Cooky blankly. “I came in on Monday morning and found the poor old bastard like this. Word in the pub is that John Burrell did it to win a bet. He walked straight out of the King’s Arms, came in here, lopped this poor bugger’s head off, walked out and slammed it down on the bar. All for a free round of drinks.”

  “No.” Lescott couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “Yes.” Cooky slid the drawer shut. “As for the children, they were here and then they were gone. I was done looking at them, so I assumed they’d either been claimed by the family, or Wild Bill had done what Wild Bill does when bodies aren’t claimed. Admittedly, he’s not great with the logbook.”

  “What does happen to bodies that don’t get claimed?”

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Cooky responded poetically. He was far too comfortable
with death.

  Thoughtless cremation. It seemed typical to Lescott that the system was just as apathetic towards those children in death as it had been in life. He knew he could walk down the hall to the crematory, where he would find a worker just as strange as Cooky with just as poor a filing system. It was a dead end.

  It occurred to Lescott that perhaps the situation wasn’t simply administrative oversight. Perhaps it was contrived. What Lescott couldn’t work out was why the murderer would risk revealing himself to dispose of bodies completely devoid of evidence. They were totally unidentifiable. The killer, in turn, was unidentifiable, a fact he would have been fully aware of given that he was the one who had painstakingly cleansed them. It didn’t make sense. Unless…

  “He came back for them…” Lescott thought back to the words upon the note found on the old man on the bench.

  “YOU TOOK WHAT WAS MINE. I HAD TO HAVE IT BACK.

  SO HERE I GIVES YOU ANOTHER FROM MY COLLECTION.”

  “He was too attached to them to let them go. He didn’t come down here to dispose of the evidence, he came to collect his prized possessions.” A thought had entered Lescott’s head, “Where’s the car?”

  “I’d presume it’s still at the impound.” Cooky shrugged.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  Chapter 20

  After a brief and fruitless trip to the crematory, Lescott made his way to the impound complex. Of course, he wasn’t authorised to access the level that housed Death Car. That would have been far too much like good luck. As it turned out, the guard stated in no uncertain terms that the express consent of a Detective Chief Inspector Alan Livingstone was required. Lescott considered giving him a call to request permission, but he chalked that down as one of his worse ideas.

  All this left Lescott with one option. A course of action that he loathed, as an idealist; but understood he had to take, as a pragmatist. He bribed the guard. It was February; Christmas was never easy for the working man. The man probably came home each night to a wife holding an assortment of unpaid bills. If he was lucky he was going to his mistresses’ home, and she was holding a jewellery catalogue. There’s a reason suicide rates are so high in February.

  As Lescott drove up the winding ramp of the multi-storey impound lot, Cooky filled the air with small talk. The pathologist had bizarrely insisted on tagging along when he heard Harris would be there. He was in awe of the volume of the operation they were crawling up through. It was row after row of cars filling floor after floor. “When the hell did this place go up?”

  “Couple of years ago. They’re centralising everything, putting it all under one roof.”

  “Not in Annandale though!” Cooky looked mortified, he clearly had a strong bond with the place and didn’t wish to see it changing.

  “They’re clearing out the slums. Inner-city real estate is too valuable. Before long, Sydney will be all new and shiny. The filth will be moved away from the beaches and inland, the smallest houses around here will be worth more than what most Australians could save in a lifetime of hard graft.”

  “Slums? That’s unfair. I grew up not too far from here. In the old Boy’s Home on Queen’s Parade. I still live here. There’s worse suburbs to raise a family. You got a family?”

  Lescott ignored the question. “Kids from those places… They don’t tend to end up working for the police…” Lescott had had many run-ins with men who’d grown up as children in those establishments. They were harsh places, which bred men with an intense dislike for authority and no respect for the law. “What’s your story?”

  “I never had the stomach for crime, I tried it. I wasn’t very good at it. All thumbs and left feet, you see. I grew up around it, though. I bunked with George Watson for a while. You might have heard of him. He’s a bit of a local celebrity nowadays, a bit of a notorious ruffian around The Cross,” Cooky continued.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. He was different back then. Poor little bugger.” Lescott kept his eyes on the cars, it didn’t feel like Cooky needed much encouragement to keep talking. “Back then, he was just this sweet defenceless kid. He was a couple of years younger than me. The older lads called him Gorgeous George.”

  “There’s worse nicknames to have. I went to school with a kid we called Skiptramp.”

  “Not when you know what it means, DS Lescott. Not when you know what it means. They did things to him that no young boy should go through.”

  “What are we talking about here? Initiation to a rugby team type of thing or straight up bullying?”

  “Neither. I’m talking about sexually sadistic stuff. It wasn’t just the other boys either. Where do you think they learned it?”

  “I’m guessing from the people who ran the damn place? The people who received a living in return for protecting the kids.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I have to ask…” Lescott paused, “Were you ok?”

  “I was lucky. I was a grubby little boy with a horrendous case of body odour. No one came near me. That’s the fine margin between him and I. Otherwise, I could have ended up just like him. The world made him what he is. I remember a kind little boy with a snotty nose.” Cooky was kind, but he was naïve.

  “There’s two types of people in this world. People who let life’s torment shape them and break them. And people who don’t. Both types suffer on a daily basis. Guess who I save my sympathy for?”

  “What about you?” Cooky asked.

  “I wasn’t abused as a kid.” Lescott didn’t trust people and he didn’t like opening up about his feelings.

  Anyone other than Cooky would have taken that as a cue to be quiet. Not Cooky, he wasn’t anyone.“No, I mean, did you grow up around here?”

  “The Dandenongs They’re a low-lying mountain range about an hour out of Melbourne. Covered in thick rainforest. I grew up in a cabin out there.”

  “What are you? Some sort of ‘hill person?’” Cooky looked at Lescott with a dirty expression. Lescott had grown up in a massive house in extensive grounds. If Cooky was judging him as somehow lower in social standing than the guy who’d grown up in a boy’s home, it was a miscalculation.

  “You live at the top of the hill, you see them coming for you, no matter which way they come. That’s what my old man said.”

  Harris’s car rolled off the street and stopped at the gate into the impound facility. The guard was far too busy filling his fat face with the contents of a bag of monkey nuts to notice. Harris cleared his throat. The man didn’t even glance up. “Need to see I.D if you want to get in there.”

  Harris looked in his glove compartment and found his old, now expired, warrant card. He hadn’t handed it in and he’d been waving it around ever since he’d been sacked. He passed it up to the guard who was now engrossed in a newspaper.

  “Sorry boss. Like I told the detective I just let through, I need this job. I have children to feed.” The guard kept his eyes on his paper and took a sip of his coffee. Harris understood what he was saying. He went into his pocket and pulled out a roll of cash. “Don’t forget my wife. She’s gotta eat, she’s a fucking big girl too.”

  “Good to see you take security seriously around here.” Harris was pissed off, he accepted that bribery was what kept the world on its wheels. He just didn’t like giving his hard-earned money to lazy bastards who’d happened to find themselves in a position of power.

  “To tell you the truth we’re not usually this strict, but with what’s been going on we’ve been put on alert.

  “What’s been going on?”

  “Not sure, bit of a weird one. All of a sudden these blokes with more money than sense have been sniffing around, handing money over like it’s going out of print.” For the first time in the entire conversation the guard looked up from his paper, he did so with a smug grin. He was biting the hand that fed him.

  The Rolls Royce had been placed under an old tarpaulin. Untouched, it would seem. Something so valuable being left alone to rust in the da
rk went against everything that made up the zeitgeist of those days. Greed, corruption, the objectification and commodification of beauty, in that little corner of Sydney, and that corner alone, they were forgotten.

  Cooky whistled as Lescott ripped the tarpaulin from the top of the car. He had no problem letting his admiration for the vehicle be known, he could overlook the gruesomeness of it all. “You know these things have the quietest clocks ever invented?”

  Lescott was bewildered, “How the hell did you manage to get a medical degree? Who did you pay off?”

  “What?”

  “What you’re referring to, I believe… Is ‘At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock.’ It’s a Madison Avenue headline.”

  “I saw a poster in an Italian brothel back in the ‘40’s…” Lescott looked up to see Harris walking over to join the conversation. “It said that this particular brand of soap’s cleaning ability was so effective it could wash the black off a black man. I think they were inferring in some way that that was the desired effect. Advertising’s an immoral pursuit.”

  Lescott nodded over at Harris, “There he is, that little ray of golden sunshine.” He was beginning to enjoy the Englishman’s ill-tempered outlook on life.

  Harris nodded back, he would allow the friendly insult; it was a pretty good one. “What are we doing here?”

  “Looking for anything we missed. Anything that helps us,” Lescott replied from the passenger seat of the Rolls Royce where he was looking through the glove box. When he’d found what he was looking for, he gave his fist a triumphant shake. He was in possession of the manifest.

  “We were just talking about our childhoods… What’s it like… Being from England?” Harris turned to see Cooky stood in uncomfortably close proximity to him, “I’d like to go. Just to see where the Queen lives if anything.”