Free The Tattooed Man by Alex Palmer Page A

discuss with us.’
    ‘Strange happenings, Commissioner,’ Harrigan replied.
    ‘Yes, unfortunately. In an hour.’
    Harrigan put the phone down, reflecting that there was no mistaking the commissioner’s priorities. He went and found Grace in the bathroom where she had finished showering and was brushing out her hair.
    ‘They want you to go in, don’t they?’ she said.
    ‘In an hour. They want me to talk to the minister. I don’t have a choice. I have to go.’
    ‘Of course you don’t have a choice. You can’t ring them up and say I’m not coming in, my girlfriend won’t let me.’
    ‘You’re a lot more to me than just a girlfriend.’
    She put her hairbrush back down on the vanity. Small items indicating her presence had begun to appear in his house. A bottle of her perfume on the dressing table in his bedroom; a cream silk chemise tossed over a chair; a brightly coloured packet of tampons in his bathroom cabinet.
    ‘But you’re still going in. You still don’t have a choice. It’s not whether either of us likes it. It’s the fact that you don’t have a choice.’
    He didn’t like where she was taking this.
    ‘According to God, those pictures are everywhere,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘They’ve even made it to some of the newspapers this morning. It’s too much for his sensibilities.’
    ‘I’ll get dressed and go and get them. We should see this.’
    By the time Grace came back from the corner store, he had showered, shaved and dressed and was eating a quick breakfast. She spread the papers out on the table. The headlines were ghoulish enough: Ice Cream Man’s body found in House of Death. There were photographs of Harrigan as the head of the task force together with colour pictures of Nattie Edwards’ gaudy house at Pittwater. A school photograph of Julian Edwards when he could have been no more than thirteen covered the Daily Telegraph’s front page. Harrigan could almost hear the sub-editors salivating.
    ‘The Australian talks about Stuart Morrissey,’ Grace said. ‘They say he had a number of businessconnections with Natalie Edwards. Is he involved in this?’
    ‘He had a deal going with Edwards and Beck. The three of them were meeting to sign a contract on the night of the murders. He didn’t turn up. I’m waiting to find out why.’
    ‘Beck’s just an unidentified body in these reports. No one’s even speculated about him. They’re all more interested in the Ice Cream Man.’
    Harrigan glanced at his watch.
    ‘I have to go. What are you going to do today?’
    ‘What am I going to do?’ Suddenly, she couldn’t hide her disappointment. ‘I think I’ll go over to Bondi, go for a swim. I was going to cook dinner for us tonight. Is that still going to happen?’
    Grace was a very good cook. It relaxed her, she said, to put food together at the end of a working day. The kitchen in her tiny flat, small as it was, was packed with cooking utensils and foodstuffs whose existence had previously been unknown to him. She did this kind of thing, took care with how they ate and drank. With her, he had dressed himself up and gone to restaurants he would otherwise never have looked inside, found himself at films, cabaret nights and concerts. He thought she was trying to civilise him. He enjoyed this, it relaxed him. Whether it was having the intended effect was another question. On the rare nights when his time was his own, he still went to the boxing. When the fighting was good, he came home feeling clean.
    ‘I’ll be there, if that’s what you want.’
    ‘Then I’ll see you.’
    He tried to take her in his arms but she shrugged away from him. He went after her anyway and held on to her. They leaned against each other.
    ‘You don’t have to put distance between us,’ he said.
    ‘You don’t have time for us. You have to see the commissioner. That’s the way it always is.’
    ‘Just for now. You don’t have to look so sad.’
    ‘For now and always. You have to go.