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
