The Tattooed Man Read Online Free PDF

frontage offered shelter from the night’s heat. From time to time, usually at parties, he was asked how he could afford to live in a waterfront house on the Balmain peninsula on a policeman’s wage. He could have told his questioners he was no blow-in. He had been born in the district in the early sixties, down near White Bay. Maybe it was just over the hillfrom where he lived now, but it might as well have been another universe. Even today, where he had lived as a boy was one of the less desirable parts of the neighbourhood. At that time, the peninsula had been a rough place known for its poverty. Its graceful, decaying nineteenth-century terraces sold for almost nothing; its forgotten waterside mansions were more often knocked down and blocks of ugly red-brick units built in their place. Their views of the harbour, the bridge and the city were like gifts thrown away. Those same terraces and mansions sold now for sums unimaginable back then.
    The real reason for his silence was the house itself, an inheritance from his paternal aunt while he was still a teenager. No easy endowment, instead a down payment on her interference in his life. A church-ridden, unmarried woman, she had been fiercely ambitious where his future was concerned, nagging and meddling. After her death, his parents had lived in the house with him. Their arguments were ingrained into the walls like some porous inner skin; their deaths had happened here. Even his ancient cat was buried here. Menzies, a ferocious, ragged tom inherited unwillingly from his father, was peacefully snoozing the big sleep in a sunny spot in the garden. It was all too close to the bone for chitchat.
    He let himself inside. The house was dark and silent. Grace had said she would meet him here after she left Toby’s barbecue. She had her own key; she could have let herself in. Maybe she’d changed her mind and left him high and dry. Stood him up in exchange for his leaving her marooned once again. Why wouldn’t she? He had done it often enough to her.
    He went through to the kitchen where he poured himself a whisky and felt the silence of the housewrap itself around him. He caught sight of his face in an oval-shaped mirror set in a cedar sideboard that had belonged to his aunt. At the age of forty-one, his darkish fair hair was beginning to thin and the strain in his face was obvious. He looked away.
    He remembered he had a phone call to make. The name Stuart Morrissey had rung warning bells for Harrigan from the time he’d first read it in that bloodstained contract. One complication led to another. Stuart led to his brother, Harold, who lived out in the sticks, on a property called Yaralla near a town called Coolemon on the edge of the Riverina.
    After Harrigan’s near murder at Cassatt’s hands, the senior ranks in the police force, embarrassed by the scandal, had sent him out to Coolemon to get him out of the way. He’d stayed there on and off for seven years, often working on secondment to the Australian Federal Police and in the end spending more time out of the town than in it. Discovering that Stuart Morrissey’s younger brother lived out there had been something unscripted. Harrigan met Harold for the first time when he had some stock stolen. Expecting another scam merchant, he found himself dealing with a man almost too honest to protect himself. Harold had proved more than once that he was someone you could trust. Just eight months ago he’d given shelter to Ambrosine, a tattooist with three children who had taken one too many risks as Harrigan’s informant. There was no phone in the cottage Harold had let Ambrosine have, and out there the signal for her mobile could be unreliable and it was unsafe to use it. The best way of reaching her was through Harold’s landline.
    Harrigan put down his glass and picked up the phone. His call went unanswered, the phone ringing until it cut out. Harold was the only personHarrigan knew who didn’t own an answering machine.