Читать книгу The Dragon's Skin - Ross Gray - Страница 17

The sky was the barrel of a black, bottomless well dusted with ice crystals. Rose squinted up through the small fogs of her breath. There were chinks of light in the top floor windows. He was at home and awake. The only other lights in the building shone from the first floor and the ground-level shopfront to the refuge for street kids. She hadn’t been here before tonight – the sanctum sanctorum. She didn’t know anyone who had crossed the threshold. If he entertained visitors, she’d heard, it was in the coffee shop behind her.

An empty W-class tram rattled past with ‘Depot’ displayed as its destin­ation. She crossed the road. How to gain access was the immediate question. The Vietnamese newsagency, the tattoo and body piercing shop Pics ’n’ Pins, and the adult bookshop A Good Hard Read, were all in darkness. It was late Sunday night.

An adolescent girl dressed, dyed and painted in black was slouching in the doorway of the refuge. The visible parts of her body looked like they’d caught all the shrapnel from an exploding hardware store. Wordlessly, she directed Rose around the corner with an abrupt thumb and a lazy roll of her head.

Rose found the doorway on the narrow side street. She felt a rare stab of apprehension as she pressed the button. If he was surprised to hear her voice he didn’t show it. He buzzed her up. She climbed the narrow staircase to the top floor. There was a sign stating ‘David Edge, Research Consultant’ on the door facing the top of the stairs. He stood, hip cocked, backlit in an open doorway at the other end of the landing.

‘G’d evening, Rose,’ he said, stepping back to draw her through the door. ‘To what do I owe?’

‘I apologise for the intrusion, David,’ she said as her eyes swept the room she’d entered. It was a large room but somehow cosy. Its atmosphere was warm and comfortable. The furnishings were spare but not sparse. There were no sets or suites, just a colourful mix and match. Earth colours, rusts, ochres and greens. One wall was bookshelves from floor to ceiling. The TV, audio equipment and a venerable upright piano lined up along the opposite wall. The end wall was taken up with the windows, heavily draped, that overlooked the street. At the other end of the room was a huge bench that divided the room from the kitchen beyond. Orchestral music was swelling from small speakers high in the corners. ‘And for the late hour,’ she added. ‘I won’t keep you long.’

‘It’s okay. I was relaxing after a class,’ he said as he took her long coat and hung it on a tall bentwood stand to the left of the door.

‘Class?’

‘I run survival skills classes for the kids downstairs. You’ve got to work to their hours – catch ’em when you can.’

‘Survival skills?’

‘Self defence and how to manage cops,’ he said with a wry twist of the lips.

She walked over and smoothed her palm over the bench top. Tasmanian oak: its grain like dark currents snaking lazily in the tallowed depths of still water. ‘Nice,’ she said.

‘Can I get you something to drink?’ He had a half glass of red wine in his hand.

‘Nothing alcoholic, thank you. I’m driving.’ It occurred to her that she had never seen him drink. She’d only ever observed him pretending at leis­ure, while actually working, perhaps holding a glass in his hand but never sipping from it. He didn’t drink when he worked. And he was the only one who knew exactly what his work was – and its hours.

‘Take a seat,’ he said as strode into the kitchen. ‘Tea, coffee? A tour of the ancestral home?’

‘Tea.’ She lowered herself into a large greenish leather armchair.

‘Indian, Chinese, Australian, green, black, herbal?’

‘Do you have any chamomile?’

‘Chamomile it is,’ he said as he opened a cupboard. ‘There’s a remote on the table if you want to turn the music down.’

‘Mahler?’ she asked.

‘The Titan.’

When he brought her tea he settled himself, reclining, on the long dark red couch, a dusky orange cushion behind his shoulders, his wine glass on the floor beside him. He studied Rose lazily, waiting for her to speak. She took a sip of her tea, and took his measure over the rim of her cup.

‘Are you drunk, David?’ she asked. Rose had no time for social niceties and the folderol of manners.

The small dimple in his left cheek twitched into a comma. He waved a hand at a bottle of Yarra Valley Pinot on the low, time-pitted and patinaed blackwood table between them. It was still half full. ‘No, Rose,’ he said. ‘I can’t afford to get drunk. Lower my inhibitions and God knows what will jump over them and run loose in the world.’

Rose had surprisingly smooth skin for a woman of her years. She had protected it her entire life from the sun and other conspirers with time. When she frowned it was – almost shockingly – obvious.

‘It’s okay. I’m not depressed. Just having a drink and a think.’ He raised the glass to his lips.

‘Is it Ben Bovell?’ He glanced at her but didn’t answer. ‘How is he?’ she asked.

He took another sip of his wine before he answered. ‘Critical. They removed the bullet fragment from his spine but couldn’t do much else for him.’

Rose looked into the cup nursed in her lap. ‘Paraplegic?’

‘It seems he’ll be able to breathe without help.’

They sat in silent contemplation of his words for a while, then she said, ‘Benny isn’t your responsibility.’

‘Then whose?’

She had no answer. She noticed his eyes drift to a large manila envelope lying open on the table next to a scatter of books with creaky academic titles. It held something about the size of a bar of soap. A DVD case lay across the flap. She thought the title was The Killers – but hoped it was her imagination.

‘It’s about Charlotte,’ she said. His eyes flicked up to engage hers. ‘Is that why you punished those boys? Because you couldn’t save Benny?’

‘You should go back to Mills and Boon, Rose,’ he said, grinning. ‘Those psychology books will rot your brain.’ The nature of their respective reading habits was a running gag. Rose read anything that sandwiched words between two covers.

‘I understand the necessity to incapacitate the first one as quickly as possible,’ said Rose without smiling. ‘But breaking the second boy’s arm seems bloody-minded.’

He didn’t respond. He swirled the wine slowly in the glass, its sanguine light rippled under his chin. She thought of buttercups and the love of butter.

‘And taking her through the park? I won’t have one of my girls used as a tethered goat, David.’ She waited, still no response. ‘How did you know?’

‘I didn’t know,’ he said at last. ‘The attention one paid Charlotte worried me. I had a … a foreboding. I didn’t know until Ray stepped out in front of us. He couldn’t have got to that point before us if he’d been following. They must have been watching the Garden for some time and learned the route Charlotte took home. They may have been watching other girls.’ He took a sip of his wine. ‘I think they wanted to experiment in rape. They thought they could do it to a prostitute and get away with it. They imagined a pro wouldn’t go to the police and if she did the cops wouldn’t care. I think they also believed they’d be raping something worthless and so their conscience wouldn’t bother them.’

A hot, bristling ball had been pushing up into her chest cavity since she spoke to Charlotte; now Rose felt it melting away.

‘I crossed the park because – if they were around – it was the only chance to draw them out. Before it was too late.’ He gave a small sad grimace. ‘I’m sorry about Charlotte.’

‘She’ll survive. But you may have lost a devotee.’

‘Probably for the best.’

‘Whose best?’ As his lips pressed a sardonic hook, she added, ‘A girl like that could be your salvation.’

‘No salvation for me, Rose.’ He sipped his wine. ‘And broken bones? I think they’ll find they’re severe dislocations.’ He ignored her let’s-not-split-hairs expression. ‘They both had to suffer pain and fear, Rose. It might be enough to give them pause. The alternative was to let them assault Charlotte, then the police could act.’ He sipped some wine. ‘They had to be … diminished.’

‘Wax on, wax off?’

He smiled ruefully. ‘I did enjoy it more than I ought. It was about Ben. A bit.’

‘You’re such a good detective, David.’ There was criticism implicit in the flat statement. Rose, like many others, thought he was wasting his talents. ‘I don’t know how you do it. Those lateral leaps of logic or intuitive insights. Creative anticipation – or whatever the trick is.’

He stared sadly into the red dregs staining his glass. ‘The trick is to imagine the worst a human being might do. The trick to that is to imagine the worst that I might do.’

‘You’re not a bad man, David.’

‘Ah. Yes I am, Rose.’ A small smile. ‘And I’m a good man too. But then, aren’t we all?’

Rose had no ready reply to that. ‘Is this really the ancestral home?’ she asked eventually.

He nodded. ‘My grandmother lived here. Her father owned half the block. She left this building to me.’

‘And you gave it away? To street kids?’

‘More or less.’

She sank back into her chair and let Mahler flow over her. ‘I’ll take the tour when I finish my tea,’ she said.