Timu sniffed—thanks to the air-conditioning in his office, he suffered from constant colds. But it was a frankly disgusting sight, this mutilated body amid the rubble. Beside him, Lieutenant Gallagher was talking with the Chief Medical Examiner. Like them, Moore was tense: the victim’s face really was painful to see. He spoke slowly. Initial observation suggested that the crime had taken place at about five in the morning. About the cause of death, there was no mystery: a fractured skull.
“To smash up a head like that,” he said, while police officers bustled about around him, “you have to strike hard, and with a heavy object. Something like an iron bar. But the victim wasn’t killed here. There would have been traces of blood on the stones, the ground. Look, there’s only a small pool under her head. The blood was already starting to congeal by the time she was dumped here.”
Timu nodded. His bladder was hurting so much, there were tears in his eyes, but he put it down to the morning wind. Gallagher was chewing his gum, which must have long lost its taste, while his men searched for clues—given the clayey soil, there was every chance they would find something.
“The TV people have arrived,” a uniformed officer said.
Timu kept silent. The area had been sealed off but, with the TV van and the cameras getting ready to roll, onlookers were gathering like sharks after a bloodbath.
“I’m going to take a statement from the guy who found the body,” Gallagher said.
His buffalo neck bowed, Timu was thinking hard. He was thinking of Mark, and his illness, and everything that had brought him to this point. “Yes,” he said. “Go ahead.”
Motionless in the middle of the planks and pieces of scrap iron, Timu indicated that the body could be taken away. Nearby, Moore was rubbing his downy beard. The two men exchanged knowing glances. It was his turn now. Timu sighed—he had to face the journalists. Leaving the specialists to pick up hypothetical fingerprints, he pulled his belt up over his paunch and made his way toward the small crowd that had gathered behind the metal barriers.
The cameras were ready, the microphones switched on. He was nearly jostled as he approached, but calmly re-established his authority. His face in the monitor was grave, his tone firm. A particularly savage murder had been committed, the investigators were currently working to establish the circumstances of the tragedy, the identity of the victim was not yet known, but a press conference would be held the next day. The police would do everything they could to find and punish the perpetrator or perpetrators of this atrocity. Everything would be thrown into the task, he promised. There would be no more no-go areas, no feeling unsafe, no more attacks committed with impunity. The city was going to be cleaned up, cleared of its trash. This time, it was war.
* * *
“What’s going on, Osborne?”
Fitzgerald had summoned him to the pigsty that served as his office. This was quite unusual: usually the two men ran into each other in the corridors of headquarters, or else in the field whenever complicated cases required Fitzgerald’s personal intervention.
It had taken Paul three years to obtain his diploma and two more to join Fitzgerald’s Criminal Investigation Department. They had liked each other immediately. They had the same lack of interest in material things, the same radical opinions, the same sadness. After a while, Paul had become Lieutenant Osborne, and everyone said he was “promising,” although Fitzgerald didn’t believe in promises. In fact, Paul hadn’t become a cop to please his boss. With the stubbornness of a tree at the side of the road, he had ended up tracking down the guys who had raped Hana. There were six of them. His patience was as great as his hatred. He wouldn’t let go of them.
“What do you want to talk about?” he replied in a light-hearted tone, as Fitzgerald looked him up and down.
“Don’t fuck around with me.” Fitzgerald hissed. “They just found a guy half dead over in Takapuna. Bo Dooley, know him?” And he threw a photograph in Osborne’s face.
That was his style.
Paul barely glanced at the Polaroid—true, the former gang leader was pretty messed about. He simply made a dubious-looking face. In spite of their friendship, this story was nothing to do with Fitzgerald.
On the other side of the desk, Fitzgerald was as red-faced as ever. “That’s the fifth guy we found in this state in the space of a year, and the fifth who isn’t making a complaint. Andy Moore, Joe Tuala, Derek Fleming, Peter Bishop, I guess you don’t know them either? Strange, because one of my informants tells me you were the one who beat them up.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Well, what do you have to say?”
“Your informant has a vivid imagination.”
“Impossible. He’s an idiot, and I’ve got him by the balls. He’s not the kind who’d risk telling me lies.”
Paul didn’t bat an eyelid.
Fitzgerald knew he was lying. Friendship had nothing to do with it. In response to his protégé’s continued silence, he leaned forward in his chair and said, “I’m warning you, Paul. If you’re extorting money from criminals with the purpose of lining your pockets, you’ll have me to deal with. Personally.”
As usual, Fitzgerald had understood everything. But Paul couldn’t admit anything. There was only one more name left on his list: Jim Faloon, a little thug sentenced two years earlier for robbery, his second such offense. He was serving his sentence in the district penitentiary and would be out the following year. In the meantime, the other five had paid a little of their debt to Hana. In all, Paul had collected a hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars. A tidy little sum, from which only Faloon’s contribution was still missing. The years had passed, and although Hana still hadn’t come back from Europe, he knew she’d be back in the end: it was his one hope of redemption.
“Don’t worry, Captain,” Paul replied. “I don’t give a damn about money.”
Fitzgerald grunted. Although his eyes were still flashing with anger, the answer seemed to satisfy him. “All right,” he said, bringing the interview to an end. “Just be careful. We all have scores to settle, but I don’t want dirty hands in my department. If you try to pull a fast one on me, if you’re working behind my back for some local big shot, I swear to you I’ll empty my gun in your face.”
Paul had laughed. Fitzgerald looked serious. A strange guy. Hard and at the same time endearing. Fitzgerald didn’t open up to anyone, but Paul liked him. He was the one who had trained and supported him. They might even have become friends if they’d wanted, but they were both too much loners to play at being friends. That was probably what linked them. Their solitude and their secrets.
With hindsight, his death appeared inevitable, but in those days, Fitzgerald had seemed indestructible.
“Are you alright? You look quite pale.”
On the next stool, a guy in a suit was looking at Osborne as if he had just come out of the ground. Probably a lawyer from the Central Business District.
“Leave me alone.”
The man shrugged and took refuge in his cappuccino. The hotel bar was gradually filling up. Having thrown up everything else, Osborne swallowed a few codeine tablets with a glass of water. The air from the street came in through the open windows but didn’t make him feel any better. He was thinking about the shredded curtains in his room, the pool of blood in which he had spent the night, the handful of dark hairs stuck to his clothes, the bathtub, the sliced-up body of Globule, which he had thrown in a garbage bag with everything else. There was also the nightclub where he had met Ann, the datura smoked in her sports car, the park, the swingers’ club, those grotesque costumes, and the cutting-edge practices they indulged in there. After that, everything was a blur. There were the avenues they had driven down, the distorted vision of the buildings, Ann’s face smiling, high as a kite, the party in a house with a swimming pool over in Ponsonby, then an abyss into which he had plunged headfirst.
This morning, all that remained was a sense of dread in the pit of his stomach and the certainty that something had happened—something horrible.
The Chevrolet was there, on the other side of the street, parked any old how near the bus stop on Shortland Street, a ticket on the windshield. So he had taken it last night. With his revolver. No memory of that.
Osborne drank three coffees one after the other and smoked his first cigarette of the day, praying for the earth to blow up, just like that, without warning.
