Read Online The Tattooed Man by Alex Palmer - Free Book Online Page A

fence. Harrigan’s study was upstairs at the back of the house. At night, from the window, he could see the lights of Louisa Road reflected in the water across the bay. His study was a bare room, the furniture spare and the floorboards covered with a worn imitation Persian rug. His bookcases lined one wall; his safe, two chairs and his desk, which was made of old dark wood and had come with the house, made up the rest.
    Grace sat in his spare chair. In the morning light, her skin was shadowed to a soft pearl. She studied the contents of his bookcases. Journals on law and policing, digests on forensic medicine and psychology, mixed with Norman Mailer’s The Fight and The Executioner’s Song. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Ellroy’s My Dark Places sharedspace with Crime and Punishment, The Devils. Histories of racing and boxing stood next to them. On a shelf not completely full were a pair of Harrigan’s own boxing gloves, from a time when, as a twenty year old, he had tried unsuccessfully to make a career as a boxer. Even if the attempt had been a failure, he still remembered it as a gap in his life when his time had been his own.
    ‘Do you only ever read books on crime?’ she asked.
    ‘Of course not. I read the form guide as well.’
    He saw her looking at the wall above his desk. His law degree hung beside a collection of prints, reproductions of works by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya that Harrigan had bought overseas years ago. Savage satire from The Caprichos mixed with horrors from The Disasters of War. He watched her look at these representations of bizarre human folly hung alongside those showing useless fighting, massacre and the dead. Facsimiles of the original nineteenth-century Spanish publications of Goya’s collected series of prints were visible on the shelf beside his desk. Beside them was an outsized book titled simply Goya.
    ‘You’re a fan,’ she said.
    ‘He’s an obsession of mine. I’m like that. Once I decide I want something, I hang on to it.’
    She got up from the chair and went to look at the prints. ‘And still they won’t go!’ she said aloud, reading the title of one. Misshapen yet human creatures desperately held up a monolith about to crush them while nonetheless staying huddled beneath where it would fall.
    ‘Don’t you think people are like that?’ he said.
    ‘It’s grotesque.’
    ‘It’s people who are grotesque. He’s showing us what we are.’
    ‘What about this one?’ she asked.
    One can’t look. Unseen soldiers thrust bayonets in from the right of the print, towards huddled people waiting in terror on their summary and bloody massacre. Pity had been expunged from the etched shadows.
    ‘You have to look,’ Harrigan said. ‘That’s the point.’
    ‘You don’t think it’s sadistic?’
    ‘No. It’s about sadism. It’s a voice for all the people who die like that. The man who drew that is bringing them back to life. That’s an accusation.’
    ‘It’s a fine line. Why did he draw things like this?’
    ‘It’s what he saw in his own life. He lived through a civil war. He put it down on paper.’
    ‘They’re all so bleak,’ she said. ‘Except when you get to her. What’s she? Rest and recreation?’
    Separated out from the rest was a print of one of Goya’s paintings, The Naked Maja. She seemed to smile out of the picture, looking directly at the watcher, both an enigma and a challenge.
    ‘I like her,’ he said. ‘She’s beautiful. Like you.’
    She gave him a half-smile that was slightly self-deprecating. He often thought Grace didn’t seem to know how lovely she was. When they had first met, he’d been harsh towards her, too harsh. At the time, he’d said it was the fault of the pressure of his work. He regretted it now and hoped he had made up for it since, even given the time his job took out of their relationship. What do you see in me? A question he wasn’t going to ask her. Just keep seeing it.
    ‘Why do you have these on the