Harrigan and Grace - 03 - The Labyrinth of Drowning

by Alex Palmer

  There was no way into the house through the garage and Harrigan went out the way he had come in. Between the house and the garage was a cement pathway which had been kept reasonably clear. A high gate between the garage and the front corner of the house blocked the view to the road. He opened the gate and looked up the length of the empty gravel driveway to the locked gate. Again, there was no sign of anyone being here.

  He went to the back door. It was secured by a deadlock, newer and much stronger than the old lock on the house at Blackheath. He didn’t attempt to break it, but walked along the back of the house, turning a corner, until he was looking at a small high window. It was the kind that winds open outwards and was just large enough to let him into the house. He dragged over one of the garden chairs and stood on it, finding himself looking into the laundry. There was a window lock on the inside, but the wooden window frame was rotten, the white paint peeling away. Whoever owned this house now wasn’t concerned with maintenance. He took a jemmy out of his backpack and began to force the window open. The rotten wood tore away, the glass cracked. All that was left was a section of the window frame, still secured in place by the window lock.

  Harrigan lowered the barely intact, broken window to the ground. Soon he was letting himself down into dry, old-fashioned, twin laundry tubs. By the look of the room, no one had washed any clothes in here for a long time. The door was shut. He took out his gun and tried the handle cautiously. It was locked but the lock was old-fashioned and easy enough to pick. Soon he stepped into a small hallway leading to the back door. The house was completely silent. He walked through into the kitchen.

  Unlike the house at Blackheath, this place was both liveable and lived in. It looked and smelled clean, although nothing appeared to have been upgraded from Amelie Santos’s time. The fridge was old enough to date back to the 1960s. He opened it and saw some basic food and a bottle of wine stored inside. Washed dishes, including two wine glasses, stood in the dish rack on the draining board. They were dry and had been for some time.

  Listening for every sound, Harrigan moved from the kitchen into a dining room. There was no sign of anyone using this room. He opened a top drawer in the sideboard. Tablecloths, linen serviettes, place mats. In the next drawer, silver cutlery. Someone was using the house, but all they had done was move in on top of what was already here without changing anything. They ate and possibly worked and slept here, but it was no home.

  He went through to the living room, where the windows looked out onto the front garden. Thickish, good-quality net curtains, now grey with dust, covered these windows. The room was shadowed but not so dark that it was difficult to see. In here, there was an atmosphere of complete abandonment. On a cabinet stood a photograph of Amelie Santos, probably from when she was in her early forties. She was dressed to ride, her cheek pressed up against her horse’s. Her smile was one of real happiness. Scrawled across the picture were the words Buster and me. It was covered in dust. Placed here more than fifty years ago, now meaningless to anyone and presumably ignored by whoever still came here.

  Moving carefully, Harrigan walked down a hallway past several bedrooms. A quick glance into one of them told him that two people slept in one bed. It had been left unmade, the doona tossed back, the sheets disordered. A change of clothes for both a man and a woman were thrown over a chair. On the end of the bed there was a compact bundle of women’s clothes, a dress and underwear, all carefully folded.

  Something about them caught his attention and he walked in to look at them more closely. He realised they were new, still folded as if they had just come out of their package. Waiting for someone to put them on for the first time. He found himself thinking of the woman who might wear them. The sight of them disturbed him, but why he couldn’t say. He looked around the bedroom. It had a stale smell. He left the clothes where they were and walked out.

  The bathroom, like the rest of the house, was clean and useable. The make-up and the electric razor on the vanity unit showed that both a man and a woman had washed there, although perhaps not that morning. He went back outside. There was a set of double doors next to the bathroom. He opened them and found himself looking into a large linen cupboard, an old-fashioned one, the kind you could step inside. The sheets and towels must have dated back to Amelie Santos’s time. He glanced up. There was a manhole cover above his head. He closed the doors and moved on.

  Then he smelled something: bleach. A little further past the bathroom was what appeared to be the fourth bedroom. There was an outside lock on the door and fittings for a padlock. He opened it. The room was shadowed and it was only possible to see by the light that came through the doorway. It was a small, bare room with white-tiled walls. There had once been a window but it was boarded over. There was nothing in there except a cheap two-litre plastic container of hospital-grade bleach against one wall. It was a secure room. The whole house was built of double brick and the door was thick wood. A place to wait until someone came for you.

  He stepped inside to look more carefully. The room had a foul atmosphere. He looked down at the floor, which was bare wood. The boards were stained with patches of liquid discoloration. He squatted down to look at them more closely. You’d need a chemical analysis to know what had caused those markings.

  Harrigan was staring at the floor when he saw a hairline cut in one of the boards close to the door. At the threshold to the room, he saw a notch in the same floorboard, just large enough for someone to get their finger into. You could only reach it when the door was open. Glanced at quickly, it looked like a natural flaw in one of the boards.

  He levered it up and found himself looking into a cavity under the floor. He took his torch out of his backpack and shone it into the hole. There was a black bag inside, the kind used for carrying a laptop computer. He reached in and pulled it out. Beneath it was a briefcase. Harrigan took this out as well. Then he replaced the floorboard and carried both back into the living room where he placed them on the coffee table.

  There were two main compartments to the black bag, each holding a slender laptop. Other smaller compartments had a range of portable hard drives and a number of flash drives. He took them out and looked them over. Each was labelled with a letter but there was no sign of any written records. He opened one of the laptops and turned it on. It asked for a password. Harrigan sat thinking. He typed in Griffin but the system responded with the message Details unknown. He turned the laptop off and closed it.

  The briefcase was locked and there was no way he could guess the combination. He forced it open, pretty much destroying it in the process, to find it packed with neat bricks of American dollar bills. He took them out one by one and counted them. Used hundreds and fifties. Quite a nest egg. You could live very well anywhere in the world on this, for quite some time.

  Harrigan suddenly realised that he was so absorbed in looking at these things, anyone could have walked up to him unnoticed. He looked up quickly but there was no one there. The room was empty. What to do with what he’d found? He put the laptops and portable drives back into the black bag and closed the briefcase again as best he could. He had already disturbed the chain of evidence. Assuming he was prepared to admit that he’d broken in here, it could be argued by a defence counsel that he’d compromised what was there, even planted these things. If he took them with him, it was theft.

  He thought for a few moments and got to his feet. Collecting a chair from the dining room, he took it down to the linen cupboard where he stood on it and pushed open the manhole cover. Then, one after the other, he pushed the black bag and the briefcase as far into the roof cavity as possible. Let them wonder where they were.

  He had closed the cupboard doors and was standing with the chair in his hand when he realised that he’d left the door to the white-tiled room open. He went to close it, stopping to look at the empty room in front of him. People had almost certainly died in there. Killers kept souvenirs. Who knew what else there was in this house? It was getting to the point where he w
ould have to take his information to the police, regardless of what Orion would do.

  He closed and was able to relock the laundry door. Once outside, he wedged the broken window back into place as best he could. Then he returned the chair to its place in the overgrown garden. Judging by the length of the grass, nobody came out here very much. Probably they wouldn’t notice that the chair had been moved. Not until they discovered what was missing and began to look around.

  The sun was warm and the overgrown garden, with its sounds of bird calls and a soft wind in the trees, seemed dreamlike in its peaceful, bright greenness. Shillingworth Trust was using this house as a bolt hole. It was a good place to be if you didn’t want anyone looking over your shoulder. Or if there was someone in the white-tiled room you wanted to attend to. Given the amount of money in that briefcase, someone would be back here for it soon enough. The best outcome would be if the police were waiting for them when they got here.

  There was one last place for him to go: the surgery at Turramurra. He would do that tomorrow morning. Then he would call the police, regardless of Orion’s protocol. Would twenty-four hours make much difference? He could only hope it wouldn’t.

  Now he had to get back home himself. He had his book launch to go to.

  He was driving down Mona Vale Road when his mobile rang.

  ‘Harrigan? It’s Eddie.’

  Good, Harrigan thought. Contacting Eddie Grippo had been next on his list of things to do.

  ‘What’s the word?’

  ‘That place you were asking about the other day, Fairview Mansions. It’s being sold. Went on the market yesterday.’

  ‘Who are you dealing with?’

  ‘Some lawyer called Joel Griffin.’

  ‘Do you know him?’ Harrigan asked.

  ‘He’s done work for the family in the past. That’s all I know about him.’

  ‘Any other news?’

  ‘No, that’s it.’

  ‘I want to see you,’ Harrigan said.

  ‘Shit, mate. If anyone sees me with you, I’m fucking dead.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning at nine. There’s a hotel in Tempe, the Royal Exchange. I’ll be waiting for you in the back room. Don’t worry, it’s private. No one will see you there.’

  ‘I’ve got to work.’

  ‘I’ve got things to do too, mate. Be there. I’ll be waiting.’

  By the time he got home, Grace was there with Ellie, changed and ready to go. His daughter ran to him as usual and he swung her up in his arms.

  ‘She’s had her dinner,’ Grace said, ‘and Kidz Corner made sure she had an extra nap this afternoon. We’ll see how she goes tonight. I’ve got her dressed in her party frock. Doesn’t she look pretty?’

  Grace looked tired but the smile was real. She had on a light dusting of make-up and her hair was brushed out. She had dressed herself as she did whenever they went out, with a touch of style, colours that showed the delicacy of her skin.

  ‘You look lovely,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a special night.’

  They arrived a little later than he had expected. When they walked into the Police Museum, the room was already crowded. Toby was there with his therapist and two friends from university. Harrigan went to speak to him. Hi Dad. Silent words as usual but words nonetheless. His friends, two young women, smilingly shook Harrigan’s hand.

  ‘Tobes has told us so much about you,’ one of them said.

  Tobes. He hadn’t known his son had this nickname.

  ‘I didn’t know he talked about me.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. All the time.’

  Grace kissed Toby on the cheek and stayed to talk while Harrigan had to mingle. He looked back at them through the crowd. Ellie was in her mother’s arms while Grace stood chatting with Toby and his friends. There was a burst of laughter over something. Don’t ever let anything happen to any of you.

  The crowd grew larger. Drinks and finger food were being handed around. Representatives from the publishers and the media mingled with Harrigan’s friends and former colleagues. Then the speeches got under way. First the Director of Public Prosecutions, who was launching the book, then Harrigan himself.

  ‘In the years I served in the New South Wales Police Service, I often left the courtroom feeling as disappointed as the victims or their relatives, and sometimes as disappointed as the accused when they were sentenced. The apparently disproportionate nature of sentencing doesn’t only apply to those who have been the victims of the crime. But equally as bad, if not worse, is the bureaucratic maze you have to walk through even to get to that trial and the delay of years that process has built into it. And then there’s the trial itself. I can’t tell you how often a witness or a victim has come up to me afterwards and said: “That trial had nothing to do with what happened to me or what I saw. They left out so many facts that were relevant, seemed to know nothing and to care even less about what really happened. What was going on?” Then you have to tell people that trials aren’t necessarily concerned with truth and justice or even facts; only the law and, often, the prejudice of its practitioners.

  ‘Why does this seem so unfair? Because the law is a blunt instrument? Or an instrument that, as it is administered today, operates mainly to serve itself, not the people it is supposed to protect or deal with fairly? Why is it that in a courtroom you can so often encounter what seems to be a caricature of the truth, of yourself and your actions? Where the idea of justice seems to be the last consideration in anyone’s mind? These are the questions I address in my book.’

  The speeches were well received. Sales were brisk, the queues to the table where Harrigan was signing books were lengthy. The launch went on longer than expected. People stayed on to talk. Ellie was tired and rubbing her eyes. Harrigan saw Grace sit down with her in a chair a short distance from the table. Ellie fell asleep in her arms. In a period of quietness, he found himself in an intense discussion with two friends, an SC and a journalist. The SC, a man, thought he had been too critical of the administration of the law; the journalist, a woman, thought he had been more than fair and could have gone further. Toby wheeled himself over to listen. Both people knew him and greeted him.

  Then Harrigan looked past them all to the entrance to the room and saw Tony Ponticelli senior walking towards him, his grandson, Joe, by his side. Without even seeming to notice them, Ponticelli pushed between Harrigan’s two friends and threw a copy of the book down on the table. Toby, his head leaning back against his chair’s headrest, was watching the scene. He was a sharp observer, Harrigan knew; years of sitting watching, often enough ignored, had left him with the skill of reading people shrewdly.

  It had been years since Harrigan had seen Tony senior. He had aged to a skeleton of himself, thin and stooped, shockingly old. His eyes were too bright; they ranged over everything without seeming to take much in.

  ‘Tony,’ Harrigan said in a neutral voice. ‘How are you? I haven’t heard much about you for a while now. You brought your grandson with you, young Joe.’

  The old man stared at him. Both the journalist and the SC stepped back.

  ‘He’s a better son to me than my real one,’ he said. ‘Paul Harrigan. I’ve come to buy your book.’

  His grandson had supplied him with a chair. He sat down as if he were planning on staying for a while.

  ‘Is that your partner over there?’ he said, looking across at Grace. ‘Is that your daughter?’

  ‘Why do you want to know, mate?’

  ‘I hear she doesn’t stay home. She goes out to work. I wouldn’t let any wife of mine do that. Is this any good?’ He pushed the book forward.

  ‘You’ll have to read it to find out.’

  ‘I’m here to tell you something. When you leave tonight, you think about Bee. You think about what she looked like when they found her. You think back to when you were all so fucking useless you never found out who did that to her. You write this fancy new book and you can’t protect a twenty-five-year-old girl. You didn’t want to. Don’t thin
k I’m ever going to forget that. That’s what I wanted to tell you.’ He looked around for his grandson. ‘Joe. Home.’

  Joe helped him to his feet.

  ‘Paul Harrigan.’ Tony senior smiled. ‘You never got me in a courtroom.’

  He looked around as if trying to make sure he knew where he was. He was about to head for the door, his grandson guiding him, when he almost walked into Joel Griffin who had come up behind him out of the crowd. Griffin stopped, excused himself and walked around him. The old man turned to stare after him. Surprised, Harrigan waited to see if any word or sign of recognition would pass between them. The old man’s mouth was working without speaking. Joe took him by the arm and steered him around, back towards the door. Tony senior saw Grace again and stared at her, seemingly half-comprehending, angry and resentful.

  ‘I do things my way,’ he said. ‘I don’t fucking let anyone tell me what to do. You’ll find out.’

  Then, to the obvious relief of the bystanders, he walked out, leaning on his minder’s arm.

  Griffin didn’t seem to see anyone much except Harrigan. He was carrying a copy of his book. ‘I’ve come for something of yours,’ he said. ‘Can I get your signature on this?’

  Harrigan scrawled his usual sprawling signature across the title page of the book. ‘Enjoy,’ he said, a slight edge in his voice.

  ‘I will,’ Griffin replied. ‘Because this is you. A signature is personal however often you give it out.’

  As Griffin turned to leave, he saw Grace. He stared at her for a few seconds, then walked the short distance over to her.

  ‘Is this your little girl?’ he said, without otherwise greeting her. ‘Does she look anything like you? Show me. I can’t see.’

  Grace held Ellie a little closer.

  ‘You don’t need to see. You’ll wake her up and then she could start to cry. It’s better that doesn’t happen.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you look like this. Even your make-up’s different. You didn’t dress like that for me today.’