Harrigan and Grace - 03 - The Labyrinth of Drowning

by Alex Palmer

  Familiar descriptions. When Toby was born, Harrigan had studied the brain and spinal cord seeking to understand his son’s disabilities, forcing himself to accept there was no cure. Since then Toby had lived with permanent damage to the very same spine and nervous system that hung on the wall. This is all we are; these filaments, those hemispheres, the two reflecting mirrors in the brain. Instruments of delusion and cruelty as much as anything else. Glitch them and the person was deformed or dead.

  Harrigan turned and his torch raked across the dark to the reception desk. Then he saw it, sitting in the centre of the desk, quietly waiting. An axe with a black stone head protruding from its handle at an oblique angle. The thick, club-like handle was almost a metre long. It had been set down on a carpet square, presumably to protect it.

  Harrigan moved forward to scrutinise it. The head was clean and polished. With both hands on the handle, it would be a powerful weapon. He recognised it for what it was: a stone axe from somewhere in the highlands of New Guinea. Grace’s father had several in his keeping, including one not unlike this from West Papua, all stored under lock and key at his home in Point Frederick. As an artefact, it was valuable and it looked old. Old enough to have been brought back in the 1960s by Frank Wells. Why choose this weapon? Unless it had meaning for you. Perhaps it was a weapon once brandished threateningly against you, now turned against others. Frank Wells would know the answer, if he was prepared to admit it.

  Harrigan put his torch down and picked up the axe. It was heavy enough to need both hands to lift it. This was the heart of it. The smash. Some fundamental breaking out of every piece of brutality, causal or intentional, that had gone into making Craig Wells or Griffin, whoever he was, whatever he was. But it wasn’t just the violence. What is it you want, that using this can give you? Something beyond words. Some force you decide to let go without any intention to control it. Adrenalin. Just a chemical. Things like the pleasure of manipulation were secondary, they just built you up to this point. But you had to take that step to kill, you had to want to. Something in you had to want to smash that energy outwards and you had to choose this way of letting it happen, knowing what it would do. What the person would look like when you’d finished.

  Maybe once you could lose it. You could go mad. But nothing in the history Harrigan had uncovered suggested any set of circumstances like that. If his beliefs were correct and Janice Wells had been the first victim, then that murder had been planned; planned for years by someone still in their teens. What had come first? This weapon stolen from his father or the intent to kill? Or had they both gelled after this weapon had first come into his hands? I can use this. A few simple words. Meeting a boy whose father had taken that step already. Did he hit her? How? The first realisation that this was possible, breaching the membrane that restrained you, to be followed by the act that confirmed: yes, you can kill. Either way it had been a deliberate choice. He could have said, I don’t have to do this. There were always other possibilities. If Harrigan was right and Wells had created his own new persona out of the death of the real Joel Griffin, why not choose to create a new life for himself some other way? Because he wanted this. He wanted what it gave him.

  Harrigan set the axe down where it had been, stepped back from what felt like the edge of nowhere. He had to get out of here soon. It was a terrifying place.

  His torch beam touched on the net curtains. The blackness impregnating the material wasn’t only dirt, it was old blood. This was the epicentre. While you were waiting to see the doctor. He glanced in a line from the reception desk to a door, now shut. The consulting room.

  He opened the door slowly. The smell of mould throughout the building had grown to be almost overpowering; in this room it was the stink of death. Harrigan took out his handkerchief and put it over his mouth and nose.

  It was a large room with an old desk facing the door. A high-backed chair stood behind the desk, giving the impression that someone had just this minute got up from it and walked out of the room. Behind the chair and along one wall to his left, overgrown plants pressed against bare windows, crowding the cracked glass like silent onlookers.

  Harrigan walked inside. The silence felt loud, like someone shrieking for his attention. He looked at the empty walls, the bare wooden floor. In the far corner, the floor had caved in. He walked forward and looked down into the space between the broken boards. Pale in the shadows, the bones he saw were all too real. There were two of them. Lying on their sides in the dankness, bodies that had decayed to skeletons, looking as if they were about to be absorbed into the ground. Thin locks of dark hair still clung about their skulls, their teeth were scattered like seeds. One had its hand just in front of its face, the way children lie sometimes when they’re sleeping. Indifferently, efficiently, the insects had cleaned their bones and built their nests around their shreds of clothing. Whoever they were, these people had been here for a long time. They couldn’t be the source of the stench he smelled now.

  In the torchlight he saw a line of ants near his feet. The busy column had cut a path through the muck on the floor towards the opposite corner of the room. He shone his torch on the column and followed it. A line visible through the dirt and leading past the windows that looked out of the front of the surgery. There were crude, broken marks on the floor where the boards had been roughly taken up and then laid back down again. He counted them as he walked. Four, making six with the two in the corner. One set of marks was newer than the others. Here the ants were disappearing into a crack in the floor, busily at work.

  Someone had died here recently. Someone had stood out there in the waiting room facing the unimaginable before finding release in their own permanent silence. Harrigan stood over these makeshift graves and looked down with an instinctive respect for the dead. The silence no longer jammed in his ears. I’ve found you, he thought. You can lie quietly now.

  Harrigan reached the other side of the fence with deep relief. The sunshine on his back, the sight of colour, the sounds of birds, brought him to life. He breathed clean air into his lungs. His phone was in one hand, his gun in the other. He was thinking, seeing a map of the suburbs roundabout in his mind. You could walk through the park from Duffys Forest to here. Probably there were tracks you could take. If you knew what you were doing, knew the terrain well enough, you could make your own tracks. Make your own and choose your time. No one would see you. Make your victims walk from the white-tiled room there to here, both of you knowing what you were going to. From bolt hole to graveyard, it was a ritual carried out six times over the last ten or so years. Not so infrequent. An addiction.

  He was weighing up the question of who to ring. Borghini was with the local command. It was his turf, he knew what he was doing and he wasn’t likely to be put off from doing his job.

  Before walking up to the road, Harrigan sheathed his gun. The Mellishes still weren’t back from their birthday party; there was no sign of a Volvo deprived of its usual parking spot. But there was another car a little further up the street that he hadn’t seen before. He stopped just at the entrance to the Mellishes’ driveway and looked at it. Then he stepped away from the avenue of trees that sheltered the driveway from the rest of the street. Trees that would have hidden him from view if he had walked along there to get to his own car.

  They came at him anyway, three of them, too quickly for him to avoid them or reach for his gun. He still had his phone, he had already punched in Borghini’s number. He hit the call button as they reached him. Ponticellis’ thugs. His phone was knocked out of his hands, skidding away. He fought them hard, dragging them further out onto the street where they had to be seen. He thought he heard a shout from someone else, not them, but by then he was face down on the ground. He felt the savage jab of a hypodermic needle in his thigh and then the world went black.

  22

  Grace drove through the quiet streets of Brooklyn feeling the eeriness of knowing that somewhere Clive’s surveillance teams were watching like patrons at a theatre
where the action was real. The town was laid out in a long, narrow line along an inlet. It wasn’t much more than houses clustered along a single dog’s-leg road that eventually reached its dead end at a public jetty looking out at the main channel of the Hawkesbury River. By the time Grace reached the parking area close to the bay, it was getting dark and the place was almost deserted.

  Sara was waiting, solitary in the dusk. She was dressed in jeans and a jacket and had her hands in her pockets. The bush-covered hills behind her tall figure were a hard, massive shape against the softening sky. On the water, the last of the light had taken on an iridescent, diamond-shaped patterning, rocking with the movement of the waves. Boats, small and large, were moored some distance out. Was Clive’s boat out there? He had said that it would be.

  Grace walked up to Sara. She was pacing restlessly up and down.

  ‘You’re hours late. Where’s Narelle?’ she asked.

  ‘Did you set that up?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Joe Ponticelli. Did you set him on me?’

  ‘I said I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  ‘First you change things. I’m told to come here to Brooklyn. And when I do, a motorbike with a pillion comes up behind me. In fact, it looks just like how Kidd got shot. They shoot through the passenger window. But they don’t get me, they get Narelle. I ran them off the road. I had a look. Joe Ponticelli’s dead. I wasn’t sure about the other one. If he wasn’t then, he probably is now.’

  ‘Where’s Narelle?’

  ‘Sleeping in the bush. She’s not going to wake up again. I had to go and wash as well.’

  ‘What about your car?’

  ‘I had to get rid of it. The one I’m driving now belongs to someone else.’

  ‘Then why bring it here? It’ll be traced. Did anyone see you?’

  ‘No! I’m more careful than that. Let’s get down to business. I’ve got the passport, the tape and I’ve got Narelle’s ID. I want to be paid.’

  Sara looked at her and then around her into the dark, but there was no obvious sign of movement.

  ‘Is that her ID you’re carrying in that bag?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s see it.’

  ‘No. Later. I’m owed a lot for this.’

  Sara smiled arrogantly at her. ‘You’ll be paid in full, don’t worry about that. But that wasn’t supposed to happen. You never know who’s going to turn out to be unreliable, do you?’ She laughed softly.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘They were watching you all the way from Liverpool. Joel might have trusted you. I wasn’t sure I did.’

  It was only when Grace had to deal with them that her backup had told her they were there. Clive’s directions.

  ‘Why did they go after me? I was delivering Narelle. What’s the point of sabotaging that?’

  Sara didn’t reply. She stared at Grace with an almost frightened expression on her face. Then she shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know. I just told them to watch you. And you killed him! God.’

  ‘It was a stupid thing to do,’ Grace said contemptuously. ‘Next time you want backup, pick someone who’s not a lunatic.’

  Sara looked away. ‘We don’t have time to talk about this. Let’s go.’

  ‘Wait a moment. Where’s Joel?’

  ‘Out there somewhere.’

  ‘That’s not good enough.’

  ‘It will just have to be,’ Sara snapped.

  ‘No, it won’t. Where’s Joel and where are we going?’

  ‘For a boat ride. What else?’

  ‘I’m not getting on any boat until I know where I’m going.’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  There was silence as Sara looked around. Her face was barely visible in the dark, her expression unseen. She stepped forward.

  ‘I’ll tell you where we’re going,’ she said in a whispered voice. ‘But no way am I telling you where Joel is right now. Do we trust each other or don’t we?’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Cottage Point. It’s not far. Now let’s get a move on. We’ve wasted too much time.’

  What if she took out her gun and arrested Sara now? But she still didn’t know where Griffin was. The surveillance teams would have heard everything that had been said. They could get to Cottage Point if they had to. Are you going to follow me up the river, Clive? Fish me out?

  ‘How do I get back from wherever we’re going?’

  ‘Joel will drive you. It’s all organised.’

  ‘All right,’ Grace said. ‘Let’s go.’

  The sailing boat, named Cottage Days, was waiting at the pontoon. It was smaller and neater than Grace had expected.

  ‘Is it only you?’ she asked.

  ‘I know what I’m doing. This is what I do to relax. I sail. I know this boat, I’ve had it for years. I know the river. I love it here.’ Sara’s sense of relief was obvious in her voice. ‘You can just be yourself here. Get in, and do me a favour: don’t talk.’

  Grace sat in silence while Sara cast off and, using the motor, guided the boat past the other vessels and out into the channel. Stars covered the sky. This far from the city, it was possible to see out to other worlds. Sara turned off the motor and began to pilot the boat under sail. Then she started to laugh.

  ‘You killed Joe Ponticelli. Life has its twists and turns. Oh, what a joke that is.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  There was malice in her voice, almost childishly so.

  ‘Why didn’t you want me to talk?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Because I may not get to sail down this river again for a while after tonight and I want to enjoy it.’

  ‘Why? Are you leaving? Where are you going? I thought we were setting up a deal.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll be our Australian connection,’ she said mockingly.

  They sailed on in silence for a short while. There was only the sound of the river, the presence of the forested hillsides and the soft, starlit sky. Sara had withdrawn, she was silent.

  ‘How long have you been sailing?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Since I was a kid. Don’t talk to me. I want to enjoy this.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I talk to you?’

  ‘Because most people are fucking idiots and I’m not sure you’re not one of them!’

  Grace waited. Sara was where no one could touch her, lost in the simple self-directed pleasure of what she was doing. Grace spoke, deliberately puncturing the emotion.

  ‘If you’re leaving, you’ll miss all this when you go, won’t you? There can’t be anywhere else in the world like this for you. Why do you have to go? Why can’t you stay here?’

  Sara looked back at Grace, her expression shadowed.

  ‘It’s just the way things have to be,’ she said.

  ‘Is Cottage Point where you were going to bring Narelle?’

  ‘Do you think that would have been difficult? Elliot’s waiting for you at Cottage Point, Marie. Oh boy, let’s go. I want to see him as soon as I can.’

  Sara imitated Narelle with too much savagery for Grace to laugh.

  ‘You just called her Marie.’

  ‘That’s her name when she’s with Joel.’

  There was silence. Sara was staring out at the water.

  ‘You and Joel are an item,’ Grace said after a while. ‘Did it bother you when he spent time with Narelle?’

  ‘No,’ Sara replied. ‘Any more than it would bother me if he spent time with you. That’s what you want, isn’t it? It’s not just the money. You want him.’

  Grace wondered why she found this so offensive when it had been part of Clive’s strategy from the beginning. She had met it before; situations where other women assumed you were chasing after their partners when you had no interest in them at all. It had worked for her; it had helped persuade Sara she was genuine.

  Sara laughed. ‘I knew it. He thought you were t
oo standoffish. I told him you were just playing hard to get. You thought you were better than he was. I told him, just wait. She’ll be there for you. Like all the others.’

  She. I’m sitting here in person. Why should you think I find him as compelling as you do? But if she said she found him repellent her cover was gone. All the others. How many of them had there been? She kept silent. Sara smiled at her, scornfully.

  ‘Where did he meet Narelle?’ Grace asked.

  ‘At my parents’ place. Her and all the other wannabe actresses seeing who they can have sex with to get a part. Didn’t have a hope.’

  And you just watched while he chatted up this little self-serving user, Grace thought, seduced her in your own parents’ house, and set her up as a gaoler and a fantasy pastime in a brothel you probably both owned. And you didn’t care. Not much.

  ‘Joel told me he’d known you since you were fifteen,’ Grace said.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘He was your first boyfriend. That’s all.’

  Your first boyfriend and you never shook him off. Some women don’t. Sara was staring at her with hard-eyed condescension.

  ‘We understand each other. Something you can only see from the outside. You’ll never get anywhere near it.’

  Grace thought how at that moment Sara sounded strangely like Narelle.

  ‘Where’d you meet him?’

  ‘At a camp I used to have to go to when I was a teenager. He was different. He saw things from the outside, the way I did. He was smarter than anyone else. We got talking and we knew we understood things other people didn’t.’

  ‘You still think that.’

  ‘I know it,’ Sara said.

  ‘Why’d you have to go to camp?’

  ‘Because my parents didn’t give a shit if I was alive or dead!’

  Grace waited till the air cleared.

  ‘Do you get on better with them now?’ she asked bravely.