The Labyrinth of Drowning

by Alex Palmer

  ‘Looking at his travel records, he mainly preferred the Cambodian orphanage,’ Clive said, ‘but he still spent time in Thailand.’

  ‘What did he do with these children from the orphanages?’ Grace said. ‘Take them away on holiday with him? Whatever it was, he doesn’t do it now. He’s almost bankrupt. He’s being blackmailed.’

  ‘Bled dry,’ Clive agreed. ‘I’ve directed our IT people to trace his computer traffic and, if they can, to hack into his own computer. I’ve also put out a “don’t touch” order on him just in case any other agency knows about his existence. The Thai woman’s escape was interesting. An act of desperation if ever I saw one, and Kidd was the person best placed to make it happen. I want to know if he is in fact responsible and what’s behind it.’

  ‘Does this mean we’ve decided once and for all that Coco is Jirawan Sanders, as the initials on her wedding ring would suggest?’

  He leaned over the table towards her. Grace sat upright, preventing herself from drawing back. ‘Did you at any time tell Jon Kidd or the police that we were seeking a woman of that name?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t.’

  ‘Then this is for you.’ He pushed a photograph across the table. It was sourced from Interpol and labelled as top secret. The Thai woman, Coco, was sitting at a table somewhere shyly smiling for the camera. The name underneath the image was Jirawan Sanders.

  ‘You had a photograph after all,’ Grace said in a neutral voice. ‘Why didn’t we just take her out of there? And why couldn’t you tell me you knew who she was?’

  ‘I had no reason to believe she wouldn’t be safe in Villawood. I didn’t want to broadcast just how interested we were.’ He smiled again. ‘This is the first significant job I’ve given you. I had no way of knowing I could trust you. I wanted you to prove that I could.’

  ‘I’ve worked for Orion for five years. You had no basis for assuming that I couldn’t be trusted with classified information.’

  ‘I wanted to know if you were competent. It’s turned out you are.’

  Grace sat for a few moments not trusting herself to speak. You as good as killed her. Kidd had said that to her. Orion, via Clive, had as good as killed Jirawan Sanders by looking to finesse for advantage instead of acting in the most straightforward way. In that moment, it became crucial to Grace that she saw this through and found whoever had murdered the Thai woman.

  ‘Can we call her Jirawan in that case?’ she asked, her voice calm.

  ‘If you think that’s necessary. What I want you to do at the brothel tonight is to see if you can confirm our informant’s information. See if there’s anyone there who might have acted as this woman’s gaoler. And watch Kidd. See what he does. Does he know or is he known to anyone there? Any detail you can pick up. We’re already monitoring his phone calls.’

  ‘What’s our relationship with the police on this?’ she asked. ‘So far, they’re running it as a murder investigation with me as an observer. Are we going to bring them into this operation? They must be wondering why we’re still in there.’

  ‘Not just yet. If we’re watching Kidd, I don’t want them getting in the way. Right now, I want to know how you’re feeling about this job. My judgement is you’re emotionally involved.’

  ‘No, it’s just another a job.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Not this time.’

  He looked at her silently. The tension in the room made her sit rigidly in her chair. She hated it here where there was no place to hide. Things said in this room could be as intimate as those said between her and Paul but without the warmth or the connection. Clive knew almost as much about her as Paul did. The biographies of all his officers were secured on his hard drive, variables that might affect someone’s work.

  ‘You’re not the woman I was expecting to meet when you came back from maternity leave,’ he said finally. ‘From everything I’ve heard about you, I’d say you lost a skin or two in that time. Your personal life has taken a lot of hours recently, which I’ve accommodated at our inconvenience. In this profession, your work comes first. But I’m still going to keep you on this operation.’

  ‘What made you decide that?’ she asked, managing to keep her anger out of her voice.

  ‘Let’s assume Kidd is corrupt and being blackmailed. His security clearance means he knows you’re an agent with Orion. If the person who has him on a string also knows you’re from Orion, they might come looking for you. Let’s find out.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be more likely they’d give me as wide a berth as possible?’

  ‘Think of that escape. A desperate act. Wouldn’t they want to try and find out exactly what we know?’

  ‘I’m the bait, you mean. For what? I still have no information on what this operation’s really about or who or what the target is.’

  ‘When you need to know, you’ll be told. I don’t think that time has come yet. But I can tell you this is a very significant operation. Being involved in this way would be quite a feather in your cap.’ He tossed this cliché at her as if it were a hook.

  ‘How much danger would that scenario put me in?’ she asked.

  ‘You’d have full backup. My judgement is you’re still professional enough to deal with it.’

  ‘Is this a direction from you?’ she asked. ‘And if it is, is there any agreement to support it? Normally when this kind of arrangement is made, there’s a written agreement and a set of directions on how to proceed.’

  ‘That’s a refusal.’

  ‘No, it’s a request for clear, written directions.’

  ‘Then we’ll see what happens first. In the meantime, you stay assigned to this operation under my direction.’

  Again, he opened his folder. This time, he spread out a series of photographs. Jirawan in the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Photographs Grace had taken herself.

  ‘There’s something else I think we should discuss,’ Grace said, keeping her irritation under control. ‘Given this woman is Jirawan Sanders, what about her husband? Is he missing? Or is he dead?’

  Clive looked up from the photographs. ‘He’s dead. Peter Sanders. He was an Australian who ran an import–export business in Bangkok, which is where he met this woman. That’s the last piece of information I’m going to give you right now.’

  ‘She has a child somewhere. If both parents are dead, shouldn’t we find out where this child is, or at least ask someone to locate him or her?’

  ‘Whatever’s happened to that child, it’s not our responsibility.’

  It’s our first responsibility! Grace wanted to shout, but choked back the words. She couldn’t risk losing this job.

  Finally Clive gathered up the pictures and put them away. ‘The man who did this—’

  ‘Man?’ she interrupted.

  ‘Apart from the evidence of sexual assault, do you think a woman would have the physical strength to do this?’

  ‘A woman could watch. She could administer a beating.’

  ‘Yes, she could. But whoever did this likes to kill. That’s my opinion. Report to me tomorrow about tonight’s raid. One other thing. Have you heard the news in the last hour?’

  ‘No. I haven’t had time.’

  ‘You should go and listen to it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Chris Newell was snatched as he left court today in a very bloody affair. Two people are dead and several badly wounded. We both know about Newell’s connection to you. If he turns up on your radar, I need to know.’

  ‘I’m going to make a personal call. Excuse me,’ Grace said, and left the room immediately.

  At Orion, personal calls were only tolerated under very unusual circumstances and had to be made on your own phone. Walking at speed down the hallway to her office, Grace rang Harrigan with a shaking hand. She was desperate to talk to him, but nothing would have made her call in front of Clive.

  The phone was answered almost at once. ‘Harrigan.’

  She breathed relief. ‘It’s me. Are you all right? What’s happened?
’

  ‘I’m okay, babe. I don’t have a scratch on me, which is more than you can say for some of the people here. It’s bad. Two men shot dead. It happened in front of me.’

  ‘You’re okay?’

  ‘I’m handling it. It’s like being back on the job again.’

  ‘Someone did that for Newell? Why?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. He’s not worth anything like this. I can’t talk to you now—I’ve got people who want me this end. What time will you be home tonight?’

  ‘Late. There’s an op going on. I don’t know when I’ll get back.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it then. You take care.’

  ‘Where’s Ellie?’

  ‘She’s fine. She’s at Kidz Corner. I’ll pick her up the same time I always do. She won’t know anything’s happened. Okay? I’ll see you.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Take care, babe.’

  ‘You too.’

  Babe. A name he had given her this last year or so. At first, it had seemed so unlike him it had startled her. One of those small pieces of intimacy between them she could still be surprised by.

  She thought about Clive’s comment on her personal life. She wasn’t the only one who had changed. Since Clive had arrived, Orion had changed as well. To an agency already obsessed with secrecy, he’d brought new levels of paranoia. People worked in compartments; no one was allowed to know what the next person was doing. It had reached a level where operatives didn’t share even the most trivial pieces of information. People muttered that this was Clive’s way of making sure there was no one to challenge him. Grace agreed with this opinion; it was the oldest tactic in the world. But aside from that was his attitude to her. He was always trying to get under her skin, to play games with her feelings. She wondered if she was imagining it, but there seemed to be a touch of obsession in his treatment of her, as if he couldn’t leave her alone.

  Even today, he’d sat on the news about Newell throughout their meeting, a meeting he had deliberately drawn out. Perhaps it was his way of getting rid of her; he had driven out other operatives since he’d arrived. Whatever his ultimate aim, he’d succeeded in putting the question in her mind. Did she want to do this kind of work any longer?

  At the heart of Grace’s life there were cracks, events that marked the time before and after happiness. She had grown up in New Guinea where her father had been a defence attaché at the Australian High Commission. Her life had been spent happily between boarding school in Brisbane and time with her family, including her brother, Nicky, to whom she was still very close. Her childhood lived in her memory as time spent in a magical place. In her mind she could still see the landscapes she had grown up in, all of which had an intense beauty. But when she was fourteen, her mother had died in a little less than twenty-four hours from a rare form of cerebral malaria. Grace had once believed that nothing in her life could match that heartbreak, not even if her father or her brother died. She knew now that losing either Paul or Ellie would be as bad.

  Her father had ceased to be Brigadier Kep Riordan with the High Commission in Port Moresby and had come back to Australia to raise his two children as best he could, on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where he’d been born. There Grace ran wild, falling in with a group of older kids who stole cars and took them for joy rides. She remembered one night shouting at the driver to go faster and faster, so much so that she’d spooked him. She’d been scouring away the emotional pain, almost killing herself in the process. It was only her father’s efforts that had kept her out of the children’s courts.

  Finally, barely sixteen, she had left school and home for Sydney and found herself singing in pubs when she was too young to drink in them. From there, she started singing for a group called Wasted Daze, a name she thought suited her. They were a group of young men who were as lost as she was. They’d toured the east coast of Australia, always heading north, camping out on beaches, too poor to do much more than buy beer and takeaway food. Grace had liked the life. She liked the open road with no destination at the end of it, just the vanishing point on the horizon. The immediate impression of each day had become a good enough substitute for happiness.

  Then Chris Newell walked into their lives. It wasn’t so unusual; they seemed to pick up stray people as they drove around in their rusting Kombi van. They were in northern Queensland by then, playing at the local pubs in a district where the main industry was growing sugar cane. Occasionally they met Newell socially; he always had dope to sell. Then one day the owner of a pub where they’d played refused to pay them; Newell told the man he’d better if he knew what was good for him. He paid with a bonus. After this, Newell offered to manage them as far as it went. They accepted the offer, but they were all, including Grace, too naïve and casual in the way they did things.

  She and Newell became an item, not for very long, a couple of months at most. By the end of this short time it was clear to everyone that Newell was a controller who liked tormenting people. They’d also discovered he was a serious dealer, not just someone who could get a bit of marihuana for his friends. No one wanted anything to do with the kind of people he was bringing into their lives. Grace decided she’d had enough. The idyll was broken, real life had asserted itself. She’d discovered she didn’t want to be a singer after all. She didn’t have the gift for performance; she didn’t want to stand up there and put her emotions on display in her music. Then there was Newell, who was beginning to frighten her; he was possessive and had a short fuse. Already he’d started shouting at her. He hadn’t hit her but she began to realise that he could and one day he would.

  The band split in a series of angry arguments; she packed her bags and left for Sydney. Newell followed her although not immediately. Someone had dobbed him in to the police; not her, probably another member of the band. Newell didn’t care; he thought she’d done it and he’d come after her.

  In that space of time when Newell had beaten and raped her, Grace had thought that she would die. In the aftermath, she’d thought she might do so anyway, in her own way.

  She had refused to go to the police. She was too frightened of Newell to testify against him in court. Nothing would shift her on this, and she hid the extent of her injuries from her family, knowing that if her father ever found out what had happened to her, nothing would have stopped him going after Newell. It was only years later that she’d told him and her brother everything that had happened to her. As well as being angry, they’d been hurt that she’d shut them out. It was the fear, she’d told them; she had never felt anything like that fear. Her father understood fear; he had fought in Vietnam. He spoke about it then to his daughter and son; the first time he’d spoken to anyone about it since he’d come home from the war. It became a point of understanding between them, something that allowed all three of them to reach some kind of resolution about the past.

  In those bad times after Newell, Grace had drunk herself into insensibility, but even as an alcoholic she was unsuccessful. Her family had been there, they had helped her. Her brother had protected her, come and taken her away from parties, poured the booze down the sink, taken her to hospital when she fell and cut herself, helped her through detox. When she was in recovery, her father had taught her to shoot, telling her it would restore her hand–eye coordination. ‘You should only ever shoot at a target,’ he’d said. ‘Never at people.’ She never drank now but she was still a very good shot.

  She had taken herself to university, studied criminology, and, before Orion, had worked briefly for the police. Unexpectedly met Paul Harrigan and found herself where she was now.

  When Grace had first joined Orion five years ago, she had still been an angry young woman. If asked, she would have said her heart was dead and she was glad it was. At times her anger drove her to take risks, just as she had done at fourteen, speeding in cars badly controlled by adolescent drivers. Saying to death, come and get me if you can. These days she was careful. Now she asked herself: what happens to my daughter if somet
hing happens to me? This anxiety was one of the sharpest feelings she’d ever had. These days, she felt everything too much.

  Quit, Harrigan had said to her more than once. If Orion’s not what you want any more, quit. If you want to, why not just walk away? Because she wasn’t a quitter. I don’t like being driven out, she thought, not by someone like Clive. If he thought she was an easy target, he would find out differently.

  She had a name now for the woman she’d met in Villawood. It was a step towards sending her home to her relatives, possibly parents who could see her properly put to rest. Who could tell her child what had happened to his or her mother. Grace had more significant things than Clive to think about. However much she’d changed, she still had work to do; important work. Finding the person who could murder Jirawan so savagely and then just walk away.

  4

  The sign Life’s Pleasures glittered above the lintel of the door in thin multicoloured neon letters, while the bulbs illuminating the stairs inside cast an inviting glow onto the footpath. To Grace, it seemed an offer impossible to refuse in this drab semi-business district of downtown Parramatta, a landscape of warehouses, video stores, cash converters and takeaway food chains.

  A police car was already stationed on the street outside. She followed the rest of the convoy to an area at the back of the four-storeyed building where there was room to park in a largish courtyard. A line of cars was parked along one side, presumably belonging to the sex workers and their clients. ‘Get their regos,’ Borghini said to one of his people.