The Labyrinth of Drowning

by Alex Palmer

  Borghini had finished talking on his phone. ‘Rung your boss?’ he asked.

  She shook her head, too filled with anger and disgust to speak.

  ‘My guess is you’d better,’ he said to her silence. ‘If you don’t, one of my superiors might ring him first. They don’t mind a bit of one-upmanship where Orion’s concerned.’

  She looked at him with a half-smile and made the call. Clive’s first response was silence.

  ‘That makes your appointment with Kidd even more important,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to come down hard on him.’

  ‘Who’s going to run with Arleen McKenzie’s murder investigation?’ she asked.

  ‘The police can do the legwork. They can keep us informed. Come in when you’ve finished there.’

  Grace turned and looked back into the kitchen. She could smell the blood now, above the other smells in the house. The pathologist, McMichael, came into her mind. Bizarrely, both for her work and the situation in which she now found herself, she was trying to get her mind around the idea of death, of not being. Death was cold, it was decay. And the dead were sticky; they held on to you, left a mark where their hands had touched you, a smell that said they’d been there. How could anyone spend their life dissecting them? What could you find amongst their remains except nothingness?

  Grace couldn’t mourn for a woman she had never met but she could feel that same deep burn of anger for the fact of her death that she had felt for Jirawan. She took a breath. The dirt of the house and of the dead seemed to have contaminated her clothes and her skin.

  ‘The place hasn’t been searched. They weren’t looking for anything. They just wanted to shut her up,’ she said.

  ‘That’s the way it looks. Maybe you’d like to come clean with me,’ Borghini said. ‘What’s at stake here that’s worth all this? I know that passport’s valuable. But why go this far for it? That’s two deaths, not including the one we started with. And you’ve brought in a lot of firepower. Would you really do that if you didn’t think there was something a lot bigger in the offing? What aren’t you telling me?’

  Nothing, she could reply, if only because this time she didn’t know herself. She was the bait but no one had told her what the prize was. She had walked open-eyed into this investigation knowing that to be the case, but she had never expected it to be this bloody.

  ‘This is a different MO,’ she said. ‘This is a contract killing. It’s cleaning up made to look like a drug-related murder. Lynette’s death was similar. Jirawan’s killing was something else.’

  ‘Maybe this killing was already organised. Maybe Arleen was too unreliable. With Sophie, you can say keep your mouth shut or your kids get hurt. Arleen was just an ex-junkie with no connections by the look of it,’ Borghini said. ‘With Lynette, we turn up at Life’s Pleasures and she panics. It creates a situation someone has to deal with quickly. Apart from that, you didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘You know just as much as we do. Everyone’s making sure we don’t get a chance to find out anything more.’

  ‘You mean what you know is limited,’ he said. ‘But maybe your boss knows a hell of a lot more. Hope he tells us both one day.’

  The sound of sirens was growing louder. Soon the house would be overrun with other police, the crime scene people and whoever else was involved. Were there any relatives to notify, any friends? Arleen McKenzie was almost as anonymous to Grace as if she’d found her lying dead on the street.

  ‘Whatever’s going on, it’s vicious,’ she said to Borghini.

  ‘Hope your guard on Miss Narelle Wong and family is up to it,’ he replied.

  ‘So do I.’ And to herself: hope my backup’s working too.

  Clive’s description for what was happening was desperation. Grace was beginning to see it as ruthless efficiency. There was a limit to how long she was going to keep walking into the dark like this. A limit to what she wanted to deal with without knowing more. If she talked to Clive, he’d draw her deeper into this strange dance where he was setting the pace, deciding the music, directing her movements. Cut her off even more. For her, the only possible next step was to see out the following few hours. She followed Borghini outside to meet the police.

  12

  Harrigan arrived with Ellie at Cotswold House, the facility on the water’s edge at Drummoyne where his son lived, mid-afternoon. Toby had no lectures that day and was in his room. Sitting in his wheelchair in front of his computer, he was using the mouse with his good hand. If Toby had been able to stand, his height might have matched Harrigan’s. In his face, his father could see a reflection of his own features. But his body was twisted; sometimes he drooled because he couldn’t help it. Often enough on meeting him people looked away repulsed.

  Nothing about his physicality affected Ellie. Harrigan and Grace had taken her to visit Toby since she’d been born. She clambered up onto his lap where she could see the computer screen.

  Hi Dad. Hi Ellie.

  Toby couldn’t speak easily. He was a master of one-sided conversations typed out on monitors of all descriptions. An outsider listening to them would only have heard Harrigan speaking into silence. An outsider reading Toby’s written replies would have had only the detached half of what had been communicated between them.

  ‘I don’t think she can read that yet, mate,’ Harrigan said.

  She will. Where’s Grace?

  ‘She’s fine. At work. How are you?’

  I’m good. What about you?

  ‘I’ve got something I want to talk to you about but it’s a tough subject.’

  Shoot. I can deal with it.

  ‘It’s your mother. Before you ask, she hasn’t been in contact. If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s fine by me.’

  She never will. Or when she’s so old, it won’t matter. I can talk about it. Why?

  ‘It’s to do with a job I’m working on. Two cases. In one, a son killed his mother. The second concerns a man who was adopted out pretty much as soon as he was born. He had a hard upbringing—his adoptive parents abused him, particularly the mother. My judgement is he turned into an abuser himself. When he found out about his real mother, it hurt him like hell. She was a rich woman who’d left him nothing.’

  Did she know where he lived? If he was adopted out immediately, she might not even have known what his name was or where she could find him.

  ‘That’s true. But that hasn’t made any difference to how he feels.’

  Why did this other guy kill his mother?

  ‘She was an alcoholic, she seems to have had one casual affair after the other. As far as I can tell she didn’t seem to care much about her son’s welfare. I think his father abused him as well. She either didn’t believe her son when he told her or she didn’t care.’

  Is the guy who killed his mother the son of the man who was adopted out?

  ‘Yes.’

  Why do you want to talk about it?

  ‘I’m trying to get into these people’s heads. What are the drivers that would make someone do that?’

  Hatred. You’d have to feel that.

  ‘You don’t.’

  No. I don’t hate my mother. I don’t want to hurt her. I guess if I met her I’d be angry. Sometimes I am angry with her but there’s too much in my life for me to think about that all the time. Do you think she thinks about me?

  ‘I think she has to. She knows I stayed with you. And she knows you’ve got a good mind. She made enough enquiries to find that out. Maybe that’s what she relies on to forgive herself. Whatever it is she feels.’

  I don’t think about her too much if that’s what you’re asking me. You’ve always been there. But there’s a gap. Disappointment. That’s what I feel. I wish it had been different because what my mother did, I think that was just a waste. I wish she had been here but she wasn’t and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  It was a long way from disappointment to enough loathing to carry out a murder. Toby had always had the rest of the extended Harrigan
clan to rely on as well: Harrigan’s two formidable older sisters and their families, all of whom had accepted Toby as one of their own. Ellie, bored, climbed down from Toby’s lap and began to explore the room. Harrigan gave her toys to play with where he could keep an eye on her.

  You shouldn’t worry about me, Dad. When you’re like me, you’ve got to be practical. I know what I can do. That’s what I concentrate on. My mother’s like anybody else who can’t handle me. They don’t come near me. Why should I care? It’s my body. I deal with it. With help.

  It was afternoon tea time. Harrigan helped both his older and his younger child eat. Ellie would grow up to feed herself and to walk and talk easily. Unless some miracle cure was discovered, some unique stem cell therapy that could transform him, Toby would never be able to do any of these things. The coloured, flashing, electric shadows of the computer monitor were his lifeline; his good hand connected his mind to the screen and gave him a voice and the tools to be part of the world. To help him physically he had his therapist, the exercise programs that prevented muscle wastage, and the regime that washed, fed and medicated him, saw him into his wheelchair and got him to his university classes, where again he was treated as one of their own. There were worse lives; Frank Wells’s for one.

  Harrigan was on his way home with Ellie, tired and a little grumpy in her safety seat in the back of the car, when Grace rang.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m going to be late. There’s been a development in our operation. I probably won’t be there before Ellie goes to bed.’

  ‘That’s okay, babe. I’ll look after her. I guess you can’t tell me what this is about.’

  ‘No, I can’t. Maybe you’d better eat without me.’

  ‘All right. I’ll see you when you get here. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’m not in any danger.’

  ‘I hope not. Take care, okay?’

  ‘I will. You too. See you.’

  Not in any danger. He remembered what he’d said to her: We’ll take it day by day, I won’t ask questions. He was doing this for Grace, for the two of them, not for Clive or even Orion. He just had to keep that in mind.

  Later, when Ellie was asleep, Harrigan went into his study and turned on his computer. Working in this room quietened his thoughts. He looked at the bookshelves lining one wall and saw the old pair of boxing gloves he kept on one of the shelves. Once, when he was about twenty, he’d tried to make a career as a boxer but hadn’t been light enough on his feet to be successful. Then, not much more than two years later, he’d become a father, pretty much by accident. When Toby was born, his world had changed and he’d had to find regular work to support his son. He still loved boxing, still went to the fights and still worked out. These days he had more time to do it and was fitter than he used to be.

  On another wall, prints of works by the Spanish artist Goya were on display. Harrigan had discovered Goya’s work when he was overseas on secondment to the Australian Federal Police. He had a vivid memory of walking into the Prado in Madrid and seeing Goya’s Black Paintings. Their savage and bizarre satire spoke strongly to his experiences of dealing with the lunacy people inflicted daily on themselves and each other. If asked, Harrigan would have said these surreal representations of humanity were all too exact. This was what people were like: they were as mad as this, as plagued by delusions and demons; their actions as futile, as ugly and as murderous as Goya had painted them to be. After this he had begun to collect books and reproductions of the artist’s work. The paintings eased Harrigan’s mind; it was a relief that someone knew as much as he did, not just about human evil, but how it actually looked when you met with it. This was its real face and it was nightmarish.

  Reaching up to the shelf nearest his desk, Harrigan took down a facsimile of Goya’s series of etchings Los Caprichos, a catalogue of human folly and vice, venality and deceit. He opened the book to the sixth print. It had the caption: Nobody knows himself. In the foreground, a masked man seemed to bow to a masked woman, both dressed as if they were at a masquerade ball. He seemed to want something from her, to search her face for some response; but her thoughts were unreadable. Perhaps she smiled but who knew what her smile might mean. Other shadowy figures, both grotesque and menacing, watched from the soft, dark wash of the background. All deceive, the text continued, and do not know themselves. Harrigan wondered if the print portrayed where he and Grace were themselves right now.

  He left these shadows and began to search through those on the net. He sent an email to a retainer of his, a university student who found carrying out research for Harrigan a more rewarding job than waiting on tables. He had several subjects for her tonight: Amelie Santos, Ian Blackmore, Jennifer Shillingworth, Camp Sunshine charity. As an afterthought he added the name of the sanatorium in Frank Wells’s letter. If the baby had been sent from there to his adoptive parents, then that must have been where the birth had taken place. Anything she could find out about any of them. Normally he would also have asked her to check out the Shillingworth Trust, but if the Ponticellis were involved, he didn’t want her anywhere near them. He would do that himself.

  He had just pressed ‘send’ when his phone announced an SMS message. When he opened it, he saw a photograph of Grace at their front gate, holding Ellie by the hand, apparently just leaving the house to go down to the park. He spent some moments looking at it. It was a recent photograph, probably taken sometime in the last fortnight. He put the phone down and got to his feet.

  He glanced at the safe but decided against taking out his gun. He didn’t want to be pushed into always doing that. Instead he walked through to the front of the house, stopping to listen at Ellie’s door. There was only the sound of her quiet breathing. In the spare front room, he didn’t turn on the light but went and stood at the dark window. Grace had put new curtains in here which were only partially closed. He stood next to the drapes and looked out. Was there anyone out there? If so, could they see him?

  They could only reach into his mind if he let them. No point in physically locking them out and then letting them in by proxy. In his mind, he drew a line, pushing his stalkers to the outer edge. Then he went back to his study where he forwarded the SMS message on to Orion. The organisation had supplied a phone number for this purpose. He could only hope they would deal with it effectively.

  He heard Grace arrive and went down to meet her. In the kitchen, she was standing with both hands holding the back of a chair, as if too tired to move. The sight of her face when she looked up shocked him. She was exhausted; she didn’t smile and her make-up had the pallor of a death mask. He put his arms around her without speaking. She leaned against him; she was almost rigid with tension.

  ‘Bad day,’ she said. ‘I have to go and shower. I feel dirty.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to tell you.’

  ‘Just tell me. Where do you think it’s going to go?’

  ‘We found a dead woman today. Shot in the back of the head. The second woman we’ve found like that in a few days. I didn’t tell you any of that.’

  ‘Come on, babe. Just relax. Sit down and get it out of your head. I’ll make you some coffee.’

  ‘I’m still armed.’

  ‘Just sit down. Ellie’s asleep,’ he said.

  ‘Did she miss me?’

  ‘Yeah, but we sorted that out.’

  If she drank alcohol, he’d have got her a whisky. Instead he made coffee, strong the way she liked it. She drank it and some life seemed to come into her face. He decided he wouldn’t tell her about the SMS message, or not just yet. It was the last thing she needed now.

  ‘It’s so sordid, you know,’ she said. ‘This woman’s life looked like shit. I thought, why would you want to live like this? I know people don’t always get a choice but it felt like the end of the world.’

  ‘It’s her life, not yours. You can’t forget that in this business. She made her own decisions, right? That’s why you were there. It must have b
een.’

  ‘She almost certainly took a bribe. And because she did, someone died. From the looks of how she lived, she needed the money. Then they killed her when they thought she might be a weak link.’

  ‘Find the person who killed her and take him off the streets. That’s the best you can do.’

  ‘I’m going to put my gun away,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back.’

  When she came downstairs again, she had showered and changed, even going so far as to wash her hair. He had heated the food and set it on the table.

  ‘I said not to wait for me.’

  ‘I know you did. Don’t worry about it.’

  They sat down to eat. She took a mouthful and stopped.

  ‘I didn’t want to cut you out like that,’ she said. ‘Clive ambushed me.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s a bastard,’ Harrigan said. ‘I’ve worked with people like him in the past. He probably doesn’t have anything else in his life.’

  ‘I just have to stay on this tightrope,’ she went on. ‘If I don’t separate life and work like this, I won’t be able to handle it. It’s my way of protecting what we have from what’s out there.’

  ‘It’s a hard ask from your boss. He’s asking you to treat me and Ellie like we don’t matter. He should be thinking about what that’s doing to you.’

  ‘When this operation’s finished, we’ll still be here,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter what Clive does. Nothing’s going to change that.’

  When they went to bed that night, Grace fell asleep almost immediately. Slept until Ellie woke her in the morning, crying. Heavy-eyed, in her nightdress, Grace hurried to her room. Ellie was lying soaked in her nappy.

  ‘Look at you, sweetie. We’ll get you dry, okay?’

  How small she was. How perfect. How new and unmarked the skin. With her daughter changed, she picked her up. Ellie touched her face and Grace kissed her. How clean she smelled, after what Grace had seen yesterday. How clean and new. Her daughter had no scars. She wanted it to stay that way; for Ellie to grow with no scars on her body or her mind, whatever it cost.