The Labyrinth of Drowning

by Alex Palmer

  ‘There’s only one place you could have got this,’ she said.

  ‘I took it off Chris. He wasn’t going to need it.’

  Before or after he died? And why did you need it?

  She put the picture back in the envelope and laid it on the table. Griffin picked it up and put it in his pocket. He was staring at her.

  ‘I’m still glad your hair is longer now. Eat something.’

  ‘After you.’

  With his eyes still on her, he took a piece of bread and dipped it. She did likewise. He smiled.

  ‘Breaking bread,’ he said, still looking at her. ‘I wanted us to do that together.’

  She ate. Under his gaze, she barely tasted the food. She was trying to pin down the way he was looking at her. His cold blue eyes were staring and intense, they never seemed to leave her face. They frightened her, badly. She might be a professional, an agent who was working, but there was no way around that feeling. You, that expression said. An intent aimed very specifically at her.

  ‘We were going to talk business,’ she said.

  He looked at her with a friendly expression. ‘Let’s say you’ve accurately described what this business is. What do you think you can do for us?’

  ‘Don’t you think someone in my position could help you out quite a bit?’

  ‘An accountant would be more useful. Law enforcement agencies aren’t that hard to avoid if you’re careful.’

  ‘You’re one step ahead of them, are you?’

  ‘Yes, always. Now if what you’re trying is blackmail, that could be very dangerous for you.’

  ‘We’re partners already, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘I’m putting my safety on the line for you.’

  ‘And you’re being paid for it. I can’t use you in the money side of things, you don’t have the skills. But I can use you for what you’re doing now.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Will you trust me?’ he asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I will pay you double what you’ve asked me for, which is a lot of money, if after you pick up Marie tomorrow, you do what I ask you to.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘You have to wait until tomorrow to find out. But it’ll tell me whether you’re genuine or not.’

  ‘I thought you were going to give me more information about the business. That’s why I came.’

  ‘And I’ve asked you to trust me. That’s what you have to do first. Now let’s talk about something else. I want to know about you. Tell me about your daughter. She’s in childcare, isn’t she?’

  Slowly Grace shook her head.

  ‘No, tell me.’

  ‘Off limits.’

  He stopped eating to look at her. ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Off limits,’ she repeated.

  He went back to eating. He was angry by the look of it, although the anger was contained. Grace watched him in silence for some moments.

  ‘What is this meeting really about? Because you keep changing the rules on me.’

  ‘No, Grace. You’re the one who keeps changing on me. You’re going to become a part of my work. If I can rely on you, you’re going to help me fulfil obligations. I wanted to spend a little time with you to work out what sort of person you are.’

  ‘What have you decided?’

  ‘You’re very hard to reach. Most people I can persuade to talk about themselves. But not you. That makes you a challenge and I like that, I suppose.’ With this, he managed to look up and smile. ‘Let’s try again. Your daughter. Did you really want to have her or did your partner make you?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I just want to know if she’s important to you.’

  Grace decided this question was beyond what could be expected of her. She stopped eating. ‘I can’t stay. I have to be back at work. People will notice if I’m not on duty.’

  She moved away from the table; he followed her and took her arm.

  ‘Why does that offend you so much? Because you don’t care about her?’

  She pulled away from him. He tightened his grip.

  ‘Let me go,’ she said.

  He was holding her arm, staring at her. Then, very reluctantly, he loosened his grip.

  ‘Let me kiss you,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s what I told you yesterday. You’ve already got a girlfriend and I don’t share.’

  ‘You will one day. And you’ll talk about yourself as well. One day you’ll tell me everything I want to know about you.’

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘No, not today. But you will. Maybe tomorrow. You’ll see.’

  She went to her car without looking back.

  Once again she went to the motel at Chatswood. Expecting to find both Clive and Borghini waiting for her, she was surprised to see only Clive.

  ‘He’ll be here soon,’ he said. ‘You handled that well but there are a few things I think you should have done differently. That’s why I wanted a word with you in private. Sit down.’

  Grace was still feeling the impact of the meeting with Griffin. What she needed was strong coffee and some encouragement, the kind Borghini usually gave her. All at once the room seemed small, even claustrophobic. She took a chair at the table. Clive sat opposite. She felt a creepiness up her backbone.

  ‘There are one or two things.’ He was looking at her with an odd expression in those usually expressionless eyes. ‘You should have kept Griffin talking for longer than you did and gone a little further. You should have talked about your daughter when he asked you to.’

  ‘I couldn’t. Least of all about her.’

  ‘The job requires you to get over that. And if he wanted you to kiss him, I think you should have done that.’

  Grace looked him in the eyes. ‘I’m not doing this job at the expense of myself,’ she said. ‘When I’m at work, I’m at work. And when I’m home, that’s somewhere else altogether. To me, that’s how we handle this. I can’t mix the two like that.’

  ‘You need to be able to put your home into a compartment and leave it there. I’ve decided you have a future with this organisation but that’s still something you’re going to have to work at.’

  Before she could answer, Borghini walked in, slamming the door behind him. He had been part of the backup. He was clearly very angry.

  ‘I’m going to get straight to the point,’ he said, sitting down and speaking directly to Clive. ‘You’re putting too much pressure on Grace. It’s all her. You shouldn’t be running the operation that way. You should be sharing the load.’

  ‘There are other people involved,’ Clive replied angrily. ‘There’s surveillance, there’s finance, there’s IT. The police. And there’s you.’

  ‘But not on the front line. I don’t say Grace doesn’t handle it well. She does. But why go to that meeting in the first place?’ He turned to Grace. ‘I thought that yesterday. It’s exposing you too much. You met him on his turf. You shouldn’t have done that. You’re the one with the perfect bargaining chip. He wants Narelle. Get him to meet you on your turf. Demand more of him than he’s giving you. Let’s get back to basics. What’s his motive? What is this thing he wants you to do? Shoot Narelle Wong dead for him? We’re letting him manipulate us, not the other way around.’

  ‘I haven’t asked for your opinion. But now that you’ve given it, this is a good time to make an announcement,’ Clive said to Borghini. ‘There’s been a change of arrangements. I’ve asked for you to be replaced as the police liaison officer. You won’t be required for this meeting.’

  Borghini looked poleaxed. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m finding you obstructive and difficult to deal with. It’s my decision who works on this investigation. You can leave. Now.’

  Borghini threw up his hands, acknowledging there was no point in arguing, and stood up.

  ‘No.’ Grace spoke sharply. ‘We need a liaison officer. There’s no one here to replace Mark. He can st
ay until his replacement takes over.’

  ‘I have the authority here,’ Clive said.

  ‘Our agreement says it’s ultimately my call how I handle the undercover operation within the broad ambit of your directions. He stays until his replacement turns up or I execute my rights under the opt-out clause as of now.’

  Clive was expressionless, staring at her. After a few moments, he gestured to Borghini, who sat down at the table again.

  ‘I guess I stay in that case.’

  ‘For now,’ Clive said. His cheeks were red and he took a few moments to regain his equilibrium. ‘This operation is in the balance. Tomorrow, when you deliver Narelle Wong, we’ll have people watching to see who she meets and where she’s taken. There’ll also be people ready to move in immediately. Now let’s have that note you took from her.’

  Grace placed the note on the table and watched Clive pick it up. She was wondering what had really been in his mind when he had spoken to her earlier or even if she wanted to know. She knew she didn’t want to be in the same room with him by herself. She thought back over other operatives who had worked closely with him. Orion’s secrecy meant those operations couldn’t be discussed. Small comments, the occasional raised eyebrow, were all she had to go on. Strange vibes and impossible demands were the last thing she wanted to deal with now; the operation was dangerous enough as it was. She was in the balance as well; she hoped Clive had the sense to realise that.

  She left the motel with enough time to get home and collect Ellie before they both went to Paul’s book launch. Borghini followed her out.

  ‘Thanks for sticking up for me in there,’ he said.

  ‘No problem,’ she said with a tired smile.

  ‘I’ve got to say this to you. Your boss has lost sight of what this is really about. You know what he’s doing? He’s watching you. I don’t know why but he’s fixed on you and he’s putting you in danger. The first rule for any operation like this is that you protect your undercover officers as much as you can. But he’s putting you and this Griffin together and he’s watching you. I think he’s getting a kick out of it.’

  Grace didn’t want to think about this.

  ‘The way things are set up I don’t see how I can back out now,’ she said. ‘Not until after tomorrow.’

  Borghini looked back at the motel room, frowning. ‘After today, I’m not supposed to be involved any more. Jesus.’ He looked down at his feet. Grace couldn’t quite understand what was in his mind. ‘Give the boss my regards,’ he said. ‘He’s a decent man. He’s always done the right thing by me.’

  Then he was gone, driving away into the afternoon traffic.

  Grace got into her car. She held on to the fact that no one could stop her from walking away if she chose to. With a bit of luck, this would all be done with in twenty-four hours. Or she would have done all she could do and would have no choice but to bail out. Assuming nothing happened to her first.

  18

  Harrigan’s retainer had emailed him a cache of information regarding Amelie Santos. She had found the private sanatorium in the Southern Highlands where Frank Wells had been born. Now closed, it had been famous, or infamous, in its day as a place where those who could afford it sent their daughters to have their illegitimate children out of anyone’s way. It had also offered a nursemaid service that cared for the babies until they were adopted out. The sanatorium had become a private psychiatric clinic in the 1970s and then gone out of business in the early ’80s. When the building was sold, the records had been sent to a social research archive in Canberra. While the hospital’s medical information had been destroyed long ago, its administrative records were available to researchers and a number of articles had been written about its history.

  The dates of Amelie Santos’s admittance and discharge had been recorded in one of the hospital’s registers. She had arrived on a Monday morning and left four days later. A note next to her discharge read: By taxi to station 11 am. Parents will meet at Central. Harrigan’s research assistant had added the information that Amelie was most likely shielded during the birth. According to the testimony of several women who had given birth there—now mostly in their sixties or seventies, one in her eighties—a screen had been placed in front of their faces, and one remembered being blindfolded. Amelie Santos might never have seen Frank, let alone held him. Only heard him before he was taken away.

  Harrigan emailed back the name Loretta Griffin and the date 1977. A brutal attempted murder, the husband convicted and gaoled. There’d been a son by the name of Joel, by the look of it an only child. Any information she could find on any of them.

  In the meantime, he’d been doing his own research into the Shillingworth Trust. The details were much as Lambert had already told him: a discretionary property trust with Tate and Patterson as its trustees and the beneficiary an otherwise unrelated company called Cheshire Nominees. The names of the company’s office holders were unknown to him, and he suspected that if he investigated them they would prove to be untraceable. The contents of the trust’s property portfolio were also no surprise. Among a number of commercial and residential properties, it included Fairview Mansions, the Blackheath house and Amelie Santos’s two other former properties at Duffys Forest and North Turramurra. Many of the properties were in less desirable parts of the city, leading Harrigan to speculate that the portfolio was a dump for dirty money. Distribute the management of properties among a range of agents and who would bother putting the pieces together?

  Valuable information but still nothing to link his investigations to Joel Griffin or Sara McLeod. Shillingworth Trust must have bought the latter two properties when Medicine International sold them on. But why? What was so special about owning them that you’d go to all that trouble? If the trustees had a use for them, then he needed to find out what it was.

  He checked the time and closed down his laptop. It was getting on and he had a long drive in front of him.

  Duffys Forest, on the northern edge of the metropolis, was a part of Sydney Harrigan rarely visited. His travels north usually took him in a direction more to the west, on the freeway across the Hawkesbury River to the Central Coast, where Grace’s father lived in retirement and her brother and his wife ran a restaurant. This far-flung piece of Sydney suburbia, like its next-door neighbour Terrey Hills, was a peninsula in the bush, surrounded on three sides by the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. It was almost rural, a home to riding schools and properties offering stabling and agistment for the much-loved horses of teenage girls. The blocks of land were large and still partially bush-covered; trees and scrub lined the narrow roads. He passed plant nurseries, a golf club, Buddhist temples, private schools and a gun club.

  Like the house at Blackheath, the property he was seeking had a For Sale sign out the front. Inspections by appointment; price on application. The house was on the southwestern edge of the suburb at a lower level than the street, and apparently reached by a long driveway. A thick line of trees on the boundary, surrounded by a cyclone-wire fence, isolated it from the road. Entrance to the driveway was through a high, locked Colorbond gate. The other houses roundabout were not much different, with the occupiers clearly valuing their privacy. Ignoring your neighbours would be easy in this place.

  Harrigan decided to risk it. He parked at a distance past the driveway where he would be out of sight of anyone arriving at the house. As well as being armed, he had brought along a few tools in case he needed to do some breaking and entering. He tossed his backpack over his shoulder and made his way towards the house, approaching it from the side via the next-door neighbour’s block of land. Their only front fence was a low wooden affair, while their house, which was built on higher ground, was some distance away and also surrounded by trees.

  He followed the cyclone fence down a slope to the park boundary where the fencing stopped and the trees merged into the national park. He pushed through the scrub to the edge of an open grassy area at the back of the house. It was an older brick building, po
ssibly dating back to the 1950s, and sprawled over the grounds. The grass near the back door had been kept mowed but the rest of the garden had been left to itself. Rusted white garden furniture was scattered among areas of taller grass and shrubs. A pair of brightly coloured crimson rosellas was bathing in an ancient stone birdbath filled after recent rain. It could not have been more peaceful.

  Beside the house was a large garage of the same vintage. Readying for a stint of housebreaking, Harrigan pulled on a pair of disposable gloves. He didn’t approach the house directly but stayed out of sight, moving through the trees on the boundary till he was close to the back of the garage where there was a door. He tried it and it opened. Inside there was space for at least two cars but at present none were there. Most likely, no one was home. Life without a car would be impossible out here.

  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.