The Labyrinth of Drowning (14 page)

H
arrigan 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 been.’

‘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.

B
y ten in the morning, Grace was walking in Parramatta Park near the pavilion, not far from the Macquarie Street gatehouse. It was a clear, sunny day and the light gave a yellow wash to the grass and the trees beyond. She had left her car in the parking area and seen a sleek, grey Mercedes already parked there. She knew this was Kidd’s car; or more accurately these days, the finance company’s. While she walked, a cyclist cruised slowly along the path in front of her. Nearby, a couple were strolling casually across the grass. They spread out a blanket and sat down, seemingly for morning tea. Her backup was in position. Then she saw Kidd, sitting on a bench waiting for her. She stopped for a few moments.
I am not myself. I want everything this man has to give because in my own head I have nothing. Whatever he says, it doesn’t matter to me. Remember that
.

She went to meet him. When she sat down beside him, he didn’t speak. He had his hands folded in his lap. It was an odd look.

‘How are you, Jon?’ she said sweetly. ‘Nice of you to take some time off work to see me.’

He spoke without looking at her. ‘I don’t want to spend any more time than I have to talking to you. Would you get to the point?’

‘What sort of person are you?’

‘What sort of person am I? What sort of person are you?’

‘Someone who doesn’t go around organising for young women to be sent to their deaths. Particularly one as nasty as Jirawan had.’

‘I don’t know that name.’

‘Yes, you do. This is for you. Have a good look at it.’

She handed him the same photocopy of Jirawan’s passport that she had shown Narelle Wong. He looked at it for some minutes, then folded it up and very calmly gave it back to her.

‘I’ve never seen it before and I’ve never heard of Jirawan Sanders.’

‘You must recognise that woman.’

‘Yes, of course. But this is the first time I’ve known her name.’

He sounded as if he was telling the truth.

‘Well, Jon, that’s too bad. I was about to offer you that passport back if you wanted it. And if you were generous enough, I wasn’t going to go around telling people exactly how you spend your holidays when you visit those orphans in Phnom Penh and Bangkok. You know the orphanages I’m talking about. You go there every year, twice sometimes.’

‘You’re the one with the corrupt mind, not me. I don’t have anything to hide.’

‘Have a look at these before you say that.’

She handed him an envelope containing the photographs taken from his computer. His mouth seemed to grow thinner as he flicked through them. He leaned back on the bench and closed his eyes. The pictures slipped from his hand and fell to the ground. She picked them up, and put them back in her bag.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said.

‘I don’t think anybody else will either.’

‘I’ve given those children things they would never have had otherwise. They have toys, they go to school. They have good clothes and they eat every day. I’m not a monster. I’m nice to them.’

‘Spare me the violins,’ Grace said. ‘What I want to know is, do we have a deal?’

‘Where did you get those pictures?’

‘Why should I tell you that?’

He looked at her so sharply and with such outright fear that, even in role, she was shocked.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You got those pictures from Orion. Otherwise you’d be dead.’

‘Does it matter where they came from? I’ve got them. It’s my call what happens to them. Do you want to be a known paedophile, Jon? Do you want to be hounded out of town everywhere you go by people baying for your blood?’

He was silent. Then he leaned forward with his head in his hands, crying. She looked away. It was obscene to watch that kind of desperation. He stopped crying and stared at the ground for a few moments, then sat up. No more tears; he had the strangest smile on his face.

‘If you want to play this game, then tell me what you want,’ he said, in a voice that sounded oddly unconcerned. ‘Money? Because I don’t have any.’

Grace didn’t like his tone. If this was a game, there was something disturbing about his tactics. For a few seconds she weighed up how she should handle this, then stayed with the plan she had agreed on with Clive.

‘Yes, I’d like money but that’s not my first priority. What I really want is in on your scam.’

‘What scam?’

‘Those foreign workers at Life’s Pleasures. Don’t tell me you don’t take a cut of what they make. Bet it’s a lot more than Lynette got. I’d like part of that money, thanks.’

‘I don’t get a cent and I don’t have a cent,’ he replied in a colourless voice.

‘Don’t talk rubbish!’

‘I don’t. No one pays me. You have to realise that the people who control me have pictures just like yours. I pay them and I keep paying them. I’ve told them there’s a limit to what I have. Do they want me to sell my kidneys on the net? They just keep saying, give me more. They don’t understand people. What happens when people get desperate.’ He was leaning forward. Then he closed his eyes again. ‘I’m so tired.’

‘Who’s they?’ Grace asked, hiding surprise at the openness of his confession. ‘These people bleeding you?’

He looked up at her. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘If you won’t do business with me, maybe I can deal with them.’

He laughed from somewhere deep down and closed his eyes again. He didn’t move or speak; he seemed to have withdrawn completely.

After a few moments, Grace spoke again. ‘Those workers don’t get paid a cent, do they? Why do they do it?’

‘As far as I can work it out, they’re paying off the costs of a new identity. My job is to find them. I review a lot of visa applications. It’s always women who will never get a visa no matter what they do, either for themselves or someone they want to bring over here.’ He was staring ahead. ‘After I’ve found them and referred them, the department never sees or hears from them again. They just disappear off the radar. What I have to do then is make sure we never follow them up. I’ve even destroyed files.’

‘How many women?’

‘Half a dozen over three years.’

‘That’s not very many.’

‘No. I’ve thought that too.’ He was speaking as if they were colleagues at a departmental meeting, discussing policy, not people’s lives. ‘Obviously I know what I’m sending these women to. I’ve been told that to make sure I pick the right women. But it’s a lot of effort for a few people. All I can think is that they like doing this. They like breaking people down. With me, it’s money. They grind it out of me. With these women, it’s sex. They have to do it. They may not want to but that’s just too bad.’ He frowned. ‘It’s the kick. It can’t be anything else. They like controlling people. It must be an addiction.’

‘Who’s they?’ Grace repeated.

He smiled at her, broadly, savagely. ‘The people you want to do business with.’

Again, silence.

‘Where do you refer these women?’ she asked.

He was still looking at her. Given the situation, and the surreal feel that seemed to have attached itself to their conversation, she couldn’t judge his expression. It seemed almost businesslike. He glanced around the park. It was peaceful, domestic, with the sound of distant voices and occasional bird calls.

‘There’s a place in Parramatta Westfield—the Portal. An immigration self-help business. The department’s been dealing with it since it opened four years ago. As far as the department knows, it’s completely above board. I’ve sent whole families there. They help with their English, tell them how to start a business, advise on how to get citizenship. I tell these women the Portal will be able to help them and usually they’re so desperate they go over there right away.’

‘Who was the last woman you referred?’

‘A young Somali woman. Nadifa Hasan Ibrahim. Very, very beautiful. She desperately wanted a visa for her brother. That wasn’t very long ago.’

‘She broke her bargain. She never turned up at Life’s Pleasures.’

‘Then she’s probably dead,’ he said in a neutral voice. ‘They wouldn’t tolerate someone not keeping their side of a bargain.’

‘Don’t you take these women over to Life’s Pleasures?’

‘No. The other night was the first time I’d been inside.’

‘Marie Li knew you, Jon.’

‘She’d met me once before, when I picked up that young Thai woman from the back door one night. The one whose passport you showed me.’

‘Jirawan,’ Grace said. ‘How does she fit into this?’

‘She wasn’t one of the women I referred. I can only guess they brought her there themselves. Why, I can’t tell you. They could have been punishing her for some reason. If they thought she owed them money, they might have been making her work it off. From my own experience, I’d say that’s the most likely scenario. They get very upset if they don’t get every cent they think is owed to them. Even the smallest amount.’

Again, the ordinariness with which he spoke was surreal.

‘They put this Jirawan in the boot,’ he said. ‘Marie Li and her gorilla. All I could do was what I was told.’

‘You didn’t know her?’

‘No, I was just told to go and pick her up and deliver her.’

‘Deliver her where?’

‘I wasn’t told that. I was to receive instructions on my mobile. I didn’t do it. I let her go with a train fare in her hand. It was all I
could do for her. I told you, I’m not a monster, I do have a conscience. That’s what they don’t quite get—that people have free will. They think they can squash it out of you. They were very angry with me that night. Now I’m going to have to pay for doing that. It’s just how they work. It would never occur to them that I might try and get back at them somehow.’ He laughed strangely.

A tall woman of indeterminate age, dressed in a tracksuit and with her hair tucked up under a cap, jogged towards them. She stopped at a bench some distance away and began stretching exercises. Kidd’s eyes followed her. He stared at his feet and laughed again.

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. They’ll eat you alive and enjoy it.’

‘Who are these people? How do you know them?’

‘They’re people I met in Thailand once. They had pictures. Since then they’ve had a lot of fun letting me know who they are and what they do. My own fault. I thought I could buy them off. What I finally realised was that someone must have found me for them. I was what they wanted. Someone who worked for the Department of Immigration. You see, these women aren’t the only ones they sell identities to. They bring other people into the country under false IDs. Criminals. People who want to hide. But once people are here, they have to stay hidden. I smooth things over, make sure no questions get asked, that sort of thing. Warn them if I have to.’

‘The way you warned them that Life’s Pleasures was being raided,’ Grace said. ‘And that I was an agent with Orion.’

‘Yes. Both those things. When you’re caught in a vice, you can’t see anything except what’s immediately in front of you. I can’t eat any more. I can’t swallow, or hold any food in my stomach. At the moment, every minute I live is just the next minute I’ve got to get through.’

‘Give me their names.’

‘I don’t need to,’ he replied. ‘The way it’s working out, I think they’ll find you.’

‘What were they doing in Thailand?’

‘Business of some kind. I got the impression they had connections with the expat community in Bangkok. I think they’re
probably involved in extortion, money laundering, that sort of thing. I’m certain it isn’t drugs.’

‘Do you know the name Peter Sanders?’ she asked.

‘Who’s that? This Jirawan’s husband? No.’

‘You say you have a conscience,’ Grace said, ‘but you still organised Jirawan’s escape from detention.’

‘Yes, I told them when her medical appointment was. Every day when I wake up, it’s the first thing I think about.’

He was staring into the distance, at the people walking and the slow traffic on the roads in the park. Then he looked at Grace. Oddly, for those few seconds he seemed almost relaxed.

‘Either you’re a cheap blackmailer or this is a sting of some kind,’ he said. ‘It’s a sting, isn’t it? You’re after them.’

‘No, Jon. You’ve got something to give and I want it. Even if it’s only information. I can turn that into money if I have to. You must have a contact. Tell me who you refer these women to.’

‘Sara McLeod,’ he said. ‘She’s one of the “they”. She runs the Portal. Why don’t you go and introduce yourself? She’s just over there, doing her exercises. Now, she’s a strange woman.’

Grace prevented herself from glancing in the woman’s direction. ‘In what way?’

He gave her an angry and provocative stare.

‘You call me a paedophile and you say I’m sick. Well, she’s sick too, they both are. You should see it. She’ll do anything for him, things you wouldn’t believe. Meanwhile, he’s off with any other woman he can get his hands on. But he can’t leave her. They’re always clawing at each other but they can’t separate. I don’t know how long they’ve been together but it must be a long time. I’ve known them for three years now. They do everything together, and I mean everything. When Jirawan was killed, she would have been part of it. That’s just as sick as anything you can lay on me. But you didn’t know who she was. You can’t have got those pictures from them. I think that whatever you say, this is a sting. Do you know what they told me when I said I was meeting you?’

Grace shook her head.

‘They wanted to know all about you. Could you be bought? I told them, yes, you could. You were just a cheap blackmailer. But
I don’t think you are. I lied to them. And I’m very sure they believed me.’ He laughed softly. ‘They think you can be their puppet. Just like me.’

He smiled triumphantly, then got to his feet and walked quickly away down the path. She followed him. A motorbike was approaching. He saw it and began to jog towards it.

‘Get away from me,’ he said.

‘We haven’t finished, Jon.’

‘Yes, we have. Get out of here. Go on! Go away! Now!’

He pushed her hard enough to wind her and knock her to the side of the path. She stumbled and almost fell. Righting herself, she saw the motorbike heading towards him. He began to run down the path as if to meet it. The bike swerved just as it reached him. There was a pillion rider on the back. Kidd stopped and flung his arms out wide. There was a popping noise, shots, and Kidd went down. The bike was gone at speed.