Alex Palmer - The Labyrinth of Drowning

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.

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.

The private entrance Doug had mentioned, a badly lit doorway, led to a flight of stairs next to a service elevator. A short climb took them to the brothel’s open doorway on the first floor. As soon as they walked in, two men waiting in deep armchairs rose to their feet and melted out of the entrance like smoke. They would have disappeared downstairs at speed if they hadn’t been stopped by the police and asked for their names and addresses.

Borghini had organised the raid well-a straightforward exercise without histrionics. He presented his warrant card and the legal papers at the reception desk and sent his people to search the premises in an orderly way. Kidd, last through the doorway, stood in the background, watching. Already the receptionist, an older woman with a solid build, dyed blonde hair and wearing a fashionable off-the-shoulder red number, was on the phone.

‘I’m just ringing Marie,’ she said with a professional smile. ‘She has a flat on the top floor, she’s there now. I’m sure she’ll be down in a moment.’

‘We know where she lives,’ Borghini replied. ‘I’ve already sent some people upstairs to talk to her. But go ahead. You can tell her I’ll be up to see her as soon as I’ve sorted things out down here.’

Officers moved along the hallways knocking on doors, announcing themselves. ‘We have reason to believe there may be illegal immigrants working on these premises,’ they repeated with each knock. ‘Could you come out to the reception desk now with your personal identification ready, please? Thank you.’

Clients began to appear in the hallways in various states of dress. Their IDs checked, they disappeared with the same speed as the men in the reception area earlier. Once out of the rooms, the workers sat in a communal kitchen, smoking and occasionally chatting. Some looked nervous but most seemed bored or irritated as they presented their IDs to the various officers on demand and were interviewed. Grace looked them over but saw no sign of the exotic workers Doug had described earlier that day. So far everybody was just another citizen.

It wasn’t the look of the brothel-much of which had an air of the suburban, of polyester chic-but its size that interested Grace. Whoever owned it was on to a good thing, and whoever had set it up in the first place had had money to invest. So far, that side of the business had proved to be a maze. Both Orion and the police investigation had identified the owner as a company, Santos Associates. Attempts to track down that company’s office holders had led nowhere. Calls to their phone numbers went unanswered, and when the company’s premises were visited no one was there. The brothel’s accounts were handled by a company called Stamfords, who actually did exist and whose people were being interviewed. They had confirmed one fact: all the money Life’s Pleasures made was automatically transferred offshore.

The brothel itself was large enough for Jirawan to have been hidden away in one room while business went on as normal in the rest of the place. Each room had a theme, a colour, a fantasy for whatever taste. The erotic paintings had the commercial look of pneumatic sex, while the mirrors on the walls and ceilings made her wonder why people so enjoyed watching themselves.

At the end of one corridor there was a fire door. Grace opened it to see the landing of a bleak, cement fire stair. She opened the door of the room closest to the exit. It was a little more spare than the others she’d seen, but it was serviceable and could be locked. It held a faint smell of air freshener gone stale. Grace climbed the fire stairs to the fourth floor. The fire door opened onto what seemed to be a private hallway laid with a length of red carpet. Not far from the fire exit a uniformed police officer stood outside an open doorway. Miss Marie Li’s apartment, with a direct line to the most discreet room in the brothel. Grace decided it was time to introduce herself.

She walked into a room where someone had let their imagination take a different turn altogether from the pay-as-you-go fantasy downstairs. It was softer, a place where all negativities were expelled. Close the door behind you and you left the grey Parramatta streets below for some much more romantic place. Even so it had a fake quality, a chinoiserie such as you might find in a 1930s Hollywood film set where the action was supposedly situated in the exotic colonial Far East. The Art Deco furnishings, the drapes in period prints, the light fittings, the potted palms, the decorated screens, even the wallpaper, were a loving recreation of the time; elegant, richly coloured and luxurious.

The room was filled with a sweet, fresh, but still almost overpowering odour. On the tables roundabout stood vases of cut flowers: red, white, lilac and yellow roses, deep blue irises, lilies. An ornate sideboard was covered with an array of orchids in heavy gilded metal pots. The flowers bloomed in every shade of colour merging to deeply variegated textures, one patterned almost like leopard skin. Downstairs, the clients paid by the half-hour to the hour; here the fantasy could go on for as long as anyone wanted.

A smaller room off the main lounge had been set up for entertainment and was dominated by a large, flat screen. There were shelves of DVDs: silent and 1930s films, Hollywood musicals- Chicago, Singing in the Rain and Camelot . Along one wall were framed photographs of famous former love goddesses: Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe: their dresses and their blonde hair shimmering under lights. A photograph of the actor Gong Li, exquisite in a gold cheongsam, hung alongside them. Grace saw a DVD of one of her films, Shanghai Triad , sitting on the top of the DVD player.

The sudden and pervasive smell of cigarette smoke caught her attention. She moved towards the kitchen, a room with gleaming stainless-steel fittings and pale granite bench tops. There were signs of interrupted food preparation on one of the benches: an array of dishes usually found on a yum cha menu and a bottle of vintage Pol Roger champagne in an ice bucket with two champagne flutes beside it. Borghini was sitting with Marie Li at the table, a uniformed policewoman with them. The rest of his team were searching the apartment. Jon Kidd was already there, leaning against the bench and watching everything.