Alex Palmer - The Labyrinth of Drowning

‘Give me the contact details,’ Harrigan said.

‘I don’t fucking have them. I was told: fucking rent it out, collect the rent, put it in a bank account. Any expenses I take them out of a float. I don’t see anyone! I don’t want to. Why should I?’

‘Renting out a building like that isn’t just fixing broken taps,’ Harrigan said. ‘Who do you contact when something happens the owners have to know about?’

‘I fucking don’t contact anyone. I’ve been told it goes back through the family.’

‘Do you know the name Craig Wells?’

‘No. Fucking never heard it before.’

‘Don’t cross me, mate,’ Harrigan said. ‘That would be a really stupid thing to do. Now, you and your woman friend out there, or whatever she is, didn’t see me here today. And if I want information from you, you give it to me. You keep your ear to the ground, you pick up what’s going on and you get back to me. Because I want to know if anyone’s coming after me or my family. And if I don’t hear, it won’t just be me that comes knocking.’

‘Jesus,’ Eddie said. ‘What the fuck do you want from me? You want me to end up dead? The family hates you. You know that. They just want to piss on your grave.’

‘That pleasure’s going to be mine, mate,’ Harrigan replied.

He got to his feet and walked out. He glanced at Gail at the desk but she was doing what she’d been told and not seeing him. Then he was gone, glad to get out of there.

Knowing that Tony Ponticelli senior had Alzheimer’s was a handy piece of information. It was hardly a surprise: Tony must have been in his late eighties. Harrigan wished he’d known before he’d talked to Eddie, but why should anyone have told him? He wasn’t Commander Harrigan any more. He no longer had intelligence reports across his desk, nor could he put people on the street when it suited him. Not for the first time, he saw the paradox in his situation. He had left the police to make his life his own; but the past kept following him while he had the handicap of only his own resources to rely on. One day he wanted to see the end of it.

He was about to start his car when his phone rang.

‘Boss,’ Trevor said, ‘some info for you. Craig Wells. Remember when the special homicide branch had a team dealing with the cold cases?’

‘Wells was one of them,’ Harrigan said. ‘I remember. One of the detectives from the original investigation came to see the team.’

‘That’s right. The records are in the archives. I’ve given Naomi a bell. She’s got a chair waiting for you whenever you want to go and have a look.’

‘I’ll do that now. Thanks.’

It was only a short drive to the police archives from where he was. Naomi, the archivist, was a substantially built middle-aged woman whom had he sweet-talked often enough when he’d been a serving police officer. She placed the square box of files in front of him with a disapproving look on her face.

‘I hope I don’t get into trouble doing this for you,’ she grumbled. ‘You’re lucky it’s still here. It’s listed to go to the State Archives in the next transfer.’

‘I’m grateful,’ he replied with a smile.

She went back to her desk. Perhaps she was lonely here in this isolated, climate-controlled shed that wasn’t much more than a staging post for records either doomed to the furnaces or awaiting perpetual incarceration in the Archives Office of New South Wales.

He opened the box and went through the records with the proficiency of a man who knows what he’s looking for. Memory came back as he searched. It had been a murder from the early ’80s, before the use of DNA testing. It had come to his cold-case team because one of the original detectives had been unable to shake off his doubts about it. On the face of it, it had been a straightforward murder-suicide. Craig Wells, then eighteen, had murdered his mother, Janice, in their rented Concord home and afterwards set fire to her car with the both of them in it, on the edge of the cliffs near Stanwell Park early one Sunday morning. The car had exploded and both bodies had been burnt past recognition. It seemed a hard way to commit suicide.

When, the next day, the police had gone to the Wellses’ home in Concord, it was all too clearly the scene of a murder. The living room was drenched in blood and there were bone pieces on the carpet, later identified as parts of a skull. A sheet had been torn from Janice’s unmade bed and presumably used to wrap and move her body to the car. The neighbours said they had seen Craig arriving home at about ten o’clock on the Saturday morning. He hadn’t been home for some days and no one knew where he’d been. No one had seen or heard anything of either Janice or Craig after that. The closest neighbour, an elderly man, said he had heard a car-he assumed Janice’s-leaving the house sometime between eight and nine that night.

Neighbours told the police that the Wellses had lived in the house for the last six years. It seemed it was just the next in a series of cheap houses they’d rented over the years. Relations between mother and son were known to be rocky. When they had first arrived, they were often heard shouting at each other. During all those years, no one had once seen Craig’s father. Janice drank heavily and had a string of lovers, some of whom stayed for a while and some who didn’t. Occasionally they were violent to her. Sometimes the police were called; at other times Janice was seen at the local shops with bruises on her face. She had worked as a receptionist at a local panel-beating business and had little money. When she died, she’d had no assets, her credit cards were in arrears and there was only a small amount of money in her bank account. Unkindly, her neighbours had called her a whinger: a woman who was always complaining how everyone had let her down. Craig never spoke to anyone.

Both victims were identified through their teeth and the pathologist was also able to establish that Janice had died as the result of a blow to the head. Mother and son had consulted a dentist only relatively recently. Craig’s records dated from when he was fifteen, his mother’s from only a few months ago. He’d gone to a busy city practice, while she’d gone to a much more up-market surgery in the northern suburbs, where they’d never seen her before or since. The treatment had been expensive and she’d paid cash. Where she’d got the money, no one knew.

Craig’s dentist had seen him several times but it turned out there were no pictures of him to help in the identification. A search of the Concord house had found photographs of Janice but none of her son. The dentist was a busy woman. Her general description of her patient fitted with the one they got from the neighbours but it wasn’t conclusive. In the house, there seemed to be very little that could have belonged to Craig and few signs he’d actually lived there. The forensic team hadn’t checked the house for fingerprints because there was nothing to compare them with.

There had been an inquest where, on the basis of probabilities, the coroner had ruled that Craig Wells had murdered his mother and then committed suicide. The small remains of both mother and son had been further cremated and the ashes scattered. Once the inquest had been completed, the few personal possessions left were either thrown away or given to charity. Both Janice and Craig Wells might never have existed.

The detective who had brought his worries to Harrigan some nine years ago now had doubted this outcome from the start. It had started with a simple detail he’d heard when he’d first gone to the crime scene. A resident had seen the car burning on the cliff and called the police. On its way there, the patrol car had passed a bike rider with a pillion passenger coming towards them and heading north. It seemed to the detective they must have seen the fire. Why hadn’t they stopped? He would have liked to ask them the question but there was no way to find them. And why choose this location to burn the car? To draw attention to it? Why not just drive it over the cliff? Another detail was that Craig had left the house in Concord between eight and nine in the evening but hadn’t set fire to the car until one in the morning. What had he been doing in the meantime?