Alex Palmer - The Labyrinth of Drowning

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.

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.