Alex Palmer - The Labyrinth of Drowning

It was a large room with an old desk facing the door. A high-backed chair stood behind the desk, giving the impression that someone had just this minute got up from it and walked out of the room. Behind the chair and along one wall to his left, overgrown plants pressed against bare windows, crowding the cracked glass like silent onlookers.

Harrigan walked inside. The silence felt loud, like someone shrieking for his attention. He looked at the empty walls, the bare wooden floor. In the far corner, the floor had caved in. He walked forward and looked down into the space between the broken boards. Pale in the shadows, the bones he saw were all too real. There were two of them. Lying on their sides in the dankness, bodies that had decayed to skeletons, looking as if they were about to be absorbed into the ground. Thin locks of dark hair still clung about their skulls, their teeth were scattered like seeds. One had its hand just in front of its face, the way children lie sometimes when they’re sleeping. Indifferently, efficiently, the insects had cleaned their bones and built their nests around their shreds of clothing. Whoever they were, these people had been here for a long time. They couldn’t be the source of the stench he smelled now.

In the torchlight he saw a line of ants near his feet. The busy column had cut a path through the muck on the floor towards the opposite corner of the room. He shone his torch on the column and followed it. A line visible through the dirt and leading past the windows that looked out of the front of the surgery. There were crude, broken marks on the floor where the boards had been roughly taken up and then laid back down again. He counted them as he walked. Four, making six with the two in the corner. One set of marks was newer than the others. Here the ants were disappearing into a crack in the floor, busily at work.

Someone had died here recently. Someone had stood out there in the waiting room facing the unimaginable before finding release in their own permanent silence. Harrigan stood over these makeshift graves and looked down with an instinctive respect for the dead. The silence no longer jammed in his ears. I’ve found you, he thought. You can lie quietly now.

Harrigan reached the other side of the fence with deep relief. The sunshine on his back, the sight of colour, the sounds of birds, brought him to life. He breathed clean air into his lungs. His phone was in one hand, his gun in the other. He was thinking, seeing a map of the suburbs roundabout in his mind. You could walk through the park from Duffys Forest to here. Probably there were tracks you could take. If you knew what you were doing, knew the terrain well enough, you could make your own tracks. Make your own and choose your time. No one would see you. Make your victims walk from the white-tiled room there to here, both of you knowing what you were going to. From bolt hole to graveyard, it was a ritual carried out six times over the last ten or so years. Not so infrequent. An addiction.

He was weighing up the question of who to ring. Borghini was with the local command. It was his turf, he knew what he was doing and he wasn’t likely to be put off from doing his job.

Before walking up to the road, Harrigan sheathed his gun. The Mellishes still weren’t back from their birthday party; there was no sign of a Volvo deprived of its usual parking spot. But there was another car a little further up the street that he hadn’t seen before. He stopped just at the entrance to the Mellishes’ driveway and looked at it. Then he stepped away from the avenue of trees that sheltered the driveway from the rest of the street. Trees that would have hidden him from view if he had walked along there to get to his own car.

They came at him anyway, three of them, too quickly for him to avoid them or reach for his gun. He still had his phone, he had already punched in Borghini’s number. He hit the call button as they reached him. Ponticellis’ thugs. His phone was knocked out of his hands, skidding away. He fought them hard, dragging them further out onto the street where they had to be seen. He thought he heard a shout from someone else, not them, but by then he was face down on the ground. He felt the savage jab of a hypodermic needle in his thigh and then the world went black.

Grace drove through the quiet streets of Brooklyn feeling the eeriness of knowing that somewhere Clive’s surveillance teams were watching like patrons at a theatre where the action was real. The town was laid out in a long, narrow line along an inlet. It wasn’t much more than houses clustered along a single dog’s-leg road that eventually reached its dead end at a public jetty looking out at the main channel of the Hawkesbury River. By the time Grace reached the parking area close to the bay, it was getting dark and the place was almost deserted.

Sara was waiting, solitary in the dusk. She was dressed in jeans and a jacket and had her hands in her pockets. The bush-covered hills behind her tall figure were a hard, massive shape against the softening sky. On the water, the last of the light had taken on an iridescent, diamond-shaped patterning, rocking with the movement of the waves. Boats, small and large, were moored some distance out. Was Clive’s boat out there? He had said that it would be.

Grace walked up to Sara. She was pacing restlessly up and down.

‘You’re hours late. Where’s Narelle?’ she asked.

‘Did you set that up?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Joe Ponticelli. Did you set him on me?’

‘I said I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘First you change things. I’m told to come here to Brooklyn. And when I do, a motorbike with a pillion comes up behind me. In fact, it looks just like how Kidd got shot. They shoot through the passenger window. But they don’t get me, they get Narelle. I ran them off the road. I had a look. Joe Ponticelli’s dead. I wasn’t sure about the other one. If he wasn’t then, he probably is now.’

‘Where’s Narelle?’

‘Sleeping in the bush. She’s not going to wake up again. I had to go and wash as well.’

‘What about your car?’

‘I had to get rid of it. The one I’m driving now belongs to someone else.’

‘Then why bring it here? It’ll be traced. Did anyone see you?’

‘No! I’m more careful than that. Let’s get down to business. I’ve got the passport, the tape and I’ve got Narelle’s ID. I want to be paid.’

Sara looked at her and then around her into the dark, but there was no obvious sign of movement.

‘Is that her ID you’re carrying in that bag?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s see it.’

‘No. Later. I’m owed a lot for this.’

Sara smiled arrogantly at her. ‘You’ll be paid in full, don’t worry about that. But that wasn’t supposed to happen. You never know who’s going to turn out to be unreliable, do you?’ She laughed softly.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘They were watching you all the way from Liverpool. Joel might have trusted you. I wasn’t sure I did.’

It was only when Grace had to deal with them that her backup had told her they were there. Clive’s directions.

‘Why did they go after me? I was delivering Narelle. What’s the point of sabotaging that?’

Sara didn’t reply. She stared at Grace with an almost frightened expression on her face. Then she shrugged.

‘I don’t know. I just told them to watch you. And you killed him! God.’

‘It was a stupid thing to do,’ Grace said contemptuously. ‘Next time you want backup, pick someone who’s not a lunatic.’

Sara looked away. ‘We don’t have time to talk about this. Let’s go.’

‘Wait a moment. Where’s Joel?’