The Labyrinth of Drowning (4 page)

‘She has a child somewhere. If both parents are dead, shouldn’t we find out where this child is, or at least ask someone to locate him or her?’

‘Whatever’s happened to that child, it’s not our responsibility.’

It’s our first responsibility
! Grace wanted to shout, but choked back the words. She couldn’t risk losing this job.

Finally Clive gathered up the pictures and put them away. ‘The man who did this—’

‘Man?’ she interrupted.

‘Apart from the evidence of sexual assault, do you think a woman would have the physical strength to do this?’

‘A woman could watch. She could administer a beating.’

‘Yes, she could. But whoever did this likes to kill. That’s my opinion. Report to me tomorrow about tonight’s raid. One other thing. Have you heard the news in the last hour?’

‘No. I haven’t had time.’

‘You should go and listen to it.’

‘Why?’

‘Chris Newell was snatched as he left court today in a very bloody affair. Two people are dead and several badly wounded. We both know about Newell’s connection to you. If he turns up on your radar, I need to know.’

‘I’m going to make a personal call. Excuse me,’ Grace said, and left the room immediately.

At Orion, personal calls were only tolerated under very unusual circumstances and had to be made on your own phone. Walking at speed down the hallway to her office, Grace rang Harrigan with a shaking hand. She was desperate to talk to him, but nothing would have made her call in front of Clive.

The phone was answered almost at once. ‘Harrigan.’

She breathed relief. ‘It’s me. Are you all right? What’s happened?’

‘I’m okay, babe. I don’t have a scratch on me, which is more than you can say for some of the people here. It’s bad. Two men shot dead. It happened in front of me.’

‘You’re okay?’

‘I’m handling it. It’s like being back on the job again.’

‘Someone did that for Newell? Why?’

‘Don’t ask me. He’s not worth anything like this. I can’t talk to you now—I’ve got people who want me this end. What time will you be home tonight?’

‘Late. There’s an op going on. I don’t know when I’ll get back.’

‘We’ll talk about it then. You take care.’

‘Where’s Ellie?’

‘She’s fine. She’s at Kidz Corner. I’ll pick her up the same time I always do. She won’t know anything’s happened. Okay? I’ll see you.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Take care, babe.’

‘You too.’

Babe. A name he had given her this last year or so. At first, it had seemed so unlike him it had startled her. One of those small pieces of intimacy between them she could still be surprised by.

She thought about Clive’s comment on her personal life. She wasn’t the only one who had changed. Since Clive had arrived,
Orion had changed as well. To an agency already obsessed with secrecy, he’d brought new levels of paranoia. People worked in compartments; no one was allowed to know what the next person was doing. It had reached a level where operatives didn’t share even the most trivial pieces of information. People muttered that this was Clive’s way of making sure there was no one to challenge him. Grace agreed with this opinion; it was the oldest tactic in the world. But aside from that was his attitude to her. He was always trying to get under her skin, to play games with her feelings. She wondered if she was imagining it, but there seemed to be a touch of obsession in his treatment of her, as if he couldn’t leave her alone.

Even today, he’d sat on the news about Newell throughout their meeting, a meeting he had deliberately drawn out. Perhaps it was his way of getting rid of her; he had driven out other operatives since he’d arrived. Whatever his ultimate aim, he’d succeeded in putting the question in her mind. Did she want to do this kind of work any longer?

At the heart of Grace’s life there were cracks, events that marked the time before and after happiness. She had grown up in New Guinea where her father had been a defence attaché at the Australian High Commission. Her life had been spent happily between boarding school in Brisbane and time with her family, including her brother, Nicky, to whom she was still very close. Her childhood lived in her memory as time spent in a magical place. In her mind she could still see the landscapes she had grown up in, all of which had an intense beauty. But when she was fourteen, her mother had died in a little less than twenty-four hours from a rare form of cerebral malaria. Grace had once believed that nothing in her life could match that heartbreak, not even if her father or her brother died. She knew now that losing either Paul or Ellie would be as bad.

Her father had ceased to be Brigadier Kep Riordan with the High Commission in Port Moresby and had come back to Australia to raise his two children as best he could, on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where he’d been born. There Grace ran wild, falling in with a group of older kids who stole cars and took them for joy rides. She remembered one night shouting at the driver to go
faster and faster, so much so that she’d spooked him. She’d been scouring away the emotional pain, almost killing herself in the process. It was only her father’s efforts that had kept her out of the children’s courts.

Finally, barely sixteen, she had left school and home for Sydney and found herself singing in pubs when she was too young to drink in them. From there, she started singing for a group called Wasted Daze, a name she thought suited her. They were a group of young men who were as lost as she was. They’d toured the east coast of Australia, always heading north, camping out on beaches, too poor to do much more than buy beer and takeaway food. Grace had liked the life. She liked the open road with no destination at the end of it, just the vanishing point on the horizon. The immediate impression of each day had become a good enough substitute for happiness.

Then Chris Newell walked into their lives. It wasn’t so unusual; they seemed to pick up stray people as they drove around in their rusting Kombi van. They were in northern Queensland by then, playing at the local pubs in a district where the main industry was growing sugar cane. Occasionally they met Newell socially; he always had dope to sell. Then one day the owner of a pub where they’d played refused to pay them; Newell told the man he’d better if he knew what was good for him. He paid with a bonus. After this, Newell offered to manage them as far as it went. They accepted the offer, but they were all, including Grace, too naïve and casual in the way they did things.

She and Newell became an item, not for very long, a couple of months at most. By the end of this short time it was clear to everyone that Newell was a controller who liked tormenting people. They’d also discovered he was a serious dealer, not just someone who could get a bit of marihuana for his friends. No one wanted anything to do with the kind of people he was bringing into their lives. Grace decided she’d had enough. The idyll was broken, real life had asserted itself. She’d discovered she didn’t want to be a singer after all. She didn’t have the gift for performance; she didn’t want to stand up there and put her emotions on display in her music. Then there was Newell, who was beginning to frighten her;
he was possessive and had a short fuse. Already he’d started shouting at her. He hadn’t hit her but she began to realise that he could and one day he would.

The band split in a series of angry arguments; she packed her bags and left for Sydney. Newell followed her although not immediately. Someone had dobbed him in to the police; not her, probably another member of the band. Newell didn’t care; he thought she’d done it and he’d come after her.

In that space of time when Newell had beaten and raped her, Grace had thought that she would die. In the aftermath, she’d thought she might do so anyway, in her own way.

She had refused to go to the police. She was too frightened of Newell to testify against him in court. Nothing would shift her on this, and she hid the extent of her injuries from her family, knowing that if her father ever found out what had happened to her, nothing would have stopped him going after Newell. It was only years later that she’d told him and her brother everything that had happened to her. As well as being angry, they’d been hurt that she’d shut them out. It was the fear, she’d told them; she had never felt anything like that fear. Her father understood fear; he had fought in Vietnam. He spoke about it then to his daughter and son; the first time he’d spoken to anyone about it since he’d come home from the war. It became a point of understanding between them, something that allowed all three of them to reach some kind of resolution about the past.

In those bad times after Newell, Grace had drunk herself into insensibility, but even as an alcoholic she was unsuccessful. Her family had been there, they had helped her. Her brother had protected her, come and taken her away from parties, poured the booze down the sink, taken her to hospital when she fell and cut herself, helped her through detox. When she was in recovery, her father had taught her to shoot, telling her it would restore her hand–eye coordination. ‘You should only ever shoot at a target,’ he’d said. ‘Never at people.’ She never drank now but she was still a very good shot.

She had taken herself to university, studied criminology, and, before Orion, had worked briefly for the police. Unexpectedly met
Paul Harrigan and found herself where she was now.

When Grace had first joined Orion five years ago, she had still been an angry young woman. If asked, she would have said her heart was dead and she was glad it was. At times her anger drove her to take risks, just as she had done at fourteen, speeding in cars badly controlled by adolescent drivers. Saying to death, come and get me if you can. These days she was careful. Now she asked herself: what happens to my daughter if something happens to me? This anxiety was one of the sharpest feelings she’d ever had. These days, she felt everything too much.

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.

T
he 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.

Marie was smoking quickly, a packet of cigarettes and a gold lighter close to her hand. There was no ingrained smell of stale cigarette smoke in the flat; if there had been, it would have disturbed the ambience, the smell of the flowers. If Marie lit up at other times, she must have had to go outside. No more than in her early twenties, she was stylishly attractive with a resemblance to Gong Li herself. Her eyebrows were finely curved, her mouth shaped full with red lipstick. Iridescent red tints in her black hair matched her rose-coloured fingernails. Her hands were shaking badly and she seemed unable to sit completely still.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked, her face showing more confusion and fear than anger.

Borghini gave the standard reply to that question. ‘Grace Riordan, one of my officers. I’ve already shown Marie a photograph of Coco and told her she’s dead,’ he said to Grace. ‘I’ve also told her we have information that she was a worker here. She denies that. She also says she’s never met the brothel’s owners and doesn’t know who they are.’

‘Lynette handles all that kind of thing,’ Marie said. ‘She deals with the accountants. I’m the hostess. That’s all I do.’

‘You’re the manager,’ Borghini said.

‘The hostess,’ she replied sharply. ‘It might be called manager but it really means hostess. I make people feel at ease. I’m better at that than Lynette.’

Grace sat down. Marie lit a cigarette from the end of the one she was just finishing. Jirawan’s photograph, taken at the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, lay on the table.

‘Where did you get this information about this girl?’ Marie asked. ‘Whoever it was, they must have been mistaken. I don’t know her. She’s never worked here.’

‘Our informant knew your receptionist’s name,’ Borghini said.

‘Maybe he’s been a customer here. He might have a grudge against us.’

‘So if I go downstairs and ask Lynette about Coco, what’s she going to tell me?’

‘That she’s never seen her here and she’s never heard of her.’

‘And the workers?’

‘The same!’ Marie’s voice had an edge of panic. ‘She was never here. I don’t know why you keep asking me. Where did this information come from? What was this informant’s name?’ She spoke with a modified Australian accent, giving her speech a strained, artificial, up-market gloss.

‘That information is confidential,’ Borghini said.

‘We don’t even know who’s accusing us. That doesn’t seem very fair.’

‘Who were you expecting tonight? You got the champagne out for someone.’

‘That’s none of your business!’ She almost shrieked this, theatrically.

‘I think you’ll find it is,’ Borghini replied. ‘Whoever he is, he hasn’t turned up.’

‘My private life is my affair. It’s got nothing to do with this.’

Grace’s gaze went past Marie to a plain-clothes officer heading towards them from the hallway that presumably led to the bedrooms. He whispered in Borghini’s ear.

‘Okay,’ Borghini said. ‘If you don’t mind, Marie, we’ll just stop there for the moment. There’s a room in your flat I want to have a look at.’

She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I don’t have anything to hide. This is my home and I don’t like you being here but I don’t have anything to hide. Which room is it?’

‘The one beside the linen cupboard.’

‘There’s nothing to see in there. I’ll show you.’

Marie rose to her feet. She was slender, and wearing a red silk cheongsam set off by very high stiletto heels. Kidd fell into step behind her. They all followed her down the hallway past the main bedroom—a large room furnished with a king-size bed and soft rugs, including one that seemed to be a genuine tiger’s skin. The windows were covered with heavy drapes. They stopped outside another door.

‘Is this the room you’re interested in?’ she said. ‘I can’t see why.’

Furnished with a single bed, it was small and spare and lacking the gaudy luxury of the rest of the flat. There was no window and the door had a lock on the outside.

‘Why do you need a lock on this door?’ Borghini asked. ‘Do you lock anyone in here?’

‘No, of course I don’t. That lock was here when I moved into this place. I don’t use this room. Go inside and look at it if you want to. It’s not such a terrible place. It has heating and an en suite.’

Grace stepped into the room. The surfaces seemed free of dust and there was the same faint smell of artificial air freshener as in the room downstairs. There would be nothing in here, not even a hair. A place with no exit, except to another room downstairs which also had no way out. She returned to the hallway.

‘It’s very clean for a room you never use,’ she said to Marie. ‘Have you cleaned it recently? It smells of air freshener.’

‘I like things clean.’

Grace glanced at Borghini. He was standing back a little, watching; a slight nod said she should go on.

‘You like things clean?’ she said. ‘Is this a maid’s room? A place for someone who cooks and cleans for you?’

‘I do my own cooking. I like to cook.’

‘Then who does your cleaning? Whoever slept in there?’

‘No one slept in there.’

‘Then who cleaned it last and when? It must have been recently. You can smell the air freshener. Why do you need to clean and put air freshener into a room no one uses?’

‘I don’t know. I…’ Marie stopped, not knowing what to say.

Another of Borghini’s people appeared in the hallway. ‘Something else you need to see,’ she said to him quietly.

In the main bedroom, an ornate Chinese cabinet stood open on the dressing table. Beside it was a shiny, silver-edged mirror, a razor blade with a silver edge matching the mirror’s and a thin silver straw, similarly decorated. The silverwork was delicately, intricately made.

‘We found those in the cabinet,’ the officer said.

‘Are these yours?’ Borghini asked Marie.

‘No. I don’t know what they are.’

‘If they’re not yours, can you tell me how they might have got here?’

She shook her head dumbly. She had tears in her eyes.

‘Perhaps someone put them there. A visitor who didn’t like me. I don’t know.’

‘We found this as well,’ one of the other plain-clothes officers said. He was holding a black silk pouch peeled open to reveal several broken lumps of cocaine in a plastic bag. It looked like a stash kept for personal use.

Grace glanced around the room once more. On the dressing table were vases of white roses mixed with smaller flowers, dark blue in colour. A silk and lace negligee lay thrown over a chair, waiting for someone to slip it on. The negligee was for two to enjoy; the cocaine seemed to be only for one. And not Marie.

‘Marie, why don’t you take a seat back out in the kitchen?’ Borghini said. ‘We’ll keep looking through here and then we’ll need to ask you some more questions. I’m afraid we’ll be keeping you for a while yet. Maybe you’d like to have a cup of coffee while you’re waiting. We’ll get to you as soon as we can.’

‘Can I call someone? I want to call someone.’

‘Who do you want to call?’

‘In these circumstances, who do you think?’ Kidd said. It was the first time he’d spoken. ‘Your family. A lawyer.’

‘I’ll call my brother,’ Marie said. ‘Can I do that?’

Grace wasn’t certain who she was asking.