by Alex Palmer
Throughout much of his life, on and off, Harrigan had lived in this house. Originally, it had been an inheritance from his aunt when he was fifteen, held in trust until he was of age. A single, church-obsessed woman, she had left it to him as an insult to his father, her brother, whom she’d hated. It had been left to her by an uncle, who’d also disapproved of his father, adding to the depth of the bitterness between them. Family loathings had given him an enviable address. The Harrigans had lived on the Balmain peninsula for several generations but, other than the uncle, they had never owned a house. His father had been a wharfie who had drunk and gambled too much and, until they had come here, Harrigan had grown up in rented accommodation near White Bay.
The house wasn’t only his home. It was memory and experience, each room reminding him of the events, some of them violent, that had shaped his life.
Harrigan had another child from a long-ago marriage, Toby, who was disabled with cerebral palsy and had always had to live in care. His mother had abandoned both him and Harrigan almost as soon as he’d been born and then disappeared from their lives. Now Toby was a twenty-year-old university student studying pure mathematics. His body kept him in a wheelchair but his mind ranged freely. Harrigan had built the room in which he now stood—during the day, a large, light-filled space—for his son, combining the two smaller rooms that had once been here. It was a place for Toby to come in his chair and feel at home. But he had not only been creating a space for his son. Harrigan had been expunging the past, in its place building something he valued, something that had meaning for him. Once these walls had been painted a drab green. One night, when he was eighteen, he had seen his mother’s blood splashed all over that green paint, when his father had fatally shot her in the face.
Jim Harrigan had supplemented his income on the wharves by petty thievery, and from there moved into more dangerous company dealing in heroin. One night he had brought home a gun he’d been told to hide. Harrigan remembered hearing his parents arguing furiously over the gun before being sickened by the sound of the shot. He remembered—could not forget—his mother lying against the wall with no face. His father said she’d grabbed at the gun. Maybe she had, but those words had no meaning for him. ‘Kill me,’ Jim Harrigan said to his son. Blinded by rage, his hands shaking, Harrigan fired wildly, almost unaware that he had, but only wounded his father. ‘That won’t do it. Try again,’ Jim Harrigan demanded. But Harrigan couldn’t shoot for a second time, and the memory stayed with him as a marker between what he could and couldn’t do. No events could have torn a hole in his life so powerfully. No one would ever harm anyone he cared about like that again.
He went upstairs and, giving up on the possibility of sleep, went into his study. Despite his unease, a deep reluctance prevented him from taking his gun out of the safe with his daughter sleeping just down the hall.
He sat down at his desk in the dark. A little to the side stood a picture of Grace seated on a blanket in Birchgrove Park, with Ellie, dressed in a white froth of baby clothes, cuddled in her arms. She was laughing and saying to her daughter, ‘Wave to the camera.’ He remembered the day when, to her shock, Grace had found out she was pregnant. They had set up house together but not married; they had never once talked about marriage. It might have been the memory of his first marriage, or his parents’ savage arguments, that prevented Harrigan from suggesting it. He rejected the possibility at a deeper level than he brought into his conscious mind. His only experiences of marriage had been destructive.
Maybe Grace understood this about him and that was why she never spoke of it herself. He left the subject alone for fear of breaking the balance between them, the easy way they accepted each other. But he still remembered sitting with her and his daughter on the blanket that day and thinking that whatever they might do, he’d never leave either of them. Toby’s photograph stood next to Grace and Ellie’s, taken the day he had received his final examination results, which he was holding in his one good hand. All three were so much a part of his life he could not imagine himself existing without them.
Perhaps he had been too caught in his night thoughts, looking inwards, something habitual to him. Staring into the dark, he saw the figure in his back garden, a man, solid against the lighter city darkness, moving away from a camphor laurel towards the wall between his garden and Birchgrove Park.
Harrigan was at his safe almost immediately and had his gun out. Moving as silently as possible, he went into the spare bedroom at the front of the house. Snatching the keys out of the drawer there, he unlocked the double doors onto the veranda and stepped outside. He heard a car starting on the street but had no intention of running outside after it, possibly straight into a bullet. He leaned over the balcony and saw it in the streetlight—a white Toyota Camry speeding up the street. It was too far away to get the numberplate. Then it was gone.
When he came out of the room, he saw Grace standing by Ellie’s door, listening. She put a finger to her lips. ‘She’s still asleep,’ she mouthed. He nodded and took his gun back to the safe. Silently they both went back to bed.
‘She didn’t wake up,’ she said softly. ‘What happened? I woke up and you weren’t here. Why did you have your gun out?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. I went and sat in my study. Then I saw someone standing in the back garden watching the house. I don’t know how long they’d been there. That car got away too quickly. Someone else must have been driving.’
‘Was it Newell?’ she asked.
‘It was hard to see who it was. I would have said he was too tall for Newell but I can’t be sure. Someone’s telling us they can get to us.’
‘Are you going to tell the police?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because on that amount of information, my old work mates won’t be able to find him any better than I can. I’ll ask around. See if anyone’s been talking about coming after me.’
‘We don’t need this,’ she said.
‘No one can get in here. And if they do, they’ll be sorry they bothered.’
‘At least Ellie didn’t wake up. She doesn’t have to know about this.’
They slept patchily until Ellie woke them in the morning and got them out of bed. While Grace bathed and dressed her, Harrigan checked the back garden. There had been some rain recently and the ground was softish. There were signs where the intruder had climbed over the wall into the garden, and partial footprints pressed into the ground. But the soles of nondescript mass market shoes were leads to nothing. Looking back up at the house, Harrigan saw the intruder had had a clear view of his study. It was possible he could have seen the darker outline of Harrigan’s figure through the tall window when he had sat down at his desk. If so, then he’d been making certain Harrigan knew he was there.
He took photographs of the intruder’s traces and went inside to make the morning coffee. It was just perking when Ellie ran into the kitchen and demanded to be picked up.
‘Hello, princess,’ he said, hoisting her up. ‘How are you? You sleep well? Yeah.’
‘You spoil her,’ Grace said, following after and smiling. ‘Calling her princess all the time.’
‘It won’t do her any harm. She’ll grow out of it.’
‘Breakfast. Come on, chicken. You’re hungry, aren’t you?’
Soon, his daughter was in her highchair with her mouth smeared with mashed banana. Harrigan had to laugh. If only his troops could see him now, not as the boss no one intelligent dared to put offside but as Harrigan the family man. Grace’s work aside, life had never been so sweet. Now he could feel a poison eating away at that sweetness. Outside, it was still dangerous; survival could be balanced on the thinnest edge, the way it always had been. But whatever happened, no one was getting into his house to do any of them any harm. Today, he was going to take his gun out, check it, clean it and make sure it was in good working order. He had too much at stake to stay unarmed.
‘I’ll take Ellie up to Kidz Corner if you like,’ Gr
ace said. ‘I can do it on my way to work. What are you going to do today?’
‘Since I don’t have to be in court, I’ll make a few calls. I’ve got some digging to do. If I have time, I’ll go and see Toby this afternoon. I’ll take Ellie.’
When he had been with the police and saw sights like the one he’d seen yesterday, he had gone to see his son to recover. Being with Toby connected him to what mattered.
‘She’ll like that,’ Grace said, and picked her daughter out of her highchair. ‘Come on, sweetie. We’ll clean you up and then we’ll go, okay?’
Her phone rang. Harrigan picked it up for her. ‘Clive,’ he said.
She set Ellie on the floor and, taking the phone, walked out of the room. Not long afterwards, she was back.
‘Something’s happened,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go now. Can you…?’
‘Yeah, I’ll look after things. When will you be back?’
‘I don’t know. I think I’m in for a long day.’
She was frowning. Probably she didn’t know how disturbed she looked.
‘Take care, babe,’ he said.
‘Always do. You too.’
Harrigan and Ellie waved her goodbye at the door.
‘Gone,’ his little daughter said.
‘Don’t worry, princess. She’ll be back. Let’s get ready. We have to go as well.’
Ellie’s childcare centre was near Birchgrove Primary School, far enough from the house to be a useful walk. Harrigan carried her on his back in her harness. When they were almost there, she started to tug playfully at his hair. ‘Take it easy, princess,’ he said with a grin. ‘That’s me on the other end.’ She giggled and he turned his head to look up at her. Then, with a feeling like a cold tap on the shoulder, he turned completely and saw a white Toyota Camry with tinted windows edging along the street not far past the corner behind them. It was the same car from last night; it hadn’t been there just moments ago.
Harrigan was carrying his daughter but he also wanted the car’s numberplate and began walking back quickly to get it. Immediately the Camry backed out the way it had come and drove at speed up the cross street. By the time he reached the corner, it was out of sight, vanished in the narrow tree-lined streets and laneways.
His next thought was to get Ellie where she would be safe. Kidz Corner was close, too close if they were being stalked. The converted duplex offered its clients security and privacy and had its own discreet security officer. Numbers of the children who went there were the sons and daughters of the very rich or the actors and writers who lived along the deepwater frontage of Louisa Road. Harrigan was none of these things but, like them, he wanted his child protected.
As soon as he’d set Ellie down to play, he went to see the owner, Kate, a big, capable woman, in her office. She knew his history and had still offered Ellie a place. It was another reason he was prepared to pay the hefty fees to make sure his daughter was safe.
‘Have you noticed a white Toyota Camry hanging around here lately?’ he asked. ‘Not the most noticeable of cars, I know.’
‘We always keep an eye out for that sort of thing. Yes, we have, several times now. We thought it might be paparazzi. Why?’
‘I don’t think it’s paparazzi. It may have been stalking me and Ellie here. I scared it off. Can you get me the rego if it comes back?’
She grinned, opened her diary and handed him a piece of paper. ‘We only offer the best service here. Mac got that the last time it turned up. He was watching it on the CCTV. If it turned up again, we were going to call the police. What do you want us to do?’
Harrigan had contacts among his former work colleagues who had offered him protection should he need it. He was careful about calling in the favour, not wanting to wear out his credit. This situation was different.
‘I’ll ring them myself when I get home. I’ll get them to call you and work out a time to come over and talk to you and Mac.’
‘Not a problem. I’ll be waiting.’
Harrigan left, looking at the high brick walls at the front of the centre, the secure gate, the intercom watched by CCTV where you announced yourself when you collected your child. It was a long way from the freedoms of his own childhood when he had roamed the Balmain peninsula at will. All his mother had asked of him was that he be home in time for tea. But the world had changed; the tough, poor, working-class suburb he had been born into over forty years ago no longer existed. His life had no resemblance to the life his parents had lived. The area, on the harbour and close to the city, with its nineteenth-century terraced houses and mansions, was so completely gentrified they would not have felt at home here.
Someone was letting him know they were out there, they could get to him. They knew his home phone number, his daughter’s childcare centre. They were prepared to get into his garden, to make him think his house might be insecure. And maybe, somehow, they might even have been the ones following Grace last night. Someone who liked to play mind games. Among his old inemies, that didn’t narrow the field very much. He would make inquiries, contact old informants. See what they could tell him. He had always relied on himself. Too often, other people let you down when it mattered most.
Whatever you’re trying to do to us, whoever you are, don’t think it’ll be easy. Don’t think you’ll get anywhere near us. With this promise to whoever was stalking him, he went home.
6
Grace thought it strange that the bright Sydney sunlight should seem so full of shadows. Clive’s phone call had broken the pleasure of the morning, the respite with her family before she started work. ‘There’s a dead woman waiting for you. Jacqueline Ryan.’ A sentence spoken as if it were a blunt instrument. He’d sent a team to the Royal Hotel to pick Ryan up but they’d arrived too late. She was already dead from a gunshot wound.
‘Why do I need to go?’ she’d asked him. ‘Presumably the team can give you all the information you want. What can I add to it?’
‘I want your judgement on the scene. Borghini’s there. He’s waiting for you. He wants to talk to you about your meeting with her. You’d better get going.’
You want me to see it. You want to shock me. Because you think I’m emotionally involved? Is that it? She crossed the white concrete arc of the Gladesville Bridge over the Parramatta River, the water glistening in the sun, going over the same ground as the night before. Boats in the nearby marina were moored in rows like white, lozenge-shaped seeds in a pod; the green of surrounding suburbs edged the water.
By now Paul would be walking their daughter to her childcare centre. There was no one she trusted more than him. They should be safe enough; just as all three of them were safe enough inside the house. But when people threatened you from outside, sanctuaries became like prisons; places where you were locked inside your head. Her mind rejected the possibility that the man watching their house last night was Newell. It was too soon, if nothing else. Wouldn’t the people who had sprung him see it as too dangerous for him to show himself? But fear ran in parallel with her reasoning. Newell was a ghost in her head. He was her own fear, never exorcised; a fear that was waiting its time, reasserting its control over its rightful territory, the way it was now.
There was no time for these kinds of thoughts. She was working. She couldn’t guess Clive’s motives but she could protect herself. When she drove into the hotel’s car park, filled with police cars, she was in role. She was no longer the woman who’d wanted to cry for Jirawan. From here on in, she would be hard-faced. Lynette was going to be just a body. Not the edgy, tired, trapped woman from last night—a woman caught in something bigger than she was—but someone who’d ceased to be, who wasn’t able to feel. If I see it any other way, I won’t be able to deal with it. I’ll break down. Maybe that was what Clive wanted: for her to break. She couldn’t let it happen.
Dropping this shutter in her mind, detaching herself from the possibility of human emotion, she got out of her car and looked for Borghini. He was standing with a group of police, still dress
ed in the clothes he had worn the night before and drinking a cup of takeaway coffee. Seeing her, he walked over.
‘Morning,’ he said, blinking. ‘Your boss told me you were on your way. Hope you got a good night’s sleep.’
He was clearly angry with her. She ignored the bait. ‘Good morning. Where is she?’
‘In her room. The pathologist is with her. You went and questioned her last night without letting me know or even clearing it with me.’
‘I don’t have to clear anything with you. I’ve already asked my people to forward you the transcript. I’m not keeping you in the dark.’
‘Do we have a team here? Or do you just go and do what you want, when you want?’
‘There wasn’t time for teamwork last night. If I hadn’t spoken to her, she’d still be dead and we wouldn’t have the information we have now.’
‘Do you know who found her?’ he asked. ‘Your people. What were they doing here? Taking her into custody? Did they search the place? Take away something we don’t know about? Is anyone going to tell me about that?’
‘If anything like that happened, you’ll be advised. Now I have to see the body. Let’s get on with it.’
‘What Orion wants, Orion gets. Come on. Scissorhands is waiting for you.’
Lynette’s room was cordoned off behind the blue police ribbons. It was the last unit on the ground floor of a double-storeyed row of motel rooms. Numbers of the other residents were standing on the upstairs veranda watching. The door to Lynette’s unit was open. McMichael and his technicians were at work inside but stopped when Grace appeared. The big man got to his feet, irritated at being interrupted.
‘I hope you’re going to make this quick,’ he said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
‘So do I,’ she replied. ‘Do we have a time of death?’
‘Before midnight. I’m not prepared to be more precise at this stage. She wasn’t carrying a stopwatch.’
‘Did she die quickly?’
‘Instantaneously. I doubt she knew what hit her.’