The Labyrinth of Drowning

by Alex Palmer

  ‘This man has never lived here?’

  ‘Not while we have been here, which is over two years now.’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you,’ Harrigan said. ‘What is your niece’s name?’

  ‘Nadifa Hasan Ibrahim. You haven’t found this man here. Will you keep looking for him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harrigan replied, knowing the request that was to come.

  ‘If you should find out anything about my niece, I would like to know.’

  ‘If I do find anything, I’ll be in touch. I give you my word on that. Are you able to tell me something about her?’

  Ibrahim got to his feet and went to a cabinet, where he took out a photograph. He passed it to Harrigan almost reluctantly.

  ‘When I was growing up, women always covered their heads whenever they went out. She’s a young woman, of course, and everything is done differently here. This is a photograph a friend took. She used to work at Westmead Hospital. Then one day we discovered she’d left her job. Her aunt asked her why and she told us that she’d changed her mind. She asked to be reinstated and they agreed. Then she disappeared. She was not at her work, she didn’t come home. We’re very concerned.’

  The photograph showed a serious-looking young woman of about twenty-four, tall, slender and very beautiful.

  ‘If you want me to keep an eye out for your niece, I may need this photograph,’ Harrigan said.

  Ibrahim nodded wordlessly.

  ‘Would you be prepared to give me some information?’ Harrigan asked. ‘If I give you my word that I won’t involve or mention you in any way, would you tell me who the managing agent for this block of units is?’

  Ibrahim looked at him for a few moments.

  ‘If you would wait,’ he said, and went into the kitchen, returning with a fridge magnet in his hand. ‘This is our agent. He leaves these magnets in our mailbox for us. It would be more useful if he fixed the plumbing when we asked him to. Please take it if you want.’

  Four Square Real Estate, Haldon Street, Lakemba. A private agency, not a franchise. Harrigan finished his coffee.

  ‘I can promise you won’t be troubled by anyone, Mr Ibrahim, and if I find anything about your niece, I’ll be in touch,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your time.’

  Ibrahim rose to his feet. ‘It was an honour to have you as our guest,’ he said formally, and saw him to the door.

  In most meetings like this, Harrigan had rarely been treated with the kind of courtesy he had received today. Despite this, the chances that he would find any information concerning Ibrahim’s niece were slim to say the least. Grimly, the ex-policeman in him said she was probably already dead and most likely Ibrahim thought that too. He drove to Haldon Street to see where the next step might take him.

  Four Square Real Estate was a single, narrow shopfront in the main commercial precinct of Lakemba, almost invisible with its dark window. Harrigan cruised past it, then parked off the street on the other side of the road. He was about to cross over when the door to the agency opened and an old foe stepped out: Tony Ponticelli junior, a middle-aged man in a sharp suit, slipping on a pair of sunglasses. Harrigan stopped where he was but Tony junior didn’t seem to have seen him. He walked to a red Ferrari parked just up the street, and drove off.

  To put it mildly, Four Square’s presentation to the world was low-key. Property Managers, Rental Properties, said the sign on the brown-painted window. Even so, there was no display of properties for sale or rent. Harrigan went inside. A drab-looking woman sat at the desk. What are you doing in here? her eyes said.

  ‘Is the manager in?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Why do you want to see him?’

  Harrigan looked around. The reception area was a small space, cheaply furnished. Everything he saw suggested that anyone who walked in here on the off chance would be told to go away. To his right was a door which he guessed led to the manager’s office.

  ‘What’s his name?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s yours?’ she replied as the door opened.

  ‘Gail, get this info written up, would you—fuck!’

  ‘Eddie Grippo,’ Harrigan said. ‘I heard you were out. This is where you’ve come to rest, is it?’

  The short man in the doorway looked sick. The papers he was carrying dangled from his hand.

  ‘Paul Harrigan. What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘I think we should have a little chat, mate.’

  Gail’s hand was hovering over the phone.

  ‘Leave it,’ Eddie said, and when she hesitated, shouted, ‘Leave it! For fuck’s sake! Don’t!’

  ‘You want to do your job,’ Harrigan said to her, ‘keep your mouth shut. You didn’t see me.’

  Her face went blank and she went back to whatever she’d been doing.

  Eddie’s office was as run-down as the rest of the shop, with a dead pot plant in one corner. He had put on weight since Harrigan had last seen him, his girth nudging the desk. In gaol some prisoners made sure they stayed fit, they worked at it like men possessed. Eddie hadn’t. All that muscle had gone to fat. Age was catching up with him the same way it was catching up with everyone, all the way to the hair on his head, which, unlike the rest of him, was thinner.

  ‘What do you want, Harrigan? Why should I give you the time of day? You’re nobody now.’

  ‘Look at you,’ Harrigan replied, unmoved. ‘You’re old. You couldn’t take on anyone any more. You want people to forget you, don’t you? So here you are in this shithole, keeping your head down. I can think of a lot of people who’d want to know where you are right now. In gaol you had people watching your arse. Out here you’ve got no one. You might open the door one day and find someone else besides me waiting for you. What was Tony Ponticelli junior doing here? I just saw him leave.’

  ‘The whole fucking thing’s legitimate, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Keep talking, mate. You make me laugh.’

  ‘It’s the property. All we do is manage the family property. That’s it.’

  ‘What was Tony junior doing here?’

  ‘Don’t you know? You don’t, do you? You’re out of the loop.’ Eddie grinned. ‘Tony senior’s got fucking Alzheimer’s. Word is he’s getting loonier every day. Tony junior runs the business now.’

  Harrigan knew the business all too well: extortion, enforcement, murder. The Ponticellis were the people to hire if you wanted anything like that done. They provided, with gusto. Once they’d been into anything—sex, drugs, any kind of contraband, corrupt property developments, shadier business deals, blackmail. Anything that could turn a dollar, which they had also done very successfully. Once, they’d probably had a higher turnover and owned more assets than some well-known companies. But the operations Harrigan had run had cut them down to size. He had gaoled their lieutenants, like Eddie, along with Tony senior’s brother, and seen others get shot in gang wars. After that, they had never recovered their territory. There was no such thing as a vacuum in the crime world. Other gangs, other nationalities, newer to the scene, had moved in.

  Harrigan’s own involvement with the Ponticellis had teetered a little too close at times. There were one or two personal matters between him and Tony senior, which were another good reason for the old man to hate his guts, even more perhaps than for destroying his empire.

  ‘Tony junior doesn’t give a shit about you, mate,’ Harrigan said. ‘You’re not his man. You’re his dad’s. He’s doing you a favour, isn’t he?’

  ‘They need someone,’ Eddie muttered.

  ‘But it doesn’t have to be you. You’re a favour to his dad, aren’t you? Cause Tony junior any trouble and you can sleep in the street. You can give me some information. Is Tony senior thinking he might settle a few scores with me before he carks it?’

  ‘Why? Are you frightened?’

  The old Eddie was coming out. Behind that soft expanse of stomach was the same hard man, the one who got a kick out of taking a knife to other people. He still had that look, the one that said he di
dn’t care if you died in front of him just so long as he had the pleasure of doing it. All that poison was still in his head.

  ‘If you think I’m frightened of you, mate, take me on and see who walks away at the end. It won’t be you. You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘If he is, he hasn’t told me,’ Eddie said. ‘I haven’t heard anything.’

  ‘The white building near the railway line between Wiley Park and Lakemba. It’s a block of units. Tell me about it.’

  ‘Fairview Mansions,’ Eddie said.

  ‘I didn’t see any sign.’

  ‘It fell down. That’s not family property. It belongs to someone else.’

  ‘So what are you doing with it?’

  ‘Fucked if I know. It’s just on the books, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who owns it?’ Harrigan asked.

  ‘Fuck,’ Eddie muttered and turned to an ancient-looking computer. ‘Shillingworth Trust. I don’t know who they are. According to this fucking thing, that’s all we have of theirs.’

  ‘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 fe
w 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?

  A plea through the media brought mixed results. The bike riders didn’t come forward but a man called Andrew Spence did. A real estate agent, he had been Janice’s latest lover. He had been in the kitchen, making himself a cup of coffee before leaving, when Craig had walked in that Saturday morning. He was adamant that Craig was empty-handed. Janice had still been in bed. Spence had heard about this eighteen-year-old boy but hadn’t met him before. The way Craig had looked at him was so disturbing that Spence had left without drinking his coffee. He hadn’t even said goodbye to Janice who he’d intended to see at least once or twice more. This led to another question. Where was the murder weapon? There’d been no sign of one in the house. If you were going to commit suicide, why bother to conceal it afterwards?