The Labyrinth of Drowning

by Alex Palmer

  ‘I realise it’s a long bow to draw. But at the time I was angry. That anger must have shown when this Miss Patterson came to collect her papers. I told her I’d seen Kylie, and made some sarcastic comment that I hoped Kylie had been in a more serious frame of mind when she’d made her assessment of Amelie than when I saw her in Penrith carrying on with some man when she should have been at work. That woman looked at me and said, “I don’t think you saw that,” and walked out. I have to say I felt quite chilled. Then a day later, the following night in fact—it was winter, I got home after dark—’ He stopped for some moments. ‘My dogs. All three of them. They were dead. And they hadn’t died very pleasantly either.’

  He couldn’t speak. Harrigan waited in silence.

  ‘I have three new dogs now. That’s them there—Penelope, Telemachus and Odysseus. But they’re not allowed out unless I’m there to watch them. I used to have a dog flap for them. Not any more.’

  ‘Your belief is that this Nadine Patterson killed your dogs?’

  ‘I’m not a fanciful man. I’ve thought over the brief encounter I had with this Patterson woman any number of times and I’m convinced I humiliated her by what I said. That’s what I saw in her face that day and, yes, I’m also convinced that she did kill my dogs and that’s why.’

  ‘You’re saying that whoever Kylie Sutcliffe was with, it was possibly Nadine Patterson’s lover.’

  ‘I’m unable to reach any other conclusion. I also have to say that I can’t see why anyone would be interested in Kylie if Nadine Patterson was there.’ He shrugged. ‘She was an arrogant woman. Arrogant and angry. And presumably vengeful.’

  ‘Did you ever speak to Kylie Sutcliffe about any of this?’

  ‘That’s another point. Not long after I saw her that day, she resigned her job at short notice and went to London with her boyfriend. I haven’t seen her in four years and neither has anyone else.’

  ‘What about her father?’

  ‘He’s dead now, and she never got along very well with her mother. I assume she’s communicating with her. I haven’t heard anything one way or the other. And then, of course, there was this mysterious letter to Mr Frank Wells. I’d executed Amelie’s will but I refused to act in the matter of the dispute over the probate. That was between Mr Wells and Medicine International. By then I wanted nothing to do with it.’

  Harrigan glanced around the office. It was well ordered, like Lambert’s desk where the papers were laid out in neat piles. Nothing about him suggested a man given to flights of fancy or paranoia. Instead, everything Harrigan had heard spoke of someone who liked stability in his life; a man who probably still grieved for his wife and was deeply attached to his dogs.

  ‘Is this the first time you’ve given this information to anyone?’ he asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Lambert replied.

  ‘Dr Santos was a rich woman. Can I ask about the extent of her estate?’

  ‘Certainly. She was the only child of wealthy parents, the sole heir to their estate, which was substantial. I doubt she spent much money on herself. Most of it she invested over her lifetime, very shrewdly. Including the house at Blackheath, there were three properties, two of which were still owned by her when she died. Her surgery, which was at Turramurra, and a house at Duffys Forest, which was where she lived in Sydney. Both of those properties went to Medicine International in accordance with her will. Her bequest to them was well in excess of some millions of dollars even after the deed of gift had been paid.’

  ‘Do you know who owns those properties now?’

  ‘No, I don’t. At the time, Medicine International advised me they intended selling on both properties and realising the capital. But those sales would have occurred after probate was declared, which meant they were handled by the charity’s own lawyers. I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Would this Nadine Patterson have known the contents of Dr Santos’s will?’

  ‘However she found it out, yes, she very definitely did. She made a number of comments during our meeting indicating that.’

  ‘Dr Santos seemed to live in isolated locations,’ Harrigan said.

  ‘She used to love to ride; it was her great pleasure. I think it was her only recreation. That’s why she lived at Duffys Forest. She could keep her horses there.’

  ‘What about the house at Blackheath? Is it still owned by the Shillingworth Trust?’

  ‘So far as I know. I can tell you it’s not lived in. I have that much information. The second trustee was a David Tate. You could check with him, whoever he might be. I have sometimes wondered if he was the man I saw with Kylie Sutcliffe that day.’

  ‘Do you know who the beneficiaries were?’

  ‘Yes, I insisted we establish that the trust was properly legally constituted, which it certainly was. It was a discretionary trust, which meant of course that the return to beneficiaries was at the discretion of the trustees. The beneficiary was a company, Cheshire Nominees. That’s where I gave up. There seemed no point in pursuing the matter further. I had no idea where it might take me.’

  ‘Could you give me the addresses of all Dr Santos’s properties, including the Blackheath house?’ Harrigan asked.

  ‘I have no problem with that. Do you intend to visit them?’

  ‘I’ll take a look at them. I’m interested in knowing who owns them now and what’s happened to them.’

  Lambert glanced at the photograph of his dogs; then he opened a desk drawer and handed Harrigan a set of keys.

  ‘You might need these,’ he said. ‘When Amelie was sent to hospital, the nurse who found her also locked up her house. When the deed of gift was made, the nursing home gave me the keys to hand on to Miss Patterson.’ Lambert looked slightly embarrassed. ‘I was about to give them to her when we had our verbal encounter, if I can describe it in that way. Her response so shocked me that I completely forgot to hand them over. Anyway, she’d already walked out of my office. I didn’t want to meet with her again so I sent them on to her at the Shillingworth Trust. They came back undelivered. Not known at this address.’

  ‘You didn’t hand them over and she didn’t ask for them,’ Harrigan said.

  ‘No. Which would suggest she already had a set. I’m sure she did. Amelie would almost certainly have had a spare set somewhere in the house.’

  ‘An easy house to break into then?’

  ‘It was generally said by the nurses who visited her that Amelie had no sense of security whatsoever,’ Lambert replied.

  ‘You don’t think the locks have been changed since her death?’ Harrigan asked.

  ‘My information is that the house is exactly as it was when the deed of gift was made. It’s been left to rot.’

  ‘Strange thing to do after all that effort. Did Dr Santos have a peaceful death?’

  ‘She did apparently. In her sleep. It seems that once Miss Patterson left, Amelie came back to something like her old self and was quite calm in her last weeks. We carried out the funeral according to her wishes, and right now she’s buried in the Northern Suburbs Cemetery next to her parents.’

  ‘Quite a story. Thank you for the information,’ Harrigan said. ‘It’s been very useful.’

  ‘It’s been a relief,’ the solicitor replied, feelingly. ‘What I want to do now is forget about it.’

  By now, it was well after one. Harrigan was on his way to his car when an SMS message arrived from Grace. She had an early mark and would collect Ellie from the childcare centre. Talk to you later, love G. He thought about ringing her but she was probably still at work. Better he didn’t infringe on Orion’s dislike of personal calls. He sent back his own message. Ok, babe. See you at home. Lu2. Then he made the trip further along the Great Western Highway to Blackheath.

  Like much of the Blue Mountains, Blackheath had the feel of a tourist town. The gift shops, antiques centres and restaurants all invited you to come inside and spend your money in comfort. Harrigan obliged by stopping for lunch before driving out to where the edge of the
town met the Blue Mountains National Park. In the 1880s Amelie’s house would have been at a distance from the railway line, the village and other homes. Today, other houses had encroached on its isolation, although it was still secluded, being surrounded by a high hedge.

  To Harrigan’s surprise, there was a For Sale by Auction sign outside the front of the house. It was the perfect excuse for him to stop and look. The tall hedge was unkempt, the front gate skewed on its hinges. There was also a wide, closed wooden gate leading into the driveway. He parked a little further along the road and, letting himself in the front gate, walked down the path. There was no sign of a car in the driveway and the roller door to the garage was shut.

  Once inside the hedge, the house and garden were enclosed and isolated from the street. Everything Harrigan saw spoke of abandonment. The plants that had once been grown in the garden had either gone to seed or died. The house was built of wood, with a wide veranda surrounding it on all four sides. It was some years since it had been painted. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell. He heard it chiming back into the interior of the house, followed by a deeper silence.

  After another attempt, which also went unanswered, he put on a pair of disposable gloves, then took out Lambert’s keys. The lock on the front door looked old enough to be an original and he soon found a key that opened it. He stepped into a hallway that ran the length of the house, hearing only the hum of silence. There was a smell of disuse rather than dirt. He took out his gun.

  He went into the front room. Dust lay on the bookshelves, ornaments and pictures. The phone had clearly not been touched for years. He tried a light switch. To his surprise, there was still electricity. Back in the hallway, he opened a closed door and found himself looking into the main bedroom. The bed was unmade, the blankets and sheets lying tossed back as if someone had just got out of it. Only the dust covering everything indicated how long it must have been since the last occupant had been here. Otherwise, someone might have just got up that morning. Even the hairbrush sitting on the dressing table still had white hairs in the bristles.

  Two framed photographs stood next to it. One after the other, Harrigan took them to the window to see them in the light, brushing them clean. The first had probably been taken in the mid-twenties of last century: a studio portrait of a young Amelie with her parents. The family seemed more relaxed than such poses usually allowed, each of them smiling. Her father had a hand on his young daughter’s shoulder. His smile was one of pride, hers was simply happy. The second picture showed Amelie Santos on her graduation day, dated in 1942. A dark-haired young woman in academic robes, she stood against carefully arranged drapes. She held her degree but she wasn’t smiling; her expression was one of sadness. Amelie Santos had had a finely made face with clear eyes. Underneath her academic gown, she was dressed in a simple, slim-fitting dress. There was nothing about her that suggested she couldn’t have found someone to share her life with if she’d wanted to.

  He walked through the rest of the house. There were signs where the possums had broken in and made their homes in the ceiling and where other creatures had chewed their way into the chair cushions to make nests. Spiders’ webs hung from the light fittings and the corners of the room. Despite the sense of decay, the house had an air of peacefulness rather than menace.

  Harrigan reached the kitchen, a room that had not been changed for at least thirty years, and looked out of the window over the sink. There was a panoramic view of the Grose Valley with its tree-covered slopes and turret-like sandstone outcrops, a sight probably unchanged in centuries. As beautiful as it was, this was a modest way of life for a woman whose personal wealth had been valued in the millions. He opened the back door and saw a pile of leaf litter balanced precariously in the air before cascading downwards. No one had opened this door for years.

  Stepping over the litter, he went out onto the back veranda. A cane chair and table, now rotted and dirty, stood just near the kitchen door. The back garden was overrun with weeds and self-sown wattles. Tall, well-grown eucalypts lined either side of the boundary, stepping down the slope one after the other towards the escarpment. Forest and mountain stretched to a horizon piled with a massive accumulation of luminous clouds. Out of the deep, dark, blue-green sweep of the trees came only the sound of bird calls and the wind in the trees, giving an intense sense of peace. Perhaps this was what she had come here to find, something that could not be bought. She must have sat here and drunk it in.

  Back inside, he closed and locked the back door again and then went out the way he had come, sheathing his gun. Outside, he looked at the garage. He had a key to the roller door and another one next to it that he hadn’t used. He went around to the side of the house where there was a second door into the garage reached by a short path from the veranda. The key turned easily in the lock and he stepped inside.

  He wasn’t in the garage proper but a windowless room at the back of it. He turned on the light and found himself in a study of some kind, a room fitted with shelving. Another door led through into the main part of the garage at the front. He opened this door, which was also locked, and looked through. A small, old blue Ford was parked there, presumably from the time when Amelie Santos had stopped driving. He locked the door again and turned his attention to what was in the room. By the look of it, it was the remains of her medical practice. On one shelf was an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, a stethoscope and old medical journals. There were other shelves filled with archive boxes, all labelled and dated. Tax records, financial information. One row of boxes on a middle shelf were labelled simply Children.

  Harrigan took one box down and set it on the table in the centre of the small room. There was a chair to sit in, and on the table a reading lamp and, chillingly, a pair of reading glasses, as if Amelie Santos might walk through the door the next minute and put them on. Harrigan turned on the reading lamp, which worked perfectly, and noticed that, unlike the rest of the house and other parts of this room, there was no dust on the table. He opened the box.

  He soon realised these were the medical records of children that Amelie Santos had treated throughout her career but had not been able to save. All had been filed in strict chronological order with their names and the span of their lives written across the top of the files. The records went back to the start of her practice. The children had died of accidents, cancer, inherited diseases. The information in the records made it clear that she had nursed many of them tirelessly.

  As well as exhaustive medical data, in amongst the records were photographs, some just of the child, some of the family as well. In some folders there were even birth certificates. Occasionally there were letters addressed to Amelie, again sometimes from the child, sometimes from the parents. In one folder there was a small knitted toy wrapped in yellowing tissue paper. There were details of the parents’ and siblings’ life and health, where they were born and had lived, including overseas travel. Amelie Santos had searched hard for answers to her patients’ illnesses.

  The children’s names reflected the changes in post-war Australia. The oldest, dating from the mid-forties, were almost completely Anglo-Celtic; then other names from other places began to appear—Greek, Italian, Eastern European, the Balkans. In the later years of Amelie’s practice, the children’s names were from all backgrounds: Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Thai, Middle Eastern, African. Some records dated from as late as the mid-1990s. Harrigan remembered what Lambert had told him: that she’d had a reputation that had brought people to her long after her retirement. Desperate people seeking answers no one had to give, including Amelie Santos; so desperate they were prepared to place any amount of sensitive information in her hands. When put together, the records provided a comprehensive biography of the dead.

  But numbers of folders were also empty with no explanation given. Then, at the end of one box, he came across a folder labelled with the name Nadine Patterson. He pulled it out and saw there was nothing inside. He slipped it back and opened the next box. There,
almost at the front, was a folder labelled David Tate. He drew this one out. It was also empty. He looked at the dates of the children’s births and deaths. About forty, if they’d been alive today. Working quickly, he made a list of the names on the empty files. Fourteen in all, including Tate and Patterson, boys and girls both, about half of them Asian or African.

  He closed up the final box and put it back on the shelf. There was enough information in some of these folders for a person to create a new identity for themselves any time they wanted to. A very profitable item to sell on the market since the identity was effectively genuine. This was the real value of the house; not the property but these records. An identity scam, presumably run by the Shillingworth trustees, people who were already in masquerade.

  What should he do now? Call his old work mates? If he did, it would get back to Orion. Talk to Lambert? It was unlikely the solicitor would want anything more to do with this. Take the files with him? What right did he have to do that? Who could be said to own these records now? Presumably they should have been returned to the families or destroyed when Amelie Santos died. But what if he secured them on the premises, in some other hiding place? Anyone coming here to use them could easily think they had been stolen.

  Harrigan went back inside the house and looked around. The roof? The cellar? In the spare bedroom, he found a large linen press, the old-fashioned kind: a long, deep chest made of some dark wood, only partially filled with sheets and towels. On opening, it smelled of mothballs. Working as quickly as he could, he transferred the boxes from the garage to here, covering them with the linen already in place. The dust on the chest was disturbed when he had finished, but hopefully no one would come into this storage cum junk room to check. Then he went back outside and broke the lock on the garage’s side door. Clumsy, but good enough to make it appear someone had broken in. He peeled off his disposable gloves and left the premises.