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 dressed 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.’
‘Small mercies in that case,’ Grace said, looking at him with an angry glint in her eye.
‘If you want to put it that way.’
Lynette was slumped with her back against the wall near the door, shot in the head, the grubby white paint stained behind her. She was dressed exactly as she had been when Grace had seen her last night. The room had been perfunctorily searched. Lynette’s bag was open, its contents scattered around her. A bottle of wine, still with its cork in place, lay smashed on the floor in the middle of the room. There was more broken glass on the table. On the bed was an open suitcase, a few clothes tossed into it.
‘Did she take that bottle to her attacker?’ Grace asked.
‘We think so,’ Borghini said. ‘It looks like she was packing when someone walked in the door. She tried to whack him with a bottle of chardonnay. He managed to get out of the way and shoot her. Fun and games,’ he added grimly.
‘Didn’t anyone hear anything?’ she asked. ‘What about her next-door neighbour? This room doesn’t exactly look soundproof.’
‘Apparently, it wasn’t unusual for her to have company. He heard banging sometime around ten, thought it was business as usual, knocked on the wall and everything went quiet. He didn’t notice anything else, he was watching TV. He said he might have heard a thud after he knocked on the wall. That could have been from a silencer.’
Lynette’s eyes were open. On impact, the terror she had felt had been obliterated; death had been brutal and immediate. Whoever had done this, they’d seen her face looking at them immediately before they fired. It hadn’t mattered to them. Killing was just another job. Grace was caught in the woman’s vacant stare, and, despite her determination to stay detached, went cold with the unexpected horror that someone could do this so easily.
‘Satisfied?’ the pathologist asked.
Perhaps there was something in the way she looked at him that made even the feared McMichael step backward.
‘I’ve seen what I need to see,’ she replied, keeping a grip on herself, unexpectedly feeling the prick of tears at the back of her eyes. She walked out.
Outside, she spoke to Borghini. ‘She was heading for the door. Running for her life, not getting there.’
‘I don’t think this was a planned killing,’ he said. ‘Or at best it wasn’t supposed to happen here. Whoever shot her fired on the kneejerk. Let me tell you something. Lynette phoned Marie Li before she left the brothel and told her she had to close up, she was going home. After that Madam chucked a wobbly. Too much of a wobbly even for her. Did this Lynette have something important in her possession? It’d be one good reason why she’s dead.’
‘If she did, she didn’t give it to me. Where was Kidd when all this was going on?’
‘He was there to see Marie Li losing it. After that, he went to make some phone calls. Then he left. Why? Does this mean there’s something else you haven’t told me?’
‘What you get told is in the hands of my boss.’ Grace looked back at the unit. Nothing was more sordid than violent death. ‘Did she die because I talked to her, because the brothel was raided or was she going to die anyway?’
‘The way things are shaping up,’ Borghini said, ‘she was going to die anyway.’
‘Then maybe Marie Li is in danger too.’
‘The thought had crossed my mind. Do you know who she really is? Narelle Wong of Chipping Norton. Her brother came and bailed her in the small hours of this morning. Let’s hope her family’s not in danger as well.’
In the meeting room at Orion, Clive handed Grace a manila envelope.
‘From the hotel’s strongbox, put there by Jacqueline Ryan,’ he said. ‘Our people recovered it early this morning.’
Grace took out a Thai passport in the name of Jirawan Sanders. Jirawan’s smiling photograph was on the details page. Stamped inside the passport was a permanent resident’s visa for Australia.
‘P&J. Peter and Jirawan forever,’ she said. ‘If her husband’s dead, the Peter she wanted to contact could have been a son. Which means he might be okay one way or the other. Immigration didn’t have the right to deport her. Did Kidd know that?’
‘When it’s the right time, we’ll ask him. But that passport is a valuable item. And right now, someone’s missing it.’
‘Whoever really owns the brothel,’ Grace replied. ‘They didn’t trust Marie, the same way they didn’t trust her with the foreign workers. Her role is strictly limited by the look of it.’ ‘To what?’
‘A convenient gaoler. A fantasy for someone to visit. One they’ve spent a lot of money on. They even changed her name.’
‘Who are these exotic workers? Are they illegal?’
‘Not necessarily. I think they’ll be foreign women newly settled in Australia or possibly on bridging visas. But maybe getting a resident’s visa depends on them working at Life’s Pleasures. That’s where Kidd comes in. He’d see a lot of applications. Maybe he’s the talent spotter. He’s senior enough to slow down or speed up the process or maybe just make it impossible to get other family members over here. Maybe all he has to do is make the threat.’
‘The initial judgement of our finance people is that Life’s Pleasures, while turning a very tidy profit of its own, is principally a money-laundering business,’ Clive said. ‘The sums involved are very substantial and it all gets moved offshore. That’s curious psychology, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘However much those women are making for that brothel by working for nothing, it’s still small beer compared to the money it’s really turning over. Why do it?’
‘That probably means we’re dealing with someone who likes to exercise control over other people for the sake of it,’ Grace said. The same way you do, she added in the silence of her thoughts.
‘Maybe that person can be goaded,’ Clive replied. ‘Lynette had the key to the strongbox in her jacket pocket. The search our killer carried out was pretty basic. Probably he just wanted to get out of there. But did she tell him she’d given this passport to the last person she spoke to, which is you?’
‘We can’t know what she said.’
‘No, and no one can know the truth, including her killers. They only know they don’t have this passport. It’s feasible you’ve stolen it. You had the opportunity.’ Clive was watching her closely. ‘Exactly what are you prepared to do?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘A sting. What if you offer this passport for sale back to both Marie Li and Kidd and see who bites?’
‘Are you telling me it’s no longer necessary we keep Jirawan’s name secret?’ she asked. She felt an intense snap of anger. After all that fuss and with Jirawan dead.
‘I’m saying we need a new strategy. What’s your answer?’ ‘Why would I want to do a thing like that in the first place?’
He opened a manila folder and placed three slender identical documents on the table in front of her.
‘You’re badly paid. Or not enough for you anyway. You’re bored. Now your partner’s not a top cop any more, he’s just not interesting enough. You don’t like motherhood, it bores you too. There’s no excitement in your life and not enough money to make it happen. You’re thinking about having an affair, if you can just find someone.’
‘That’s all in here, is it?’ she asked.
‘Yes. The written agreement and clear directions you wanted,’ he said. ‘Read it. Tell me what you think.’
‘Before we go anywhere, I’m definitely not thinking of having an affair with anyone.’
‘It’s an option you don’t have to follow if you don’t want to. You’ve got the face to make that scenario work. But no organisation has the power to direct one of its operatives to act in that way. We all know that.’
‘Good,’ she said, and picked up the documents, looked through them. ‘This is detailed. You didn’t prepare this sting overnight.’
‘I’ve been thinking about the possibilities ever since Jirawan Sanders was found dead. Her murder means our target is almost certainly in Australia.’
‘You still haven’t said who or what that is.’
‘That document says I will brief you in full when the time comes. And there’s something else. There’s a wild card at work here.’
He had a nakedly manipulative look on his face.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘These people following you, phoning you last night. Who might they be? Do you think it’s Newell?’
‘Newell couldn’t have known where I was last night. Harrigan has a lot of enemies. It’s more likely to be one of them.’ She never referred to Harrigan by his first name in front of Clive.
‘What about the people behind these two women’s murders? As you’ve said, how could anyone know where you were last night unless they were following you from Parramatta? If they’ve identified you, then they’re already interested in you. If you go seeking them, they may well want to deal.’
‘We can’t know that.’
‘No. But it’s a possibility.’
One that put her in even greater danger. She didn’t say this; she didn’t want him to think the possibilities frightened her.
Clive opened his folder and took out two photographs, placing them next to each other like playing cards. Jirawan lying in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park; Lynette as she’d been found in her hotel room.
‘Take these pictures with you,’ he said. ‘When you’re reading that agreement, keep them on the desk in front of you.’
Rather than argue, Grace gathered them up.
‘Who do I talk to first?’
‘When you’ve read and signed the agreement, you talk to this Marie Li or Narelle Wong or whatever her name is. Then you call on Kidd.’
‘Do I tell Harrigan?’
‘That’s all in there,’ Clive said a little sharply. ‘I told you to read it. If you sign the agreement, then I’ll want to speak to your partner about the operation myself. Don’t worry, you’ll be there when I do. If you don’t want me to do that, I’ll take you off the job now.’
She pulled back a little from the abruptness with which he spoke.
‘Are we sharing any of this with the police?’ she asked.
‘I’ve decided we are, at least with Borghini. He’ll know about the role you’re playing but no one else will. I’ll brief his senior command myself on what they need to know. You were a sworn police officer once. You can appear to be seconded back while this operation is going on. But the proviso is this. Both you and Borghini take your directions from me and no one else.’
‘Borghini probably won’t like that.’
‘He can take it or leave it,’ Clive said. ‘The question is, will you?’
‘I’ll let you know this afternoon,’ she replied and walked out.
Give Clive his due, he had set it out in detail. There was nothing in these pieces of paper to trap her; it was the reverse, the details were comprehensive. Despite that, the job was both dangerous and secretive, even by Orion’s standards. The worst aspect of her work had always been its loneliness. This agreement isolated her further. On her desk, she had a photograph of Paul holding Ellie at her naming ceremony. She remembered thinking at the time, how had she got here? How had she managed to achieve so much just by blundering around the way she always did? The photograph held a world, one that mattered to her more than anything. Clive’s agreement cut her off from that world and left her isolated in another one. The two photographs he had given her lay on the desk; they showed her exactly what she was walking into. They were openings into some other kind of darkness, a place that had nothing to do with the life she lived outside her work. Clive might say that he meant them to make her think twice about what she was taking on. But really he knew her well enough to realise they would have the opposite effect.
She looked at the picture of Paul and Ellie again and the anxiety came back. What happens to my daughter if something happens to me? But it was there on paper: backup, safety, an opt-out clause if she couldn’t handle it. Orion was careful with its operatives’ safety. Her own experience had demonstrated that to her. She would have to step away from both Paul and Ellie in her mind. If she didn’t, the focus she needed, the cold-bloodedness, would not be there. If she once wavered in her intent, not only would she be in danger but she could put the operation at risk and other people who were involved as well.
Clive was asking a lot of her and it angered her to think he probably realised just how much this would cost her. And, regardless of the detail in this document, the real aim of the operation was being hidden from her. All she was being offered was a briefing sometime in the future. In other words, she was being asked to fly blind; she was being used. But she wanted this person, these people, whoever they were, as much as he did. This was her agenda and it was just as important as whatever Clive might have planned. No one was safe when people like this were out there, including the people who meant most to her. She picked up her pen and signed the documents.