The city offices of Life Patent Strategies were on the thirty-third floor of Australia Square. As promised, a man was waiting to meet Harrigan at the entrance to the underground car park. He didn’t introduce himself, but politely showed Harrigan where to park and then led him into the elevator. It deposited them near a glass door decorated with the LPS insignia. Elena’s bodyguard Damien was waiting to let them into a reception area furnished with soft chairs. A padded silence absorbed sound. The first bodyguard stationed himself by the door while Damien showed Harrigan to Elena’s office.
It was a large and uncluttered room with a minimal amount of furniture. Clearly, she liked space around her. It stretched from the door to her desk and on either side of her. She had been waiting for him in silence; a visitor’s chair was already in place. Briefly, he looked past her at the view. Against a perfect sky, the glass towers at North Sydney showed a strangely insubstantial outline. She turned to look as well.
‘It’s breathtaking, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I’m never tired of that view, it makes me feel free. I’ve very rarely felt that in my life. Please sit down, Commander. I’m going to trust you once again. That’s all, Damien. I’ll call you.’
Both waited until the door had closed behind the bodyguard. Harrigan watched her take in the sight of his damaged face.
‘You can trust me, Dr Calvo,’ he said. ‘In fact, you can rely on me.’
‘Why do I need to rely on you? My understanding of this meeting is that we’re here to discuss your son. Does this mean you’ve changed your mind since the last time I saw you? If I recall, at that time I offered you a number of things and you refused them all. Are you now prepared to accept them?’
‘Like you said that first time we met, Dr Calvo, assuming we go ahead with those arrangements, you’d have expectations of me. There are a few matters in relation to those expectations I’d like to discuss. If you really do want my services, that is.’
He stopped. She gestured for him to go on.
‘My guess is, you know more about what’s going on right now than just about anybody else. I think you have a very good idea of why those people were shot up at Pittwater even if you don’t necessarily know who did it.’
‘We’re not here to talk about me, Commander.’ She shut him down with one of the iciest stares he had seen. ‘You’ve changed the subject. We’re here to talk about your son. Are you prepared to enter into an agreement with me concerning his future wellbeing?’
‘That depends. Andreas du Plessis kidnapped my son and put me through hell. Worse, he left my son to die of thirst in a long-stay car park. The deal was that my son came home alive. I want an answer from you. Whose idea was it to renege on the deal?’
‘I know nothing about those events and I don’t see what this has to do with me,’ she said. ‘But I will say that in business, you will almost certainly fail, and fail very badly, if you don’t keep your word once you’ve given it. If I give an undertaking, I always stand by it without exception.’
‘In other words, you’re washing your hands of your dirty tricks man.’
‘Why are you saying that to me? Are you recording this? This smells of entrapment, Commander. I have two bodyguards waiting outside. Should I call them in here? I know a great deal about you. It’s unwise for you to put me offside.’
‘I know quite a lot about you too, Dr Calvo. Have a look at this.’
From his wallet, he took a copy of the photograph of the couple and their child in a ruined city in 1946. She glanced down at it on the desk and then back at him. She said nothing and didn’t touch it.
‘My squad found this picture in Jerome Beck’s wallet when we found his body. You said that at the end of World War Two, your father was a displaced person. Was he ever in Dresden? It’s a long way from your childhood, isn’t it? Something for Beck to resent mightily. Is that what you were arguing about in the car park that night in June four-and-a-half years ago? You deal in DNA, Dr Calvo. We have Beck’s DNA. Would you like to do a match?’
Elena rested her elbows on her desk, her chin on her hands, looking at him. She was very still. Harrigan put the photograph back in his wallet.
‘My guess is, when Beck found out from his mother who his father really was, he went looking for him. Your father gave him a job. Everything I’ve heard about your father tells me he’s not the sentimental type. He must have found something for his long lost son to do. Something useful to the family firm. Whatever it was, it paid very well. That probably means it was something no one else was prepared to do. I think he went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with du Plessis. They were working for your father. Whatever Beck was doing here, he was doing it for your father as well. That’s the key, isn’t it? Whatever program Beck was running at that research facility in north London, it was for your father. In this country, it was genetically modified crops that harm people in some way and the research was being done out at Campbelltown. Now, that’s not good publicity.’
She leant forward to speak.
‘In business, it’s never a good idea to use guesswork as a basis for a decision. It’s much better to work from factual information. I don’t think you have any means of backing up these bizarre theories.’
‘The contract would have given us that information if we still had it. What did Daniel tell me the morning I visited you? Every contract Abaris draws up records in detail who owns the patent rights and the intellectual property. That’s one of the reasons you wanted to get hold of it so badly, isn’t it? Except someone was thinking ahead of you. There’s still another copy out there somewhere. The killers have got it. You’ve got no leverage where they’re concerned.’
‘Are you telling me you do?’ she asked. ‘You don’t know who they are. I don’t think you have any way of finding out.’
‘Do you have a way of finding out? Do you have something to guide you that we don’t? A suspicion that you can’t quite shake off as impossible? Do you think they’re going to come after you? Is that why you have two bodyguards in a building as secure as the facility at Campbelltown? You do need me.’
‘If you don’t know who these killers are, what can you do for me? A bodyguard is more useful.’
‘In business,’ Harrigan said, ‘it’s a good idea to trust people who can offer you something no one else can. You just accused me of entrapment. There are two things you can do. You can trust me and give me what I want. Or I can walk out of here and run this investigation the way it should be run, the way I would usually run it. I can do that now Marvin Tooth is a dead man. Then one day, sooner rather than later, we’ll find your dirty tricks man and come knocking on your door. Then everything you’ve worked for will be on the line. You know that. You’ve moved heaven and earth to protect yourself already.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want du Plessis. No one does that to my son and gets away with it. I want him to pay personally for what he did to Toby. Organise that for me, Dr Calvo, and we both get what we want. Wouldn’t you call that a win-win situation?’
‘And after that?’ she said.
‘One step at a time,’ Harrigan replied.
‘How can I arrange to give you something I don’t have?’
‘I said I wanted you to trust me. You set it up, Dr Calvo. You set up a meeting and you give me the details.’
‘For any deal, there’s always a cooling-off period. I need twenty-four hours.’
‘The last time I spoke to you, you told me there was no time.’
‘I gave you time anyway, if you recall. You can do the same for me,’ she replied. She glanced at her watch and then at him. The intensity of her stare made him want to look away. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow morning first thing. Can we say this meeting is finished?’
‘If you call me tomorrow morning, what do we do? Do we meet here?’
‘Most probably, yes. I’m usually here on a Saturday.’ She pressed a button on her intercom. ‘Damien, would you come in, please?’
Almost immediately, Damien appeared.
‘Good afternoon,’ Elena said to Harrigan with a polite smile. ‘Damien, see the commander gets to his car. Make sure he gets there safely.’
Harrigan decided it was better to say nothing.
Damien didn’t leave until he had watched him drive out of the car park. At the next set of red lights, Harrigan turned off the wire. There was more space left on the tape. He would wear it again tomorrow. One step at a time. She was more desperate than he’d thought. Now he just had to wait and see if throwing the berley would work.
Harrigan didn’t go home. He drove to the Bondi Junction shopping mall where he went to the gents and took off the wire, locking it in his briefcase. The florist was about to close. He was just in time to buy Grace a dozen long-stemmed red roses before driving over to see her unannounced. He didn’t want to risk calling her first and have her tell him she didn’t want to see him. To his relief, she answered the buzzer.
‘Hi, Abbie, you didn’t have to come and get me. I’m not ready yet. I’ll buzz you in.’
Abbie was Abigail, Grace’s closest friend and a criminal lawyer with a fierce reputation.
‘It’s not Abbie,’ Harrigan said. ‘It’s me. Do you want to see me?’
There was the briefest of pauses.
‘Okay.’
When he reached her floor, he found that her front door was ajar for him. Inside, she was standing in front of the full-length mirror on her wardrobe applying the last of her make-up. Her dress shimmered in the glass. He shut the door behind him.
‘You’re going out,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To dinner with the girls. Then we’re going to a party at Noah’s.’
She put her lipstick down on her dressing table and looked at herself. There was silence.
‘You look lovely,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you some flowers.’
She took them from him, awkwardly, without looking at him. ‘Thanks. They’re beautiful. I’ll put them in water.’
She didn’t sound as if she meant it. In her tiny kitchen, she filled the sink with water and left them there, not looking for a vase. Suddenly, she opened the drawer where she kept her bills and then shut it. Immediately, he knew what she was doing: searching for her cigarettes. It was one of her strategies, so called, for dealing with her addiction. She refused to buy cartons, only single packets of twenties, and sometimes found herself late at night without a cigarette. On these occasions, she tried to hang on. In her flat, she kept a spare packet salted away for those emergencies when her stamina gave out and she had to light up. Sometimes, when she hadn’t used it for a while, she forgot where this packet was hidden.
‘You’ll have some in your bag,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Where are you going for dinner?’
She had knelt down and was looking in the cupboard under the sink.
‘Claude’s,’ she said. ‘I didn’t ask you because I didn’t think there was any chance you’d have the time.’
He had never liked going to expensive restaurants; he always thought of it as a waste of money. It was another difference between them. To Grace, money was something you spent. She shut the cupboard door and stood in front of the sink with her hands on her hips, not looking at him.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘I wanted to see you. I have time. Maybe we could go somewhere. If you want to go out, why don’t you let me take you out? Just you and me. You choose. Wherever you like.’
‘Maybe we could go somewhere. Why don’t I let you take me out?’ she repeated and then pulled open another kitchen drawer. She stood there looking down at it. ‘I wanted to see you last night and you didn’t have the time. Now you’ve got a couple of hours to spare for me and you just breeze in here like this and say that. The roses are supposed to make it all okay. That’s one way you can get your sex, I suppose.’
Harrigan was genuinely insulted. ‘Grace, I’ve never treated you like that. I think you should take it easy with what you say. I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately.’
‘You always are. You always will be. You’ll always have a really good reason why you can’t be here. Fine. I’m not going to ask you for one. The other night I thought, I can’t put myself through this again. Let’s just finish with it.’
‘I thought we were going to see it through until I had this investigation under control.’
‘That was before you didn’t ring me when I asked you to and before you gave me all this time to think about it. Nothing’s going to change. We might as well face up to that now.’
She pushed the kitchen drawer shut. A bag the same colour as her dress was on the table. He picked it up.
‘You’ll have some cigarettes in here. I’ll get them for you.’
‘No, don’t do that!’
It was too late. He took out not her cigarettes but a small old handgun. He put her bag back on the table and turned the gun over in his hand.
‘Do you carry this around with you all the time? Are you taking this to your party tonight?’
‘I’ve got a place in my car where I hide it,’ she said. ‘Give it back.’
‘You don’t have your car with you right now. Is this legal?’
‘What do you think?’
‘No wonder you didn’t want a gun when I offered you one the other day. You already had one. Why do you need this?’
‘You’re the one who said I needed protection. Anyway, aren’t you armed?’
‘Not at the moment. Don’t change the subject. You didn’t get this in the last few days. Why do you need it? Why do you need to have it in your car?’
‘It’s none of your business,’ she said, her voice growing angry. ‘Give it back.’
‘Not until you tell me why you’ve got it. Have you had this all the time we’ve been together? Because you thought you needed the protection. From me? Or from someone else? Do you think I wouldn’t protect you?’
‘How could you? You don’t have enough time to do that.’
This hurt him.
‘You tell me what this is about, Grace. I’m not leaving until you do.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that. You’re so used to telling people what to do. Give that back to me. It’s got nothing to do with you. I’m going out now and I need it.’ Moving suddenly and quickly, she reached to snatch the gun out of his hand.
‘Don’t do that! I am not going to fight with you over a gun!’
He felt himself losing control at some deeper level. He spun away from her, turning his back. He broke the gun down instinctively, shaking out the bullets, then with all the strength he had, he smashed it down on the floor tiles in her small kitchen alcove. It cracked with a noise that made him think it must have accidentally fired. It couldn’t have fired, he’d broken it down. It would be unusable now, the barrel cracked or damaged in some way, making it too dangerous to fire. Ammunition lay scattered where it had fallen. Her tiles were cracked and splintered. He turned to her. She was gaping at him.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘You get shot fighting over guns. Do you think I want to see you with a bullet wound in your head? One I put there? If that did happen, I’d probably feel like putting one in my own head!’
They stared at each other in silence. Then she took her cigarettes out of her bag and lit one.
‘No,’ she said. ‘That isn’t the reason, not for you to act like that. Why did you do that? Tell me.’
He looked down at the shattered tiles and then at her.
‘When I was eighteen, my father shot my mother. It was Cassatt’s gun, I’ve got it in my cellar. He’d had a run-in with a dealer on the docks and he’d shot him. He gave my father the gun to hide. My mother did what you just tried to do, take it out of his hands. He shot her in the face. Cassatt handled the investigation, he got my father off. When we were leaving the law courts, he turned me and said “Your father loved your mother, mate. You ought to realise that.” I hit him so hard, I knocked out one of his front teeth. I saw what my mother looked like when she died. I’m not going to live with another memory like that.’
She put her cigarette in an ashtray on the table and sat down with her face in her hands. ‘That’s why you went after him. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.’
‘You don’t have to say any more than that. This is as much as we’ll ever need to say about this ever again.’ He sat down opposite her. ‘Your turn, Grace. Tell me why you’ve got that gun.’
She picked up her cigarette and smoked with her eyes closed, shaking from head to foot. He had never seen her like this. He thought it was better that he didn’t try to touch her. She opened her eyes.
‘Someone used to stalk me once. He was sort of a boyfriend for a while. We broke up over ten years ago but he kept coming back. I got that gun—’ She stopped. ‘I got that gun after I came home from a party one night and he was waiting for me in the car park. He threw petrol all over me.’
Harrigan was silent. It was one of the few occasions in his life when he could truthfully say he was shocked.
‘I heard him say, “My lighter’s not working.” Something like that. I turned and ran. I wondered later if it was a joke but I don’t think it was. I locked myself in my flat and I sat under the shower fully dressed for hours just soaking myself with water. The next day I moved out of that flat and into this one. Then I got hold of that gun. That’s why I have it, in case he comes back.’
Harrigan was drumming his fingers softly on the table top.
‘Who is this person? What’s his name?’
She shook her head.
‘No, what’s his name?’
‘Chris Newell,’ she said after a while.
He took out his notebook and wrote it down.
‘Where is he now?’
‘Silverwater. He got seven years for armed robbery about a year ago. I kept my gun just in case he got out again somehow. It’s a security blanket. I don’t feel safe without it now.’
Harrigan jotted down these small details without asking how she’d got involved with someone like that in the first place.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘Keep an eye on him. Maybe a little more. He sounds like he deserves some attention. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have warned him off for you. I would have made sure he never came back.’
She lit another cigarette from the end of the one she was smoking without answering him.
‘Is he the one who gave you your scar?’
‘It was a long time ago. I was only nineteen. It was when I was still singing with my band. He was supposed to be our manager. Then we found out he was dealing on the side. I’d already decided I didn’t want to sing any more. When I told him it was all over between us, he beat me up and told me I wasn’t going anywhere. When he wasn’t looking, I walked out. I took my car and I drove and I didn’t stop. Then I heard he was in gaol, he’d walked into a sting. He thought I’d dobbed him in but I hadn’t. When he got out, he came after me.’ She put her second cigarette in the ashtray and drew a deep breath. ‘I thought I knew everything back then. I was so green. It’s all over now. I’m a different person.’
‘You never reported him.’
‘I was drinking back then. I don’t know what kind of a witness I would have made. I didn’t want to put myself through that. I was too frightened of him. That’s the truth.’
‘If he ever comes near you again, it’ll be the last time he ever does. That’s a promise.’
He raped you, he understood, watching her ash, then scrub out her cigarette. He raped you and he left you with that scar. Because men who give women scars like you have almost always do that. Seventeen years on the job had taught him this as a fact of experience. She would never tell him that directly to his face; it would always be unspoken.
She had stopped shaking. Her face was drawn, her eye make-up smudged.
‘You matter to me,’ he said. ‘You must know that. You must know how much.’
‘Then why are you never here? It’s the work you do. It crushes everything else out of your life except Toby, and that’s only because he’s the other half of you.’
‘You want me to change.’
‘You don’t have to work the hours you work. You don’t have to be everyone’s saviour. I know an addiction when I see one. It fills a gap for you. Can’t you imagine having something else in your life as well?’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I’m not going to live with things the way they are now. I don’t want to break up. I don’t want to put myself through that. But I don’t want to live like this either. You have to make a choice as to what you really want. You’re the only one who can do that. I have to wash my face.’
When she came back out of the bathroom, he was clearing away the broken gun into a plastic bag.
‘I’ll get rid of this,’ he said. ‘I’ll get your tiles fixed. I know someone who owes me a favour. He’ll do a good job.’
She smiled. ‘I’d be surprised if you didn’t.’
The phone rang. Grace let it go through to the answering machine.
‘Hi, Gracie, it’s Abbie. We’re all at Claude’s wondering where you are but I guess you’ve found something better to do. Hope so anyway. Maybe we’ll see you at Noah’s. We just hope you’re not with Harrigan. Give us a call tomorrow, will you? See you.’
‘Don’t they approve of me?’ he asked.
‘Of course they don’t. They think you’re a Neanderthal. But then they think the same thing about me for doing what I do. According to Abbie’s latest boyfriend, I’m the original fascist.’
He laughed.
‘You look beautiful. We don’t have to sit here all night. Let’s go out.’
‘Not just like that. What happens tomorrow?’
‘After twenty-four hours, I may have all the time you want me to have with you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m fishing for Elena Calvo. I’ve already seen her to get it started. I’m waiting to see if she’s going to bite and if she’s going to give me du Plessis as well as herself. If she does, that could be the end of my career.’
‘You gave him the tape. She knows that.’
‘It’s not just that. Du Plessis has the contents of Mike’s safety deposit box. If I take Elena Calvo down, I’m sure she’ll take me with her.’
‘This could cost you a lot more than your job,’ she said. ‘What are you setting up?’
‘A sting. There’s no way back from it now. You say I work too much. Let me stop working for now. Let’s go out and enjoy ourselves.’
‘You didn’t answer my question. What happens tomorrow?’
‘Let’s wait for the sun to come up on Sunday morning first. When it does, if it does, I work out what I want. I do want you in my life. If you want to be there.’
‘I’m here now. If that’s how things are, then I think we should go out. Have fun. We may not get another chance. Wait till I put my make-up on again.’
She had other places to go besides Claude’s. A smaller restaurant she’d just discovered; a nightclub where the band was the best she’d heard all year. ‘The singer has a magic voice,’ she told him. He didn’t drink much; tomorrow he needed a clear head.
‘What happens now?’ she asked, much later when they were lying in her bed. ‘How do you know when you’ve caught your fish?’
‘Whatever Calvo’s going to do, she’ll move quickly. Probably she’ll want to see me sometime tomorrow. She’ll have the meeting set up already. When I go to it, du Plessis will either be there waiting for me or he’ll be following me. If Calvo wants him to get rid of me, my bet is that everything Cassatt had on me will be left behind with my body. That’ll take care of my credibility forever. But if Calvo wants me to remove du Plessis for her, then he won’t be expecting me. The difficulty I have is getting her to incriminate herself on tape. She’s very cagey about what she says. But she’s frightened. That’ll work for me.’
‘That strategy is so dangerous.’
‘I’ll get through it. I’ve got Trevor onside and my backup in place. Let’s sleep now. We need to.’
They did sleep. For now, the morning could take care of itself.