‘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 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.