Harrigan put his torch down and picked up the axe. It was heavy enough to need both hands to lift it. This was the heart of it. The smash. Some fundamental breaking out of every piece of brutality, causal or intentional, that had gone into making Craig Wells or Griffin, whoever he was, whatever he was. But it wasn’t just the violence. What is it you want, that using this can give you? Something beyond words. Some force you decide to let go without any intention to control it. Adrenalin. Just a chemical. Things like the pleasure of manipulation were secondary, they just built you up to this point. But you had to take that step to kill, you had to want to. Something in you had to want to smash that energy outwards and you had to choose this way of letting it happen, knowing what it would do. What the person would look like when you’d finished.
Maybe once you could lose it. You could go mad. But nothing in the history Harrigan had uncovered suggested any set of circumstances like that. If his beliefs were correct and Janice Wells had been the first victim, then that murder had been planned; planned for years by someone still in their teens. What had come first? This weapon stolen from his father or the intent to kill? Or had they both gelled after this weapon had first come into his hands? I can use this. A few simple words. Meeting a boy whose father had taken that step already. Did he hit her? How? The first realisation that this was possible, breaching the membrane that restrained you, to be followed by the act that confirmed: yes, you can kill. Either way it had been a deliberate choice. He could have said, I don’t have to do this. There were always other possibilities. If Harrigan was right and Wells had created his own new persona out of the death of the real Joel Griffin, why not choose to create a new life for himself some other way? Because he wanted this. He wanted what it gave him.
Harrigan set the axe down where it had been, stepped back from what felt like the edge of nowhere. He had to get out of here soon. It was a terrifying place.
His torch beam touched on the net curtains. The blackness impregnating the material wasn’t only dirt, it was old blood. This was the epicentre. While you were waiting to see the doctor. He glanced in a line from the reception desk to a door, now shut. The consulting room.
He opened the door slowly. The smell of mould throughout the building had grown to be almost overpowering; in this room it was the stink of death. Harrigan took out his handkerchief and put it over his mouth and nose.
It was a large room with an old desk facing the door. A high-backed chair stood behind the desk, giving the impression that someone had just this minute got up from it and walked out of the room. Behind the chair and along one wall to his left, overgrown plants pressed against bare windows, crowding the cracked glass like silent onlookers.
Harrigan walked inside. The silence felt loud, like someone shrieking for his attention. He looked at the empty walls, the bare wooden floor. In the far corner, the floor had caved in. He walked forward and looked down into the space between the broken boards. Pale in the shadows, the bones he saw were all too real. There were two of them. Lying on their sides in the dankness, bodies that had decayed to skeletons, looking as if they were about to be absorbed into the ground. Thin locks of dark hair still clung about their skulls, their teeth were scattered like seeds. One had its hand just in front of its face, the way children lie sometimes when they’re sleeping. Indifferently, efficiently, the insects had cleaned their bones and built their nests around their shreds of clothing. Whoever they were, these people had been here for a long time. They couldn’t be the source of the stench he smelled now.
In the torchlight he saw a line of ants near his feet. The busy column had cut a path through the muck on the floor towards the opposite corner of the room. He shone his torch on the column and followed it. A line visible through the dirt and leading past the windows that looked out of the front of the surgery. There were crude, broken marks on the floor where the boards had been roughly taken up and then laid back down again. He counted them as he walked. Four, making six with the two in the corner. One set of marks was newer than the others. Here the ants were disappearing into a crack in the floor, busily at work.
Someone had died here recently. Someone had stood out there in the waiting room facing the unimaginable before finding release in their own permanent silence. Harrigan stood over these makeshift graves and looked down with an instinctive respect for the dead. The silence no longer jammed in his ears. I’ve found you, he thought. You can lie quietly now.
Harrigan reached the other side of the fence with deep relief. The sunshine on his back, the sight of colour, the sounds of birds, brought him to life. He breathed clean air into his lungs. His phone was in one hand, his gun in the other. He was thinking, seeing a map of the suburbs roundabout in his mind. You could walk through the park from Duffys Forest to here. Probably there were tracks you could take. If you knew what you were doing, knew the terrain well enough, you could make your own tracks. Make your own and choose your time. No one would see you. Make your victims walk from the white-tiled room there to here, both of you knowing what you were going to. From bolt hole to graveyard, it was a ritual carried out six times over the last ten or so years. Not so infrequent. An addiction.
He was weighing up the question of who to ring. Borghini was with the local command. It was his turf, he knew what he was doing and he wasn’t likely to be put off from doing his job.
Before walking up to the road, Harrigan sheathed his gun. The Mellishes still weren’t back from their birthday party; there was no sign of a Volvo deprived of its usual parking spot. But there was another car a little further up the street that he hadn’t seen before. He stopped just at the entrance to the Mellishes’ driveway and looked at it. Then he stepped away from the avenue of trees that sheltered the driveway from the rest of the street. Trees that would have hidden him from view if he had walked along there to get to his own car.
They came at him anyway, three of them, too quickly for him to avoid them or reach for his gun. He still had his phone, he had already punched in Borghini’s number. He hit the call button as they reached him. Ponticellis’ thugs. His phone was knocked out of his hands, skidding away. He fought them hard, dragging them further out onto the street where they had to be seen. He thought he heard a shout from someone else, not them, but by then he was face down on the ground. He felt the savage jab of a hypodermic needle in his thigh and then the world went black.
22
Grace drove through the quiet streets of Brooklyn feeling the eeriness of knowing that somewhere Clive’s surveillance teams were watching like patrons at a theatre where the action was real. The town was laid out in a long, narrow line along an inlet. It wasn’t much more than houses clustered along a single dog’s-leg road that eventually reached its dead end at a public jetty looking out at the main channel of the Hawkesbury River. By the time Grace reached the parking area close to the bay, it was getting dark and the place was almost deserted.
Sara was waiting, solitary in the dusk. She was dressed in jeans and a jacket and had her hands in her pockets. The bush-covered hills behind her tall figure were a hard, massive shape against the softening sky. On the water, the last of the light had taken on an iridescent, diamond-shaped patterning, rocking with the movement of the waves. Boats, small and large, were moored some distance out. Was Clive’s boat out there? He had said that it would be.