Silence.
‘Why did you kill Elliot Griffin, Joel?’ the police interviewer asked. ‘Did he believe you were his son and try to seek you out? Did he want money? Why not just tell him he’d made a mistake? How could he connect you to his son?’
Silence.
‘Or did he remind you that you weren’t who you said you were?’ the profiler asked. ‘You were killing your old self all over again when you killed him. Because you really aren’t Joel Griffin. You’re Craig Wells.’
Griffin looked her directly in the eyes. Watching, Harrigan thought he saw her flinch.
‘This is who I am,’ he said. ‘If someone comes to you and says, you’re not who you say you are, then, whether they want money from you or not, they’re drinking your blood. I don’t put up with that from anyone no matter who they are.’
‘Are you making a threat, Joel?’ the police interviewer asked quietly.
‘No.’
‘Elliot Griffin found you and wanted money,’ the interviewer continued after a pause. ‘That’s what you’re saying. And because of that you killed him.’
Silence.
‘Are you obsessed with the past, Joel?’ the profiler said. ‘You seem to have to keep worrying at it. Punishing it. You keep trying to obliterate it and then you keep bringing it back to life. Isn’t that like being on a treadmill?’
‘I was finished here,’ Griffin said. ‘I was leaving. I wasn’t coming back.’
‘Don’t you like Sydney? This is where you were born. Why come back after all those years if it hooked you back into the past?’
‘I never wanted to come back here. That was Sara’s idea.’
‘Why did she want to come back?’
‘She was homesick. She didn’t like the weather in London. She wanted to go sailing again.’
‘So you came home.’
‘She was going to get on a plane without me. It meant I had to move the whole business here.’
‘Are you the main driver of the business, Joel?’ the police interviewer asked.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re a very skilled financier.’
‘I’m good with money. I know how to make it work.’
‘Money’s important to you.’
‘Money is real. When everything else is finished, there’s always money,’ Griffin said.
‘Financial analysis has identified the companies Santos Associates and Cheshire Nominees as ultimately owned by you and Sara McLeod. Everything you own, you own jointly with her. You both shared your money. That’s a statement of commitment, isn’t it?’ the profiler said. ‘You owned in common. You killed people if they wanted money from you or didn’t pay you. But you and Sara shared every cent you had.’
Silence.
‘So when she wanted to get on a plane home, you couldn’t let her do that. You couldn’t kill her either. You had to go with her.’
Silence.
‘You couldn’t leave her. She knew everything about you.’ The profiler spoke almost gently. ‘Knew you as Craig and Joel. Was your lover as Craig and Joel. Helped you kill your mother and Joel Griffin. The first police on the scene that night passed a motorbike coming towards them with a rider and a pillion. That was the two of you, wasn’t it? How were you feeling? Exhilarated? You were only eighteen, the both of you.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ Griffin replied.
‘It’s almost like you both stayed back there, when you were eighteen. You kept doing it over and over again. But it began to wear out. And you started fighting with each other.’
‘She’s dead,’ Griffin said. ‘If she’s dead, then the past doesn’t matter. It’s finished. It was finished anyway.’
‘Are you grieving for her?’
Harrigan leaned forward. Griffin looked completely detached.
‘Everyone dies,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know that?’
‘You needed her because she was the other half of you as a murderer and you can’t get rid of that self. You like to kill. It eases your mind in some way, doesn’t it? What’s left now she’s gone? The money?’
‘There’s no point in questions like that or these speculations,’ the lawyer said. ‘My client has already said he has no admissions to make on any of these subjects.’
‘There’s always money.’ Griffin spoke simultaneously with his lawyer, then turned his head away from his questioners towards the one-way glass.
He couldn’t know it but he was looking directly at Harrigan and Grace. His eyes seemed empty of expression, his face dead. Grace looked away and stood up.
Harrigan glanced at Borghini and all three of them left the viewing area.
‘Every time we talk to him, it’s like that,’ Borghini said. They’d gone to a nearby shopping centre to have coffee. ‘I’ve sat opposite him, and sometimes before the interview starts he’s normal. He’ll talk to you. As soon as we start, he’s gone. It’s like he’s turned off a switch in his head. After that, nothing reaches him. He hasn’t said a word about Sara McLeod. Unless you ask him directly, he won’t talk about her. They were together for how long? Since she was fifteen. She was forty-three when she died. Nothing. Not even goodbye.’
‘He’s a sick man,’ Grace said. ‘There’s nothing else to say.’
‘How did you know to be at Duffys Forest?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Police work. I tried to tell your boss but he wouldn’t listen,’ Borghini said, looking to Grace. ‘When we found Jirawan Sanders, we checked for any possible related incidents in that locality. A neighbour, Adrian Mellish, had reported hearing a scream from the surgery about a month ago. We checked the ownership of the building. It belonged to Shillingworth. We checked further, found the house at Duffys Forest. If you track where Jirawan Sanders was found, it’s on a path between the two. We were working to get a search warrant for the Turramurra building when I got your call, boss. Except that when I answered it you weren’t there. Then we get another call a couple of minutes later saying a man’s been kidnapped. When we get there, we find your phone and Mellish tells us you were there looking at the house. We go in and find this graveyard. I didn’t know where they’d taken you so I thought, okay, I’ll put a team at Duffys Forest just in case. Lucky I did.’
‘Did you tell Orion any of this?’ Grace asked.
‘Oh yeah. I called them in straightaway.’
‘When did they get to Duffys Forest?’
‘We went there together, which was about half an hour before Griffin arrived. They were calling the shots, saying when we should and shouldn’t move. We moved too late in my opinion. They stayed too far back.’
Grace said nothing.
‘I think that squares things, mate,’ Harrigan said. ‘You don’t owe me any favours.’
‘Not a problem, boss. Just doing my job.’
Grace was silent for some time while they were driving home.
‘What did you mean when you told Mark he didn’t owe you any favours?’ she asked.
‘Do you know who he is?’
‘I guess you’ll tell me.’
‘His birth name’s Vincenzo Ponticelli. He’s Bianca’s brother.’
‘Did she tell you?’
‘Yeah. I don’t think she could have told anybody else because otherwise he’d probably be dead by now. They see him as a traitor. He’s got no loyalty to any of the family. He saw old man Ponticelli beat up his mother and worse. When she ran, she went to Perth and married again. Mark took his stepfather’s name and grew up there, a long way from any of them. He came back here about five years ago when he married a Sydney girl. I went and saw him, wanted to know if he was straight or bent. But he’s as straight as they come.’
‘No one’s put the faces together? Him and his father?’
‘Apparently, he looks more like his mother. I don’t think they’ll stay here. It’s too close for comfort for him.’