Harrigan’s investigations took him across the sprawling western Sydney suburbs to the foothills of the Blue Mountains, then up onto the Great Western Highway that cut across into the interior of the continent. Katoomba was the urban centre of the ribbon of small towns that clustered the length of this road, which, in parallel with the railway line, ran along the spine of the low, forest-covered mountains. He reached there late morning, and looked for parking in the steep, chaotic street near the railway station where the grand old Carrington Hotel stood and where the restaurants and coffee shops were full of holiday-makers and honeymooners.
Harrigan’s appointment was at a solicitor’s office, a shopfront close to the top of the town. He let himself into a neatly if modestly furnished reception area. ‘Mr Lambert’s waiting for you,’ the receptionist said and took him through to a smallish office. Simon Lambert got to his feet to offer his hand. There was a subdued fussiness to his dress, down to the waistcoat and bow tie. Possibly he was as much as sixty. His dark curly hair was turning white.
‘Thanks for making the time to see me,’ Harrigan said.
‘You’re quite well known in this profession. I’m sure you know that. Please sit down. Where would you like to start this conversation?’
‘Dr Amelie Santos. You were her solicitors.’
‘We were. Why is that a concern of yours?’
‘I have a client who’s concerned with the affairs of Frank Wells. I’ve already spoken to Frank. Now I’m seeking some information from you.’
‘Yes, I remember Mr Wells,’ the solicitor said dryly. ‘His existence was a shock to us all. I directed my staff not to deal with him after the first two phone calls. If you’ll excuse my language, he told my receptionist to get fucked. I wasn’t going to have us put up with that.’
‘Did you have any idea that Dr Santos had a son?’
‘None. In fact, until Mr Wells’s solicitor sent us the proof, I didn’t believe it. I thought he was trying it on. I still can’t connect the man I spoke to on the phone with the woman I knew.’
‘You knew nothing about her husband?’
‘Nothing at all, and I certainly would never have asked her.’
‘Did Dr Santos have any kind of companion in her life, even a close friend?’
‘None that I knew of,’ Lambert replied. ‘Her work meant everything to her. I think it’s fair to say it took the place of any personal relationship.’
‘You seem to know her well.’
‘I first met her when she was in her late sixties.’ The solicitor smiled wryly. ‘More than twenty years ago now, when I was a little younger myself. She was planning on retiring up here and she wanted to make her will. Her family had a long-standing connection with the area.’
‘Which was?’
‘Her grandfather built a holiday house at Blackheath in the 1880s. He was a very well-known Sydney barrister in his day. So was his son, Amelie’s father. Apparently neither of them could stand Sydney’s humidity during the summer. The family always came up to the mountains for Christmas. I remember Amelie talking about coming up by steam train. It was a very fond memory for her. She planned to live out her retirement there. As it happened, she didn’t actually fully retire until she was in her seventies. She was considered a very fine doctor. She still had people consulting with her from time to time even in retirement.’
‘Do you know an Ian Blackmore?’ Harrigan asked.
Lambert gave a thin-lipped smile, more chagrin than anything else. ‘Mr Blackmore. No, I’d never heard of him before. When I saw that letter on our letterhead, which we’d obviously never written, I didn’t know what to think.’ He paused. ‘May I ask why you want to know all this?’
‘As well as being the son of Dr Santos, Frank Wells was also the father of a boy called Craig Wells. That boy murdered his mother when he was eighteen. At the time it was believed he also committed suicide. I’m investigating the possibility he may still be alive.’
‘Do you have a description of this man?’
‘No.’
Lambert was silent for a few moments.
‘Presumably such a man would be dangerous,’ he said.
‘Very dangerous. It was a brutal and premeditated murder. If he is still alive, then it means someone else died in his place.’
‘Then I may have some useful information. Amelie did move up here when she retired and she did live in the house at Blackheath. It was an isolated existence for a woman of her age but she gave me to understand she valued her privacy. When she was in her eighties she was forced to accept home care. Visits from the community nurses to help her wash and dress, that sort of thing. Then early one morning one of these nurses arrived to find Amelie lying in her nightgown on her front path. This nurse was convinced it wasn’t a fall. She was very sure Amelie had taken a blow to the side of the head. It left a wound that never really healed.’
‘Did this nurse see anyone else at the house at the time?’
‘No, but she wouldn’t have been paying any attention to that. She was busy calling an ambulance. If there had been someone there, they could have easily got out through the back of the house. Amelie never recovered and she was eventually sent to Meadowbank Aged Care, which is near the Three Sisters here. By this time she was very confused. Her usually clear-headed self was quite gone. The nursing staff didn’t expect her to live very long and they requested she be assessed for mental competency by the local health care service. However, shortly after she was admitted to Meadowbank she began to receive a visitor, a woman.’
‘Who was this woman?’
‘She gave her name as Nadine Patterson, and told the nursing staff she was a friend who had been concerned for Amelie’s welfare for some time.’
‘Did you meet her?’ he asked.
‘Only once. You see, as her solicitor, I had only a limited power of attorney over Amelie’s affairs. Which meant that if Amelie was assessed as mentally competent, then she would remain in control of her assets. However, if she was declared incompetent, then she had a mechanism set up whereby all her assets would remain in trust until she died, when her will would be executed. As it happened, Amelie had left her entire estate to a medical charity, Medicine International. It was a very generous bequest.’
‘Was she mentally competent?’
‘No. Not in my opinion anyway. But the South Western Health Care Service in the form of one Kylie Sutcliffe disagreed.’
‘With what result?’
‘I was called down to Meadowbank one day to make a deed of gift. Amelie was deeding the house at Blackheath, including all its contents, and a very substantial sum of money, virtually all the readily available money she had, to the Shillingworth Trust as it was called.’
‘Are you sure about that name?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Very. Do you know it?’
‘I’ve come across it in my investigations before today. You agreed to do this for her?’
‘In a way, that’s the point I’m making. I seriously thought about challenging it. Nadine Patterson was one of the trustees. It seemed such blatant exploitation. But Amelie, who had regained a certain lucidity by this time, begged me not to. She said to please just let her make the gift and finish with it. She was so distressed that I went ahead. Then she directed the nursing staff never to let this Nadine Patterson in again. As it was, the woman never came back.’
‘She’d got what she came for,’ Harrigan said. ‘Can you describe her?’
‘I only met her once when she came to collect the legal papers. She was tall, very stylish, red hair, attractive. Very distant. Barely polite and only at first. You see, I don’t want to be harsh, but the woman who made the assessment that Amelie was mentally competent, when she clearly wasn’t, was a single woman who wasn’t particularly young or pretty or interesting.’
‘You knew her?’
‘Oh yes. Kylie was a local girl. She went to school here. I knew her father very well, he was a local vet for many years. I’m a widower; my wife died eight years ago. Unusual these days, I know. Most people divorce. We always kept dogs, we used to show them. I still do. Scottie dogs.’
He glanced at two photographs on his desk; one that Harrigan guessed was of his wife, and another showing three Scottie dogs sitting on cushions, all wearing tartan ribbons around their necks.
‘It was virtually the day after Amelie had signed the deed of gift. I was driving into Penrith, I had to be in court that afternoon. I realised I was beside Kylie in the traffic. I don’t think she saw me. She pulled ahead and turned in to a motel. She had a passenger with her, and as I drove past I saw her getting out of the car with a man.’
‘Do you have a description of this man?’
‘Not really. I only saw him from the back.’
‘What about the make of the car?’
‘It was her car. I recognised it. Actually it was her work car. Apparently she was supposed to be working that day.’
‘Your suggestion is this woman, Kylie Sutcliffe, was persuaded to make an assessment favourable to Nadine Patterson for the purposes of coercing Dr Santos into making this gift?’
‘I realise it’s a long bow to draw. But at the time I was angry. That anger must have shown when this Miss Patterson came to collect her papers. I told her I’d seen Kylie, and made some sarcastic comment that I hoped Kylie had been in a more serious frame of mind when she’d made her assessment of Amelie than when I saw her in Penrith carrying on with some man when she should have been at work. That woman looked at me and said, “I don’t think you saw that,” and walked out. I have to say I felt quite chilled. Then a day later, the following night in fact-it was winter, I got home after dark-’ He stopped for some moments. ‘My dogs. All three of them. They were dead. And they hadn’t died very pleasantly either.’
He couldn’t speak. Harrigan waited in silence.
‘I have three new dogs now. That’s them there-Penelope, Telemachus and Odysseus. But they’re not allowed out unless I’m there to watch them. I used to have a dog flap for them. Not any more.’
‘Your belief is that this Nadine Patterson killed your dogs?’
‘I’m not a fanciful man. I’ve thought over the brief encounter I had with this Patterson woman any number of times and I’m convinced I humiliated her by what I said. That’s what I saw in her face that day and, yes, I’m also convinced that she did kill my dogs and that’s why.’
‘You’re saying that whoever Kylie Sutcliffe was with, it was possibly Nadine Patterson’s lover.’
‘I’m unable to reach any other conclusion. I also have to say that I can’t see why anyone would be interested in Kylie if Nadine Patterson was there.’ He shrugged. ‘She was an arrogant woman. Arrogant and angry. And presumably vengeful.’
‘Did you ever speak to Kylie Sutcliffe about any of this?’
‘That’s another point. Not long after I saw her that day, she resigned her job at short notice and went to London with her boyfriend. I haven’t seen her in four years and neither has anyone else.’
‘What about her father?’
‘He’s dead now, and she never got along very well with her mother. I assume she’s communicating with her. I haven’t heard anything one way or the other. And then, of course, there was this mysterious letter to Mr Frank Wells. I’d executed Amelie’s will but I refused to act in the matter of the dispute over the probate. That was between Mr Wells and Medicine International. By then I wanted nothing to do with it.’
Harrigan glanced around the office. It was well ordered, like Lambert’s desk where the papers were laid out in neat piles. Nothing about him suggested a man given to flights of fancy or paranoia. Instead, everything Harrigan had heard spoke of someone who liked stability in his life; a man who probably still grieved for his wife and was deeply attached to his dogs.
‘Is this the first time you’ve given this information to anyone?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Lambert replied.
‘Dr Santos was a rich woman. Can I ask about the extent of her estate?’
‘Certainly. She was the only child of wealthy parents, the sole heir to their estate, which was substantial. I doubt she spent much money on herself. Most of it she invested over her lifetime, very shrewdly. Including the house at Blackheath, there were three properties, two of which were still owned by her when she died. Her surgery, which was at Turramurra, and a house at Duffys Forest, which was where she lived in Sydney. Both of those properties went to Medicine International in accordance with her will. Her bequest to them was well in excess of some millions of dollars even after the deed of gift had been paid.’
‘Do you know who owns those properties now?’
‘No, I don’t. At the time, Medicine International advised me they intended selling on both properties and realising the capital. But those sales would have occurred after probate was declared, which meant they were handled by the charity’s own lawyers. I had nothing to do with it.’
‘Would this Nadine Patterson have known the contents of Dr Santos’s will?’
‘However she found it out, yes, she very definitely did. She made a number of comments during our meeting indicating that.’
‘Dr Santos seemed to live in isolated locations,’ Harrigan said.
‘She used to love to ride; it was her great pleasure. I think it was her only recreation. That’s why she lived at Duffys Forest. She could keep her horses there.’
‘What about the house at Blackheath? Is it still owned by the Shillingworth Trust?’
‘So far as I know. I can tell you it’s not lived in. I have that much information. The second trustee was a David Tate. You could check with him, whoever he might be. I have sometimes wondered if he was the man I saw with Kylie Sutcliffe that day.’
‘Do you know who the beneficiaries were?’
‘Yes, I insisted we establish that the trust was properly legally constituted, which it certainly was. It was a discretionary trust, which meant of course that the return to beneficiaries was at the discretion of the trustees. The beneficiary was a company, Cheshire Nominees. That’s where I gave up. There seemed no point in pursuing the matter further. I had no idea where it might take me.’
‘Could you give me the addresses of all Dr Santos’s properties, including the Blackheath house?’ Harrigan asked.
‘I have no problem with that. Do you intend to visit them?’
‘I’ll take a look at them. I’m interested in knowing who owns them now and what’s happened to them.’
Lambert glanced at the photograph of his dogs; then he opened a desk drawer and handed Harrigan a set of keys.
‘You might need these,’ he said. ‘When Amelie was sent to hospital, the nurse who found her also locked up her house. When the deed of gift was made, the nursing home gave me the keys to hand on to Miss Patterson.’ Lambert looked slightly embarrassed. ‘I was about to give them to her when we had our verbal encounter, if I can describe it in that way. Her response so shocked me that I completely forgot to hand them over. Anyway, she’d already walked out of my office. I didn’t want to meet with her again so I sent them on to her at the Shillingworth Trust. They came back undelivered. Not known at this address.’
‘You didn’t hand them over and she didn’t ask for them,’ Harrigan said.
‘No. Which would suggest she already had a set. I’m sure she did. Amelie would almost certainly have had a spare set somewhere in the house.’
‘An easy house to break into then?’
‘It was generally said by the nurses who visited her that Amelie had no sense of security whatsoever,’ Lambert replied.
‘You don’t think the locks have been changed since her death?’ Harrigan asked.
‘My information is that the house is exactly as it was when the deed of gift was made. It’s been left to rot.’
‘Strange thing to do after all that effort. Did Dr Santos have a peaceful death?’
‘She did apparently. In her sleep. It seems that once Miss Patterson left, Amelie came back to something like her old self and was quite calm in her last weeks. We carried out the funeral according to her wishes, and right now she’s buried in the Northern Suburbs Cemetery next to her parents.’
‘Quite a story. Thank you for the information,’ Harrigan said. ‘It’s been very useful.’
‘It’s been a relief,’ the solicitor replied, feelingly. ‘What I want to do now is forget about it.’
By now, it was well after one. Harrigan was on his way to his car when an SMS message arrived from Grace. She had an early mark and would collect Ellie from the childcare centre. Talk to you later, love G. He thought about ringing her but she was probably still at work. Better he didn’t infringe on Orion’s dislike of personal calls. He sent back his own message. Ok, babe. See you at home. Lu2. Then he made the trip further along the Great Western Highway to Blackheath.
Like much of the Blue Mountains, Blackheath had the feel of a tourist town. The gift shops, antiques centres and restaurants all invited you to come inside and spend your money in comfort. Harrigan obliged by stopping for lunch before driving out to where the edge of the town met the Blue Mountains National Park. In the 1880s Amelie’s house would have been at a distance from the railway line, the village and other homes. Today, other houses had encroached on its isolation, although it was still secluded, being surrounded by a high hedge.
To Harrigan’s surprise, there was a For Sale by Auction sign outside the front of the house. It was the perfect excuse for him to stop and look. The tall hedge was unkempt, the front gate skewed on its hinges. There was also a wide, closed wooden gate leading into the driveway. He parked a little further along the road and, letting himself in the front gate, walked down the path. There was no sign of a car in the driveway and the roller door to the garage was shut.
Once inside the hedge, the house and garden were enclosed and isolated from the street. Everything Harrigan saw spoke of abandonment. The plants that had once been grown in the garden had either gone to seed or died. The house was built of wood, with a wide veranda surrounding it on all four sides. It was some years since it had been painted. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell. He heard it chiming back into the interior of the house, followed by a deeper silence.
After another attempt, which also went unanswered, he put on a pair of disposable gloves, then took out Lambert’s keys. The lock on the front door looked old enough to be an original and he soon found a key that opened it. He stepped into a hallway that ran the length of the house, hearing only the hum of silence. There was a smell of disuse rather than dirt. He took out his gun.
He went into the front room. Dust lay on the bookshelves, ornaments and pictures. The phone had clearly not been touched for years. He tried a light switch. To his surprise, there was still electricity. Back in the hallway, he opened a closed door and found himself looking into the main bedroom. The bed was unmade, the blankets and sheets lying tossed back as if someone had just got out of it. Only the dust covering everything indicated how long it must have been since the last occupant had been here. Otherwise, someone might have just got up that morning. Even the hairbrush sitting on the dressing table still had white hairs in the bristles.
Two framed photographs stood next to it. One after the other, Harrigan took them to the window to see them in the light, brushing them clean. The first had probably been taken in the mid-twenties of last century: a studio portrait of a young Amelie with her parents. The family seemed more relaxed than such poses usually allowed, each of them smiling. Her father had a hand on his young daughter’s shoulder. His smile was one of pride, hers was simply happy. The second picture showed Amelie Santos on her graduation day, dated in 1942. A dark-haired young woman in academic robes, she stood against carefully arranged drapes. She held her degree but she wasn’t smiling; her expression was one of sadness. Amelie Santos had had a finely made face with clear eyes. Underneath her academic gown, she was dressed in a simple, slim-fitting dress. There was nothing about her that suggested she couldn’t have found someone to share her life with if she’d wanted to.
He walked through the rest of the house. There were signs where the possums had broken in and made their homes in the ceiling and where other creatures had chewed their way into the chair cushions to make nests. Spiders’ webs hung from the light fittings and the corners of the room. Despite the sense of decay, the house had an air of peacefulness rather than menace.
Harrigan reached the kitchen, a room that had not been changed for at least thirty years, and looked out of the window over the sink. There was a panoramic view of the Grose Valley with its tree-covered slopes and turret-like sandstone outcrops, a sight probably unchanged in centuries. As beautiful as it was, this was a modest way of life for a woman whose personal wealth had been valued in the millions. He opened the back door and saw a pile of leaf litter balanced precariously in the air before cascading downwards. No one had opened this door for years.
Stepping over the litter, he went out onto the back veranda. A cane chair and table, now rotted and dirty, stood just near the kitchen door. The back garden was overrun with weeds and self-sown wattles. Tall, well-grown eucalypts lined either side of the boundary, stepping down the slope one after the other towards the escarpment. Forest and mountain stretched to a horizon piled with a massive accumulation of luminous clouds. Out of the deep, dark, blue-green sweep of the trees came only the sound of bird calls and the wind in the trees, giving an intense sense of peace. Perhaps this was what she had come here to find, something that could not be bought. She must have sat here and drunk it in.
Back inside, he closed and locked the back door again and then went out the way he had come, sheathing his gun. Outside, he looked at the garage. He had a key to the roller door and another one next to it that he hadn’t used. He went around to the side of the house where there was a second door into the garage reached by a short path from the veranda. The key turned easily in the lock and he stepped inside.
He wasn’t in the garage proper but a windowless room at the back of it. He turned on the light and found himself in a study of some kind, a room fitted with shelving. Another door led through into the main part of the garage at the front. He opened this door, which was also locked, and looked through. A small, old blue Ford was parked there, presumably from the time when Amelie Santos had stopped driving. He locked the door again and turned his attention to what was in the room. By the look of it, it was the remains of her medical practice. On one shelf was an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, a stethoscope and old medical journals. There were other shelves filled with archive boxes, all labelled and dated. Tax records, financial information. One row of boxes on a middle shelf were labelled simply Children.
Harrigan took one box down and set it on the table in the centre of the small room. There was a chair to sit in, and on the table a reading lamp and, chillingly, a pair of reading glasses, as if Amelie Santos might walk through the door the next minute and put them on. Harrigan turned on the reading lamp, which worked perfectly, and noticed that, unlike the rest of the house and other parts of this room, there was no dust on the table. He opened the box.
He soon realised these were the medical records of children that Amelie Santos had treated throughout her career but had not been able to save. All had been filed in strict chronological order with their names and the span of their lives written across the top of the files. The records went back to the start of her practice. The children had died of accidents, cancer, inherited diseases. The information in the records made it clear that she had nursed many of them tirelessly.
As well as exhaustive medical data, in amongst the records were photographs, some just of the child, some of the family as well. In some folders there were even birth certificates. Occasionally there were letters addressed to Amelie, again sometimes from the child, sometimes from the parents. In one folder there was a small knitted toy wrapped in yellowing tissue paper. There were details of the parents’ and siblings’ life and health, where they were born and had lived, including overseas travel. Amelie Santos had searched hard for answers to her patients’ illnesses.
The children’s names reflected the changes in post-war Australia. The oldest, dating from the mid-forties, were almost completely Anglo-Celtic; then other names from other places began to appear-Greek, Italian, Eastern European, the Balkans. In the later years of Amelie’s practice, the children’s names were from all backgrounds: Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Thai, Middle Eastern, African. Some records dated from as late as the mid-1990s. Harrigan remembered what Lambert had told him: that she’d had a reputation that had brought people to her long after her retirement. Desperate people seeking answers no one had to give, including Amelie Santos; so desperate they were prepared to place any amount of sensitive information in her hands. When put together, the records provided a comprehensive biography of the dead.
But numbers of folders were also empty with no explanation given. Then, at the end of one box, he came across a folder labelled with the name Nadine Patterson. He pulled it out and saw there was nothing inside. He slipped it back and opened the next box. There, almost at the front, was a folder labelled David Tate. He drew this one out. It was also empty. He looked at the dates of the children’s births and deaths. About forty, if they’d been alive today. Working quickly, he made a list of the names on the empty files. Fourteen in all, including Tate and Patterson, boys and girls both, about half of them Asian or African.
He closed up the final box and put it back on the shelf. There was enough information in some of these folders for a person to create a new identity for themselves any time they wanted to. A very profitable item to sell on the market since the identity was effectively genuine. This was the real value of the house; not the property but these records. An identity scam, presumably run by the Shillingworth trustees, people who were already in masquerade.
What should he do now? Call his old work mates? If he did, it would get back to Orion. Talk to Lambert? It was unlikely the solicitor would want anything more to do with this. Take the files with him? What right did he have to do that? Who could be said to own these records now? Presumably they should have been returned to the families or destroyed when Amelie Santos died. But what if he secured them on the premises, in some other hiding place? Anyone coming here to use them could easily think they had been stolen.
Harrigan went back inside the house and looked around. The roof? The cellar? In the spare bedroom, he found a large linen press, the old-fashioned kind: a long, deep chest made of some dark wood, only partially filled with sheets and towels. On opening, it smelled of mothballs. Working as quickly as he could, he transferred the boxes from the garage to here, covering them with the linen already in place. The dust on the chest was disturbed when he had finished, but hopefully no one would come into this storage cum junk room to check. Then he went back outside and broke the lock on the garage’s side door. Clumsy, but good enough to make it appear someone had broken in. He peeled off his disposable gloves and left the premises.
He drove to Blackheath to visit the real estate agent. A franchise of one of the major chains, they had a large office on the main street. Amelie Santos’s house was listed as property of the week. House and furnishings included. Panoramic view of the Grose Valley. Some simple repairs and a coat of paint will return this beautiful Victorian house to its former glory. Large block with excellent potential for expansion. Harrigan went inside.
‘This is quite amazing,’ said the real estate agent, a conservatively dressed older woman wearing an ugly sky-blue suit, who met him with a motherly smile. ‘That property only went on the market yesterday and we’ve already had so many enquiries. We’re having an open day this Saturday so please do come along. It’s a unique purchase, a piece of history really.’
Possibly she could talk prospective buyers into any sale she liked, simply because she appeared so harmless on the surface.
‘Maybe you could give me an indication of what the reserve might be,’ Harrigan said.
She named a figure that ensured no one who could be described as a battler would be bidding at the auction.
‘Any chance of a private viewing?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘The owners are going to be there over the next few days to take some things out of the house. We’ve been asked not to let anyone in till Saturday.’
‘What sort of condition is it in?’ he asked, curious to hear how she might describe it.
‘It’s a deceased estate and hasn’t been lived in for several years now. It needs a good clean and an airing out. Structurally it’s very sound, though it will need painting. We’re sending some cleaners in this Friday, just to spruce it up a little.’
‘Is there any reason the owners are selling right now?’
Trusts of any sort were useful tools for money laundering, another reason why Shillingworth might acquire a property then leave it to rot. Perhaps the agent had this in her mind when she answered him.
‘I think they judged the market as right for the sale. Property prices are easing a little and there are more buyers around than there used to be. It’s all above board. We’ve spoken with the trust’s legal representative, a Mr Griffin.’
‘Joel Griffin?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘I’ve heard of him. Thanks.’
He left to make the long drive back to Sydney. He would be late. When he was a little closer to the city, he would phone Grace and let her know when he would be home. He welcomed the drive, it gave him time to think. What was Joel Griffin doing involved in this? Why would he be a party to the sale of assets from a secretive trust? Just his name brought another dimension of threat to Harrigan’s investigations.
In the mess of information he had, one name stood out: Shillingworth. Shillingworth Trust led to the Ponticellis, to Eddie Grippo at Four Square Real Estate. There, the connection became shadowy. The best he could say was that there was one. A question for Eddie: do you know Joel Griffin? If Griffin did have a connection to the Ponticellis, this was the first Harrigan had heard of it. Was his intelligence so bad? Or was the connection an occasional one, not much mentioned? And why sell Blackheath now? Forget market conditions. Whatever the reason, the trustees, Patterson and Tate, whoever they really were, had decided it was time to move on. Would other assets, such as Fairview Mansions, come up for sale? Another question for Eddie.
Then there was the line back to Frank Wells, to his adoptive mother’s niece, Jennifer Shillingworth, the woman with access to Salvation Army adoption records, the one person who could have known who Frank’s real parents were. A woman who, thirty-five or more years ago, hadn’t been above trying on the odd scam herself. In a time before changes to the adoption laws, she might well have known people who were desperate enough to buy that kind of information. If this speculation were true, then, as Frank Wells himself had said, she was the most likely source of the documents an otherwise unknown Ian Blackmore had sent to him four years ago.
Ignoring the road rules, Harrigan picked up his mobile and sent an SMS to his retainer. He had already asked her to track down the Shillingworth woman but still he texted: Find me Jennifer Shillingworth as a first priority and forward me any information you already have ASAP.
She’s dead. The instinctive words came into Harrigan’s mind even as he sent the message. It remained to be seen if his expectation was on the money. Maybe someone had eventually bought that information from her. There were only three people who could have known it was for sale in the first place, let alone want to buy it: Frank, Janice and a young Craig, watching his parents fight. Frank hadn’t wanted to know and Janice was dead. Maybe after she’d left Frank, she had gone on about it to her son, the way she had to her husband. Maybe when she was drunk, banging it into his head. If only your father had found out who his parents were, maybe we’d have some money now. We wouldn’t be so broke. It fitted with the woman he’d read and heard about.
But supposedly Craig was dead too. Harrigan smiled to himself. Death was a perfect alibi. It gave you the space to do whatever you wanted. You could coerce property out of an old and vulnerable Amelie Santos and, in some strange twist of humour, put it into a trust named after the woman who might well have led you to her in the first place. But why wait until four years ago to chase it up? What had been the catalyst? Because Amelie Santos was old and could be expected to die soon? You turn up out of nowhere and introduce yourself to her as her grandson and heir even though she’s never seen you before. Would she even let you in? See you as other than a threat? And what could she be to you, other than a victim to exploit? Someone to cajole, charm, threaten and, with the help of your partner, finally terrorise?
But you couldn’t announce yourself to her as Craig Wells. If you’d killed off your old identity by murdering someone else in your place, there’d be no room for you to resurrect yourself. Once Craig Wells was dead, he had to stay dead and you couldn’t bring him back to life. But you wouldn’t have to. Amelie Santos couldn’t have known her son’s name. You could give yourself any name you liked, say your father was dead to keep him out of the picture, and then try to get whatever you could out of your victim. In the way of family resemblances, maybe you even looked something like your grandfather.
Thinking this over, it occurred to Harrigan that perhaps all those years ago Jennifer Shillingworth might possibly have also approached Amelie Santos. If she had, then presumably the doctor, like her son, Frank, had sent her on her way, saying she didn’t want to know. And then later, when the laws were changed and adoption records became accessible, it was only to the family members. In that case, the only recourse for someone who had expunged his existence as Craig Wells was the original one: bribery. You go back to the woman who wanted to sell the information in the first place and ask her if she still wants to make a deal. Hadn’t Frank told him that Jennifer Shillingworth had already made copies of the documents? Maybe they’d been just locked away in a drawer somewhere, waiting.
Then there was the woman at the centre of this, Amelie Santos, the seemingly innocent vortex for all these connections. The strangeness of sifting through the paper remains of her patients’ old lives had left Harrigan with a sense of bleakness. Amelie Santos could have kept her child. Despite the circumstances of her marriage, she had still been a married woman in a time when that had mattered. Her father had had the means to support them both. Even in those days, with his help she would have been able to become a doctor as well as raising her son. Instead, that part of her life had been obliterated, except for the pieces of paper she had kept for herself from the child patients she could not save, a lifetime’s worth of grief and loss. For Amelie Santos, did pieces of paper detailing a patient’s name and history replace what had been lost in the flesh? Were they like fetish objects filling a vacuum, things that were fixed in time and could not grow older? Perhaps she’d had no choice in relinquishing her son. Had her father or mother told her it had to happen, regardless? Or had the father of her child hurt her so much, she had rejected their son herself? If he had, why keep his name? No way to know now.
In all these shadows, Amelie Santos wasn’t the only obsessive figure. Someone had wanted what she had so much they had tracked her to her nursing home, deceived a woman they’d had no other interest in to assist them, and then presumably threatened and frightened an aging woman to get hold of it. Had they known at the time they were also acquiring the identities of the dead? Or had there been another reason for their actions and those records were only a bonus? Were they the same people who had tried to kill Amelie Santos in the first place?
With a chill, Harrigan realised that it was only their failure to murder Amelie Santos that had allowed them to acquire the Blackheath house. Whoever had attacked her that morning must simply have wanted to kill her. If they’d succeeded, the Blackheath house would have gone to Medicine International along with the rest of her estate. Presumably the organisation would have sold it on, the way they had her other two properties. But why kill someone as harmless as a woman in her late eighties if there was no prospect of material gain? In her own way, wasn’t she as much a victim in this as other people? Harrigan answered his own questions: because she wouldn’t give you what you wanted. You’d have to believe you had a right to it; so much so that you hated her enough to want to kill her when she wouldn’t give it to you.
It was still all speculation; nothing but shadows and guesswork. Time for home and sanctuary, Harrigan thought, negotiating the gridlock of Sydney’s commuter traffic.
Grace had cooked dinner; the smell of the food greeted him when he opened the door. He kissed her and picked up Ellie. It was like walking into comfort. Then Grace slipped away from him back to the stove.
‘Hungry?’ she asked.
‘Yeah.’
He couldn’t judge her mood. She did things too carefully, put plates on the table as if they might break as she set them down. Was too quiet, too patient, with Ellie, her eyes excluding anything else as she helped her to eat, as if there was only the spoon and her daughter’s mouth. Ellie’s small fingers shredded still further the pieces of fish Grace gave her to eat. Grace wiped her fingers clean with a smile but still seemed distant. When she talked to him, she was trying hard to pay attention. The food was good, very good; but her mind was not there.
‘What’s up, babe?’ he asked when Ellie was in bed and they were alone.
‘Just work,’ she said, the way she always did.
She turned away, got up from the table and was gone again into wherever she was in her head. He watched her clear the dishes away and tidy the kitchen. She smiled at him and went into the lounge. Soon after, music filled the room. She appeared in the doorway.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Do you want to dance? Come on. Let’s dance.’
‘Now?’
‘Yeah. Why not?’
‘Okay,’ he said.
In the living room, he slipped his arms around her and they danced to the slow music. She seemed to need it, to relax against him. She was slender and her body was warm in his arms.
‘What’s the music?’ he asked.
‘Art Tatum with Benny Carter.’
She often played these musicians.
‘It’s good,’ he said.
‘It’s wonderful.’
He held her a little closer.
‘What do people say about us?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ he replied. ‘People will say anything. It’s meaningless.’
She smiled and seemed to come back to him. There was just the moment, the clean and beautiful music. In his mind, he had a fence around this space, one no one else could break through. Outside of it, everything dissolved as being neither here nor there, almost not in existence. This was the centre of things, here. Nothing else mattered.
When they went to bed that night, they made love. Later, she slept under the weight of his arm. They had always slept close together. With his other lovers, they had each tended to drift to opposite sides of the bed. Tonight, when they were both in a waiting space where the future was impossible to judge, their presence felt like a refuge for each other and they slept more deeply and peaceably than they could have expected.