The route to Turramurra on Sydney’s upper north shore took Harrigan to another boundary of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, to the west of Duffys Forest. He drove north along Bobbin Head Road into the suburb, a landscape of private hospitals and private schools. The streets were lined with well-grown trees giving shelter to expensive houses on large blocks. There was very little traffic; no one was behind him. The dwelling he was looking for was on the eastern side of Bobbin Head Road, in a cul-de-sac on the edge of the national park with a view over an expanse of bushland. There was no For Sale sign out the front. Maybe they hadn’t got here yet.
Harrigan reached for his backpack with its selection of tools and got out of his car. There was a high cyclone-wire fence identical to the one surrounding the Duffys Forest house. Again, trees and shrubs crowded against the fence and there was a Colorbond gate across the driveway, also locked. Harrigan looked through a gap between the fence and the gate, down the driveway to a house in the style of a suburban Spanish hacienda. The garden appeared overgrown and the property was enclosed by both the street trees and those growing on the block. Nearby was a mailbox combined with a doctor’s lantern, the red glass now largely broken. Despite this being a suburban street, there was a sense of isolation about the place. There was silence except for the sound of bird calls and the quiet hum of the day’s heat.
As far as he could tell, the fence surrounded the whole block. He was wondering where to start when a man in his sixties appeared in the opposite driveway and walked quickly across the road towards him.
‘Are you a real estate agent?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m not. Can you tell me who you are?’
‘My card. I came to ask you what you were doing here.’
He was a short man, a little overweight, bright-eyed and balding, casually dressed in expensive clothes.
‘Pleased to meet you, Adrian,’ Harrigan said, reading from the card that announced the bearer, an Adrian Mellish, to be a financial consultant. He offered his own card. ‘Paul Harrigan. Can I ask you why you have an interest in this place?’
‘Your name’s familiar,’ Mellish replied. ‘Weren’t you once a policeman? I seem to remember reading in the newspapers…Aren’t you a private investigator now?’
‘Not exactly. I’m a security consultant. If you want to know more about me, you can check my website. You didn’t answer my question.’
‘Our interest is that we live across the road,’ Mellish said. ‘We’ve been wishing ever since Amelie retired that this property would be sold and someone would do something with it. It’s been empty for at least fifteen years. One or two people have been looking at it lately. We were hoping that something might actually be happening.’
‘Do you know who these people were?’
‘No, not at all. You’re the first one I’ve spoken to.’
‘This was Dr Amelie Santos’s surgery, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. Did you know her?’
‘Only by reputation,’ Harrigan said. ‘It seems an out of the way place for a doctor’s surgery. Can you tell me anything about her?’
‘Actually Amelie was very successful. People trusted her and they came to her. We used to go to her and take our children. She was quite wonderful with children. But she was a very private woman. We always invited her over for Christmas drinks but she didn’t always come. I know she died about four years ago. There was an obituary in the paper. But still nothing’s happened.’
‘You’ve been here for a while,’ Harrigan said.
‘Helen and I moved into this street when we were first married. Best thing we ever did.’
‘How long has the fence been here?’
‘A long time. It went up when Amelie retired.’
‘She put the fence up?’
‘Oh, yes. She came and saw us. Apologised for the inconvenience, that sort of thing. At the time, she said it was just temporary. She didn’t want the place vandalised while it was empty. But once she retired, she never came back here. I don’t think she could bear to sell it. She’d spent so much of her life here. She left it in limbo and it’s been that way ever since.’
‘Addie.’
Across the road, Harrigan saw a thin middle-aged woman dressed in white. She was waving to her husband.
‘Have to go,’ he said. ‘A grandchild’s birthday party.’
‘Have a nice time,’ Harrigan said.
Mellish hesitated. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just looking the place over.’
He glanced at the backpack Harrigan had over his shoulder. ‘You know, Helen and I…we’ve lived here for a long time. It’s a lovely suburb, really.’
‘Yes.’
‘But once or twice we’ve wondered if there’ve been people over here. At night.’
‘Did you ever report anything?’ Harrigan asked.
‘I did once. Just a month ago. We heard a scream, or we thought we did. I suppose it could have been in the park. I rang the police the next day but they just sent their community liaison officer around to patronise us.’ He looked at Harrigan, an odd expression on his face. ‘We’ve both really grown to wish this building wasn’t here. Most of the time, we ignore it. I don’t think anything would make me go inside. But if I were to, I’d look along the back boundary. There’s a gate. I’ve certainly never seen anyone go in through the front. Bye, now.’
Harrigan watched them back out of the driveway in a Volvo. Mellish leaned out of the window to call to him. ‘We’ll be gone for a while. You can park your car in our driveway if you like. Get you off the street.’ They both gave him a wave and drove away.
Harrigan decided he would move his car, and parked it in the Mellishes’ lengthy driveway, which was overhung with exotic trees, their leaves turning gold in the autumn. A pervasive sense of solitude settled on the street. He walked down to the furthest end of the cyclone fence and saw a track leading into the national park. He followed it down to the park boundary and looked along the line of the fence. Judging by the state of the vegetation, few people walked along here. About halfway along, he found what Mellish had sent him to find: a makeshift if secure gate cut into the fence. He took bolt cutters out of his backpack and went to work.
Eventually, he had the gate open. When he left he could put it back in place without it appearing to have been damaged. Before he went inside, he turned to look at what was behind him. There was no path as such down into the national park, just a curtain of trees. Looking in the direction of the road, the house stood as a barrier. No one would see what was going on down here from up there.
He climbed through the gateway and walked around to the front of the house, startling two white-cheeked eastern rosellas that flew up out of the long grass. The exterior was a dirty white stucco with columns on either side of the front door. The windows were dirty and cracked, the window frames rotten. The paint on the front door was peeling. Although the lock was broken, the door itself seemed secure. He shook it; most likely it had been nailed shut on the inside.
There was a separate garage facing a concreted parking area where the grass had grown up through the cracks. The roller door opened for him but there was nothing inside other than the usual rubbish found in most abandoned garages. He looked up at the road. The trees surrounding the property provided a screen from the other houses in the street. This and the fall of the land deepened his sense of isolation.
He walked around to the back of the house again. The building was more compact than it had first appeared. Two rusted metal rubbish bins stood by the back door. He checked them and found they were empty. He was still armed; he took his gun out of its holster and looked behind him. No one was there. He tried the back door. It was locked. He looked around in the intense quiet and then shot out the lock. The cracks brought a deeper silence, a cessation of bird calls. They would echo across the suburb and those who heard them would wonder where they had come from. Let’s see if they bring anyone here.
He pushed the door open. It wedged at an angle against the floor. He stood on the threshold, looking both forward and back. Outside, there was no one but him; looking inside, the room was dark. He took his torch out of his backpack, illuminating what had once been a simple kitchen. The floor and all the surfaces were thickly covered with dirt, the ceiling corners heavy with cobwebs. There was no sign that anyone was there. He stepped inside. It was warm and the air smelled strongly of mould and decay. Following the powerful beam of his torch, he walked past rooms that opened on either side of the hallway. One had been a bathroom, another possibly a dispensary. The floorboards were shaky under his feet and there were signs of water damage where the rain had got in. In any number of places, the plaster had fallen from the ceiling to the floor to lie in heaps on rotting carpet. The whole house was derelict.
He reached what had been the waiting room, revealed under his torch beam. Chairs sat in a line in front of a window covered by net curtains so thick with dirt they were black. Insect nests appeared as dark clumps in the rotting fabric. In the bright afternoon sun, the room was in darkness. His eyes were growing used to his surroundings but in the mass of shadows, he still needed the torch to see the detail of what was around him. The sound of something scrabbling startled him. He looked around quickly but the torchlight revealed only a possum. In what was otherwise silence, he felt certain there was no other living person here besides himself.
On the opposite wall the torch beam showed a long, narrow, aged photographic print that might have come from Amelie Santos’s long-ago university days: Spinal Medulla or Cord. Like a top-heavy jellyfish, the dual hemispheres of the human brain were shown suspended above its long, trailing propellants. Harrigan read the labels attached to these floating threads, some of which were thicker than others: spinal nerve roots and dorsal root ganglia.
Familiar descriptions. When Toby was born, Harrigan had studied the brain and spinal cord seeking to understand his son’s disabilities, forcing himself to accept there was no cure. Since then Toby had lived with permanent damage to the very same spine and nervous system that hung on the wall. This is all we are; these filaments, those hemispheres, the two reflecting mirrors in the brain. Instruments of delusion and cruelty as much as anything else. Glitch them and the person was deformed or dead.
Harrigan turned and his torch raked across the dark to the reception desk. Then he saw it, sitting in the centre of the desk, quietly waiting. An axe with a black stone head protruding from its handle at an oblique angle. The thick, club-like handle was almost a metre long. It had been set down on a carpet square, presumably to protect it.
Harrigan moved forward to scrutinise it. The head was clean and polished. With both hands on the handle, it would be a powerful weapon. He recognised it for what it was: a stone axe from somewhere in the highlands of New Guinea. Grace’s father had several in his keeping, including one not unlike this from West Papua, all stored under lock and key at his home in Point Frederick. As an artefact, it was valuable and it looked old. Old enough to have been brought back in the 1960s by Frank Wells. Why choose this weapon? Unless it had meaning for you. Perhaps it was a weapon once brandished threateningly against you, now turned against others. Frank Wells would know the answer, if he was prepared to admit it.
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.