In the silence of the house, Harrigan, standing by Ellie’s open doorway, could hear only the quiet breathing of his daughter while she slept. If Grace were home, she’d have put on some music; the jazz she loved so much, singers and musicians he’d never heard of before he met her. She sang their daughter to sleep in her own soft, slightly throaty voice. Other than in the shower, it was almost the only time she sang these days. He liked her voice and wished she would sing more. ‘One day I’ll join a choir,’ she’d told him. ‘Whatever you want,’ he’d replied, wanting her to be happy, even now not quite able to believe that she could be happy with him.
When she wasn’t here, he preferred silence. Tonight, after what he’d seen just a few hours ago, this silence mixed with the sound of Ellie’s breathing gave him a sense of cleanness. He had fed and bathed Ellie, settled her to bed and read her to sleep. She had curled up on the pillow with the promise that her mother would be there in the morning. Each of these things worked against the pictures in his mind of the dead and wounded men he had seen that day. He was yet to find out if the memory would reassert itself like some malignant intrusion.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen that kind of thing before. Often enough when he’d been with the police, he’d looked cold-bloodedly at the dead, dealt in a detached way with the living, and then worked as hard as he could to find who’d done the killing. Throughout, other people did the grieving. He’d hoped he had left all that behind. He had come home this afternoon with a sense of sickness that was new to him.
Downstairs, he poured himself a whisky. Grace didn’t drink and because of that he didn’t drink much himself. Tonight he needed alcohol to ease his thoughts. He went upstairs again and into his study, a plain room at the back of the house that looked down onto his long, narrow strip of land to Snails Bay on the inner harbour. This was where he collected his thoughts, where he worked. Joel Griffin had left almost as bad a taste in Harrigan’s mouth as the killings he’d witnessed. What did Griffin know about either Grace or him? And what did he need to do about it?
He googled Griffin’s name and waited to see if anything new might come up from the last time he’d gone searching. There was one fact he hadn’t thought much about before: Griffin hadn’t qualified in Australia. He’d got his degree at the University of London seventeen years ago and been admitted to the bar in Australia when he had returned to the country in the mid-1990s. Qualifications gained overseas were too convenient to Harrigan’s mind. Maybe they were genuine, maybe they weren’t. But if his qualifications were fake, Griffin, as a fraud, was better at his work than any number of lawyers Harrigan knew to be genuine. At best, this fragment of information only proved where he had been seventeen years ago and when he had come back to Australia.
The information he couldn’t find was also interesting. Griffin was a lone wolf, listed as an individual only, not connected to any particular legal firm. Unlike some other practitioners, there was no photograph attached to his contact details. This wasn’t so very unusual, but it fitted the man’s elusiveness. Harrigan phoned the number given for Griffin’s office and was answered by a recorded message, the kind preinstalled on any readily available answering machine. There was nothing to identify that you were leaving a message for Joel Griffin, barrister. He hung up without leaving his details.
After a moment’s thought, he googled again-not Griffin, but himself and Grace. On a few occasions their photographs had made it to the gossip columns of various media websites. Grace called it her fifteen seconds of virtual fame. Harrigan studied the photographs one after the other. On none was her scar visible.
He heard her car outside and went down to the kitchen, relieved that she was home. Despite the lateness of the hour he had waited for her before eating, caught in his own thoughts and occupied with his daughter’s needs. Then Grace was there in the doorway, smiling. As he always did, he touched her face and then kissed her. He knew the real face under the make-up, the feel of her skin, her mouth. He knew her, the emotions she kept hidden, her body, better than anyone.
‘How are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m okay. It’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before. We need to talk about it.’
‘I’ll get changed and put my gun away. Is Ellie asleep?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Maybe I won’t look in on her. I might wake her up.’
‘The door’s open. You can look in.’
When she came back downstairs, the transformation was complete. The real woman had appeared. Her long dark hair was out on her shoulders, her make-up was gone. The drab pants suit had been changed for jeans, a yellow T-shirt and socks. She curled up cross-legged on a chair.
‘Put your gun away?’ he asked.
Both he and Grace had an unbreakable rule that they never wore their firearms in their daughter’s presence, even if they were concealed. Harrigan had a licence for a firearm for his personal safety and kept a handgun and ammunition in a safe in his study. Grace, whose work allowed her to keep her gun with her at all times, locked hers in there as well when she was home.
‘It’s where little children’s hands can’t get to it. I did look in on her. She’s fast asleep. She’s got your hair. It’s so beautiful. When we cut it, I’m going to keep some.’
Harrigan put the meal on the table-food Grace had cooked on her days off, his interest in kitchen matters reaching no further than setting the microwave and turning it on.
‘Newell, babe,’ he said. ‘Is he going to turn up here?’
Could Newell really be so mad? The fear was like living in shadows where you couldn’t distinguish real from false. Had it been him on her tail tonight? It depressed her that she couldn’t talk to Harrigan about it.
‘It’d be lunacy,’ she said instead. ‘Every police officer in New South Wales must be out there looking for him. He won’t be able to show his face anywhere. How did it happen?’
‘It was a setup. Someone must have been paid to make sure Chris Newell was there at that time and they could get to him. If that includes either of the drivers, they’re both dead now. They can’t tell anyone anything. I was talking to Joel Griffin when it happened.’
‘Why him?’
‘He wanted to see me. He knows about you and Newell, babe. He knows about your scar and how you got it. He was trying to blackmail me. Kept fishing to see what I was prepared to give him.’
Grace looked as if she’d been punched in the stomach. She put down her fork, covered her face for a few seconds.
‘Oh, God,’ she said.
‘It hasn’t happened yet.’
He reached over and took her hand. She held on to him, squeezing hard, then let go.
‘What did you tell him?’ she asked.
‘That he could go jump. If he tried anything funny, he’d regret it.’
She picked up her fork again. The mood had changed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her so angry.
‘He can put it all over the front page of the Telegraph if he wants to. I wouldn’t give him the time of day.’
‘We’re giving him nothing,’ Harrigan said. ‘What’s he going to do? If he puts it out there, he’s in breach of client confidence. What’s that going to do for his reputation? If he does, I’ll go after him through the Bar Council.’
‘If it does get out, it’ll affect me at work. Clive won’t like it.’
‘Are you going to tell him about it?’
‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘He might take me off what I’m working on and I don’t want that. I don’t have to tell him everything. My life’s my own.’
‘How was it today?’
She shrugged, frowning. Her work was beginning to affect her, he thought. Grace, at ease, put other people at their ease, laughed and made him laugh. The woman who liked to dress up and go out and enjoy herself was another self to the one who dressed so plainly for work. When she was under pressure, she changed; she put on a hard, excluding shell. He knew that Newell was partly to blame for that cold barrier being there, but that didn’t help things. He didn’t want her to become like that again, the way she had been when he’d first met her. He wanted her light-hearted and full of sparkle again, the way she had been these last few years.
‘It was okay,’ she said. ‘I think I achieved something so that was good. Do you know a Mark Borghini? He’s my contact with the police. He asked about you.’
‘Mark? Yeah, I know him. He’s not exactly Mr Tactful but he’s good value. That’s good for you, babe. You can rely on him. What did he want to know?’
‘Just how you were.’
He waited but she seemed to have nothing else to say. He let the subject pass. Knowing Mark Borghini was her contact made him feel better about the work she was doing.
‘This escape-it’s madness,’ she said. ‘The police are going to find whoever’s behind it, sooner rather than later because they’ll put everything they’ve got into it. And when they do, those people will end up dead.’
‘It’s suicide,’ Harrigan agreed. ‘Makes no sense to me at all. Whatever’s going on, we don’t want anything to do with it. Or Griffin. He’s a strange fish. He told me he was representing Newell pro bono.’
‘Why?’
‘As far as I can tell, for the information in Newell’s head. Maybe that’s how Griffin makes his money. Extortion.’
‘It won’t work with us,’ Grace said.
‘No way.’ There was a pause. ‘You’re tired, babe.’
‘Yeah. Let’s go to bed.’
As they were clearing up, their home phone rang: a private unlisted number they gave out only to friends and family. Grace glanced at Harrigan.
‘For you?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know who it could be at this time of night.’
‘Could be Nicky, I suppose. He can call this late.’
Her brother ran a restaurant on the Central Coast and sometimes rang at the end of his working day to chat to her. She picked up the phone, putting it on speakerphone.
‘Hi there,’ she said, cautiously.
A woman began to laugh, softly and maliciously. ‘Grace,’ she said and laughed again.
Grace turned off the speakerphone but left the line open, then picked up her work mobile and called the Orion control centre. ‘I have an anonymous call on my home phone right now. The caller said my first name, then began to laugh.’ She glanced at the phone. ‘They’ve just hung up. Can you trace that call and log the time and date, please? Thank you.’
‘Why do you think that call’s related to your work?’ Harrigan asked when she’d finished.
‘I don’t know for sure. But I was followed home from my op tonight.’ She took a breath, knowing this simple confidence was breaking the rules. ‘All the way to Darling Street by someone who wanted me to know they were there. Whoever they were, they were trying to frighten me.’
‘Are you supposed to tell me that?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Was it Newell?’
‘No, I don’t think so. He couldn’t know I’d be there at that time.’
Harrigan reflected that he often didn’t know where she was or what she was doing either.
‘Is that what this operation is?’ he asked. ‘Dangerous?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You should have told me, babe. I need to know if you’re in danger. It’s not just me. There’s Ellie as well.’
‘I know that. I never stop thinking about it. Since Clive’s been there, it’s been impossible,’ she said. ‘You can’t tell anyone the simplest thing.’
‘He’s a control freak. Forget him. It’s late.’
They went to bed and, in defiance of the phone call, made love. Grace’s thought was that she needed this to feel human, needed the comfort. Just to let the physical pleasure cleanse her of what had happened that day and bring her back to herself. She felt the warmth of his body and was never more at ease with herself.
Harrigan thought of this as his fundamental territory; something he had that no one else could touch. If everything else was gone, this exclusiveness would still exist between them. This closeness was a refuge for them both, somewhere they needed no disguises and where no one could threaten either of them. The room, like the house, was their own world, safe, inviolable. Later, he lightly traced out her face.
‘You’re lovely,’ he said. ‘You have a face like the Madonna.’
‘And what kind of face does she have?’
‘Like yours. Clean. Dark, beautiful eyes.’
‘She’s more peaceful than me, she must be. I’m not a peaceful person.’
‘I just want you the way you are,’ Harrigan replied.
Harrigan woke in the early morning feeling a deep sense of unease. He couldn’t go back to sleep; the phone call had jangled him too much. By the radio clock, it was 3:15 am. After a while he got up, pulled on his tracksuit and went to check the house. First, he looked in on Ellie. Her long, dark-fair hair was tousled over the pillow. She turned over just after he looked through the open doorway but kept on sleeping. Very quietly he shut the door in case she should wake and hear him moving around. He stood in the darkness of the hallway, thinking.
His house was secure; his history with the police made that essential. He had a drawerful of death threats against him and his family, some more lurid than others. It wasn’t only criminals who wanted him harmed or dead; there were police, some still serving and some not, who had scores to settle with him. There were bars on his windows, security doors on all the entrances, and an alarm system installed. There was a number to ring at police headquarters if he or his family needed protection. His car was always parked in the single locked brick garage, the only one there was room for on his block. Grace’s car was kept behind the locked gate at the front of the house. The wall that ran between his garden and Birchgrove Park was higher than he would have liked but he had no choice. Maybe one day, when people were dead or had worn out their passions, these locks and bars could go, but not now.
He went downstairs and checked the doors, front and back, including those that led out onto the deck. The old exotic trees that had been planted in the backyard decades ago were beginning to die. Soon they would need to be replaced. Their mostly bare branches were black against the pale glow of the city lights in the night sky. In this partial light, he saw two possums, mother and offspring, sitting on the rail of the deck, silhouettes against the lighter shadows. Suddenly they were gone. Harrigan tensed, waiting, but saw no one.
Throughout much of his life, on and off, Harrigan had lived in this house. Originally, it had been an inheritance from his aunt when he was fifteen, held in trust until he was of age. A single, church-obsessed woman, she had left it to him as an insult to his father, her brother, whom she’d hated. It had been left to her by an uncle, who’d also disapproved of his father, adding to the depth of the bitterness between them. Family loathings had given him an enviable address. The Harrigans had lived on the Balmain peninsula for several generations but, other than the uncle, they had never owned a house. His father had been a wharfie who had drunk and gambled too much and, until they had come here, Harrigan had grown up in rented accommodation near White Bay.
The house wasn’t only his home. It was memory and experience, each room reminding him of the events, some of them violent, that had shaped his life.
Harrigan had another child from a long-ago marriage, Toby, who was disabled with cerebral palsy and had always had to live in care. His mother had abandoned both him and Harrigan almost as soon as he’d been born and then disappeared from their lives. Now Toby was a twenty-year-old university student studying pure mathematics. His body kept him in a wheelchair but his mind ranged freely. Harrigan had built the room in which he now stood-during the day, a large, light-filled space-for his son, combining the two smaller rooms that had once been here. It was a place for Toby to come in his chair and feel at home. But he had not only been creating a space for his son. Harrigan had been expunging the past, in its place building something he valued, something that had meaning for him. Once these walls had been painted a drab green. One night, when he was eighteen, he had seen his mother’s blood splashed all over that green paint, when his father had fatally shot her in the face.
Jim Harrigan had supplemented his income on the wharves by petty thievery, and from there moved into more dangerous company dealing in heroin. One night he had brought home a gun he’d been told to hide. Harrigan remembered hearing his parents arguing furiously over the gun before being sickened by the sound of the shot. He remembered-could not forget-his mother lying against the wall with no face. His father said she’d grabbed at the gun. Maybe she had, but those words had no meaning for him. ‘Kill me,’ Jim Harrigan said to his son. Blinded by rage, his hands shaking, Harrigan fired wildly, almost unaware that he had, but only wounded his father. ‘That won’t do it. Try again,’ Jim Harrigan demanded. But Harrigan couldn’t shoot for a second time, and the memory stayed with him as a marker between what he could and couldn’t do. No events could have torn a hole in his life so powerfully. No one would ever harm anyone he cared about like that again.
He went upstairs and, giving up on the possibility of sleep, went into his study. Despite his unease, a deep reluctance prevented him from taking his gun out of the safe with his daughter sleeping just down the hall.
He sat down at his desk in the dark. A little to the side stood a picture of Grace seated on a blanket in Birchgrove Park, with Ellie, dressed in a white froth of baby clothes, cuddled in her arms. She was laughing and saying to her daughter, ‘Wave to the camera.’ He remembered the day when, to her shock, Grace had found out she was pregnant. They had set up house together but not married; they had never once talked about marriage. It might have been the memory of his first marriage, or his parents’ savage arguments, that prevented Harrigan from suggesting it. He rejected the possibility at a deeper level than he brought into his conscious mind. His only experiences of marriage had been destructive.
Maybe Grace understood this about him and that was why she never spoke of it herself. He left the subject alone for fear of breaking the balance between them, the easy way they accepted each other. But he still remembered sitting with her and his daughter on the blanket that day and thinking that whatever they might do, he’d never leave either of them. Toby’s photograph stood next to Grace and Ellie’s, taken the day he had received his final examination results, which he was holding in his one good hand. All three were so much a part of his life he could not imagine himself existing without them.
Perhaps he had been too caught in his night thoughts, looking inwards, something habitual to him. Staring into the dark, he saw the figure in his back garden, a man, solid against the lighter city darkness, moving away from a camphor laurel towards the wall between his garden and Birchgrove Park.
Harrigan was at his safe almost immediately and had his gun out. Moving as silently as possible, he went into the spare bedroom at the front of the house. Snatching the keys out of the drawer there, he unlocked the double doors onto the veranda and stepped outside. He heard a car starting on the street but had no intention of running outside after it, possibly straight into a bullet. He leaned over the balcony and saw it in the streetlight-a white Toyota Camry speeding up the street. It was too far away to get the numberplate. Then it was gone.
When he came out of the room, he saw Grace standing by Ellie’s door, listening. She put a finger to her lips. ‘She’s still asleep,’ she mouthed. He nodded and took his gun back to the safe. Silently they both went back to bed.
‘She didn’t wake up,’ she said softly. ‘What happened? I woke up and you weren’t here. Why did you have your gun out?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. I went and sat in my study. Then I saw someone standing in the back garden watching the house. I don’t know how long they’d been there. That car got away too quickly. Someone else must have been driving.’
‘Was it Newell?’ she asked.
‘It was hard to see who it was. I would have said he was too tall for Newell but I can’t be sure. Someone’s telling us they can get to us.’
‘Are you going to tell the police?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because on that amount of information, my old work mates won’t be able to find him any better than I can. I’ll ask around. See if anyone’s been talking about coming after me.’
‘We don’t need this,’ she said.
‘No one can get in here. And if they do, they’ll be sorry they bothered.’
‘At least Ellie didn’t wake up. She doesn’t have to know about this.’
They slept patchily until Ellie woke them in the morning and got them out of bed. While Grace bathed and dressed her, Harrigan checked the back garden. There had been some rain recently and the ground was softish. There were signs where the intruder had climbed over the wall into the garden, and partial footprints pressed into the ground. But the soles of nondescript mass market shoes were leads to nothing. Looking back up at the house, Harrigan saw the intruder had had a clear view of his study. It was possible he could have seen the darker outline of Harrigan’s figure through the tall window when he had sat down at his desk. If so, then he’d been making certain Harrigan knew he was there.
He took photographs of the intruder’s traces and went inside to make the morning coffee. It was just perking when Ellie ran into the kitchen and demanded to be picked up.
‘Hello, princess,’ he said, hoisting her up. ‘How are you? You sleep well? Yeah.’
‘You spoil her,’ Grace said, following after and smiling. ‘Calling her princess all the time.’
‘It won’t do her any harm. She’ll grow out of it.’
‘Breakfast. Come on, chicken. You’re hungry, aren’t you?’
Soon, his daughter was in her highchair with her mouth smeared with mashed banana. Harrigan had to laugh. If only his troops could see him now, not as the boss no one intelligent dared to put offside but as Harrigan the family man. Grace’s work aside, life had never been so sweet. Now he could feel a poison eating away at that sweetness. Outside, it was still dangerous; survival could be balanced on the thinnest edge, the way it always had been. But whatever happened, no one was getting into his house to do any of them any harm. Today, he was going to take his gun out, check it, clean it and make sure it was in good working order. He had too much at stake to stay unarmed.
‘I’ll take Ellie up to Kidz Corner if you like,’ Grace said. ‘I can do it on my way to work. What are you going to do today?’
‘Since I don’t have to be in court, I’ll make a few calls. I’ve got some digging to do. If I have time, I’ll go and see Toby this afternoon. I’ll take Ellie.’
When he had been with the police and saw sights like the one he’d seen yesterday, he had gone to see his son to recover. Being with Toby connected him to what mattered.
‘She’ll like that,’ Grace said, and picked her daughter out of her highchair. ‘Come on, sweetie. We’ll clean you up and then we’ll go, okay?’
Her phone rang. Harrigan picked it up for her. ‘Clive,’ he said.
She set Ellie on the floor and, taking the phone, walked out of the room. Not long afterwards, she was back.
‘Something’s happened,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go now. Can you…?’
‘Yeah, I’ll look after things. When will you be back?’
‘I don’t know. I think I’m in for a long day.’
She was frowning. Probably she didn’t know how disturbed she looked.
‘Take care, babe,’ he said.
‘Always do. You too.’
Harrigan and Ellie waved her goodbye at the door.
‘Gone,’ his little daughter said.
‘Don’t worry, princess. She’ll be back. Let’s get ready. We have to go as well.’
Ellie’s childcare centre was near Birchgrove Primary School, far enough from the house to be a useful walk. Harrigan carried her on his back in her harness. When they were almost there, she started to tug playfully at his hair. ‘Take it easy, princess,’ he said with a grin. ‘That’s me on the other end.’ She giggled and he turned his head to look up at her. Then, with a feeling like a cold tap on the shoulder, he turned completely and saw a white Toyota Camry with tinted windows edging along the street not far past the corner behind them. It was the same car from last night; it hadn’t been there just moments ago.
Harrigan was carrying his daughter but he also wanted the car’s numberplate and began walking back quickly to get it. Immediately the Camry backed out the way it had come and drove at speed up the cross street. By the time he reached the corner, it was out of sight, vanished in the narrow tree-lined streets and laneways.
His next thought was to get Ellie where she would be safe. Kidz Corner was close, too close if they were being stalked. The converted duplex offered its clients security and privacy and had its own discreet security officer. Numbers of the children who went there were the sons and daughters of the very rich or the actors and writers who lived along the deepwater frontage of Louisa Road. Harrigan was none of these things but, like them, he wanted his child protected.
As soon as he’d set Ellie down to play, he went to see the owner, Kate, a big, capable woman, in her office. She knew his history and had still offered Ellie a place. It was another reason he was prepared to pay the hefty fees to make sure his daughter was safe.
‘Have you noticed a white Toyota Camry hanging around here lately?’ he asked. ‘Not the most noticeable of cars, I know.’
‘We always keep an eye out for that sort of thing. Yes, we have, several times now. We thought it might be paparazzi. Why?’
‘I don’t think it’s paparazzi. It may have been stalking me and Ellie here. I scared it off. Can you get me the rego if it comes back?’
She grinned, opened her diary and handed him a piece of paper. ‘We only offer the best service here. Mac got that the last time it turned up. He was watching it on the CCTV. If it turned up again, we were going to call the police. What do you want us to do?’
Harrigan had contacts among his former work colleagues who had offered him protection should he need it. He was careful about calling in the favour, not wanting to wear out his credit. This situation was different.
‘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.