presumably Sanders is her married name. Where’s her husband? What’s his involvement in this? If my interview with this detainee is going to be useful, don’t I at least need some basic biographical information?’
Clive smiled at her again. He was somewhere in his mid-fifties, with well-preserved features and an unshakeable sense of calm. This calm was genuine ice and it repulsed her. Emotion was only useful when it was being manipulated, something he did with finesse. Even the way he told everyone to call him by his first name seemed a pretence at openness. She shouldn’t let her feelings affect her judgement so much. He came with the territory; by necessity it was a cold-blooded profession. But her dislike was too deep. Whether he had another life, any kind of lover, a partner perhaps, even children, she didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
‘You know how to think,’ he said, patronisingly, as if she had passed a test.
‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’ she replied, manufacturing a professional smile of her own.
‘Then you don’t need to keep talking to me. There’s nothing you’ve raised in this meeting that you shouldn’t be able to handle. Go and see her. Then come back and tell me how she reacts. I think this discussion has gone on long enough.’
Clive wasn’t someone you argued with for too long. She’d left his office quickly and made her way to the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, where the woman was being held as an illegal immigrant. She’d been picked up in the city on George Street outside the concourse to Wynyard railway station at midnight four days ago, with no identification and only the clothes she’d been wearing. She’d refused to cooperate with the police, and they’d sent her to Villawood, not knowing what else to do.
Four people had been present for the interview: the Thai woman; Grace; the interpreter; and a Department of Immigration official, Jon Kidd. He was the officer in charge of the woman’s case, and senior enough to have the necessary security clearance to deal with Orion. A short man, he was expensively and meticulously dressed, his leather shoes brushed to an almost mirror finish.
The Thai woman was tiny. Eye to eye, the first quality Grace saw in her was fear. It sat on her delicate frame as if it would break her. After that first terrified glance, she refused to look at Grace or the interpreter again, her eyes sliding sickly to the door, begging for a way out. Too often, like the reflex action of someone trapped, she looked at Kidd and then away, as if she was even more frightened of him. He didn’t meet her eye but instead stared at Grace.
‘Tell her not to be so afraid,’ Grace said. ‘We can give her protection if she needs it.’
The reply was brief tears, almost laughter.
‘There’s no such thing,’ the interpreter translated awkwardly, clearly embarrassed. ‘You can’t help me.’
‘I thought we were here for a meaningful interview,’ Kidd said sarcastically. ‘Why are you telling her things like that?’
‘This woman is terrified.’
‘I can see that. Ask your questions and go. Clearly you’re frightening her.’
‘I would have said she’s just as much frightened of you.’
‘She has no reason to be. We want to deport her, which is what she wants as well. You’re just getting in the way,’ Kidd said. ‘Finish and let her go.’
‘I want a name.’
‘Nothing,’ the interpreter said. ‘She has no name.’
‘That’s not true. We all have a name.’
‘Not her. She’s wiped it out.’
‘Then I’ll find a way to give it back to her.’
Grace was shocked at herself. She was a professional; she didn’t say things like that. But by then the woman was weeping continuously and the words weren’t translated.
‘For God’s sake, finish it,’ Kidd said. ‘Let her go back to Thailand. That’s all you can do for her.’
Impossible, Grace thought. The machinery has started; it’ll grind us all down.
‘That’s the one thing I can’t do now,’ she said, maintaining composure. ‘You must know that. Ask her one more time to talk to me.’
‘She can’t,’ the interpreter said.
‘This is going to be all your fault,’ Kidd said ferociously in Grace’s ear after they’d left the room.
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded.
He looked at her with eyes bright with anger and accusation. ‘Whatever happens next…it’ll be your fault. Goodbye.’
Grace had carried the woman’s fear back to Clive. Fear and secrecy were poisons she couldn’t cure alone.
‘Terrified,’ she’d said. ‘Absolutely terrified. She’s acting like she expects to be murdered at any moment. And there’s something else-Kidd, the immigration officer. I think we should check him out. Given the way he acted today and some of the things he said to me, I’d question his motives. Apart from that, this woman acted as if she felt in danger from him.’
Clive stared at her for some moments. ‘That had better not be a wild accusation,’ he said.
‘I don’t make those calls lightly.’
‘Then get her out of there,’ he replied. ‘Now.’
But someone else had got there first. The information came through from Kidd himself: in the hour after Grace and the interpreter had left Villawood, the Thai woman had escaped while on her way to a medical appointment. Her whereabouts were unknown. Listening, Grace had to wonder if he was involved in any way. No one could get out of Villawood without help. But she had no grounds for putting the question directly to him, or not yet. Then, some thirty-six hours later, at 1:45 am, she got the phone call she’d been dreading.
‘Subject has a very neat Caesarean scar,’ McMichael announced. ‘Very well done. She’s had at least one child at some stage. All right, let’s get started.’
Under the pathologist’s knife the most intrinsic of intrusions took place. It was the dead woman’s final nakedness. With scalp removed and skull opened, the body peeled back breastbone to pelvic bone, the Thai woman ceased to be human and became a series of parts. Jon Kidd was standing next to Grace; he drew in his breath sharply, swore, then walked out.
‘Get after him. We need him,’ Borghini said to his offsider, who left the viewing area immediately. He turned to Grace. ‘I thought he was her case manager. Didn’t he ask to be here?’
‘He’s not used to seeing the dead,’ Grace replied. ‘They get killed somewhere else.’
She caught her breath; her facade had almost cracked as well. Every morning before going to work, she coiled up her long dark hair to sit at the back of her head, then put on her make-up, pale foundation that turned her face into the china mask of a heroine from an ancient Japanese drama. Her work clothes made up the rest of her armour. It wasn’t an impenetrable disguise but it was usually enough to get her through. But she hadn’t known this woman had had a child.
Grace had that same scar. Just eighteen months ago her daughter Ellie had been brought into the world in that same way when, after Grace had been in labour for twelve hours, the baby’s heartbeat had dropped alarmingly. Paul Harrigan, her partner, carried in his wallet a photograph he had taken just after they’d first put the baby into her arms. Her hair was dark and messy against the white pillow, her face exhausted. Her long eyelashes brushed towards her cheeks as she looked down at Ellie, whom she seemed to be holding almost too tightly, the baby’s head resting on the crook of her arm. Ellie’s sparse hair clung in wet lines against her large and delicate head and her tiny crooked fingers were almost translucent.
There was no damp, newly breathing child or clean white sheets for this unknown woman on her metal bed. For the first time in her career, Grace was caught between two powerful emotions: fury at what had happened and the feeling that she might cry for the woman on the table.
‘What do we have here?’ McMichael said. ‘I think it’s a wedding ring.’ He held up the proverbial gold band in a pair of tweezers.
‘Mate,’ Borghini said, ‘we need that ring. Bag it up.’
‘She swallowed it,’ Grace said, shocked. ‘She wasn’t going to let her murderer take it away from her.’
The pathologist heard her over the intercom. ‘Thank you, Mrs Harrigan,’ he said furiously. ‘How else was it
