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.
15
The next morning in the meeting room, there was a third seat at the table, so far empty.
‘Borghini’s late,’ Clive said.
‘The traffic’s bad,’ Grace replied.
‘He’d better be here when Griffin calls.’
Her mobile lay on the table. She stared at it.
‘I want some information,’ she said.
Clive didn’t speak but motioned for her to go on.
‘There have been three deaths besides Jirawan’s. Everyone we want to talk to gets removed. We might as well be at war-’
‘We are at war.’
‘I want to know what this operation is really about.’
He leaned too close towards her, the way he always did. ‘Are you thinking of bailing out?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘This is the crucial phase. I need to know if I can rely on you.’
‘Then answer my question,’ she said.
‘It’s very well timed because we’re getting to the point where you need to know. Does the Ghost network mean anything to you?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a name we’ve given to a significant financial brokerage for various criminal and terrorist organisations in
