This time the motel was close to Chatswood shopping centre. Grace parked outside the room. Before she went inside, she put her hair up in a simple knot.
Borghini was waiting with a cup of coffee. ‘For you. I reckon you need it. I noticed you like it strong.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, managing a smile and sitting down. Borghini stood watching her, his hands on his hips.
‘You’re a brave lady,’ he said.
Clive sat in the chair beside her, putting himself between them.
‘You did that very well. You held your nerve.’
‘Christ,’ Borghini said, taking his seat. ‘That guy’s a fucking murderer!’
‘He can lead us to our target,’ Clive said.
‘And what the fuck is that? What result do you really want?’
‘I’ve brought you into this much more than I would bring most people in. You can repay me by not asking questions like that. I’ll tell you what you need to know.’
Grace’s hair slipped out of its knot and fell onto her shoulders again. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ she said.
‘You can leave it out,’ Clive said.
She didn’t answer or even look at him. She went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. Standing in front of the mirror, she needed to make sure she was really there. She took out her mobile. She wanted to ring Paul. She wanted to say, ‘It’s me. I’m here.’ Instead she put her phone away and redid her hair, then made sure her make-up was in place. The role-playing wasn’t over yet. There were hours to go before she went home, when her hair could come down the way she liked it to. No one touches me or my hair but you and Ellie, she said to Paul wherever he was. Then she went outside to get on with her work.
‘We have a deal with our targets,’ she said, sitting back at the table. ‘The question is, do I deliver Narelle Wong?’
‘Yes, you do,’ Clive said.
‘How do we stop her ending up dead?’
‘We’ll be following you every step of the way.’
‘After today, I’m very sure my anonymous caller the other night was Sara McLeod,’ Grace said. ‘That’s a dual connection between this operation and whoever was stalking us. Her and the Ponticellis.’
Borghini was sitting with his arms folded, watching. He leaned forward.
‘I know the boss has enemies. I know that includes the Ponticellis. With them, you’re dealing with people who don’t forget. I was trying to talk to you about this earlier. Is Griffin connected to them? What are his contacts? How did he know Chris Newell was dead? This whole thing smells. We’re not playing them. They’re playing us. They’re drawing you in to delivering this woman but is that going to get us any closer to what we’re trying to achieve?’ He turned just to Grace. ‘They trusted you, the two of them, just like that. Why? Everything Griffin says to you, it’s so fucking personal. You’re not stalking him. You just told us. They’re stalking you.’
‘Life’s Pleasures,’ Grace asked Clive. ‘Santos Associates owns it. Have we found out anything else about that company yet?’
‘We haven’t been able to locate any of its office holders,’ he said, ‘but given that its main business is money laundering, we’re very certain it’s part of the Ghost network. Life’s Pleasures is still operating but the building went on the market yesterday. As we know, all the income had already been moved offshore.’
‘Are they selling up the farm? Leaving the country?’ Borghini asked.
‘That’s a very likely scenario. They’re removing all witnesses, liquidating assets. They may well consider Grace to be their puppet, the way Kidd said. But it’s still a dangerous situation to have an organisation like Orion investigating them. Their safest course of action is to disappear overseas under assumed identities.’
‘Then Mark’s right.’ Grace was sitting with her arms folded, looking Clive in the eye. ‘They have another agenda. We’re playing their game.’
‘No, they’re playing ours.’
‘No one’s told them that,’ Borghini said.
‘We’re walking into something they’ve set up,’ Grace said. ‘We have to ask ourselves what it is. It’s my safety on the line.’
‘You have every resource I can put out there to rely on,’ Clive said. ‘The only way we can find out what they’re really up to is for you to go in deeper. We will not close down this network until we know its full extent. We don’t have anything like that information yet. If Griffin has a fix on you, then maybe he’ll reveal his connections. You have to keep getting closer to him. You can’t do anything that will make him back off.’
‘It’s too dangerous,’ Borghini said.
‘I can do it,’ Grace replied.
‘I didn’t say you couldn’t. I’m sure you can. That’s not the point.’
‘What we do is keep to our plan,’ Clive interrupted. ‘We plan Grace’s next meeting with Griffin.’
‘I’ve got some info first,’ Borghini said. ‘We’ve been checking out where Jirawan Sanders was found in Ku- ring-gai Chase. Standard police work but the results are interesting enough.’
‘Send me a written report,’ Clive said. ‘We don’t have time for that now.’
Borghini was silenced. Throughout the rest of the meeting he said almost nothing, but Grace saw him watching both her and Clive intently. She wondered if his role as the liaison officer was likely to be terminated soon. She would have kept him on but she had no authority. She reminded herself that she was here because she had made her own decisions and had her own aims in mind. But she would be sorry if Borghini was no longer there. No one else stood up to Clive the way he did. It was a pleasure to watch.
16
Harrigan sat at his desk with his computer on, his window to the net, to the world, open. Spam piled into his in-box: dross, get-rich-quick promises, miracle enhancements and pornography-all of which he erased. Nothing from his mind stalkers, either by email or by phone, which was a relief. Among the rubbish, he saw an email from his retainer with the subject line
Her information was that Jennifer Shillingworth was listed as a missing person. She had disappeared early in 1996 when she was seventy-one. She had been booked in for surgery at the Sydney Adventist Hospital in Wahroonga but had never arrived. Her family didn’t understand this; she’d been on a waiting list for elective surgery for some time and then suddenly, from somewhere, the money she needed for private surgery had arrived. Jennifer had refused to tell them who her benefactor was and had made her own arrangements to get to the hospital. The morning she left home was the last time anyone had seen her.
Reading this, Harrigan thought how all that had been waiting for Jennifer Shillingworth had been her own death. Someone had bought her information and then removed her in case she made the connections public. Naming the property trust they’d created after her must have been their idea of a joke. The whole story read that way, as the nastiest joke in the world. The timing was interesting: a number of years before anyone had approached Amelie Santos. Probably they had been waiting until the doctor was at her most vulnerable before they acted. All of it spoke of careful, long-term planning.
His retainer had also tracked down the Camp Sunshine charity and Ian Blackmore. He had been a youth worker with the charity until it wound up in 1984. After its demise, Blackmore had worked both here and overseas before reportedly committing suicide eight years ago. His sister, one Liz Brewer, would be happy to talk to Harrigan any time he liked if he wanted to go and see her. She lived in Marsfield.
Mid-morning on a weekday, the drive up to northwest Sydney, past Macquarie University, was fairly plain sailing. The house he was seeking was on a large block where the garden was filled with native trees and shrubs. The woman who let him in was in her mid-fifties, shortish, with highlighted hair and the figure some women acquire after menopause, thickening around the middle. They sat down in a large and comfortable if untidy living room. Around him were the trappings of baby-boomer wealth and the accretions of family history. Photographs of parents, children and grandchildren covered sideboards and shelves.
