The Labyrinth of Drowning

18

Harrigan’s retainer had emailed him a cache of information regarding Amelie Santos. She had found the private sanatorium in the Southern Highlands where Frank Wells had been born. Now closed, it had been famous, or infamous, in its day as a place where those who could afford it sent their daughters to have their illegitimate children out of anyone’s way. It had also offered a nursemaid service that cared for the babies until they were adopted out. The sanatorium had become a private psychiatric clinic in the 1970s and then gone out of business in the early ’80s. When the building was sold, the records had been sent to a social research archive in Canberra. While the hospital’s medical information had been destroyed long ago, its administrative records were available to researchers and a number of articles had been written about its history.

The dates of Amelie Santos’s admittance and discharge had been recorded in one of the hospital’s registers. She had arrived on a Monday morning and left four days later. A note next to her discharge read: By taxi to station 11 am. Parents will meet at Central. Harrigan’s research assistant had added the information that Amelie was most likely shielded during the birth. According to the testimony of several women who had given birth there-now mostly in their sixties or seventies, one in her eighties-a screen had been placed in front of their faces, and one remembered being blindfolded. Amelie Santos might never have seen Frank, let alone held him. Only heard him before he was taken away.

Harrigan emailed back the name Loretta Griffin and the date 1977. A brutal attempted murder, the husband convicted and gaoled. There’d been a son by the name of Joel, by the look of it an only child. Any information she could find on any of them.

In the meantime, he’d been doing his own research into the Shillingworth Trust. The details were much as Lambert had already told him: a discretionary property trust with Tate and Patterson as its trustees and the beneficiary an otherwise unrelated company called Cheshire Nominees. The names of the company’s office holders were unknown to him, and he suspected that if he investigated them they would prove to be untraceable. The contents of the trust’s property portfolio were also no surprise. Among a number of commercial and residential properties, it included Fairview Mansions, the Blackheath house and Amelie Santos’s two other former properties at Duffys Forest and North Turramurra. Many of the properties were in less desirable parts of the city, leading Harrigan to speculate that the portfolio was a dump for dirty money. Distribute the management of properties among a range of agents and who would bother putting the pieces together?

Valuable information but still nothing to link his investigations to Joel Griffin or Sara McLeod. Shillingworth Trust must have bought the latter two properties when Medicine International sold them on. But why? What was so special about owning them that you’d go to all that trouble? If the trustees had a use for them, then he needed to find out what it was.

He checked the time and closed down his laptop. It was getting on and he had a long drive in front of him.

Duffys Forest, on the northern edge of the metropolis, was a part of Sydney Harrigan rarely visited. His travels north usually took him in a direction more to the west, on the freeway across the Hawkesbury River to the Central Coast, where Grace’s father lived in retirement and her brother and his wife ran a restaurant. This far-flung piece of Sydney suburbia, like its next-door neighbour Terrey Hills, was a peninsula in the bush, surrounded on three sides by the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. It was almost rural, a home to riding schools and properties offering stabling and agistment for the much-loved horses of teenage girls. The blocks of land were large and still partially bush-covered; trees and scrub lined the narrow roads. He passed plant nurseries, a golf club, Buddhist temples, private schools and a gun club.

Like the house at Blackheath, the property he was seeking had a For Sale sign out the front. Inspections by appointment; price on application. The house was on the southwestern edge of the suburb at a lower level than the street, and apparently reached by a long driveway. A thick line of trees on the boundary, surrounded by a cyclone-wire fence, isolated it from the road. Entrance to the driveway was through a high, locked Colorbond gate. The other houses roundabout were not much different, with the occupiers clearly valuing their privacy. Ignoring your neighbours would be easy in this place.

Harrigan decided to risk it. He parked at a distance past the driveway where he would be out of sight of anyone arriving at the house. As well as being armed, he had brought along a few tools in case he needed to do some breaking and entering. He tossed his backpack over his shoulder and made his way towards the house, approaching it from the side via the next-door neighbour’s block of land. Their only front fence was a low wooden affair, while their house, which was built on higher ground, was some distance away and also surrounded by trees.

He followed the cyclone fence down a slope to the park boundary where the fencing stopped and the trees merged into the national park. He pushed through the scrub to the edge of an open grassy area at the back of the house. It was an older brick building, possibly dating back to the 1950s, and sprawled over the grounds. The grass near the back door had been kept mowed but the rest of the garden had been left to itself. Rusted white garden furniture was scattered among areas of taller grass and shrubs. A pair of brightly coloured crimson rosellas was bathing in an ancient stone birdbath filled after recent rain. It could not have been more peaceful.

Beside the house was a large garage of the same vintage. Readying for a stint of housebreaking, Harrigan pulled on a pair of disposable gloves. He didn’t approach the house directly but stayed out of sight, moving through the trees on the boundary till he was close to the back of the garage where there was a door. He tried it and it opened. Inside there was space for at least two cars but at present none were there. Most likely, no one was home. Life without a car would be impossible out here.

There was no way into the house through the garage and Harrigan went out the way he had come in. Between the house and the garage was a cement pathway which had been kept reasonably clear. A high gate between the garage and the front corner of the house blocked the view to the road. He opened the gate and looked up the length of the empty gravel driveway to the locked gate. Again, there was no sign of anyone being here.

He went to the back door. It was secured by a deadlock, newer and much stronger than the old lock on the house at Blackheath. He didn’t attempt to break it, but walked along the back of the house, turning a corner, until he was looking at a small high window. It was the kind that winds open outwards and was just large enough to let him into the house. He dragged over one of the garden chairs and stood on it, finding himself looking into the laundry. There was a window lock on the inside, but the wooden window frame was rotten, the white paint peeling away. Whoever owned this house now wasn’t concerned with maintenance. He took a jemmy out of his backpack and began to force the window open. The rotten wood tore away, the glass cracked. All that was left was a section of the window frame, still secured in place by the window lock.

Harrigan lowered the barely intact, broken window to the ground. Soon he was letting himself down into dry, old-fashioned, twin laundry tubs. By the look of the room, no one had washed any clothes in here for a long time. The door was shut. He took out his gun and tried the handle cautiously. It was locked but the lock was old- fashioned and easy enough to pick. Soon he stepped into a small hallway leading to the back door. The house was completely silent. He walked through into the kitchen.

Unlike the house at Blackheath, this place was both liveable and lived in. It looked and smelled clean, although nothing appeared to have been upgraded from Amelie Santos’s time. The fridge was old enough to date back to the 1960s. He opened it and saw some basic food and a bottle of wine stored inside. Washed dishes, including two wine glasses, stood in the dish rack on the draining board. They were dry and had been for some time.

Listening for every sound, Harrigan moved from the kitchen into a dining room. There was no sign of anyone using this room. He opened a top drawer in the sideboard. Tablecloths, linen serviettes, place mats. In the next drawer, silver cutlery. Someone was using the house, but all they had done was move in on top of what was already here without changing anything. They ate and possibly worked and slept here, but it was no home.

He went through to the living room, where the windows looked out onto the front garden. Thickish, good- quality net curtains, now grey with dust, covered these windows. The room was shadowed but not so dark that it was difficult to see. In here, there was an atmosphere of complete abandonment. On a cabinet stood a photograph of Amelie Santos, probably from when she was in her early forties. She was dressed to ride, her cheek pressed up