your daughter. You’d care about her too, wouldn’t you?’
Harrigan dropped his voice. ‘You’re one step away, mate. Say another word…’
Griffin moved back. He smiled and put on a pair of wrap-around sunglasses. Now Harrigan was looking at his own reflection.
‘You want to know what’s in it for me? Chris is my client and I’m defending him. Simple as that. It’s a pity he won’t cooperate with me. If he did, he might be out of gaol before the end of the year. But there he is right now. On his way back to Long Bay.’
Harrigan turned. Two unmarked police cars had appeared in convoy at the intersection of Oxford Street and Darlinghurst Road. The first was an escort car; the second carried Newell sitting between two plain-clothes officers. They were waiting to turn left onto Oxford.
‘What are they doing here? Why didn’t they ask for a van to take Newell back?’ Harrigan said.
Griffin made no reply.
As the cars made the turn, two motorbikes came roaring alongside them. The riders shot first into the cars’ tyres then into the cars themselves before slaloming out of the way. The cars slewed dangerously. A heavy four- wheel-drive broke through the lights and rammed into the car carrying Newell, smashing it halfway onto the pavement, causing the passers-by to run. The escort car had skewed to a stop at a dangerous angle across the road, blocking both lanes.
One motorbike rider had shot into the escort car while the second fired at people around the scene, keeping them at bay. Pedestrians hit the footpath. Harrigan dragged Griffin to the ground. Bullets echoed around them.
The driver of the four-wheel-drive got out and shot into the prisoner’s car, smashing the glass. He was wearing a balaclava. ‘Open it!’ he yelled at the driver. The back door on the intact side was opened and the gunman shot the driver at point-blank range. One of the guards, clearly wounded, was pushed out onto the road, Newell tumbling after him. Dragging some kind of cutter out of his pocket, the gunman cut the handcuffs that joined the two men together.
Then it was all over. The driver of the four-wheel-drive and Newell were on the back of the two motorbikes, roaring out of sight.
Harrigan and Griffin got to their feet. Griffin’s sunglasses had been knocked off in the fall and had landed some distance away on the footpath. He went and got them before brushing himself down. He touched his lapel. ‘I’ve lost my badge.’ His face and voice were calm. ‘Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!’ he said, sounding almost like a schoolboy. ‘Trigger-happy people. They really like using their guns.’ He matched his words with the feigned action of shooting at the people lying on the road.
‘Are you okay, mate?’ Harrigan asked, wondering if the reaction might be shock.
‘I’m fine. There’s my badge.’ He bent down and picked it up. ‘The pin’s broken.’
‘Wait here for the police,’ Harrigan said. ‘They’ll want your statement.’
Griffin looked at Harrigan. His eyes showed no emotion. ‘Don’t call me mate,’ he said.
‘Aren’t you worried about your client?’
‘Why should I be? You’d have to say his troubles are over.’
Harrigan would have said they were just starting but he didn’t have time to talk to Griffin any longer. He ran to the scene through the chaos of stopped traffic. Passers-by were getting shakily to their feet. When he reached the prisoner’s car, he saw the driver clearly dead, one guard lying seriously wounded on the road and the other bleeding and unconscious in the back. There was another dead man at the wheel of the escort car, while his partner was sprawled on the road, wounded and bleeding, unable to move.
A man shouted over the ruckus. ‘I’m from St Vincent’s, we’ve got help coming. Stay calm.’
‘I’m a doctor,’ a woman called and hurried to the wounded man lying on the road by the escort car.
Harrigan returned to the prisoner’s car to help the two wounded men there. ‘We need another doctor over here and quickly,’ he yelled back. Around him, car horns rose to a blaring cacophony. On what should have been a quiet autumn day in Sydney, all hell had broken loose.
3
Crace sat facing a largish man at a small table in the bright room; a video camera was recording their meeting. There were no windows in the room; its brightness came from the overhead lights and the bare white walls and floor. The man was reading over the fine print on a form he had just filled in. He looked up at Grace; she smiled professionally.
‘If you’re happy to agree to all this, Doug,’ she said, ‘I need you to sign here and here.’
He half-smiled in return, with a touch of embarrassed egotism at finding himself the centre of attention. ‘Will I really go to gaol if I tell anyone I’ve been here or even that I know this place exists?’
The sound of their voices was sharp in the bright clarity of the room. He wore light-sensitive glasses which seemed to have become fixed in a permanent, very pale blue colour, giving him the look of someone wearing sunglasses unnecessarily.
‘Do you want anyone to know what we’re going to discuss here?’ she asked in reply.
He shook his head. He had heavy features and looked older than his thirty-nine years. The form said he was a married man with three children, and that his wife was a part-time commerce teacher at the local Catholic high school. He worked as a middle-ranking public servant for the state government. A family without much spare cash after the mortgage, car and private school fees had been paid. The last person who’d want his wife to know he regularly visited a brothel called Life’s Pleasures.
‘I’m only here because Coco’s dead,’ he said. He didn’t look at Grace. ‘She had to be illegal. When you went and saw her, she’d freeze up. The last time I saw her, she was curled up on the bed, really tense. I walked out. I asked Lynette if I could see one of the other girls instead. It just wasn’t fun.’
‘Who’s Lynette?’ Grace said.
‘The receptionist. She said I could swap if I wanted to. I didn’t have to pay again.’
‘Was there any other reason you thought Coco might have been illegal?’
‘Her English wasn’t very good. I thought if you were here legally, you’d have to have some English. And she was new. She started just a couple of months ago.’
‘Why did you keep seeing her?’ Grace prodded gently.
‘No one’s going to know?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Passing on this information would be a criminal offence.’
The reassurance seemed to help. He held his hands together on the table, looking ahead. His face went red.
‘You didn’t have to wear a condom,’ he said.
‘I don’t think you told the police that,’ Grace said quietly.
‘I didn’t trust them to keep their mouths shut.’
Orion had given him a paper-thin sense of safety where he could reveal himself. His sense of guilt must have weighed on him every night before he went to sleep.
‘Were there any other workers you didn’t have to wear a condom for?’ Grace asked.
‘No. Not that I knew about anyway.’
‘You weren’t worried about your health? Or your wife’s?’
‘Marie said Coco had regular health checks. Me and my wife don’t have sex that often. She doesn’t seem to like it much.’ His voice was flat.
‘Who’s Marie?’
‘
‘Except in this case,’ Grace said.
‘Lynette said Coco wasn’t anything to do with her. I should always talk to Marie about her.’
‘How did you hear about Coco in the first place?’
His face was still red. ‘It was on the net. They’ve got a website.
