been scouring away the emotional pain, almost killing herself in the process. It was only her father’s efforts that had kept her out of the children’s courts.
Finally, barely sixteen, she had left school and home for Sydney and found herself singing in pubs when she was too young to drink in them. From there, she started singing for a group called Wasted Daze, a name she thought suited her. They were a group of young men who were as lost as she was. They’d toured the east coast of Australia, always heading north, camping out on beaches, too poor to do much more than buy beer and takeaway food. Grace had liked the life. She liked the open road with no destination at the end of it, just the vanishing point on the horizon. The immediate impression of each day had become a good enough substitute for happiness.
Then Chris Newell walked into their lives. It wasn’t so unusual; they seemed to pick up stray people as they drove around in their rusting Kombi van. They were in northern Queensland by then, playing at the local pubs in a district where the main industry was growing sugar cane. Occasionally they met Newell socially; he always had dope to sell. Then one day the owner of a pub where they’d played refused to pay them; Newell told the man he’d better if he knew what was good for him. He paid with a bonus. After this, Newell offered to manage them as far as it went. They accepted the offer, but they were all, including Grace, too naive and casual in the way they did things.
She and Newell became an item, not for very long, a couple of months at most. By the end of this short time it was clear to everyone that Newell was a controller who liked tormenting people. They’d also discovered he was a serious dealer, not just someone who could get a bit of marihuana for his friends. No one wanted anything to do with the kind of people he was bringing into their lives. Grace decided she’d had enough. The idyll was broken, real life had asserted itself. She’d discovered she didn’t want to be a singer after all. She didn’t have the gift for performance; she didn’t want to stand up there and put her emotions on display in her music. Then there was Newell, who was beginning to frighten her; he was possessive and had a short fuse. Already he’d started shouting at her. He hadn’t hit her but she began to realise that he could and one day he would.
The band split in a series of angry arguments; she packed her bags and left for Sydney. Newell followed her although not immediately. Someone had dobbed him in to the police; not her, probably another member of the band. Newell didn’t care; he thought she’d done it and he’d come after her.
In that space of time when Newell had beaten and raped her, Grace had thought that she would die. In the aftermath, she’d thought she might do so anyway, in her own way.
She had refused to go to the police. She was too frightened of Newell to testify against him in court. Nothing would shift her on this, and she hid the extent of her injuries from her family, knowing that if her father ever found out what had happened to her, nothing would have stopped him going after Newell. It was only years later that she’d told him and her brother everything that had happened to her. As well as being angry, they’d been hurt that she’d shut them out. It was the fear, she’d told them; she had never felt anything like that fear. Her father understood fear; he had fought in Vietnam. He spoke about it then to his daughter and son; the first time he’d spoken to anyone about it since he’d come home from the war. It became a point of understanding between them, something that allowed all three of them to reach some kind of resolution about the past.
In those bad times after Newell, Grace had drunk herself into insensibility, but even as an alcoholic she was unsuccessful. Her family had been there, they had helped her. Her brother had protected her, come and taken her away from parties, poured the booze down the sink, taken her to hospital when she fell and cut herself, helped her through detox. When she was in recovery, her father had taught her to shoot, telling her it would restore her hand- eye coordination. ‘You should only ever shoot at a target,’ he’d said. ‘Never at people.’ She never drank now but she was still a very good shot.
She had taken herself to university, studied criminology, and, before Orion, had worked briefly for the police. Unexpectedly met Paul Harrigan and found herself where she was now.
When Grace had first joined Orion five years ago, she had still been an angry young woman. If asked, she would have said her heart was dead and she was glad it was. At times her anger drove her to take risks, just as she had done at fourteen, speeding in cars badly controlled by adolescent drivers. Saying to death, come and get me if you can. These days she was careful. Now she asked herself: what happens to my daughter if something happens to me? This anxiety was one of the sharpest feelings she’d ever had. These days, she felt everything too much.
Quit, Harrigan had said to her more than once. If Orion’s not what you want any more, quit. If you want to, why not just walk away? Because she wasn’t a quitter. I don’t like being driven out, she thought, not by someone like Clive. If he thought she was an easy target, he would find out differently.
She had a name now for the woman she’d met in Villawood. It was a step towards sending her home to her relatives, possibly parents who could see her properly put to rest. Who could tell her child what had happened to his or her mother. Grace had more significant things than Clive to think about. However much she’d changed, she still had work to do; important work. Finding the person who could murder Jirawan so savagely and then just walk away.
4
The sign
A police car was already stationed on the street outside. She followed the rest of the convoy to an area at the back of the four-storeyed building where there was room to park in a largish courtyard. A line of cars was parked along one side, presumably belonging to the sex workers and their clients. ‘Get their regos,’ Borghini said to one of his people.
The private entrance Doug had mentioned, a badly lit doorway, led to a flight of stairs next to a service elevator. A short climb took them to the brothel’s open doorway on the first floor. As soon as they walked in, two men waiting in deep armchairs rose to their feet and melted out of the entrance like smoke. They would have disappeared downstairs at speed if they hadn’t been stopped by the police and asked for their names and addresses.
Borghini had organised the raid well-a straightforward exercise without histrionics. He presented his warrant card and the legal papers at the reception desk and sent his people to search the premises in an orderly way. Kidd, last through the doorway, stood in the background, watching. Already the receptionist, an older woman with a solid build, dyed blonde hair and wearing a fashionable off-the-shoulder red number, was on the phone.
‘I’m just ringing Marie,’ she said with a professional smile. ‘She has a flat on the top floor, she’s there now. I’m sure she’ll be down in a moment.’
‘We know where she lives,’ Borghini replied. ‘I’ve already sent some people upstairs to talk to her. But go ahead. You can tell her I’ll be up to see her as soon as I’ve sorted things out down here.’
Officers moved along the hallways knocking on doors, announcing themselves. ‘We have reason to believe there may be illegal immigrants working on these premises,’ they repeated with each knock. ‘Could you come out to the reception desk now with your personal identification ready, please? Thank you.’
Clients began to appear in the hallways in various states of dress. Their IDs checked, they disappeared with the same speed as the men in the reception area earlier. Once out of the rooms, the workers sat in a communal kitchen, smoking and occasionally chatting. Some looked nervous but most seemed bored or irritated as they presented their IDs to the various officers on demand and were interviewed. Grace looked them over but saw no sign of the exotic workers Doug had described earlier that day. So far everybody was just another citizen.
It wasn’t the look of the brothel-much of which had an air of the suburban, of polyester chic-but its size that interested Grace. Whoever owned it was on to a good thing, and whoever had set it up in the first place had had money to invest. So far, that side of the business had proved to be a maze. Both Orion and the police investigation had identified the owner as a company, Santos Associates. Attempts to track down that company’s office holders had led nowhere. Calls to their phone numbers went unanswered, and when the company’s premises were visited no one was there. The brothel’s accounts were handled by a company called Stamfords, who actually did exist and whose people were being interviewed. They had confirmed one fact: all the money Life’s Pleasures made was
