Chapter 6
“When did you turn into such a nerd?”
Ellie looked up from working on her sister’s couch to see Zara standing barely twenty centimetres away from her, patiently holding out a plate of spaghetti, looking as though she’d been there for some time.
“Oh, shit, sorry,” Ellie apologised and put down her yellow highlighter.
Yellow was for Estella’s confirmed crimes while pink was for suspected.
There was a lot of pink in these pages piled on her lap.
“Thank you for cooking,” she said guiltily.
She was used to being the one to take care of her sister, rather than the other way around.
She’d gotten so absorbed in her work she’d barely noticed the hours — just like the weeks and months — slipping by, almost not even registering that her sister was in the kitchen at all.
“It’s fine,” Zara said. “Just please tell me I’m not going to come home one of these days to find my living room wall is covered in crime scene photos and red strings tacked everywhere. You look deranged right now.”
“I do not—” Ellie started to defend herself.
Then she looked twice at the scene she’d created.
Her sister’s couch was a nest of books and papers, from salacious true crime tell-alls with blood-splattered covers to textbooks penned by forensic psychologists.
There were print-outs of newspaper articles and copies of all the court documents she’d been granted access, capped off by the glory that was The Dossier.
“Okay, I do look nuts, you’re right,” she admitted, gently pushing the folder to the side and gratefully twirling a forkful of homemade spaghetti into her mouth.
“I did a three-year nursing degree and took about a quarter of the notes you’ve made in the last three months,” Zara observed, her brows raised.
“Should we be bragging about that?” Ellie tilted her head. “Lives in your hands, etcetera?”
Zara scoffed. “That ring-binder alone looks like someone’s PhD thesis. Don’t you think that might be overkill?”
“Overkill?” Ellie almost choked on her mouthful. She swallowed, wiping her chin. “Overkill would be how Devo Grant was shot in the head after he was bludgeoned with a bat. The Dossier isn’t overkill; it’s a bible of in-depth research on Estella Grant.”
“The Dossier?” Zara smirked. “You are such a nerd right now. It’s killing me that you’re thirty-one years old and I can’t tease you in front of your high school friends any more. Who were those mean girls you used to hang out with?”
“You hung out with the mean girls?” Arthur had ignored all the talk of murder PhDs in favour of reading a fantasy novel in the corner armchair, while happily shovelling spaghetti into his mouth, but the horror of mean girls made him lift his eyes from the page.
“You weren’t mean were you, Aunty Ellie? ”
“They weren’t mean girls,” Ellie protested. “Becca and Nicola were just—”
“Bullies pretending to be your best friends,” Zara interjected. “Don’t worry kiddo, Aunty Ellie was still sweet as pie in high school. She just refused to see that those girls only liked her because she was pretty, then pushed her around because she was pretty.”
“High school is dumb.” Arthur scrunched up his nose. “Are you sure I need to go for the whole five years?”
“Sure do.” Zara nipped her son’s argument in the bud, giving him a steely gaze until he huffed and picked up his book again. “Alright, explain this dossier to me, like I’m a nurse, not a professor of criminology, or whatever in the name of Meryl Streep is happening over here.”
“Okay.” Ellie shoved in another forkful of spaghetti then pushed her plate aside.
She ignored her sister’s recap of her attraction to mean girls, sitting up straight, and laying her hands on everything she had on Estella Grant.
The Dossier was a soft calf-brown leather folio, that opened out to a full document holder, containing neatly hole-punched papers, separated by an entire rainbow of colour-coded tabs.
She flipped it to the first section, which was a delightfully soft baby-pink.
“The first section is basic biographical data, and what I can find out about Estella’s family of origin, and the events of her childhood. ”
In truth, the baby-pink section was scant.
It held her birth name (Estella Gloria Carletti), her birth date and age (34), and the names of her parents (Floyd and Celestina Carletti.) No siblings.
Birth place: Adelaide, which felt shockingly out of place considering what a Melbourne fixture the adult Estella Grant would become.
Her father was a petty criminal, who’d floated in and out of jail, and her mother had died when Estella was a tender seventeen years old.
No cause of death was recorded in The Dossier, but Ellie was confident her research skills would remedy that soon enough. She flipped on.
“The lilac section is about her marriage to Mike Grant and what’s known about the two of them as a couple,” she continued. “She met him at eighteen and married him at twenty-one.” She glanced up at Zara who scrunched her face up in mild horror.
“Let me guess, older man?”
“Actually no,” Ellie mused. “He was only twenty-two himself. A couple of young, criminal lovebirds. At that point he was just the youngest son of Alan Grant, who’s been building the family name in all the wrong circles for decades.
Mike was one of his dad’s heavies. Floyd — Estella’s dad — was a cousin of the Florellis, ran drugs for them for a bit, but it seems he got the shits with them and somehow ended up working for their rivals, the Grants. ”
“Don’t they hate each other?” Zara started clearing their plates, waving Ellie back when she started to put The Dossier aside to help her. “What’s up with that?”
“Yeah, sworn enemies, murdering each other brutally over turf wars, the usual gang shenanigans. Seems like Floyd made himself useful and became such a stalwart Grant lackey that his own daughter married into the mob. And there we have it; a match made in hell.”
“Any wedding photos?”
Ellie laughed at her sister’s hopeful expression.
“Such a romantic. Nope, nothing I’ve seen in the public record.
The two of them were small fry back then.
Besides, can you imagine the guest list?
Every member of Victoria Police’s gang squad would have been itching to get their hands on half the invitees.
No, that kind of thing would be locked up tight within the mob. ”
“Mob wedding,” Zara contemplated. “Bet her dress was killer.”
“Badum-ching!” Ellie said, but it didn’t feel funny.
“Now, the peach section is about Mike Grant himself. His journey up through the ranks, his time behind bars, his crimes — both convicted and alleged — the murders of both his brother and his brother-in-law and his ascension to the top.” The peach section was epic.
Ellie was still working through all the information she had collated, and that was only from a cursory search of newspaper headlines and available court documents.
“Nice guy.”
“A peach,” she emphasised, quite pleased with herself for her colour coding.
“Okay, so indigo is all about the Hartmann entanglement, what’s known of Estella’s affair with her husband’s lawyer, and his subsequent betrayal of client-legal-privilege to become a police informant on Mike himself.
The fallout of the public enquiry, Mike going free from jail on a murder count… it’s all completely bananas.”
“That’s still the part I don’t understand,” Zara’s voice elevated above the running water in the sink.
“Estella humiliates Mike Grant — a dangerous man by any account — with a public affair with his lawyer, a man who’s deliberately ratting on Mike to get him sent to jail, presumably to keep the lovely Estella to himself. And somehow she stays married to Mike?”
“All’s fair in love and war and a marriage of criminals?” Ellie guessed. “I don’t get it either. Anyway, the buttercup section is about the events back in February. The Grant gang implosion, the murders of five men, including Mike Grant himself, and Estella’s rise to the top.”
“And the fact she still hasn’t been charged with anything — where are we now — six months down the track? Do you think it means she’s a victim too? A plot that took out the love of her life?”
“I honestly don’t know. But my question is, if that’s the case, then why the hell is Estella Grant still standing? Who benefits from her being in charge? At least more than Estella herself?”
“You think she did it. Pulled the strings, at least.”
“Cops can’t prove it,” Ellie said, hedging her bets. “So maybe she didn’t.”
“You want to know though.”
“It’s the crux of her entire character, isn’t it? Is she a psychopath or a victim of circumstance?”
“And you think The Dossier will uncover that, when a whole police taskforce can’t?”
Ellie went still. Zara had, in her usual astute way, cut right through the bullshit.
Ellie could read everything in the entire public record, but it still wouldn’t give her what she wanted.
There was no way she’d get a read on Estella Grant, the woman, not like this. What she needed was to get closer.
A lot closer.