Blood Redemption hag-1

by Alex Palmer

  The accusation glanced off Harrigan’s hide.

  ‘We’ll check it,’ he said. ‘Did you see anyone else this morning, Matthew? We found some used syringes in the back of the shop and we’re pretty certain there was at least one other person inside at the time. Did you see anyone else near that shop, before or afterwards?’

  ‘I’ve seen smackheads come out of there sometimes. I know it gets used for that, but I didn’t see anyone today other than her.’

  The words sounded strange in his mouth, Grace thought, his nerve was about to break. There was a brief silence.

  ‘Are you going to find her? You said you would.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Harrigan replied.

  ‘Because she’s a coward and she’s a cold-blooded murderer and you’ve got to find her and put her away, you know, for ever.’

  As he spoke, his grandmother leaned forward with her eyes closed, then sat upright again, appearing to force herself to listen. Grace’s miniature cassette player, balanced on the low table, kept on recording.

  ‘We’ll find her.’ Harrigan sounded disinterested. ‘I don’t want people like her out on the streets. I want her in a cell where she belongs for a good long time.’ He paused. ‘I’ve got some people outside who are going to stay with you both for a while. If you want anything, you just ask them for it. That’s what they’re here for. Do you want to get changed now, Matthew? Your grandmother brought these clothes in for you. You should get out of what you’re wearing.’

  ‘I’m not going to do that. You see this?’ The boy let go of Grace’s hand and held out his arms where the blood had dried to fine caked dark crimson dust on his school blazer. ‘This is real. This is what happened. I’m not going to change.’

  ‘That’s not going to make any difference for you, Matthew,’

  Harrigan said quietly. ‘It’s better if you clean away what you can. Why don’t you let me and your grandmother give you a hand?’

  There was a change of quality in the atmosphere; Grace felt a sense of the boy taking on an imposed restraint. He sat still for a few moments and then shrugged his acquiescence. She said her goodbyes to him, which he received with a confused vagueness, and waited outside while he changed. A little later, Mrs Tsang appeared in the corridor with Harrigan.

  ‘I’ll give you these now, Mrs Tsang. I think you’ll want them,’ he said and reaching into his inside jacket pocket handed the elderly woman a plastic bag with the dead man’s effects: a gold watch, a tiepin, a wallet and a wedding ring.

  ‘My husband gave Henry that watch. When he and Agnes were married,’ she said in an ordinary voice, taking the package from him.

  Harrigan was guiding her gently back into the room as she spoke.

  ‘Don’t forget you can call me. Any time. Any of the numbers on my card.’

  Grace, watching the waiting room door close on both Matthew and Mrs Tsang, allowed herself to breathe.

  ‘Is that what he told you?’

  They were on their way out to his car. She had stopped outside the hospital entrance to put on her coat against the wind, and stood in the wintry weather feeling stretched and dirty. Just then she would have paid good money for a cigarette but she had none with her, a self-imposed self-denial she was regretting badly. She frowned as she replied.

  ‘Yeah, pretty much. He made a lot more sense that time around, he really lost it in the ambulance. Anyway, I’ve got it all on the tape. Both times.’

  ‘Good for you, Grace.’

  Neutrality gone, he snapped his reply at her. Grace felt the expression on her face harden as she looked at him and did not reply.

  What do you want me to do? Cry for Matthew? I can do that if you want but what’s the point? He was watching her.

  ‘You’ve cleaned your coat up,’ he said.

  She touched the still warm and damp black wool and felt a shift in her workaday realities. All the usual boundaries had been negated by a single morning’s work.

  ‘The hospital did that for me. It was nice of them to take the trouble.’

  ‘Yeah, it was, wasn’t it? Okay, we can’t hang around here having a good time all day, we’ve got places to go. You drive, I hear?’

  He was looking at her speculatively with the ghost of a grin.

  ‘Of course I drive.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard on the grapevine you were pretty speedy. You can drive me in that case.’ He tossed her the car keys and she caught them one-handed with a perfect cricketer’s catch. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  She almost said that the grapevine was more speedy than she could hope to be. That morning, early, Grace had slipped her much loved car, her 1971 red Datsun 240Z, her stylish piece of retro culture on wheels, into a vacant parking space, zipping in ahead of a clapped-out Ford Cortina. The driver, a man of about fortyish or so with pronounced veins on his forehead and eyes popping with anger, had leaned out of his window and yelled at her that this was his spot, he always parked there, get out of it. Other spaces were vacant nearby and her stubbornness came up like a wall. ‘Too late,’ she’d said to him with her sweetest smile as she got out of her car and walked away.

  That was Jeffo, someone had told her later, he was on the team with her. He’s nasty, you watch out for him.

  ‘I don’t care at all. Where to?’ she replied honestly, with edge, tossing back some irritation of her own.

  ‘The morgue. You know where that is? McMichael’s managed to fit the professor in sooner rather than later. He’s put some poor electrocuted woman and her broken-hearted husband on hold just for us. So let’s feel privileged. You ready to go?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘A girl,’ he said as she pulled out into the traffic. ‘Little. Not old. Not much to know about someone who just shot both your parents in a back alley in Chippendale, is it? Why would she do something like that?’

  ‘Obsession?’ Grace replied, startled by the question and uncertain whether or not an answer was wanted from her. ‘If you go after someone like that, you usually have to be obsessed with them in some way. It sounded to me like she had tunnel vision. She didn’t even see Matthew until he was right there in front of her. I don’t think she even twigged who he was.’

  ‘I think that’s spot on, Gracie. I don’t think she saw anything at all except what was at the other end of that gun. When we find her, we’ll ask her, won’t we? I’ll sit on one side of the table and she’ll sit on the other and she won’t tell me anything that makes any sense of this at all. We’ll all just wonder why.’

  He sat with his mobile phone in his hand, tapping it as he spoke, a strained, absorbed expression on his face. Grace looked at him sideways, surprised by what he had said. He didn’t fit her preconception of the ferociously ambitious workaholic she had been warned to expect. She had thought he would be ragged and frenetic.

  Instead, his movements were unhurried and his expression was mainly indifferent. He was younger than she had expected and he had the kind of appearance an advertising agency might use to sell any make-believe Australian product from insecticide to financial services. The hair was receding a little at the temples, and there were suggestions of fatigue around the grey eyes. These and the possibility of a little too much preoccupation adding fault lines to his longish face were blemishes a marketing manager might balk at. But the clothes fitted. Suit, tie, colour, style, he must have spent time in front of the mirror adjusting them to be just right. It was a presentation for climbing ladders, a working disguise, you couldn’t know what he was. She smiled faintly to herself. Are you a liar? And if you’re not, then who are you? These were her first unspoken questions whenever she met anyone. He was watching her as she stopped at a set of traffic lights. Stop looking at me, she said to him in her mind, I get tired of being looked at.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to make some phone calls. I’m not trying to be impolite.’

  ‘There is just one thing,’ she said. ‘Do you mind not calling me Gracie? Thanks.’

  Grace was not g
oing to be Gracie to someone she had met for the first time that morning and who went by the title of her boss. Harrigan looked at her in some surprise.

  ‘I don’t care. Whatever you want. Do you mind if I get on with it?’

  He gestured to his phone.

  ‘Go for it,’ she said very quietly, looking ahead.

  I don’t care either, pretend I’m not here. I’m the greenhorn, I’ll just drive the car. I need my thoughts to myself for a little while anyway.

  She needed this stretch of time to push out of her head, or at least appease, her visions of the last few hours, among them Matthew Liu locked into a tight, dry-eyed knot on his chair in a hospital waiting room. She had thought she was ready for this kind of extremity, had dusted off her rhino hide to take on this kind of violence. To face it and deal with it. She put this mantra on with her make-up every day together with all the other pieces of her armour. This morning, the sight of blood slicked on a city road had left a more poisonous aftershock than she had been prepared for. She thought of her coat, tossed carelessly onto the back seat of the car, remembering the touch of warm dampness where the stains had been cleaned away from the lapel, before focusing solely on the drive ahead.

  2

  The garage doors slid shut with the crash of sheet metal echoing into an empty space. Lucy Hurst listened as their reverberations stilled in an intensified silence. Around her, from the transom windows set up high in the brick walls, intermittent sunlight streaked dusty diamond shapes across the pearl-grey shadows. The thinned-out light touched on the stained concrete floor, the white Mazda she had parked in the centre of the deserted garage, and was then reflected as an oily, metallic brilliance as it passed over a deep trench of water near the car.

  Rain, seeping in under the wide metal doors, had flowed down the ramp to fill the garage pit over time. Lucy stopped beside the trench, calming her breathing.

  As she stood there, the key to the garage doors slipped unhindered, almost unnoticed, from her hand and fell into the black water. The silence deepened as the barely perceptible sound of the splash faded.

  She stared down into the pit, watching as the obscure reflection of her own face was broken apart by the spreading concentric circles of water. Her breathing slowed as time stopped. The noise of distant traffic on Anzac Parade, several streets away, existed in another world.

  She listened, waiting. Under the continuous rumbling of the trucks and buses grinding their way through the city’s external arteries, she heard another sound, a soft, pervasive sound, the faint calling voices of young children crying. It silenced every vibration, every other sound.

  She answered their crying in the silence of her own thoughts. I’m listening to you. Listen to me back. Listen to this. Listen to it. In her memory, the roar of the shots she had fired faded into stillness.

  Now, in this drab place, even the shadows became comforting to her. She felt them fold about her as peaceably as a blanket, not necessarily soft or warm, but giving succour in the absence of any other shelter. She could breathe in the quiet, even with the smell of the dust and diesel. She felt an easing of her constrictions, the bindings which were usually pulled tight like a length of swaddling cloth or a shroud around her chest began to loosen and unwind. Briefly, she felt a sense of lightness new to her, a cleanness, the feeling that her body had dissolved.

  Lucy drew in breath the way thirsty people drink water and walked towards the back of the garage. Here, a set of temporary offices had once been fashioned out of partitions made from grey painted wood and frosted glass. She went into one of these small rooms and turned on the bare light bulb. Opposite she saw a face in the pock-marked mirror above a washbasin, the likeness of some other unknown girl staring at her with fierce eyes. There were dark streaks on her forehead, across her eyebrows and into the line of her hair. Lucy brushed her fingers across her own forehead, watching as the reflection did likewise, and felt those dried, crumbling ridges in wonderment. She remembered, the flash of an achromatic image, her recall reducing blood to the texture of oil. The man’s ruined face, his blood instantaneously on her face and clothes, touching her with the same sensation as warm viscous water. With a broken fingernail, she scratched at the dust this blood had become and stared at herself.

  She was uncertain how long it was before she went to the basin and turned on the tap. Her hands hurt as she did so, both were grazed, she did not know how this had happened. Cold, rusty water came pouring out; she bent her head underneath the icy flow and let it wash the thin streaks of blood into the iron-coloured stream. In the mirror, water dripped from a face white as a carving out of bone.

  I don’t have a gun any more. Her thought was loud in the silence.

  Something essential to her was missing. She remembered. She had hurt her hands when she lost the gun; she had tripped on her way back to her car, landing heavily and tearing her cheap gloves. The gun had slipped out of her hand and skidded out of reach across the lane, the metal sparking on the rough bitumen, and she had not stopped to pick it up. It was there still, waiting for someone else to find it. She closed her eyes at the realisation and expunged all thoughts from her mind.

  She pushed her short wet reddish-brown hair back from her high forehead and turned away. She had things to do, things she had to do.

  She sat on her crumpled sleeping bag on a pallet on the floor and changed her clothes, stripping away the outward signs of the shooting, leaving blood-stained shoes, torn jeans, her jacket in a crumpled heap on the floor, emerging in clean clothes to display a small body that possessed an elastic thinness. Work. She focused on this single word and looked at the table, where a stolen slimline notebook computer, with means to connect to the Internet through a mobile telephone, waited to be used. This was what she had come here to do: not to hide but to work. Things which were unfinished had to be cleaned up, closed off.

  She sat down in front of the computer, hesitated and then hit the space bar. At the touch of a few keys, bright expensive software danced across the screen and Lucy began to re-energise her virtual world. She was travelling inwards, to a place of her own making, whose existence and shape, even the trajectory by which she reached it, had been fabricated by her alone. Light from the screen’s radiance played on her face as she opened up onto the screen her kaleidoscope of moving shapes and colours. This world absorbed her, its geography was her visionary endgame. She had created it, building up its structures, moving the pieces about in patterned strategies whose outcomes she had known from the beginning.

  At its heart was the foundation image, the centre onto which she had grafted all her other images of expanding complexity. Lucy had half believed that by some strange transference of events, Dr Liu might have been erased from the website as she, Lucy, had erased her from life that morning. Instead, the doctor remained where Lucy had placed her from the beginning, lying in a replica of the street she had lain in that morning in Chippendale, shot dead. In this familiar screen image, the buildings around the prone woman were burning and the street was littered with debris from a shattered landscape, everything shining with the green-ant glow of nuclear poison.

  There were images missing from this crossover world, unforeseen events which Lucy had encountered in the actual world less than an hour ago. Events which she needed to build into her website to allow her electronic vision to replicate actuality, to ease the memory by binding them into a pictogram. The man with the ruined face also lying dead beside the woman on the roadway, and a boy, staring at her from a distance close enough for her to touch him. As she drew on this memory it took control of her, flooding her thoughts. Her hands on the keyboard became weighted, frozen in action.

  She had intended to kill the woman. She had not thought she would ever have to use the gun on anyone else, she did not remember how she had. No one else was supposed to be there. The sound of the first shot had deafened her and she was caught in an airlock, breathless and vacant with the shock, staring at the red stain soaking into the woman’s blue jacket.
Then the man was there in front of her without warning, so close that he was almost in her face. As she stared at him, his face was suddenly and almost immediately unmade. She did not remember feeling the recoil of the gun.

  She dropped a curtain in her mind over the memory. With a jerky, clumsy movement, she hit the close button and watched her other world fold back into its icon on the screen, collapsing inwards like a magician’s stream of silk scarves. Its absence left behind a clear blue light which shone out of the computer like a benediction.

  Lucy dived into the light, out onto the web, desperate.

  Turtle, it’s the Firewall. Are you out there? If you are, please talk to me, I need to talk turtle with you if you’re there. Please say you are.

  I’m here like I’m always here Firewall Wotzup??? Early 4u For some few moments, Lucy did not type anything.

  Firewall????

  I did it.

  U did wot???!!! Firewall u are joking U must beNo, I’m not.

  U have 2 tell me u did not U are lying 2 me!

  No, I did.

  I don’t believe u. It’s not possible U couldn’t do that I did. Surf in and find out if you don’t believe me because it’s probably on the web by now. But I did it. In Chippendale, just like I said I would. And if you don’t believe me, I can tell you things about it they probably won’t want to tell you. But I did do it.

  I don’t get u. Why?????

  I’ve already told you why. You don’t have to ask me that.

  I don’t mean all that wild stuff u talk all the time I mean why? 4 real Someone had to do it. That was me. It isn’t any more complicated than that.

  Bullshit!!! I know u I know wots in your head ok??? U didn’t have2 do this No way did u have 2 do this

  Lucy sat staring at her keyboard, rubbing her forehead hard with her hands before typing again.

  You say that but it’s not true. It was something I had to do. All last night, I was here in my sleeping bag and I saw it so clearly in my mind. You know better than anyone what it’s like to see things so clearly in your head like that. It was like that woman was standing in front of me in this blue light and I saw her for what she was. She was evil. I knew what I had to do. Your head takes you everywhere. But I can move, I can walk, and that means I have to do things. I have to go out into the world and I have to do things. I had to do what I did.