Blood Redemption hag-1

by Alex Palmer

  Stay awake, she told herself, fighting the waves of the drug, stay awake. She had struggled into a half-sitting position when Graeme came back. Gently he pushed her back down onto the pillow.

  ‘You shouldn’t fight it, Lucy. Just go with it, as you sometimes say.

  That was Mrs Lindley. She’s expecting me to dinner, she’s already sent the car to pick me up. It should be here very shortly. I will be back later on tonight because I have a few other things to do as well. I think you’ll sleep through till then. You rest now. You’ve earned it.’

  I’m not going to let you do this to me.

  Just as she slid away she heard a door banging somewhere, a voice calling out. She thought there was something she should recognise about this voice. Then she had the final fleeting perception of Graeme hurriedly leaving the room.

  6

  ‘I’m just a little puzzled, my friend, as to why,’ the preacher was saying with a slightly baffled, slightly anxious smile. ‘Here you are, knocking at my door, the only door that was open to Lucy in the past, yet I don’t recall you ever showing any noticeable concern for her before today. Is there any particular reason why you should come around here looking for her now?’

  Stephen Hurst was surprised to find himself playing mind games with a man he’d thought would be only too happy to help him. When he had first knocked on the door to this office, the preacher had appeared behind him from out of nowhere. He had ushered him in, cleared away the remains of a meal from his desk and then sat Stephen down with a perfunctory smile. Everything about him radiated a tired patience while he generously displayed tolerance towards someone who was wasting his time. He was not someone Stephen would have picked as Lucy’s chosen saviour, even though, from everything she had told him these last few months, this was just who he was.

  ‘No offence,’ Stephen said, mildly enough in his high-pitched, boyish voice, ‘but I don’t see why I have to give you a reason for wanting to talk to my own sister.’

  In reply, the man’s smile was beatific.

  ‘I always care for my flock, Stephen. I have no idea whether she wants to see you or not, and that is a very important consideration for me. Has she been in touch with you lately?’

  Stephen adjusted his round metal-rimmed glasses, watching the man’s face, unable to work out where he was coming from.

  ‘Yes, she has,’ he replied after a short pause. ‘She rang me last week.

  She knows what this is about. From what she said, I thought she’d have told you all about it.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I need to find her,’ Stephen said. ‘She needs to think about coming home for a little bit. I’ve got to talk to her about that.’

  ‘Is that what she wants?’

  ‘Well, I have to ask her.’

  ‘And home is — where?’

  ‘Didn’t she tell you? I would have thought you’d know.’ Stephen saw a slight flush of red cross the preacher’s face.

  ‘I don’t know that I can help you, Stephen, unfortunately,’ he replied, leaning forward. ‘I am sure you know that Lucy lives a very nomadic sort of existence. In my experience, she finds you. Perhaps that’s what she’ll do if she wants to. Find you. Perhaps she’ll call you again.’

  ‘Lucy told me that if I ever needed to find her, this is where I should start looking. She said I just had to ask you and you’d help me out. I can wait around if you like. Just to see if she turns up.’

  The preacher smiled and shook his head. He stood up and walked to the door of his office and opened it.

  ‘I’m afraid not. This is private property. People come here to pray and I can’t have them disturbed. I have to say I’m a little surprised at the way you invaded the place. I didn’t realise the back door was unlocked. You should have rung the front door bell, that’s how most people announce themselves to me. But I’ll show you out the way you came. I don’t want you to get lost.’

  The combination of his smile and gaze compelled Stephen to his feet. At the door, he hesitated.

  ‘No, I’ll wait for her,’ he said, taking courage. ‘She said she’d be here some time and I’ve got the time to wait. I need to find her. I don’t want to just walk away from her. You never know what Lucy’s up to or what’s she’s doing to herself. I’ll wait.’

  To his surprise, the man reached over and took hold of his wrist.

  ‘No, Stephen. I don’t think you should wait. I think you should leave now. As it happens, I have to go out very shortly myself.’

  Stephen tried to pull away but the man had a numbingly tight grip; he was still smiling, as though nothing unusual was happening. Under the man’s gaze, Stephen was trapped in inaction, unable to say something so simple as ‘let me go’. It was either leave now or fight, but he had no energy and no words of protest to help him. He blinked a little behind his glasses and chose to leave.

  ‘Just this way,’ the preacher said.

  He led Stephen through the short hallway to the back door. As soon as they stepped outside, he let him go. Stephen looked at his wrist and saw that it had been squeezed white at the bone. He stared at the preacher in shock.

  ‘You walk uncomfortably, Stephen. You have a limp,’ he said. ‘Why is that?’

  Stephen answered the question, speaking haltingly. ‘It’s my knee, it got smashed up when I was fifteen. I’ve had three operations to fix it.’

  ‘How unfortunate for you. I do sympathise,’ the preacher replied.

  ‘And believe me, Stephen, I understand your misgivings concerning Lucy only too well. I have always had grave concerns for her safety. I know what a troubled young woman she is. She lives on the edge, falls in and out of addiction and puts herself in terrible danger. I fear for her very much and I often wonder what the next phone call is going to tell me. But I cannot be with her twenty-four hours a day. That is for you to do and I am afraid you have let her down very badly there. Perhaps you should go to the police and tell them how afraid you are for her welfare. No one wants the worst to happen. No one wants her to be found one morning lying in a laneway, taken from all of us who care for her because she has overdosed.’

  The preacher’s voice seemed to drop down to a strange mechanical whisper in Stephen’s ear, as quiet as the inner voice of self-doubt.

  Stephen could not reply. The preacher turned and went back into the theatre, locking the door behind him.

  Stephen’s wrist began to ache as the blood flowed back. He stood for a few moments nursing it then walked down the laneway back out to the street. He got into his car and drove to a place where he was certain the doors would be open to him: the Hampshire Hotel on Parramatta Road.

  * * *

  Stephen sat solitary in the saloon bar and, over a beer and a cigarette, tried to weigh up the man he had just met. The preacher had spun his words out well, like a spruiker fronting a sex show, or a used-car salesman or a politician. Just like his father. They all had that same sideways calculating and slightly anxious glance, asking the question, have I got away with it? They all had the gift of the gab, that inviting smile. They got under your skin and, once they had, they took more than they gave.

  Stephen contemplated without joy how he was caught between two of them. On the one hand, there was his father, the local butcher. A successful man with a large and profitable shop and money in the bank, who had always greeted his customers with a grin and a slogan, something picked up from the radio that appealed to him: We’repleased to meet you and we’ve got meat to please you. What can wedo for you today? George Hurst’s patter was all picked up from here and there, scraps of wit glued together, a dazzling patchwork. He made the housewives laugh, and some of his regulars had cried when they heard he had cancer. His father’s days of persuasion were over now, he could not sweet-talk the disease out of his bones as the substance of his body consumed itself.

  And on the other side was the preacher, a man with a cold fish smile who left behind an after-chill which grew stronger the more you thought about
him. Stephen nursed his wrist and wondered: who and what are you? What does Lucy want with you?

  He ground out his cigarette in the ashtray and held up his glass for a refill. The man beside him got up and left the afternoon paper behind on the bar. Stephen took another cigarette, reading the banner headlines and the opening paragraph of the story without moving his head. For a few short seconds, the cigarette hung from his mouth unlit. Then he pulled the newspaper towards him and read it over again.

  When the beer arrived, the barmaid said, ‘That’s such a shocking thing, isn’t it? And just up the road here too. You don’t feel you’re safe any more, do you?’

  ‘No, that’s right, you don’t,’ he replied perfunctorily and lit his cigarette at last, staring across the bar at the music machine in a darkened corner.

  There had to be certain things Lucy could never do, no matter what she had told him during these last few months. Stephen had to believe this, he did not have a choice when the alternative was unthinkable. He preferred things to remain unsaid: he found they were easier to deal with that way, and later he could forget they had ever happened. He thought about the preacher again. Lucy, you get yourself involved with some fucking weirdos. When are you going to realise no one out there is going to give you what you want? The words snapped angrily in his mind.

  He pushed the newspaper away and sipped his second beer. He wanted to be practical, to stop thinking, to find her. To bring her home safely and bury the past with his father’s death, to have it finished with once and for all. To make it something he never had to think about again.

  He finished his beer quickly and stood up to leave.

  7

  ‘Amazing Grace. We don’t get many people like you in here. Come and talk to me. You’re going to like me. I’m a real sensitive New Age guy.’

  Ian Enright, thirty-something and a gym junkie and one of Harrigan’s team, grinned to people around him as he spoke. Grace had just walked into the office and put her bag down on her desk, which was some distance away from his. She saw the small group watching her speculatively and wondered if they were manufacturing gossip, then told herself not to be so thin-skinned.

  Harrigan’s 2IC, Trevor Gabriel, appeared beside them, calling out to the room, ‘Better get a move on, people, it’s show time. It’s on in the big room, not out here.’

  People got to their feet. Grace waved to Trevor across the busy office, a gesture he returned with a smile.

  ‘You know her?’ Ian asked.

  ‘Known her for fucking centuries, mate. She’s an old friend. I was at uni with her once upon a time.’

  ‘Introduce me. I’d like to get friendly with her too.’

  Trevor glanced at him darkly and was already moving away. He joined Grace by her desk, leaving the others to watch and wonder.

  Trev, a substantial man with no neck and shoulders like a wrestler, had black hair shorn to stubble. Known to be gay, he was the subject of occasional to frequent nasty remarks but was too formidable for anyone sensible to bait to his face. No one could credibly spread the rumour that he and Grace were sleeping together, but if they were friends it could be said that she was here only on his recommendation.

  In the rounds of gossip, this particular slant on her arrival had already become currency. There was some slender truth to it. Trevor had suggested Grace as a possible recruit and was her informant about life on the team and Harrigan in particular.

  In the midst of this, Harrigan himself arrived to marshal his team for a recap of the day’s events. He stopped at Grace’s desk to let her know that he intended introducing her to the troops once they were inside the incident room, if that was all right with her.

  ‘Sure,’ she replied with a polite smile, a response the watchers searched for hidden meanings.

  The incident room was the engine room. Everything that was worth watching happened in this ugly elongated piece of open space without windows and where the walls were lined with imitation wood panelling. It was a public place, where people arrived as at a theatre, where accounts of rape, assault and murder were thrashed out in detached detail, and competition and aggression acted out free of charge. People came here to hatch out ideas, discover what they might be asked to do next, or find fodder for something to talk about.

  ‘Okay,’ Harrigan said, calling for quiet. ‘Before we start — most of you have already met Grace Riordan. Grace started here today, I’ve already told her she’s lucky we could turn on something like this for her. We’ve tossed her in the deep end but she’s handled it. And she’s still smiling. You can’t ask for much more than that. Welcome, Grace.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she replied, her clear voice carrying across the room. ‘I’ve got to say that I never once had to wonder what I was going to do next today, which is not something you can complain about. And it’s nice to be here. Thanks for the welcome.’

  There was some laughter and applause.

  ‘That doesn’t change, Grace,’ Ian called out. ‘You never stop working around here.’

  ‘It’s my concern for your welfare, mate. I don’t want you to get bored,’ Harrigan said. ‘We’ll give you a proper welcome with a few ales down at the Maryborough as soon as we can, Grace, but just now we don’t have the time, I’m sorry. We’ve got work to do.’

  With the social niceties out of the way, he looked over a sheaf of photographs which he’d laid down on the metal table in front of him.

  Everyone waited as he gathered his thoughts. He looked up to address the room.

  ‘Something I want you all to remember as soon as you wake up in the morning, as soon as you get in to work every day: we have no time to spare. This job has priority over everything else we do from now on, no matter what it is, and that includes our social lives. We’ve got someone very sick out there on the streets, armed or unarmed we don’t know, and we have to find her. She is not going to walk away from this. I want this girl. I want her as soon as we can get her.

  ‘All right. To start.’ He held up the sheaf of photographs. ‘These were all posted in the Haymarket over the last three months. There’s nothing of much use to us here but they are somewhere to start. This is our girl’s mind at work.’

  He began to pin reproductions of Dr Agnes Liu’s hate mail onto a cork board that covered half the length of the wall. ‘Oh, gross,’ someone called out as the images began to appear. A display of foetuses in miniature white coffins with the phrase ‘Holocaust Victims’ written across them. Dr Liu’s picture covered with a wash of red ink, the words ‘Satanist Mass Murderer STOP NOW’ scrawled across her face. Then ultrasounds and more photographs of aborted foetuses. A text in what appeared to be a child’s handwriting: ‘ So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: forblood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the bloodthat is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it. ’

  ‘How sick is all that?’ someone else said.

  ‘As sick as the mind that went looking for all that,’ responded an older woman with a cracked and broken voice. ‘Someone who likes to occupy themselves with that sort of thing. A really happy mind, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Louise is still sober and it’s after five. What do you know?’ Grace heard someone mutter. Jeffo, the man who had shouted at her in the car park that morning, was standing a little too close to her.

  ‘Women do that sort of thing to themselves?’ he called out loudly then, in her ear, ‘Turns your stomach.’

  Grace did not bite, she was studying the glossy pictures. She recognised one of them, the mildest, the famous photograph of the tiny feet of a foetus between a man’s thumb and forefinger. Eight months ago, a female protester from a ragged group waving placards on the street had pushed it into Grace’s hands as she made her way into a Whole Life Health Centre clinic to have an abortion herself.

  ‘I don’t give a shit what they do, mate,’ Harrigan responded with professional indifference. ‘That’s not our business.’

  ‘They’re fucking asking for troub
le if you ask me,’ Jeffo said.

  No one replied to him. The gibe had changed the atmosphere, there was a creeping sense of tension and anger in the room. Harrigan paused.

  ‘Let’s get something clear right now,’ he said. ‘Point one. Like I just said, I do not give a shit what happens in those clinics. That goes for everyone else in this room. Point two. We’re looking for a murderer.

  That’s all we need to think about. End of story.’

  Grace remembered the woman protester snaring her at the clinic door, ear-bashing her all the way inside until Grace had taken her by the arm and hustled her back out onto the street. There she had flashed her warrant card under the woman’s nose. ‘You see this?’ she had said. ‘Do you want me to arrest you? Do you want to spend the night in the lock-up? Or do you want to get out of here right now?’

  The woman had stared open-mouthed at the card for some moments, before walking away with a strange, almost satisfied expression on her face. When Grace went back inside the clinic, Dr Agnes Liu had come to thank her before showing her into the operating theatre. The woman had been bothering them all week, she told Grace, they were so grateful she had moved her on. All facts that Grace had no intention of ever sharing with anyone in this particular room.

  ‘This is the important bit of mail,’ Harrigan was saying. ‘The doc didn’t get to see this, it was waiting for her this morning at the clinic.

  So we can assume this wasn’t for her; it’s meant for us or whoever else was going to clean things up. I want to know where this photograph came from and I want to know who the woman is. It looks like it’s been taken from off the web somewhere but there’s nothing to locate it for us. Louise is going to track it down if she can.

  If it’s still out there.’

  Those assembled looked on silently at the photograph of a woman lying face down in front of an open doorway, shot dead. The words

  ‘You can run but you can’t hide’ were written across the image.