Blood Redemption hag-1

by Alex Palmer

  Toby closed his eyes, his nurse adjusted his pillows. He was slipping away into unconsciousness.

  ‘I’ll sit with him,’ Masson said.

  ‘Okay,’ Harrigan replied.

  ‘Okay,’ he said again, as he walked down the corridor outside, wrung out. He stopped to stand on the back deck to the building, looking out over Cockatoo Island. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the night air, holding every muscle tensed.

  Alcohol was not allowed on the premises of Cotswold House. Susie, dressed down at the end of the day, provided Harrigan with strong coffee in her office instead. She listened to him, occasionally blinking with tiredness.

  ‘He’s got us all on display, Susie, everyone. Me, Ronnie, Carolyn, all their kids, the whole family. He’s my son, he’s the closest thing to me. To me, this is about as private as it gets, but he’s got me up there on the Net with everyone else.’

  He was referring to what a former long-term lover had once called the Harrigan tribe: his two sisters with their extended and conjoint families, a gathering of people that could, when collected, fill a hall.

  On such occasions, Harrigan spent most of his time avoiding relatives who wanted favours from him. Photographs of them all, Harrigan included, filled Toby’s website. Toby had not told the world that his father was a policeman, it was almost the only detail he had left out.

  Harrigan had refused to let him include it, saying that if he did, he could expect to find abuse, pleas for help, or outrageous flattery in every email he opened.

  ‘He’s not thinking about what it means to you, Paul,’ Susie replied.

  ‘He’s thinking about what it means to him. His body keeps him constrained every second of his life. He’s an adolescent boy. He needs to tell the world who he is.’

  ‘Yeah. And you let him talk to a murderer. And you didn’t even know it.’

  Susie rocked a little in her seat with the force of the accusation, her cheeks tinged with red.

  ‘I can’t stop him talking to people on the Net. I don’t think we should even want to try and do that,’ she said. ‘He never talks to girls anywhere else. He’s a boy. What do you think he’s going to do? And how could anyone have known who this girl was?’

  Harrigan sat with his head in his hands, staring at Susie’s desk.

  ‘He trusted her, you know. Why? Why let someone like that hurt him so much? I — ’

  Harrigan stopped, obliged in common honesty to admit that he was the person who had most hurt his son that night. There was a hint of toughness in Susie’s voice as she replied.

  ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to lock him away so he can’t talk to anyone again?’

  ‘No, of course I’m not. I don’t understand it myself, I like to see who I’m talking to.’

  He knew that not everyone out there wanted to look at his son, that sometimes people turned away at the sight, repulsed. There was silence again. A little of the tension faded from the air.

  ‘Toby is a very strong-willed person, Paul. He’s the strongest person I know. He’ll get through this.’

  ‘Yeah, he will. I know he will. I have to go, Susie. I’ve got to go back to work. I’ve got to tell them about this. I’ll come by tomorrow but I’m not sure when. Whenever I can get the time.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Toby tonight. We’ll look after him, he’ll be fine.

  Good night. Take care.’

  She spoke in her professional voice but still managed to sound as tired as he felt.

  ‘Thanks, Susie. Good night,’ he said.

  Harrigan walked out into the cold night air. His son’s tears and his mucus were streaked down his shirt and jacket. This was love; it was the strangest thing in the world to feel, as fundamental and difficult as it was. He could not imagine existing without his connection to his son.

  How he got through the next few hours he did not quite know. In the Gents, he sponged the stains off his jacket and shirt. Out in the office, he watched himself work, thorough, quietly spoken, controlled.

  Before he left that night, the information had been recorded, the responsibility for its investigation allocated and the team advised. He moved through it all somehow numbed against the pain but knowing that it was there waiting for him as soon as this anaesthetic wore off.

  By the time he reached home, the rain was pouring down; it was a relief to watch the city dissolve in the streaks of water down the windows.

  Tonight, he was exhausted enough to sleep as soon as he lay down.

  In the Temple, the preacher was also at work. He sat at his desk, staring at the telephone, thinking of Lucy, of her particular insolence, considering that it was not a good thing for anyone to be quite so insolent. In the artificial light, he appeared aged beyond recognition.

  In the luxury of solitude, he let all his masks slip.

  ‘Do you think I can’t make you come to me, Lucy?’ he said aloud, with no more emotion than if he was reflecting on the state of the weather. ‘I think you’ll see that I can if I want to. I think you’ll see that it’s really just a matter of timing.’

  Lucy aside, the timing of events had become one of urgency.

  Thinking of this, he made a phone call.

  ‘Yes? Yvonne Lindley speaking.’

  It was an old woman’s voice, creaky and sounding puzzled.

  ‘Yvonne. It’s Graeme. I hope I’m not calling you too late in the evening.’

  ‘No, not at all. I never sleep at night these days. I should have realised it was you, Graeme. For one fleeting moment there I hoped it might have been a son or a daughter of mine but of course it’s not.

  Nice to hear from you all the same. How can I help?’

  ‘It’s refuge business again, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Always a good cause. You know, John would have been very interested in the work you do, he would have seen the value of it.

  What’s the problem?’

  ‘One of my charges, he was out on conditional release. He’s a wild boy and I’m afraid he’s gone and got himself locked up again. Which is a pity because we were making very good progress.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He was caught joyriding in a stolen car. I might add he was a passenger, not the instigator. He foolishly went out with some old acquaintances, one of whom turned up in this car, and they all went for a ride. He’s only fifteen so he certainly wasn’t driving.’

  ‘When you’re young, you’re mad, aren’t you? We certainly used to do things we weren’t supposed to do. We had fun though, John and I.

  Do you know those were his last words to me? It’s been fun, Evie, I’ve had a ball. Fifteen, you say? That’s very young, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. He’s quite young in the head as well, which of course is how he let himself be talked into this in the first place. The thing is, if I had him here at the refuge, I could keep up the good work, but as soon as he’s back in the boys’ home, he’ll just slip into his old ways again.’

  ‘We can’t have that happen, can we? You leave this to me. I think we can get this sorted out without too much fuss.’

  ‘You may find the police are not very keen to cooperate. Their only solution is to lock him away. And what’s worse, Yvonne, and I have to tell you this, they are trying to pin some extraordinary charge on him.

  This is despite the fact that I know he had absolutely nothing to do with these events. They seem convinced that what is pure coincidence is actual guilt.’

  ‘You just leave things to me, Graeme. I’ll take care of this. We’ll show them there’s life in the old girl yet. I’ll make them sit up and take notice. There should be a pen and paper here somewhere — won’t be a moment — ah, here we are. Now, this boy’s name is — what?’

  ‘One that’s very easy to remember, Yvonne. Greg Smith.’

  Patiently he spelled out the details until she had all the information she needed and he was able to hang up, relieved of her presence even at the distance of a telephone call.

  Now that busine
ss was out of the way, he had a task to attend to which he had been avoiding throughout the day. He went up to his bedroom and hesitated for a few moments in the doorway, an expression of aversion on his face. The windows were open and heavy rain had been blown into the room, soaking the floor. This pleased him: the force of the weather had cleared the room of its human odours and any sense of a physical presence. He walked inside and pulled the blankets from his bed, throwing them on the floor. He stripped the bloodstained sheets, the pillow, everything, tied them into a loose bundle and threw them down the stairs. He did not feel quite the same nausea that had gripped him last night when he had walked in here and put his hand onto the sheets when they were still warm and damp with Lucy’s blood. He pulled the mattress from the bed and upended it down the stairs after the bedding. In the pouring rain, he dragged both the mattress and the bedding over the uneven ground to the edge of the demolition site, to a blue industrial waste bin which he knew would be emptied within a few days. He threw the bloodstained items into the bin and slammed the lid closed, a sound that echoed down the empty street.

  He stood in the rain, letting it soak him, relieved that he had managed to do this alone, that he had not had to ask Bronwyn, a woman from his congregation who did his cleaning, to do it for him.

  He walked quickly back to his office, into the tiny kitchen, and dried himself, scrubbing his hands to remove the last touch of any stain. He wondered where he would sleep tonight; he could sleep almost anywhere if necessary. Physical comfort was something for which he had never felt much need. In the end, he decided not to stay in the Temple. It would be too easy for the police to find him here and he wasn’t ready to talk to them quite yet. He needed time to think before Greg was delivered into his care.

  He took the refuge van and went to take shelter with some like-minded people, acquaintances he knew he could rely on. He drove through the empty streets in the rain, his thoughts buzzing with possibilities for the future.

  16

  ‘Is there anyone in this picture that you recognise?’

  Grace and Matthew Liu sat at a white table in the centre of the large room, close to the desk where the nurses came and went. Pale blue curtains surrounded the individual beds of the intensive care ward. Grace spoke quietly, the cushioned floors softened all extraneous sounds. In a glass room at the furthermost end of the ward, Agnes Liu slept on in shadows which had the quality of dark water.

  On a monitor, lighted graphs sketched the pattern of her breathing and her heartbeat in pencil-thin lines.

  ‘Yeah,’ Matthew said, ‘that one. That’s her. For sure.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’ Grace asked.

  Matthew Liu put the photograph back down on the table where it lay under his hands. The fine bones of his fingers splayed over its glossy surface. It was a photograph of a small group of homeless boys in Belmore Park, taken at an angle to increase the sense of distance. One of the boys stood to the side, talking to another figure seen only from the back, the slender female outline of a figure wearing a black jacket and jeans and with short curly hair. She seemed to have her arms folded in front of her, drawing her clothes tightly around the curve of her outline.

  ‘The way she’s holding her shoulders. That’s how she looked when she walked away. She’s like a cut-out in the air. You know who someone is when they do something like that to you. They’re in your head, you can’t get them out.’

  He spoke angrily.

  ‘Okay.’ Grace slipped the photograph back into the file. ‘How are you going today? Do you want me to stay and talk to you, or just stay?

  I’ve got all the time in the world if you want it.’

  He shrugged. He had shaved his thick black hair in deliberate mourning and his cheeks looked hollowed out. He had taken on age, something laid roughcast over his features. He was dressed in worn black clothing. He had not cried once in her presence since she had sat with him in the street the morning that it had happened. He refused to talk, to her, to anyone. Sometimes when she visited, he only wanted her to sit with him in silence while he sat next to his mother, waiting.

  ‘You don’t have to stay, I’m all right. Mum’s not going to die now, you know that. I don’t want to talk. I’m going to go and sit with her.’

  ‘You know where I am if you do want to call me any time.’

  He shook his head and walked away. Everything he did broadcast grief and anger in equal proportions, both immense.

  At the entrance to the ward, Grace found Agnes Liu’s doctor waiting for her.

  ‘Some of your time?’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to let her talk to you. She’s not going to rest easy until she does and I can’t persuade her that it really isn’t wise. I think it’s best to have this done with as soon as we can. I’ll be in touch when I think she’s able to talk for any length of time. Probably tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.’

  ‘If you call me, I can arrange to be here then. Only me?’

  ‘If you do bring anyone else, they’ll have to stay outside. I don’t want two people standing over her. One of you is bad enough. No offence,’

  he added as an afterthought before frowning and walking away.

  Grace left St Vincent’s mired in an old, familiar feeling: stasis, the sense of her heart becoming stagnate, her blood stopped. Numb to the end of each limb, each fingertip, she was gripped by emotional hypothermia. She sat with this weight on her, stranded at the lights on Oxford Street, watching the crowds pass by in the remains of the wet weather. It was her old habit of feeling either too much or too little, when all she wanted was balance. She had thought she was cured.

  She arrived just in time for the morning’s meeting in the incident room, something which usually happened earlier. Today’s meeting had been shifted back and the room was filled with people hanging around, impatient. Harrigan, the buzz went, was trapped in his office, caught up with a telephone call from the Tooth demanding detailed explanations for the funds expended on the investigation and (as he said) the reasons for its lack of progress to date. The case had become stalled in a slow trickle of information, most of it leading them nowhere; they hadn’t even managed to locate the preacher yet, he might as well have evaporated from the city. People said you could almost see Harrigan chafing as he worked.

  Grace waited with everyone else. Carrying Greg Smith’s file under her arm, she slowly walked the length of the Firewall’s turbulent pictures, considering each in turn. The disconnected images unwound like bobbin threads along the corkboard, a glossy snakeskin depicting huge and random destruction. As she moved from sheet to sheet, she asked herself: if this is your game plan, what’s your starting point?

  How do you get there?

  Ian appeared at her elbow, startling her a little.

  ‘What are you going to do for the end of the world, Gracie?’ he said to her, smiling.

  ‘I don’t know. What do you have to do to get to the pearly gates?

  Scrub your teeth with bath cleaner? I’d like to look my best, I guess.’

  ‘You wouldn’t need to do that to look your best,’ he replied. ‘I’d sink a few golden ambers first. There’s no beer in the afterlife.’

  Grace watched over his shoulder as Jeffo slipped another photograph into the array of pictures. Several people standing nearby glanced at it and then at each other, raising their eyebrows. She held her breath. They did not look in her direction and they did not laugh.

  She relaxed and smiled at Ian.

  ‘You don’t know, it could be flowing in the streets up there. It’s got to have something going for it,’ she said.

  ‘I wish,’ he said.

  ‘If you two really want to know,’ Harrigan grumbled, passing them by, ‘why don’t you ask our woman up there on the board. She can tell you. She’s already made it to the afterlife. The only thing flowing for her is her own blood.’

  ‘Good morning to you too,’ Grace said, softly.

  ‘What’s up with him this morning?’ Ian said.

 
They looked at each other, and then at the corkboard. Louise had pinned up a second reproduction of the picture of the unknown woman lying dead across a set of steps with the words ‘You can run but you can’t hide’ scrawled across her. This time, the reproduction came from an Internet news service and carried the headline: AVENGING ANGELS’ DEADLY STRIKE. POLICE FAIL TO MAKE ARREST AFTER

  DOCTOR SHOT BY EXTREME ANTI-ABORTION GROUP.

  Harrigan’s arrival called them all to silence. He settled his papers on the table, taking a few seconds to dispel his irritation. Whenever the Tooth tormented him like this, some other scheme was usually in progress elsewhere, and for Harrigan the true questions were twofold.

  Were all their backs, his included, protected? And where were the real land mines buried? Time was ticking on, like the clock on his murdering girl’s website. Not so many days had passed since he had first located the website but the pressures for a result were growing more intense by the hour. The Firewall was still out there, his superiors were still leaning on him, the politicians were leaning on them, and the media was baying for blood. He glanced briefly at the mosaic of diverse pictures on the corkboard without taking them in. They shone in the reflection of the overhead lights, the images lost in the glitter.

  ‘We know who this is now.’ Louise’s voice was already coarsened by alcohol even though it was only late morning. She was tapping the picture of the dead woman with a slightly shaking hand. ‘Dr Laura Di-Cuollo, obstetrician, Long Beach, California. She was shot dead on her own front doorstep sixteen months ago. That case is still open. The people who shot her call themselves the Avenging Angels. They took this piccie as soon as they’d done it and then they sent it out to every news service that wanted to print it. That’s who they are. They don’t believe in hiding what they do.’

  ‘But our colleagues in the US of A do,’ Harrigan said. ‘We’ve been trying to open up the lines of communication with them on this but all we get is the cold shoulder. They hang up the phone on me as soon as they can; we email or fax them urgently and they lose the message. We’re going to keep trying but we have to chase this our end as well if we’re going to get anywhere with it. So — what we know about our killer.