Blood Redemption hag-1

by Alex Palmer

  She’s armed and dangerous. She’s prepared to use her gun again. She’s unpredictable. She’s “stuck back home” wherever that is. What we don’t know. Is our girl one of these Avenging Angels, so-called? People involved with this kind of organisation are inclined to firebomb clinics as well as shooting the staff. There are five Whole Life Health Centre clinics in the Sydney metropolitan area. I am trying to get a watch on them all but Marvin…’ Harrigan paused, weighing his words ‘… is still considering the options, so he’s told me. He’ll let me know once he’s checked over our budget. So consider this in your deliberations: are we dealing with a single killer? Or a member of an organisation which has its own resources to draw on, possibly from more than one country?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell us that yourself, mate? Maybe your boy knows.

  Why don’t you ask him instead of us?’ Jeffo muttered poisonously.

  How far the words were intended to carry, Grace could not be sure.

  She was standing in the orbit of his voice and several other people close to her had smiled. Jeffo was giving voice to certain exclusions that had rankled badly with some. Toby Harrigan’s relationship with the Firewall, all that side of the investigation, had been siphoned off to a small team working to Louise, with instructions to talk to no one other than Harrigan concerning anything they found. Grace had heard the sour rumblings of gossip. How the boss was favouring a burnt-out alcoholic, compromising the possibility of their results. A whispered heresy — ‘Harrigan’s losing it, he should take himself off the job’ -

  had started to do the rounds.

  ‘I’m going to ask each of you to exercise your mind on those questions,’ Harrigan said, looking around at them all, speaking with an acerbic edge that implied he had picked up on the undercurrents.

  ‘Every one of you, because there are no answers yet and it’s time we had some. But right now we’ve got a picture of her, Grace tells me.

  Why don’t you show us?’

  ‘A picture of sorts,’ Grace replied, taking the photograph out of her file and walking forward. ‘This came out of Greg Smith’s file at Juvenile Justice. It’s a magazine photograph published about a year ago when someone was doing an expose on what happens to state wards. It’s too bad their research didn’t go much past this picture.’

  There was limited space left on the board, occupied as it was by the Firewall’s website. Searching for room, Grace found herself looking at Toby Harrigan in his wheelchair, the photograph that welcomed viewers once they had surfed into his website. No other pictures of Harrigan’s son had made it to the board, he had not allowed it. His son existed there only as part of the Firewall’s ferocious world.

  Harrigan, standing close by, saw it at the same moment that she did.

  They glanced at each other but neither reacted. Harrigan, turning, searched through the assembled team until he located Jeffo and eyeballed him. The man looked away at once.

  ‘Matthew Liu is certain this is her. He was sure from the moment I showed it to him and I believe him,’ Grace said, taking the only available space, next to Harrigan’s son. ‘She’s the right height, 156

  centimetres. Tiny, in other words. She’s thin and she could get into the clothes the shooter wore. You put her beside the website and there are similarities with the Firewall as well. It’s not much to go on, but it is something to connect her to Greg Smith.’

  ‘That’s useful, isn’t it?’ Jeffo said, this time meaning to be heard.

  ‘We can all go round checking the backs of people’s heads.’

  There was some laughter. Grace did not waste her time even glancing in Jeffo’s direction.

  ‘I look forward to you doing better, mate,’ Harrigan snapped, with just enough venom to make sure everyone knew what his feelings towards Jeffo were. He spoke to Trevor, ‘It’s enough for a description.

  Get it written up and get it circulated, the photo as well. Yeah, what is it, Dea?’

  His administrative assistant, a small and tough-looking woman with dyed blonde hair, had appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Marvin’s on the phone again,’ she announced.

  Oh joy, Harrigan thought irritably. He nodded to Trevor to take over and left the room. Trevor was cynically cheerful as he handed out the jobs for the day.

  ‘You finally get to go and chat up young Greggie this arvo, Gracie.

  The shrink says it’s okay. They’re expecting you at three thirty,’ he said to her. ‘Tough luck, mate. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.’

  ‘I’ll cope,’ she said, faking a blithe indifference.

  Dirty jobs done dirt cheap a speciality, Trev, Grace improvised from a well-known song, reflecting on her present conditions of employment.

  It surprised Grace to find that Toby Harrigan was still on the board when she came in after a brief lunch, presumably because Harrigan had been locked in his office since the meeting, kept there by constant demands from the Tooth. She looked at the boy and thought that he had Harrigan’s face, twenty or so years back. Harrigan was not the only one with someone he loved in a wheelchair, she had someone there herself. Someone who was both a one-time lover and a friend, who found himself confined to the same means of transportation by fate, bad luck, call it what you like, a disease in the genes he had grown into without knowing it. Grace thought of the clock running backwards for her friend as his nerve strings were cut one by one, bringing him to a common meeting point with Harrigan’s son.

  At the age of not quite thirty, Grace had acquired a lasting sense of uncertainty, she lived every day with the anticipation of insecurity. At any time, something might happen that would blow you out of the water and you would never know it. In her imaginings, the Bondi Pavilion could easily have doubled as the deserted cantina from some spaghetti western where the roofs were open to the skies, drifts of sand massed in the corners of deserted rooms and bird shit painted the walls. One day, those same white walls might crumble into the sea, leaving behind broken archways in silhouette against a hot blue Sydney sky. Wistful dreams compared to the visions on the Firewall’s website, imaginings of annihilation which reduced Grace’s own to a production which (she had to admit) was strictly amateur night.

  She stopped to look at the Firewall and Toby Harrigan in their imagined embrace in the hallway of what looked like a prison, a space which gave the impression of airlessness. Briefly, she touched the two figures. You can’t see her but you love her. She knows who you are and she loves you. You’re both down there together in her eyes. That’s why she wants to get you to your feet and save you. Save you and save herself.

  ‘Who do you love?’ Grace sang softly to herself.

  ‘Are you curious about my boy, Grace? Do you want to know something about him? I can give you all the textbooks you like. They have open days where he lives if you’re interested. Come along and have a look one day, you don’t have to be shy.’

  Harrigan appeared beside her and removed the photograph of his son from the board, sliding it into a folder.

  ‘No, that’s not why I’m here,’ she said at once. ‘I came in here to think, it’s the only place where it’s quiet enough to. He looks like you, that’s all that was in my head.’

  He shrugged, apparently embarrassed by what he had said. There were lines of strain around his eyes.

  ‘Yeah, you could say that. Same face if you like. Poor kid.’

  He spoke more quietly.

  ‘I was really thinking about her,’ she said, changing the subject, glancing at the anonymous figure in the photograph. ‘I’m trying to work her out. She didn’t go out looking for blood. She wasn’t doing it for kicks.’

  ‘I almost wish she had been, I’d find her easier to understand. I don’t cotton on to killing people for fantasies like this.’

  ‘This is so extreme, I almost don’t know where to start with it,’

  Grace said, glancing along the board. ‘You look at it and there are no holds barred at all. Where do you have to come from to
see the world this way?’

  ‘Nowhere we want to go. I don’t care what makes her what she is, Grace. I want her off the streets before she does something to someone else. You put a gun in the hands of someone who thinks like this and they will use it, it goes with the territory. Why are you asking yourself that question?’

  ‘It’s one way of getting her off the streets, isn’t it? Working out who she is, what she might do next.’

  He glanced along the corkboard. ‘You look at this and you say to yourself, this is who she is,’ he said. ‘And the answer is, so what? Some people have no problem killing, they like to do it for fun or profit.

  Other people do it because they’re away with the pixies. We know that. The rest is just work.’

  ‘Don’t we have to out-think them?’ Grace replied, looking at the slender and unknown girl in the photograph talking to Greg Smith.

  ‘Isn’t that the point? Apart from anything you might feel for the people they’ve damaged. Doesn’t that make you want to ask those questions?’

  She said this last not as an argument, but as an expression of something felt.

  ‘Yeah, the people involved do matter,’ he said. ‘As it happens, Grace, I ask myself those questions all the time. I read all the books as well. Every time a new one comes out, I get hold of it and I think, maybe this one is going to tell me something. What I’m saying is, I don’t see that it amounts to very much in the end to know what makes her what she is. It won’t be a blinding insight into anything.’

  Unconsciously, Grace flicked a stray strand of her long brown hair back from her face, an unexpectedly elegant gesture to Harrigan’s observation.

  ‘You have to be one step ahead of them whatever you do,’ she said, unwillingly seeing in her mind the man who had raped her and whose body was still imprinted on her own however much she wanted to scour it away. ‘People can play all kinds of games with you at a distance. You can’t let them do that.’

  Harrigan, looking at her, did not reply for a few moments.

  ‘That’s a good way of seeing things if you want to do this job,’ he said. ‘Are you taking that picture with you when you go to see that boy?’

  They both glanced at the photograph taken in Belmore Park.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got it already. I’d better go, it’ll take me a while to get there.’

  ‘Why don’t you come and see me when you get back? I’d like to hear what he’s got to say before you write it up. And don’t forget to ring me if you get any spectacular information.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  She smiled at him and left the room. He walked out after her. Come and see me and then we’ll go out and eat together somewhere. No, let’s not do that, that really will give everyone something to talk about.

  There were enough whispers doing the rounds at the moment without adding something like that to them.

  At that moment, Harrigan was called back into his office to take yet another phone call from the Tooth’s personal assistant, a woman who possessed the perfect up-your-arse voice, demanding yet more information on what they’d spent, what they’d achieved. Trapped at his desk, he watched Grace readying to leave. She wouldn’t want to spend her time with him anyway. Would she? As the idiot woman rabbited on in his ear, he watched Grace walk out of the office — a nice light movement, full of ease — and wondered.

  As soon as Harrigan had escaped from his telephone call, he quietly shredded the photograph of his son. Jeffo was going to regret his little joke. All the signs were there: Harrigan was being undermined from both the outside and the inside, and if he wanted to survive he’d have to watch every step he took. It was the worst possible time to think of something so scandalous and stupidly suicidal as sleeping with his most junior officer. He had much better keep his eye focused on things that were likely to have more reliable benefits. Such as hanging onto his career and making sure that too many knives didn’t go thud between his shoulderblades.

  Out on the road, Grace drove nimbly through the traffic, pleased with her freedom. She sang to herself as she drove, hits on the airwaves and remnants from songs she had sung during her own short career. She felt restless, something which usually ended in her dusting off her shiny clothes and high-heeled shoes and going out to party. She was good at living it up, Sydney people generally were, they knew how to party. There was Bondi with its tarted-up strip on the edge of the beach and the shining sea, and the city itself, bright in a sunlight with an ancient, hard clarity to it. It was a city lazy in the sun, casual and brash with its eye on the good times, thorough in the execution of its corruption, the way it went about everything that mattered. She never wanted to live anywhere else.

  She overtook the slower cars on the expressway, approaching the river, speeding down the descent towards Brooklyn and the Hawkesbury River Bridge. Almost fourteen years ago she had travelled this same distance in the reverse direction, at that time by train, leaving home to work in the city, with a sense of freedom she had never again felt with such intensity. The railway line had twisted (still did) along the backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, past disused oyster beds and decaying blue and green fibro houses isolated in the midst of the eucalyptus forest on the water’s edge. The train had picked up speed as it climbed through the tunnels approaching the river crossing and had then come roaring out of the dark onto the bridge. She had felt that the sky had opened out around her, that she was flying. To the east of the railway she had seen the grey pylons of the old bridge, the green river between the tree-covered hills as it flowed to the sea, and the town on the south bank beneath her, a pastiche of white buildings and red roofs, with cars glinting in the sunlight. In the mid afternoon on a working day, as she crossed by the road bridge, racing a commuter train in the distance and beginning her ascent towards the Central Coast, the river was still a boundary line.

  Travelling across it had always had a peculiar bitter-sweetness for her.

  Today, she felt a shiver of anticipation, of energy, down her spine.

  This energy lasted as long as it took her to reach Kariong, to be shown into the office and meet a man who wanted to spend as little time as possible speaking to her. Sooner than expected, she was back out in the car park ringing the boss.

  ‘Harrigan.’

  ‘It’s Grace here.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some not very good information. I’m at Kariong but Greg Smith isn’t. He’s been bailed.’

  ‘You’re joking. Who bailed him? When?’

  ‘Preacher Graeme Fredericksen. He bailed Greg from the Children’s Court at Parramatta early this afternoon while I was still on my way up here.’

  ‘He’s finally surfaced, has he? So why didn’t anyone tell us? Why weren’t we involved in this?’

  ‘They don’t seem to want to include us in this at all. They didn’t get any warning themselves, or so they’re telling me. Two departmental officers arrived in a government car at lunch time and picked him up.

  The paperwork came down from the department with some very senior signatures on it.’

  ‘Is he with the preacher now? Have they gone back to his refuge or whatever it is?’

  ‘That’s who Greg left the court with. But I can’t reach anyone at the refuge and I can’t raise the preacher. No matter what number you ring, you only get through to the voice mail. They’re shut down to the world. I can tell you they left the court in the refuge van at about 2:45, but that’s all the information I’ve got.’

  ‘Get back in here as soon as you can. I’ll take it from here.’

  It had been a pointless journey. Driving back out onto the expressway Grace looked down the Gosford road, thinking of home, knowing it was just a short drive to her father’s house at Point Frederick on the Broadwater and wondering what he was doing now. He could be in his study, caught up in his work, writing research papers and speeches, or standing in his back garden on the edge of the water, wondering why things had worked out the way they had. She had
n’t the time to go and see him now, however much she might want to. She had work to do.

  Grace sped up over Mooney-Mooney Bridge, heading back to the city. From about fourteen onwards, she could have found herself in a stolen car being driven too fast along this same freeway; the pleasure she had taken in the speed was with her as she drove now. Back then, the acceleration had been in her own head, she had wanted to get inside the sense of the speed itself, to let go completely, shouting at the driver (some other kid, completely spooked by her) go faster, let’s smash through something. They never had smashed anything — their car or another or the sandstone embankment — all they had done was to come very close. She had to admit it, she had wanted to save that lost boy’s life. Now all she could do was draw the line Harrigan had talked about.

  When she reached the office, neither the preacher nor the boy had been found and every available person was out searching for them. She stopped in the doorway to Harrigan’s office, hesitating. He was on the phone and gestured to her to wait. As he hung up, he looked at her expectantly.

  ‘I’ve got the paperwork from Kariong for you if you want to see it,’

  she said, feeling cold as she spoke. ‘It looks like they used the psychiatric assessment as a lever to get him out.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He was distant, unreadable. ‘Leave it with me, would you, Grace? I don’t have time to talk now. Okay?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  She went back to her desk, hiding behind her make-up and scrubbing out a sharply felt disappointment.

  Not long after, Louise knocked discreetly on Harrigan’s door and put a message on his desk. It was the transcript of an email they had retrieved from the trash file on Toby’s computer.

  Firewall, u have 2 be so careful now, the police know about yourweb site and they are watching everything u say and do. U rememberI love u, Firewall, love u always.

  Harrigan nodded as he read it.

  ‘Keep me posted,’ he said, and buried his head in his paperwork, working at a murderous pace, driving all other thoughts out of his head.