Blood Redemption hag-1

by Alex Palmer

  No

  Do you know what they’re saying about me in the paper? That I’m a really cruel person. I like killing people. I like seeing blood. They had this poll — they asked people what they thought should happen to me and all these people said they thought I ought to be shot too.

  Every day I think about what I did. I didn’t do it for fun. I did it because I had to. Is that what your father thinks I am?

  There was a brief hesitation.

  Yes he does but I told him no I said u are not like that I said hemustn’t see u like that

  What difference does that make? You’ve been telling me one thing, and maybe you’ve been telling him something else as well, and all the time you’ve got some other reason for what you’re saying to both of us.

  U have 2 listen I care about u I don’t talk 2 anyone else the way Italk 2 u U don’t have a choice Firewall U have nowhere 2 go That’sthe only reason I said u should go 2 the police Because if u don’t Idon’t know wots going 2 happen 2 u If u do this my dad can help u Ican make him help u

  No. Where I go and what I do, that’s my choice. And if I end up dead, so what? No one’s going to care. You’re deciding things for me and you can’t do that.

  Wot do u want??

  Nothing that’s possible, but that doesn’t matter. I wanted to say goodbye, that’s all.

  U never listen U never listen 2 anyone

  I almost listened to you. But you were lying to me.

  She was gone, closing down, logging out. She was floating in space, there was nothing to anchor her, only the next step, the next action.

  She picked up the phone and rang Graeme. As she did, she thought that he had no power over her any more, the next action was just whatever game the two of them were playing at the time. He answered his phone almost immediately.

  ‘Hi, Graeme,’ she said. ‘Are you okay to talk?’

  ‘Lucy. Yes, I am. Where have you been? You’ve kept me waiting.

  I’ve been here with Greg for hours.’

  ‘We’re all waiting for something. Last time I talked to you, you were waiting for the end of the world, weren’t you? How are you?’

  ‘I am fine, Lucy. I am very well indeed and I’m very glad to hear you are in such good spirits. I’ve got someone here you want to talk to. Just as you’ve asked.’

  There was shuffling as the phone was passed over.

  ‘Hi, Luce.’

  ‘Hi there, Greg. How are you?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yeah, I am, Luce,’ he said. ‘It’s sort of okay at the moment.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why not? You said it was sort of okay.’

  ‘Yeah. But only sort of. I’ve got to go now.’

  ‘No. I — ’

  The preacher came back on. Lucy listened to his voice with irritation. ‘It’s time we got together,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got a car but there’s a couple of things I’ve got to do here. Tomorrow at the latest. Tomorrow night. Okay?’

  ‘Why do we have to wait till then?’

  ‘Because I have things I’ve got to do here, Graeme. And they’re important.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘I’ll just be there, Graeme. From about ten. You can come by whenever you want to. But we’ll all be there, the three of us, won’t we?’

  ‘Of course. We have an arrangement then?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she replied impatiently. ‘You want to put Greg back on again?’

  ‘All right,’ he replied, after a pause.

  ‘Before you go,’ she said, ‘like I told you, don’t ring me. I’ll call you.’

  There was no need for this. She just wanted to make him dance a little.

  ‘As you wish,’ he said.

  ‘I just wanted to say we’ll see each other,’ she said, once Greg was back.

  ‘Yeah, we will sometime, Luce. Look — you make sure you’re okay, all right. And don’t worry about me. Because everything’s going to be all right. You just remember that. You don’t think about me any more.

  You’ve just got to think about yourself,’ he replied, and then the phone went dead.

  Lucy went out into the fresh air again, to a clearer if colder day than yesterday. This time she did not take her gun with her, she left it behind, pleased not to feel its pressure against her skin. The doctor had gone, ages ago probably. She stood on the edge of the slope looking down to the escarpment. The dog was not in her kennel, although the remains of some bones were scattered by her dish. No one had replaced the chain. Wherever she was, Dora was living in freedom.

  Stephen appeared, coasting the old Datsun he had promised her down the driveway, parking it behind his car. He got out and walked towards her. He stopped at a short distance.

  ‘I got you a full tank, Luce,’ he said. ‘Do you want some money as well? I can give you a few hundred dollars if you need it.’

  ‘Yeah, if you could,’ she replied. ‘How’s Dad?’

  ‘The quack’s given him a shot so he’ll be out to it for quite a while.

  Mel said she’d give you a call when he wakes up but that could be pretty late tonight. You might not be able to talk to him until tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll just wait. I’ve got the time.’

  Because this is the endpoint, this will be goodbye for ever. It was the last piece of time left to her.

  She watched him walk into the house. It seemed to crowd forward to the edge of the slope, a squat red-brick dwelling. Her choice would have been to burn it, not to paint it over. When she left here this time, she would not be able to come back. She accepted this as final before she turned to walk back inside and go up to her room. It was growing late in the afternoon but perhaps it would be as much as another day before she could leave. I’m waiting for you again, Dad. It’s what I always seem to do.

  20

  Ashort time after the Firewall had stopped talking to Turtle, Louise placed a transcript of their conversation on Harrigan’s desk. He read it over and said he would keep it. Once Louise had left, he rang Susie and asked her how Toby was.

  ‘Tim’s with him at the moment,’ she said, ‘I’ll check.’

  Eventually she was back on the line.

  ‘He’s okay, Paul. He is upset but he doesn’t want to talk to anyone about it.’

  ‘I’m coming over to see him now,’ he said.

  ‘No, don’t.’ She spoke quickly. ‘He said you would do that and he doesn’t want you to. I have to tell you that.’

  There was a brief silence in which Harrigan did not trust himself to reply.

  ‘Paul — if you can just accept this. We can look after him from our end. He’s not going into spasm or anything like that. But he needs his own space. You have to give him his space.’

  ‘You tell him from me, I’ll be there tomorrow morning no matter what. Unless he wants to get in touch with me beforehand and ask me to come earlier. But I’ll be there tomorrow regardless.’

  ‘I’ll tell him that, that’s not a problem.’

  ‘Good.’

  He hung up and sat reading over the transcript.

  I am not my father. Did I ever say you were, Toby? I’ve only ever wanted you to be yourself. I must have told you that.

  The only cure for this investigation was to pass it to someone else

  — which he would not do because there was no one he trusted — or to solve it as soon as he could. In his experience, the emotions were usually deadened by fatigue, and constant work almost always resulted in lasting fatigue. On this thought he went back to work, reviewing, checking, reporting, requesting follow-ups, driving his team the way he drove himself.

  He was relieved when the phone call from the hospital came through to Grace later that afternoon. She appeared in his doorway to say that she was on her way and they went in their separate cars. Out on the streets, peak hour was in full flow, the traffic edged along.
The Firewall’s website had infected him, it muscled in on his sensibilities at the end of the day. He had the sense that the roads were crowded with people fleeing the city. He joined in with them, feeling as much at a loose end as anyone else.

  At St Vincent’s, the bright corridors and the murmur of noise gave some sense of activity to this end-of-world feel on a chill winter’s day.

  Grace was waiting for him. When Harrigan appeared, she thought the lights had over-painted his face with a sheen curiously like the stage make-up she used to wear. Why not? To her observation, he spent a fair amount of his time performing for others. Together they went upstairs to the intensive care ward, where Matthew was waiting for them in the ante-chamber.

  Harrigan, seeing him for the first time since the shooting, took in the shorn hair and the black mourning.

  ‘Hello, Matthew. How are you?’ he said.

  ‘You said you’d catch her,’ Matthew replied, his arms folded.

  ‘We will. That’s a promise.’

  ‘You haven’t yet. But if you don’t, I will. And then she’ll pay, she’ll really pay. That’s a real promise, that’s not just a wank.’

  ‘You won’t have to do that because we will find her. But right now we’re here to see your mother. Every bit helps. Every step’s a step along the way.’ Harrigan had no other reply.

  ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t have the nerve to tell people that sort of shit. I’d be too fucking embarrassed,’ Matthew said, and walked away.

  Harrigan watched him go, expressionless.

  ‘Bear with me while I remember your reports,’ he said to Grace. ‘Is he like that towards you?’

  ‘He’s not that aggressive with me but it’s the same thing. He lashes out at everyone and he won’t let anyone reach him. He can’t last, one day he has to break.’

  Harrigan thought that when that happened he did not want to see it.

  In the glass room, Dr Agnes Liu lay in her high hospital bed on a mass of pillows which her nurse was rearranging carefully.

  ‘Whatever Agnes thinks,’ her doctor was saying to Grace, ‘she’s not up to any marathon sessions. If I have to, I’m going to close it down.

  I’m warning you in advance.’

  ‘I’ll take it very gently,’ she replied.

  Harrigan stood a little out of range of Agnes Liu’s vision, waiting and watching.

  Inside the room the nurse nodded to Grace and then sat to the side.

  A human odour, of injury and sickness, and another, of antiseptic, filled the room. Grace sat beside Agnes Liu, the speaker to her miniature cassette recorder affixed to her lapel.

  ‘How are you, Agnes?’ she said.

  ‘I think that everybody worries too much,’ the woman replied. ‘But I’m not used to being the patient.’

  She took Grace’s hand as she spoke and Grace leaned forward.

  Shock had worn Agnes Liu’s face, a fine mix of Anglo-Australian and Chinese descent, to its constitutive bones. She was in her early forties.

  Her eyes were dark, her skin ivory-pale. Her black hair had been lately washed and brushed out to display silver-grey lights curling back from her forehead.

  ‘Where’s Matthew? He’s very angry with me for talking to you. I told him it has to be done.’

  ‘He’s outside. I spoke to him just now.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s all right. He’s coping. He’s a very strong boy.’

  Agnes spoke each phrase as something short and measured, the careful apportioning of a limited strength. ‘Yes, he is. But he doesn’t know how to hide things yet. You have to realise, I was taught never to let inconvenience make me lose my composure. My mother met my father at university. She fell in love and they married. In 1955. She was eighteen. It was a scandal, her family didn’t speak to her again for decades. My grandmother, my father’s mother, she was as bad. She refused to welcome her. We always had to keep up appearances no matter how we felt. Matthew doesn’t know how to do that yet. When I’m better, I’ll talk to him.’

  She stopped.

  ‘Do you know what I remember most about the morning I was shot? That girl. How we looked at each other. I turned and she was there on the street. Just there. Just in front of me. With a gun. I remember thinking, oh, that’s so small. And I looked at her. We were looking each other in the eyes. And I knew she was going to kill me. I knew it so naturally. Oh, here’s someone for an appointment, I thought it like that. I was looking her in the eyes when she fired. I thought, I know you.

  ‘I’ve been lying here thinking it over ever since. Thinking, how can you know who someone is when all you can see of them is their eyes?

  But I remembered other things as well and I thought, yes, it’s her. About four months ago, someone called. My home number. I don’t give that to anyone. None of us do. But this person had it. She said, do you know who I am? I said, no. How could I? She was just a voice. She said, I am the butcher’s daughter. Did I remember now? No, I didn’t, not then. She said I was a murderer and one day I would die for what I had done. She was crying. I hung up at once. We got a new phone number. I put it out of my mind. I have to put that sort of thing out of my mind.’

  She paused, everything became still.

  ‘I can’t remember every detail. There are gaps. But I can remember this. One day — when Matthew was nine, I think, around then — one very hot day, I remember everyone saying how hot it was. The air conditioning could barely cope. This woman brought her daughter into one of the clinics. It was late morning. They didn’t have an appointment. This child, she looked so ill, and so young. I said I would see her right away. And then she miscarried, almost immediately, right there in the reception. There was so much blood, I … There were women there, they had brought their children in for check-ups, older women, they saw it all. We called an ambulance. I said to this woman

  — do you want to drive your own car? Or do you want to go in the ambulance? They didn’t have a car. They’d come by train, and bus.

  Some extraordinary distance. I said to this woman, I don’t know how your daughter survived the trip. Couldn’t you see how sick she was?

  Why did you come here? It’s so far away. Someone told me about you, she said. I didn’t know what else to do. But if the only way to get to hospital was to go in the ambulance, then she would go in the ambulance. We were all shocked. She was so unmoved. In the end one of my staff drove her. I thought, that poor child.’

  Again there was a pause. Grace glanced up at the nurse.

  ‘I want to keep talking,’ Agnes Liu said, and they waited.

  ‘Agnes,’ Grace spoke quietly, ‘can you remember where they lived?

  Just the suburb?’

  ‘I’ve tried to but I can’t — I have a blank.’

  ‘The clinic?’

  ‘No. I travel, you see. I go from clinic to clinic. I want to make sure things are being done in the right way. I can’t picture where I was. I know these things happened but I can’t picture any of it.’

  Include five possibilities out of five clinics, Harrigan thought, standing outside.

  ‘I rang the hospital that evening to see how she was. She was already home, they said. Her father had come to get her. I was furious with them. I said, she needed care. Oh, they were so busy. There was no staff, no one had realised. They had no address for her. Or not one that made any sense. There was nothing I could do. But I was distressed. I thought, why was any of that necessary? Then one day -

  quite a few months later, I’m not sure how long — this woman, she came to the clinic again. They had an appointment with me but I didn’t know the name. I think it was a different name, I can’t remember what it was. She wanted to see me.

  ‘I spoke to her in my office. The first thing she said was, we have a car this time. I didn’t quite know what to say. Her daughter was pregnant again, she said. She wanted an abortion, she was waiting outside in the car now. Would I do it? I was flabbergasted. I said, why have you come to see me again? Oh, she
said, I didn’t know where else to go. I said, what does your daughter want? Oh, this is what she wants. And then the woman said — I didn’t know if she was being deliberately stupid — my daughter’s uncontrollable. My husband wants her to go on the pill so this doesn’t happen again. He doesn’t like it.

  ‘There are times when I’m talking to people, when I’m watching their faces. I looked at this woman and I wondered, is this stupidity or cunning? I don’t know. But it’s evil, whatever it is. I said I wasn’t prepared to do that. Her daughter was young, I think she was only fifteen. It’s not good to go on the pill at that age. I asked her to bring the girl in. I spoke to her privately, I insisted. I asked her about her boyfriend. She gaped at me. I asked her about her father. She didn’t seem to know what I meant. She said he was a butcher. Yes, I thought.

  I asked was this what she wanted? She said, yes. What else could she say? The mother was waiting outside my office. And she looked at me.

  I can only say I knew — I was certain from the look on her face — that this child’s father was the father of her child. I thought, yes, this is cunning. You want to implicate me. This is your way of shifting the blame. If I know, it’s not your fault, is it? It’s mine. I felt ill.

  ‘What should I have done? Call the police? Throw them out? I thought, I have an obligation. I have to protect this child from injury.

  I can perform this abortion and then I know it will be done properly, not some bungled thing. I wouldn’t have trusted the woman not to do something dreadful. I said to her that I needed family details, would she fill out a form? She did. I performed the abortion. And when it was over, the child began to cry. I thought she would never stop. I didn’t wait. I went and I called the police. But when I was on the phone, I saw the woman dragging her daughter out of the recovery room. I didn’t know what to do.

  ‘I put the phone down and I went after them. Out to the car park.

  I stopped them leaving. The girl was in the back seat, curled up. Still crying, I think. The car door was locked. I said to the woman through the window, she can’t have sexual relations with anyone for at least a fortnight. They had to know that. It was all I could do for the girl. This woman just drove away. She almost knocked me down. I rang the police. Then I found out from them — every detail this woman had given me was false. Of course. I was so naive to think otherwise. I still don’t know if I did the right thing.’ She stopped, closing her eyes. ‘I think, that girl crying in the back seat — was she someone who hated me for what I did? I don’t know.’