Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ she said, once the gun was empty. ‘I don’t like hurting people.’

‘You won’t be hurting anyone,’ he replied. ‘She’ll feel nothing at all, there will be none of the pain she has inflicted on you. You will be cutting a thread, it will be clean and merciful. Blood will wash away blood. You will be left clean. When it’s over you will feel nothing except the most blessed relief. The voices of your children will be silent for ever. They, and you, will be at peace.’

She held the gun, unable to prevent herself from feeling a faint emotional rush at possessing it, a sense of swelling that she had somehow grown stronger.

‘It’s empty again,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘So I can’t use it on myself then?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Please don’t do that, Lucy,’ he said in his softest voice, smiling at her. ‘I care about you. Please don’t do that to me.’

On the park bench beside the pools of cold water, Lucy’s thoughts momentarily gained clarity. No, that would have spoiled everything, wouldn’t it? That would have put the kybosh on everything.

The quiet was shaken by a blast from the horn of a truck rumbling past University Hall. The noise shattered the glass shell containing Lucy and her thoughts. She got to her feet and hoisted her backpack on her shoulders, turning her back against the chill wind.

I’ve used that gun now, Graeme, just like you showed me. Now I’m going to come and talk to you about it, and maybe you can tell me for a second time why I did it.

She walked across the park towards City Road and King Street, a small figure overshadowed by the university buildings crowded onto the perimeter of the parklands. Unnoticed by almost everyone.

There were certain things Grace knew she could never do. The sectioning of the dead was one of them, even though the postmortems she had attended were always such matter of fact events. It was only this remaking of dissection as an everyday occurrence which made it bearable for her. Today, that this was just regular, paid work for them all, had the opposite effect, she did not know why.

She watched the attendant wheel Henry Liu to the stainless-steel table then saw him jerk his thumb at the corpse and ask it to get up on the table now if it didn’t mind, mate, because they were all in a hurry.

Grace felt the joke was on her. She glanced at Harrigan beside her but did not see a flicker of reaction in his face. How did he do it?

The pathologist appeared, Kenneth McMichael, shambling angel of death, a massive man in his surgical gown. Dressed and groomed by St Vinnie’s, his coke bottle glasses were flecked with flakes of dandruff from his oily black hair. He leaned over the corpse and took its head in his huge, dexterous hands, turning it this way and that as he studied the wound, as delicately as if he were holding a child.

‘Now,’ he said, and the word was almost a sigh, ‘this is not something you’d be expecting when you got out of bed this morning.

Are we dealing with a regular firearm here?’ His voice was soft and dry like the crunch of fine sand.

‘No, we’re not, Ken,’ Harrigan replied matter of factly. ‘This is very much a one-off. Specially modified to do the maximum amount of damage close up.’

‘You can put it down as succeeding in that case,’ the pathologist said, with a slightly ironic raising of his eyebrows. ‘All right. Let’s start.’

Harrigan’s expression did not change but Grace was surprised to notice him suppress a recoil to this comment.

On the steel table, technicians stripped the body of its clothes, peeling it to indiscriminate nakedness before charting its fragile geography by x-ray.

‘He’s not going out dancing tonight,’ one said, removing the shirt.

‘Not without a makeover,’ the other replied.

The pathologist grinned as they spoke and briefly hummed cha-cha-cha . With gentle finesse, he welcomed his subject into its permanent silence by sectioning it down to piecework, his soft voice speaking his findings into a cassette recorder. As Henry Liu’s body was opened out into its layered complexity, Grace smelled a pervasive odour she had never noticed so vividly before: old blood. It stank, there was no other word for it. She stepped back, giddy on her feet, swallowing. Briefly she thought she would faint.

‘Are you all right? Leave if you have to,’ Harrigan said.

‘No, I’m okay. I’ll stay.’

‘Is your companion feeling this, Harrigan?’

McMichael was looking at her, unsmiling, for some reason angered.

She shook her head.

‘Yes, you are,’ he said. ‘Now why is that? You could even say this is beautiful.’

He gestured to the open cavity of skull on the table in front of them, where the interior bloomed pink and grey into the open air. The attendants were also watching her.

‘He was murdered,’ she replied. ‘People do feel for the dead.’

‘Do they?’ he asked and leaned on the table, supporting himself with both hands. He smiled at her. ‘Autopsy. From the Greek. Auto , self. Optes , witness. Navel-gazing in other words.’ He straightened up and gestured to the corpse with his large hands. ‘This is all of us, madam. Remember that, because you’ll be here soon enough. You are looking at yourself, that’s what’s bothering you.’

Grace felt another sickness at the memory of events that might well have placed her here on a table like this, but which, in their final washup, had not. She was alive and standing, but she was also cold to the bone in this steel and tile room where the living mixed with the dead. She stared back at the pathologist: And what would you know about people who can still breathe?

‘Ken, we’re not in one of your lectures now. Give my officer a break, thanks,’ Harrigan interrupted testily. ‘Let’s move on. We’ve only got so much time.’

The pathologist smiled as he went back to work in silence. Grace stood still. When McMichael and his assistants were finished, the dead man lay naked on the table, his palms upwards, his eyes still open and staring at the ceiling. What had to be presented to the living had been stitched back together with an easy skill. He had become a figure which, other than to be disposed of, was finished with in every sense. Grace could not make any of the usual connections. If these pieces were not living now, how had they ever been alive? Why couldn’t Henry Liu get up, get dressed and walk away? Briefly, the fact of death did not make sense to her, she could not understand it.

‘We’re finished,’ McMichael said. ‘Something you can tell your lady friend, Harrigan. We don’t do anything wonderful like getting people back on their feet again. Sorry to disappoint her.’

Harrigan was unruffled. ‘Thanks, Ken. I’ll need your report ASAP, you know that. I’ll be waiting on it.’

‘I’ll see you outside,’ Grace said.

She was gone so quickly she left Harrigan slightly confused. He followed her out into the hallway and found himself in the less than congenial position of loitering outside the door to the women’s toilet.

He stopped a female technician in the corridor.

‘I think my officer is in there and she’s probably feeling a little light on her feet. Could you check for me if she’s okay? Tell her I’ve gone to the cafe to get something to eat. She can catch up with me there when she feels up to it.’

‘I can do that,’ the woman replied, smiling sympathetically.

Grace was holding onto the white porcelain basin for support and looking into the mirror when the technician opened the door and asked her if she was all right.

‘Yes,’ she replied, trying to smile but otherwise unable to move. ‘I’m just redoing my face, that’s all.’