Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

In reply, she smiled at him and said nothing. He seemed to be speaking to her in a less detached and more personal way than was usual for him in her brief experience. Even so, she thought it would be a mistake to see this concern as any particular compliment to her. Her information said that ambition drove his interest in other people’s welfare. He was known for caring how well his people coped with their work because he wanted outcomes, bottom lines accounted for to those he had to answer to. Grace surmised that his advice was just an expression of his famed ‘team approach’, summed up as mutual survival, a way of keeping all their heads above water. She was happy to keep everything businesslike. It made life so much easier.

As Grace drove them down Parramatta Road, Paul Harrigan remembered. Or, more accurately, could not stop himself remembering. A hot summer night, twenty-one years ago. A small room with walls painted a dull green and splashed with blood. Bright dark hair (just like his hair), matted and straggling onto the linoleum.

In the fluorescent light, how bright that blood was, how liquid, how shining and iridescent, like smudges of engine oil. (You think these things when you’re eighteen and you’ve never seen anyone dead before.) He could not see his mother’s face, she lay staring at the skirting board. In the dull light, his father had turned around, still holding the.38 Smith amp; Wesson revolver. Paul had walked into the room and turned his mother over to look into her face. In the present, he closed his eyes again. For whatever reason, at the trial the jury had accepted his father’s plea of an accidental killing. Standing in the dock after the verdict, Jim Harrigan had said in a clear, if shaking voice, ‘I never meant to kill Helen. I wish I was dead along with her.’

No, father mine, it wasn’t going to happen like that. I made sure you got to live with that memory for the rest of your life. The way I still do. That was the point.

Harrigan drew in his breath too sharply and noticed Grace glance at him curiously. He came back to the world, clearing away his thoughts, that memory. He didn’t want to start another day this way again in a hurry. The events he encountered as part of his job didn’t usually trouble him like this. He watched and dealt with them as objectively as McMichael dissected his subjects, with a meticulous, almost gentle and uninvolved touch. His approach was like his careful dressing every morning, matching the right colour shirt with the right cut suit, dabbing on the Givenchy aftershave lotion, making sure the exterior he presented to the world was faultless. It was nothing essential to himself, just something to keep out the daily dirt. Today the boy’s shock had been too close to the bone. Harrigan’s careful separations were contaminated, by the dead man’s face painting itself in reverse onto his blue handkerchief (burned to ashes, he hoped, in some incinerator in the morgue) and the streaks of blood down his newest recruit’s black coat. As the car came to a smooth halt at a set of lights, he said to himself, as he’d thought at the time: We’ll find this person, Matthew, this girl, whatever she is. I will get her. Whatever it takes, I will get her. I will see her locked away for as long as I can.

‘Once you’ve dropped me off at this press conference, Grace, take the car and get over to the hospital again. See if you can find out how the doc’s going, and check up on Matthew as well. He felt safe with you. I’d like you to keep an eye on him over the next few weeks. See if you can help him stay with it.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Poor kid. Having to live with seeing that for the rest of his life.’

Her words matched the anger he felt within himself. Often anger just left him drained, but today it’d had a nice clean feel to it. In his own territory, almost under his eyes, someone had blown away two people going about their daily business and left it to him to pick up the pieces.

He could see it as an insult to himself as much as anything else if he chose to, an affront to the order he liked to see kept out there. He remembered his own advice to his recruit: see it that way and it can’t hurt you.

The lights changed, the traffic moved. He looked sideways at Grace; as she glanced around to check the blind spot, he studied the scar down her neck. A neat scar and a neat cut. Put there, in his opinion, by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. A millimetre to the right and she wouldn’t have been driving this or any other car right now. Why would anyone want to do that to her? You have a lovely face, he thought. Not many people who come knocking on my door look anything like you. So why are you bothering with this shit job? You could do anything you wanted. And why do you bother with all that paint? How long did it take her to put it on in the morning? Her hair was braided back from her face, her white make-up picking out its shape like some finely made china mask. Her eyes were dark brown, the eyebrows equally dark, a little thicker than they should have been, her mouth dark red with lipstick. He’d watched her back in the cafe as she ashed her cigarette and noticed that she hadn’t left a mark on the filter or on the rim of her coffee cup. He disliked the imprint of a woman’s lip on leftover butts or china, the sight of it left him with a sense of sleaziness he could not shake off. No, she needed a little less paint and some more hair, something to give her face some softness, to make it something you’d want to touch. Everything about her now prickled with ‘Don’t touch me’. It was a pity.

He wanted to talk to her but could think of nothing vaguely sensible to say. Instead, he turned his gaze out at the city streets. He knew these streets, this drive downtown, as well as he knew anything, just as he knew the shoreline of the harbour from the Coat Hanger through to Iron Cove. Old industrial landscapes, superimposed on the ancient yellow ochre foreshores of a drowned river, which were changing even as he watched them. He had grown up at the heart of them, on the Balmain peninsula, with a view of the White Bay power station, close to the container wharves and the White Bay Hotel on the crest of the hill, overlooking the timber yards and the wharves and the curve of Victoria Road with its unbroken traffic. The streets around his home were crowded with old pubs, thin, narrow terraces on high foundations, irregular wooden houses and rows of identical single-storey cottages. On certain days in those treeless streets, the sun had cast a wrung-out yellow light, thin and brittle as a light bulb. When he was a child, this washed-out emptiness had left him with a sense of bleak contentment. He had felt secure near the shadow of the bulk of the power station and its rusted conveyer belts, whether it was outlined against a hot summer sky or, in weather like today’s, standing desolate in the grey rain.

He no longer lived in that part of the peninsula and Balmain had changed. Houses had been bought up, renovated and had become expensive. The patina of how things used to be had been polished away or covered with the unfamiliar shininess of fresh paint. A matching change and demolition had occurred in the city, in ways which gave familiar landmarks — such as the clock tower at Central Station, which they now passed, and the ugly chiselled colonnade on Eddy Avenue -

the status of what was left behind. He often mused that the fate of the city’s landscape was not unlike that of many of the people he had met in his sixteen years on the job. They had either been tarted up out of recognition or had rotted away to ruin; or were dead and buried under the concrete foundations of the office towers and apartment buildings which had sprouted across the surrounding streets.

Occasionally, he liked to think of himself as a survivor from another time but he knew this was hardly true. He had changed as the times and the places around him had changed. He had dressed himself up as well. Promotions he once would never have expected to achieve had become possible these last few years, and he had gone after them, hungrily, successfully. Somehow he had hung around long enough to climb ladders, to have the prospect of further promotion. He had acquired influence and he liked it, he liked using it, it was a nice change. It was a consolation prize, something to make up the balance, an antidote to his occasional black moods, like the one today.