Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

They waited around a little longer until the door was finally opened to them.

‘I’ve already told him who you are,’ Ria Allard said, as they came inside. ‘You don’t have to bother with that. He knows your names and why you’re here.’

‘We have to tell him anyway, Ria. I’m sure you know that,’

Harrigan replied, smiling in a businesslike way.

Harrigan went through the ritual, giving Grace the opportunity to look the case worker over. Her hair was dyed too black for her ageing face and she had reduced her eyebrows to a thin painted line. Anger was her most obvious quality; she sat beside Greg Smith seething with unspoken rage. The introductions finished, Harrigan sat back a little from the table, leaving it to Grace.

‘Hi, Greg,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘How do you think he is?’ the case worker answered for him.

‘You’ve hauled him in here on some wild pretext, he’s hardly had any breakfast. What do you think he’s feeling like?’

‘Maybe he’d like to tell me that for himself,’ Grace replied with her tough, sweet smile, and then repeated for him, ‘How are you?’

The boy shrugged. He had a long, thin face that was hollowed out from the nose across to the cheekbones and his hair straggled onto his shoulders. He twisted his red beanie in his hands and glanced quickly from one person to the next. The room was lit with bright lights which left no shadows in the corners. Everything in his edgy movements told Grace that the walls were closing in on him.

‘I’m okay,’ he said eventually.

‘I’ll start by asking you about the car, Greg. Okay?’

‘Whatever you want,’ he replied quickly.

In the background, the case worker snorted in contempt.

‘Where did you find it?’

‘It was just on the road. Nowhere.’

‘Nowhere? You can’t remember where it was?’

‘No.’

‘What about the other boy? What can you tell us about him?’

‘He was just there. I don’t know anything about him. I never saw him before.’

The boy gave a loose smile, quick and unconvincing. Grace waited for a moment.

‘Why did you take it down to Macdonaldtown Station to torch it?

Is it because you live near there?’

‘Good place for it,’ he replied, shrugging and trying to grin. ‘That’s all.’

‘In the New Life Ministries refuge,’ Grace continued, ‘just up and over the hill. That’s where your guardian, Preacher Graeme Fredericksen, lives as well. He’s not here today, he’s not answering his phone. Do you know why that is?’

‘Why are you asking him that?’ the case worker asked.

‘Just let him answer, Ria,’ Harrigan said quietly.

‘I don’t know. He’s busy, I guess. I don’t care, I don’t want to fucking see him.’

The boy’s hands were twisting at his beanie and he was shaking.

‘Why not? We’d like to see him if we could find him.’

At this, there was a change in the boy. He became still, glancing from Grace to Harrigan, an indefinable expression on his face.

‘Are you afraid of him, Greg?’ Grace asked.

‘No.’

The word had an echo in the small room. The boy seemed almost to smile as he said it.

‘Did you like living in the refuge?’ Grace asked in the silence.

The case worker stirred a little in her seat but did not intervene. The boy glanced at her sideways.

‘It’s just a place,’ he said, speaking in a flat voice. ‘I’m not going back there again, so what does it fucking matter?’

‘No, you’re not,’ Grace replied, watching his face and trying to pin down whatever he was feeling. ‘Why did you want to torch the car?’

‘I wanted to see it burn.’

‘You like that?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, throwing it back at her, ‘I do. I like seeing that. It makes me feel good.’

‘You like it,’ she said very gently. ‘Do you like being in rooms like this too? Being questioned like this. You like being in Kariong? Does that make you feel good?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, picking at his fingernails, ‘I fucking love it.’

He looked up at her, smiling. She was silent at the sight of the desolation in his face.

‘You don’t have to live like this, Greg,’ she said, leaning towards him.

‘You really don’t.’

‘You say that. And that’s all you fucking know. What’s going to fucking change in my life? Nothing. There’s nowhere I can go where anyone wants me. Except here.’

His body language said that he was worn out. Grace felt a nudge in her feelings, a sudden realisation as she looked at him.

‘Where anyone wants you,’ she said. ‘Does no one want you?’

‘No, they fucking don’t,’ he said quietly.

‘Don’t bully him.’

The case worker interrupted, sounding as if she had just remembered that she should put in her two cents worth. Harrigan almost smiled but did not speak.

‘You would have seen the car burn, Greg,’ Grace continued. ‘There was enough petrol on it. It would have gone up like a Christmas tree.

There would have been nothing left. And maybe nothing left of you, if you’d been standing close enough. You did that because someone does want you.’

The boy looked at her but did not answer.

‘Those clothes in the boot,’ she continued, ‘put them together and you know what you have? A young girl. That’s what those pieces add up to. She wants you. That’s why you wanted those clothes to disappear off the planet. So you could protect her. Where did you find them? Were they already in the car? Or did you put them in the boot so you could burn everything in one go?’

‘They were just there. I never touched them.’

‘So when we check them or the boot or anything about them, will we find your fingerprints? Anything that ties them to you?’

‘It doesn’t matter if you do,’ he replied, quite calm.

‘Why not?’

He shrugged, ever so slightly, looking to the side.

‘Because. It just doesn’t matter. Whatever you say. Nothing matters.’

‘Yes, it does. You matter. And she does. She matters. She matters to you, you matter to her,’ Grace said. ‘She’s smaller than you. Small and thin. Just a little girl. When did you see her last? After yesterday morning?’

He became absolutely still, there was just the soft sound of his breath.

‘She fell. When she was running away. Did you know that? Did she tell you? She landed quite hard,’ Grace said. ‘She landed on her hands and knees. She tore her gloves and she scraped her hands. It must have hurt.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ he said very quietly.

‘She didn’t tell you.’

‘That’s entrapment,’ Ria said, quickly. ‘Don’t you say anything, Greg.’

The boy did not reply to either of them.

‘There’s a lot of blood on those clothes, Greg. I saw the shooting later and that was the first thing I thought. How much blood there was.’

‘So fucking what if there was blood?’

Grace leaned closer to him. She spoke to him directly, cutting everyone else out.

‘This is not something she can walk away from, Greg. This is something that means people come after her until they find her, no matter what. You must know that. Maybe you even told her that -

you can’t walk away from this because it’s going to find you wherever you go. What matters is how you deal with it.’

Again there was silence.

‘Do you want to leave her out there? What do you think might happen to her if you do? Is she going to end up dead?’

The boy leaned forward, pressing his elbows on the table and bracing his fists against his forehead. He looked up at Grace once, his mouth a thin pressed line, and then looked down again. He shook his head from side to side.

‘Just tell me,’ Grace said. ‘Tell me who she is. Just do that and we can put a line under this. You can and she can. Before something does happen to her.’