Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘That boy’s on the edge. He’s not going to talk to me if I don’t get down there with him.’

He looked past her to the crowd behind her.

‘That’s what you have to learn, Grace. To make him open up without doing that. Because you’ve got no business getting down there with him. You don’t take on what other people bring into the interview room. That’s the road to hell. You don’t go where they are.

What you do is draw a line.’

‘Maybe it’s not like that for me,’ she replied. ‘Maybe I am just talking to people one on one, without taking it on the way you say I am. I can do that without it hurting me, I can meet them there. Maybe that’s a difference between us.’

He looked down into his drink, smiling in an odd way.

‘Do you know you get to people? You’re good at it. I think that every time I see you talk to someone. You let that woman bait you today and then five minutes later you got right back into her.’

Without even trying, you can pick on all the right nerve points just like you know exactly where they are, he could have said to her. You must have x-ray vision.

‘People say I get to them,’ she replied, shaking her head and moving her plait of thick brown hair from one shoulder to the other. ‘I don’t try to do it.’

‘You don’t have to. I’ve got a son, you know,’ he said suddenly,

‘there’s only me to look after him, his mother dumped him. He’s got cerebral palsy. Can’t walk, can’t talk. He’s got a really good mind but he’s stuck in a wheelchair. He will be all his life. He just wants to live.

You have that kid there, and even with everything that’s against him, he could still do something with his life. He just wants to throw it away. I don’t like seeing people dead, Grace. But some people — you can’t save them, they don’t want to be saved. If you go after them, they just want to take you with them. That kid is one of them, he doesn’t want to be saved. He told you that too.’

‘I heard him say that. I don’t like throwing people away. I get stubborn.’

She was embarrassed by his confidence, moved by his description of his son. She threw her cigarette butt into a nearby ashtray. Harrigan put his empty glass on a table.

‘I didn’t know any of that about your son,’ she said, feeling that she owed Harrigan this courtesy at the least. ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to find anything out. I don’t do that.’

‘I didn’t think you were. I don’t usually talk about it. No one talks about it,’ he replied, looking past her, avoiding her gaze. They might have thought, mutually, that it was the sole thing not discussed exhaustively by the team.

‘Well, I won’t say anything to anyone,’ she said quickly, wanting to move on. ‘So — are you in this job to draw that line? Is that what you do every day?’

‘Me?’ It was unusual to find himself on the other end of the question. He grinned. ‘No, I’m here because I couldn’t think of anything else to do with my life. I needed a job to support my son and this was the only thing I thought I could stick at for more than a fortnight. Sixteen years later I’m still here.’

It was the truth as far as it went, a diversionary tactic rather than a lie. His presence here was the result of a half-formed thought brought into being by his father’s irritated gibe one night in the kitchen: ‘Why don’t you be a fucking walloper? You’re always telling people what to do.’ Not long afterwards, a serving policeman, an old mate of his father’s, had called him with an offer.

‘It’s chance sometimes, isn’t it,’ Grace replied. ‘You never know where your life is going to take you.’

He smiled in agreement; she smiled back in the same way.

‘You are stubborn,’ he said quietly. ‘What are you really trying to do here?’

‘I’m brave and foolish,’ she said, sending herself up. ‘I’m trying to make a difference.’

‘You did make a difference today. You’re the only one here who could have talked to that boy and got anything out of him except four-letter words.’

She shrugged and smiled again. ‘Thanks for saying it.’

They found themselves looking at each other in silence, both searching for something else to say. Grace felt the kick inside, the unexpected jag of attraction, and wished she hadn’t; it was the last thing she needed just now.

‘You’re on the TV, Boss. You too, Gracie,’ Ian called out.

They turned and separated by an unspoken agreement, and then gathered around the bar with everyone else. The barman turned up the sound on the early evening news. The team watched Matthew Liu, flanked by both Harrigan and Grace, make a plea for anyone to come forward with any information that would help them find the girl who had shot both his parents.

‘You are so photogenic, Gracie. They’re going to like that up top,’

Trevor said, smiling at her indulgently as the clip ended.

Grace thought she might say that it was just the bad lighting and then decided to leave it where it was.

‘Okay, folks, I think that’s it,’ Harrigan called out, breaking up the party. ‘Back to it.’ He ignored the groans as he led the way back to work.

Back at the office, he found that the time out had not refreshed any of them; there was a sense of languor throughout the room. Harrigan glanced at Grace as she worked her way through Greg Smith’s files, considering her scruples as he did so. He thought about his own son.

He felt the compulsion to go and see him and make sure that he was safe. The office was acquiring an unusual sense of enclosure, he wasn’t sure he could breathe in here for much longer. He reached for the phone to call Cotswold House, but did not pick up the handset.

Finally, when the day shift was going home and the graveyard shift was settling in, he got to his feet and went in search of Trevor.

‘I’m taking an hour, Trev,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m going to see my boy.

I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

‘Okay, Boss. I’ll call you if anything happens.’

Harrigan collected his jacket and found himself at the lift at the same time as Grace. Caught a little awkwardly, he stopped and let her get in first.

‘Did you see that?’ Ian asked. ‘Are they going out together somewhere?’

‘He likes her and she likes him,’ Louise said, breathing out gin. ‘All they did in the pub for an hour was talk to each other.’

‘Gracie’s going home, people,’ Trevor announced. ‘I told her to piss off because she’s done everything she can today. And he’s going to see his boy. He told me so in case I need to know where to find him. He’s coming back.’

‘You want to make a bet?’ Jeffo was grinning. He too was heading for the door. ‘How much time do you waste on a spastic kid? She’d know where her bread is buttered. Fifty bucks says he gets it into her.’

Ian and Louise turned away as he spoke.

‘Jesus, mate,’ Trevor said, riled. ‘You know sweet fuck-all about her and you say that. Why don’t you keep your dirty mouth shut for once?’

Trev might divert the talk to other subjects but he knew that no matter what he tried to say now, there was no hope for it. Soon the gossip would be away in a pack with the dogs.

Down in the car park, Harrigan glanced around to see Grace a few cars away from his own, unlocking her own door. They had hardly spoken to each other as they came down in the lift. He waved to her self-consciously across the short distance and saw the gesture returned in a similar fashion. Then they both went their separate ways out into the winter night.

In her car, Grace determinedly watched the road ahead, resisting the urge to check in her rear-view mirror which way he had gone. In his own car, Harrigan was concentrating his thoughts on his son.