Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Before he left that night, the information had been recorded, the responsibility for its investigation allocated and the team advised. He moved through it all somehow numbed against the pain but knowing that it was there waiting for him as soon as this anaesthetic wore off.

By the time he reached home, the rain was pouring down; it was a relief to watch the city dissolve in the streaks of water down the windows.

Tonight, he was exhausted enough to sleep as soon as he lay down.

In the Temple, the preacher was also at work. He sat at his desk, staring at the telephone, thinking of Lucy, of her particular insolence, considering that it was not a good thing for anyone to be quite so insolent. In the artificial light, he appeared aged beyond recognition.

In the luxury of solitude, he let all his masks slip.

‘Do you think I can’t make you come to me, Lucy?’ he said aloud, with no more emotion than if he was reflecting on the state of the weather. ‘I think you’ll see that I can if I want to. I think you’ll see that it’s really just a matter of timing.’

Lucy aside, the timing of events had become one of urgency.

Thinking of this, he made a phone call.

‘Yes? Yvonne Lindley speaking.’

It was an old woman’s voice, creaky and sounding puzzled.

‘Yvonne. It’s Graeme. I hope I’m not calling you too late in the evening.’

‘No, not at all. I never sleep at night these days. I should have realised it was you, Graeme. For one fleeting moment there I hoped it might have been a son or a daughter of mine but of course it’s not.

Nice to hear from you all the same. How can I help?’

‘It’s refuge business again, I’m afraid.’

‘Always a good cause. You know, John would have been very interested in the work you do, he would have seen the value of it.

What’s the problem?’

‘One of my charges, he was out on conditional release. He’s a wild boy and I’m afraid he’s gone and got himself locked up again. Which is a pity because we were making very good progress.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He was caught joyriding in a stolen car. I might add he was a passenger, not the instigator. He foolishly went out with some old acquaintances, one of whom turned up in this car, and they all went for a ride. He’s only fifteen so he certainly wasn’t driving.’

‘When you’re young, you’re mad, aren’t you? We certainly used to do things we weren’t supposed to do. We had fun though, John and I.

Do you know those were his last words to me? It’s been fun, Evie, I’ve had a ball. Fifteen, you say? That’s very young, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. He’s quite young in the head as well, which of course is how he let himself be talked into this in the first place. The thing is, if I had him here at the refuge, I could keep up the good work, but as soon as he’s back in the boys’ home, he’ll just slip into his old ways again.’

‘We can’t have that happen, can we? You leave this to me. I think we can get this sorted out without too much fuss.’

‘You may find the police are not very keen to cooperate. Their only solution is to lock him away. And what’s worse, Yvonne, and I have to tell you this, they are trying to pin some extraordinary charge on him.

This is despite the fact that I know he had absolutely nothing to do with these events. They seem convinced that what is pure coincidence is actual guilt.’

‘You just leave things to me, Graeme. I’ll take care of this. We’ll show them there’s life in the old girl yet. I’ll make them sit up and take notice. There should be a pen and paper here somewhere — won’t be a moment — ah, here we are. Now, this boy’s name is — what?’

‘One that’s very easy to remember, Yvonne. Greg Smith.’

Patiently he spelled out the details until she had all the information she needed and he was able to hang up, relieved of her presence even at the distance of a telephone call.

Now that business was out of the way, he had a task to attend to which he had been avoiding throughout the day. He went up to his bedroom and hesitated for a few moments in the doorway, an expression of aversion on his face. The windows were open and heavy rain had been blown into the room, soaking the floor. This pleased him: the force of the weather had cleared the room of its human odours and any sense of a physical presence. He walked inside and pulled the blankets from his bed, throwing them on the floor. He stripped the bloodstained sheets, the pillow, everything, tied them into a loose bundle and threw them down the stairs. He did not feel quite the same nausea that had gripped him last night when he had walked in here and put his hand onto the sheets when they were still warm and damp with Lucy’s blood. He pulled the mattress from the bed and upended it down the stairs after the bedding. In the pouring rain, he dragged both the mattress and the bedding over the uneven ground to the edge of the demolition site, to a blue industrial waste bin which he knew would be emptied within a few days. He threw the bloodstained items into the bin and slammed the lid closed, a sound that echoed down the empty street.

He stood in the rain, letting it soak him, relieved that he had managed to do this alone, that he had not had to ask Bronwyn, a woman from his congregation who did his cleaning, to do it for him.

He walked quickly back to his office, into the tiny kitchen, and dried himself, scrubbing his hands to remove the last touch of any stain. He wondered where he would sleep tonight; he could sleep almost anywhere if necessary. Physical comfort was something for which he had never felt much need. In the end, he decided not to stay in the Temple. It would be too easy for the police to find him here and he wasn’t ready to talk to them quite yet. He needed time to think before Greg was delivered into his care.

He took the refuge van and went to take shelter with some like-minded people, acquaintances he knew he could rely on. He drove through the empty streets in the rain, his thoughts buzzing with possibilities for the future.

‘Is there anyone in this picture that you recognise?’

Grace and Matthew Liu sat at a white table in the centre of the large room, close to the desk where the nurses came and went. Pale blue curtains surrounded the individual beds of the intensive care ward. Grace spoke quietly, the cushioned floors softened all extraneous sounds. In a glass room at the furthermost end of the ward, Agnes Liu slept on in shadows which had the quality of dark water.

On a monitor, lighted graphs sketched the pattern of her breathing and her heartbeat in pencil-thin lines.

‘Yeah,’ Matthew said, ‘that one. That’s her. For sure.’

‘Why are you so sure?’ Grace asked.

Matthew Liu put the photograph back down on the table where it lay under his hands. The fine bones of his fingers splayed over its glossy surface. It was a photograph of a small group of homeless boys in Belmore Park, taken at an angle to increase the sense of distance. One of the boys stood to the side, talking to another figure seen only from the back, the slender female outline of a figure wearing a black jacket and jeans and with short curly hair. She seemed to have her arms folded in front of her, drawing her clothes tightly around the curve of her outline.

‘The way she’s holding her shoulders. That’s how she looked when she walked away. She’s like a cut-out in the air. You know who someone is when they do something like that to you. They’re in your head, you can’t get them out.’

He spoke angrily.

‘Okay.’ Grace slipped the photograph back into the file. ‘How are you going today? Do you want me to stay and talk to you, or just stay?