Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

I’ve got all the time in the world if you want it.’

He shrugged. He had shaved his thick black hair in deliberate mourning and his cheeks looked hollowed out. He had taken on age, something laid roughcast over his features. He was dressed in worn black clothing. He had not cried once in her presence since she had sat with him in the street the morning that it had happened. He refused to talk, to her, to anyone. Sometimes when she visited, he only wanted her to sit with him in silence while he sat next to his mother, waiting.

‘You don’t have to stay, I’m all right. Mum’s not going to die now, you know that. I don’t want to talk. I’m going to go and sit with her.’

‘You know where I am if you do want to call me any time.’

He shook his head and walked away. Everything he did broadcast grief and anger in equal proportions, both immense.

At the entrance to the ward, Grace found Agnes Liu’s doctor waiting for her.

‘Some of your time?’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to let her talk to you. She’s not going to rest easy until she does and I can’t persuade her that it really isn’t wise. I think it’s best to have this done with as soon as we can. I’ll be in touch when I think she’s able to talk for any length of time. Probably tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.’

‘If you call me, I can arrange to be here then. Only me?’

‘If you do bring anyone else, they’ll have to stay outside. I don’t want two people standing over her. One of you is bad enough. No offence,’

he added as an afterthought before frowning and walking away.

Grace left St Vincent’s mired in an old, familiar feeling: stasis, the sense of her heart becoming stagnate, her blood stopped. Numb to the end of each limb, each fingertip, she was gripped by emotional hypothermia. She sat with this weight on her, stranded at the lights on Oxford Street, watching the crowds pass by in the remains of the wet weather. It was her old habit of feeling either too much or too little, when all she wanted was balance. She had thought she was cured.

She arrived just in time for the morning’s meeting in the incident room, something which usually happened earlier. Today’s meeting had been shifted back and the room was filled with people hanging around, impatient. Harrigan, the buzz went, was trapped in his office, caught up with a telephone call from the Tooth demanding detailed explanations for the funds expended on the investigation and (as he said) the reasons for its lack of progress to date. The case had become stalled in a slow trickle of information, most of it leading them nowhere; they hadn’t even managed to locate the preacher yet, he might as well have evaporated from the city. People said you could almost see Harrigan chafing as he worked.

Grace waited with everyone else. Carrying Greg Smith’s file under her arm, she slowly walked the length of the Firewall’s turbulent pictures, considering each in turn. The disconnected images unwound like bobbin threads along the corkboard, a glossy snakeskin depicting huge and random destruction. As she moved from sheet to sheet, she asked herself: if this is your game plan, what’s your starting point?

How do you get there?

Ian appeared at her elbow, startling her a little.

‘What are you going to do for the end of the world, Gracie?’ he said to her, smiling.

‘I don’t know. What do you have to do to get to the pearly gates?

Scrub your teeth with bath cleaner? I’d like to look my best, I guess.’

‘You wouldn’t need to do that to look your best,’ he replied. ‘I’d sink a few golden ambers first. There’s no beer in the afterlife.’

Grace watched over his shoulder as Jeffo slipped another photograph into the array of pictures. Several people standing nearby glanced at it and then at each other, raising their eyebrows. She held her breath. They did not look in her direction and they did not laugh.

She relaxed and smiled at Ian.

‘You don’t know, it could be flowing in the streets up there. It’s got to have something going for it,’ she said.

‘I wish,’ he said.

‘If you two really want to know,’ Harrigan grumbled, passing them by, ‘why don’t you ask our woman up there on the board. She can tell you. She’s already made it to the afterlife. The only thing flowing for her is her own blood.’

‘Good morning to you too,’ Grace said, softly.

‘What’s up with him this morning?’ Ian said.

They looked at each other, and then at the corkboard. Louise had pinned up a second reproduction of the picture of the unknown woman lying dead across a set of steps with the words ‘You can run but you can’t hide’ scrawled across her. This time, the reproduction came from an Internet news service and carried the headline: AVENGING ANGELS’ DEADLY STRIKE. POLICE FAIL TO MAKE ARREST AFTER

DOCTOR SHOT BY EXTREME ANTI-ABORTION GROUP.

Harrigan’s arrival called them all to silence. He settled his papers on the table, taking a few seconds to dispel his irritation. Whenever the Tooth tormented him like this, some other scheme was usually in progress elsewhere, and for Harrigan the true questions were twofold.

Were all their backs, his included, protected? And where were the real land mines buried? Time was ticking on, like the clock on his murdering girl’s website. Not so many days had passed since he had first located the website but the pressures for a result were growing more intense by the hour. The Firewall was still out there, his superiors were still leaning on him, the politicians were leaning on them, and the media was baying for blood. He glanced briefly at the mosaic of diverse pictures on the corkboard without taking them in. They shone in the reflection of the overhead lights, the images lost in the glitter.

‘We know who this is now.’ Louise’s voice was already coarsened by alcohol even though it was only late morning. She was tapping the picture of the dead woman with a slightly shaking hand. ‘Dr Laura Di-Cuollo, obstetrician, Long Beach, California. She was shot dead on her own front doorstep sixteen months ago. That case is still open. The people who shot her call themselves the Avenging Angels. They took this piccie as soon as they’d done it and then they sent it out to every news service that wanted to print it. That’s who they are. They don’t believe in hiding what they do.’

‘But our colleagues in the US of A do,’ Harrigan said. ‘We’ve been trying to open up the lines of communication with them on this but all we get is the cold shoulder. They hang up the phone on me as soon as they can; we email or fax them urgently and they lose the message. We’re going to keep trying but we have to chase this our end as well if we’re going to get anywhere with it. So — what we know about our killer.

She’s armed and dangerous. She’s prepared to use her gun again. She’s unpredictable. She’s “stuck back home” wherever that is. What we don’t know. Is our girl one of these Avenging Angels, so-called? People involved with this kind of organisation are inclined to firebomb clinics as well as shooting the staff. There are five Whole Life Health Centre clinics in the Sydney metropolitan area. I am trying to get a watch on them all but Marvin…’ Harrigan paused, weighing his words ‘… is still considering the options, so he’s told me. He’ll let me know once he’s checked over our budget. So consider this in your deliberations: are we dealing with a single killer? Or a member of an organisation which has its own resources to draw on, possibly from more than one country?’

‘Why don’t you tell us that yourself, mate? Maybe your boy knows.

Why don’t you ask him instead of us?’ Jeffo muttered poisonously.

How far the words were intended to carry, Grace could not be sure.