Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Other people do it because they’re away with the pixies. We know that. The rest is just work.’

‘Don’t we have to out-think them?’ Grace replied, looking at the slender and unknown girl in the photograph talking to Greg Smith.

‘Isn’t that the point? Apart from anything you might feel for the people they’ve damaged. Doesn’t that make you want to ask those questions?’

She said this last not as an argument, but as an expression of something felt.

‘Yeah, the people involved do matter,’ he said. ‘As it happens, Grace, I ask myself those questions all the time. I read all the books as well. Every time a new one comes out, I get hold of it and I think, maybe this one is going to tell me something. What I’m saying is, I don’t see that it amounts to very much in the end to know what makes her what she is. It won’t be a blinding insight into anything.’

Unconsciously, Grace flicked a stray strand of her long brown hair back from her face, an unexpectedly elegant gesture to Harrigan’s observation.

‘You have to be one step ahead of them whatever you do,’ she said, unwillingly seeing in her mind the man who had raped her and whose body was still imprinted on her own however much she wanted to scour it away. ‘People can play all kinds of games with you at a distance. You can’t let them do that.’

Harrigan, looking at her, did not reply for a few moments.

‘That’s a good way of seeing things if you want to do this job,’ he said. ‘Are you taking that picture with you when you go to see that boy?’

They both glanced at the photograph taken in Belmore Park.

‘Yeah, I’ve got it already. I’d better go, it’ll take me a while to get there.’

‘Why don’t you come and see me when you get back? I’d like to hear what he’s got to say before you write it up. And don’t forget to ring me if you get any spectacular information.’

‘Sure,’ she said.

She smiled at him and left the room. He walked out after her. Come and see me and then we’ll go out and eat together somewhere. No, let’s not do that, that really will give everyone something to talk about.

There were enough whispers doing the rounds at the moment without adding something like that to them.

At that moment, Harrigan was called back into his office to take yet another phone call from the Tooth’s personal assistant, a woman who possessed the perfect up-your-arse voice, demanding yet more information on what they’d spent, what they’d achieved. Trapped at his desk, he watched Grace readying to leave. She wouldn’t want to spend her time with him anyway. Would she? As the idiot woman rabbited on in his ear, he watched Grace walk out of the office — a nice light movement, full of ease — and wondered.

As soon as Harrigan had escaped from his telephone call, he quietly shredded the photograph of his son. Jeffo was going to regret his little joke. All the signs were there: Harrigan was being undermined from both the outside and the inside, and if he wanted to survive he’d have to watch every step he took. It was the worst possible time to think of something so scandalous and stupidly suicidal as sleeping with his most junior officer. He had much better keep his eye focused on things that were likely to have more reliable benefits. Such as hanging onto his career and making sure that too many knives didn’t go thud between his shoulderblades.

Out on the road, Grace drove nimbly through the traffic, pleased with her freedom. She sang to herself as she drove, hits on the airwaves and remnants from songs she had sung during her own short career. She felt restless, something which usually ended in her dusting off her shiny clothes and high-heeled shoes and going out to party. She was good at living it up, Sydney people generally were, they knew how to party. There was Bondi with its tarted-up strip on the edge of the beach and the shining sea, and the city itself, bright in a sunlight with an ancient, hard clarity to it. It was a city lazy in the sun, casual and brash with its eye on the good times, thorough in the execution of its corruption, the way it went about everything that mattered. She never wanted to live anywhere else.

She overtook the slower cars on the expressway, approaching the river, speeding down the descent towards Brooklyn and the Hawkesbury River Bridge. Almost fourteen years ago she had travelled this same distance in the reverse direction, at that time by train, leaving home to work in the city, with a sense of freedom she had never again felt with such intensity. The railway line had twisted (still did) along the backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, past disused oyster beds and decaying blue and green fibro houses isolated in the midst of the eucalyptus forest on the water’s edge. The train had picked up speed as it climbed through the tunnels approaching the river crossing and had then come roaring out of the dark onto the bridge. She had felt that the sky had opened out around her, that she was flying. To the east of the railway she had seen the grey pylons of the old bridge, the green river between the tree-covered hills as it flowed to the sea, and the town on the south bank beneath her, a pastiche of white buildings and red roofs, with cars glinting in the sunlight. In the mid afternoon on a working day, as she crossed by the road bridge, racing a commuter train in the distance and beginning her ascent towards the Central Coast, the river was still a boundary line.

Travelling across it had always had a peculiar bitter-sweetness for her.

Today, she felt a shiver of anticipation, of energy, down her spine.

This energy lasted as long as it took her to reach Kariong, to be shown into the office and meet a man who wanted to spend as little time as possible speaking to her. Sooner than expected, she was back out in the car park ringing the boss.

‘Harrigan.’

‘It’s Grace here.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve got some not very good information. I’m at Kariong but Greg Smith isn’t. He’s been bailed.’

‘You’re joking. Who bailed him? When?’

‘Preacher Graeme Fredericksen. He bailed Greg from the Children’s Court at Parramatta early this afternoon while I was still on my way up here.’

‘He’s finally surfaced, has he? So why didn’t anyone tell us? Why weren’t we involved in this?’

‘They don’t seem to want to include us in this at all. They didn’t get any warning themselves, or so they’re telling me. Two departmental officers arrived in a government car at lunch time and picked him up.

The paperwork came down from the department with some very senior signatures on it.’

‘Is he with the preacher now? Have they gone back to his refuge or whatever it is?’

‘That’s who Greg left the court with. But I can’t reach anyone at the refuge and I can’t raise the preacher. No matter what number you ring, you only get through to the voice mail. They’re shut down to the world. I can tell you they left the court in the refuge van at about 2:45, but that’s all the information I’ve got.’

‘Get back in here as soon as you can. I’ll take it from here.’

It had been a pointless journey. Driving back out onto the expressway Grace looked down the Gosford road, thinking of home, knowing it was just a short drive to her father’s house at Point Frederick on the Broadwater and wondering what he was doing now. He could be in his study, caught up in his work, writing research papers and speeches, or standing in his back garden on the edge of the water, wondering why things had worked out the way they had. She hadn’t the time to go and see him now, however much she might want to. She had work to do.

Grace sped up over Mooney-Mooney Bridge, heading back to the city. From about fourteen onwards, she could have found herself in a stolen car being driven too fast along this same freeway; the pleasure she had taken in the speed was with her as she drove now. Back then, the acceleration had been in her own head, she had wanted to get inside the sense of the speed itself, to let go completely, shouting at the driver (some other kid, completely spooked by her) go faster, let’s smash through something. They never had smashed anything — their car or another or the sandstone embankment — all they had done was to come very close. She had to admit it, she had wanted to save that lost boy’s life. Now all she could do was draw the line Harrigan had talked about.