Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘Paul — if you can just accept this. We can look after him from our end. He’s not going into spasm or anything like that. But he needs his own space. You have to give him his space.’

‘You tell him from me, I’ll be there tomorrow morning no matter what. Unless he wants to get in touch with me beforehand and ask me to come earlier. But I’ll be there tomorrow regardless.’

‘I’ll tell him that, that’s not a problem.’

‘Good.’

He hung up and sat reading over the transcript.

I am not my father . Did I ever say you were, Toby? I’ve only ever wanted you to be yourself. I must have told you that.

The only cure for this investigation was to pass it to someone else

— which he would not do because there was no one he trusted — or to solve it as soon as he could. In his experience, the emotions were usually deadened by fatigue, and constant work almost always resulted in lasting fatigue. On this thought he went back to work, reviewing, checking, reporting, requesting follow-ups, driving his team the way he drove himself.

He was relieved when the phone call from the hospital came through to Grace later that afternoon. She appeared in his doorway to say that she was on her way and they went in their separate cars. Out on the streets, peak hour was in full flow, the traffic edged along. The Firewall’s website had infected him, it muscled in on his sensibilities at the end of the day. He had the sense that the roads were crowded with people fleeing the city. He joined in with them, feeling as much at a loose end as anyone else.

At St Vincent’s, the bright corridors and the murmur of noise gave some sense of activity to this end-of-world feel on a chill winter’s day.

Grace was waiting for him. When Harrigan appeared, she thought the lights had over-painted his face with a sheen curiously like the stage make-up she used to wear. Why not? To her observation, he spent a fair amount of his time performing for others. Together they went upstairs to the intensive care ward, where Matthew was waiting for them in the ante-chamber.

Harrigan, seeing him for the first time since the shooting, took in the shorn hair and the black mourning.

‘Hello, Matthew. How are you?’ he said.

‘You said you’d catch her,’ Matthew replied, his arms folded.

‘We will. That’s a promise.’

‘You haven’t yet. But if you don’t, I will. And then she’ll pay, she’ll really pay. That’s a real promise, that’s not just a wank.’

‘You won’t have to do that because we will find her. But right now we’re here to see your mother. Every bit helps. Every step’s a step along the way.’ Harrigan had no other reply.

‘If I were you, I wouldn’t have the nerve to tell people that sort of shit. I’d be too fucking embarrassed,’ Matthew said, and walked away.

Harrigan watched him go, expressionless.

‘Bear with me while I remember your reports,’ he said to Grace. ‘Is he like that towards you?’

‘He’s not that aggressive with me but it’s the same thing. He lashes out at everyone and he won’t let anyone reach him. He can’t last, one day he has to break.’

Harrigan thought that when that happened he did not want to see it.

In the glass room, Dr Agnes Liu lay in her high hospital bed on a mass of pillows which her nurse was rearranging carefully.

‘Whatever Agnes thinks,’ her doctor was saying to Grace, ‘she’s not up to any marathon sessions. If I have to, I’m going to close it down.

I’m warning you in advance.’

‘I’ll take it very gently,’ she replied.

Harrigan stood a little out of range of Agnes Liu’s vision, waiting and watching.

Inside the room the nurse nodded to Grace and then sat to the side.

A human odour, of injury and sickness, and another, of antiseptic, filled the room. Grace sat beside Agnes Liu, the speaker to her miniature cassette recorder affixed to her lapel.

‘How are you, Agnes?’ she said.

‘I think that everybody worries too much,’ the woman replied. ‘But I’m not used to being the patient.’

She took Grace’s hand as she spoke and Grace leaned forward.

Shock had worn Agnes Liu’s face, a fine mix of Anglo-Australian and Chinese descent, to its constitutive bones. She was in her early forties.

Her eyes were dark, her skin ivory-pale. Her black hair had been lately washed and brushed out to display silver-grey lights curling back from her forehead.

‘Where’s Matthew? He’s very angry with me for talking to you. I told him it has to be done.’

‘He’s outside. I spoke to him just now.’

‘How is he?’

‘He’s all right. He’s coping. He’s a very strong boy.’

Agnes spoke each phrase as something short and measured, the careful apportioning of a limited strength. ‘Yes, he is. But he doesn’t know how to hide things yet. You have to realise, I was taught never to let inconvenience make me lose my composure. My mother met my father at university. She fell in love and they married. In 1955. She was eighteen. It was a scandal, her family didn’t speak to her again for decades. My grandmother, my father’s mother, she was as bad. She refused to welcome her. We always had to keep up appearances no matter how we felt. Matthew doesn’t know how to do that yet. When I’m better, I’ll talk to him.’

She stopped.

‘Do you know what I remember most about the morning I was shot? That girl. How we looked at each other. I turned and she was there on the street. Just there. Just in front of me. With a gun. I remember thinking, oh, that’s so small. And I looked at her. We were looking each other in the eyes. And I knew she was going to kill me. I knew it so naturally. Oh, here’s someone for an appointment, I thought it like that. I was looking her in the eyes when she fired. I thought, I know you.

‘I’ve been lying here thinking it over ever since. Thinking, how can you know who someone is when all you can see of them is their eyes?

But I remembered other things as well and I thought, yes, it’s her. About four months ago, someone called. My home number. I don’t give that to anyone. None of us do. But this person had it. She said, do you know who I am? I said, no. How could I? She was just a voice. She said, I am the butcher’s daughter. Did I remember now? No, I didn’t, not then. She said I was a murderer and one day I would die for what I had done. She was crying. I hung up at once. We got a new phone number. I put it out of my mind. I have to put that sort of thing out of my mind.’

She paused, everything became still.

‘I can’t remember every detail. There are gaps. But I can remember this. One day — when Matthew was nine, I think, around then — one very hot day, I remember everyone saying how hot it was. The air conditioning could barely cope. This woman brought her daughter into one of the clinics. It was late morning. They didn’t have an appointment. This child, she looked so ill, and so young. I said I would see her right away. And then she miscarried, almost immediately, right there in the reception. There was so much blood, I … There were women there, they had brought their children in for check-ups, older women, they saw it all. We called an ambulance. I said to this woman

— do you want to drive your own car? Or do you want to go in the ambulance? They didn’t have a car. They’d come by train, and bus.

Some extraordinary distance. I said to this woman, I don’t know how your daughter survived the trip. Couldn’t you see how sick she was?

Why did you come here? It’s so far away. Someone told me about you, she said. I didn’t know what else to do. But if the only way to get to hospital was to go in the ambulance, then she would go in the ambulance. We were all shocked. She was so unmoved. In the end one of my staff drove her. I thought, that poor child.’