Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

And then she got up and she got in the car. Like she hadn’t even noticed she’d fallen down. She had this thing around her face but in the car she was pulling it off. Just kind of ripping it away like she couldn’t breathe. She drove right past us really fast. I don’t know how she didn’t see us. I don’t know what she was looking at. We didn’t wait around, we just got out of there. We got a taxi out on Broadway. Some drivers don’t care, you just have to wave your money around and they’ll pick you up anyway. Doesn’t matter what you look like.’

There was silence. Grace could sense Harrigan leaning on the glass outside the room, waiting.

‘Did you see her face, Gina? Can you give us any kind of a description?’ she asked.

Gina smiled to herself and took another cigarette, lighting it from the end of the one she was smoking.

‘You going to keep your word?’ she asked.

The thin and fixed smile was still on her face. Grace felt a small shock as she watched the girl’s expression.

‘Have you got a name for us, Gina?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, I do. But I have to know if you’re going to keep your word first.’

‘I’ll keep my word.’

‘I knew her. That was the thing. I knew who she was. She was a friend of mine once.’ The girl rubbed her forehead, her face haggard.

‘Lucy Hurst. Yeah, Lucy. I liked her, you know. I never thought I’d do this to her.’

On the other side of the glass, Harrigan stood upright. ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Got you!’

‘Do you have an address?’ Grace asked.

‘No, I don’t know where she came from. She used to hang around near where I worked. She used to buy from me sometimes, if you really want to know. That’s how we got to know each other.’

‘She was an addict?’

‘Sort of. She moved in and out a bit, she was someone who could do that. She’d binge sometimes. I used to think she was playing some kind of funny game of her own, I don’t know what. Lucy could be really strange.’

‘She didn’t work herself?’

‘Oh, no. No way. No one got within cooee of Luce. I’m not saying she didn’t get jumped on while she was out there, she did. That happens, you just can’t do anything about that. But she never got involved with anyone. She used to hang with this kid called Greg. But they were just friends, you know, they never did it or anything like that. And she had this brother who used to come around looking for her sometimes. His name was Stevie.’

‘Can you do an identikit for me?’ Grace asked.

‘Yeah, I’m good with faces. I’ve got to remember the ones I don’t want to see again.’

‘One more question, Gina.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Why did you take so long to come in here with that information?’

The girl drew a circle on the edge of the ashtray with her cigarette.

She stared up at Grace with a look that seemed to be waiting for some kind of blow, violence of some kind, as if she had withdrawn into herself before this expectation. It was a look that said she had never grown used to it.

‘I really couldn’t get here before. I couldn’t.’

‘But now you can. Because you want the money?’

‘How much of it am I going to get?’

Grace glanced at the blank window before she spoke.

‘Quite a lot of it on that information. All of it, probably,’ she replied.

‘I’ve got to have it,’ the girl said very softly, almost a whisper. ‘I just have to.’

‘It’s okay, Gina. We can fix it up,’ Grace said. ‘Let’s go and do the identikit.’

Outside the interview room, Trevor was waiting by himself.

‘Harrigan wants to see you before you leave with her, mate,’ he said quietly.

‘Sure,’ she replied, not without some anxiety.

Later, Grace placed the identikit, together with a statement, on Harrigan’s desk. He picked up the slightly surreal picture: a robotic, not quite cartoon-like reproduction of a young woman’s face. A face with high cheekbones, a wide forehead and short reddish-brown hair.

‘Not a bad-looking face,’ he said. ‘Do you think this is reliable?’

‘Yes, I do. She was very clear about it. No hesitation, didn’t change her mind once.’

He put it back down on the desk. Outside in the main office, small groups of people had gathered to look at the picture as another copy did the rounds. There was a buzz of activity as his officers rang contacts, searched databases and checked lists for any addresses and possibilities.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘The Cross.’

‘How did I know that? Stay in contact. The last thing I want is anyone hurt.’

Or dead, but superstition prevented him from saying that aloud.

‘I’d like to ring Matthew and let him know. Is that okay with you?’

he asked.

‘No, that’s no problem,’ she said. ‘Don’t let him find it out on the news.’

‘Grace,’ he said, as she stood up to go, ‘this has got a very nasty smell to it. You have thought about that?’

‘Yes, I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought about it quite a lot. What are we going to do about it? Go after Gina? Is that what we do now?’

‘I’d like to. I’d like to charge her with withholding information. I’d like to throw the book at her for sitting on that name for all this time.

But no, we don’t do that. I’ll tell someone else about her and maybe they’ll go and look into whatever is going on. If they’ve got the time and the money. In the meantime, watch your back. Make sure you ring in when you’re finished. You’d better get going.’

He went back to his papers, she walked out. Neither of them looked at each other, until the last moment when he looked up to see her walk out the door, just in time to see her glance back at him. Once she had gone, he rang the media unit, advising them he had an identikit on its way over to them to be released for saturation coverage. Then he rang the hospital and asked to speak to Matthew Liu.

‘Where do you want to go first, Gina?’ Grace asked as she eased out into the evening traffic.

It had clouded over and begun to rain, just lightly. Gina was lighting one more of Grace’s cigarettes and looking at her side on. She leaned forward, bracing one hand on the dashboard. Her nails were bitten to the quick, her cigarette smoke curled up against the windscreen.

‘Do you want to go to Maccas? I can show you where you can park.’

‘Okay.’

Grace cruised up Liverpool Street. The bright lights of the traffic flowed around her.

The girl hummed a tune which Grace recognised. She sang along quietly.

‘Corinna, Corinna, where you been so long?/Corinna, Corinnawhere you been so long?/Got no home, baby, since you’ve been gone.’

‘You know it?’

‘Yeah. I used to sing it once. I used to be a singer. That was a while ago now.’

‘It couldn’t have been that long ago. What did you give it away for?’

‘Got sick of it. I wanted to do something else for a change.’

‘It’s my working name,’ the girl said, ‘Corinna. Because I like the song.’

‘Yeah, I do too,’ Grace replied.

‘You’ve got a nice voice,’ Gina said after a little while. ‘I wouldn’t have given it away if I could sing like you. I would have kept going.’

‘Well, I didn’t. I still don’t want to. It wasn’t that much fun after a while. It was just everyone wanting a piece of you.’

‘Everything’s like that, it doesn’t matter what you do,’ Gina replied.

‘What you do now must be like that.’

Grace smiled. ‘Maybe a bit. No, it’s not the same,’ she said. ‘You’re clean now, aren’t you, Gina?’

‘Yeah. I got my mind back. Weird.’