Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘Thanks.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Melanie said.

‘There’s nothing to get, Mel. Don’t worry about it,’ Lucy replied.

The three of them walked through to the front of the house, towards the noise of the television set. Lucy stopped at the lounge room door, wondering what she could say, if there was anything to say.

Her mother stood up and stared at her. She gaped at her daughter and then pointed at her. Her mouth was open like a fish blowing bubbles but no sound came out. Lucy guessed at once what had happened and walked into the room to see her face in identikit on the television screen, with a request from the announcer that anyone knowing the whereabouts of Lucy Hurst should ring Crime Stoppers immediately.

Looking at her mother, Lucy suddenly laughed out loud.

‘Let me leave you something to remember me by, Mum,’ she said, and putting down her backpack she drew her gun out of its pocket.

She aimed it directly at her mother.

Her mother screamed, Stephen shouted, ‘No, Lucy, don’t!’

Lucy turned the gun from her mother to the television set and shot it to pieces. The screen cracked, smashed and went dead; a stray bullet shattered the window behind.

There was utter silence and then the sound of crying. Her mother had fallen back onto the couch and was weeping. Melanie was bent over, holding her ears, crying and shaking where she stood. Stephen simply stared at his sister as she put the gun away and hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder.

‘Goodbye,’ she said and walked out the door into the pre-dawn light and drove away in Stevie’s old Datsun towards the city.

Thirty minutes later the police cars from the Hornsby patrol came screaming into the driveway, immediately behind an ambulance which had been proceeding to the same destination at a much slower pace.

Why did the air in the house smell like this? A faint and secondary odour under the cold, something in the skin of the walls, an invasive rottenness that Harrigan noticed as soon as he walked in the door. He looked at the incandescent lights burning in competition with the growing daylight outside, the shattered television set and a window broken in the spray of bullets, a young girl he did not know rocking herself on the sofa with her arms folded around her body, weeping. Nothing out of the ordinary. Domestic rubbish left behind by a night-time explosion of violence, shock spreading in the aftertaste of the morning hangover. Lucy Hurst’s earlier presence was printed on the air; her absence was a shadow in every room.

Harrigan was in role: considering the information he had to hand, deploying his people, speaking quietly. Genuinely untouched by what he saw, he set about playing the watcher. Seeing if anything could be salvaged from what was otherwise a wasted exercise; something he had realised as soon as he had walked down the driveway, past the patrol cars and the ambulance and seen the expressions on the faces of the waiting officers. He sent Grace to comfort Melanie Hurst and talk to the mother, Trevor and Ian to talk to the brother. They met Stephen Hurst in the hallway, just as he came down the stairs.

‘My father’s up there. He hasn’t been dead for more than an hour.

Can’t this wait? Can’t I see to him first?’

‘You have called your doctor, Mr Hurst?’ Harrigan asked.

‘Of course I called him. He’s up there now. I just spoke to him.’

‘Then may I go up there? I need to speak with him before your father is removed.’

‘I don’t believe this. I didn’t believe it when she took that gun out and I still don’t believe it. If you want to, go up. There’s nothing to see.

Just my father.’ Stephen Hurst shook his head.

Harrigan nodded and walked upstairs, listening as Trevor asked if Mr Hurst would like to go through with them into his own kitchen for just a few questions. He glanced back down and saw that the young man walked with a noticeable limp.

Upstairs, he stopped to look into an empty room which someone had already cordoned off, into which, once they arrived, he would send the forensic team to comb for any human trace. On the floor, the sheets, anywhere. Hair, body fluids, blood. He thought dispassionately of Lucy Hurst’s electronic voice reaching out to his son from this ordinary, shabby, adolescent room and moved on. The door to the main bedroom was open. The doctor was drawing the sheets up over the head of the dead man. He and Harrigan introduced themselves at the foot of the bed, shaking hands in front of the mute form lying under pink cotton flowers.

‘I will be signing the death certificate,’ the doctor said, slightly pompous. ‘This is a wholly natural death, I have been waiting for it.

It’s a good thing for him it’s over.’

‘Yes,’ Harrigan replied laconically, without a trace of irony.

‘I understand the family don’t know I was the one who called in?’

He was waiting. Harrigan nodded.

‘I’d appreciate it if it could stay that way,’ the doctor said.

‘At the moment, I think they’re probably waiting to hear from you what you’ve just told me,’ Harrigan replied, with a perfunctory smile.

The doctor left.

The odour of human sickness Harrigan had detected throughout the house was no stronger here, but in a room which was both cold and seemed airless it had an extra bite. He looked at the figure in the bed.

Unmoved by the dead man’s presence, he peeled back the sheet to look at the death mask. The features had already shrunk back onto the skull.

As wasted as it was, the corpse had the presence of a familiar spirit, malevolent if impotent. Harrigan considered that wherever he had so far set foot in this house with its narrow corridors and packed boxy rooms, it had left its imprint. This particular demon had played itself out. What it had loosed was somewhere out there in the city, out of his reach and, for all he knew, was only just beginning its own campaign. He replaced the sheet and walked to the window to look out over the national park.

Rain clouds were building on the dawn horizon and he could see the wind moving through the tree tops, hear it worrying at the glass. He left the window closed and touching nothing else went downstairs.

The kitchen was a dark room with no external window, the only outside light would come through the back door into the adjacent laundry. This door was now closed against the weather, he could see it shaking in the wind like the window upstairs. At the present moment, the room was lit by a single fluorescent tube flat against the ceiling. Harrigan appeared silently and stood leaning against the kitchen bench where he could watch Stephen Hurst. The boy had a candid face, presently shadowed in the spread of the white light. Ordinary things had been placed at random on a green laminex table: cigarettes, plastic lighters, ashtrays, chipped coffee cups which were half filled with instant coffee.

Stephen, wearing a dark red and blue check flannelette shirt, leaned on his elbows, a numbed expression on his face. He was smoking, the air thick with the smell of it. Harrigan watched him, assessing the variables of fact, emotion and agenda in each of the answers he gave.

‘She’s got some money, your car and a full tank of petrol. A brown 1977 120Y Datsun?’ Trevor said, without so much as a grin.

‘Yeah.’

Harrigan wondered how he might explain to the waiting media that their home-grown terrorist had escaped New South Wales’s finest by trundling away in an infamous, shit-brown 120Y.

‘She can’t be travelling very fast, I guess,’ Ian commented. ‘Do you think your sister would steal a car if she needed to?’

‘She probably already has,’ Stephen replied, exhausted.

‘She’s good at that, is she?’ Ian continued.