Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Lucy picked up her dead phone and shrugged. She threw it into a heap of rubbish in a corner then went outside into the main part of the garage. She sat on the concrete floor and leaned against the wall near the office door, looking towards where her car straddled the pit.

She drew her knees up and leaned her forehead on them. She began to think of death as a combination of presence and absence, where the body is there only to remind you that you can never talk to someone again. She chased this idea around in her mind, drawing circles in the dust on the floor, shaking her head. Absence compounded on absence; she had no power to cry for anyone. She was dry, used up.

‘I’ve got nothing to lose, have I?’ she said to her silent ghosts. ‘No one can tell me I do. Not Grace, whoever she is. Even if she is walking in the dark just like me. I don’t feel anything.’

She lit a cigarette and threw the match, still burning, onto the concrete floor. It burned for a short time longer, then went out.

Turtle would say that she still had things to lose. He would know, better than anyone. How are you, Turtle? Does your father still come and rub that pain out of your back, the way you said he does? If I could, I would come and see you, I would sit with you and I’d feed you, the way you say he does. I would take you out if you wanted to go out and I wouldn’t care what anyone thought about either of us. You say that sometimes people won’t look at you. You say that they stand right beside you and say that you don’t have a brain or any feelings. If anyone said anything about you like that and I was with you, I’d make sure they never said anything hurtful to you again. I’d tell them what they could do.

She felt an intense need to talk to him, to go online and say, will you forgive me? I forgive you. I want to talk to you so much. She had no means to reach him and no way of acquiring those means. All she had was time, hours in which to wait. She leaned her head against the wall. This was endgame. One more sleep and it would all be over. If she ever slept again.

The waiting ground on, like slow wheels. Harrigan had put in place the graveyard shift and sent some of his other people home, but by late in the evening they felt as worn as he was, the enclosure was getting to them. They manned the phones, checked the information they received constantly from the public and found that almost all of it was either old or useless. Opposite the Temple in Camperdown, the surveillance teams sat rubbing their eyes as they waited outside a silent, almost dark building. The sheer boredom ate at everyone.

Harrigan told his people to catnap whenever they could and sent them out on breaks to give them some fresh air, to get them to move.

A little after nine, he took a phone call from the surveillance team telling him the preacher had just left the Temple.

‘He’s been picked up by a very nice Jaguar,’ a female voice said,

‘chauffeur driven. Our registration check says it’s owned by a Mrs Yvonne Lindley, north St Ives. Looks like he’s going out to a late dinner. There he goes. He’s heading off to the Harbour Bridge by the looks of it. Going north.’

Half his luck.

‘Keep on him,’ Harrigan said. ‘Don’t let him get away from you.’

‘We’ll do our best.’

‘No,’ Harrigan replied, ‘you won’t lose him, is what you’ll do.’

In an excess of self-protection as much as anything else, he had earlier rung the security firm charged with guarding the Whole Life Health Centre clinics. They had assured him that the clinics were under twenty-four-hour protection. He asked for that in writing and then logged the time and date of his call. He emailed Marvin, copying the message to everyone he needed to if he was going to protect his back, expressing concern that at least one of these clinics just might go up tonight, only to receive in reply a phone call from the Tooth’s personal assistant saying that they had every confidence in present arrangements.

‘Send me that in writing,’ he said to her, knowing that she would not.

Harrigan was snookered, he had no people he could send to fill the gap.

He was reduced to making sure the street patrols had been alerted and having the staff at the clinics warned personally by his own people.

As the time ground on, he took another call from the surveillance team.

‘We’re sitting outside Yvonne Lindley’s pile on the north shore. And a very nice pile it is too. He’s inside,’ the female voice said.

‘Call me if anything happens.’

‘And the rain comes down at last. We’ll be back to you as soon as he’s on the move.’

The storm which had threatened all day had finally broken; the rain began to pour in sheets down his window. It was a relief. He went out into the main office to see who was there and who was out. He saw Grace disappearing into the tea room, presumably in search of coffee; a small group in a corner with Jeffo, Ian sitting nearby. Trev was out in search of fast food. Grace reappeared on her way back to the computer room. Engrossed in whatever it was they were looking at, the small group around Jeffo had not seen him. He had turned to go back to his office when he heard laughter, some quiet, almost whispered comments, louder laughter and then Ian speaking, not quietly.

‘Fuck off, mate. I wouldn’t show that around here if I was you.’

Harrigan turned again in time to see Grace stop nearby, putting a mug of coffee down on a desk.

‘What’s that?’ she said.

Jeffo said something to her, Harrigan could not hear what. He was waving a picture from side to side in front of her, moving his body with it and laughing. She walked up to him. The crowd around him parted a little.

‘Give me that,’ she said.

‘No way, Jose,’ Jeffo replied, passing it out of her reach to someone else.

She hit him hard across the face with an open hand, the sound like a whiplash throughout the open office. He jerked back in shock and touched blood on his mouth. There was a collective gasp and, in the background, muted cheers from a few other watchers. Jeffo stood up slowly, moving around towards her. She stood her ground.

‘Gracie, you back off now,’ Ian said urgently, on his feet as well and circling them. ‘Jeffo, why don’t you sit down and just shut up for once.’

‘You bitch. I bit my lip,’ Jeffo said, moving dangerously close to her.

‘You give me that,’ she said again, not moving, facing him.

Harrigan was between them, outraged.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he said to Grace. ‘You never do that. You never, never hit anyone you work with. Don’t you ever do that again. Not while you work for me.’

Grace stepped back, pushing her hair out of the way, smudging her makeshift make-up. She looked sideways and then back at him and barely nodded. Jeffo had also stepped back, muttering a single word to her as he did so. He was grinning as he took repossession of the photograph but no one else was smiling. Harrigan turned to him just as he was slipping it out of sight into his top drawer.

‘What’s that, mate? Let me have a look,’ Harrigan said.

‘It’s just a joke. Nothing.’

‘If it’s a joke, let’s share it. We can all have a laugh, we need one.

Come on. Let’s see it. Give it here.’

There was silence as Harrigan found himself looking at a picture of a younger Grace on a stage somewhere, holding a microphone and wearing high heels but otherwise naked to the waist and barely clothed at all.

‘That is not me,’ she said angrily. ‘That is airbrushed rubbish. It’s got nothing to do with me. I don’t even look like that.’

Harrigan felt sick to his stomach. He eyeballed Jeffo while he tore the photograph into four pieces and shouted for Dea. The tiny woman appeared at once.