Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Harrigan leaned his chin on his knuckles.

‘Fredericksen has,’ he said. ‘From the moment he laid eyes on you.

He recognised you again today and he threatened you to me. He knows exactly who you are.’

‘He can only have seen my picture. I don’t know how he could know who I am just from that.’

‘You’ve got a face that’s very easy to remember.’

‘It’s just a face,’ she said. ‘Anyway. They took my picture. One day when I was on my way into the city clinic. They hassled me, I showed them my warrant card and I sent them on their way. I shouldn’t have, should I? They remembered my name. They sent me one of their lovely letters saying they knew where to find me.’

‘They had your address and you didn’t tell me that?’

‘You didn’t need to know.’

He was silent, staring at her. He could not quite believe what he was hearing.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Just before Christmas,’ she said, again not looking at him.

He did the mathematics while Grace lit another cigarette. She was still not looking at him.

‘You could do that, could you?’ he said, very quietly.

As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t. Unexpectedly, he had felt the nudge of the prohibitions he had been taught during his boyhood, an unexpected repugnance that she could have had an abortion. He didn’t want to feel that.

She looked at him, drawing on her cigarette. ‘Yes, Paul. I could do that.’

Her tone was icy. There was silence.

‘I don’t need this,’ he said.

‘That’s all that matters, is it?’

‘It does when I’m holding everything together.’

‘This is not your business,’ she said angrily. ‘It won’t stop you wrapping this up.’

‘If something happens to you, who goes to see your family? I do.

These lunatics shoot people they think deserve to die. Do you think I want to knock on your family’s door and have to tell them something like that? You don’t get paid to take risks like this.’

Grace shook her head. ‘Isn’t it my life? Don’t I make that decision?’

‘Not while you work for me.’

‘No? Do you know you don’t give people much space, Paul? You like to organise them too much. You think you know how they ought to feel and what they ought to do. Maybe you don’t.’

Harrigan felt heat rise at the back of his neck.

‘You’re getting very personal there, Grace. Anyone else but you and you’d be gone.’

‘This is personal. Because we are personal, aren’t we? Everything we do is personal. I know we were for about twenty minutes in here this morning. I don’t think I was imagining it. You asked me.’

Harrigan watched her hand smooth the scar on her neck. He had wanted to ask her if she would sleep with him, he had thought she would. He did not know what he wanted to ask of her now. He did not know how to describe her any more.

‘Do we have anything else to say to each other? Do you need to know anything else?’ she said into his silence, taking it to mean that their original twenty minutes was finished. ‘I should get back to work.’

Before he could reply, his mobile rang again.

‘We’re on the Pacific Highway,’ the voice said. ‘I’m sorry but I’ve got to tell you that we’ve lost him.’

‘You haven’t.’

‘We have. He gave us the slip, he had it planned. He got out of the car at an intersection and disappeared down a lane and into someone’s garden, we think. We don’t know where he went after that. We stopped the Jag and we’ve spoken to the driver. The target had asked him to stop and let him out. We’ve got a search on but I think we’ve lost him for the night.’

‘Then keep searching. And tomorrow morning you can come in here and you can explain yourselves to me.’

‘They’ve lost him,’ he said to Grace in disbelief. ‘What do they do for brains? They’re supposed to be the best. Fuck! ’

She was shocked to see how much the exhaustion and strain had changed his face. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, strangely polite, and walked out of the room.

She waited for a few moments then ashed out her cigarette. She collected their joint goods, coats, phones, her shoulder bag, his wallet which he had left on the table. She stopped at the counter on her way out.

‘What do I owe you?’ she said.

The man shook his head. He looked out through the doors at Harrigan who was standing under the shelter of the entrance way, staring at the weather.

‘He works too hard,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she replied. Don’t we all.

‘Thanks,’ she said and left, appearing beside Harrigan in the doorway to hand him his coat. He accepted it without speaking, together with his pager, his phone and his wallet, the sight of which made him raise his eyebrows in some surprise.

Grace felt the warmth of Harrigan’s physicality in the fabric of his jacket, the cotton of his white shirt, with all the closeness of aftershave and ordinary human odour. Crossing the line to connect to the body beneath the fabric had slipped past the bounds of possibility. All the sexual need she still felt for him had led her into grief, not much else, but this was usual. It was better to ask why she might want to put herself into the poisonous situation of having an affair with her boss.

He looked at the empty street, waiting for Lucy Hurst to appear any moment out of the dark. A degree of control had returned to his face.

‘You should have told me all of that sooner than now, Grace,’ he said.

‘None of the things you’ve done tonight have been very professional.’

She did not know how to interpret the disappointment in his voice.

‘I’m just starting out. I’ll toughen up in time, the way I’m supposed to,’ she said, without looking at him. ‘I’ll see you back there.’

She left him standing in the doorway of the cafe and ran through the rain to her car.

‘Yeah. Probably you will. You’ve probably got that in you somewhere,’ he said quietly to himself, watching her go.

Grace breathed in solitude as freedom. No one need know she was letting herself slide badly enough to cry as she drove back to the office, the tears grudgingly squeezing out for her. Out on the streets it was still pouring rain. Lightning strikes split the sky.

The lightning crashed down over the bell curve of the sky and, for an instant, illuminated Lucy in her car, driving away from the Whole Life Health Centre at Randwick. She knew this building from her own experience: she had been taken there twice without wanting to go there, and then had passed it by when she went to and from the garage. Mostly, however, like the others in its chain, it had been studied for some months by the others in Graeme’s inner circle. It had been photographed, notes taken of its interior layout, and its possible destruction discussed at the Temple. Discussed, as most of these things were between Graeme and Bronwyn and the select few. As something wanted desperately, the way people she knew out on the streets talked about who they had last fucked or how much money they would get once they had done this one job, this single deal. Destruction was a fantasy never achieved by any of them.

Lucy was here for another reason; she had her own point to make.

‘Alarms ring back at base’, the signs on the building said. Lucy treated them with scepticism and, with practised skill, entered through a narrow back window into a toilet, out of weather that was harsh enough to keep anyone inside. Not that she cared, she was happy to let the rain chill her to the bone. She had kept the device she had made dry by wrapping it in plastic around her body, and delivered it whole to the building, placing it next to the electrical circuits, unconcerned for the danger she was putting herself in. She only needed enough charge and accelerant to start a fire that would gut the inside of the building and she knew how that could be done. She was the only one in the darkened building, so what did it matter if it did go up and she went with it? As she left, she considered that if the alarms had rung back at the base, then no one had bothered to answer them. They must all be watching TV and saying how bad the weather was.