Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘There’s nothing to sort out.’

‘There is something, Lucy.’

‘What?’

‘Will you leave the doors open for me? Those wooden doors that open onto the foyer. Just so people out here can see me through those glass doors at the front and know what’s going on.’

‘Is that all? Is that so they can get a clear shot at me?’

‘It’s so the people out here can see what’s happening.’

‘Yeah, I don’t care about that. I’ll do something else as well. Once you’re in here, I’ll let everyone else but you and Graeme out. How’s that?’

‘That’s a good thing to do. Will we organise that?’

‘Yeah, let’s do that. So — are you coming in now?’

‘Lucy, will you let me ask you something first? Why do you want to see me? What are you going to do? I would like to know that.’

The negotiator was nodding her head.

‘I told you. I want to look at you. I want to see what you really look like. I want to talk to you. I told you all that. There are seven people in here, Grace. Now I can just shoot three of them if I have to. And then maybe you’ll come in.’

‘Are you going to shoot me? Is that what you want to do?’

‘That depends on you.’

‘How does it depend on me?’

‘You’d better come in and find out, hadn’t you,’ Lucy snapped. ‘I am sick of talking to people. I’ve told you what I want. No more talking like this. Finish!’

Outside on the street, the negotiator shook her head.

‘Okay, Lucy. I’ll be in there very soon. We’re just getting the sound right for you. I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Just give me a little more time.’

‘Don’t you keep me waiting too long.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Okay,’ the negotiator said once the conversation had ended, ‘when she says, don’t keep her waiting, she means it. You have to keep her logic focused on not using that gun. She needs to be given a reason for not using it. You have to play a waiting game in there. Keep her talking. She does want to talk. Don’t lie to her whatever you do. If she thinks you’re lying to her, you’re probably gone.’

The negotiator spoke in a voice at odds with both her appearance and her words, one that offered the listener a sense of immediate reassurance. Grace drank this reassurance down as a temporary relief for the impossible.

‘That isn’t enough,’ Harrigan said. ‘Keep her talking? What else can you tell me?’

‘We have no leverage,’ the negotiator replied. ‘It’s a matter of the choice you make. She’s decided she’s got nothing to lose. She’s made her choice. She will kill people, I am sure.’

A sound technician from the nearby van appeared amongst them without any noticeable concern for what he might be interrupting.

‘I need a sound check,’ he said to Grace. ‘Can you say something once I’m back in my van?’

Grace, who had lit a cigarette, smiled. On a signal from the man, she sang, Hey, yeah, you with the sad face/Come up to my place andlive it up/Hey, yeah, you beside the dance floor/Whattya cry for let’slive it up.

The technician laughed as he leaned out of the van door. ‘Clear as a bell,’ he called.

Harrigan found himself scratching his chin.

‘Thanks,’ he said to the negotiator, ‘I need to talk to my officer now.

I’ll call you when we need you next.’

The woman disappeared into the crowd.

‘It’s just a song I like, Paul. My first boyfriend used to sing it to me,’

Grace said with a smile before he could speak.

‘You can’t go in there if you can’t see this through. You want to walk away? Now’s your chance.’

‘I know that,’ she said, dropping ash on the wet road, ‘I can do it.’

‘You haven’t put any make-up on,’ he said.

Grace almost said that no, she hadn’t had the energy for some reason but she had changed her knickers, that was something. She pushed down the desire to laugh out loud.

‘No, and just when I need the protection too,’ she said, looking away.

‘Look at me,’ he said, and she did. ‘Just keep it calm. Do what the negotiator says — play for time. Call her now and talk some more.

You don’t go in there until I say you do.’

Again, Lucy answered the phone at once.

‘Hi, Lucy. We’re still out here. It won’t be long now.’

‘And you’re still taking your fucking time, Grace. What are you up to?’

‘We’re about there with the sound, Lucy, and I’m having a cigarette before I come in. I need one.’

‘You smoke? Why don’t you bring them in with you?’

‘Sure. We can both have one.’

Last cigarettes, Grace thought.

Lucy laughed in the gap of silence, she might have heard this thought on the airwaves.

‘I’m telling you, Grace, don’t think about it. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Everything could be just fine.’

‘That’s nice. I haven’t always managed to have everything just fine in my life.’

‘No, me neither. I’d like to stop fucking around. I’m sending someone to open the door in five minutes. You’d better be there. Or you’re going to hear shooting. And then there’s only going to be one person who’ll walk away from this, and that’ll be the person who opened the door.’

Grace hung up and dropped a second packet of cigarettes in her pocket. Harrigan contacted his ring-in carpenters.

‘How are you going on that window?’ he asked.

‘The seal’s very brittle so it’s looking more hopeful than it did.

We’re doing our best. But it’s going to take time.’

‘Just do it,’ Harrigan said.

‘Wait here,’ he told Grace and walked across to the house opposite to speak to the marksman. He was set up in a room where the heavy green lounge suite, the radio, carpet, even the ducks on the wall were loving recreations from the fifties and sixties. His rifle was trained through the open window, past an effigy of Elvis, onto the front doors of the Temple.

‘We’ve got the door open. Remember, I want her neutralised.’

‘No worries,’ the man replied.

‘I’ll be outside the van. Make sure you communicate with me whenever you have to.’

He went back outside to speak to Grace, who was dropping yet another cigarette butt on the bitumen.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said to her. ‘I’ll buy you a lime and soda at the Maryborough when this is over with.’

‘We can do better than that, Paul,’ she said with a grin. ‘We’ll go upmarket, where they sell fresh lime. That’d be better.’

‘Anything you want,’ he replied.

He gave people their last-minute instructions, they took up their positions. Harrigan squatted down near the sound van where he could see inside the hall. If he discounted being almost shot dead in an inner city alleyway ten years ago, watching Grace walk across the open space towards the door of the Temple rated as the worst moment of his working life.

A dowdy-looking woman had opened the wooden doors between the foyer and the hall and stood waiting by the glass doors, but instead of running out as soon as Grace went inside, as he had expected, she turned and followed her back in. Very shortly afterwards a small group of people appeared in the tiny foyer and came running down the steps into the street, where they were met and spirited away by his waiting officers. There was no woman and child. Harrigan trained binoculars into the hall and saw Lucy sitting on the floor holding the child in her arms. The marksman contacted him at that moment.

‘I can’t get a clear aim at her. She’s using the child as a shield,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I can see,’ Harrigan replied. ‘Just keep waiting.’

Inside the Temple, Grace watched the small group of lost souls disappear out of the building into the grey weather. Her footsteps were too loud on the bare floorboards, the air around her was icy cold; the atmosphere gave the extraordinary sense of the auditorium as a place without exits. Only the preacher, lying face down on the floor, and the woman who had guided her in remained. The woman was standing near the wall, her arms hanging loosely, an expression of appalling fear on her face. Lucy sat towards the back of the hall, holding the weeping child in her lap.