Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

Blood, in this bleak light a shining, dark liquid, stained Grace Riordan’s coat as she sat down with the boy in the gutter. She saw it brush from his clothes onto hers as she wound her arm around his thin waist and felt him cling onto her in reply. The curt orders from Harrigan still sounded in her head: Stay with that boy. Keep him with it because we need him. She let the blood lie there, damp and untouched on the fine black wool, and said, ‘We’re here, Matthew. You hold on to me. We’ll have your mother in hospital as soon as we can.’

Grace was forcing calmness on them both as sirens screamed and a more human racket exploded around them. A rush of people stepping either side of the boy’s shock, knocking on doors, stopping traffic, and searching the streets for a witness or a killer, whichever they might find first. Close to their feet, the paramedics treated Dr Agnes Liu where she lay on a wet road just now being strung with blue police ribbons, her breastbone broken open by a bullet. Grace did not have to tell the boy, probably only thirteen, that his mother held on by a thread. It was said in the blood on his school uniform and in the expression in his eyes, emotion displayed down to the bone, nakedness Grace chose not to look at too closely just then. She chose also not to think too much about the woman lying so near to them in the street. Later there would be time for her but not now.

‘What are they doing? Why are they taking so long?’

She held Matthew Liu upright as he spoke, his compact body racked with tears. They sat in the speckling cold rain of a sun and showery day, in a dog-legged street of old terraces, warehouses of textile merchants and a red brick building hung with a discreet sign on its restored Art Deco facade: The Women’s Whole Life Health Centres Inc., Administrative Offices, Chippendale. At a distance too close to them, the corralled media had begun to gather and howl for interviews and footage.

‘They’re doing everything they can, Matthew,’ Grace replied, listening to her cliche. ‘Don’t think about anything except this minute right now.’

‘I know why. I do know why. But not Dad. I don’t understand Dad.’

‘If you want to talk to me about that, Matthew, you go right ahead.

I’ll be with you all the way to the hospital and you can tell me everything you want to.’

As she spoke, she saw the boy turn to look past her, down the short distance along the street to where his father lay on the roadway. She stopped him, turning his head away and shielding his eyes with her hand.

‘Don’t. There’s no point.’

‘No, I should. I should be able to handle it.’

‘No, Matthew. Don’t. Don’t do it to yourself.’

She might have to look but the boy did not. He had seen it once already, when it happened, that should be enough for him whatever he thought. He did not fight with her.

She glanced back to where Paul Harrigan, with a number of other police, was standing over the boy’s father. The man half sat, half lay on the street, his head resting against the front wheel of his car.

Professor Henry Liu, late musicologist from the University of Sydney.

Much of his face was gone but his eyes remained, open and human, staring upwards. As she watched, Harrigan reached into his pocket and taking out a large blue handkerchief dropped it over the man’s face. The fabric clung and was stained immediately into a pattern of red. Grace blinked at the unexpected sight of the makeshift death mask and suppressed the recoil of her shock, the sudden in-drawing of her own breath.

Harrigan had turned away and was walking towards them through the moving crowds, a tall man with dark blond hair, preoccupied, apparently unmoved by the scene. He did not look at her but squatted down at eye level in front of the boy. He spoke in a neutral and uninflected voice, the tone of someone who is, and remains, detached from the events occurring around him.

‘Matthew? Do you know who I am? My name’s Paul Harrigan and I’m in charge of this investigation.’

In the face of a numbed response, Harrigan slipped his card into the pocket of the boy’s stained school blazer. ‘Keep that in case you need it.

Now, I’m going to find who did this to your parents. That’s a promise.

I’m going to find them. But I’ll need your help. I need to talk to you a little later on today about what’s happened here. Can you do that?’

The boy nodded, his face set, his tears now dry. Harrigan put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Okay. We’ll get your mother into hospital first and I’ll come and see you there. This lady will be with you all the way in the ambulance.

I just need to speak to her for a moment. Over here.’

Grace followed him into a pocket of stillness within the constant movement of the crowd. She saw him glance down at the wet stains smudged onto her coat and then look past her, at Matthew, scanning the scene behind her for whatever was happening elsewhere. He spoke to her in the same neutral and unhurried voice he had used with the boy.

‘That boy is your responsibility from here on in. You make sure you keep him afloat until I can get to speak to him. Call me if you need to.’

She did not have time to do more than nod before a paramedic pushed between them.

‘We’ve got to go to St Vincent’s. We’ve got to go now.’

‘You’d better get on your way.’

Harrigan turned away as Dr Liu was lifted from the roadway, her son rushing towards her. Grace caught him by the hand and told herself, don’t panic, keep the boy contained.

Keep everything contained, keep it moving. Moving someone from one place to another is only an exercise in practicality, even if they are dying and practicality is the only thing you have to offer them. She told herself this after she had followed Matthew into the ambulance.

It raced through the city streets and he began to talk in an uncontrolled and jerky stream of words which she tried to record on her miniature cassette player. At the hospital, the reception party of hurrying people wheeling the injured woman through the corridors brought with it the strange atmosphere of emergency, of events whose outcomes are balanced on the finest, most fragile point.

At the entrance to the operating theatre, the doors were closed in both their faces. Matthew stared at them bewildered and let her put her arm around his shoulders and guide him to a small waiting room set aside for their use. A uniformed officer guarded the door.

Marooned, the boy sat on a vinyl chair next to a low table covered with ancient TV Week magazines. He hunched forward, his hands in his thick black hair, dry-eyed and waiting. His head seemed too large for his small body, his fine bones should not carry the weight. Grace looked at him bent over the table and squeezed him lightly on the shoulder, just once.

‘I’ll be right back, Matthew. You just hang in there,’ she said quietly, and stepped outside to call the boss.

Harrigan’s voice came over the airways, thin and trivial through the compact instrument. ‘How’s the doc? Is she going to make it?’

His question came over as the original throwaway line. She paused, glancing around at the busy, echoing corridor.

‘They don’t know. I’ve been told she’s going to be in surgery for quite a while and it could go either way.’ She drew a breath to stop the catch in her voice from becoming too apparent. ‘The boy’s talked to me but he’s not making much sense and he’s not going to last. If you want to talk to him today, it has to happen soon.’

‘I’ll be on my way over there as soon as I can get away. Just keep him with it.’

‘There is one thing he’s said. He thinks he knows why.’