Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption (30 page)

‘I’ve been lying here thinking it over ever since. Thinking, how can you know who someone is when all you can see of them is their eyes?

But I remembered other things as well and I thought, yes, it’s her. About four months ago, someone called. My home number. I don’t give that to anyone. None of us do. But this person had it. She said, do you know who I am? I said, no. How could I? She was just a voice. She said, I am the butcher’s daughter. Did I remember now? No, I didn’t, not then. She said I was a murderer and one day I would die for what I had done. She was crying. I hung up at once. We got a new phone number. I put it out of my mind. I have to put that sort of thing out of my mind.’

She paused, everything became still.

‘I can’t remember every detail. There are gaps. But I can remember this. One day — when Matthew was nine, I think, around then — one very hot day, I remember everyone saying how hot it was. The air conditioning could barely cope. This woman brought her daughter into one of the clinics. It was late morning. They didn’t have an appointment. This child, she looked so ill, and so young. I said I would see her right away. And then she miscarried, almost immediately, right there in the reception. There was so much blood, I … There were women there, they had brought their children in for check-ups, older women, they saw it all. We called an ambulance. I said to this woman

— do you want to drive your own car? Or do you want to go in the ambulance? They didn’t have a car. They’d come by train, and bus.

Some extraordinary distance. I said to this woman, I don’t know how your daughter survived the trip. Couldn’t you see how sick she was?

Why did you come here? It’s so far away. Someone told me about you, she said. I didn’t know what else to do. But if the only way to get to hospital was to go in the ambulance, then she would go in the ambulance. We were all shocked. She was so unmoved. In the end one of my staff drove her. I thought, that poor child.’

Again there was a pause. Grace glanced up at the nurse.

‘I want to keep talking,’ Agnes Liu said, and they waited.

‘Agnes,’ Grace spoke quietly, ‘can you remember where they lived?

Just the suburb?’

‘I’ve tried to but I can’t — I have a blank.’

‘The clinic?’

‘No. I travel, you see. I go from clinic to clinic. I want to make sure things are being done in the right way. I can’t picture where I was. I know these things happened but I can’t picture any of it.’

Include five possibilities out of five clinics, Harrigan thought, standing outside.

‘I rang the hospital that evening to see how she was. She was already home, they said. Her father had come to get her. I was furious with them. I said, she needed care. Oh, they were so busy. There was no staff, no one had realised. They had no address for her. Or not one that made any sense. There was nothing I could do. But I was distressed. I thought, why was any of that necessary? Then one day —

quite a few months later, I’m not sure how long — this woman, she came to the clinic again. They had an appointment with me but I didn’t know the name. I think it was a different name, I can’t remember what it was. She wanted to see me.

‘I spoke to her in my office. The first thing she said was, we have a car this time. I didn’t quite know what to say. Her daughter was pregnant again, she said. She wanted an abortion, she was waiting outside in the car now. Would I do it? I was flabbergasted. I said, why have you come to see me again? Oh, she said, I didn’t know where else to go. I said, what does your daughter want? Oh, this is what she wants. And then the woman said — I didn’t know if she was being deliberately stupid — my daughter’s uncontrollable. My husband wants her to go on the pill so this doesn’t happen again. He doesn’t like it.

‘There are times when I’m talking to people, when I’m watching their faces. I looked at this woman and I wondered, is this stupidity or cunning? I don’t know. But it’s evil, whatever it is. I said I wasn’t prepared to do that. Her daughter was young, I think she was only fifteen. It’s not good to go on the pill at that age. I asked her to bring the girl in. I spoke to her privately, I insisted. I asked her about her boyfriend. She gaped at me. I asked her about her father. She didn’t seem to know what I meant. She said he was a butcher. Yes, I thought.

I asked was this what she wanted? She said, yes. What else could she say? The mother was waiting outside my office. And she looked at me.

I can only say I knew — I was certain from the look on her face — that this child’s father was the father of her child. I thought, yes, this is cunning. You want to implicate me. This is your way of shifting the blame. If I know, it’s not your fault, is it? It’s mine. I felt ill.

‘What should I have done? Call the police? Throw them out? I thought, I have an obligation. I have to protect this child from injury.

I can perform this abortion and then I know it will be done properly, not some bungled thing. I wouldn’t have trusted the woman not to do something dreadful. I said to her that I needed family details, would she fill out a form? She did. I performed the abortion. And when it was over, the child began to cry. I thought she would never stop. I didn’t wait. I went and I called the police. But when I was on the phone, I saw the woman dragging her daughter out of the recovery room. I didn’t know what to do.

‘I put the phone down and I went after them. Out to the car park.

I stopped them leaving. The girl was in the back seat, curled up. Still crying, I think. The car door was locked. I said to the woman through the window, she can’t have sexual relations with anyone for at least a fortnight. They had to know that. It was all I could do for the girl. This woman just drove away. She almost knocked me down. I rang the police. Then I found out from them — every detail this woman had given me was false. Of course. I was so naïve to think otherwise. I still don’t know if I did the right thing.’ She stopped, closing her eyes. ‘I think, that girl crying in the back seat — was she someone who hated me for what I did? I don’t know.’

There was a pause.

‘Could you describe her to us, Agnes? Would that be possible?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure — her face is there but I don’t know how to … She was so young … ’

Standing outside, the doctor signalled to the nurse.

‘That’s it. You’re putting too much pressure on her,’ he said to Harrigan. ‘We’re finished.’

The nurse touched Grace on the shoulder. Grace nodded. She began to disengage her hand.

‘I’ll leave it there, Agnes. Don’t feel you have to think about it any more. Thank you for giving us that. That information’s very important.’

‘Wait,’ Agnes said, in a voice that was too soft to be heard by anyone else, ‘come closer.’

Grace bent down, the woman whispered in her ear.

‘I know you. You came to a clinic. This mad woman was bothering us. You threw her out.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘You look better. Much better than you did.’

Her hand slipped away and Grace found herself outside the room with Harrigan, watching the doctor and nurse bend over the bed.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to Harrigan and took refuge in the Ladies, holding tissues under her eyes to stop the tears from brimming down her cheeks. Mascara flickered fine black speckles onto the white paper.

Holding herself in grip, she repaired her make-up and then went outside to find Harrigan waiting for her in the corridor.

‘The doc’s okay,’ he said, studying her face. ‘She’s out to it but she’s okay. We’ve been told we can go home now. How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Do you want me to buy you a cup of coffee? Since you don’t drink.’

‘A cigarette is what I really need,’ Grace replied, letting a chink of her feelings out.

‘Why don’t we try for both?’ he said. ‘Let’s take half an hour off.

We can spare each other that much time.’

In a coffee shop nearby, where you could sit in an individual booth unwatched by the crowd, Harrigan ordered at great expense a short black and a strong flat white from a silver-studded waiter. Grace lit a cigarette and inhaled the poisonous smoke with gratitude. She forced a shiver down her spine, releasing tension, and came back to the present to find Harrigan watching her from the other side of the table.

‘That was a nasty story,’ she said.

There was no sympathy for the Firewall in Harrigan at that moment. ‘You can say that,’ he replied. ‘I can tell you I’ve heard worse.

It’s not a new story.’

What could be worse? Grace found herself unexpectedly shaken by this reply.

‘No,’ she said and then was silent, staring at the tablecloth, drawing on her cigarette. When she looked up, Harrigan saw an expression of extraordinary sadness cross her face.

‘We don’t even know it’s her, do we? The doc could be talking about someone else who’s got nothing to do with this,’ she said.

‘She could be, that’s possible. I don’t think it’s very likely but it’s possible.’

‘Well, if it is her, then why? Why take it out on the doc? Why not just go and shoot your own rubbish father if he’s done something like that to you? Or your idiot mother. Now, that would be justifiable homicide. I wouldn’t convict her.’

She drew down more smoke, an angry glint in her eye. Harrigan found himself laughing dryly.

‘Good question. We can assume she’s been manipulated in some way. But I wouldn’t say that explained her.’

The waiter brought their coffees. After a few seconds’ hesitation, Harrigan ordered a neat whisky. He looked at Grace to see if she wanted anything else as well but she shook her head.

‘If you look at everything about her,’ she said, ‘she’s such a wild card. How far can you manipulate someone like that?’

‘I think our friendly neighbourhood preacher would consider it a challenge,’ Harrigan said. ‘Now there’s someone who wouldn’t like some upstart girl getting up his nose if she wasn’t doing what he wanted.’

He was tapping his fingers on the table top as he spoke.

‘He’d get a kick out of doing that? Putting a gun in her hand and saying, go out and use it?’ Grace asked.

‘He’d love it.’ Harrigan was musing. ‘Take a good look at him the next time he comes in. I don’t think I’ve met many people more cold-blooded than he is.’

‘No? Haven’t you dealt with some really choice characters — serial killers, people like that?’

‘No one worth talking about. People like that are nothing, Grace.

They’re an empty space. Their only quality is how dangerous they are.

Someone like that is strictly business. You run them to earth, you put them away, you forget their existence. They’re not worth one second of your time.’

The waiter placed a shot glass containing a thimbleful of whisky on the table. He amended the bill before returning to drape himself decoratively over the bar. Harrigan glanced at the sum charged and wondered if he should not have taken out a mortgage on his house before deciding he needed an evening heart-starter.

‘Then she’s not like the preacher,’ Grace said. ‘If that’s what he is, she isn’t like that.’

‘How do you know she’s not?’

Grace ashed out her cigarette and wanted to light another but did not.

‘She was raped,’ she said to Harrigan, looking at him directly, preventing her voice from shaking. ‘I’m not saying it justifies anything, but it does give her a reason for what she did.’

‘A reason? Her reason for shooting down two bystanders is that she was raped?’

Grace’s back was immediately bathed in a cold sweat. ‘You don’t think that matters?’

‘No, that’s not what I said. And it’s not what I think either.’

‘You heard the story,’ she said, with forced detachment. ‘It wasn’t exactly straightforward. Not that I think it’s ever straightforward.

Why wouldn’t it be a reason?’

‘Do you think reason is the word you want to use?’

Grace folded her arms and leaned a little forward, resting on the table.

‘Maybe it is. It’s a reason to her even if it’s not for us. Compulsion, if you think that’s a better word. Maybe I do want to get into her head so I know why she does what she does.’

‘You want to be her?’

‘For a little while maybe. Just to get the insight.’

‘Grace, could you shoot down two people in cold blood?’

‘I don’t think she did act in cold blood. But no, if you’re asking me.

I hope I couldn’t.’

She gave in and lit another cigarette.

‘Then you can’t be her. For the exact same reason you say you want to. She’s got no insight into what she’s doing, she can’t have.

And you do.’

‘I want to know that she’s human. I want to treat her like she is.’

‘Why does someone like you want to get down in the dirt with someone like her?’ he asked.

Why does your son? To have asked him this question would have been unforgivable.

‘Is it dirt?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, if that’s what it is, we’re all down in it, aren’t we? One way or another. It’s all just people doing what they do to each other all the time. Lovely, lovely people.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t see myself down there. And there’s no way I’d ever see you down there. Not for one second.’

‘I can’t see it as hard and fast as that,’ she said. ‘It’s like a spectrum, we slide up and down it.’

‘Maybe. But some people like it down there, Grace, they like being in the dirt. They do things, they leave devastation behind them, and they walk away like it’s never happened. They don’t care. They’ll give you any excuse why they don’t have to think about what they’ve done.

I don’t believe either of us is like that.’

You don’t know who or what I am, Paul, she thought in reply.

There was a brief silence in which they looked at each other.

‘You’re tired,’ he said, thinking aloud.

‘Aren’t we all? So are you,’ she replied, crushing out her cigarette.

He did not answer.

‘That session got to me,’ she said. ‘More than I thought it would.’

‘That’s going to happen, it’s better to admit it upfront. Do you have something you do when you want to unwind?’ he asked.

‘I go and sink myself in music. I can get lost in it for hours. I might do that when I get home.’