Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption (39 page)

‘No worries, Paul,’ said the man, looking after Grace as they went out into the street.

Dawn had begun to light the steep, narrow hill down to Central Station in a pale wash, touching on the litter in the gutters.

‘Can I drive?’ Grace asked.

‘Go for it.’ He threw her the car keys.

‘How’d they get the address?’ she asked as they got in.

‘A Doctor Andrew Matheson from Hornsby rang the hot line. He says he’s sure he saw her at a house in Berowra Heights yesterday afternoon. He’s treating a man there for terminal cancer. The man’s name is Hurst and he used to be a butcher,’ Harrigan said.

‘Berowra Heights. That’s a long way from the city.’

‘We could have her. We could have her in half an hour.’

She glanced at him. He was punching his fist lightly into his other hand. Take it easy, Paul. Don’t let’s assume too much just now.

Meanwhile, she would have to deal with the speculation that would be rife after she was seen arriving at work in Harrigan’s car first thing in the morning.

27

In the hour before dawn, Lucy was woken by the sound of footsteps and whispered voices in the hallway outside her room. She got out of bed, put on her old dressing gown and opened the door. The door to her father’s room was open and the room was lit by a soft light.

Melanie appeared, hurrying.

‘It’s Dad,’ she said, ‘I think he’s dying. I’m calling the ambulance.’

She had tears in her eyes as she turned to go down the stairs.

‘Can I go in there?’ Lucy called out to her.

‘If you want. But I don’t know if he can hear you. I think it’s too late.’

Gathering courage, Lucy walked towards their father’s room.

Inside, Stephen was sitting beside him, holding his hand. There was almost no sound in the room. Stephen looked up and saw her. He shook his head.

‘He’s dead,’ he said quietly, in disbelief. ‘He’s gone. It’s all over.’

Lucy could hear the sound of rain on the window. The window was open a little, the curtain moving in the cold wind. The pale fire she had seen in her father the day before had gone, his body was just what it was called: remains. His face had no connection to the face she had known as her father’s. It was less than a mask, something completely used up. As she stood there, she shivered. She felt a sense of claustrophobia, a stifling airlessness. She was convinced that he was still here in shadow, caught in this room. She pushed the window open wide and let the strong wind into the enclosed space. It burst in with unexpected force, knocking the bedside lamp to its side. The room seemed to flash from positive into negative and back again within an instant and she felt that now he had gone, it was empty.

Stephen, startled out of his thoughts, let go of their father’s hand.

He stared at his sister.

‘It’s all finished,’ she said to him. She was shocked at the depth and the painfulness of her relief. Her heart was racing, her breathing so deep she could have been intensely frightened by something.

Stevie stood up and shut the window, righted the lamp.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was like he was still in here, I had to let him out.’

‘It’s okay, Luce. Don’t worry about it. Let me just sit quiet for a moment.’

He went back to their father. Lucy looked out of the window and saw in the distance a few scattered lights on the edge of the park. The reflection in the dark glass superimposed the image of her father’s body over the scene. She turned back to the room to see Stephen pulling the floral bedsheet over the body’s face. As he did so, her father was reduced to an outline.

‘We don’t have to wait in here,’ Stevie said. ‘Let’s go downstairs. We don’t have to look at him.’

He left the light on in the room behind them. Just before he closed the door, Lucy looked at the covered figure one last time.

‘I’ll see you down there, Stevie,’ she replied. ‘I’m going to get dressed. I’m leaving.’

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yeah. I’m sure.’

Yes, she was cut loose completely. There was nothing here to hold her.

Lucy went back into her room and dressed slowly. She had packed her backpack the night before. Her gun was concealed in an outside pocket, where she could reach it. She sat on her bed for a few moments before standing up and walking out into the hallway again, and then glancing one last time at the closed door to her father’s room.

On her way downstairs she heard the familiar sound of the television set in the lounge room and saw that the light was on. In the kitchen, she found Stephen and Melanie sitting at the table, drinking instant coffee. Melanie was crying softly. Stephen was smoking.

‘Does Mum know?’ Lucy asked.

‘You heard her, did you?’ Stephen blew smoke out. ‘Yeah, she knows. Mel got her out of bed. It doesn’t matter, Luce. Whatever she does now, it doesn’t matter. She can watch TV for the rest of her fucking life.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m going now. You don’t need me. I’ll just be in the way.’

‘Why do you have to go?’ Melanie asked. ‘You don’t have to leave now.’

‘Oh, yes, I do,’ Lucy said.

‘I’ve got this for you. I meant to give it to you last night,’ Stephen said.

Melanie stared as he handed Lucy several hundred dollars and a set of car keys.

‘It’s out the front,’ he said, and she nodded.

‘Thanks.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Melanie said.

‘There’s nothing to get, Mel. Don’t worry about it,’ Lucy replied.

The three of them walked through to the front of the house, towards the noise of the television set. Lucy stopped at the lounge room door, wondering what she could say, if there was anything to say.

Her mother stood up and stared at her. She gaped at her daughter and then pointed at her. Her mouth was open like a fish blowing bubbles but no sound came out. Lucy guessed at once what had happened and walked into the room to see her face in identikit on the television screen, with a request from the announcer that anyone knowing the whereabouts of Lucy Hurst should ring Crime Stoppers immediately.

Looking at her mother, Lucy suddenly laughed out loud.

‘Let me leave you something to remember me by, Mum,’ she said, and putting down her backpack she drew her gun out of its pocket.

She aimed it directly at her mother.

Her mother screamed, Stephen shouted, ‘No, Lucy, don’t!’

Lucy turned the gun from her mother to the television set and shot it to pieces. The screen cracked, smashed and went dead; a stray bullet shattered the window behind.

There was utter silence and then the sound of crying. Her mother had fallen back onto the couch and was weeping. Melanie was bent over, holding her ears, crying and shaking where she stood. Stephen simply stared at his sister as she put the gun away and hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder.

‘Goodbye,’ she said and walked out the door into the pre-dawn light and drove away in Stevie’s old Datsun towards the city.

Thirty minutes later the police cars from the Hornsby patrol came screaming into the driveway, immediately behind an ambulance which had been proceeding to the same destination at a much slower pace.

28

Why did the air in the house smell like this? A faint and secondary odour under the cold, something in the skin of the walls, an invasive rottenness that Harrigan noticed as soon as he walked in the door. He looked at the incandescent lights burning in competition with the growing daylight outside, the shattered television set and a window broken in the spray of bullets, a young girl he did not know rocking herself on the sofa with her arms folded around her body, weeping. Nothing out of the ordinary. Domestic rubbish left behind by a night-time explosion of violence, shock spreading in the aftertaste of the morning hangover. Lucy Hurst’s earlier presence was printed on the air; her absence was a shadow in every room.

Harrigan was in role: considering the information he had to hand, deploying his people, speaking quietly. Genuinely untouched by what he saw, he set about playing the watcher. Seeing if anything could be salvaged from what was otherwise a wasted exercise; something he had realised as soon as he had walked down the driveway, past the patrol cars and the ambulance and seen the expressions on the faces of the waiting officers. He sent Grace to comfort Melanie Hurst and talk to the mother, Trevor and Ian to talk to the brother. They met Stephen Hurst in the hallway, just as he came down the stairs.

‘My father’s up there. He hasn’t been dead for more than an hour.

Can’t this wait? Can’t I see to him first?’

‘You have called your doctor, Mr Hurst?’ Harrigan asked.

‘Of course I called him. He’s up there now. I just spoke to him.’

‘Then may I go up there? I need to speak with him before your father is removed.’

‘I don’t believe this. I didn’t believe it when she took that gun out and I still don’t believe it. If you want to, go up. There’s nothing to see.

Just my father.’ Stephen Hurst shook his head.

Harrigan nodded and walked upstairs, listening as Trevor asked if Mr Hurst would like to go through with them into his own kitchen for just a few questions. He glanced back down and saw that the young man walked with a noticeable limp.

Upstairs, he stopped to look into an empty room which someone had already cordoned off, into which, once they arrived, he would send the forensic team to comb for any human trace. On the floor, the sheets, anywhere. Hair, body fluids, blood. He thought dispassionately of Lucy Hurst’s electronic voice reaching out to his son from this ordinary, shabby, adolescent room and moved on. The door to the main bedroom was open. The doctor was drawing the sheets up over the head of the dead man. He and Harrigan introduced themselves at the foot of the bed, shaking hands in front of the mute form lying under pink cotton flowers.

‘I will be signing the death certificate,’ the doctor said, slightly pompous. ‘This is a wholly natural death, I have been waiting for it.

It’s a good thing for him it’s over.’

‘Yes,’ Harrigan replied laconically, without a trace of irony.

‘I understand the family don’t know I was the one who called in?’

He was waiting. Harrigan nodded.

‘I’d appreciate it if it could stay that way,’ the doctor said.

‘At the moment, I think they’re probably waiting to hear from you what you’ve just told me,’ Harrigan replied, with a perfunctory smile.

The doctor left.

The odour of human sickness Harrigan had detected throughout the house was no stronger here, but in a room which was both cold and seemed airless it had an extra bite. He looked at the figure in the bed.

Unmoved by the dead man’s presence, he peeled back the sheet to look at the death mask. The features had already shrunk back onto the skull.

As wasted as it was, the corpse had the presence of a familiar spirit, malevolent if impotent. Harrigan considered that wherever he had so far set foot in this house with its narrow corridors and packed boxy rooms, it had left its imprint. This particular demon had played itself out. What it had loosed was somewhere out there in the city, out of his reach and, for all he knew, was only just beginning its own campaign. He replaced the sheet and walked to the window to look out over the national park.

Rain clouds were building on the dawn horizon and he could see the wind moving through the tree tops, hear it worrying at the glass. He left the window closed and touching nothing else went downstairs.

The kitchen was a dark room with no external window, the only outside light would come through the back door into the adjacent laundry. This door was now closed against the weather, he could see it shaking in the wind like the window upstairs. At the present moment, the room was lit by a single fluorescent tube flat against the ceiling. Harrigan appeared silently and stood leaning against the kitchen bench where he could watch Stephen Hurst. The boy had a candid face, presently shadowed in the spread of the white light. Ordinary things had been placed at random on a green laminex table: cigarettes, plastic lighters, ashtrays, chipped coffee cups which were half filled with instant coffee.

Stephen, wearing a dark red and blue check flannelette shirt, leaned on his elbows, a numbed expression on his face. He was smoking, the air thick with the smell of it. Harrigan watched him, assessing the variables of fact, emotion and agenda in each of the answers he gave.

‘She’s got some money, your car and a full tank of petrol. A brown 1977 120Y Datsun?’ Trevor said, without so much as a grin.

‘Yeah.’

Harrigan wondered how he might explain to the waiting media that their home-grown terrorist had escaped New South Wales’s finest by trundling away in an infamous, shit-brown 120Y.

‘She can’t be travelling very fast, I guess,’ Ian commented. ‘Do you think your sister would steal a car if she needed to?’

‘She probably already has,’ Stephen replied, exhausted.

‘She’s good at that, is she?’ Ian continued.

Stephen did not reply.

‘You say you don’t know where she’s gone,’ Trevor said. ‘Do you know of a Preacher Graeme Fredericksen?’

‘I don’t think she’s gone to see him.’

‘You do know him then?’ Trevor asked.

‘Yeah, I’ve met him. Sleazy creepy little bastard.’

A pity your sister didn’t see him that way, Harrigan thought.

‘Why do you say she won’t be there?’ Ian asked.

‘Because I went looking for her there once. The day those people got shot. That afternoon,’ Stephen replied. ‘He said she wasn’t there but he was lying, I’m sure he was. I went back and found her later that night. She was a mess, she looked so sick. I don’t know what happened but I think … .’ He stopped and swallowed. ‘I know it seems like a mad thing to say but I wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t tried to kill her or something. She doesn’t trust him now. I’ve heard her talking to him on the phone sometimes —’

‘She’s phoned him?’

‘Yeah, quite a few times. Or he’s phoned her. At least I think it’s him. Graeme. Who else would it be? I don’t know what’s going on.

That’s the honest truth.’

‘Do you mind if I ask a question — Ian, Trevor? Do you mind, Mr Hurst?’ Harrigan asked, quietly neutral as usual, pulling back a chair.