Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption (40 page)

‘No,’ Stephen said, shaking his head, reaching for another cigarette.

‘Your sister was a mess, you say, when you found her that night.

Did you ask her why she was in such a mess?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t ask her any questions?’

‘I never ask Lucy questions. I haven’t for years.’

‘Your family ask a lot from you, Mr Hurst. Money. A car. All night out on the streets looking for your sister.’

‘It’s not only me. Ask Mel, they drink her blood too. Used to anyway, not any more.’

‘I notice you walk with a limp, Mr Hurst.’

‘I broke my kneecap when I was fifteen. It never healed properly.’

‘Did your father do that to you?’ Harrigan asked out of pure guesswork.

Stephen did not reply.

‘When did you realise your sister was a murderer?’

‘I didn’t know. You wouldn’t think that sort of thing about your sister. I didn’t know till this morning when she was leaving.’

‘Then why give her money and a car? Did you see something in yesterday’s newspaper that alerted you perhaps?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘You did know. Why didn’t you do something?’

Stephen Hurst leaned his face on his hands, pushing his glasses awry. His cigarette dangled from his fingers. When he looked up, Harrigan saw that the edge of one side of his glasses had impressed a mark under his eye. The boy smiled bitterly.

‘I didn’t know. All I’m trying to do is keep things turning over here so Mel and me can walk away from this in one piece. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do. What do you want from me? I don’t see what I can give you.’

‘I want to find your sister before anyone else gets added to the list of the injured and the dead, Mr Hurst. At the moment, I have more people on that list than I care for.’

‘I don’t know where she is. If I knew I would have told you that first thing.’

He drew on his cigarette again. Harrigan was pushing back his chair, standing up.

‘My officers will take your statement now. Thank you.’

‘You do that, do you? Come around and ask people those kinds of questions and then go away again,’ Stephen Hurst said, almost to himself, grinding out his cigarette.

‘No, Mr Hurst. I’m the one who has to cover all the angles regardless, because if I don’t, then I can’t do my job,’ Harrigan replied.

He walked out into the hallway in time to see Grace leaving a room, closing the door softly behind her. He smiled at her, she smiled back.

‘How did you go with the mother?’ he asked.

‘Listen to this,’ she replied quietly.

He listened at the door and heard the sound of a television set.

‘She’s got a portable in there,’ Grace said. ‘That’s what she wanted.

Tea, toast and the television set. Talking to her is like talking to nothing, she stares back at you like she’s a baby chicken. I think she made sure she had no idea what was going on.’

‘What about the girl?’

‘She’s out of it, the doctor’s given her a shot. She’s exhausted. I don’t think she would have had the time to know what was happening. Neither of them can tell us anything.’

‘Par for the course,’ he said, ‘no one here can. She’s given me the slip, Grace, by thirty minutes.’

‘What do you want me to do now?’

‘I don’t think there is much more you can do here. Do you want to take a cigarette break? Catch up with me a little later.’

‘Okay.’

Grace went and stood out on the edge of the ruined garden but did not light a cigarette, letting the cold air shift the odour of the house out of her nostrils. She braced her hands behind her head and felt the strength of the gathering wind. It was strong and icy and pushed her back as she turned from side to side, loosening the muscles in her neck and spine. A bank of black cloud was continuing to build on the horizon. On its patch of ground above the trees the house stood exposed before the full force of the weather.

The garden on the slope just below had already been searched and was not cordoned off. Grace walked down into the green shade, picking her way along the muddy paths. Dead flowers littered the ground, old rhododendron trees and camellias were massed together.

At the base of the slope, an ancient and decaying sleep-out stood near the edge of an escarpment. The door was open like a mouth. Grace looked inside but did not go in. The room was dark and smelled like a cave of moist earth and the windows were covered with cobwebs.

Are you in there? There could be no one in there, the area had been searched. The waiting quietness of the shadows felt like a trap about to close. Grace turned away to look out over the native forest in the national park and then heard a soft growl behind her. She looked and saw an ancient dog in the doorway to the sleep-out, snarling at her from the shadows.

‘You horrible mongrel,’ she said softly, ‘you don’t have to protect her now, she’s gone. I wouldn’t go in there anyway.’

The dog growled more loudly, more savagely. It moved forward, herding her towards the escarpment.

‘Go away. You don’t frighten me.’

The dog stood its ground, grinning yellow teeth. It moved forward again. Grace stood still where she was and then took a step to the side, towards the path to the house, staring it in the eyes.

‘You stay there, you just stay there.’

It was braced on its claws but as she moved slowly away it stayed still, watching her off. When she gained the pathway, she saw it relax its stance and then disappear back into the sleep-out. Grace walked back up the hill quickly, thinking that this was no place to be, it was dangerous, full of trapdoors and tripwires. No one would want to live here.

She found Harrigan in the hallway near the door to the lounge room, talking to Ian and Trevor. He signalled to her to join them, the others looked at her speculatively. Avoiding their joint gaze, she glanced through to the lounge room where a forensic team was working on the ruined television set.

‘There you are,’ he said, following her line of vision and then looking back at her again. ‘We’ve been tossing a few ideas around.

We’re shadow boxing with her so I’m going to make her dance for us a little. Do you want to talk to her?’

‘Out there in cyberspace, you mean? Is she still out there?’

‘Why don’t we find out? Why don’t you send her an email — give her Greggie’s last message. Quote it word for word. That’s what he wanted you to do.’

‘Who am I talking to? Lucy Hurst or the Firewall?’ she asked.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think I should talk to the girl who’s protecting the world.’

‘Yeah. Go out looking for the Firewall. Okay, I’m staying on here for a little while longer but you can all go now. These two will take you back,’ Harrigan said, glancing at them. ‘I told them not to go without you.’

He walked away. Grace found herself watching him go.

‘Okay, Gracie,’ Ian said with a faint touch of sarcasm, ‘do you want to hop in the back?’

‘Would you mind if I drove?’

‘Careful, mate,’ Trevor said, ‘Gracie’s a speed queen.’

‘No, that’s okay,’ Ian said, handing her the keys and grinning at Trevor. ‘You can ride in the back. No smoking.’

‘Sure,’ she replied.

Driving was a relief. She reached the Pacific Highway quickly and zipped along through the traffic, letting the speed work the tensions out of her head. For a short time, they were silent.

‘That was a horrible place,’ Grace said after a while. ‘Why doesn’t she burn that place down while she’s about it? It needs it.’

Trevor laughed in the back.

‘Don’t give her any ideas, Gracie. You really think you want to talk to her?’

‘Yeah. Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know if that’s the right way to go. I don’t know how dangerous it might be.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. Who’s she going to kill next? You don’t want to be anywhere near the firing line,’ Ian said.

‘We don’t know that yet,’ Grace replied, a little bleakly.

‘She will, Gracie,’ Ian said to her, almost gently. ‘I hate to say it, but she will now she’s got started.’

‘What does Harrigan want you to do?’ she asked them.

‘Go and pick up the preacher. He wants the three of us to talk to him, whatever we’re going to get out of that,’ Trev replied.

They were silent again.

‘Okay, Graciekins,’ Trevor said suddenly, ‘enough of this pissing around. Where did you spend last night? You weren’t at Harrigan’s place, were you?’

‘What kind of a question is that? No, I wasn’t. I was in my flat. In my own bed. By myself. You are such suspicious-minded, nosy people.’

‘It’s what we do for a living,’ Ian said, helpfully. ‘You’re supposed to think that way too.’

‘I am not sleeping with Harrigan!’

‘I’m just saying what everyone else is saying.’ Trevor sounded defensive. ‘If you do want to fuck him, you might as well go ahead and do it now because everyone thinks you are.’

‘Trev, you are so
crass
!’

‘I’m just telling it like it is,’ he said, taken aback by her degree of anger.

Ian had been laughing but he stopped himself.

‘We believe you, Gracie,’ he said, wiping his eyes, ‘but I don’t know if anybody else will.’

She shook her head but did not reply. She sped up, driving too fast, feeling an unfocused sense of urgency. ‘Take it easy, mate,’ she heard Ian say after a little while and she did slow down, taking it quieter.

Why is life like this? she thought to herself. Outside, the sky held the threat of a deluge not quite delivered.

29

Lucy dumped the Datsun off the road near a station not far from Hornsby and stole another car from a commuter who would not find out until he had disembarked from his evening train. The best she could do for disguise was to pull the hood of her jacket over her head and hope that no one looked at her too closely. Circumstances favoured her: it was early, barely light, and the weather was bad, dark and cold. She drove carefully in a thin stream of traffic towards the towers of the city, on her way to the only place she knew where she could hide both her car and herself. There was no other choice.

The garage at Randwick was as anonymous as the first time she had driven in there after the shooting. There was a new padlock on the door but she cracked this open with a screwdriver she carried for this purpose. She drove inside, into a hermetically sealed sanctuary, an island of concrete within four brick walls hiding her from everyone’s sight.

She parked beside the pit, stood once again in the centre of the deserted building and considered that she was back where she had started. It was as dark in this place as it had been before. She took her pack out of the car and stowed it in the office, moving uneasily in the shadows, wondering if the ghosts she had encountered here earlier were still waiting for her. She walked out into the main part of the garage again.

What do I do now?

She did not have to go to the police to give herself up. She only had to call them and they would come for her. They would fill the street outside and, once they had her in custody, she would never have to decide to do anything again. She would be moved from place to place as the system needed her to be moved, she would only have to make sure that she was ready to go when they wanted her to and that she talked to whoever she was told to talk to. That she did what she was told to do and kept herself clean and fed. If she did not do this, they would force it on her. No, she wasn’t going to call them, not yet.

She had the whole day to fill, the conundrum of how to meet Graeme that evening to solve, the future of her life to decide. At present, her ghosts were quiet and she felt oddly that she had no power of emotion left. The memory of the people she had shot was not troubling her just now, those thoughts had faded since she had shot out her mother’s television set. She smiled as she thought of this.

She began to prowl the perimeter of the garage, kicking at bits of rubbish. Unseen until she stood over it, she came across a worn, dark red beanie tossed to the side out of the way. She picked it up and whirled it around on the end of her hand, staring at it. The almost abstract thought that her father had died that morning came into her head. She felt nothing for him and did not pretend to; it was more that something which had pressed down on a nerve was gone. As she stared at the beanie, another thought joined with this; the meaning of a difference in the look of the garage registered with her for the first time.

For some moments she felt too frightened to move, but told herself she could face anything, she already had. She walked to the pit on the other side of the car. It had been covered over with heavy wooden boards. She looked at the boards and decided she would not move them. She did not want to see someone she loved turned into the same thing that her father had become.

An interior stillness took hold of her, an emptiness unlike the gossamer lightness she had felt the last time she was here or the quietness which usually preceded the rustling sounds of her children’s voices. She had no blood. She was made of layers of rustling, dry parchment, an accumulated skin only. Her articulated thoughts had a curious density, like sounds not quite heard, muffled by a wall of thick, discoloured glass. With this odd and echoing interior voice she thought, quite calmly, that all that mattered was the next action, the next step. And then, after that, nothing would matter, because it would all be finished.

She walked around to the other side of the car and leaned against it. Unbidden and unwanted, the ghosts in her mind were returning in force, a jangling mess breaking furiously through a curtain of silence.

She screamed at them in her head to stop. They fell silent immediately, they had somehow melted into the air. An intensity of anger took their place. A hushed sound, burning as it made its way through her bloodstream, hummed in her head, obscuring her vision.

‘I don’t have to be frightened of anyone, do I? Not you, Graeme, not anyone. I’ve been there,’ she said aloud.

Anger flipped to coldness, white toxicity became planetary iciness, powerful in its capacity to plan. This detachment was an anaesthetic, it was useful. She could be possessed by grief or rage and still act. She had things to do. Important things to do.