Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption (7 page)

On the steel table, technicians stripped the body of its clothes, peeling it to indiscriminate nakedness before charting its fragile geography by x-ray.

‘He’s not going out dancing tonight,’ one said, removing the shirt.

‘Not without a makeover,’ the other replied.

The pathologist grinned as they spoke and briefly hummed
cha-cha-cha
. With gentle finesse, he welcomed his subject into its permanent silence by sectioning it down to piecework, his soft voice speaking his findings into a cassette recorder. As Henry Liu’s body was opened out into its layered complexity, Grace smelled a pervasive odour she had never noticed so vividly before: old blood. It stank, there was no other word for it. She stepped back, giddy on her feet, swallowing. Briefly she thought she would faint.

‘Are you all right? Leave if you have to,’ Harrigan said.

‘No, I’m okay. I’ll stay.’

‘Is your companion feeling this, Harrigan?’

McMichael was looking at her, unsmiling, for some reason angered.

She shook her head.

‘Yes, you are,’ he said. ‘Now why is that? You could even say this is beautiful.’

He gestured to the open cavity of skull on the table in front of them, where the interior bloomed pink and grey into the open air. The attendants were also watching her.

‘He was murdered,’ she replied. ‘People do feel for the dead.’

‘Do they?’ he asked and leaned on the table, supporting himself with both hands. He smiled at her. ‘Autopsy. From the Greek.
Auto
, self.
Optes
, witness. Navel-gazing in other words.’ He straightened up and gestured to the corpse with his large hands. ‘This is all of us, madam. Remember that, because you’ll be here soon enough. You are looking at yourself, that’s what’s bothering you.’

Grace felt another sickness at the memory of events that might well have placed her here on a table like this, but which, in their final washup, had not. She was alive and standing, but she was also cold to the bone in this steel and tile room where the living mixed with the dead. She stared back at the pathologist: And what would you know about people who can still breathe?

‘Ken, we’re not in one of your lectures now. Give my officer a break, thanks,’ Harrigan interrupted testily. ‘Let’s move on. We’ve only got so much time.’

The pathologist smiled as he went back to work in silence. Grace stood still. When McMichael and his assistants were finished, the dead man lay naked on the table, his palms upwards, his eyes still open and staring at the ceiling. What had to be presented to the living had been stitched back together with an easy skill. He had become a figure which, other than to be disposed of, was finished with in every sense. Grace could not make any of the usual connections. If these pieces were not living now, how had they ever been alive? Why couldn’t Henry Liu get up, get dressed and walk away? Briefly, the fact of death did not make sense to her, she could not understand it.

‘We’re finished,’ McMichael said. ‘Something you can tell your lady friend, Harrigan. We don’t do anything wonderful like getting people back on their feet again. Sorry to disappoint her.’

Harrigan was unruffled. ‘Thanks, Ken. I’ll need your report ASAP, you know that. I’ll be waiting on it.’

‘I’ll see you outside,’ Grace said.

She was gone so quickly she left Harrigan slightly confused. He followed her out into the hallway and found himself in the less than congenial position of loitering outside the door to the women’s toilet.

He stopped a female technician in the corridor.

‘I think my officer is in there and she’s probably feeling a little light on her feet. Could you check for me if she’s okay? Tell her I’ve gone to the café to get something to eat. She can catch up with me there when she feels up to it.’

‘I can do that,’ the woman replied, smiling sympathetically.

Grace was holding onto the white porcelain basin for support and looking into the mirror when the technician opened the door and asked her if she was all right.

‘Yes,’ she replied, trying to smile but otherwise unable to move. ‘I’m just redoing my face, that’s all.’

‘Your boss said to say he’s gone over to the Street Café to get something to eat and you might want to join him when you feel like it.’

‘Thanks. I’ll be there in a little while.’

She spoke with effort, her cheeks pale beneath her façade. The young woman smiled at her in the mirror and went out again.

‘Why do I do this?’ Grace said to herself, shaking her head and leaning on the basin. She had refused to faint but she had been sick.

She looked into the mirror to check her face. Another mirror behind her returned the reflection: she saw the white mask of her make-up repeated in a series of ever diminishing images until it disappeared into the dark. Pulling herself upright, she and the other reflections faced each other as she drew a careful line around her mouth with her dark red lipstick.

‘Just look the world in the eye, okay, Gracie? Walk tall,’ she said, mocking her own melodrama. She straightened her jacket to give the final touch to her armour and then went out to find the cigarette machine, her coat and the boss, in that order, with that priority.

He must never leave that mobile phone alone. All the way here, he had been talking to somebody or other. Now he was on the phone to someone else again as she walked up to him with a cup of coffee in one hand and a sandwich in the other. His coffee was cooling on the table in front of him, a half-eaten roll beside it.

‘How are you?’ he asked, returning the persistent object to its holder on his belt. She wondered if he ever thought of turning it off or throwing it away.

‘I’m okay,’ she replied. ‘Do you mind if we sit outside so I can have a cigarette? I know it’s a bit cold.’

‘You smoke, do you? We’re in the right place for you then, you must have a death wish. No, I don’t mind just so long as you don’t want to smoke in the car. My car’s been a cigarette-free zone ever since I gave them away myself.’

I wouldn’t dream of it, boss, she thought.

They found a table under an awning, out of the scattered rain and sheltered from the wind which harried litter in small gusts across the tiny stretch of open ground.

‘Did you pass out?’ he asked as they sat down.

‘No.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it if you did. It’s going to happen to you at least once if you’ve got half a brain.’

He sounded almost sympathetic. Grace, on the other hand, was reminded of the last few hours and felt an immediate return of nausea.

She put down her sandwich and drank coffee instead.

‘I’m not lying, I didn’t pass out,’ she said. ‘I felt a little queasy, that’s all. I just needed something to eat.’

He drank his own coffee and watched her force her way through the leftovers of her sun-dried tomato and ham sandwich.

‘I’m sure you did,’ he said when she had finished. ‘But want me to tell you the reason you’re feeling it now? You saw something of the man. Everything about that boy made his father more real to you.

You’ve got to remember, it’s not a person you’re dealing with. Whoever they were, they don’t exist any more, it’s good night for them. A body’s nothing, it’s a throwaway. See it that way and it can’t hurt you.’

He spoke dispassionately, a giver of useful advice. A brief shower of rain fell on the awning, a sound like a hush as Grace brushed away the crumbs and lit her first cigarette of the day with relief. She glanced out at the passing rain and felt cold at heart.

‘Do you have to see it like that?’ she replied. ‘A body isn’t just nothing. Not to the people who cared about him.’

‘You’re not those people and you can’t afford to think like that. Not in there.’

‘No? Because if I do, the pathologist will stick the knife into me instead? “This is all of us, madam. Remember that, because you’ll be here soon enough.”’ She heard herself mimicking McMichael’s soft dry voice with savage accuracy. ‘What a horrible creep he was! Is he always like that?’

To her surprise, Harrigan laughed, much more than what she had said called for. She wondered how much tension he had stored away in there.

‘Yeah. He is. A horrible creep,’ he said, still laughing. ‘And yes, he is always like that. I don’t know how often I’ve heard him give that little speech. He’s got a filthy temper. He’s reliable, that’s the only thing you can say about him. You wouldn’t ask him round for dinner.’

He wiped his eyes.

‘You’ve had quite a day, haven’t you? We didn’t even have to organise it for you. We just tossed you in at the deep end.’

‘It’s okay, it’s not a big deal. This isn’t my first job.’

This solicitude embarrassed her, she wanted to brush it away.

‘Either way, I wouldn’t worry about it. You’ve handled it well.’

‘Thanks,’ she replied concisely, blushing faintly under her make-up.

She had always dealt badly with praise. Unconsciously, she touched the raised line of a scar on her neck, a straight thread-like mark beginning with a fish hook near her pulse and finishing above the line of her breast bone. It was a habit all her self-discipline could not suppress. The touch of her fingers wanted to soothe away both the scar and the indelible physical memory of the cut itself. She saw his gaze follow the movement of her hand and, realising what she was doing, stopped. She wondered if he would ask her about it, people did from time to time. There was no point in Harrigan asking her anything: she had no explanations to give, not to anyone, ever. Eight years ago, an ex-lover had held her down and cut that scar into her neck in a few short moments which she had thought would be her last on this earth. She had carried the impression of his body ever since: first inside her, brutally, as he raped her and then his fist in her face until she lost consciousness. He was her personal demon. Time after time she unpeeled him from her memory, only to find him back again when she least expected him, dragging that smell of old bad blood after him, the same odour she had smelled in the dissection room.

‘Are you okay to drive?’ Harrigan asked, watching her with a slight frown. ‘Do you want me to?’

‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘Driving’s good, I like it. It’ll clear my head.

Where to this time?’

‘Downtown. I’ve been summoned to a press conference with the Area Commander and sundry other dignitaries. The Area Commander’s known as the Tooth for your information, Grace, Marvin Tooth. If you haven’t met him yet, that’s a joy you can look forward to. Don’t forget to count your fingers after you’ve shaken his hand. You’ll probably find a couple missing.’

‘I can hardly wait,’ she replied with a faint smile. Tell me about him. I already know. She stubbed out her cigarette and reached for the car keys.

‘You do have a reason for being in this job, don’t you, Grace? I’m sure you do,’ he said, as they walked to the car.

Grace had spelled out her reasons for wanting to be here on her enrolment forms ad nauseam.

‘I think that’s all on file,’ she replied.

‘I’m not asking you to tell me what they are. It’s just that, whatever you think you’re doing here, this is just a job. This is how you earn your dough. When you go home at night, you do whatever else you do with your life. You try and turn it into much more than that and you can end up in a lot of trouble. It’s not a good idea to put too much pressure on yourself. Other people will do that for you soon enough.’

Maybe they already have. Maybe I’ve found that out for myself already. Don’t be modest, Harrigan, you’ve made a pretty good fist of it yourself so far today. And if everything I’ve heard about you is true, since when did you ever act like this is just a job?

In reply, she smiled at him and said nothing. He seemed to be speaking to her in a less detached and more personal way than was usual for him in her brief experience. Even so, she thought it would be a mistake to see this concern as any particular compliment to her. Her information said that ambition drove his interest in other people’s welfare. He was known for caring how well his people coped with their work because he wanted outcomes, bottom lines accounted for to those he had to answer to. Grace surmised that his advice was just an expression of his famed ‘team approach’, summed up as mutual survival, a way of keeping all their heads above water. She was happy to keep everything businesslike. It made life so much easier.

As Grace drove them down Parramatta Road, Paul Harrigan remembered. Or, more accurately, could not stop himself remembering. A hot summer night, twenty-one years ago. A small room with walls painted a dull green and splashed with blood. Bright dark hair (just like his hair), matted and straggling onto the linoleum.

In the fluorescent light, how bright that blood was, how liquid, how shining and iridescent, like smudges of engine oil. (You think these things when you’re eighteen and you’ve never seen anyone dead before.) He could not see his mother’s face, she lay staring at the skirting board. In the dull light, his father had turned around, still holding the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. Paul had walked into the room and turned his mother over to look into her face. In the present, he closed his eyes again. For whatever reason, at the trial the jury had accepted his father’s plea of an accidental killing. Standing in the dock after the verdict, Jim Harrigan had said in a clear, if shaking voice, ‘I never meant to kill Helen. I wish I was dead along with her.’

No, father mine, it wasn’t going to happen like that. I made sure you got to live with that memory for the rest of your life. The way I still do. That was the point.

Harrigan drew in his breath too sharply and noticed Grace glance at him curiously. He came back to the world, clearing away his thoughts, that memory. He didn’t want to start another day this way again in a hurry. The events he encountered as part of his job didn’t usually trouble him like this. He watched and dealt with them as objectively as McMichael dissected his subjects, with a meticulous, almost gentle and uninvolved touch. His approach was like his careful dressing every morning, matching the right colour shirt with the right cut suit, dabbing on the Givenchy aftershave lotion, making sure the exterior he presented to the world was faultless. It was nothing essential to himself, just something to keep out the daily dirt. Today the boy’s shock had been too close to the bone. Harrigan’s careful separations were contaminated, by the dead man’s face painting itself in reverse onto his blue handkerchief (burned to ashes, he hoped, in some incinerator in the morgue) and the streaks of blood down his newest recruit’s black coat. As the car came to a smooth halt at a set of lights, he said to himself, as he’d thought at the time: We’ll find this person, Matthew, this girl, whatever she is. I will get her. Whatever it takes, I will get her. I will see her locked away for as long as I can.