‘I just wish they weren’t there. I want them to leave me alone, that’s all.’
‘No, Lucy. Listen to them. They are asking you to give them rest. You can do for them what was never done for you: you can give them redress.
Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. You have a right to vengeance, Lucy.’
He continued the slow massaging for some moments, then stopped and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders.
‘We know who Agnes Liu is, Lucy. We’ve known about her for a long, long time. It’s not chance that’s brought you here. This is ordained.
You came here to be made clean and you will be. You came here for peace of mind and you will find it. Now you wait here. You just wait.’
When he came back, he placed a gun, compact and metal blue, on the table in front of her. She looked at it for some moments. She shook her head to say she did not understand.
‘Have you ever fired a gun before?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I know about them being out there and all that, and people getting hold of them. But I’ve never had to do that.’
He picked up the gun and loaded it with two bullets.
‘This is a very special gun. It’s one that I had made. I want you to try and use it. Come with me,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you how to fire it.’
He led her to the centre of the lawn and stood behind her as he folded both her hands around the gun. He was not a tall man and her body fitted against his without discomfort, his strength seemed to cushion her. In this serenity and the closeness of his human presence, she had felt a suspension of time, a sense of the peacefulness he had promised. She let her body relax.
‘When you’re ready,’ Graeme said to her soothingly. ‘No one can hear us out here. Call on your strength. And then fire. Twice. You can do it.’ He stepped away from her.
The shots crashed out, she rocked on her feet. Graeme did not quite laugh as he watched her trying to shake the ringing sound out of her head.
‘It’s a little noisy but you get used to it,’ he said. ‘Let’s sit down and talk, Lucy.’
They had sat down on a stretch of grass much more lush than the winter-starved turf that surrounded her now in the public park. The blue metal finish of the gun lying between them gleamed in the sun.
Graeme was a young-looking man with clear brown eyes but as she looked at him Lucy had thought that maybe he was older than he liked to appear. This did not worry her, he had a good-looking face, a comfortable face, and dark hair which had not yet turned grey. She had picked up the gun and weighed it in her hand.
‘You have to understand, Lucy, that when you have that gun in your hands, the way you do now, you have the power. No one else owns it, it belongs to you. And then you control whatever happens to you, not the reverse. You need to remember that.’
She did remember, both that and the strange lightness of spirit she had felt in counterbalance to the weight in her hand. He had continued to speak as she held the pistol balanced in her palm.
‘You can take this gun and find redress for the sins committed against you, against your unborn children. You, Lucy, are a very strong young woman. You take this gun and you will show the world how strong you are.’
She had sat holding the gun for some moments longer.
‘Do you want to load it for me again?’ she asked.
‘And if I do, what will you do?’
‘I’ll shoot at that tree.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘What else am I going to do?’
‘Guns are there to be used, Lucy. That’s why they were created.
But you have to use them carefully. They have their designated targets. Your target has already been chosen for you, but I think you know that.’
He reloaded the gun. She looked at the tree and imagined the doctor at the car door, speaking to her mother. She emptied the gun into both imaginary figures, firing as quickly as she could, feeling the force of the bullets as they thudded into the tree.
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ she said, once the gun was empty. ‘I don’t like hurting people.’
‘You won’t be hurting anyone,’ he replied. ‘She’ll feel nothing at all, there will be none of the pain she has inflicted on you. You will be cutting a thread, it will be clean and merciful. Blood will wash away blood. You will be left clean. When it’s over you will feel nothing except the most blessed relief. The voices of your children will be silent for ever. They, and you, will be at peace.’
She held the gun, unable to prevent herself from feeling a faint emotional rush at possessing it, a sense of swelling that she had somehow grown stronger.
‘It’s empty again,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘So I can’t use it on myself then?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Please don’t do that, Lucy,’ he said in his softest voice, smiling at her. ‘I care about you. Please don’t do that to me.’
On the park bench beside the pools of cold water, Lucy’s thoughts momentarily gained clarity. No, that would have spoiled everything, wouldn’t it? That would have put the kybosh on everything.
The quiet was shaken by a blast from the horn of a truck rumbling past University Hall. The noise shattered the glass shell containing Lucy and her thoughts. She got to her feet and hoisted her backpack on her shoulders, turning her back against the chill wind.
I’ve used that gun now, Graeme, just like you showed me. Now I’m going to come and talk to you about it, and maybe you can tell me for a second time why I did it.
She walked across the park towards City Road and King Street, a small figure overshadowed by the university buildings crowded onto the perimeter of the parklands. Unnoticed by almost everyone.
4
There were certain things Grace knew she could never do. The sectioning of the dead was one of them, even though the postmortems she had attended were always such matter of fact events. It was only this remaking of dissection as an everyday occurrence which made it bearable for her. Today, that this was just regular, paid work for them all, had the opposite effect, she did not know why.
She watched the attendant wheel Henry Liu to the stainless-steel table then saw him jerk his thumb at the corpse and ask it to get up on the table now if it didn’t mind, mate, because they were all in a hurry.
Grace felt the joke was on her. She glanced at Harrigan beside her but did not see a flicker of reaction in his face. How did he do it?
The pathologist appeared, Kenneth McMichael, shambling angel of death, a massive man in his surgical gown. Dressed and groomed by St Vinnie’s, his coke bottle glasses were flecked with flakes of dandruff from his oily black hair. He leaned over the corpse and took its head in his huge, dexterous hands, turning it this way and that as he studied the wound, as delicately as if he were holding a child.
‘Now,’ he said, and the word was almost a sigh, ‘this is not something you’d be expecting when you got out of bed this morning.
Are we dealing with a regular firearm here?’ His voice was soft and dry like the crunch of fine sand.
‘No, we’re not, Ken,’ Harrigan replied matter of factly. ‘This is very much a one-off. Specially modified to do the maximum amount of damage close up.’
‘You can put it down as succeeding in that case,’ the pathologist said, with a slightly ironic raising of his eyebrows. ‘All right. Let’s start.’
Harrigan’s expression did not change but Grace was surprised to notice him suppress a recoil to this comment.
On the steel table, technicians stripped the body of its clothes, peeling it to indiscriminate nakedness before
