Blood Redemption

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 cafe 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 Cafe 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 facade. 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.