Blood Redemption

doing to herself. I’ll wait.’

To his surprise, the man reached over and took hold of his wrist.

‘No, Stephen. I don’t think you should wait. I think you should leave now. As it happens, I have to go out very shortly myself.’

Stephen tried to pull away but the man had a numbingly tight grip; he was still smiling, as though nothing unusual was happening. Under the man’s gaze, Stephen was trapped in inaction, unable to say something so simple as ‘let me go’. It was either leave now or fight, but he had no energy and no words of protest to help him. He blinked a little behind his glasses and chose to leave.

‘Just this way,’ the preacher said.

He led Stephen through the short hallway to the back door. As soon as they stepped outside, he let him go. Stephen looked at his wrist and saw that it had been squeezed white at the bone. He stared at the preacher in shock.

‘You walk uncomfortably, Stephen. You have a limp,’ he said. ‘Why is that?’

Stephen answered the question, speaking haltingly. ‘It’s my knee, it got smashed up when I was fifteen. I’ve had three operations to fix it.’

‘How unfortunate for you. I do sympathise,’ the preacher replied.

‘And believe me, Stephen, I understand your misgivings concerning Lucy only too well. I have always had grave concerns for her safety. I know what a troubled young woman she is. She lives on the edge, falls in and out of addiction and puts herself in terrible danger. I fear for her very much and I often wonder what the next phone call is going to tell me. But I cannot be with her twenty-four hours a day. That is for you to do and I am afraid you have let her down very badly there. Perhaps you should go to the police and tell them how afraid you are for her welfare. No one wants the worst to happen. No one wants her to be found one morning lying in a laneway, taken from all of us who care for her because she has overdosed.’

The preacher’s voice seemed to drop down to a strange mechanical whisper in Stephen’s ear, as quiet as the inner voice of self-doubt.

Stephen could not reply. The preacher turned and went back into the theatre, locking the door behind him.

Stephen’s wrist began to ache as the blood flowed back. He stood for a few moments nursing it then walked down the laneway back out to the street. He got into his car and drove to a place where he was certain the doors would be open to him: the Hampshire Hotel on Parramatta Road.

* * *

Stephen sat solitary in the saloon bar and, over a beer and a cigarette, tried to weigh up the man he had just met. The preacher had spun his words out well, like a spruiker fronting a sex show, or a used-car salesman or a politician. Just like his father. They all had that same sideways calculating and slightly anxious glance, asking the question, have I got away with it? They all had the gift of the gab, that inviting smile. They got under your skin and, once they had, they took more than they gave.

Stephen contemplated without joy how he was caught between two of them. On the one hand, there was his father, the local butcher. A successful man with a large and profitable shop and money in the bank, who had always greeted his customers with a grin and a slogan, something picked up from the radio that appealed to him: We’repleased to meet you and we’ve got meat to please you. What can wedo for you today? George Hurst’s patter was all picked up from here and there, scraps of wit glued together, a dazzling patchwork. He made the housewives laugh, and some of his regulars had cried when they heard he had cancer. His father’s days of persuasion were over now, he could not sweet-talk the disease out of his bones as the substance of his body consumed itself.

And on the other side was the preacher, a man with a cold fish smile who left behind an after-chill which grew stronger the more you thought about him. Stephen nursed his wrist and wondered: who and what are you? What does Lucy want with you?

He ground out his cigarette in the ashtray and held up his glass for a refill. The man beside him got up and left the afternoon paper behind on the bar. Stephen took another cigarette, reading the banner headlines and the opening paragraph of the story without moving his head. For a few short seconds, the cigarette hung from his mouth unlit. Then he pulled the newspaper towards him and read it over again.

When the beer arrived, the barmaid said, ‘That’s such a shocking thing, isn’t it? And just up the road here too. You don’t feel you’re safe any more, do you?’

‘No, that’s right, you don’t,’ he replied perfunctorily and lit his cigarette at last, staring across the bar at the music machine in a darkened corner.

There had to be certain things Lucy could never do, no matter what she had told him during these last few months. Stephen had to believe this, he did not have a choice when the alternative was unthinkable. He preferred things to remain unsaid: he found they were easier to deal with that way, and later he could forget they had ever happened. He thought about the preacher again. Lucy, you get yourself involved with some fucking weirdos. When are you going to realise no one out there is going to give you what you want? The words snapped angrily in his mind.

He pushed the newspaper away and sipped his second beer. He wanted to be practical, to stop thinking, to find her. To bring her home safely and bury the past with his father’s death, to have it finished with once and for all. To make it something he never had to think about again.

He finished his beer quickly and stood up to leave.

7

‘Amazing Grace. We don’t get many people like you in here. Come and talk to me. You’re going to like me. I’m a real sensitive New Age guy.’

Ian Enright, thirty-something and a gym junkie and one of Harrigan’s team, grinned to people around him as he spoke. Grace had just walked into the office and put her bag down on her desk, which was some distance away from his. She saw the small group watching her speculatively and wondered if they were manufacturing gossip, then told herself not to be so thin-skinned.

Harrigan’s 2IC, Trevor Gabriel, appeared beside them, calling out to the room, ‘Better get a move on, people, it’s show time. It’s on in the big room, not out here.’

People got to their feet. Grace waved to Trevor across the busy office, a gesture he returned with a smile.

‘You know her?’ Ian asked.

‘Known her for fucking centuries, mate. She’s an old friend. I was at uni with her once upon a time.’

‘Introduce me. I’d like to get friendly with her too.’

Trevor glanced at him darkly and was already moving away. He joined Grace by her desk, leaving the others to watch and wonder.

Trev, a substantial man with no neck and shoulders like a wrestler, had black hair shorn to stubble. Known to be gay, he was the subject of occasional to frequent nasty remarks but was too formidable for anyone sensible to bait to his face. No one could credibly spread the rumour that he and Grace were sleeping together, but if they were friends it could be said that she was here only on his recommendation.

In the rounds of gossip, this particular slant on her arrival had already become currency. There was some slender truth to it. Trevor had suggested Grace as a possible recruit and was her informant about life on the team and Harrigan in particular.

In the midst of this, Harrigan himself arrived to marshal his team for a recap of the day’s events. He stopped at Grace’s desk to let her know that he intended introducing her to the troops once they were inside the incident room, if that was all right with her.

‘Sure,’ she replied with a polite smile, a response the watchers searched for hidden meanings.

The incident room was the engine room. Everything that was worth watching happened in this ugly elongated piece of open space without windows and where the walls were lined with imitation wood panelling. It was a public place, where people arrived as at a theatre, where accounts of rape, assault and murder were thrashed out in