detached detail, and competition and aggression acted out free of charge. People came here to hatch out ideas, discover what they might be asked to do next, or find fodder for something to talk about.
‘Okay,’ Harrigan said, calling for quiet. ‘Before we start — most of you have already met Grace Riordan. Grace started here today, I’ve already told her she’s lucky we could turn on something like this for her. We’ve tossed her in the deep end but she’s handled it. And she’s still smiling. You can’t ask for much more than that. Welcome, Grace.’
‘Thanks,’ she replied, her clear voice carrying across the room. ‘I’ve got to say that I never once had to wonder what I was going to do next today, which is not something you can complain about. And it’s nice to be here. Thanks for the welcome.’
There was some laughter and applause.
‘That doesn’t change, Grace,’ Ian called out. ‘You never stop working around here.’
‘It’s my concern for your welfare, mate. I don’t want you to get bored,’ Harrigan said. ‘We’ll give you a proper welcome with a few ales down at the Maryborough as soon as we can, Grace, but just now we don’t have the time, I’m sorry. We’ve got work to do.’
With the social niceties out of the way, he looked over a sheaf of photographs which he’d laid down on the metal table in front of him.
Everyone waited as he gathered his thoughts. He looked up to address the room.
‘Something I want you all to remember as soon as you wake up in the morning, as soon as you get in to work every day: we have no time to spare. This job has priority over everything else we do from now on, no matter what it is, and that includes our social lives. We’ve got someone very sick out there on the streets, armed or unarmed we don’t know, and we have to find her. She is not going to walk away from this. I want this girl. I want her as soon as we can get her.
‘All right. To start.’ He held up the sheaf of photographs. ‘These were all posted in the Haymarket over the last three months. There’s nothing of much use to us here but they are somewhere to start. This is our girl’s mind at work.’
He began to pin reproductions of Dr Agnes Liu’s hate mail onto a cork board that covered half the length of the wall. ‘Oh, gross,’ someone called out as the images began to appear. A display of foetuses in miniature white coffins with the phrase ‘Holocaust Victims’ written across them. Dr Liu’s picture covered with a wash of red ink, the words ‘Satanist Mass Murderer STOP NOW’ scrawled across her face. Then ultrasounds and more photographs of aborted foetuses. A text in what appeared to be a child’s handwriting: ‘
‘How sick is all that?’ someone else said.
‘As sick as the mind that went looking for all that,’ responded an older woman with a cracked and broken voice. ‘Someone who likes to occupy themselves with that sort of thing. A really happy mind, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Louise is still sober and it’s after five. What do you know?’ Grace heard someone mutter. Jeffo, the man who had shouted at her in the car park that morning, was standing a little too close to her.
‘Women do that sort of thing to themselves?’ he called out loudly then, in her ear, ‘Turns your stomach.’
Grace did not bite, she was studying the glossy pictures. She recognised one of them, the mildest, the famous photograph of the tiny feet of a foetus between a man’s thumb and forefinger. Eight months ago, a female protester from a ragged group waving placards on the street had pushed it into Grace’s hands as she made her way into a Whole Life Health Centre clinic to have an abortion herself.
‘I don’t give a shit what they do, mate,’ Harrigan responded with professional indifference. ‘That’s not our business.’
‘They’re fucking asking for trouble if you ask me,’ Jeffo said.
No one replied to him. The gibe had changed the atmosphere, there was a creeping sense of tension and anger in the room. Harrigan paused.
‘Let’s get something clear right now,’ he said. ‘Point one. Like I just said, I do not give a shit what happens in those clinics. That goes for everyone else in this room. Point two. We’re looking for a murderer.
That’s all we need to think about. End of story.’
Grace remembered the woman protester snaring her at the clinic door, ear-bashing her all the way inside until Grace had taken her by the arm and hustled her back out onto the street. There she had flashed her warrant card under the woman’s nose. ‘You see this?’ she had said. ‘Do you want me to arrest you? Do you want to spend the night in the lock-up? Or do you want to get out of here right now?’
The woman had stared open-mouthed at the card for some moments, before walking away with a strange, almost satisfied expression on her face. When Grace went back inside the clinic, Dr Agnes Liu had come to thank her before showing her into the operating theatre. The woman had been bothering them all week, she told Grace, they were so grateful she had moved her on. All facts that Grace had no intention of ever sharing with anyone in this particular room.
‘This is the important bit of mail,’ Harrigan was saying. ‘The doc didn’t get to see this, it was waiting for her this morning at the clinic.
So we can assume this wasn’t for her; it’s meant for us or whoever else was going to clean things up. I want to know where this photograph came from and I want to know who the woman is. It looks like it’s been taken from off the web somewhere but there’s nothing to locate it for us. Louise is going to track it down if she can.
If it’s still out there.’
Those assembled looked on silently at the photograph of a woman lying face down in front of an open doorway, shot dead. The words
‘You can run but you can’t hide’ were written across the image.
Streams of blood flowed from her head down a small set of steps onto a pathway. A small winged figure carrying a sword was etched into one corner.
‘I want to know who thinks they’ve got the right to make that decision about someone else,’ Harrigan said, tapping the photograph before turning away.
‘They’re on a mission from God, Boss.’ Louise spoke out again.
‘They can do what they like. They do — that’s who they are.’
‘You find them, Lou,’ Harrigan replied.
‘Do my best,’ she said, with a grin as cracked as her voice.
‘Now, our home-grown protesters. They’re on a mission from God as well. You can start with these nosey people, Ian. They make a habit of photographing the women who go into the clinics and then sending them letters afterwards, saying things like you’re a murderer, we know where you live, and so on and so forth. Question: How do they get the information about who the women are and where they live?
We’ve had a couple of these women ring the hot line already, you can talk to them as well.’
‘Can I get some help?’ Ian asked.
‘Yeah, you can find someone to help you out. You can organise that.’ Harrigan sounded a little surprised.
‘I thought Grace here might like to learn the ropes. She can work with me.’
There were some smirks and suppressed laughter at this, while Grace glanced at him with pity, shaking her head.
‘No, mate, you can find someone else,’ Harrigan replied, with a touch of astringency. ‘Grace is going to be occupied with Matthew Liu, apart from anything else she might have to do. We’ve already agreed on that. Now, America — Trevor’s going to follow up that connection.
And the gun. It’s a pistol, not exactly home-made but something close to it … ’
No, she wasn’t working with Ian. Grace brushed off the silly grins, they did not concern her. She couldn’t work with Ian because she was one of
