‘He shouldn’t be crowded,’ she said. ‘He won’t survive it.’
‘He shouldn’t be crowded,’ Harrigan repeated. ‘You don’t say. I never would have thought of that. Thank you, Grace.’
Grace cut the connection on the edge of his sarcasm, thought to herself, you had to know, I had to say it, and dismissed him from her immediate concerns.
She had thought the waiting room would be a haven but it attracted people like flies. Doctors came to offer unwanted sympathy, nurses to suggest sedatives, auxiliaries to supply drinks. ‘Keep them out,’ she told the guard at the door. A little later there was a knock and a tall Caucasian woman was ushered into the room. Grey-haired and sixty-something, she was straight-backed and old-fashioned in her dress, which was both elegant and conservative and included a hat and gloves. She carried an armful of neatly folded clothes; there might have been no such thing as suitcases or even plastic bags left in the world.
‘Miss Riordan? My name is Mrs Tsang. I am Agnes’s mother. I’ve been asked to come down here and be with Matthew. I understand you are with the police but I’m afraid I must ask you to leave now. I have to see my grandson alone. I have been told his clothes are very badly stained with blood and I want him to change them. We can’t do that while you are here.’
She spoke in an authoritative, almost mechanical voice, without stopping for breath. Matthew Liu gave voice to a gasp of some kind and held his head in his hands.
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
Grace had stood up.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Tsang, but I can’t leave either of you. I have to stay with you both until someone else takes over from me.’
As she spoke, Matthew suddenly shouted, outraged, ‘Why do you
—
He might have run at his grandmother if Grace had not held him back in his chair.
‘Don’t, Matthew. Let it go. Just stay calm,’ she said, holding onto him.
The woman herself had stepped back quickly, her face white but emotionless. She stood there in confusion, hugging the clothes she was carrying. Harrigan, arriving unaccompanied, walked into the room, timing it perfectly to see the chaos. There was a brief silence in which the boy subsided in his chair and Mrs Tsang stared at Harrigan, shrugging graceful if ageing shoulders.
‘I do apologise,’ she said to him with perfect manners. ‘He should never use such language, certainly not in front of this young woman.
It is always better to keep up an appearance. It will make things easier in the long run. But he won’t listen to me … ’
‘Do you want me to take those?’ he replied, unfazed by anything she had said. He took the armful of clothes from her and set them on the table. ‘Why don’t you sit down over here? Would you like some water?’
Without argument, Mrs Tsang sat in a chair opposite Matthew. They did not look at each other, neither seemed to know what to do. Grace handed her a glass of water which she drained without stopping like an obedient child and then placed neatly and gently on the table. Harrigan sat near her and went through the etiquette, handing her his card.
‘I’m going to talk to your grandson now, Mrs Tsang. You understand, this could be upsetting for you. If it’s too much for you, you say so. Otherwise if you’d just like to sit there nice and quiet, that’d be the best thing. You need anything, you ask my officer here.
She’ll get it for you. Anything at all.’
His politeness combined the impossible with the normal, inviting them to accept that this was a completely usual situation, leaving the woman without an alternative.
‘Yes, of course, I do understand. They told me … ’
Unable to speak further, she gestured her agreement and sat still with her hands folded in her lap.
‘That’s good,’ he said. He turned to the boy and leaned forward.
Grace placed her miniature cassette recorder on the table amongst the torn photographs of soap opera stars, considering how the way Harrigan had soothed everyone down allowed for no dissent, and jotted into her memory how he had reduced her to a nameless role to help him keep the peace. Unasked, she stayed beside Matthew. The boy took her hand and held onto her tightly.
‘I need you to take me through what happened, Matthew,’ Harrigan was saying. ‘Try and put it in some sort of order for me if you can. Take it as slow as you like.’
The boy waited before speaking. Grace felt his small fingers wound into her own and thought that Harrigan had to feel for him as well, but how would you ever know?
‘I don’t know why she shot Dad. I think she just wanted Mum.
That girl — I didn’t even see her, all of a sudden she was just there on the street. She shot Mum’ — Grace saw Mrs Tsang close her eyes -
‘and she sort of swung around and she shot Dad. It all took … two seconds? Then she went back into that shop on the other side of the road — it’s deserted, they used to sell peanuts there or something — I don’t think she even saw me until she turned around. I thought, she’s going to shoot me now. I don’t know why she didn’t. Why didn’t she?’
He was shaking his head, wondering why he was still alive.
‘Don’t ask yourself why people do things like this, Matthew,’
Harrigan replied. ‘You don’t want to know what they’re thinking. It’s not worth your time.’
‘A fucking girl. Killed my dad. For no reason. You know her hands
— she had these gloves on but her hands were really shaking. It’s sort of mad, isn’t it? You wouldn’t think you’d notice anything but I could see her hands so clearly. She looked at me and I saw those mad eyes and that gun … ’
Grace felt him squeeze harder on her hand as he rubbed his forehead. His face was thinned down with remembered terror and he was shaking.
‘It’s okay, Matthew,’ she said to him, looking at Harrigan, watching him wait his time.
‘We found the gun, Matthew,’ he said after a short pause. ‘She dropped it around the back of the shop right where she’d parked her car. You don’t have to think about her having it any more. So, can you tell me? Did you see her face at all?’
The boy shook his head. ‘No, you couldn’t really see her, she had this scarf thing on. And this blue coat. With a hood. There was blood all over it. She was little. She wasn’t much taller than me. And thin. So fucking thin, because there was nothing of her, she was just so little.
I’d know her. If you showed me a picture I’d know it was her right away. She was — I don’t know — I didn’t think she was old. Twenty?’
Mrs Tsang had drawn herself upright in her seat and seemed to be holding her breath, whether because of what Matthew had described or his language, Grace could not tell.
‘You’re sure it was a girl?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Yeah, I’m sure. I didn’t believe it at first. But I’m sure.’
‘My officer tells me you think you know why. Do you want to tell me about that?’
‘It’s Mum, it’s what she does. She runs those Whole Life clinics — it’s all women’s stuff. They do these things, health care and abortions and things like that. She gets this mail — ultrasounds and letters saying she’s a murderer and all that crapola. And she gets these idiot protesters hanging around the clinics. They keep saying things to her like
“Murderer, God’s going to strike you down.” She’s not a murderer, she saves lives, but they don’t think about that, that’s too hard for them — ’
He stopped, staring at Harrigan. ‘You don’t care about that sort of thing, do you? You’re not going to hold that against her?’
‘No, Matthew, that doesn’t affect me one way or the other. I don’t think about it.’
‘Mum’s been getting this really gross hate mail lately — it was disgusting, it was death threats and dead babies. Dad kept saying to her, you’ve got to go to the police about it. But no, she said she wasn’t going to do that, because you wouldn’t do anything about it if she did.
Then last night they had this incredible argument. He told her, you’ve got to go to the police because it’s just
