Blood Redemption

As he approached his fortieth birthday, he was still holding down his age. There were no grey hairs visible yet and he was keeping his weight under control, staying fit. He put his hand on his stomach, breathing in a little. Trevor’s moon face appeared in the mirror alongside his own.

‘I was just wondering if you were planning on pissing her off on the quiet. That’s what you’d normally do, isn’t it?’

Harrigan was combing his hair.

‘No. Why should I? Unless you know something I don’t and you want to tell me about it. For starters, did Marvin try and get her in the sack?’

Trevor, who had no more dress sense than a fly, straightened his ugly tie in the mirror and then smoothed down his thick, black moustache. Harrigan glanced at him, waiting. Trev only shrugged.

‘No, mate, it wasn’t anything like that. Talk to her about it. She’ll tell you if she wants to.’

There was silence.

‘Is she a single lady? Has she got someone in her life?’ Harrigan asked.

In the mirror, Trevor gave his reflection a sideways glance.

‘You don’t know, mate, she might be a dyke. But if she is, I haven’t seen her at a Sleaze Ball yet. No, I don’t think she has.’

‘I told her she needs to watch her back.’ Harrigan was slightly embarrassed, parrying with a touch of self- justification.

‘I’ve already told her that myself,’ Trev replied. ‘Half a dozen times at least.’

8

Grace left the overhead light switched off in her tiny flat near Bondi Beach and trod her way across its small square of living space by the light of the street lamps outside. Newly renovated studio apartment, the advertisement had said, living and bedroom in one.

Grace thought that radical austerity combined with New Age squalor was a better description, with the harsh green carpet ruffed up with steel wool as a matching design feature. She had her priorities, accommodation was not one of them. This was somewhere to sleep, to get dressed in. She was here for the scenery outside, for the sight of the headlands with their white and orange buildings and the strip along the beach front just at dawn, both momentarily transformed in a clean wash of light. To drink takeaway coffee on the beach and watch the sea, a cold, marbled green at this time of year, and feel the salt air on her face before she was obliged to paint on the day’s make-up.

Her flat had other useful attributes which were not to be sneezed at: a secure car park you needed a keycard to get into, doors which were programmed to your own personal combination lock. Her ex-lover, her own personal demon, made his reappearance in her life (as well as in her memory) from time to time. She saw him trailing behind her in the street sometimes, or standing at a distance from her building, watching her windows. She had taken some discreet steps for her own protection, obtaining a handgun illegally, something that would not bear examination in her current line of work. There was no other defence she could rely on. Tonight, there was no one out there on the cold and misty street, which proved that even personal demons can be driven away by bad weather. Relieved, she sat at her table, put down her bag and lit a cigarette, kicking off her shoes.

‘I am so tired,’ she said aloud to the rustle of the undrawn curtains.

‘I am so tired.’

In this moment of sudden relaxation, the vision of Henry Liu naked on a steel table came into her mind. She saw him with a handkerchief over his face and then without, and remembered the stink of old blood which had attached itself to her during the autopsy. In her memory, the smell had the same vividness and she felt, briefly, the same sickness. She swallowed. In the clinic, Dr Liu’s hands had been gentle, she had comforted Grace while she sat in the recovery room unexpectedly crying once her abortion was over. Agnes Liu did not carry that smell of blood, nothing like it, she was not the thing those people said she was.

Grace put her cigarette in the ashtray and closed her eyes. She pressed her head between her hands, stretching and then arching her backbone against the chair before relaxing again. She pushed her fingers into her hair and squeezed her scalp. I want, she thought, loosening the knots in her spine, I want. Body warmth to push that cold and ugly picture out of her head. Some sex, now that would be nice. To come home to some beautiful man, thin and muscular, with smooth skin and a smooth stomach, who could make her forget what she had seen during the day. The thought made her smile. She should be so lucky. These days, when she had no one serious to concern herself with, she chose to be casual about it. Keeping sex for when the impulse, the fancy, took her, rarely inviting anyone here into her plain sanctuary.

She shook the appetite away, expunging it. Grace was inclined, from time to time, to move from abstinence to indulgence and back again.

She was in no mood for either state just now, or for the emotional press that went with wanting someone a bit too hungrily. She only wanted to keep her thoughts to herself, on her work, to see how long she could persist in her job among the minefields the Tooth kept laying for her. It was just a game, Survival at Work, where the rules spelled out that you took no prisoners. She did not have to keep playing if it came to that; she could walk away whenever she wanted to.

She allowed herself a few more moments of rest as she finished her cigarette, before the pleasure of stripping away the day’s make-up and letting out her hair.

On the other side of the city, Harrigan stood on the pier in Snails Bay and looked out over the black water towards the lighted span of the Harbour Bridge. He was there in the hope of emptying out his mind and feeling the constraints which cramped his body during the day disappear. Often he did not sleep and, if he lay in bed, could spend hours filling the shadows with his night thoughts, phantasms of failure, scraps of bad memory, old grief. This was a hazardous chemistry for his waking dreams at any time: depression followed after them like a promise. On his dangerous white nights, he came out here where he could think freely. Caught up in the quietness of the night noises, and watching the movement of the lights on the water, he might eventually relax enough to be able to sleep as soon as he lay down.

Tonight, nothing could shift the memory of the professor’s face or Matthew’s Liu’s dazed confusion. They touched him more than the thought of Agnes Liu in St Vincent’s Hospital, surviving on the faint lines of green light generated by her life support system. He wondered who else might be dying out there in the luminous darkness of the city.

He could be called out at any time to deal with any stranger’s death.

To resolve it, if it could be resolved, for whoever wanted to know; sometimes for no one other than himself.

He kept this simple word why in his mind as he worked through whatever case he had to hand, even if the why, when discovered, had no sense to it. He always questioned where any death might lead you, ever since his father had shot his mother and handed Harrigan the gun with shaking hands saying: ‘Shoot me, Paulie. I don’t want to live.’ He had fired once, knocking his father back into a chair, to hear him say, ‘That won’t do it. Shoot me again.’ Harrigan had discovered that he could not pull the trigger for a second time, a notch in his mind marking what he could and couldn’t do. His father had taken responsibility for the gunshot wound on himself, pleading a botched suicide attempt. Once again, the court had believed him.

Years ago, Harrigan had gone up-market with everybody else, moving from White Bay across to the inner harbour, just up and over Darling Street — which ran like a spine along the Balmain peninsula -

and down the other side of the hill. Not so very far from his boyhood home, a distance you could walk. These days, it was another world altogether. As he walked along the edge of Birchgrove Park under the Moreton Bay fig trees, he looked up at his house not far from the water’s edge, a pale brick two-storeyed terrace more than a century old with an apron of white lace on the upstairs veranda. ‘How did you afford that, mate?’ A question often asked with the implication, ‘since you’re only a copper?’ ‘By the sweat of my brow,’ he always replied with a grin. It had belonged to his aunt, his father’s sister, a relationship soured by years of arguments too rancorous to be forgiven. She had inherited it from an uncle, much to his father’s chagrin, who had expected that it would come to them both. Harrigan had earned it: she had made him pay for it with sweat and blood in