Susie’s opalescent blue fingernails glinted in the light. In reply, she spoke with the care of someone who made a living walking tightropes.
‘Well, I don’t think you need me to tell you any of this. He’s seventeen at his next birthday. In some ways he’s older than most boys his age, but he’s a lot younger in others. If he doesn’t want you washing him any more, I’d say that’s probably all there is to that. He does need to feel his body’s his own. But he needs his head space more. That’s where he lives.
You know better than anyone, Paul, he’s got people around him all the time, he has to have. Usually he’s never alone except in his head. We don’t have the right to intrude in there without him letting us. If there’s something on his mind, he’ll tell you when he’s ready to.’
He did not reply, her words had left him almost breathless. They looked at each other across her desk.
‘He still needs me, Susie. He’s always going to need me.’
‘Yes, he will. But that isn’t what I said.’
He stood up.
‘We’ll have to talk about this some other time. I can’t hang around here now, I should have been at work half an hour ago. I didn’t really have the time to come here in the first place. I’m only here for him.’
She smiled at him professionally in reply. He walked out without thanking her or saying goodbye. Did she think she knew his son better than he did? He could not talk to her, he could not look at her.
Harrigan went out into the morning sunlight and stopped by his car. Toby was with his therapist in the activity room, sitting in the sun and watching him through the wide windows. He waved and saw the flicker of Toby’s fingers in reply. As things were now, Toby was with him for life. Oh, there was money enough. Harrigan had sued the hospital where Toby had been born for everything he could think of, taking their drunk and incapable doctor through every level of appeal.
The exercise had got him the law degree he was supposed to have had a decade earlier, and while it had taken years, in the end they had paid, had been forced to pay, much more than he had ever expected or hoped for. Money was no longer the point. He does need me, Susie.
Who else is going to love you, Toby, the way I do?
There was never an escape. Trevor Gabriel tracked him down on his mobile phone as he loitered in the traffic on his way back into the city, worrying at his concerns for Toby in the no-man’s land between work and not-work, almost as if he was unemployed.
‘Morning, Boss,’ Trevor said cheerily. ‘Good news, we’ve found the car. A couple of juveniles were caught trying to torch it in the wee small hours down near Macdonaldtown Station. We’ve got one of them in custody now.’
‘Just the one? What happened to the other?’
‘Still in full cry. He went up a wall and over the train lines and away.’
‘Yeah?’ Harrigan tried to picture it. ‘Lucky he didn’t get smacked by the state rolling stock. Who have we got?’
‘Ours is a Greg Smith. He’s fifteen and he’s got a file the size of a phone book down at Family Services. And another one at Juvenile Justice to go with it.’
Harrigan manoeuvred through the traffic as he traversed the steel spider’s web of what he still called the new Glebe Island Bridge. On his left, the Balmain peninsula looked like an island in a glittering mirror of water, edged in a scattered green amongst the container wharves.
The Romanesque colonnaded church tower of St Augustine’s, the tallest of the towers and steeples, was outlined against the clear air.
‘Have we checked any known associates for this other boy?’
‘The patrol went around knocking on a few doors early this morning but they didn’t find anybody. I’ve got a couple of the guys out looking at the moment.’
‘Is anyone with the car? Do we know anything about it?’
‘Ian should over be there by now. The owner is a Christine Van Aalst. She reported it missing from outside of her house in Enmore at 7.08 a.m. yesterday. She checks out. I’d say she was just unlucky.’
‘I’ll go over there now and take a look. In the meantime, don’t let anyone pester this boy. Keep him on ice till I get there.’
‘No rush,’ Trevor replied. ‘The boy’s in the care of some character called the Preacher Graeme Fredericksen, whoever he is. We can’t raise him from anywhere, he’s not at home and he’s not answering any of his phones. And we’re still waiting for the case worker from Family Services to get here. I don’t know what she’s doing with herself but she’s bloody slow too.’
While Trevor spoke, Harrigan was watching the glass walls of the city’s office towers ranged in the near distance with the pale sky behind them. The sunlight glanced off the sides of the buildings with the sharpness of new steel.
‘Nobody wants this boy,’ he said. ‘Check up on that preacher or whatever he is, would you? He should be there if no one else is. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
He began to drive with purpose, making a detour through the city’s arterial roads to the other side of Newtown. At the scene, a small group of bystanders had gathered to watch on a nearby street corner. They looked at him curiously as he let himself in under the blue ribbons. The houses roundabout were the same as the one he’d grown up in near White Bay: narrow single-storey cottages with a lone front window opening onto a tiny porch. These ones had been painted in bright colours and had second storeys extended into the roof line, with bars placed over the windows for security. Trees had been planted along the street to shade them, bottle brush and jasmine lined the laneways close by. In summer, these plants would provide the illusion of coolness.
The car, a late model white Mazda sedan, had been parked in a narrow lane between the back fences of the houses and the retaining wall bordering the railway line. At first sight, it appeared largely undamaged. There was a fire engine standing close by at the end of the lane. He saw Ian at a short distance from the car, watching the forensic team at work.
‘Hi, Boss,’ he said as Harrigan walked up.
‘Morning, mate. What’s happened here?’
‘The kid we’ve got in custody was splashing petrol around in the boot when he got jumped on by a couple of the locals. Apparently a car got torched down here a while ago and half their garages and the fences along here almost went up in smoke. So the neighbours got together and put in a silent alarm. Lucky they did, that car is fucking drenched. I think it would’ve exploded if anyone had lit it up.’
‘And the one we didn’t get went up that wall?’
Harrigan looked up at the dark-stained and uneven stone wall rising above their heads. A suburban train rattled past at speed on one of the further tracks.
‘That’s what I’ve been told. Up, up and away. He must have done because no one’s found him yet. You might want to take a look in the boot while you’re here, there’s some interesting things in there.’
Harrigan walked over to the car with Ian and greeted the head of the forensic team. They stopped work and stood aside for him. Tossed inside the boot was a small collection of blood-stained clothes: jeans, jacket, gloves and a scarf.
‘I see what you mean,’ Harrigan said, wrinkling his nose, ‘the sweet odour of petrol.’
‘Can you tell us anything about this?’ he asked the forensic team leader, a middle-aged woman with purple hair.
‘So far?’ the woman replied. ‘Whoever she is, if she got into these clothes, she’s very small. She took a tumble, a bad one. It must have hurt. She landed on her hands and knees and she tore her gloves. I’m fairly certain we should get some skin fragments for you. If we do, we can tie the gun to the glove to the hand without too much argument.
There’s a lot of blood on these clothes as well.’ She smiled at him. ‘An embarrassment of riches.’
‘You could say that,’ Harrigan replied a little dryly. ‘Thank you.’
They moved back, out of the way.
‘That’s how she dropped her gun,’ Ian said, ‘tripped coming out of the shop. Our girl can’t know what she’s doing. I don’t think she could have made any more mistakes if she’d tried.’
‘We know everything we need to know about her except who she is. And she’s still out there,’ Harrigan replied. ‘You’re staying on to see this through?’
