thought I could stick at for more than a fortnight. Sixteen years later I’m still here.’
It was the truth as far as it went, a diversionary tactic rather than a lie. His presence here was the result of a half-formed thought brought into being by his father’s irritated gibe one night in the kitchen: ‘Why don’t you be a fucking walloper? You’re always telling people what to do.’ Not long afterwards, a serving policeman, an old mate of his father’s, had called him with an offer.
‘It’s chance sometimes, isn’t it,’ Grace replied. ‘You never know where your life is going to take you.’
He smiled in agreement; she smiled back in the same way.
‘You are stubborn,’ he said quietly. ‘What are you really trying to do here?’
‘I’m brave and foolish,’ she said, sending herself up. ‘I’m trying to make a difference.’
‘You did make a difference today. You’re the only one here who could have talked to that boy and got anything out of him except four-letter words.’
She shrugged and smiled again. ‘Thanks for saying it.’
They found themselves looking at each other in silence, both searching for something else to say. Grace felt the kick inside, the unexpected jag of attraction, and wished she hadn’t; it was the last thing she needed just now.
‘You’re on the TV, Boss. You too, Gracie,’ Ian called out.
They turned and separated by an unspoken agreement, and then gathered around the bar with everyone else. The barman turned up the sound on the early evening news. The team watched Matthew Liu, flanked by both Harrigan and Grace, make a plea for anyone to come forward with any information that would help them find the girl who had shot both his parents.
‘You are so photogenic, Gracie. They’re going to like that up top,’
Trevor said, smiling at her indulgently as the clip ended.
Grace thought she might say that it was just the bad lighting and then decided to leave it where it was.
‘Okay, folks, I think that’s it,’ Harrigan called out, breaking up the party. ‘Back to it.’ He ignored the groans as he led the way back to work.
Back at the office, he found that the time out had not refreshed any of them; there was a sense of languor throughout the room. Harrigan glanced at Grace as she worked her way through Greg Smith’s files, considering her scruples as he did so. He thought about his own son.
He felt the compulsion to go and see him and make sure that he was safe. The office was acquiring an unusual sense of enclosure, he wasn’t sure he could breathe in here for much longer. He reached for the phone to call Cotswold House, but did not pick up the handset.
Finally, when the day shift was going home and the graveyard shift was settling in, he got to his feet and went in search of Trevor.
‘I’m taking an hour, Trev,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m going to see my boy.
I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘Okay, Boss. I’ll call you if anything happens.’
Harrigan collected his jacket and found himself at the lift at the same time as Grace. Caught a little awkwardly, he stopped and let her get in first.
‘Did you see that?’ Ian asked. ‘Are they going out together somewhere?’
‘He likes her and she likes him,’ Louise said, breathing out gin. ‘All they did in the pub for an hour was talk to each other.’
‘Gracie’s going home, people,’ Trevor announced. ‘I told her to piss off because she’s done everything she can today. And he’s going to see his boy. He told me so in case I need to know where to find him. He’s coming back.’
‘You want to make a bet?’ Jeffo was grinning. He too was heading for the door. ‘How much time do you waste on a spastic kid? She’d know where her bread is buttered. Fifty bucks says he gets it into her.’
Ian and Louise turned away as he spoke.
‘Jesus, mate,’ Trevor said, riled. ‘You know sweet fuck-all about her and you say that. Why don’t you keep your dirty mouth shut for once?’
Trev might divert the talk to other subjects but he knew that no matter what he tried to say now, there was no hope for it. Soon the gossip would be away in a pack with the dogs.
Down in the car park, Harrigan glanced around to see Grace a few cars away from his own, unlocking her own door. They had hardly spoken to each other as they came down in the lift. He waved to her self-consciously across the short distance and saw the gesture returned in a similar fashion. Then they both went their separate ways out into the winter night.
In her car, Grace determinedly watched the road ahead, resisting the urge to check in her rear-view mirror which way he had gone. In his own car, Harrigan was concentrating his thoughts on his son.
14
On her way back up to the house in the early evening dusk, Lucy saw that the dog was once again chained up in her kennel. Dora had disappeared some time during the afternoon and she’d wondered what had happened to her. As soon as Lucy walked into the kitchen, where Melanie was preparing dinner, her sister turned to her.
‘You let the dog off her chain.’
‘Yeah, I did. I don’t see why she has to be chained up like that.’
Melanie leaned on the bench, her face taut. Every muscle in her body was rigid with tension.
‘She’s chained up because Dad wants her to be. So you have to leave her like that or he gets upset. And when he gets upset, he takes it out on me. He can still do that, even if he’s only whispering at me. The things he says — they are just so gross. Would you not take her for a walk like that again? Please. It’s too hard, Luce.’
Lucy turned away, shaking her head against rising furies.
‘Do you want some tea?’ her sister called out to her but Lucy did not reply.
She walked slowly down the hallway to the lounge room, drawn towards the sound of the television. Yellow light shone through the door onto the carpet in the hallway, a contoured and gleaming polyester blue.
As Lucy drew closer, she began to chew on her thumbnail. Through the door she could see the television was turned on to an evening game show, ‘Wheel of Fortune’, the volume turned up high. Then her mother, sitting on the lounge watching the show, and her father, stretched out in his reclining chair, apparently asleep, the tray of medications Melanie had prepared earlier sitting near him on a coffee table. She stopped at the door. The room was filled with an odour of sickness, like rotting flowers. Seeing her, her mother pulled herself upright, dragging her cardigan down past her waist. She tried to speak but could not, looked from her daughter to her sick husband, whose eyes remained closed.
‘Hi, Mum,’ Lucy said, going inside.
Her mother nodded in silent response. Her husband opened his eyes and looked at his daughter.
‘Hi, Luce,’ he said. ‘We heard you were home. How are you?’
Her father’s face had become an under-face, the kind you arrive at after sickness has stripped everything else to the bone. Illness had drawn pain to the surface of George Hurst’s face, it was almost the only thing that still existed of him. Lucy could not speak. She almost cried.
‘Come home to see your old man at last,’ he said against the racket of the television show. ‘Come and give him a kiss, hey? I know I’m not too pretty to look at these days.’
She did not. She sat in an armchair opposite them both.
‘Stevie asked me to come home,’ she said slowly, looking from her father to her mother, who was still playing with the ends of her cardigan. She had not changed at all, she was a round-faced woman, a little pudgy, with flat hair brushed back behind her ears.
‘How are you, Lucy?’ she said, now that her husband had spoken.
‘Are you keeping well?’
Above the noise of the television, the air seemed to simmer with a thousand jangling and unheard sounds.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy replied.
