had fun though, John and I.
Do you know those were his last words to me? It’s been fun, Evie, I’ve had a ball. Fifteen, you say? That’s very young, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. He’s quite young in the head as well, which of course is how he let himself be talked into this in the first place. The thing is, if I had him here at the refuge, I could keep up the good work, but as soon as he’s back in the boys’ home, he’ll just slip into his old ways again.’
‘We can’t have that happen, can we? You leave this to me. I think we can get this sorted out without too much fuss.’
‘You may find the police are not very keen to cooperate. Their only solution is to lock him away. And what’s worse, Yvonne, and I have to tell you this, they are trying to pin some extraordinary charge on him.
This is despite the fact that I know he had absolutely nothing to do with these events. They seem convinced that what is pure coincidence is actual guilt.’
‘You just leave things to me, Graeme. I’ll take care of this. We’ll show them there’s life in the old girl yet. I’ll make them sit up and take notice. There should be a pen and paper here somewhere — won’t be a moment — ah, here we are. Now, this boy’s name is — what?’
‘One that’s very easy to remember, Yvonne. Greg Smith.’
Patiently he spelled out the details until she had all the information she needed and he was able to hang up, relieved of her presence even at the distance of a telephone call.
Now that business was out of the way, he had a task to attend to which he had been avoiding throughout the day. He went up to his bedroom and hesitated for a few moments in the doorway, an expression of aversion on his face. The windows were open and heavy rain had been blown into the room, soaking the floor. This pleased him: the force of the weather had cleared the room of its human odours and any sense of a physical presence. He walked inside and pulled the blankets from his bed, throwing them on the floor. He stripped the bloodstained sheets, the pillow, everything, tied them into a loose bundle and threw them down the stairs. He did not feel quite the same nausea that had gripped him last night when he had walked in here and put his hand onto the sheets when they were still warm and damp with Lucy’s blood. He pulled the mattress from the bed and upended it down the stairs after the bedding. In the pouring rain, he dragged both the mattress and the bedding over the uneven ground to the edge of the demolition site, to a blue industrial waste bin which he knew would be emptied within a few days. He threw the bloodstained items into the bin and slammed the lid closed, a sound that echoed down the empty street.
He stood in the rain, letting it soak him, relieved that he had managed to do this alone, that he had not had to ask Bronwyn, a woman from his congregation who did his cleaning, to do it for him.
He walked quickly back to his office, into the tiny kitchen, and dried himself, scrubbing his hands to remove the last touch of any stain. He wondered where he would sleep tonight; he could sleep almost anywhere if necessary. Physical comfort was something for which he had never felt much need. In the end, he decided not to stay in the Temple. It would be too easy for the police to find him here and he wasn’t ready to talk to them quite yet. He needed time to think before Greg was delivered into his care.
He took the refuge van and went to take shelter with some like-minded people, acquaintances he knew he could rely on. He drove through the empty streets in the rain, his thoughts buzzing with possibilities for the future.
16
‘Is there anyone in this picture that you recognise?’
Grace and Matthew Liu sat at a white table in the centre of the large room, close to the desk where the nurses came and went. Pale blue curtains surrounded the individual beds of the intensive care ward. Grace spoke quietly, the cushioned floors softened all extraneous sounds. In a glass room at the furthermost end of the ward, Agnes Liu slept on in shadows which had the quality of dark water.
On a monitor, lighted graphs sketched the pattern of her breathing and her heartbeat in pencil-thin lines.
‘Yeah,’ Matthew said, ‘that one. That’s her. For sure.’
‘Why are you so sure?’ Grace asked.
Matthew Liu put the photograph back down on the table where it lay under his hands. The fine bones of his fingers splayed over its glossy surface. It was a photograph of a small group of homeless boys in Belmore Park, taken at an angle to increase the sense of distance. One of the boys stood to the side, talking to another figure seen only from the back, the slender female outline of a figure wearing a black jacket and jeans and with short curly hair. She seemed to have her arms folded in front of her, drawing her clothes tightly around the curve of her outline.
‘The way she’s holding her shoulders. That’s how she looked when she walked away. She’s like a cut-out in the air. You know who someone is when they do something like that to you. They’re in your head, you can’t get them out.’
He spoke angrily.
‘Okay.’ Grace slipped the photograph back into the file. ‘How are you going today? Do you want me to stay and talk to you, or just stay?
I’ve got all the time in the world if you want it.’
He shrugged. He had shaved his thick black hair in deliberate mourning and his cheeks looked hollowed out. He had taken on age, something laid roughcast over his features. He was dressed in worn black clothing. He had not cried once in her presence since she had sat with him in the street the morning that it had happened. He refused to talk, to her, to anyone. Sometimes when she visited, he only wanted her to sit with him in silence while he sat next to his mother, waiting.
‘You don’t have to stay, I’m all right. Mum’s not going to die now, you know that. I don’t want to talk. I’m going to go and sit with her.’
‘You know where I am if you do want to call me any time.’
He shook his head and walked away. Everything he did broadcast grief and anger in equal proportions, both immense.
At the entrance to the ward, Grace found Agnes Liu’s doctor waiting for her.
‘Some of your time?’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to let her talk to you. She’s not going to rest easy until she does and I can’t persuade her that it really isn’t wise. I think it’s best to have this done with as soon as we can. I’ll be in touch when I think she’s able to talk for any length of time. Probably tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.’
‘If you call me, I can arrange to be here then. Only me?’
‘If you do bring anyone else, they’ll have to stay outside. I don’t want two people standing over her. One of you is bad enough. No offence,’
he added as an afterthought before frowning and walking away.
Grace left St Vincent’s mired in an old, familiar feeling: stasis, the sense of her heart becoming stagnate, her blood stopped. Numb to the end of each limb, each fingertip, she was gripped by emotional hypothermia. She sat with this weight on her, stranded at the lights on Oxford Street, watching the crowds pass by in the remains of the wet weather. It was her old habit of feeling either too much or too little, when all she wanted was balance. She had thought she was cured.
She arrived just in time for the morning’s meeting in the incident room, something which usually happened earlier. Today’s meeting had been shifted back and the room was filled with people hanging around, impatient. Harrigan, the buzz went, was trapped in his office, caught up with a telephone call from the Tooth demanding detailed explanations for the funds expended on the investigation and (as he said) the reasons for its lack of progress to date. The case had become stalled in a slow trickle of information, most of it leading them nowhere; they hadn’t even managed to locate the preacher yet, he might as well have evaporated from the city. People said you could almost see Harrigan chafing as he worked.
Grace waited with everyone else. Carrying Greg Smith’s file under her arm, she slowly walked the length of the Firewall’s turbulent pictures, considering each in turn. The disconnected images unwound like bobbin threads
