‘I’ll leave it there, Agnes. Don’t feel you have to think about it any more. Thank you for giving us that. That information’s very important.’
‘Wait,’ Agnes said, in a voice that was too soft to be heard by anyone else, ‘come closer.’
Grace bent down, the woman whispered in her ear.
‘I know you. You came to a clinic. This mad woman was bothering us. You threw her out.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘You look better. Much better than you did.’
Her hand slipped away and Grace found herself outside the room with Harrigan, watching the doctor and nurse bend over the bed.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to Harrigan and took refuge in the Ladies, holding tissues under her eyes to stop the tears from brimming down her cheeks. Mascara flickered fine black speckles onto the white paper.
Holding herself in grip, she repaired her make-up and then went outside to find Harrigan waiting for her in the corridor.
‘The doc’s okay,’ he said, studying her face. ‘She’s out to it but she’s okay. We’ve been told we can go home now. How are you?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Do you want me to buy you a cup of coffee? Since you don’t drink.’
‘A cigarette is what I really need,’ Grace replied, letting a chink of her feelings out.
‘Why don’t we try for both?’ he said. ‘Let’s take half an hour off.
We can spare each other that much time.’
In a coffee shop nearby, where you could sit in an individual booth unwatched by the crowd, Harrigan ordered at great expense a short black and a strong flat white from a silver-studded waiter. Grace lit a cigarette and inhaled the poisonous smoke with gratitude. She forced a shiver down her spine, releasing tension, and came back to the present to find Harrigan watching her from the other side of the table.
‘That was a nasty story,’ she said.
There was no sympathy for the Firewall in Harrigan at that moment. ‘You can say that,’ he replied. ‘I can tell you I’ve heard worse.
It’s not a new story.’
What could be worse? Grace found herself unexpectedly shaken by this reply.
‘No,’ she said and then was silent, staring at the tablecloth, drawing on her cigarette. When she looked up, Harrigan saw an expression of extraordinary sadness cross her face.
‘We don’t even know it’s her, do we? The doc could be talking about someone else who’s got nothing to do with this,’ she said.
‘She could be, that’s possible. I don’t think it’s very likely but it’s possible.’
‘Well, if it is her, then why? Why take it out on the doc? Why not just go and shoot your own rubbish father if he’s done something like that to you? Or your idiot mother. Now, that would be justifiable homicide. I wouldn’t convict her.’
She drew down more smoke, an angry glint in her eye. Harrigan found himself laughing dryly.
‘Good question. We can assume she’s been manipulated in some way. But I wouldn’t say that explained her.’
The waiter brought their coffees. After a few seconds’ hesitation, Harrigan ordered a neat whisky. He looked at Grace to see if she wanted anything else as well but she shook her head.
‘If you look at everything about her,’ she said, ‘she’s such a wild card. How far can you manipulate someone like that?’
‘I think our friendly neighbourhood preacher would consider it a challenge,’ Harrigan said. ‘Now there’s someone who wouldn’t like some upstart girl getting up his nose if she wasn’t doing what he wanted.’
He was tapping his fingers on the table top as he spoke.
‘He’d get a kick out of doing that? Putting a gun in her hand and saying, go out and use it?’ Grace asked.
‘He’d love it.’ Harrigan was musing. ‘Take a good look at him the next time he comes in. I don’t think I’ve met many people more cold-blooded than he is.’
‘No? Haven’t you dealt with some really choice characters — serial killers, people like that?’
‘No one worth talking about. People like that are nothing, Grace.
They’re an empty space. Their only quality is how dangerous they are.
Someone like that is strictly business. You run them to earth, you put them away, you forget their existence. They’re not worth one second of your time.’
The waiter placed a shot glass containing a thimbleful of whisky on the table. He amended the bill before returning to drape himself decoratively over the bar. Harrigan glanced at the sum charged and wondered if he should not have taken out a mortgage on his house before deciding he needed an evening heart-starter.
‘Then she’s not like the preacher,’ Grace said. ‘If that’s what he is, she isn’t like that.’
‘How do you know she’s not?’
Grace ashed out her cigarette and wanted to light another but did not.
‘She was raped,’ she said to Harrigan, looking at him directly, preventing her voice from shaking. ‘I’m not saying it justifies anything, but it does give her a reason for what she did.’
‘A reason? Her reason for shooting down two bystanders is that she was raped?’
Grace’s back was immediately bathed in a cold sweat. ‘You don’t think that matters?’
‘No, that’s not what I said. And it’s not what I think either.’
‘You heard the story,’ she said, with forced detachment. ‘It wasn’t exactly straightforward. Not that I think it’s ever straightforward.
Why wouldn’t it be a reason?’
‘Do you think reason is the word you want to use?’
Grace folded her arms and leaned a little forward, resting on the table.
‘Maybe it is. It’s a reason to her even if it’s not for us. Compulsion, if you think that’s a better word. Maybe I do want to get into her head so I know why she does what she does.’
‘You want to be her?’
‘For a little while maybe. Just to get the insight.’
‘Grace, could you shoot down two people in cold blood?’
‘I don’t think she did act in cold blood. But no, if you’re asking me.
I hope I couldn’t.’
She gave in and lit another cigarette.
‘Then you can’t be her. For the exact same reason you say you want to. She’s got no insight into what she’s doing, she can’t have.
And you do.’
‘I want to know that she’s human. I want to treat her like she is.’
‘Why does someone like you want to get down in the dirt with someone like her?’ he asked.
Why does your son? To have asked him this question would have been unforgivable.
‘Is it dirt?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, if that’s what it is, we’re all down in it, aren’t we? One way or another. It’s all just people doing what they do to each other all the time. Lovely, lovely people.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t see myself down there. And there’s no way I’d ever see you down there. Not for one second.’
‘I can’t see it as hard and fast as that,’ she said. ‘It’s like a spectrum, we slide up and down it.’
‘Maybe. But some people like it down there, Grace, they like being in the dirt. They do things, they leave devastation behind them, and they walk away like it’s never happened. They don’t care. They’ll give you any excuse why they don’t have to think about what they’ve done.
I don’t believe either of us is like that.’
You don’t know who or what I am, Paul, she thought in reply.
There was a brief silence in which they looked at each other.
‘You’re tired,’ he said, thinking aloud.
