might as well quit now and not waste my time because if I don’t I’m going to be really sorry. He’s spent the last eight months proving it. I’ve seen that picture stuck up on a lot of walls. And I know it’s still out there.’
‘What happened to your friend?’
‘He already had another job. In London. I didn’t know that. He’s a forensic accountant. He’s making a fortune over there.’
She tried to laugh it off. Come to London with me, Gracie, but I don’t want anything like babies. She could hear him saying it.
Everything between them had died there and then.
Harrigan watched her as she ate in silence for a little while longer and then pushed the plate to the side, the food not quite finished.
He walked out on you, didn’t he? Dropped you right in it and walked away. I’d treat you better than that.
‘That wasn’t too bad,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to be polite.’ He watched her light a cigarette.
‘That’s a nasty story.’
‘It’s just a story.’
‘The Tooth can’t do anything to you while you work for me. But don’t ever do that again, Grace. You never hit anyone. It doesn’t matter how much they provoke you.’
‘Well, I did,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m only human. Maybe I got pushed too far.’
He wanted to say, you can’t be human and do this job; you’re too human, that’s your problem. In the brief silence, his mobile rang. It was his surveillance team.
‘He’s on the move,’ the voice said. ‘It’s bucketing down out here and the visibility is very bad. This is not going to be easy.’
‘You don’t lose him,’ Harrigan said. ‘It doesn’t matter what happens.’
Grace was looking at him expectantly.
‘The preacher’s on the move,’ he told her.
‘We should get back in.’
‘In a moment. You still haven’t been straight with me, Grace.’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Not completely. Don’t tell me you have.’ He had finished his drink and sat leaning his elbows on the table. ‘Marvin’s dangerous but the most he can do is run you out of your job. Don’t think I don’t know what that means. But the people we’re dealing with right now will do a lot more than that. You tell me. Do they know you? Just give me an honest answer. I need to know.’
Grace ground out her cigarette and was faced with a fundamental inability to lie.
‘Yes, they know who I am. I don’t know if they’ve made the connection yet.’
She sat back, feeling cold, her heart beating strongly. She was afraid and her hands were shaking badly. She refused to look at him.
Harrigan leaned his chin on his knuckles.
‘Fredericksen has,’ he said. ‘From the moment he laid eyes on you.
He recognised you again today and he threatened you to me. He knows exactly who you are.’
‘He can only have seen my picture. I don’t know how he could know who I am just from that.’
‘You’ve got a face that’s very easy to remember.’
‘It’s just a face,’ she said. ‘Anyway. They took my picture. One day when I was on my way into the city clinic. They hassled me, I showed them my warrant card and I sent them on their way. I shouldn’t have, should I? They remembered my name. They sent me one of their lovely letters saying they knew where to find me.’
‘They had your address and you didn’t tell me that?’
‘You didn’t need to know.’
He was silent, staring at her. He could not quite believe what he was hearing.
‘When did this happen?’
‘Just before Christmas,’ she said, again not looking at him.
He did the mathematics while Grace lit another cigarette. She was still not looking at him.
‘You could do that, could you?’ he said, very quietly.
As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t. Unexpectedly, he had felt the nudge of the prohibitions he had been taught during his boyhood, an unexpected repugnance that she could have had an abortion. He didn’t want to feel that.
She looked at him, drawing on her cigarette. ‘Yes, Paul. I could do that.’
Her tone was icy. There was silence.
‘I don’t need this,’ he said.
‘That’s all that matters, is it?’
‘It does when I’m holding everything together.’
‘This is not your business,’ she said angrily. ‘It won’t stop you wrapping this up.’
‘If something happens to you, who goes to see your family? I do.
These lunatics shoot people they think deserve to die. Do you think I want to knock on your family’s door and have to tell them something like that? You don’t get paid to take risks like this.’
Grace shook her head. ‘Isn’t it my life? Don’t I make that decision?’
‘Not while you work for me.’
‘No? Do you know you don’t give people much space, Paul? You like to organise them too much. You think you know how they ought to feel and what they ought to do. Maybe you don’t.’
Harrigan felt heat rise at the back of his neck.
‘You’re getting very personal there, Grace. Anyone else but you and you’d be gone.’
‘This is personal. Because we are personal, aren’t we? Everything we do is personal. I know we were for about twenty minutes in here this morning. I don’t think I was imagining it. You asked me.’
Harrigan watched her hand smooth the scar on her neck. He had wanted to ask her if she would sleep with him, he had thought she would. He did not know what he wanted to ask of her now. He did not know how to describe her any more.
‘Do we have anything else to say to each other? Do you need to know anything else?’ she said into his silence, taking it to mean that their original twenty minutes was finished. ‘I should get back to work.’
Before he could reply, his mobile rang again.
‘We’re on the Pacific Highway,’ the voice said. ‘I’m sorry but I’ve got to tell you that we’ve lost him.’
‘You haven’t.’
‘We have. He gave us the slip, he had it planned. He got out of the car at an intersection and disappeared down a lane and into someone’s garden, we think. We don’t know where he went after that. We stopped the Jag and we’ve spoken to the driver. The target had asked him to stop and let him out. We’ve got a search on but I think we’ve lost him for the night.’
‘Then keep searching. And tomorrow morning you can come in here and you can explain yourselves to me.’
‘They’ve lost him,’ he said to Grace in disbelief. ‘What do they do for brains? They’re supposed to be the best.
She was shocked to see how much the exhaustion and strain had changed his face. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, strangely polite, and walked out of the room.
She waited for a few moments then ashed out her cigarette. She collected their joint goods, coats, phones, her shoulder bag, his wallet which he had left on the table. She stopped at the counter on her way out.
‘What do I owe you?’ she said.
The man shook his head. He looked out through the doors at Harrigan who was standing under the shelter of the entrance way, staring at the weather.
‘He works too hard,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she replied. Don’t we all.
‘Thanks,’ she said and left, appearing beside Harrigan in the doorway to hand him his coat. He accepted it without speaking, together with his pager, his phone and his wallet, the sight of which made him raise his eyebrows
