with her small son, an old man and his wife, some few others who had come out even in this terrible weather. The plastic seats had been upended and tossed aside. The hail, which had crashed so loudly on the old roof that it was hard to hear anyone speak, had ceased although the rain continued to come down.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy said, ‘it’s him and me and there are about seven other people here as well. We’re all in here together. They can’t get out because all the doors are locked. And you can’t get in for the same reason. You see, Graeme likes the doors locked. He always keeps them locked. But I thought we could let you in, if you wanted to come in. I thought you might like to come down here and talk to me.’
‘Why do you want me to do that, Lucy?’ Grace said, sitting down.
Harrigan sat opposite, watching her as they all listened.
‘I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you with everyone listening!’
Grace glanced at Harrigan who nodded.
‘I can come down there and I can talk to you. That’s no problem.
If we come now, I can talk to you as soon as we get there.’
‘No, let me tell you what I want, Grace. I want to see what you look like. I want to know who you are. I have to look at you, I have to talk to you face to face. So I want you in here looking at me. Looking at me and fixed up for sound.’
Harrigan was shaking his head.
‘Okay, Lucy, we’re coming down. You wait for us there.’
‘No, Grace, you’re not listening to me. I am sick of people fucking lying to me,’ Lucy screamed across the office. ‘When you come here, you’re coming inside to see me and you are going to talk to me. I am telling you something. I have a gun with fifteen bullets in it. Now that’s one for everybody here, one for me, and six left over. Now you
You are coming in. And you’re going to tell me that you are in ten seconds from now or I am going to start shooting people. You listen to me. I am counting as of now. One. Two. Three. Four. Five … ’
Harrigan gave Grace the faintest of nods.
‘I’ll be there, Lucy. I’ll come in and I’ll talk to you.’
‘You will?’
‘Yes, I will.’ Harrigan leaned his chin on his hands.
‘But you have to promise me you won’t shoot anyone. Will you do that?’
‘As long as they don’t move, or try and do anything silly, they’ll be fine,’ Lucy said. ‘And is that a promise from you that you’ll be here?’
‘Yes, it’s a promise from me,’ Grace replied. ‘So who is there with you, Lucy?’
‘There’s Bronwyn. And Graeme. He’s really pleased to be here, I can see it in his face. There’s this woman and her kid. Lucky kid.
There’s an old lady who doesn’t know what day it is and her husband who looks after her and his sister who looks after him. And there’s this other white-faced guy who’s always here. That’s all.’
‘And you’re not going to hurt them.’
‘Not if they just sit there. But I’m waiting for you, Grace, so you’d better come.’
‘Give me your number, Lucy, so I can call you and tell you where we are and what we’re doing. So you don’t think we’re not coming.’
Lucy read out the number which Harrigan wrote down.
‘Before we go, Lucy, how did you get my number here?’
‘Graeme gave it to me. He knows all about you, Grace. He showed me your picture. I just want to see if that really is you. I’ll see you soon.’
Grace hung up. The room stayed silent as people glanced at each other and waited for Harrigan to speak.
‘We need a negotiator to talk to her. As well as you, don’t we, Grace? The best we’ve got.’ He looked her in the eye, the memory of earlier conversations between them in both their minds at that moment. ‘We’ve got to try and talk you out of this if we can. We’d better hope we can. You’d better get ready to talk to her. Ian and Trev, in my office now. The rest of you, get yourselves ready to go.’
The crowd broke up.
‘Where are you going, Gracie?’ Ian asked, as Grace headed quickly for the exit.
‘I’m going to wash my face and change my blouse,’ she replied grimly. ‘If I’m going to get shot, I want to be wearing clean clothes.’
Harrigan was suddenly in front of her. People stopped to stare.
‘You do not say that, not for any reason, not even as a joke. Do you hear me? None of you are getting shot and that includes you. You take that back.’
‘It wasn’t a joke, Paul. But I didn’t say it anyway,’ she replied, shaken that he should be so angry about something which, for her, was just a way of coping with events way past the limit.
‘Good.’
He walked away, thinking he was glad that she had listened to him for once; others simply noted that she had called the boss by his first name.
In his office, he asked Ian and Trevor to wait while he made his first phone call. He was putting the essentials in place before he did anything else. Negotiators were all very well but sometimes there was no substitute for a reliable marksman or two.
He also had another job to do before he left along with everyone else. He went to Louise, who he had instructed to stay behind, and asked her to email his son.
‘Just tell him what’s going on,’ he said.
He didn’t want Toby to find out by accident through an Internet browser that the girl he thought he loved had been shot dead by police on a rainy morning in Camperdown.
36
Lucy listened as the sirens began to grow louder outside. She smiled and aimed her gun more directly at the preacher.
‘Listen to that, Graeme. And it’s all because I’ve got this. Nothing else would make anyone waste their time on me like that.’
He tried to shift forward to speak to her.
‘Don’t move!’ she snapped and he stopped where he was.
‘Lucy, listen to me. There’s nothing you can take out of this. If you put yourself in my hands, perhaps I can bargain for you. We can try and talk this through somehow.’
She smiled at him in reply.
‘No, Graeme. No way. You just sit there. The only thing I want you to do is keep your mouth shut. It’ll be nice not to hear you talk for a change.’
Briefly, the anger in the preacher’s face was greater than his fear.
Suddenly afraid herself, Lucy tightened her hand around her gun.
‘That’s who you are, isn’t it, Graeme,’ she said, ‘playing all those little games. No, not little games, all those big games. You want to know why I’m here? Because I’m going to deal with this in my own way from now on. I’m not hiding my face this time. You set this up.
This time, you can just sit there and be part of it.’
‘Do you want me to go to gaol with you, Lucy? Is that it?’ he said, taking just enough courage to speak.
She laughed. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen yet. I really don’t. It depends on all sorts of things. I’m not expecting that I’m going to walk out of here alive and I don’t care if I don’t. But you just sit there. Don’t talk, don’t say a word. Don’t even think anything. That goes for the rest of you as well.’
The others remained huddled against the wall, too frightened to think of moving. Bronwyn cried silently. The child began to cry softly as well, leaning against his mother, his voice echoing beneath the now quieter sound of the
