was staring at Lucy with a hungry expression. Lucy looked at him at the same time.
‘Don’t you move, Graeme, and don’t you talk. Not till I tell you to,’
she said. ‘Because if you do, I’ll get you before you can do anything.’
He sat back, his expression unchanged.
‘Do you think a lot about what happened that morning, Lucy? Is that what you’re telling me, that it’s always on your mind?’ Grace asked.
‘Yes, it is. But I don’t know what to think about it.’ She was shaking her head. ‘I think about it and I get lost.’
‘You’re walking in the dark again,’ Grace said. ‘That’s what we’re doing now. Walking around in the dark. But something else bothers you about that morning. You said that — that it was just one thing.’
‘Yeah. Do you want to know what it is?’
‘You tell me, Lucy.’
‘I should never have done it at all.’ She sounded like a small child.
‘That’s how I feel now. I should never have done it, it was such a bad thing to do. Really bad. But that’s it, you see. How do I deal with that?
I know that because I feel it. But what if it wasn’t such a bad thing to do, the way Graeme says it wasn’t? And then if shooting that doctor was the right thing to do, I should do what Graeme wants me to do right now. I should shoot you as well. And that’s what I’ve got to know.’
‘Why do you have to shoot me?’
‘Because you killed your baby. Graeme knows that about you, everyone does. And he says that’s what I should do.’
‘You don’t have to do any of this, Lucy,’ Grace said. ‘You can put your gun down and just walk out of here. And that’s it. You can walk out of here with me and I’ll make sure nothing happens to you. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to do anything.’
‘No, I do. That’s the point. I killed someone. I’m stuck here. I am.’
‘No, Lucy, you’re not — ’
‘
‘Don’t argue with her,’ the negotiator said quietly, close beside Harrigan. ‘Whatever you do, don’t argue with her.’
There was silence. Lucy’s hand tightened on the gun and then relaxed a little again. Grace breathed.
‘I am, Grace,’ Lucy was saying. ‘Now I’ve got to solve this. I’ve got to solve it.’
There was silence. Lucy sat gathering her breath, taking courage.
She looked from Grace to the preacher.
‘All right, Graeme. Talk. What do I do now?’
He seemed to subside with relief when she said this.
‘Whatever your conscience tells you to do, Lucy,’ he replied easily, as though he was sitting at his desk in a counselling session. ‘You must know in your heart what’s right.’
‘What do you think is right?’
‘I’m not the actor here,’ he replied. ‘I can’t take the place of your own conscience.’
‘But what would you do? You said that Grace here walks blood through the city streets. She deserves to die. You said that to me last night. You said to me: you can get rid of the evil she is, you can wash it clean. That’s what you said. So what would you do? If you had to.’
You fucking bastard, Harrigan thought. You fucking, fucking bastard.
‘I would leave her to answer to God,’ the preacher said.
‘Well, what does that mean? Does that mean it happens the way it did last time? I shoot her for you and you get to hear about it on the radio?’
‘No, Lucy. It means we all have a role to play and mine is different to yours,’ he said. ‘If I am not here, how can anything be accomplished? It is my work to lead, to organise. There are a great many sacrifices in that.’
Lucy looked away from the preacher and back to Grace.
‘You killed your baby. Why did you do that?’ she asked her. ‘You think what I did was wrong, don’t you? You do, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Grace said.
‘But how can what I did be wrong if you can go and do that? It’s just as bad, isn’t it?’
In the few short seconds before she replied, Grace thought she was gone.
‘I don’t know if there’s any way I can tell it to you so you’d understand me, Lucy. I’m just going to say to you that that’s what I chose to do, it’s what I felt I had to do. I don’t see it the way you do.’
‘You chose to?’ Lucy asked. ‘You did? On your own?’
‘Yes.’
Lucy raised her gun.
‘I still think that’s murder, Grace, whatever you want to say,’ she said, and fired three times.
In moments during which the world turned white for her, three bullets crashed past Grace’s head into the thick wooden door where it stood open behind her. She felt her body turn to water and then become solid again. Her eyes blinked as the scene around her faded, then came back to life. Outside, Harrigan contacted the marksmen and told them to take out Lucy Hurst as soon as they could.
‘Did I frighten you, Grace? Well, look at Graeme,’ Lucy was saying in a half-incredulous, half-laughing voice. ‘Yeah, just look at you, Graeme. You really thought you were going to see blood this time, didn’t you? You’re hanging out for it.’
His expression was open-mouthed and ecstatic, frozen with a smile of pure joy.
‘It wouldn’t just be hers either, it’d be mine too, because the first thing that’d happen is I’d get blown away as well. Get up. You just fucking get up, Graeme. You are a liar. You don’t care about anything.
All you do is get off on killing people. That’s all you do. You sit there and you talk rubbish to me and all the time, you just want to get off on it. And you just want to see me fucking do it for you.’
‘You listen to me, Lucy. All you have seen is righteous joy — ’
‘You shut up!’
‘Don’t do that, Lucy,’ Grace was saying as they scrambled to their feet, ‘leave it. You know what you want to know now. Just leave it.’
‘No, Grace. Don’t you fucking listen? I killed someone. I’ve got to make up for that.’
‘No, you have to leave it — ’
The preacher suddenly screamed and ran at Lucy. She jumped backwards and shouted at him to stop where he was. They froze where they stood, staring at each other. In that instant, a pattern of bullets thudded between them into the floor where Lucy had just been standing. All three of them looked up to a square of grey light where a window above and behind them had been removed. Lucy laughed aloud, dancing back out of range.
‘Too late. Too bad,’ she said.
In that second, the preacher turned and ran for the door. She fired at him repeatedly as he ran, seemingly unaware of the recoil of the gun knocking her backwards. He fell to the floor. Grace cracked Lucy on the wrist with the side of her hand and the gun dropped, crashing onto the wooden floor. Grace kicked it aside as Lucy dived for it, stretching her hand out towards it. They wrestled on the floor, Grace fighting an unexpected strength in Lucy’s thin and wiry body. She heard the glass doors being broken open behind them.
‘Stupid!’ she was shouting, ‘it’s stupid. Why waste your life?’
‘Why do you care? I didn’t want to have to shoot you.’ She heard Lucy’s voice, furious and breathless in her ear. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
Then Grace was bodily lifted up and away as armed police swarmed around them. They held Lucy face down on the floor and retrieved her gun. Grace was on her feet, looking at a hall filled with people and Harrigan standing in front of her.
‘Are you all right?’ he was asking her in his neutral voice.
‘Yes, I’m okay,’ she heard herself say.
‘No injuries?’
He was looking closely at her face.
‘No.’
