‘Good. Why don’t you go outside with Trev and get yourself a cigarette? We’ll clean up in here.’
‘Yeah, Gracie.’ Trevor was there behind Harrigan. ‘Just come outside with me and get some fresh air for a moment.’
‘I’m okay,’ she said.
‘Of course you are. Come on,’ he said, in the voice that he always used to organise his friends.
She followed him out, passing the paramedics who had come in behind everyone else and were kneeling beside the preacher.
‘No, he’s gone. There’s nothing we can do here,’ she heard one of them say.
Then she walked out the door and down the steps into the open street.
‘It’s stopped raining,’ she said. ‘Oh, it’s nice to be outside.’
‘Yeah,’ Trevor said, ‘and the sun’s coming out. Have a cigarette.’
She accepted it, shaking her head, light on her feet.
‘I feel really strange, Trev. My head feels about four times the size it should be.’
‘You’re in shock, mate,’ Trevor replied. ‘Just stand there and smoke your cigarette. Don’t do anything.’
‘I’m still alive,’ she said, drawing in a deep breath and laughing, with tears in her eyes.
‘Oh, mate,’ Trevor said, losing it. He shook his head and gave her a bear hug, destroying her unlit cigarette.
In the hall, Harrigan looked down at the preacher. He lay on his side staring up at the ceiling and his blood had spread out over the floor.
Harrigan almost expected to see the man wink at him and hear his voice whispering quietly in his ear, ‘Don’t worry, Paul. Between you and me, this is just a ruse.’ The thought was real enough to be disturbing.
He turned to look at Lucy Hurst where she was being held face down on the floor and motioned to his people to stand her up. This was the girl his son thought he loved, the one who had led him on a dance from one end of the city to the other. She hardly came up to his chin, was barely old enough to be his concern.
‘Lucy Marilyn Hurst,’ he said, ‘I’m going to arrest and charge you with two counts of murder. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’
She looked him directly in the eye, unafraid. Small particles of dust covered her reddish brown hair.
‘Yeah, I understand,’ she said, dismissively. ‘I know all about that stuff.’
He began the ritual, noticing that as he spoke to her she did not once look in the direction of the preacher. She seemed to have erased the fact that he was there.
To Grace’s surprise, people came up to her as she stood outside on the street and congratulated her. She had not expected this to happen. Ian appeared and shook her hand.
‘You were fucking brave, Gracie,’ he said, squeezing her hand before disappearing back into the crowd.
‘I didn’t think about that,’ she said to Trevor, this detail occurring to her for the first time.
‘Yeah, well,’ he replied, ‘a fucking good thing you didn’t.’
While they stood there, Lucy Hurst was escorted out of the hall and placed in a car. She glanced around and saw Grace at a distance but did not acknowledge her. She appeared quite calm. Grace watched her being driven away.
‘I guess I don’t get to see her again,’ Grace said, ‘except in court.’
‘Not unless you want to.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I do.’
Not long afterwards, Harrigan walked up to them slowly.
‘How are you?’ he said to her.
‘I’m okay,’ she replied. ‘A bit light on my feet.’
He was silent for a few moments, looking at her, shaking his head.
‘You should never have been anywhere near here in the first place.
If I’d known any of that info sooner, you wouldn’t have been.’
‘Well, I’m here. I’m still alive to tell the tale.’
She tried to smile.
‘You were lucky,’ he said. ‘You were lucky but you were brave. You deserved to be lucky. Now you’ve done that once, you don’t ever have to do it again, do you?’
‘No, I guess not,’ she replied.
‘You get debriefed before you do anything else. I’ll need to see you back at the office when you’re finished. And Trev, when you’re ready
— I need you now.’
‘You almost had her shot,’ Grace said after him as he walked away.
He stopped and came back to her.
‘Is that what you’re turning over in your mind? There’s no in-between here. If I was going to finish the day looking at someone’s body, it wasn’t going to be yours. I don’t have an apology for that.’
‘It’s not that. She wouldn’t have cared if you had,’ Grace said. ‘She said to me, she didn’t
‘Yeah. She had you on a tightrope. She had us all dancing around.’
‘All she wanted to know was who she should shoot now. Because that was the only thing she had left to do. So what are we doing here?
Have we solved anything? We’re just playing some kind of game along with her.’
‘Right first time, Grace. When you get to this point, it is a game and it’s called survival. And you survived. Go and get debriefed. You need to.’
She let it go and he walked away.
‘Do you always talk to him like that?’ Astounded, Trevor dropped his own cigarette butt on the road beside Grace’s small litter. ‘No one else would fucking dare! You must be sleeping with him, Gracie.’
‘No, I’m not. All we ever do is talk,’ she said, watching Harrigan as he went up the steps back into the hall.
37
The day was not over yet. After the morning’s proceedings had been wrapped up and he had allowed himself the luxury of a shower and a change of clothes, Harrigan stood at the front of the incident room watching it fill. He saw Grace slip in the door almost last of all, fresh out of her debriefing. People turned to speak to her, to shake her hand. She smiled awkwardly in reply. There was still a buzz from the morning; people did not seem to notice (or perhaps they had, what could he know) that both Trevor and Ian were standing quiet and withdrawn at the back of the room. Harrigan had talked to them a little earlier. He called for quiet just after Dea had walked into the room.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘it’s been a very long day. For some of you it’s been a very long thirty-six hours and more and all you want to do is go home. So I’ll be quick. I’ll say first, briefly — probably too briefly
— you were brave today, Grace, very brave. Everyone here thinks so.
I don’t want you to think it hasn’t been noticed.’
There was some applause, she said ‘Thanks’ in her clear voice. He continued.
‘I’m telling you this now because I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else. We might even get bumped to second stop on the news.
One of the area commanders was asked to step down last night. He’s now got a date with the Police Integrity Commission and no one’s expecting him back. I won’t tell you who it is, you’ll hear soon enough; it’s not Marvin, I’ve got to say. As a result, there’s been a reshuffle up top and while I was the last person to expect this because it’s a jump up the ladder for me, I’ve been asked to stand in as the Homicide and Violent Crime Agency Commander as of nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
There was a ripple of surprise throughout the room. He saw them watching him intently.
‘Now, as you know, we’ve never fitted into the new structure, we’re a glitch from times gone by. It seems Marvin doesn’t like us being too independent on his patch. So I have to tell you — with me going, we’re finished.
