This unit is disbanded as of now.’
There was a shocked and stony silence.
‘Just like that? Is that it?’ Louise’s rough voice was the first to sound in the room. ‘This job is the only thing that’s keeping me going.’
‘No one’s losing their job. No one. If you want to, there are redundancies on offer. But there’ll be jobs in the agencies or the local commands for you all. Whatever we can work out, there will be jobs and they’ll be ones that you want to have.’ Again there was silence. When he spoke again, he felt he was pleading with them. ‘I told them this was a waste. I said, this is a good team, look at the results. They wouldn’t listen to me. They’d made their minds up before I walked in the room.’
‘You didn’t have to take that job on, Harrigan,’ Trevor called out.
‘You could have said no.’
‘I wasn’t going to do that, mate. There’s no point in me pretending I would.’
‘Don’t call me mate, mate,’ Trevor said to himself.
‘Now, Trev and Ian are going to take this case over to the Agency, to finish it off. I’m not leaving it with Marvin, I got that much out of them. And I’ll be here tomorrow afternoon to talk placements with you all. Does anyone have any questions?’
He waited in the silence. They looked at him but no one spoke.
‘So for all the work we’ve done, Harrigan, for you, for everyone,’
Ian called out, ‘all that happens now is we get shafted. And you let them do it.’
‘There was nothing I could do to stop them. Nothing.’
Again there was silence.
‘If you want to come down to the Maryborough now, I’ll buy you all a drink as a farewell,’ he said.
It was too late, they were leaving anyway, without speaking to him or even looking at him. They walked out in ones and twos, heading for the elevators. All he could do was go and sit in his office and watch them leave. Where Grace had gone, he did not know.
Trevor and Ian appeared, putting on their jackets. Harrigan went out to them.
‘Where’s Grace?’ he asked Ian.
‘How should I know? I thought if anyone would know that, you would,’ Ian replied.
‘There’s no need for this,’ Harrigan said almost angrily as they moved past him. ‘When you’re in the Agency, you can both look for promotions. The prospects will be a lot better for you there. I’ll make sure they are.’
‘Yeah?’ Trevor turned on him and spoke acidly. ‘But they still weren’t going to give me your job, were they? And do I know why?
You fucking bet I do.’
They were gone in the lift with some others.
Dea was among the last to go. He watched her tidy her desk before she left, she was the only one who had. Everyone else had collected their coats and bags and left everything just as it was. Family photos, individual coffee cups, posters, football scarves remained in place. He walked up to her as she was picking up her bag.
‘Do you know where they’ve gone?’
‘I don’t know. Out. The Maryborough, I suppose. Don’t know if they want to see you down there.’ She did not look at him. ‘What happens to me?’
‘I’ll see you get a job, Dea.’
‘Maybe I don’t want one. It might be time to give it away. Might take one of those redundancies you’re tossing around.’
She walked out without looking back or saying goodbye and then there was no one left. Isolation had sucked the air out of the room, he had to get out of there. He picked up his phone and rang Susie, telling her he would be on his way over to see Toby just as soon as possible.
As he spoke, he looked at the vacant office, with its scattered chairs and empty desks, and thought that people asked too much of you sometimes. Shortly afterwards, he was driving in a slow traffic that was picking its way through the storm’s aftermath, on his way to Cotswold House, relieved beyond description to have the day finished with.
Grace was stepping her own way through the chaos of the office, collecting her bag and her coat, glancing at Harrigan’s empty office and asking herself where he would have gone. She had places of her own to go; they did not include the Maryborough where she knew everyone else would be writing themselves off. She drove over to St Vincent’s Hospital, to the intensive care ward where Agnes Liu had been moved out of her goldfish bowl. Her son was with her, as usual. Agnes smiled in a pale sort of way from her mound of pillows when Grace sat down beside the bed.
‘They rang you?’ Grace asked. ‘You do know?’
‘Yes. Your Inspector rang me. A little while ago now,’ Agnes said.
‘Matthew saw it on TV as well. You’ve found her.’
‘Yes, we’ve got her in custody. She’ll probably be there for some time.’
‘Was it her? The girl I told you about?’
‘Yes, it was her.’
‘I thought it would be. There will be people who’ll blame me for this. I can hear now what they’re going to say.’
‘They shouldn’t. She’ll be the last person to agree with them if they do.’
‘They will. They always do.’
‘I won’t be one of them,’ Grace said, shaking her head.
‘I’m going to recover,’ Agnes said. ‘I am going to go back into practice, even if it’s only for a few days or even hours a week. I have to. It’s the only thing I can do from here.’
‘You’ll do it, then,’ Grace replied gently. ‘You’ll show them.’
Matthew Liu wanted to see her alone before she left and they went into a small, private room. His face was as thin and hollow as it had been the last time she had seen him.
‘I saw you on TV,’ he said. ‘You went in there and you talked to her?’
‘Yes, I did,’ Grace replied and, in saying this, realised that she had crossed a boundary, that something about her had changed fundamentally.
‘What was she like?’
‘Small. Very small, just like you said. And very, very young.’
‘Did she really tell you she wished she hadn’t done it?’ he asked, unbelieving.
‘She did. And she meant it,’ Grace replied.
‘And she said that to you?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘Is she mad? I can’t see it.’
‘She’s nowhere you can connect to. Where she comes from is not somewhere you want to go.’ Grace was surprised to hear herself sounding like Harrigan. ‘She’ll do whatever she does with herself but you mustn’t let that touch you in any way at all. You can’t let her destroy your life. Today’s your very first day, Matthew. It’s the first day of your life. You have to start from here.’
He broke down, shouting and picking up a chair and smashing it against the wall, and then weeping furiously. Grace stayed with him for as long as he wanted to cry before seeing him repair himself and go back to his mother’s bedside. She needed to do this for herself, it took her out of her own head. She left them sitting together as the day finished.
She left the hospital and, in the evening dark, sat in her car in the car park. In the darkness, she remembered the flash of white light she had seen as the bullets had crashed past her head and into the thick wooden door behind her that morning. If they had hit her, she would never have seen that light. The shaky memory of almost not being here rubbed like Velcro against the sense that she was here at this minute in time, still breathing, still thinking. A middle-aged man walked past her on his way to his own car and she watched him without curiosity. She had been changed by the morning, she could hardly describe how, only that now everything seemed brighter and sharper, more urgent. She took out her mobile and made a call.
‘Hello, Paul?’ she said to his answering machine. ‘It’s Grace here. I thought you’d like to know that I’ve just
