Blood, in this bleak light a shining, dark liquid, stained Grace Riordan’s coat as she sat down with the boy in the gutter. She saw it brush from his clothes onto hers as she wound her arm around his thin waist and felt him cling onto her in reply. The curt orders from Harrigan still sounded in her head: Stay with that boy. Keep him with it because we need him. She let the blood lie there, damp and untouched on the fine black wool, and said, ‘We’re here, Matthew. You hold on to me. We’ll have your mother in hospital as soon as we can.’
Grace was forcing calmness on them both as sirens screamed and a more human racket exploded around them. A rush of people stepping either side of the boy’s shock, knocking on doors, stopping traffic, and searching the streets for a witness or a killer, whichever they might find first. Close to their feet, the paramedics treated Dr Agnes Liu where she lay on a wet road just now being strung with blue police ribbons, her breastbone broken open by a bullet. Grace did not have to tell the boy, probably only thirteen, that his mother held on by a thread. It was said in the blood on his school uniform and in the expression in his eyes, emotion displayed down to the bone, nakedness Grace chose not to look at too closely just then. She chose also not to think too much about the woman lying so near to them in the street. Later there would be time for her but not now.
‘What are they doing? Why are they taking so long?’
She held Matthew Liu upright as he spoke, his compact body racked with tears. They sat in the speckling cold rain of a sun and showery day, in a dog-legged street of old terraces, warehouses of textile merchants and a red brick building hung with a discreet sign on its restored Art Deco facade: The Women’s Whole Life Health Centres Inc., Administrative Offices, Chippendale. At a distance too close to them, the corralled media had begun to gather and howl for interviews and footage.
‘They’re doing everything they can, Matthew,’ Grace replied, listening to her cliche. ‘Don’t think about anything except this minute right now.’
‘I know why. I do know why. But not Dad. I don’t understand Dad.’
‘If you want to talk to me about that, Matthew, you go right ahead.
I’ll be with you all the way to the hospital and you can tell me everything you want to.’
As she spoke, she saw the boy turn to look past her, down the short distance along the street to where his father lay on the roadway. She stopped him, turning his head away and shielding his eyes with her hand.
‘Don’t. There’s no point.’
‘No, I should. I should be able to handle it.’
‘No, Matthew. Don’t. Don’t do it to yourself.’
She might have to look but the boy did not. He had seen it once already, when it happened, that should be enough for him whatever he thought. He did not fight with her.
She glanced back to where Paul Harrigan, with a number of other police, was standing over the boy’s father. The man half sat, half lay on the street, his head resting against the front wheel of his car.
Professor Henry Liu, late musicologist from the University of Sydney.
Much of his face was gone but his eyes remained, open and human, staring upwards. As she watched, Harrigan reached into his pocket and taking out a large blue handkerchief dropped it over the man’s face. The fabric clung and was stained immediately into a pattern of red. Grace blinked at the unexpected sight of the makeshift death mask and suppressed the recoil of her shock, the sudden in-drawing of her own breath.
Harrigan had turned away and was walking towards them through the moving crowds, a tall man with dark blond hair, preoccupied, apparently unmoved by the scene. He did not look at her but squatted down at eye level in front of the boy. He spoke in a neutral and uninflected voice, the tone of someone who is, and remains, detached from the events occurring around him.
‘Matthew? Do you know who I am? My name’s Paul Harrigan and I’m in charge of this investigation.’
In the face of a numbed response, Harrigan slipped his card into the pocket of the boy’s stained school blazer. ‘Keep that in case you need it.
Now, I’m going to find who did this to your parents. That’s a promise.
I’m going to find them. But I’ll need your help. I need to talk to you a little later on today about what’s happened here. Can you do that?’
The boy nodded, his face set, his tears now dry. Harrigan put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Okay. We’ll get your mother into hospital first and I’ll come and see you there. This lady will be with you all the way in the ambulance.
I just need to speak to her for a moment. Over here.’
Grace followed him into a pocket of stillness within the constant movement of the crowd. She saw him glance down at the wet stains smudged onto her coat and then look past her, at Matthew, scanning the scene behind her for whatever was happening elsewhere. He spoke to her in the same neutral and unhurried voice he had used with the boy.
‘That boy is your responsibility from here on in. You make sure you keep him afloat until I can get to speak to him. Call me if you need to.’
She did not have time to do more than nod before a paramedic pushed between them.
‘We’ve got to go to St Vincent’s. We’ve got to go now.’
‘You’d better get on your way.’
Harrigan turned away as Dr Liu was lifted from the roadway, her son rushing towards her. Grace caught him by the hand and told herself, don’t panic, keep the boy contained.
Keep everything contained, keep it moving. Moving someone from one place to another is only an exercise in practicality, even if they are dying and practicality is the only thing you have to offer them. She told herself this after she had followed Matthew into the ambulance.
It raced through the city streets and he began to talk in an uncontrolled and jerky stream of words which she tried to record on her miniature cassette player. At the hospital, the reception party of hurrying people wheeling the injured woman through the corridors brought with it the strange atmosphere of emergency, of events whose outcomes are balanced on the finest, most fragile point.
At the entrance to the operating theatre, the doors were closed in both their faces. Matthew stared at them bewildered and let her put her arm around his shoulders and guide him to a small waiting room set aside for their use. A uniformed officer guarded the door.
Marooned, the boy sat on a vinyl chair next to a low table covered with ancient TV Week magazines. He hunched forward, his hands in his thick black hair, dry-eyed and waiting. His head seemed too large for his small body, his fine bones should not carry the weight. Grace looked at him bent over the table and squeezed him lightly on the shoulder, just once.
‘I’ll be right back, Matthew. You just hang in there,’ she said quietly, and stepped outside to call the boss.
Harrigan’s voice came over the airways, thin and trivial through the compact instrument. ‘How’s the doc? Is she going to make it?’
His question came over as the original throwaway line. She paused, glancing around at the busy, echoing corridor.
‘They don’t know. I’ve been told she’s going to be in surgery for quite a while and it could go either way.’ She drew a breath to stop the catch in her voice from becoming too apparent. ‘The boy’s talked to me but he’s not making much sense and he’s not going to last. If you want to talk to him today, it has to happen soon.’
‘I’ll be on my way over there as soon as I can get away. Just keep him with it.’
‘There is one thing he’s said. He thinks he knows why.’
‘Does he now? Okay. Be there shortly.’
In the brief interim, Grace had gathered courage.
‘He shouldn’t be crowded,’ she said. ‘He won’t survive it.’
‘He shouldn’t be crowded,’ Harrigan repeated. ‘You don’t say. I never would have thought of that. Thank you, Grace.’
Grace cut the connection on the edge of his sarcasm, thought to herself, you had to know, I had to say it, and dismissed him from her immediate concerns.
She had thought the waiting room would be a haven but it attracted people like flies. Doctors came to offer unwanted sympathy, nurses to suggest sedatives, auxiliaries to supply drinks. ‘Keep them out,’ she told the guard at the door. A little later there was a knock and a tall Caucasian woman was ushered into the room. Grey-haired and sixty-something, she was straight-backed and old-fashioned in her dress, which was both elegant and conservative and included a hat and gloves. She carried an armful of neatly folded clothes; there might have been no such thing as suitcases or even plastic bags left in the world.
‘Miss Riordan? My name is Mrs Tsang. I am Agnes’s mother. I’ve been asked to come down here and be with Matthew. I understand you are with the police but I’m afraid I must ask you to leave now. I have to see my grandson alone. I have been told his clothes are very badly stained with blood and I want him to change them. We can’t do that while you are here.’
She spoke in an authoritative, almost mechanical voice, without stopping for breath. Matthew Liu gave voice to a gasp of some kind and held his head in his hands.
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
Grace had stood up.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Tsang, but I can’t leave either of you. I have to stay with you both until someone else takes over from me.’
As she spoke, Matthew suddenly shouted, outraged, ‘Why do you
— why now? Mum’s dying! Why do you have to fucking think about that now?’
He might have run at his grandmother if Grace had not held him back in his chair.
‘Don’t, Matthew. Let it go. Just stay calm,’ she said, holding onto him.
The woman herself had stepped back quickly, her face white but emotionless. She stood there in confusion, hugging the clothes she was carrying. Harrigan, arriving unaccompanied, walked into the room, timing it perfectly to see the chaos. There was a brief silence in which the boy subsided in his chair and Mrs Tsang stared at Harrigan, shrugging graceful if ageing shoulders.
‘I do apologise,’ she said to him with perfect manners. ‘He should never use such language, certainly not in front of this young woman.
It is always better to keep up an appearance. It will make things easier in the long run. But he won’t listen to me … ’
‘Do you want me to take those?’ he replied, unfazed by anything she had said. He took the armful of clothes from her and set them on the table. ‘Why don’t you sit down over here? Would you like some water?’
Without argument, Mrs Tsang sat in a chair opposite Matthew. They did not look at each other, neither seemed to know what to do. Grace handed her a glass of water which she drained without stopping like an obedient child and then placed neatly and gently on the table. Harrigan sat near her and went through the etiquette, handing her his card.
‘I’m going to talk to your grandson now, Mrs Tsang. You understand, this could be upsetting for you. If it’s too much for you, you say so. Otherwise if you’d just like to sit there nice and quiet, that’d be the best thing. You need anything, you ask my officer here.
She’ll get it for you. Anything at all.’
His politeness combined the impossible with the normal, inviting them to accept that this was a completely usual situation, leaving the woman without an alternative.
‘Yes, of course, I do understand. They told me … ’
Unable to speak further, she gestured her agreement and sat still with her hands folded in her lap.
‘That’s good,’ he said. He turned to the boy and leaned forward.
Grace placed her miniature cassette recorder on the table amongst the torn photographs of soap opera stars, considering how the way Harrigan had soothed everyone down allowed for no dissent, and jotted into her memory how he had reduced her to a nameless role to help him keep the peace. Unasked, she stayed beside Matthew. The boy took her hand and held onto her tightly.
‘I need you to take me through what happened, Matthew,’ Harrigan was saying. ‘Try and put it in some sort of order for me if you can. Take it as slow as you like.’
The boy waited before speaking. Grace felt his small fingers wound into her own and thought that Harrigan had to feel for him as well, but how would you ever know?
‘I don’t know why she shot Dad. I think she just wanted Mum.
That girl — I didn’t even see her, all of a sudden she was just there on the street. She shot Mum’ — Grace saw Mrs Tsang close her eyes -
‘and she sort of swung around and she shot Dad. It all took … two seconds? Then she went back into that shop on the other side of the road — it’s deserted, they used to sell peanuts there or something — I don’t think she even saw me until she turned around. I thought, she’s going to shoot me now. I don’t know why she didn’t. Why didn’t she?’
He was shaking his head, wondering why he was still alive.
‘Don’t ask yourself why people do things like this, Matthew,’
Harrigan replied. ‘You don’t want to know what they’re thinking. It’s not worth your time.’
‘A fucking girl. Killed my dad. For no reason. You know her hands
— she had these gloves on but her hands were really shaking. It’s sort of mad, isn’t it? You wouldn’t think you’d notice anything but I could see her hands so clearly. She looked at me and I saw those mad eyes and that gun … ’
Grace felt him squeeze harder on her hand as he rubbed his forehead. His face was thinned down with remembered terror and he was shaking.
‘It’s okay, Matthew,’ she said to him, looking at Harrigan, watching him wait his time.
‘We found the gun, Matthew,’ he said after a short pause. ‘She dropped it around the back of the shop right where she’d parked her car. You don’t have to think about her having it any more. So, can you tell me? Did you see her face at all?’
The boy shook his head. ‘No, you couldn’t really see her, she had this scarf thing on. And this blue coat. With a hood. There was blood all over it. She was little. She wasn’t much taller than me. And thin. So fucking thin, because there was nothing of her, she was just so little.
I’d know her. If you showed me a picture I’d know it was her right away. She was — I don’t know — I didn’t think she was old. Twenty?’
Mrs Tsang had drawn herself upright in her seat and seemed to be holding her breath, whether because of what Matthew had described or his language, Grace could not tell.
‘You’re sure it was a girl?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Yeah, I’m sure. I didn’t believe it at first. But I’m sure.’
‘My officer tells me you think you know why. Do you want to tell me about that?’
‘It’s Mum, it’s what she does. She runs those Whole Life clinics — it’s all women’s stuff. They do these things, health care and abortions and things like that. She gets this mail — ultrasounds and letters saying she’s a murderer and all that crapola. And she gets these idiot protesters hanging around the clinics. They keep saying things to her like
“Murderer, God’s going to strike you down.” She’s not a murderer, she saves lives, but they don’t think about that, that’s too hard for them — ’
He stopped, staring at Harrigan. ‘You don’t care about that sort of thing, do you? You’re not going to hold that against her?’
‘No, Matthew, that doesn’t affect me one way or the other. I don’t think about it.’
‘Mum’s been getting this really gross hate mail lately — it was disgusting, it was death threats and dead babies. Dad kept saying to her, you’ve got to go to the police about it. But no, she said she wasn’t going to do that, because you wouldn’t do anything about it if she did.
Then last night they had this incredible argument. He told her, you’ve got to go to the police because it’s just the same — ’ He stopped, briefly.
‘We were in the States a couple of years ago when Dad was over at Berkeley, and Mum was working at this women’s clinic. She got the same crap from some mad pro-life group over there and it was so dangerous for her. They had her picture all over the Net and they told everyone where she lived. They put these crosses on the front lawn for all the babies they said she’d killed. They’d camp out beside them and when she came out in the morning, they said to her she was going to end up dead herself one day, maybe today. She used to ask the people she worked with, do they mean it? And everyone told her, yeah, these people are psychos, you’ve got to be so careful about them. She had to wear this bulletproof vest when she went to work, and they had armed guards all over the place. Last night Dad said to her, it’s like it’s the same people and they’re dangerous. You’ve got to go to the police.
Call them now, he said. Oh no, she wasn’t going to do that. I’ll go to work and I’ll call them tomorrow. That is just so like her. That’s what he was doing out of the car. He was saying to her, are you going to call them? She said, yes, I’m going to call them. It was too late, wasn’t it?’
Grace sat and let the boy hold on to her while he regained some calm. As she did, she saw Harrigan again wait and watch and then pursue his point.
‘Do these people who stalked your mother in the States have a name?’
‘I can’t remember. I can tell you where she worked over there, they’d know all about them.’
‘We’ll talk to them. What about the ones who hang around the clinics here?’
‘I don’t think they’ve got a name, they’re just loonies. But you might know something about them. They used to take pictures of women going into the clinics and Mum used to call you in when they did. You’d come down sometimes and move them on. But that’s all you ever did.’
The accusation glanced off Harrigan’s hide.
‘We’ll check it,’ he said. ‘Did you see anyone else this morning, Matthew? We found some used syringes in the back of the shop and we’re pretty certain there was at least one other person inside at the time. Did you see anyone else near that shop, before or afterwards?’
‘I’ve seen smackheads come out of there sometimes. I know it gets used for that, but I didn’t see anyone today other than her.’
The words sounded strange in his mouth, Grace thought, his nerve was about to break. There was a brief silence.
‘Are you going to find her? You said you would.’
‘Yes, I am,’ Harrigan replied.
‘Because she’s a coward and she’s a cold-blooded murderer and you’ve got to find her and put her away, you know, for ever.’
As he spoke, his grandmother leaned forward with her eyes closed, then sat upright again, appearing to force herself to listen. Grace’s miniature cassette player, balanced on the low table, kept on recording.
‘We’ll find her.’ Harrigan sounded disinterested. ‘I don’t want people like her out on the streets. I want her in a cell where she belongs for a good long time.’ He paused. ‘I’ve got some people outside who are going to stay with you both for a while. If you want anything, you just ask them for it. That’s what they’re here for. Do you want to get changed now, Matthew? Your grandmother brought these clothes in for you. You should get out of what you’re wearing.’
‘I’m not going to do that. You see this?’ The boy let go of Grace’s hand and held out his arms where the blood had dried to fine caked dark crimson dust on his school blazer. ‘This is real. This is what happened. I’m not going to change.’
‘That’s not going to make any difference for you, Matthew,’
Harrigan said quietly. ‘It’s better if you clean away what you can. Why don’t you let me and your grandmother give you a hand?’
There was a change of quality in the atmosphere; Grace felt a sense of the boy taking on an imposed restraint. He sat still for a few moments and then shrugged his acquiescence. She said her goodbyes to him, which he received with a confused vagueness, and waited outside while he changed. A little later, Mrs Tsang appeared in the corridor with Harrigan.
‘I’ll give you these now, Mrs Tsang. I think you’ll want them,’ he said and reaching into his inside jacket pocket handed the elderly woman a plastic bag with the dead man’s effects: a gold watch, a tiepin, a wallet and a wedding ring.
‘My husband gave Henry that watch. When he and Agnes were married,’ she said in an ordinary voice, taking the package from him.
Harrigan was guiding her gently back into the room as she spoke.
‘Don’t forget you can call me. Any time. Any of the numbers on my card.’
Grace, watching the waiting room door close on both Matthew and Mrs Tsang, allowed herself to breathe.
‘Is that what he told you?’
They were on their way out to his car. She had stopped outside the hospital entrance to put on her coat against the wind, and stood in the wintry weather feeling stretched and dirty. Just then she would have paid good money for a cigarette but she had none with her, a self-imposed self-denial she was regretting badly. She frowned as she replied.
‘Yeah, pretty much. He made a lot more sense that time around, he really lost it in the ambulance. Anyway, I’ve got it all on the tape. Both times.’
‘Good for you, Grace.’
Neutrality gone, he snapped his reply at her. Grace felt the expression on her face harden as she looked at him and did not reply.
What do you want me to do? Cry for Matthew? I can do that if you want but what’s the point? He was watching her.
‘You’ve cleaned your coat up,’ he said.
She touched the still warm and damp black wool and felt a shift in her workaday realities. All the usual boundaries had been negated by a single morning’s work.
‘The hospital did that for me. It was nice of them to take the trouble.’
‘Yeah, it was, wasn’t it? Okay, we can’t hang around here having a good time all day, we’ve got places to go. You drive, I hear?’
He was looking at her speculatively with the ghost of a grin.
‘Of course I drive.’
‘Yeah, I heard on the grapevine you were pretty speedy. You can drive me in that case.’ He tossed her the car keys and she caught them one-handed with a perfect cricketer’s catch. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
She almost said that the grapevine was more speedy than she could hope to be. That morning, early, Grace had slipped her much loved car, her 1971 red Datsun 240Z, her stylish piece of retro culture on wheels, into a vacant parking space, zipping in ahead of a clapped-out Ford Cortina. The driver, a man of about fortyish or so with pronounced veins on his forehead and eyes popping with anger, had leaned out of his window and yelled at her that this was his spot, he always parked there, get out of it. Other spaces were vacant nearby and her stubbornness came up like a wall. ‘Too late,’ she’d said to him with her sweetest smile as she got out of her car and walked away.
That was Jeffo, someone had told her later, he was on the team with her. He’s nasty, you watch out for him.
‘I don’t care at all. Where to?’ she replied honestly, with edge, tossing back some irritation of her own.
‘The morgue. You know where that is? McMichael’s managed to fit the professor in sooner rather than later. He’s put some poor electrocuted woman and her broken-hearted husband on hold just for us. So let’s feel privileged. You ready to go?’
‘Sure.’
‘A girl,’ he said as she pulled out into the traffic. ‘Little. Not old. Not much to know about someone who just shot both your parents in a back alley in Chippendale, is it? Why would she do something like that?’
‘Obsession?’ Grace replied, startled by the question and uncertain whether or not an answer was wanted from her. ‘If you go after someone like that, you usually have to be obsessed with them in some way. It sounded to me like she had tunnel vision. She didn’t even see Matthew until he was right there in front of her. I don’t think she even twigged who he was.’
‘I think that’s spot on, Gracie. I don’t think she saw anything at all except what was at the other end of that gun. When we find her, we’ll ask her, won’t we? I’ll sit on one side of the table and she’ll sit on the other and she won’t tell me anything that makes any sense of this at all. We’ll all just wonder why.’
He sat with his mobile phone in his hand, tapping it as he spoke, a strained, absorbed expression on his face. Grace looked at him sideways, surprised by what he had said. He didn’t fit her preconception of the ferociously ambitious workaholic she had been warned to expect. She had thought he would be ragged and frenetic.
Instead, his movements were unhurried and his expression was mainly indifferent. He was younger than she had expected and he had the kind of appearance an advertising agency might use to sell any make-believe Australian product from insecticide to financial services. The hair was receding a little at the temples, and there were suggestions of fatigue around the grey eyes. These and the possibility of a little too much preoccupation adding fault lines to his longish face were blemishes a marketing manager might balk at. But the clothes fitted. Suit, tie, colour, style, he must have spent time in front of the mirror adjusting them to be just right. It was a presentation for climbing ladders, a working disguise, you couldn’t know what he was. She smiled faintly to herself. Are you a liar? And if you’re not, then who are you? These were her first unspoken questions whenever she met anyone. He was watching her as she stopped at a set of traffic lights. Stop looking at me, she said to him in her mind, I get tired of being looked at.
‘Don’t mind me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to make some phone calls. I’m not trying to be impolite.’
‘There is just one thing,’ she said. ‘Do you mind not calling me Gracie? Thanks.’
Grace was not going to be Gracie to someone she had met for the first time that morning and who went by the title of her boss. Harrigan looked at her in some surprise.
‘I don’t care. Whatever you want. Do you mind if I get on with it?’
He gestured to his phone.
‘Go for it,’ she said very quietly, looking ahead.
I don’t care either, pretend I’m not here. I’m the greenhorn, I’ll just drive the car. I need my thoughts to myself for a little while anyway.
She needed this stretch of time to push out of her head, or at least appease, her visions of the last few hours, among them Matthew Liu locked into a tight, dry-eyed knot on his chair in a hospital waiting room. She had thought she was ready for this kind of extremity, had dusted off her rhino hide to take on this kind of violence. To face it and deal with it. She put this mantra on with her make-up every day together with all the other pieces of her armour. This morning, the sight of blood slicked on a city road had left a more poisonous aftershock than she had been prepared for. She thought of her coat, tossed carelessly onto the back seat of the car, remembering the touch of warm dampness where the stains had been cleaned away from the lapel, before focusing solely on the drive ahead.