‘Is there anyone in this picture that you recognise?’
Grace and Matthew Liu sat at a white table in the centre of the large room, close to the desk where the nurses came and went. Pale blue curtains surrounded the individual beds of the intensive care ward. Grace spoke quietly, the cushioned floors softened all extraneous sounds. In a glass room at the furthermost end of the ward, Agnes Liu slept on in shadows which had the quality of dark water.
On a monitor, lighted graphs sketched the pattern of her breathing and her heartbeat in pencil-thin lines.
‘Yeah,’ Matthew said, ‘that one. That’s her. For sure.’
‘Why are you so sure?’ Grace asked.
Matthew Liu put the photograph back down on the table where it lay under his hands. The fine bones of his fingers splayed over its glossy surface. It was a photograph of a small group of homeless boys in Belmore Park, taken at an angle to increase the sense of distance. One of the boys stood to the side, talking to another figure seen only from the back, the slender female outline of a figure wearing a black jacket and jeans and with short curly hair. She seemed to have her arms folded in front of her, drawing her clothes tightly around the curve of her outline.
‘The way she’s holding her shoulders. That’s how she looked when she walked away. She’s like a cut-out in the air. You know who someone is when they do something like that to you. They’re in your head, you can’t get them out.’
He spoke angrily.
‘Okay.’ Grace slipped the photograph back into the file. ‘How are you going today? Do you want me to stay and talk to you, or just stay?
I’ve got all the time in the world if you want it.’
He shrugged. He had shaved his thick black hair in deliberate mourning and his cheeks looked hollowed out. He had taken on age, something laid roughcast over his features. He was dressed in worn black clothing. He had not cried once in her presence since she had sat with him in the street the morning that it had happened. He refused to talk, to her, to anyone. Sometimes when she visited, he only wanted her to sit with him in silence while he sat next to his mother, waiting.
‘You don’t have to stay, I’m all right. Mum’s not going to die now, you know that. I don’t want to talk. I’m going to go and sit with her.’
‘You know where I am if you do want to call me any time.’
He shook his head and walked away. Everything he did broadcast grief and anger in equal proportions, both immense.
At the entrance to the ward, Grace found Agnes Liu’s doctor waiting for her.
‘Some of your time?’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to let her talk to you. She’s not going to rest easy until she does and I can’t persuade her that it really isn’t wise. I think it’s best to have this done with as soon as we can. I’ll be in touch when I think she’s able to talk for any length of time. Probably tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.’
‘If you call me, I can arrange to be here then. Only me?’
‘If you do bring anyone else, they’ll have to stay outside. I don’t want two people standing over her. One of you is bad enough. No offence,’
he added as an afterthought before frowning and walking away.
Grace left St Vincent’s mired in an old, familiar feeling: stasis, the sense of her heart becoming stagnate, her blood stopped. Numb to the end of each limb, each fingertip, she was gripped by emotional hypothermia. She sat with this weight on her, stranded at the lights on Oxford Street, watching the crowds pass by in the remains of the wet weather. It was her old habit of feeling either too much or too little, when all she wanted was balance. She had thought she was cured.
She arrived just in time for the morning’s meeting in the incident room, something which usually happened earlier. Today’s meeting had been shifted back and the room was filled with people hanging around, impatient. Harrigan, the buzz went, was trapped in his office, caught up with a telephone call from the Tooth demanding detailed explanations for the funds expended on the investigation and (as he said) the reasons for its lack of progress to date. The case had become stalled in a slow trickle of information, most of it leading them nowhere; they hadn’t even managed to locate the preacher yet, he might as well have evaporated from the city. People said you could almost see Harrigan chafing as he worked.
Grace waited with everyone else. Carrying Greg Smith’s file under her arm, she slowly walked the length of the Firewall’s turbulent pictures, considering each in turn. The disconnected images unwound like bobbin threads along the corkboard, a glossy snakeskin depicting huge and random destruction. As she moved from sheet to sheet, she asked herself: if this is your game plan, what’s your starting point?
How do you get there?
Ian appeared at her elbow, startling her a little.
‘What are you going to do for the end of the world, Gracie?’ he said to her, smiling.
‘I don’t know. What do you have to do to get to the pearly gates?
Scrub your teeth with bath cleaner? I’d like to look my best, I guess.’
‘You wouldn’t need to do that to look your best,’ he replied. ‘I’d sink a few golden ambers first. There’s no beer in the afterlife.’
Grace watched over his shoulder as Jeffo slipped another photograph into the array of pictures. Several people standing nearby glanced at it and then at each other, raising their eyebrows. She held her breath. They did not look in her direction and they did not laugh.
She relaxed and smiled at Ian.
‘You don’t know, it could be flowing in the streets up there. It’s got to have something going for it,’ she said.
‘I wish,’ he said.
‘If you two really want to know,’ Harrigan grumbled, passing them by, ‘why don’t you ask our woman up there on the board. She can tell you. She’s already made it to the afterlife. The only thing flowing for her is her own blood.’
‘Good morning to you too,’ Grace said, softly.
‘What’s up with him this morning?’ Ian said.
They looked at each other, and then at the corkboard. Louise had pinned up a second reproduction of the picture of the unknown woman lying dead across a set of steps with the words ‘You can run but you can’t hide’ scrawled across her. This time, the reproduction came from an Internet news service and carried the headline: AVENGING ANGELS’ DEADLY STRIKE. POLICE FAIL TO MAKE ARREST AFTER
DOCTOR SHOT BY EXTREME ANTI-ABORTION GROUP.
Harrigan’s arrival called them all to silence. He settled his papers on the table, taking a few seconds to dispel his irritation. Whenever the Tooth tormented him like this, some other scheme was usually in progress elsewhere, and for Harrigan the true questions were twofold.
Were all their backs, his included, protected? And where were the real land mines buried? Time was ticking on, like the clock on his murdering girl’s website. Not so many days had passed since he had first located the website but the pressures for a result were growing more intense by the hour. The Firewall was still out there, his superiors were still leaning on him, the politicians were leaning on them, and the media was baying for blood. He glanced briefly at the mosaic of diverse pictures on the corkboard without taking them in. They shone in the reflection of the overhead lights, the images lost in the glitter.
‘We know who this is now.’ Louise’s voice was already coarsened by alcohol even though it was only late morning. She was tapping the picture of the dead woman with a slightly shaking hand. ‘Dr Laura Di-Cuollo, obstetrician, Long Beach, California. She was shot dead on her own front doorstep sixteen months ago. That case is still open. The people who shot her call themselves the Avenging Angels. They took this piccie as soon as they’d done it and then they sent it out to every news service that wanted to print it. That’s who they are. They don’t believe in hiding what they do.’
‘But our colleagues in the US of A do,’ Harrigan said. ‘We’ve been trying to open up the lines of communication with them on this but all we get is the cold shoulder. They hang up the phone on me as soon as they can; we email or fax them urgently and they lose the message. We’re going to keep trying but we have to chase this our end as well if we’re going to get anywhere with it. So — what we know about our killer.
She’s armed and dangerous. She’s prepared to use her gun again. She’s unpredictable. She’s “stuck back home” wherever that is. What we don’t know. Is our girl one of these Avenging Angels, so-called? People involved with this kind of organisation are inclined to firebomb clinics as well as shooting the staff. There are five Whole Life Health Centre clinics in the Sydney metropolitan area. I am trying to get a watch on them all but Marvin…’ Harrigan paused, weighing his words ‘… is still considering the options, so he’s told me. He’ll let me know once he’s checked over our budget. So consider this in your deliberations: are we dealing with a single killer? Or a member of an organisation which has its own resources to draw on, possibly from more than one country?’
‘Why don’t you tell us that yourself, mate? Maybe your boy knows.
Why don’t you ask him instead of us?’ Jeffo muttered poisonously.
How far the words were intended to carry, Grace could not be sure.
She was standing in the orbit of his voice and several other people close to her had smiled. Jeffo was giving voice to certain exclusions that had rankled badly with some. Toby Harrigan’s relationship with the Firewall, all that side of the investigation, had been siphoned off to a small team working to Louise, with instructions to talk to no one other than Harrigan concerning anything they found. Grace had heard the sour rumblings of gossip. How the boss was favouring a burnt-out alcoholic, compromising the possibility of their results. A whispered heresy — ‘Harrigan’s losing it, he should take himself off the job’ -
had started to do the rounds.
‘I’m going to ask each of you to exercise your mind on those questions,’ Harrigan said, looking around at them all, speaking with an acerbic edge that implied he had picked up on the undercurrents.
‘Every one of you, because there are no answers yet and it’s time we had some. But right now we’ve got a picture of her, Grace tells me.
Why don’t you show us?’
‘A picture of sorts,’ Grace replied, taking the photograph out of her file and walking forward. ‘This came out of Greg Smith’s file at Juvenile Justice. It’s a magazine photograph published about a year ago when someone was doing an expose on what happens to state wards. It’s too bad their research didn’t go much past this picture.’
There was limited space left on the board, occupied as it was by the Firewall’s website. Searching for room, Grace found herself looking at Toby Harrigan in his wheelchair, the photograph that welcomed viewers once they had surfed into his website. No other pictures of Harrigan’s son had made it to the board, he had not allowed it. His son existed there only as part of the Firewall’s ferocious world.
Harrigan, standing close by, saw it at the same moment that she did.
They glanced at each other but neither reacted. Harrigan, turning, searched through the assembled team until he located Jeffo and eyeballed him. The man looked away at once.
‘Matthew Liu is certain this is her. He was sure from the moment I showed it to him and I believe him,’ Grace said, taking the only available space, next to Harrigan’s son. ‘She’s the right height, 156
centimetres. Tiny, in other words. She’s thin and she could get into the clothes the shooter wore. You put her beside the website and there are similarities with the Firewall as well. It’s not much to go on, but it is something to connect her to Greg Smith.’
‘That’s useful, isn’t it?’ Jeffo said, this time meaning to be heard.
‘We can all go round checking the backs of people’s heads.’
There was some laughter. Grace did not waste her time even glancing in Jeffo’s direction.
‘I look forward to you doing better, mate,’ Harrigan snapped, with just enough venom to make sure everyone knew what his feelings towards Jeffo were. He spoke to Trevor, ‘It’s enough for a description.
Get it written up and get it circulated, the photo as well. Yeah, what is it, Dea?’
His administrative assistant, a small and tough-looking woman with dyed blonde hair, had appeared in the doorway.
‘Marvin’s on the phone again,’ she announced.
Oh joy, Harrigan thought irritably. He nodded to Trevor to take over and left the room. Trevor was cynically cheerful as he handed out the jobs for the day.
‘You finally get to go and chat up young Greggie this arvo, Gracie.
The shrink says it’s okay. They’re expecting you at three thirty,’ he said to her. ‘Tough luck, mate. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.’
‘I’ll cope,’ she said, faking a blithe indifference.
Dirty jobs done dirt cheap a speciality, Trev, Grace improvised from a well-known song, reflecting on her present conditions of employment.
It surprised Grace to find that Toby Harrigan was still on the board when she came in after a brief lunch, presumably because Harrigan had been locked in his office since the meeting, kept there by constant demands from the Tooth. She looked at the boy and thought that he had Harrigan’s face, twenty or so years back. Harrigan was not the only one with someone he loved in a wheelchair, she had someone there herself. Someone who was both a one-time lover and a friend, who found himself confined to the same means of transportation by fate, bad luck, call it what you like, a disease in the genes he had grown into without knowing it. Grace thought of the clock running backwards for her friend as his nerve strings were cut one by one, bringing him to a common meeting point with Harrigan’s son.
At the age of not quite thirty, Grace had acquired a lasting sense of uncertainty, she lived every day with the anticipation of insecurity. At any time, something might happen that would blow you out of the water and you would never know it. In her imaginings, the Bondi Pavilion could easily have doubled as the deserted cantina from some spaghetti western where the roofs were open to the skies, drifts of sand massed in the corners of deserted rooms and bird shit painted the walls. One day, those same white walls might crumble into the sea, leaving behind broken archways in silhouette against a hot blue Sydney sky. Wistful dreams compared to the visions on the Firewall’s website, imaginings of annihilation which reduced Grace’s own to a production which (she had to admit) was strictly amateur night.
She stopped to look at the Firewall and Toby Harrigan in their imagined embrace in the hallway of what looked like a prison, a space which gave the impression of airlessness. Briefly, she touched the two figures. You can’t see her but you love her. She knows who you are and she loves you. You’re both down there together in her eyes. That’s why she wants to get you to your feet and save you. Save you and save herself.
‘Who do you love?’ Grace sang softly to herself.
‘Are you curious about my boy, Grace? Do you want to know something about him? I can give you all the textbooks you like. They have open days where he lives if you’re interested. Come along and have a look one day, you don’t have to be shy.’
Harrigan appeared beside her and removed the photograph of his son from the board, sliding it into a folder.
‘No, that’s not why I’m here,’ she said at once. ‘I came in here to think, it’s the only place where it’s quiet enough to. He looks like you, that’s all that was in my head.’
He shrugged, apparently embarrassed by what he had said. There were lines of strain around his eyes.
‘Yeah, you could say that. Same face if you like. Poor kid.’
He spoke more quietly.
‘I was really thinking about her,’ she said, changing the subject, glancing at the anonymous figure in the photograph. ‘I’m trying to work her out. She didn’t go out looking for blood. She wasn’t doing it for kicks.’
‘I almost wish she had been, I’d find her easier to understand. I don’t cotton on to killing people for fantasies like this.’
‘This is so extreme, I almost don’t know where to start with it,’
Grace said, glancing along the board. ‘You look at it and there are no holds barred at all. Where do you have to come from to see the world this way?’
‘Nowhere we want to go. I don’t care what makes her what she is, Grace. I want her off the streets before she does something to someone else. You put a gun in the hands of someone who thinks like this and they will use it, it goes with the territory. Why are you asking yourself that question?’
‘It’s one way of getting her off the streets, isn’t it? Working out who she is, what she might do next.’
He glanced along the corkboard. ‘You look at this and you say to yourself, this is who she is,’ he said. ‘And the answer is, so what? Some people have no problem killing, they like to do it for fun or profit.
Other people do it because they’re away with the pixies. We know that. The rest is just work.’
‘Don’t we have to out-think them?’ Grace replied, looking at the slender and unknown girl in the photograph talking to Greg Smith.
‘Isn’t that the point? Apart from anything you might feel for the people they’ve damaged. Doesn’t that make you want to ask those questions?’
She said this last not as an argument, but as an expression of something felt.
‘Yeah, the people involved do matter,’ he said. ‘As it happens, Grace, I ask myself those questions all the time. I read all the books as well. Every time a new one comes out, I get hold of it and I think, maybe this one is going to tell me something. What I’m saying is, I don’t see that it amounts to very much in the end to know what makes her what she is. It won’t be a blinding insight into anything.’
Unconsciously, Grace flicked a stray strand of her long brown hair back from her face, an unexpectedly elegant gesture to Harrigan’s observation.
‘You have to be one step ahead of them whatever you do,’ she said, unwillingly seeing in her mind the man who had raped her and whose body was still imprinted on her own however much she wanted to scour it away. ‘People can play all kinds of games with you at a distance. You can’t let them do that.’
Harrigan, looking at her, did not reply for a few moments.
‘That’s a good way of seeing things if you want to do this job,’ he said. ‘Are you taking that picture with you when you go to see that boy?’
They both glanced at the photograph taken in Belmore Park.
‘Yeah, I’ve got it already. I’d better go, it’ll take me a while to get there.’
‘Why don’t you come and see me when you get back? I’d like to hear what he’s got to say before you write it up. And don’t forget to ring me if you get any spectacular information.’
‘Sure,’ she said.
She smiled at him and left the room. He walked out after her. Come and see me and then we’ll go out and eat together somewhere. No, let’s not do that, that really will give everyone something to talk about.
There were enough whispers doing the rounds at the moment without adding something like that to them.
At that moment, Harrigan was called back into his office to take yet another phone call from the Tooth’s personal assistant, a woman who possessed the perfect up-your-arse voice, demanding yet more information on what they’d spent, what they’d achieved. Trapped at his desk, he watched Grace readying to leave. She wouldn’t want to spend her time with him anyway. Would she? As the idiot woman rabbited on in his ear, he watched Grace walk out of the office — a nice light movement, full of ease — and wondered.
As soon as Harrigan had escaped from his telephone call, he quietly shredded the photograph of his son. Jeffo was going to regret his little joke. All the signs were there: Harrigan was being undermined from both the outside and the inside, and if he wanted to survive he’d have to watch every step he took. It was the worst possible time to think of something so scandalous and stupidly suicidal as sleeping with his most junior officer. He had much better keep his eye focused on things that were likely to have more reliable benefits. Such as hanging onto his career and making sure that too many knives didn’t go thud between his shoulderblades.
Out on the road, Grace drove nimbly through the traffic, pleased with her freedom. She sang to herself as she drove, hits on the airwaves and remnants from songs she had sung during her own short career. She felt restless, something which usually ended in her dusting off her shiny clothes and high-heeled shoes and going out to party. She was good at living it up, Sydney people generally were, they knew how to party. There was Bondi with its tarted-up strip on the edge of the beach and the shining sea, and the city itself, bright in a sunlight with an ancient, hard clarity to it. It was a city lazy in the sun, casual and brash with its eye on the good times, thorough in the execution of its corruption, the way it went about everything that mattered. She never wanted to live anywhere else.
She overtook the slower cars on the expressway, approaching the river, speeding down the descent towards Brooklyn and the Hawkesbury River Bridge. Almost fourteen years ago she had travelled this same distance in the reverse direction, at that time by train, leaving home to work in the city, with a sense of freedom she had never again felt with such intensity. The railway line had twisted (still did) along the backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, past disused oyster beds and decaying blue and green fibro houses isolated in the midst of the eucalyptus forest on the water’s edge. The train had picked up speed as it climbed through the tunnels approaching the river crossing and had then come roaring out of the dark onto the bridge. She had felt that the sky had opened out around her, that she was flying. To the east of the railway she had seen the grey pylons of the old bridge, the green river between the tree-covered hills as it flowed to the sea, and the town on the south bank beneath her, a pastiche of white buildings and red roofs, with cars glinting in the sunlight. In the mid afternoon on a working day, as she crossed by the road bridge, racing a commuter train in the distance and beginning her ascent towards the Central Coast, the river was still a boundary line.
Travelling across it had always had a peculiar bitter-sweetness for her.
Today, she felt a shiver of anticipation, of energy, down her spine.
This energy lasted as long as it took her to reach Kariong, to be shown into the office and meet a man who wanted to spend as little time as possible speaking to her. Sooner than expected, she was back out in the car park ringing the boss.
‘Harrigan.’
‘It’s Grace here.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve got some not very good information. I’m at Kariong but Greg Smith isn’t. He’s been bailed.’
‘You’re joking. Who bailed him? When?’
‘Preacher Graeme Fredericksen. He bailed Greg from the Children’s Court at Parramatta early this afternoon while I was still on my way up here.’
‘He’s finally surfaced, has he? So why didn’t anyone tell us? Why weren’t we involved in this?’
‘They don’t seem to want to include us in this at all. They didn’t get any warning themselves, or so they’re telling me. Two departmental officers arrived in a government car at lunch time and picked him up.
The paperwork came down from the department with some very senior signatures on it.’
‘Is he with the preacher now? Have they gone back to his refuge or whatever it is?’
‘That’s who Greg left the court with. But I can’t reach anyone at the refuge and I can’t raise the preacher. No matter what number you ring, you only get through to the voice mail. They’re shut down to the world. I can tell you they left the court in the refuge van at about 2:45, but that’s all the information I’ve got.’
‘Get back in here as soon as you can. I’ll take it from here.’
It had been a pointless journey. Driving back out onto the expressway Grace looked down the Gosford road, thinking of home, knowing it was just a short drive to her father’s house at Point Frederick on the Broadwater and wondering what he was doing now. He could be in his study, caught up in his work, writing research papers and speeches, or standing in his back garden on the edge of the water, wondering why things had worked out the way they had. She hadn’t the time to go and see him now, however much she might want to. She had work to do.
Grace sped up over Mooney-Mooney Bridge, heading back to the city. From about fourteen onwards, she could have found herself in a stolen car being driven too fast along this same freeway; the pleasure she had taken in the speed was with her as she drove now. Back then, the acceleration had been in her own head, she had wanted to get inside the sense of the speed itself, to let go completely, shouting at the driver (some other kid, completely spooked by her) go faster, let’s smash through something. They never had smashed anything — their car or another or the sandstone embankment — all they had done was to come very close. She had to admit it, she had wanted to save that lost boy’s life. Now all she could do was draw the line Harrigan had talked about.
When she reached the office, neither the preacher nor the boy had been found and every available person was out searching for them. She stopped in the doorway to Harrigan’s office, hesitating. He was on the phone and gestured to her to wait. As he hung up, he looked at her expectantly.
‘I’ve got the paperwork from Kariong for you if you want to see it,’
she said, feeling cold as she spoke. ‘It looks like they used the psychiatric assessment as a lever to get him out.’
‘Yeah.’ He was distant, unreadable. ‘Leave it with me, would you, Grace? I don’t have time to talk now. Okay?’
‘Sure,’ she said.
She went back to her desk, hiding behind her make-up and scrubbing out a sharply felt disappointment.
Not long after, Louise knocked discreetly on Harrigan’s door and put a message on his desk. It was the transcript of an email they had retrieved from the trash file on Toby’s computer.
Firewall, u have 2 be so careful now, the police know about yourweb site and they are watching everything u say and do. U rememberI love u, Firewall, love u always.
Harrigan nodded as he read it.
‘Keep me posted,’ he said, and buried his head in his paperwork, working at a murderous pace, driving all other thoughts out of his head.