Harrigan wanted to make Lucy Hurst dance for him but the truth was that he could not move. Once the options were laid on the table they came down to a single possibility: watch and wait. Exert pressure, push people a little and see what will break, then pick up the pieces.
He had put in place all the resources he had: surveillance teams, street patrols, saturation coverage in the media, his own people monitoring every scrap of information that was fed to them, waiting for the break. Other than that, he was fixed in the small square of space that made up his office.
Outside his window, the weather seemed to be engaged in the same kind of phoney war. The wind was chasing rubbish through the air, using it as a punching bag for unseen fists. The ground was dry, there was as yet no rain, only an anticipation. He was detached and sealed away in this building, watching for an outcome through his wide glass window, an unwilling spectator at some organised gladiatorial event where the pleasure for most of the other spectators is that the outcomes are real.
His people had brought the preacher in and Harrigan had decided to keep him waiting, although he doubted that this tactic would have much effect on the man. He laid his photographs out on the table one by one and asked himself what he could achieve by placing these images in front of someone he had already decided was unreachable.
The preacher was still human. Most people are accessible through fear and others can’t resist a game. He gathered the photographs into a folder and walked out of his office.
In the interview room, the preacher sat waiting with Trevor and Ian. Harrigan greeted him with his professional smile. Ian moved his chair back to sit against the wall, Trevor to the side out of the way.
Harrigan had asked for space while he talked with the preacher.
‘Thanks for coming in, Graeme. We appreciate it,’ he said, taking his seat.
‘Paul, I am happy to assist you in any way I can. I hope I will have something of value to tell you.’
‘Good.’ Harrigan’s tone was perfunctory. ‘Just a point to get clear to begin with. You know Lucy Hurst?’
‘I do indeed. She is a member of my congregation, a very troubled young woman. She was, or is, in desperate need of help. However,’ the preacher forestalled him, ‘I am afraid I am unable to repeat any of the conversations we may have had together. They are strictly confidential. I’m afraid that confidence is inviolable.’
‘That wasn’t my question, Graeme. Let me tell you what I do want to know. You’re a man of God. That’s what you say you are.’
‘That is what I am.’
‘What makes you that?’
The preacher sat upright, his hands clasped in front of him, resting on the table.
‘You don’t need to ask me that question. You know the answer.
You’ve heard me preach. You know I reach into the heart. It is not my voice that speaks through me but the voice of eternal love, no, of primal love, the first of all loves that speaks through me. I speak an eternal truth to those who will hear it.’
‘Then why do you need this? Your resume with the Family Services Commission says you have a Master of Theology from Freedom World University. Our information says that’s a postbox in a trailer park in South Chicago. Why bother? If you have all those skills without this piece of paper?’
The preacher glanced at the ornately decorated degree that Harrigan had slid across the table towards him.
‘Ian Enright,’ he said, reading the name of the recipient. He looked at Ian. ‘That’s you. Again you have the answer to your question, Paul.
You have already identified the true worth of these pieces of paper.’
‘My question was, why did you bother?’
‘People need the reassurance these things offer.’
‘Why not get a real one?’
‘I have no need of it.’
‘You don’t need a real degree but you do need a fake one?’
‘It’s a crutch for others, Paul. I don’t have the time to devote myself to that sort of study. I have the world out there to concern myself with.
No one asked Christ if he had a degree.’
‘You don’t have a problem presenting yourself fraudulently to others?’
‘I am not presenting myself fraudulently. I am exactly what I say I am. That piece of paper allows others who may doubt me to cast aside their doubts and see me for what I truly am.’
Harrigan looked at the preacher for a few seconds. Then he gave a short, offensive laugh.
‘I couldn’t agree with you more, mate,’ he said. ‘I think it says exactly what you are.’
The lines of the preacher’s face hardened into expressionless anger.
The atmosphere tightened, the ante was upped slightly. Harrigan retrieved the imitation degree and returned it to his folder.
‘I have a list here I want you to read aloud, please, Graeme.’ His tone was brusque. ‘You were associated with the New Life Ministries in Berkeley, California. These are the members of the Life Support Group who were also associated with that church. Tell me the ones you know.’
The preacher smiled and rested his fingers on the list without looking at it.
‘I meet so many people in my work, Paul.’
‘But you never forget anyone. You told me that yourself. When I was at your prayer meeting you even knew who the children were. You have to be able to glad-hand people in your line of work, don’t you?
You want to control them so they jump when you say jump? Then you have to know who they are, don’t you? Read those names and tell me the ones you know.’
‘I am not obliged to do that.’
Fredericksen pushed the paper back across the table.
‘Trev?’ Harrigan asked. They listened as Trevor read each name aloud.
‘Recognise any of those names, Graeme?’
‘They’re just names to me, Paul.’
‘Are you a member of a group called the Avenging Angels?’
‘What are they?’
‘You know what they are. You tell me.’
Fredericksen replied with unshakable self-possession.
‘I am my own man, Paul. I do only what I am called to do. Where people are concerned, I am just myself, nothing else.’
‘Do you know this woman?’
He placed on the table the picture of the woman shot dead on her front doorstep with the words ‘You can run but you can’t hide’ written across the image.
‘Again you ask me to identify someone from the back of the head.’
‘This woman’s face was shot away so it wouldn’t help you much.
Let me introduce you anyway: Dr Laura Di-Cuollo, obstetrician, Long Beach, California. She used to carry out abortions at a local women’s health clinic.’
Fredericksen glanced briefly at the photograph. He drew his head up in what appeared a gesture of fastidious distaste. Then the swiftest of expressions, joy, crossed his face.
‘Does this picture appeal to you? Does it please you?’
The preacher did not speak. Harrigan continued.
‘It’s a cruel picture, Graeme. Don’t you feel grief, sorrow, anything, when you look at it?’
‘This woman dealt in death. Why should anyone, herself, her fellow travellers, be surprised if one day death catches up with her?’
‘You’re saying she deserved to die?’
‘No, not at all. Only that those who deal in death should not be surprised if one day their partner in life comes to claim them.’
In the room, briefly, there was a sense of extraordinary cold.
‘I see,’ Harrigan said eventually. ‘What about this?’
He placed in front of the preacher the picture of Professor Henry Liu lying dead in a Chippendale street.
‘None of this has anything to do with me. Why are you showing me these things?’
‘What about this one?’
A picture of the professor in the same street with the blue handkerchief Harrigan himself had dropped across his face. He set the two photographs side by side.
‘You show me pictures, Paul, but you don’t tell me why.’
‘The morning this shooting happened, and we got the call to go down there, we found one dead body and one living one. And one teenager with his life shot to pieces. I dropped that handkerchief over the dead man’s face because of the way he looked.’ There was a pause.
‘Don’t you find that sickening to look at?’
Harrigan’s voice was quiet. He watched the preacher look from one picture to the next without blinking or registering any change to his expression.
‘Do you know what this man did for a living? He taught music. I’m asking you, Graeme: should he have expected to be shot dead like that?’
As he spoke, Harrigan very briefly felt the memory of his conversation with Grace that morning, an impression gone in a second.
There was silence. The preacher stared at Harrigan, his hands resting on the photographs.
‘I have no idea,’ he replied calmly.
‘Do you feel any grief for him? His son? His wife? You know who she is, Graeme. Your mates from your congregation spend half their lives outside her clinics buzzing around her clients.’
‘She dealt in death. Her son should be accusing her. So should the ghost of her husband. Perhaps in the afterlife he will, when the scales have fallen from his eyes. Perhaps he will accuse her while he watches her fall into her place in Hell.’
Again there was a sense of profound cold in the room. Harrigan saw how the attention of everyone, himself, his two officers, was fixed on this man who drank it in, unafraid.
‘There’s only God’s law for you, Graeme.’
‘There is only God’s law for every one of us, Paul.’
‘Does this represent God’s law to you?’
He tapped the pictures, avoiding any physical contact with the preacher. Fredericksen smiled at him with a slightly taunting expression.
‘You are the law enforcer here, Paul. Tell me how you see it.’
‘I see it as cold-blooded murder.’
Silence. Fredericksen continued to smile.
‘Then we wait for the answer to your question. We wait until the day that we are called to account before God. On that day, the true representatives of the law will be revealed to us. We will see whose blood is innocent and whose is not.’
‘You want to talk about blood guilt?’ Harrigan said. ‘The Lius were shot by the same type of gun that shot Laura Di-Cuollo. They’re not all that common in this country in the hands of nineteen-year-old street kids. Did you give Lucy Hurst that gun?’
‘How can I have given her a gun? I have no gun. I can’t answer that question.’
‘You can’t answer my question?’
‘No.’
‘Because to answer the question would be to lie to me directly.’
‘I don’t lie, Paul. I tell people the truth in their hearts.’
‘Did you give Lucy Hurst a gun and tell her to go out and do this?’
There was a fraction of a hesitation.
‘No, I did not say that to her,’ he replied.
‘She killed the wrong person. She didn’t even know how to control the gun. Why pick someone so young? No one else have the nerve?
Including you? Enforcing God’s law is fine provided you don’t have to do the dirty work.’
Harrigan laughed in the preacher’s face.
‘Her actions have nothing to do with me,’ the man replied.
‘You mean the fact that she made such a dog’s breakfast of it?’
‘None of this has anything to do with me.’
‘You don’t kill people. You get other people to do it for you.’
‘That is untrue.’
‘You mean you kill people as well?’
The preacher’s face was not so much white as colourless. He sat completely still.
‘I am not an agent of death. Others are the agents of death. Why don’t you harass them?’
‘Your agents. Would you kill Lucy Hurst if she was a danger to you?’
‘I am not an agent of death. I am a preserver of life.’
‘Haven’t you ever wanted to kill someone? Wouldn’t you like to have a go at me now?’
The preacher drew himself up with the same fastidious movement, and the same brief expression of savage joy crossed his face.
‘You are not my concern, Paul. Your fate will be decided by a force far stronger than you, or me for that matter. I may be its agent. But I am not an agent of death. I offer eternal life.’
‘Careful what rubbish you say there, mate.’ Trevor spoke very softly and very angrily, words that had been forced out of him.
The tension snapped like a piece of fine and brittle glass. The preacher jumped from his seat. ‘How dare you talk to me!’ he roared.
Harrigan was on his feet and in the preacher’s face before anyone else could move.
‘You will not talk to my officers like that!’
The force of his words pushed the preacher back into his seat.
There was silence. The preacher’s face had been transformed by fury.
He sat there shaking.
‘Am I under arrest?’ he asked.
Harrigan shook his head.
‘I wish to leave now in that case or I will bring a complaint of unlawful detention.’
‘You agreed to come down of your own accord, Graeme. But you can go anyway. I’m finished here. But I’m sure we’ll talk to each other again soon.’
This time the man did not speak or smile. He stood up, the doors were opened and the four of them walked to the lifts. At a nod from Harrigan, Dea phoned for an escort to see the preacher out. No one spoke. The escort took his time.
While they stood there, they heard the sound of female voices: Louise and Grace returning from some girls’ only coffee break. They appeared in the foyer on their way back to work. Harrigan and Grace looked at each other without intending to. Then he saw her look at the preacher with that steel in her expression she sometimes had.
Fredericksen watched her go, his face impassive. The lift doors opened and the escort arrived.
‘Do you know, Paul,’ the preacher said, turning to him, ‘it’s never wise to be arrogant. Pride does go before a fall.’
Harrigan placed himself between the preacher and everyone else and spoke quietly and affably. He was smiling.
‘Who are you threatening, Graeme? Me or one of my people?
Because that would be a very stupid thing for you to do.’
‘I am not threatening anyone, Paul. I never do. Everything is in the hands of God. Does that worry you? Would that make you step outside your own limits?’
‘This man will organise you a lift home,’ Harrigan replied. ‘Thanks for coming in.’
They looked at each other and then the preacher turned away.
‘Good day to you,’ he said to no one in particular.
He was gone and they all breathed.
‘Fuck me,’ Ian and Trevor said, simultaneously.
‘Snap,’ Trevor said. ‘Sorry, Dea.’
‘That’s okay,’ she said, with an unconcerned wave of her hand.
‘He’s a first for me, I’ve got to say that,’ Harrigan said, damping down the fact the interview, and Fredericksen, had disturbed him much more than was usual.
‘Why did he scream at you like that, mate?’ Ian asked.
‘Who gives a shit?’ Trevor shrugged.
‘Why did you say that to him?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Because of all the crap he was going on with. What would he know?
I need a smoke.’
‘Take a break and then come and see me in my office, the both of you,’ Harrigan said.
He went back into the main part of the office and saw Grace about to disappear into the computer room. He walked up to her.
‘My office,’ he said, ‘now.’
‘What is it?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Work.’ The comment was overhead by Jeffo who, Grace noticed, grinned at them both and made a face behind Harrigan’s back.
‘What is it?’ she asked as she sat down on the other side of his desk.
‘I need to know — would the preacher or anyone connected with him have any reason to know anything about you?’
‘Why are you asking me that?’
‘Because if they do, I would have to say you are in considerable personal danger as of now. I’m going to ask you again. Do they know anything about you? Your address, anything. Anything you tell me is confidential, Grace.’
Grace pictured herself sitting in this chair telling him how she had had an abortion eight months ago, or even confining her information simply to describing how the preacher’s hangers-on had tracked her down and leaving it to him to fill in the gaps. She could not bring herself to say any of this, the confession stuck in her throat. What would it matter if she did say nothing? What could she tell him that he didn’t already know? He would finish the investigation soon, within days at the most. She shook her head without speaking.
‘Are you sure?’
She shook her head again. He tapped the desk with his fingertips.
‘Have you sent out an email to the Firewall?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. I haven’t got anything back yet.’
He was silent for a little longer.
‘I’m going to take you at your word, Grace,’ he said. ‘You’re responsible for what you do in here — ’
‘I’ve never seen it any other way.’
‘I’m not saying anything different. We were talking about murderers the other night. You just saw the genuine article standing in the foyer. He gets a kick out of it. Think about that. Let me know as soon as you get anything back online.’
‘Okay,’ she said and left, meeting Trev and Ian at the door.
‘Hi, guys,’ she said and headed back to the computer room.
‘Did we interrupt anything?’ Ian asked disingenuously.
‘No, mate, there’s nothing to interrupt,’ Harrigan growled. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
In the computer room, Grace sat in front of the monitor waiting to see if the Firewall would come online, asking herself, what could Harrigan do to protect her anyway? Take her off the job, lock her away? She concentrated on her work. Work was her only possible relief at the moment. She decided that even tedium could have its uses when you needed it enough.