There were certain things Grace knew she could never do. The sectioning of the dead was one of them, even though the postmortems she had attended were always such matter of fact events. It was only this remaking of dissection as an everyday occurrence which made it bearable for her. Today, that this was just regular, paid work for them all, had the opposite effect, she did not know why.
She watched the attendant wheel Henry Liu to the stainless-steel table then saw him jerk his thumb at the corpse and ask it to get up on the table now if it didn’t mind, mate, because they were all in a hurry.
Grace felt the joke was on her. She glanced at Harrigan beside her but did not see a flicker of reaction in his face. How did he do it?
The pathologist appeared, Kenneth McMichael, shambling angel of death, a massive man in his surgical gown. Dressed and groomed by St Vinnie’s, his coke bottle glasses were flecked with flakes of dandruff from his oily black hair. He leaned over the corpse and took its head in his huge, dexterous hands, turning it this way and that as he studied the wound, as delicately as if he were holding a child.
‘Now,’ he said, and the word was almost a sigh, ‘this is not something you’d be expecting when you got out of bed this morning.
Are we dealing with a regular firearm here?’ His voice was soft and dry like the crunch of fine sand.
‘No, we’re not, Ken,’ Harrigan replied matter of factly. ‘This is very much a one-off. Specially modified to do the maximum amount of damage close up.’
‘You can put it down as succeeding in that case,’ the pathologist said, with a slightly ironic raising of his eyebrows. ‘All right. Let’s start.’
Harrigan’s expression did not change but Grace was surprised to notice him suppress a recoil to this comment.
On the steel table, technicians stripped the body of its clothes, peeling it to indiscriminate nakedness before charting its fragile geography by x-ray.
‘He’s not going out dancing tonight,’ one said, removing the shirt.
‘Not without a makeover,’ the other replied.
The pathologist grinned as they spoke and briefly hummed cha-cha-cha. With gentle finesse, he welcomed his subject into its permanent silence by sectioning it down to piecework, his soft voice speaking his findings into a cassette recorder. As Henry Liu’s body was opened out into its layered complexity, Grace smelled a pervasive odour she had never noticed so vividly before: old blood. It stank, there was no other word for it. She stepped back, giddy on her feet, swallowing. Briefly she thought she would faint.
‘Are you all right? Leave if you have to,’ Harrigan said.
‘No, I’m okay. I’ll stay.’
‘Is your companion feeling this, Harrigan?’
McMichael was looking at her, unsmiling, for some reason angered.
She shook her head.
‘Yes, you are,’ he said. ‘Now why is that? You could even say this is beautiful.’
He gestured to the open cavity of skull on the table in front of them, where the interior bloomed pink and grey into the open air. The attendants were also watching her.
‘He was murdered,’ she replied. ‘People do feel for the dead.’
‘Do they?’ he asked and leaned on the table, supporting himself with both hands. He smiled at her. ‘Autopsy. From the Greek. Auto, self. Optes, witness. Navel-gazing in other words.’ He straightened up and gestured to the corpse with his large hands. ‘This is all of us, madam. Remember that, because you’ll be here soon enough. You are looking at yourself, that’s what’s bothering you.’
Grace felt another sickness at the memory of events that might well have placed her here on a table like this, but which, in their final washup, had not. She was alive and standing, but she was also cold to the bone in this steel and tile room where the living mixed with the dead. She stared back at the pathologist: And what would you know about people who can still breathe?
‘Ken, we’re not in one of your lectures now. Give my officer a break, thanks,’ Harrigan interrupted testily. ‘Let’s move on. We’ve only got so much time.’
The pathologist smiled as he went back to work in silence. Grace stood still. When McMichael and his assistants were finished, the dead man lay naked on the table, his palms upwards, his eyes still open and staring at the ceiling. What had to be presented to the living had been stitched back together with an easy skill. He had become a figure which, other than to be disposed of, was finished with in every sense. Grace could not make any of the usual connections. If these pieces were not living now, how had they ever been alive? Why couldn’t Henry Liu get up, get dressed and walk away? Briefly, the fact of death did not make sense to her, she could not understand it.
‘We’re finished,’ McMichael said. ‘Something you can tell your lady friend, Harrigan. We don’t do anything wonderful like getting people back on their feet again. Sorry to disappoint her.’
Harrigan was unruffled. ‘Thanks, Ken. I’ll need your report ASAP, you know that. I’ll be waiting on it.’
‘I’ll see you outside,’ Grace said.
She was gone so quickly she left Harrigan slightly confused. He followed her out into the hallway and found himself in the less than congenial position of loitering outside the door to the women’s toilet.
He stopped a female technician in the corridor.
‘I think my officer is in there and she’s probably feeling a little light on her feet. Could you check for me if she’s okay? Tell her I’ve gone to the cafe to get something to eat. She can catch up with me there when she feels up to it.’
‘I can do that,’ the woman replied, smiling sympathetically.
Grace was holding onto the white porcelain basin for support and looking into the mirror when the technician opened the door and asked her if she was all right.
‘Yes,’ she replied, trying to smile but otherwise unable to move. ‘I’m just redoing my face, that’s all.’
‘Your boss said to say he’s gone over to the Street Cafe to get something to eat and you might want to join him when you feel like it.’
‘Thanks. I’ll be there in a little while.’
She spoke with effort, her cheeks pale beneath her facade. The young woman smiled at her in the mirror and went out again.
‘Why do I do this?’ Grace said to herself, shaking her head and leaning on the basin. She had refused to faint but she had been sick.
She looked into the mirror to check her face. Another mirror behind her returned the reflection: she saw the white mask of her make-up repeated in a series of ever diminishing images until it disappeared into the dark. Pulling herself upright, she and the other reflections faced each other as she drew a careful line around her mouth with her dark red lipstick.
‘Just look the world in the eye, okay, Gracie? Walk tall,’ she said, mocking her own melodrama. She straightened her jacket to give the final touch to her armour and then went out to find the cigarette machine, her coat and the boss, in that order, with that priority.
He must never leave that mobile phone alone. All the way here, he had been talking to somebody or other. Now he was on the phone to someone else again as she walked up to him with a cup of coffee in one hand and a sandwich in the other. His coffee was cooling on the table in front of him, a half-eaten roll beside it.
‘How are you?’ he asked, returning the persistent object to its holder on his belt. She wondered if he ever thought of turning it off or throwing it away.
‘I’m okay,’ she replied. ‘Do you mind if we sit outside so I can have a cigarette? I know it’s a bit cold.’
‘You smoke, do you? We’re in the right place for you then, you must have a death wish. No, I don’t mind just so long as you don’t want to smoke in the car. My car’s been a cigarette-free zone ever since I gave them away myself.’
I wouldn’t dream of it, boss, she thought.
They found a table under an awning, out of the scattered rain and sheltered from the wind which harried litter in small gusts across the tiny stretch of open ground.
‘Did you pass out?’ he asked as they sat down.
‘No.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it if you did. It’s going to happen to you at least once if you’ve got half a brain.’
He sounded almost sympathetic. Grace, on the other hand, was reminded of the last few hours and felt an immediate return of nausea.
She put down her sandwich and drank coffee instead.
‘I’m not lying, I didn’t pass out,’ she said. ‘I felt a little queasy, that’s all. I just needed something to eat.’
He drank his own coffee and watched her force her way through the leftovers of her sun-dried tomato and ham sandwich.
‘I’m sure you did,’ he said when she had finished. ‘But want me to tell you the reason you’re feeling it now? You saw something of the man. Everything about that boy made his father more real to you.
You’ve got to remember, it’s not a person you’re dealing with. Whoever they were, they don’t exist any more, it’s good night for them. A body’s nothing, it’s a throwaway. See it that way and it can’t hurt you.’
He spoke dispassionately, a giver of useful advice. A brief shower of rain fell on the awning, a sound like a hush as Grace brushed away the crumbs and lit her first cigarette of the day with relief. She glanced out at the passing rain and felt cold at heart.
‘Do you have to see it like that?’ she replied. ‘A body isn’t just nothing. Not to the people who cared about him.’
‘You’re not those people and you can’t afford to think like that. Not in there.’
‘No? Because if I do, the pathologist will stick the knife into me instead? “This is all of us, madam. Remember that, because you’ll be here soon enough.”’ She heard herself mimicking McMichael’s soft dry voice with savage accuracy. ‘What a horrible creep he was! Is he always like that?’
To her surprise, Harrigan laughed, much more than what she had said called for. She wondered how much tension he had stored away in there.
‘Yeah. He is. A horrible creep,’ he said, still laughing. ‘And yes, he is always like that. I don’t know how often I’ve heard him give that little speech. He’s got a filthy temper. He’s reliable, that’s the only thing you can say about him. You wouldn’t ask him round for dinner.’
He wiped his eyes.
‘You’ve had quite a day, haven’t you? We didn’t even have to organise it for you. We just tossed you in at the deep end.’
‘It’s okay, it’s not a big deal. This isn’t my first job.’
This solicitude embarrassed her, she wanted to brush it away.
‘Either way, I wouldn’t worry about it. You’ve handled it well.’
‘Thanks,’ she replied concisely, blushing faintly under her make-up.
She had always dealt badly with praise. Unconsciously, she touched the raised line of a scar on her neck, a straight thread-like mark beginning with a fish hook near her pulse and finishing above the line of her breast bone. It was a habit all her self-discipline could not suppress. The touch of her fingers wanted to soothe away both the scar and the indelible physical memory of the cut itself. She saw his gaze follow the movement of her hand and, realising what she was doing, stopped. She wondered if he would ask her about it, people did from time to time. There was no point in Harrigan asking her anything: she had no explanations to give, not to anyone, ever. Eight years ago, an ex-lover had held her down and cut that scar into her neck in a few short moments which she had thought would be her last on this earth. She had carried the impression of his body ever since: first inside her, brutally, as he raped her and then his fist in her face until she lost consciousness. He was her personal demon. Time after time she unpeeled him from her memory, only to find him back again when she least expected him, dragging that smell of old bad blood after him, the same odour she had smelled in the dissection room.
‘Are you okay to drive?’ Harrigan asked, watching her with a slight frown. ‘Do you want me to?’
‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘Driving’s good, I like it. It’ll clear my head.
Where to this time?’
‘Downtown. I’ve been summoned to a press conference with the Area Commander and sundry other dignitaries. The Area Commander’s known as the Tooth for your information, Grace, Marvin Tooth. If you haven’t met him yet, that’s a joy you can look forward to. Don’t forget to count your fingers after you’ve shaken his hand. You’ll probably find a couple missing.’
‘I can hardly wait,’ she replied with a faint smile. Tell me about him. I already know. She stubbed out her cigarette and reached for the car keys.
‘You do have a reason for being in this job, don’t you, Grace? I’m sure you do,’ he said, as they walked to the car.
Grace had spelled out her reasons for wanting to be here on her enrolment forms ad nauseam.
‘I think that’s all on file,’ she replied.
‘I’m not asking you to tell me what they are. It’s just that, whatever you think you’re doing here, this is just a job. This is how you earn your dough. When you go home at night, you do whatever else you do with your life. You try and turn it into much more than that and you can end up in a lot of trouble. It’s not a good idea to put too much pressure on yourself. Other people will do that for you soon enough.’
Maybe they already have. Maybe I’ve found that out for myself already. Don’t be modest, Harrigan, you’ve made a pretty good fist of it yourself so far today. And if everything I’ve heard about you is true, since when did you ever act like this is just a job?
In reply, she smiled at him and said nothing. He seemed to be speaking to her in a less detached and more personal way than was usual for him in her brief experience. Even so, she thought it would be a mistake to see this concern as any particular compliment to her. Her information said that ambition drove his interest in other people’s welfare. He was known for caring how well his people coped with their work because he wanted outcomes, bottom lines accounted for to those he had to answer to. Grace surmised that his advice was just an expression of his famed ‘team approach’, summed up as mutual survival, a way of keeping all their heads above water. She was happy to keep everything businesslike. It made life so much easier.
As Grace drove them down Parramatta Road, Paul Harrigan remembered. Or, more accurately, could not stop himself remembering. A hot summer night, twenty-one years ago. A small room with walls painted a dull green and splashed with blood. Bright dark hair (just like his hair), matted and straggling onto the linoleum.
In the fluorescent light, how bright that blood was, how liquid, how shining and iridescent, like smudges of engine oil. (You think these things when you’re eighteen and you’ve never seen anyone dead before.) He could not see his mother’s face, she lay staring at the skirting board. In the dull light, his father had turned around, still holding the.38 Smith amp; Wesson revolver. Paul had walked into the room and turned his mother over to look into her face. In the present, he closed his eyes again. For whatever reason, at the trial the jury had accepted his father’s plea of an accidental killing. Standing in the dock after the verdict, Jim Harrigan had said in a clear, if shaking voice, ‘I never meant to kill Helen. I wish I was dead along with her.’
No, father mine, it wasn’t going to happen like that. I made sure you got to live with that memory for the rest of your life. The way I still do. That was the point.
Harrigan drew in his breath too sharply and noticed Grace glance at him curiously. He came back to the world, clearing away his thoughts, that memory. He didn’t want to start another day this way again in a hurry. The events he encountered as part of his job didn’t usually trouble him like this. He watched and dealt with them as objectively as McMichael dissected his subjects, with a meticulous, almost gentle and uninvolved touch. His approach was like his careful dressing every morning, matching the right colour shirt with the right cut suit, dabbing on the Givenchy aftershave lotion, making sure the exterior he presented to the world was faultless. It was nothing essential to himself, just something to keep out the daily dirt. Today the boy’s shock had been too close to the bone. Harrigan’s careful separations were contaminated, by the dead man’s face painting itself in reverse onto his blue handkerchief (burned to ashes, he hoped, in some incinerator in the morgue) and the streaks of blood down his newest recruit’s black coat. As the car came to a smooth halt at a set of lights, he said to himself, as he’d thought at the time: We’ll find this person, Matthew, this girl, whatever she is. I will get her. Whatever it takes, I will get her. I will see her locked away for as long as I can.
‘Once you’ve dropped me off at this press conference, Grace, take the car and get over to the hospital again. See if you can find out how the doc’s going, and check up on Matthew as well. He felt safe with you. I’d like you to keep an eye on him over the next few weeks. See if you can help him stay with it.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Poor kid. Having to live with seeing that for the rest of his life.’
Her words matched the anger he felt within himself. Often anger just left him drained, but today it’d had a nice clean feel to it. In his own territory, almost under his eyes, someone had blown away two people going about their daily business and left it to him to pick up the pieces.
He could see it as an insult to himself as much as anything else if he chose to, an affront to the order he liked to see kept out there. He remembered his own advice to his recruit: see it that way and it can’t hurt you.
The lights changed, the traffic moved. He looked sideways at Grace; as she glanced around to check the blind spot, he studied the scar down her neck. A neat scar and a neat cut. Put there, in his opinion, by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. A millimetre to the right and she wouldn’t have been driving this or any other car right now. Why would anyone want to do that to her? You have a lovely face, he thought. Not many people who come knocking on my door look anything like you. So why are you bothering with this shit job? You could do anything you wanted. And why do you bother with all that paint? How long did it take her to put it on in the morning? Her hair was braided back from her face, her white make-up picking out its shape like some finely made china mask. Her eyes were dark brown, the eyebrows equally dark, a little thicker than they should have been, her mouth dark red with lipstick. He’d watched her back in the cafe as she ashed her cigarette and noticed that she hadn’t left a mark on the filter or on the rim of her coffee cup. He disliked the imprint of a woman’s lip on leftover butts or china, the sight of it left him with a sense of sleaziness he could not shake off. No, she needed a little less paint and some more hair, something to give her face some softness, to make it something you’d want to touch. Everything about her now prickled with ‘Don’t touch me’. It was a pity.
He wanted to talk to her but could think of nothing vaguely sensible to say. Instead, he turned his gaze out at the city streets. He knew these streets, this drive downtown, as well as he knew anything, just as he knew the shoreline of the harbour from the Coat Hanger through to Iron Cove. Old industrial landscapes, superimposed on the ancient yellow ochre foreshores of a drowned river, which were changing even as he watched them. He had grown up at the heart of them, on the Balmain peninsula, with a view of the White Bay power station, close to the container wharves and the White Bay Hotel on the crest of the hill, overlooking the timber yards and the wharves and the curve of Victoria Road with its unbroken traffic. The streets around his home were crowded with old pubs, thin, narrow terraces on high foundations, irregular wooden houses and rows of identical single-storey cottages. On certain days in those treeless streets, the sun had cast a wrung-out yellow light, thin and brittle as a light bulb. When he was a child, this washed-out emptiness had left him with a sense of bleak contentment. He had felt secure near the shadow of the bulk of the power station and its rusted conveyer belts, whether it was outlined against a hot summer sky or, in weather like today’s, standing desolate in the grey rain.
He no longer lived in that part of the peninsula and Balmain had changed. Houses had been bought up, renovated and had become expensive. The patina of how things used to be had been polished away or covered with the unfamiliar shininess of fresh paint. A matching change and demolition had occurred in the city, in ways which gave familiar landmarks — such as the clock tower at Central Station, which they now passed, and the ugly chiselled colonnade on Eddy Avenue -
the status of what was left behind. He often mused that the fate of the city’s landscape was not unlike that of many of the people he had met in his sixteen years on the job. They had either been tarted up out of recognition or had rotted away to ruin; or were dead and buried under the concrete foundations of the office towers and apartment buildings which had sprouted across the surrounding streets.
Occasionally, he liked to think of himself as a survivor from another time but he knew this was hardly true. He had changed as the times and the places around him had changed. He had dressed himself up as well. Promotions he once would never have expected to achieve had become possible these last few years, and he had gone after them, hungrily, successfully. Somehow he had hung around long enough to climb ladders, to have the prospect of further promotion. He had acquired influence and he liked it, he liked using it, it was a nice change. It was a consolation prize, something to make up the balance, an antidote to his occasional black moods, like the one today.
‘Is just here okay?’
Grace’s clear voice broke into his reverie.
‘Yeah, this is fine, thanks. I’ll see you back here a bit later. Call me if you’ve got any serious info on the doc.’
‘Sure,’ she said with a smile.
He watched her pilot the car back out into the traffic. He thought about her hands on the steering wheel, her nails painted dark red, the colour of her lipstick. Hard colours. Softness wasn’t a qualification for the job.
He arrived just in time to take his seat at the table before the questioning started. At any press conference, he always felt like one of the three wise monkeys sitting in a row. He would have claimed the right to speak no evil as the safest possible option. Do otherwise and a man could fall into a crevasse; as he had done once, spectacularly, in his career, lucky to escape with a seven-year transfer to a small town near the Riverina and a smashed jaw. Both accomplishments had been courtesy of a fellow officer who had taken a strong exception to Harrigan’s interference in his personal business affairs, as he saw it. Both had been preferable to their alternative: becoming the statistic of an officer shot dead while on duty. That would have earned him impressive funeral rites but little else.
Apart from any other benefit, the whole affair had been a lesson to Harrigan that it was unwise to bait someone quite that far. He could still remember the embarrassed faces of the senior officers who had visited him while he was recovering in hospital to offer him either resignation or exile. Exile was only on offer because of the scandal the affair had caused in the media; and it was one way of making sure he kept his mouth shut (which he had done, obligingly).
The officer who had almost shot him dead, one Michael Casatt, had gone down in flames a few years ago, following the latest royal commission into police corruption, the same commission which had opened up the possibilities of Harrigan’s own advancement. It had been sweet entertainment to think of the man squirming in front of the video in the courtroom, but while the exile might be over, the sporadic ache in Harrigan’s reconstructed jaw was there still. A useful reminder for him to be a little more subtle about how he went about his own business in future.
He brought himself back to the present, to pay attention as the Assistant Commissioner expressed public condolences for the loss of a citizen loved, respected and admired. He admired the man’s calm as he refused to be drawn on questions of how the shooting might affect the government’s law and order campaign in the upcoming state election.
With an equally straight face, Harrigan listened as the Tooth spoke portentously on the pooling of area command resources with Harrigan’s specialist crime task force. Such persuasive lies. They’d be lucky to get one free beer out of the man for Christmas. The Tooth did not double as Santa Claus, or as the tooth fairy for that matter. He was good material for the cameras, a smiling man with a fleshy face and neatly cut hair silvered grey, his soft distended stomach hidden by the table. At first glance, he appeared benign, even pliable, but to Harrigan’s certain knowledge he could outmanoeuvre the best of them.
Then the pack turned on Harrigan and the two men beside him sat back and let him deal with it. In Harrigan’s estimation the media were parasites: they drank other people’s blood to stay alive. They were useful only occasionally, if you wanted something out of them. He stonewalled. Initial information suggested the intended victim had not been Professor Henry Liu but his wife, Dr Agnes Liu. At last report her condition was critical but stable. The motive was unclear. The murder weapon had been found, investigations were continuing. After this he deflected questions until the Assistant Commissioner wound things up.
Outside in the corridor, Harrigan was disturbed to find the Tooth bearing down on him in an apparently friendly manner, his smile revealing a line of even, very white teeth which would have done a dentist proud. It was a smile designed to make you complicit, to make you grin like an idiot in reply, while the ‘How are you?’ that went with it made Harrigan marvel at how Marvin could make a casual greeting sound like a death threat.
‘Paul. You handled the boys and girls very nicely in there. Of course, we may have to get together sometime and talk a little more frankly about resources — unfortunately I do have other commitments and this job could be a bit of a squeeze. Meanwhile, a quick word with you now? There’s a question I wanted to ask.’
The man moved him towards a window by the elbow; Harrigan stepped aside from his touch.
‘You had a recruit from the Graduate Entry Scheme start with you today? Grace Riordan? Is that right?’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Harrigan replied, managing not to look surprised.
‘Yes, she hasn’t been out of the Academy all that long — eight, nine months perhaps? I know there are recent academic qualifications of some kind in criminology but really … ’ He paused as if expressing their agreed contempt. ‘Public Affairs needs a body. Why don’t you let them consider her? There are other people I could let you have. As I understand it, her only outstanding quality is that she flaunts herself.’
Ouch, Harrigan thought.
‘She hasn’t in front of me.’ He spoke casually, pacing his words.
‘No, I don’t want to do that, thanks, Marvin. She handled herself well today. She’s got a brain and she uses it. It’s nice to see. It’s rare enough.’
‘Have it your own way. But there are other people. And you can always be in touch with me later if you want to change your mind.
Perhaps we can come to some arrangement the next time you drop by to discuss your resource allocations. She may not be your most honest recruit. I dare say you’ll find that out in time.’
‘I guess time will tell us a lot of things. I wouldn’t have any reason to think that way about her now. I’ll see you later, mate. Give my regards to Joan.’
They smiled at each other with equivalent insincerity before separating and walking away. Harrigan stopped to watch with distaste as the Tooth’s broad back disappeared into the open elevator, and wondered why he was so anxious to sink his fangs all over his new starter. She was lucky he never let Marvin decide who ought to work for him, simply as a matter of self-preservation. He could never be sure who the Tooth might want to salt onto his team or why. Still, if Marvin did not like her, then probably he could trust her. Bright skies, mate, he said to himself ironically, if a little sourly. Always look for the bright skies while you negotiate the tightropes strung over the crevasse beneath.
He walked along the corridors back to his office softly whistling,
‘Always look on the bright side of life’.