by Alex Palmer
‘Lucy, there are certain things you should think about first.’ The preacher’s voice had become calm. ‘Wherever you go, the police will find you. And what are you going to do then?’
‘How are they going to find me? They don’t know who I am. They can’t prove anything. No one’s going to tell them about me. You won’t. Greg won’t.’
Neither would Stephen, he would just pretend that he had never known in the first place. Despite this, Lucy’s confidence was shaken.
‘No,’ the preacher replied in his usual voice, ‘that’s very true. Greg will not betray you, Lucy, now or ever. I’ll see you tomorrow night in that case. I’m sure we have a great deal to talk about. Goodbye.’
He was gone more quickly than she expected. She was sitting there wondering why he had cut the line so abruptly when Melanie touched her on her shoulder.
‘Do you want to see Dad now?’ she asked. ‘He’s awake and he’s looking rested at the moment.’
‘Yeah, okay. I’ll just get myself together first.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll tell him you’ll be a couple of minutes.’
This early July afternoon, the door to her father’s room was open to her. As Lucy approached, she smelled the coldness and cleanliness of the outside air. The windows had been opened, the smell of sickness was being cleaned out, if only temporarily. The room looked out over the national park, Lucy could see the high white clouds in the wide curve of a pale sky and the sea of trees reaching to the horizon.
Her father sat up against his pillows, his arms resting on floral sheets. As she stood hesitantly in the doorway, he spoke to her.
‘My little girl,’ he said.
She did not reply. She looked around. Melanie was sitting in a chair near the window.
‘Come on in. Come and talk to your old man. Come and give me a kiss,’ he said.
She stood at the end of the bed. It was old-fashioned with a slatted wooden bedhead and she rested her hands on it, looking at him. She was seeing him in x-ray, every impurity had been burned away by sickness, only a faint pale fire remained inside him which was consuming itself.
The man she had known four years ago no longer existed. Only the voice was the same, that cajoling voice persuading you to what he wanted, to believe what he said. Seeing him, she realised she did not have to tell him that she had nothing to forgive him for. There was no compulsion on her to do so. She could walk out of here now and it would all be over soon in any case; Melanie and Stephen would be released.
‘Don’t just stand there, Lucy. Come and give your old man a kiss.’
She realised with a faint shock that she could do this. She went up to him and kissed him on the forehead and, for a short moment, felt the dry texture of his skin, something she had known well, something she had tried to scrub away, sometimes ferociously. She found herself shrugging the memory away as something finally used up, a cicada’s shell, brittle and transparent.
‘We’ve got nothing to blame each other for, have we? You’re going to tell me that, aren’t you, Luce?’
‘I used to have, Dad,’ she said, speaking at last. ‘But I don’t any more. You say you don’t blame me for leaving you and Mum and not telling you where I was going. And now I don’t care about what’s happened between us. I can’t hurt you any more and you can’t hurt me. You can’t do anything to me ever again. So I am just going to walk away from you all.’
‘Luce … ’
Melanie spoke fearfully, leaning forward in her chair, her body tensed, but their father was not quite listening.
‘You don’t have anything to hold against me,’ he said. ‘You said that.’
She opened her mouth to say that she did and he should know that; it was just that she was finishing with him. But she did not speak it.
She looked at him. The man lying in bed before her had been reduced to the fragility of a broken spider’s web.
‘No, I don’t, Dad. You can sleep on that.’
It was as much as she could say to him but it was enough.
‘I knew that’s what you thought in your heart of hearts. I knew you understood me. Everything between us, it didn’t matter. It was normal, you know that. I knew you’d get over the blame game one day,’ he said.
‘Yeah, okay, Dad. It is all over. I’ll go now,’ she said, needing to be out of there.
He nodded, his eyes were closing. At the door Melanie caught her by the hand briefly.
‘Thanks for doing that,’ she said.
Lucy smiled without meaning it and was gone. She went downstairs, out of the back door and found the dog sitting in her kennel. ‘Come on, girl,’ she said and the dog followed her, down into the garden, to the escarpment.
Lucy stopped part of the way down to look at a camellia bush: the blossoms were a pale pink and damp with the night’s rain, the leaves shining in the sun. It had been one of her grandmother’s favourites for the colour and the shape of the flower. Lucy looked at it without any words in her head to describe it; it became an image fixed permanently in her mind as something solely visual. She had lost the power of speech, of thought based on the use of words. The impressions in her mind were of images, of what was felt and seen only, her knowledge of language had been washed out of her. She stood there for some moments before walking down through the garden and then into the bushland. Eventually, she stopped to sit at the edge of the stream and, in this space, to forget the world existed until she went out into it again. She would sleep at the house tonight and then, in the very early dawn, she would be gone.
23
I don’t doubt that. I hope indeed you find him very soon.
The preacher’s voice was touched with rhetoric even in conversation. The tape of the prayer meeting finished and the incident room became quiet.
‘That must have been a fun two hours for you, Boss,’ Trevor commented, as the assembled team began to shift and stretch in the relieved silence.
‘You are not joking. Don’t cry on my shoulder today, I’ll have rheumatism for the rest of my life after sitting through that,’ Harrigan replied.
‘We are in the darkness, you and I. Come with me and I’ll show you the way to the light,’ Grace said in her own clear voice. ‘He can really project, he goes out after you. He could probably sing pretty well if he wanted to. It’s such a pure voice.’
There was an edge to her words. Harrigan looked at her. Sometime during the morning while he had been out, she had disappeared back into her regulation dress and make-up. She was watching with the others as Ian pinned to the corkboard pictures of the photographer and the gadfly who had ambushed her outside the Whole Life Health Centre clinic a little over eight months ago. Both had been photographed as they left the prayer meeting that morning and now were being posted to the board for display, observation, dissection.
‘Can you tell that just by listening to him, Gracie?’ Ian asked.
‘It’s one of the things that makes him so easy on the ear. If you can forget the garbage he’s talking at you.’
‘I’m glad you said that, Gracie. The shit those people were talking would turn your stomach,’ Trevor said.
‘Okay, Ian. What can you tell us about these two acolytes?’
Harrigan asked, stymieing any possible discussion on the nature of opinions which, to his knowledge, were not so very far removed from those of some people in the room.
‘Enough to know they’ve missed their calling — they should be on this job,’ he replied. ‘They’re regular protesters outside the Whole Life Health Centre clinics, they travel from clinic to clinic. How do they track the clients down? They buy confidential information from government sources and we’re pretty sure we know who their contact is. They get an ID first and they chase it up. Sometimes they follow the women back to their cars and get their registration numbers, sometimes they do it some other way. There have been break-ins at the clinics and some medical records have been stolen. They work at it, it gives them something to do with their lives.’
It takes a mind to put the Firewall’s website together, twisted or not.’
‘Well, we know she’s not,’ Ian replied, ‘but she’d send the doc her hate mail and like doing it. These two, they do what they’re told. For them, it’s how high do I jump, where’s the cliff?’
‘What about the preacher?’ Harrigan said, moving things along.
‘What do we know?’
Trevor walked forward and laid down a folder of papers on the metal table, then smoothed down his short black hair with one hand, collecting his thoughts.
‘It wasn’t that easy to track him down. We started with the resume he gave Family Services and, give him his due, he’s what he says he is, a travelling preacher. He says he studied theology at the Freedom World Theological College, Illinois. That’s a joke, folks. Freedom World is a trailer park out of Chicago. Send money and the postbox will send you the piece of paper. They’ll even fax it to you if you’ve got a tight deadline the way we did and don’t mind paying for it. We got one for Ian for his birthday. Happy Birthday, mate, you’ve got a whole new life in front of you. Congratulations.’
There was laughter throughout the room as Trevor pinned an ornate degree awarded in Ian’s name onto the corkboard next to a photograph of the preacher. He stood with his hands on his hips.
‘Okay. You’re skint and you’re cooling your heels at Mascot for the first time in twenty-five years. Who are you going to call? Auntie Yvonne Lindley. She puts you up. Why not? She’s sitting at home all alone in that mausoleum of hers out at north St Ives. Glad to have the company. Want a recommendation to the Family Services Commissioner for your community care refuge? Auntie Yvonne will get you one written on the Minister’s letterhead. She even lets you have a couple of her buildings rent-free, courtesy of the Lindley Family Property Trust.’
‘She’s eighty plus, isn’t she?’ Ian said. ‘She must be past it by now.’
‘Sharp as the day she was born, Ian,’ Louise croaked, ‘and with about as much sense.’
‘Careful what you say,’ Trevor continued, ‘the family will have you round signing forms to have her carted away. Word is she wants to write her kiddies out of her will and write the preacher in. This is where you get told to stop pushing the envelope and fuck off, mate.
Geoff Lindley tells you to butt out or he will close you down. Result?
Mother bars son from house. Check. Elizabeth Lindley lets everyone know that poor dear old Mum’s lost it, it is just so sad, folks, maybe it’s time to call in the family doctor and get her declared mentally unfit.
Checkmate. End of the current state of play. Life is not as rosy as it was in the land of Lindley.’
‘Does he have any money of his own?’ Harrigan interrupted. ‘He must have some somewhere, surely.’
‘Nothing that we can find and, believe me, we’ve looked,’ Trevor said. ‘So if the supply gets cut here, what does he fall back on? We don’t know.’
‘It’d be good to cut the supply and find out. Make him sweat,’ Ian said.
‘If he can sweat. Maybe he can’t,’ Louise reflected.
‘Let’s go over to the States,’ Trevor said. ‘Why go there in the first place? There’s no answer to that one. Your parents are dead. You spend a little time here studying to be a minister but you don’t finish it. Nothing to keep you round here. But why the States? Because it meant not being here? Because there you can buy yourself a piece of paper and it makes you a preacher? He’s the only one who can tell us that. Meanwhile … ’
He pinned up onto the corkboard a photograph of a group of ordinary-looking people with humourless faces and dressed in shabby clothes.
‘Oh, God, look at them. Meet the Addams Family,’ Grace said.
There was some laughter at this, including from Harrigan.
‘No, Gracie, this is the Life Support Group.’ Trevor was grinning.
‘These are the people who stalked Agnes Liu when she was in California. They are way out on the far side of the pro-life movement.
Ask them about abortion and they will tell you it’s Satanic sacrifice.
Women get pregnant so they can go and have abortions and then become witches and work for Satan. That’s where these people connect to the world.’
‘Nothing like being in touch with reality,’ Louise muttered.
‘You said it, Lou. These people are classic urban terrorists. Clinic bombings, threats, harassment, it’s all in a day’s work for them. One of them is in gaol for arson as we speak. You can look her up on the Net. She’s got her own website, she’s a prisoner of God. Is there a connection between these people and the preacher? We could not get one scrap of information out of our American cousins on this bunch, they wouldn’t talk to us. So we did what everybody does when they’re stuck — we went and found our very own Deep Throat. And that’s the journalist who wrote that story.’
There were howls of derision as Trevor pointed to the print-out from the Internet news service that carried the headline: AVENGING
ANGELS’ DEADLY STRIKE. POLICE FAIL TO MAKE ARREST AFTER DOCTOR
SHOT BY EXTREME ANTI-ABORTION GROUP.
Trevor brushed the commotion away with an airy wave of his hand.
‘Laugh as much as you want. But when we got in contact with her, she gave us information. Pages of it. This for starters.’
He pinned up the photocopy of an article from a Californian weekend magazine which had the lead line: IN THE DARK MIND OF
EXTREMITY: THE BLOODY CONSEQUENCES OF MILLENARIAN BELIEF IN THE
ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT. STORY BY JANE MONAHAN.
‘What’s all that crap about?’ Jeffo asked.
‘All you need to know, mate, is that you’re looking at this woman, Jane Monahan’s, life. Writing exposes like this one. That’s all she does.
It seems she was a good friend of Laura Di-Cuollo. When that investigation went nowhere, she picked it up in the press. When we got in touch with her, she didn’t want to stop talking. She knows a lot about the Angels: according to her they’ve got more than one shooting behind them. Trouble for us is, how much of her info can we use?
Most of it would get thrown out by any half-decent lawyer. But it fits.
She knows Fredericksen, he’s mentioned in her latest article but just in passing. He was living in the vicinity of Berkeley at the same time the doc was there and had a set-up very similar to the one he’s got here now: rich benefactor, political connections, a private church. Except he wasn’t the main man, he was more of a sidekick. People active within the Life Support Group were connected to his church. This woman’s talked to people who’ve moved away from that group and some of them knew our man. The “nice talker” one of them called him, the man who sets things up. And she knows about the gun that shot her friend. She says she got the ballistics information out of the police forensic lab by paying for it — would you believe, she actually told me that — and if it’s true, I can tell you that the same type of gun
— not the same gun, but the same type — that shot Di-Cuollo also shot our doc. It’s a modified pistol and Monahan tells me it’s a calling card for the Angels. The preacher left the States not long after that shooting. Everything was a bit too warm for him. He’s connected, but we’ve got nothing except our journalist friend to help us prove it.’
‘But is the Firewall one of them?’ Grace asked.
‘That doesn’t matter just at the moment,’ Harrigan said, speaking to her again for the first time since that morning. ‘We know he’s connected. What she is is something we ask her when we find her.’
A short silence followed.
‘It’s a game then,’ Grace said eventually. ‘He likes playing with other people’s lives. It’s a blood sport for him, it gives him a high. It’s not money. It’s the rush.’
‘Yeah, whatever, Gracie,’ Trevor said.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘that’s good, that’s all good. That’s taken us a lot further along the road. Keep digging. And while we do that, we watch the preacher’s every move and we see what happens. We’ve got to turn up something soon.’
‘Like a body maybe?’ Trevor asked him as they all left the room.
‘Say, like poor old Greggie’s?’
‘If I’m going to be honest about it, Trev, I think hell will freeze over before we find that kid,’ Harrigan said.
Grace, moving past him, glanced at him as he said this. Before he could speak to her she was gone into the crowd.
Cafeteria coffee was not Harrigan’s favourite beverage but as he needed both caffeine and a break from the team it was his best choice.
He had sat down to drink it when he saw Grace out on the terrace, leaning against the railing and looking out at the cityscape as she smoked a cigarette. After some moments’ thought, he went out to join her. She looked up in surprise as he appeared. She greeted him and then again looked out at the jumble of roofs and high-rise.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘Fine.’
Yes, he could see that.
‘I’m sorry I ripped into you this morning,’ he said. ‘It was out of order for me to say that to you in front of everyone. You’re doing a good job, Grace. I’m not trying to make your life more difficult.’
She stood upright and shrugged, ever so slightly.
‘Thanks. But I wish I had left my phone on. I wish I had taken that call,’ she said.
‘What could you have done? We would have known a bit sooner and that’s about all. Don’t take it on.’
‘It’s more that it’s all of a piece. That kid sends his last message out to the world and I wasn’t even there to hear it.’
‘Where were you?’ he asked, a question he knew he had no business asking.
