Read Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption for Free Online Page A

just another student from one of the universities. A small crowd had gathered opposite the police cordon, watching and talking underneath the yellow sign outside of St Barnabas’s Church that told the passing parade, ‘Forgiveness means not having to pretend any more.’ Lucy stopped amongst them, looking on, listening.
    ‘Two of them. Someone shot two people. And their boy was there watching.’
    The words were taken up by the crowd and spread like an echo from an uncertain source.
    That was me. I shot her. I waited for her inside that empty shop and then I went out into the street and I shot her. I shot the both of them.
    No one turned on her for her unspoken words. The surrounding buildings were unchanged from their daily aspect. The uniformed police guarding the street looked around at the crowd, their faces expressionless with boredom. She could walk up to them and say, ‘You want me. I did that.’ Why didn’t she? They might only laugh at her, or even become angry, and then wave her on her way. Lucy waited for a few moments longer and then, there being nothing else to do, walked on.
    She sat on a bench in Victoria Park, her backpack propped beside her, and stared at the ornamental ponds where the seagulls and ducks huddled in close to the shore. Brief sunlight brought a drab flush of yellow to the thin grass. Lucy glanced back towards Broadway, to the wide intersection where City Road fed its vehicles into the traffic. As the sunlight faded and the weather became dreary and dark, she saw the sporadic glow of headlights from the passing cars and the occasional gleam of neon from the shop fronts on the far side of the road. These lights were the only brightness to touch her; her visionary other-world had grown drab, its vivid dye had bled out of her into the watery air. From here she could see nothing of the police ribbons. She was isolated here. She could pretend that the shooting had never happened; and then, curiously, understood that she did not want to let her act of execution go, however bloody it had turned out to be.
    The noise of surrounding traffic hung in suspension. The preternatural quiet held her in a sense of anticipation, she waited as the atmosphere became strangely claustrophobic, strangely lonely. She was chasing another memory down this emptiness. There was sunlight warming her, the sound of magpies carolling in the background, and Graeme’s voice as he spoke to her, rich as honey. They were sitting opposite each other at a picnic table someone had set out on the back lawn of a small private hospital.
    ‘Why, Lucy? Why do you need to go and live on the streets the way you do? You’ve been to school, you have an education. You’re an intelligent girl. Why do this to yourself?’
    ‘I’m playing a game. I call it dancing with death. I like doing that.
    Didn’t you know that?’
    ‘Why death? Why not life?’
    ‘Why anything? I can do anything I like, you know.’
    There was no other reason why she should have been at that tiny private hospital on the northwestern edge of the city, Greenwood Convalescent, a run-down place with few patients and an ageing doctor. She had been living rough and bingeing, deliberately chancing her luck with heroin. Pushing it, marrying lethal exhilaration with the thought that this rush might be her last chance to see daylight.
    Grinning to herself each time that she came back to the light and thought, well, I’m still here, maybe next time I won’t be. I won’t know, will I? Do I care?
    Detox was an option forced on her by Greg with the help of Ria, the woman from the Family Services Commission. Greenwood was the only place where she had been able to find Lucy a bed at short notice, tracked down after endless frantic phone calls to unresponsive agencies, none of whom had any space available. Lucy had agreed to go there on the fall of a coin.
    Even so, Greenwood was a strange place in which to come to earth.
    When Graeme introduced himself to her as her