Free Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption by Alex Palmer

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