45

A BLUR. PARAMEDICS cleaned and sterilised her hand at the scene, a doctor stitched up the entry and exit points in the emergency department of Stirling hospital, and a nurse offered a sedative. Still dazed, Grace swallowed it. The next thing she knew, it was Wednesday morning.

The on-duty doctor came and went, and soon after that, Sergeant Swanwick and another detective were seated beside her bed, watching a nurse apply a new dressing, layers of gauze and flesh-coloured tape that made her thumb stick out.

‘Useful for hitchhiking,’ she quipped.

Humour, because she didn’t know if she was about to be arrested. Swanwick responded with a wintry smile. ‘Bone damage?’

Grace scanned the narrow, curtained space surreptitiously. Where were her clothes? ‘No.’

‘Nerve damage?’

‘Some,’ admitted Grace, thinking that a bung hand was going to be a problem if she was going back to her old profession, which had depended on some degree of sensitivity. She might have to go straight—and, in her nervous state, almost offered Swanwick this wisecrack, too. It’s the painkillers, she thought. Said out loud: ‘The doctor said it could take a while for the nerves to repair.’

Swanwick ran a scowl over Grace’s face and arms, the bruises there. ‘Well, it could have been a lot worse. They’re letting you out this morning?’

Grace nodded. ‘That’s what the doctor said earlier.’ She shifted; her butt was sore from rolling around on the cobblestones in the alley. ‘Is Erin okay?’

‘She’s fine. At home, waiting for the hospital to call. She’ll come in and collect you.’

Grace had a dim memory of Erin last night—how had she got to the alley?—holding her good hand in the police car that had taken her to hospital. Not an ambulance: only one was available, and it had taken Hendren down to the city. She also had a dim memory of a constable sitting in a chair outside the ward all night. Whether or not he was still there, she didn’t know: Swanwick had drawn the curtain around the bed.

She glanced at the other detective, a kid in an ill-fitting suit. He was on the other side of the bed, a notebook in his lap. She glanced at Swanwick again. Waited. Then asked what someone in her position was bound to ask: ‘I didn’t get a good look. Was it Erin’s ex who shot me?’

‘Yes.’

Grace asked another innocent question, even though she knew the answer. ‘Is he going to come after me again?’

A complicated look from Swanwick. ‘No.’ She sighed and added, ‘The bullet went through his stomach and nicked his spine. He might not walk again. And he’s facing a number of serious charges: assault, stalking, reckless injury, discharging a firearm…’

Grace leaned back on heaped pillows. ‘Sooner him than me.’

‘Yes. Look, I need a statement,’ Swanwick said, with a glance at her colleague. He placed a digital recorder on the bed beside Grace’s hip, then blushed and moved it to the bedside cabinet. ‘We’ll get it typed up and, when you’re feeling better, you can come in and sign it. If you start to feel tired, we can finish it another time.’

‘Sure,’ Grace said, steeling herself.

‘First of all, why did you leave the refuge? You must have known what might happen.’

Grace glanced at the curtain; she felt imprisoned. The sounds of the hospital were constant: voices, a crackling PA call, the squeak of rubber soles. The smell: disinfectant, laundered bedding, pharmaceuticals. Even a faint whiff of Sergeant Swanwick’s shampoo and the junior detective’s aftershave.

She was relieved to hear a voice outside the curtain: ‘Breakfast dishes?’

But Swanwick, tilting her chin up, directed her voice over the curtain rail: ‘Come back in half an hour, please.’

‘Right you are,’ and squeaky footsteps, a wobbly wheel, as Grace told herself: Half an hour of questions? Better keep the answers brief.

She answered Swanwick. ‘I was scared.’

‘Of Ms Mandel’s husband?’

‘Not specifically him,’ Grace said. She summoned memories and images of Galt and found herself no longer acting but sinking into the bed as if to hide. ‘I’ve had DV troubles of my own. It all got to me.’

‘What kind of DV troubles? Are you in danger?’

Grace tweaked the backstory she’d given Erin. ‘I grew up in New Zealand. My parents were in the antiques business. I got married too young. Usual story, he turned out to have a temper, and when my parents died, he sort of ran their business into the ground and blamed everything on me. I just walked out one day.’

‘Is he looking for you?’

‘I don’t think so. For him it would be too much effort. But Erin told me everything her ex did to her last night, and…I don’t know, I thought if I could just drive somewhere far away…’

‘In Ms Mandel’s car?’

Grace shifted in embarrassment. ‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

Grace shrugged. ‘I was attacked before I could even unlock it.’ She cocked her head a little. ‘I guess he was watching?’

She could see that Swanwick knew what she was doing: angling for information. Swanwick’s smile was still thin but less wintry as she said, ‘I’d asked for a regular patrol. When they spotted a motorbike that hadn’t been there earlier, they called it in. I checked, and it had been rented with stolen ID.’

She stopped as if she’d said too much.

Grace filled the silence. ‘That explains why everyone got there so quickly.’

A level gaze from Swanwick. Grace could barely read it.

Time passed before the sergeant said, ‘Indeed. Now, tell me about the attack.’

Grace told her. When she finished, Swanwick said, ‘You got tangled up together and you both fell to the ground and the gun just went off.’

‘Yes.’

‘You weren’t holding it?’

‘No.’

‘It wasn’t your gun?’

Grace shuddered. ‘I don’t know anything about guns.’

Swanwick nodded slowly, her gaze flat.

Grace said, ‘I should’ve stayed with Erin, I’m really sorry. I’ve caused a real mess,’ she added, waving her bulky hand around as if it symbolised all that had happened.

‘Yes, well, it is what it is,’ Swanwick said curtly, sounding unsatisfied. Whether that was to do with her, or life in general, Grace couldn’t say.

A nurse opened the curtain after Swanwick and her detective left the ward, and Grace felt lain bare to the world. The staff, the other patients, fixed on her with a hard curiosity. Was it true that she’d been shot? Was it true that she was a person of interest in something?

A waiting game, until Erin arrived at 9 a.m. bringing a change of clothes and an orderly with a wheelchair. Out to the Subaru, parked in the turning circle near the main entry, where Grace tilted her face to the sun. ‘Good to be alive,’ she said, and felt it powerfully, as if for the first time.

Erin laughed. ‘Sure is.’

She seemed vibrant, her eyes bright and her thin frame almost enlarged by life and its possibilities. ‘Buckle up, let’s get you home.’

Home, thought Grace as her boss and landlady flicked the wheel and zipped through the carpark. Thoughts of home took Grace to the stash behind her bathtub surround. ‘Have the police finished searching for bugs?’

Erin slowed for the exit; her eyes raked the main road in both directions as if to scorch it. ‘All good. Nothing found.’

In which case, would they have bothered to dust for prints? If they did run her prints, they’d know who she was. Anita—all grown up after her juvenile arrest in Sydney. Was Swanwick playing a waiting game?

They rode in silence through the hills, Erin still seeming to vibrate at the wheel. Eventually she said, ‘Sorry about your hand.’

‘Could’ve been worse.’

‘Grace, it wasn’t smart, what you did.’

A reversal in our roles, Grace thought. She usually looks to me for the smart thing to do. ‘I know. I’m really sorry.’

‘I told you how foul he could be.’

‘Yes.’

Erin seemed to need more, so Grace added: ‘I should’ve listened.’

‘Yes.’

More silent riding, the morning sun slanting in against Grace’s window, so that all she wanted to do was sleep.

‘Have a nap if you like.’

It unnerved Grace that Erin should be watching her. She checked: Erin’s eyes were still on the road. Some sixth sense? Maybe she glanced at me and I missed it…fuck, I’m losing my touch, she thought. My defences are down. She placed her head against the glass and sleep was upon her.

Then she was being steered through her front door and down the little hallway to her bedroom. She tried to look for any sign that the police had dusted for prints, and badly wanted to check behind her bathtub panel, but Erin, no-nonsense, propelled her into bed.

She slept through lunch and woke feeling groggy at 3.30. Erin was there, reading, in a kitchen chair that she’d dragged into the bedroom.

‘You must’ve really needed that sleep.’

‘Feel like I was hit by a bus,’ Grace said.

All she wanted was to be alone, but Erin said, ‘Tea? Coffee?’

‘Tea,’ Grace said.

She waited until she heard the tap in the kitchen before swinging her legs onto the floor. The world tilted; she waited for it to settle. Plodded to her bathroom, perched on the loo, finished that and grabbed the nailfile from the medicine cabinet. Then, crouching beside the bathtub, all of her limbs protesting, she undid the screws fumblingly with her left hand.

Nothing. The gold bar, cash, ID and Klee oil painting were gone.

Wondering if the world had shifted in the past twenty-four hours, she returned to her bedroom and was slipping under the covers when Erin returned with a mug of tea in each hand.

‘Here you go.’

‘Thanks,’ Grace said, sounding hollow, even to her own ears.

Erin, settling onto the chair beside the bed again, kicked off her shoes and slurped at her tea. ‘It’s all safe,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘All your stuff, both stashes. It’s all safe.’