The Likeness

It had taken him a long time to ask. “Yes,” I said, “he did. If it’s any comfort, he didn’t mean to do it. It wasn’t planned, nothing like that. They just had an argument. He happened to have a knife in his hand, because he was doing the washing up, and he lost his temper.”

“She suffer?”

“No,” I said. “No, Mr. Corrigan. The pathologist says all she would have felt before she lost consciousness is shortness of breath and a fast heartbeat, as if she’d been running too hard.” It was peaceful, I almost said; but those hands.

He said nothing for so long that I wondered if the line had gone or if he had walked away, just put the phone down and left the room; if he was leaning on a railing somewhere, taking deep breaths of wild cool evening air. People were starting to come back from lunch: footsteps thumping up the stairs, someone in the corridor bitching about paperwork, Maher’s big belligerent laugh. Hurry, I wanted to say; we don’t have much time.

Finally he sighed, one long slow breath. “Do you know what I remember?” he said. “The night before she ran away, that last time. We were sitting out on the veranda after dinner, Gracie was having sips of my beer. She looked so beautiful. More like her mum than ever: calm, for once. Smiling at me. I thought it meant… well, I thought she’d settled, finally. Maybe taken a fancy to one of the jackaroos-she looked like that, like a girl does when she’s in love. I thought, That’s our baby, Rachel. Isn’t she gorgeous? She turned out all right, in the end.”

It sent strange things fluttering in my head, frail as moths circling. Frank hadn’t told him: not about the undercover angle, not about me. “She did, Mr. Corrigan,” I said. “In her own way, she did.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Sounds like. I just wish…” Somewhere that bird screamed again, a long desolate alarm call fading off into the distance. “What I’m saying is, I reckon you’re right: that fella didn’t mean to kill her. I reckon it was always going to happen, one way or another. She wasn’t made right for this world. She’d been running away from it since she was nine.”

Maher slammed into the squad room, bellowed something at me, whapped a big piece of sticky-looking cake onto his desk and started disemboweling it. I listened to the static echoing in my ear and thought of those herds of horses you get in the vast wild spaces of America and Australia, the ones running free, fighting off bobcats or dingoes and living lean on what they find, gold and tangled in the fierce sun. My friend Alan from when I was a kid, he worked on a ranch in Wyoming one summer, on a J1 visa. He watched guys breaking those horses. He told me that every now and then there was one that couldn’t be broken, one wild to the bone. Those horses fought the bridle and the fence till they were ripped up and streaming blood, till they smashed their legs or their necks to splinters, till they died of fighting to run.

***

Frank turned out to be right: we all came out of Operation Mirror just fine, or at least no one ended up fired or in jail, which I think probably meets Frank’s standard for “fine.” He got docked three days’ holiday and got a reprimand on his file, officially for letting his investigation get out of control-with a mess this size, IA needed someone’s head to go on the block, and I got the feeling they were delighted to let it be Frank’s. The media had a shot at whipping up some kind of frenzy about police brutality, but nobody would talk to them-the most they got was a shot of Rafe giving a photographer the finger, which showed up in a tabloid, complete with morally upright pixilation to protect the children. I did my compulsory time with the shrink, who was over the moon to see me again; I gave him a bunch of mild trauma symptoms, let them vanish miraculously over a few weeks under his expert guidance, got my clearance and dealt with Operation Mirror my own way, in private.

Once we knew where those cards had been posted, she was easy enough to track down. There was no need to bother-anything she had done before she hit our patch and got herself killed wasn’t our problem-but Frank did it anyway. He sent me over the file, stamped CLOSED, with no note.