by Garry Disher
Hirsch snapped out of it. What mattered was a kid locked in superheated air. Today’s forecast top was thirty-five degrees and it was high twenties already: the temperature would be close to fifty inside a car.
He forged along the footpath as Gwynne struggled to keep up. Then a soft thud and Gwynne wailing, ‘Oh, no, oh no.’
Hirsch darted a look. The guy had dropped his phone. Idiot. Hirsch ran on, and after a beat, Gwynne was at his heels again, gasping: ‘All good, no damage to the screen. Talk about lucky.’
Hirsch shook his head. ‘Did you call an ambulance?’
Gwynne faltered, then was labouring close behind Hirsch again. ‘Should I have?’
Doctor Pillai, thought Hirsch, Gwynne already gone from his mind. The doctor, based at a little medical centre in Redruth, held a clinic in Tiverton every Friday—and there was her dusty Forester, parked outside the ex-Bank of Adelaide building.
By now Hirsch was sprinting along the shopfront veranda. This close to Christmas, there were a dozen cars parked snout-up to Ed Tennant’s little supermarket: farm utes, station wagons, sedans, all as dusty as Dr Pillai’s Subaru. Everyone—Ed, his wife, their customers—clustered around a rusty pink Hyundai. Panting from the heat, the fast jog, Hirsch asked if anyone had thought to fetch the doctor.
‘I sent Gemma over,’ Tennant said.
Sliding through the mix of farmhands and townspeople, Hirsch peered into the rear seat of the little car. A toddler slumped in a baby seat. All of the windows were up. He tugged on a door handle.
‘Already tried that,’ someone said.
Scouting around for a rock, a metal bar, anything, Hirsch said, ‘Whose car is it?’
No one answered.
Frustrated, Hirsch said, ‘Ed, check the shop.’
‘Already done. Everyone’s accounted for.’
Hirsch glanced both ways along the street. The shut-up houses crouching for shade, Tiverton Hardware, closed for forty years, the old stone bank with a sign in the window, Friday Clinic 8 a.m–6 p.m. His gaze flicked over a house brick and swung back. An open-fronted wooden box beside the petrol bowser, the brick anchoring unclaimed copies of the Advertiser at the end of each day. Hirsch grabbed it and belted it against the Hyundai’s side window. It bounced off the glass, jarred his wrist. Again, and the glass fractured. He stabbed the brick at the remnants, tossed it aside, reached in for the lock as hot air poured out. Now he was heaving the door open, one knee on the back seat, fumbling at the straps that secured the child. A girl, about three years old, flushed, clammy, unresponsive. Hirsch backed out with her in his arms and then a woman was clawing at him in a shrieking panic.
‘Give her back. What are you doing? She’s mine, give her back!’
Hirsch lifted the little girl aloft instinctively, twisting away from the woman, this way, that way. He stumbled against Gemma, who had trailed the woman from across the street.
‘She was in seeing the doctor,’ Gemma explained. Exhilarated, in her stolid way, to be caught up in the drama.
Still trying to dodge the mother, Hirsch escaped from the confines of the closely parked cars and trotted towards the clinic. Dr Pillai was emerging with her bag, a hand up telling him to stop. ‘It’s like an oven in there,’ she called as she started across the street.
Hirsch flinched. The child’s mother was clawing at his forearm. ‘Give her back to me!’
The ridiculous dance continued. Hirsch freed a hand and shoved the woman aside as her arms windmilled at him. ‘Calm down. The doctor needs to examine her.’
‘Give her to me!’ shrieked the woman.
She ducked under his arm. Slapped, punched and kicked as he tried to keep the little girl out of her mad reach. Then his shirt buttons were popping, his shirttails flapping, and, somehow, she had his service pistol in her hands.
Time seemed to stop.
The woman trembled. Blinked, stared aghast at the pistol.
Hirsch moved first. Turning in a circle, he proffered the child, seeking willing arms, but the onlookers were stunned, so he turned back to the woman. ‘Let’s all take a deep—’
The woman dropped the pistol. It smacked butt-first beside her sandalled feet and Hirsch flinched and ducked, expecting it to go off. Time stopped again. And then he scooped up the pistol with his free hand, holstered it, fastened the strap, watching warily as the woman shrank away and flailed her hands as if caught in a spider’s web. ‘I didn’t mean…I don’t…’ she stammered.
By now Dr Pillai was there, trapping her wrists. ‘Denise.’
The woman said dazedly, ‘I didn’t mean…He was going to take my daughter away.’
‘He’s a policeman. He won’t hurt her. You need to be calm. Do you think you can do that for me?’
The woman blinked. Pillai said, ‘Just let me check on Anna for you, okay?’
No response, so the doctor turned to Hirsch. ‘Let’s get her into the shop, next to the refrigerated cabinets.’ She glanced at Tennant. ‘Some damp towels, please, Mr Tennant. Ice if you have it.’
Hirsch followed as they trooped inside, the child moulded hot and damp to his shoulder and uttering shallow, panting breaths. The woman named Denise kept close to him, calmer now.
He blinked as he moved from sunlight to dimness. It was always murky in Ed’s shop, maybe to hide the cobwebs in the corners of the pressed-tin ceiling. Warped floorboards creaked as Hirsch hurried down an aisle between shelved groceries to the banks of refrigerated units along the back wall. Frozen food behind glass; butter, milk, cheese and processed meat on open shelves. The air was markedly cooler.
And then Dr Pillai was gently taking the child from his arms and stripping off her pants and top.
‘Poor little thing, she’s so hot.’
‘Ed! Wet towels,’ said Hirsch, an edge to his voice.
Tennant was standing with Martin Gwynne and a couple of others, and seemed torn between the little girl’s plight and the desire to keep an eye out for light-fingered customers. It was Gwynne who replied. ‘Should I…?’
‘I’m on it,’ Gemma said, trotting to a door in the corner.
Hirsch had been in town for a year now; he knew the door led to a storeroom, a tearoom and the staff toilet. Presently he heard the rush of tap water and Gemma was hurrying back with a pair of sodden, threadbare towels, intent and capable. She pushed past Gwynne, who gave her a sour look.
It occurred to Hirsch that Gemma Pitcher might do all right if she got out of Tiverton. She was a soft, slow-moving twenty-year-old, her usual outfit a vast T-shirt above sandals and knee-length black leggings. Limp brown hair to her shoulders, cropped raggedly above her eyes. A nostril stud, an eyebrow ring, a barcode tattooed on one fleshy calf. Nothing and no one to stimulate her—but now this little emergency. And she was equal to it, shoving one of the towels at Hirsch and folding the other into a square the size of a breadboard and placing it on the floor.
Pillai nodded her approval and settled the toddler’s tiny spine on the moist pad. She reached wordlessly for the second towel and began to dab the flushed face, neck and trunk and brush away the perspiration-damp hair. She looked up. ‘Another towel, please.’
Gemma came back with a wet, grimy handtowel. ‘Sorry.’
‘So long as it does the trick,’ Pillai said, draping it over the child’s torso.
By now she was reviving. A cough. Dazed eyes opening, unfocused, then full of fear under the gaze of all those looming strangers. She whimpered, reached her arms to her mother. ‘Mumma.’
The woman named Denise knelt, stroked her daughter, saying wretchedly, ‘Sorry, bubba. So, so sorry.’
She turned to Hirsch. ‘Really sorry.’
Hirsch was silent.
She said, ‘Please, I was only gone five minutes. I needed a repeat prescription.’
With Hirsch still unforthcoming, she added, ‘I’ve never left her like that before. I had no idea. I wasn’t away that long.’
‘It doesn’t take much,’ the doctor said.
; Hirsch nodded his agreement. He didn’t know what he was going to do about the incident. He needed to know the child would recover fully before he went into punitive-cop mode.
Gemma was hovering. ‘Does she need a drink?’
Pillai looked up. ‘Thank you, Gemma. Water, nothing else. Unrefrigerated if you have it. And a cup.’
Gemma returned with bottled spring water and a paper cup. ‘Easy does it,’ Pillai said, dribbling water into the child’s mouth. ‘A bit at a time.’
Hirsch asked, ‘She going to be okay?’
The doctor shrugged minutely, her slim brown fingers testing the child’s forehead and cheeks. She smiled down, murmuring words of comfort. The flushed face looked back, still dazed, but then broke into a shy smile. Hirsch thought: shame certain people aren’t present to see this.
Most of the locals welcomed a weekly clinic in the town and they seemed happy to be treated by a Sri Lankan doctor. But he’d heard pub talk disparaging Pillai’s credentials and one day, seated in the clinic’s waiting room, worried that his pollen allergies had tipped into asthma, he’d overheard an old woman hiss at Pillai, ‘Don’t you touch me.’
The doctor seemed to come to a decision. ‘I’d be a lot happier if we could monitor her in hospital for a few hours, possibly overnight.’
She took the mother’s hands in hers. ‘Okay, Denise? It’s for the best. We don’t want her to relapse. Her temperature’s coming down and her vital signs are good, but we need to monitor her fluid intake and just keep a general eye on her.’
The woman looked stunned, afraid. ‘Hospital?’
‘The one in Redruth,’ Pillai said.
‘Ambulance?’ asked Hirsch.
The doctor shook her head. ‘Could take ages to get here. We’ll take her ourselves. You drive, Paul, I’ll sit in the back with Anna and Denise.’
Aircon cranked high, Hirsch sped south along the Barrier Highway, passing the disused grain silos at the end of the little town, their shadows like blockish brushstrokes across the highway, then down through a shallow valley, distant, dirty grey hills on either side. A corrugated-iron hayshed here, a scrap of red farmhouse roof there, closeted behind cypress trees. Otherwise the world was populated by wind turbines silhouetted against the sky, wheat stubble, a tiny dust eddy on a hillslope that might have been the wind, might have been a farmer checking sheep. For now, Hirsch was calling it home.
Lifting his forefinger to greet an oncoming car—a kind of rural benediction that he’d adopted—he waited for the road to clear and reached for his iPhone. Shielded it from view, set it to record, popped it into the cup holder between the seats.
‘Denise, do you mind if I ask you a few questions? We might not get an opportunity later.’
A long silence from the back seat. Then Dr Pillai murmuring. Hirsch waited.
‘She feels pretty bad about what happened, Paul.’
Hirsch nodded. ‘I know. But it was witnessed, and there will be a hospital admission, meaning a bit of paperwork. Just general questions, form-filling questions.’
The woman answered this time, her voice a dry-mouthed croak. ‘Okay.’
‘What’s your last name?’
‘Rennie.’
‘And your daughter’s called Anna?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where do you live?’
Another long pause. ‘Does that matter?’
‘Paperwork, Denise. I need a street address.’
With an effort, the woman said, ‘Hope Hill Road, number fifty-eight.’
He’d been along Hope Hill Road plenty of times, probably twice a month on one of his long-range patrols through the dry, outlying sheep-station country. Hope Hill wasn’t a town, or even really a hill; it certainly didn’t offer much hope.
‘Are there others in the family?’
Another pause. This is a seriously private woman, he thought.
She said, ‘Ne…Noel, my husband.’
Had she been about to say ‘Neil’? ‘And what do you do for a living?’
Marginal country, he was thinking. Surely they don’t farm.
‘Noel has stocks and shares,’ Rennie said, stressing the name. ‘I have an online business. Gift cards, things like that.’
The internet would be pretty patchy near Hope Hill.
Basic ADSL? Satellite? ‘Have you lived there for long?’
‘No.’
She didn’t elaborate. Hirsch said, ‘And no other children?’
She seemed to find the question difficult. ‘No.’
‘Does Anna go to kindergarten?’
‘No,’ she said, her voice dropping to a hollow croak.
‘Do you usually shop in Tiverton?’
Dr Pillai cut in, probably sensing that Rennie was struggling. ‘Denise usually shops in Redruth, isn’t that right, Denise?’ She leaned into the gap between the seats as if to create a huddle of kind souls. ‘I first met Denise when she brought Anna in to see me. She gets ear infections, poor thing. How’s she doing, Denise?’
‘Good.’
Anna had been asleep, lulled by the movement of the Toyota. Using the mirror, Hirsch had seen the doctor touch the child’s forehead from time to time. Then suddenly a little voice was piping, ‘The wheels of the bus go round and round.’
‘We’re feeling a lot better, aren’t we,’ cooed Pillai.
Hirsch tuned them out. Twenty minutes later, Redruth appeared, streets named after Cornish towns. Old stone houses and an abandoned copper mine set in the folds of seven small hills. Down past the high school, the council chambers and a car repairer, through the square where a scene from Breaker Morant had been filmed, and out along the southern entrance to the town. Redruth and District Hospital, the sign said. Hirsch knew it didn’t have the staff, equipment or expertise of a city hospital—was more of an aged-care facility than anything—but better the kid be monitored for a few hours than sent home with her mother just yet.
‘Am I in trouble?’ Denise Rennie said, in a low, wretched voice.
Hirsch chewed on that. Then Pillai was looming between the seats again. She touched his upper arm. ‘Paul?’
Hirsch came to a decision. ‘Not from me.’
After a moment, he clarified. ‘Unless Anna’s condition deteriorates. I’m sure you understand.’
‘We do,’ Pillai said.
Hirsch would keep quiet about it. Denise Rennie had learnt a hard lesson. She’d committed some kind of misdemeanour, though, and another cop might have taken action.
Pillai was saying, in a jolly tone, ‘So no more leaving kids unattended in the car on a hot day, Denise.’
‘I won’t.’
And no more grabbing your friendly local policeman’s service pistol, thought Hirsch.
Rather than wait around at the hospital, and conscious that Tuesday was the twenty-fifth, Hirsch went Christmas shopping. As if Christmas would bring much joy to him this year. Wendy and Katie were going to a family thing in the Barossa Valley and he was on duty. Either staring at a wall, just another Christmas orphan, or mopping up after drunks, pulling bodies out of car wrecks and breaking up family brawls.
The main Redruth shops were clustered around the square. Hirsch knew from reading a local-history booklet that a 1960s primary-school headmaster, dismayed that no one recognised the town’s historical significance and tourist potential, started a movement to restore and preserve the copper mine and the Cornish miners’ cottages and other colonial-era buildings. That had been okay with everyone. Less okay, as far as town-square business proprietors had been concerned, was the proposed removal of neon signs and banner advertising from shop facades. Right now the streetscape was more commercial present than colonial past.
First, Redruth Antiques and Gifts, where he bought a tall, slender, unadorned vase. ‘You can’t go wrong with a vase, right?’ he asked the woman serving him.
She was young and tanned, and gave him a sceptical smile that filled him with doubt. ‘Christmas present,’ he explained, as if she might come clean
about her misgivings.
‘Wife? Girlfriend?’
‘Girlfriend.’
‘She likes long-stemmed flowers?’
Hirsch didn’t know for sure. What he did know was that he liked the vase and hoped that would be enough. This was a nightmare and all he could do was come through it intact, and a minute later he was leaving the shop with the vase securely and beautifully wrapped.
Katie was next on his list. The latest Andy Griffiths title and four iPhone cases similar to her current case, which was chipped and inky. Also gift-wrapped in Christmas paper.
Then cards for friends and family which, if posted instantly, should arrive well after the big day, in keeping with every Hirsch Christmas. But he’d caught up. Items crossed off list. Back to police work.
He returned to the hospital carpark, stowed his shopping, and stepped into the blessed cool of the foyer just as his phone beeped for an incoming text. Dr Pillai: Releasing the little one soon.
Time to check on Brenda Flann.
Hirsch found her in a ward with three elderly patients who seemed to shrink from her purpling bruises, ballooning eyes and foul tongue. The sons were sitting on either side of her and all gave Hirsch scowls of such malevolence that he told Brenda he’d catch up with her another day and backed out.
Half an hour later he was making the return trip with his passengers. Exhaustion had set in; few words were spoken, the child slept. As they drew into Tiverton, he mentioned that he was putting on the Santa suit that evening and would Denise like to bring Anna along…?
All he got was a grunt.
8
SATURDAY, 5.30 A.M.
Insomuch as the Natives are slippery to a degree almost inhuman, it behoves the police to be proportionally canny, lest they be outwitted.
Hirsch closed Mrs Keir’s handwritten history and drained the first coffee of the day, feeling unready for the dawn. After playing Santa—what, a mere ten hours ago?—he was bone-sore, bone-weary, completely addled.
He activated his phone and replayed Katie’s video. The ghostly dimness of evening in Kitchener Street, which ran from the side wall of Ed Tennant’s shop to Nan Washburn’s little horse stud. The darkness deepening as the last shreds of sunlight winked out along the western hills, then unnatural light creeping in: mobile phone screens, sparklers, one or two cigarettes flaring, and the fairy lights on a Christmas tree in a builder’s bucket in the middle of the street. Bright voices on the soundtrack, the town and farm kids gathered with their parents and grandparents.
