by Garry Disher
‘Wakey, wakey.’
‘Not amused, here,’ Hirsch said.
‘Mum says we’re hitting the road in a few minutes.’
Hirsch turned his head. Wendy’s pillow lay abandoned on the other side of the bed. ‘Already?’
‘Uh huh.’ The feather tormented him again. ‘So wakey, wakey.’
Hirsch glanced past Katie to what had become his chair when he stayed over, where he tossed or draped his clothing. Right now, he was naked under the sheet, his girlfriend’s young daughter was between him and his pants, and he wondered, not for the first time, how that might look to anyone watching. He didn’t know who might be, but they were always around somewhere.
‘Er,’ he said now.
She climbed to her feet. ‘Mum says you can stay in bed as long as you like but I think you should come and say goodbye.’
‘Is that so?’
A different Katie gazed at him. ‘I know you have to work today, but work isn’t everything.’
He said, ‘Er,’ again.
‘There are three police at Redruth. One of them could’ve stood in for you today.’
‘Katie,’ Hirsch said, wondering how to follow up.
She got in first. ‘Mum likes you. I like you.’
Hirsch struggled to sit upright and give a considered response, but Wendy had appeared in the doorway, her shower-damp hair darkening the neck and shoulders of a blue sundress. ‘Give the poor man some peace.’
Hirsch just wanted her back in bed with him. He said, ‘Give the poor man some privacy, more like.’
She smiled, distracted, and crossed the room to plant a brief kiss. ‘You went back to sleep.’
He usually didn’t. He usually slipped away from her bed before dawn. ‘The brat says you’re off soon?’
‘Five minutes,’ Wendy said.
Her hands on her daughter’s shoulders now, she gazed at Hirsch sombrely, as if unpicking a tangle of feelings. She’s wondering if I’m worth it, he thought. And probably hoping I don’t stumble on any more scenes of slaughter. He tried a smile. She nodded briskly and bundled Katie out of the room.
Hirsch was showered and dressed inside four minutes and found the two of them stowing bags into the car. At the five-minute mark he was hugging them goodbye and then Wendy was adroitly looping her Mazda around the turning circle beside her veranda. They disappeared down the driveway.
Feeling faintly rebuked, Hirsch retreated to the house. It smelt of toast and coffee. The vase he’d given Wendy glowed on the sideboard. And he felt bereft suddenly. Anchored to nothing, unimportant. He made some toast and ate it on the veranda. It tasted of cardboard. Eyeing Wendy’s roses, he fetched the secateurs for a spot of deadheading. Another hot day ahead.
Twenty minutes later, he headed back to town, Sound-garden cranked up to shake him loose. The road dipped and rose and turned in on itself as it followed the contours of a disorderly landscape. The music helped but he was still uneasy—loneliness creeping in, the Hamel Road house, the missing children. His thoughts took him to the shepherd’s son’s grave. The past was proximate and unsettling—stamped in stone, so if you lived here you’d never rid yourself of it. The graves and the abandoned lives out in the back country, the blood spilt and now unspoken about.
He reached the grain silos and rolled through the town. Baking under the mid-morning sun, its blinds were down, doors and windows shut, air-conditioners rattling. Everyone indoors. But, far from defending itself against the summer heat, the place seemed huddled tight this morning. Fear or shame, or something of both. Nan’s horses; the Hamel Road killings.
He pulled up outside the police station, lowered the windows a crack, and got out. The shop across the road was shut, no cars at the kerb. The pub shut? That was a first.
He locked the Toyota, toe-tested his spotted driveway—the new tar was satisfyingly soft—and stepped onto the veranda. There was a note poking out from under the door.
Big, looping script: Dear Paul Daryl never came home last night Laura.
He turned around and headed along the street, the sun pounding on his shoulders again.
Hirsch wondered if Marie Cobb had moved from her chair at the sticky table since he’d last seen her. The same slumped posture, the same ashtray, the same long, amnesiac pauses between one desperate suck on her cigarette and the next.
But Laura was all business. Moving around the kitchen as if her mother was a permanent fixture, she fetched Hirsch a glass of water, plonked it on the table, sat opposite him.
‘Gemma come and got him.’
‘Last night some time?’
She nodded.
‘Early? Late?’
‘Late.’
‘Did he say where he was going?’
‘No,’ she snorted. ‘He’d never tell me.’
‘Did Gemma say anything?’
‘Never talked to her. She just tooted out in the street and off he went.’
‘She hasn’t got a car.’
‘She had her mum’s,’ Laura said.
I bet they drove to Adam Flann’s, Hirsch thought. ‘Has Daryl got a mobile?’
‘It just goes to voicemail.’
‘I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s the holidays. They probably had a few beers at Adam’s and decided to stay the night.’
‘I rung the house six times this morning. No answer.’
Wayne would have been taking part in the search for the missing Rennie girls. Was Brenda still in the hospital? If she’d gone home, was she too stiff and sore to come to the phone? Or too drunk. ‘Do you have a number for Gemma?’
Laura shook her head—and then, exquisitely attuned to everything around her, she got up from her chair and stood behind her mother, wrapping the thin frame in her arms, resting her chin on the lank hair. Hirsch realised that Marie was crying silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. He glanced up at Laura. Laura gave him a look. You know what you have to do.
It seemed that Eileen Pitcher hadn’t moved for days either, still perched like a twiggy bird in the speckled shade thrown by her grapevine.
Hirsch leaned against a veranda post and said, ‘You’re not worried she hasn’t come home?’
‘She’s a big girl,’ Eileen said, staring, in her dead-eyed way, past his torso. Nothing and no one to look at out there, only harsh sunlight on the empty street.
‘Does she have a mobile?’
A ripple of astonishment crossed the woman’s face: who didn’t have a mobile?
Hirsch drew his phone from his pocket. ‘Can I have her number?’
Eileen recited it, slowly, pauses between the digits. Hirsch called it. Voicemail.
He checked his watch: two hours before Kellaher and Dock were due in town. ‘She didn’t say anything to you about picking up Daryl Cobb? Where they were going?’
‘Not her.’
‘The man who came looking for Mrs Rennie the other day—has he been back?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Gemma hasn’t mentioned him again?’
The little shoulders shrugged.
‘Did Gemma seem upset or anxious or scared to you yesterday?’
‘Not her.’
Hirsch wondered if Eileen knew of her daughter’s involvement with Adam Flann. He said carefully, ‘Perhaps she and Daryl went to a particular friend’s house? Adam Flann’s, maybe?’
A pause, and, for the first time, Eileen Pitcher showed a flicker of feeling. It was like watching someone start to wake up. ‘Is Gemma in trouble?’
‘Not with the police, Eileen. I’m sure she just spent the night with her mates. But we do need to speak to her.’
The bony hands washed and rewashed themselves. The eyes looked inwards.
‘I tell you what,’ Hirsch said, ‘I’ll head out to Adam’s house and if she’s there, tell her to call you, how would that be?’
‘Is he going to hurt her?’
Asking about the stranger, thought Hirsch, not Adam. ‘No,’ he lied. ‘He was just a nosy reporter.�
��
Hirsch was running out of time for finding Gemma before the Homicide officers arrived. He climbed into the hot cab of the Toyota and called the Redruth hospital: Brenda Flann had palmed some painkilling meds and taken them all at once. Now she was sick as a dog.
‘We’re monitoring her condition. And she’ll need a psych eval before we release her.’
‘Are her sons with her?’
‘Haven’t seen them for a few days.’
Hirsch completed the call and headed out across the bumpy back country to the Flanns’ rundown homestead. No sign of Wayne’s ute but someone—presumably Wayne—had towed Brenda’s old Falcon home from the Tiverton council yard. The crumpled front panels were gone and wrecking-yard replacements sat in the nearby dirt—a glimpse of a dutiful son.
He knocked: no answer, and the outer doors were locked. He peered in the windows, didn’t see anyone, and wandered in and out of the sheds. No dead teenagers. Just dust, oil stains, beer bottles, split garbage bags and an old tractor. Rat droppings and hessian sacks. Only one gleam of new metal—a sizeable locked cabinet tucked in the corner of a hayshed. It was partly concealed behind some large sheets of splintery five-ply painted white and fitted with rolling mechanisms. Looked like the sliding doors of a built-in wardrobe. Hirsch had no means of searching the cabinet and no reason to obtain a warrant, but the itch was in him.
He walked back to the house, cocked his ear, phoned Gemma again. Then Daryl. Nothing. Silence inside the house.
It occurred to him that the trio might have gone up to Mischance Creek to join the search party. Heading across country to Hamel Road, he found Sergeant Brandl and asked her to check the log.
She scanned it, said, ‘Nup, sorry, no Gemma Pitcher, Daryl Cobb or Adam Flann. Why the interest?’
‘The Homicide Squad guys want to talk to Gemma about the man who came into the shop, and I can’t find her anywhere.’
‘Any reason to think this man’s after her?’
‘No idea. All I know is, late yesterday evening she picked up the Cobb boy in her mother’s car and they didn’t come back. Adam’s her boyfriend, and Adam and Daryl are mates, but they’re not at his place.’
‘Daryl Cobb and Adam Flann—persons of interest in the horse mutilation, right? Perhaps it’s a case of Ms Pitcher helping them disappear.’
Hirsch gave her an appreciative nod. ‘It’s a thought, but I’m pretty convinced they had nothing to do with it.’
‘They might not think that. I bet Comyn gave them a hard time.’
‘Yeah.’
‘They might be thinking, okay, the police will stitch me up for something, some time or other, so they asked the girl to help them disappear. What’re the dynamics between them?’
Hirsch considered the question. ‘Gemma seems dull, but she’s capable under stress. She’s a year older than Adam, who is a year older than Daryl, who is easily led. I get the feeling Adam looks to her for some kind of stability. His dad’s in jail, his brother’s never around and his mother’s reluctantly drying out in hospital.’
‘You know what kids are like,’ Brandl said. ‘They huddle around half-baked theories, convince themselves the world’s against them, and run off into the sunset to do something stupid.’
But what kind of stupid? He turned to go. Brandl touched his sleeve. ‘Tell Homicide straight away.’
‘Will do.’
Hirsch returned to the Toyota, leaned against a side panel and made the call. The sun tightened the bands around his skull.
Kellaher, predictably, was ropeable.
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘She at least agreed to talk to us?’
‘I arranged it last night, sir.’
‘No reluctance?’
‘No.’
‘Any ideas?’
‘I think she’s gone off somewhere with a couple of friends in her mother’s car.’
Kellaher said, ‘So she’s being thoughtless? It’s not a disappearance we should be worried about?’
‘Disappearance’ had an ugly meaning now, as in disappeared-believed-dead. Hirsch climbed into the Toyota, ran the air-conditioner and said carefully, ‘I’m hoping the three of them went to a party last night and are still sleeping it off.’
Kellaher said, ‘You’ve circulated the plate number?’
Hirsch swallowed. Should have done that an hour or more ago. ‘Just about to, sir.’
‘Get it done. Any other bright ideas where these kids might have gone—apart from some booze-up?’
‘No, sir. I’ll keep asking around.’
The phone went dead. Hirsch used the MRT to call up the registration details of Eileen Pitcher’s car and issued an alert. Almost 1 p.m. and some search party volunteers were straggling in from the patch of mallee scrub behind the house, Nan Washburn among them. Probably a badly needed distraction for her, thought Hirsch.
Where was Craig?
He got out and joined Nan at a shaded table that was set with tea urns, water bottles on ice, and plates of sandwiches. ‘Anything?’
‘One snake, one sleepy lizard.’
Hirsch unscrewed the top from a water bottle and passed it to her.
‘Thanks.’
He watched the motions in her throat as she drank. Dusty shoes, patches of perspiration on her shirt. ‘Is Craig here?’
She shook her head. ‘Too many people for his liking. Makes him jumpy.’
‘He back at the caravan yet?’
Nan Washburn stretched her spine and ran her gaze around the dry land, the house and the vehicles on the stretch of dead grass allocated for parking and didn’t meet his gaze. ‘Still at my place.’ She laughed grimly. ‘I just want my life back. Everyone in town’s been giving me space, but Craig’s driving me nuts, frankly. He means well, and I liked having him with me for the first couple of days, but now I just want him back where he belongs. Is that terrible of me?’
Hirsch shook his head. Some relationships withstood daily cohabitation. Others needed limits. He imagined the scene, Nan telling Craig he should return to the caravan, then the tense long drive to Mischance Creek with him beside her in the car…
‘Look,’ he said. ‘In a day or two, when it suits you both, why don’t I collect him and bring him back here? Save you the trouble.’
She put her hand to her chest. ‘Oh. I wasn’t…But that would be lovely.’
‘Okay, give me a call,’ Hirsch said.
He waved goodbye and bumped back along the temporary driveway to Hamel Road. He stopped the car. Had anyone searched Craig’s place beside the creek? He turned right instead of left, away from Tiverton, past the ruins to the caravan. He knocked on the door. Waited, then tried the door. Locked. He walked into the clearing and waited a while, letting his senses register and sift. But it was a windless clear noon in the bush. The sounds of the caravan flexing in the heat, that’s all. Perspiration salty on his lips.
He walked along the creek to the gravestone. It drew him—he supposed it always would—and he lingered for a while. Lichen crawled across the chiselled face, filling the grooves and channels that spelt out the boy’s name and fate, and the father’s appeal to God. Hirsch blinked. Realised he was holding his hand over his heart. Weird. He turned away to stare down into the creek, where murky water pooled around the bulrushes. A tiny ripple—a yabby or a water plant, shapeshifting as if woven into the water.
He walked on, curious about the creek beyond the gravestone and hoping to spot footprints in the moist soil at each of the stagnant pools, or creek-bed stones that had been rolled weather-side down by small feet. Mostly the creek was broad and straight, the bed barely two metres below the paddocks on either side, but where it curved, or cut between hillocks, the banks were significantly higher.
He was picking a noisy path through one such gulch—the tumble-smoothed stones, clustered pink, dry and weirdly testicular, tocking out a jerky tune under his feet—when a scree of dust and pebbles rattled downslope to spill over his shoes. He tilted his head, dwarfed b
y seven or eight metres of striated red soil embedded with rocks. A glimpse of dead grass at the top. Some creature up there, he thought. Or the dirt was unstable.
He turned back, passing the gravestone for a final silent tribute. Then the long drive home, thinking about Wendy, and when he finally reached the police station in Tiverton, a pair of Sydney cops were waiting for him with hard faces shut tight.
20
AN ORGANISED CRIME Squad senior sergeant named Vita Roesch and a Homicide Squad senior constable named Robert Hansen.
Both shopsoiled, as if they’d spent the day sitting in a plane and then a car, which they had. Both still managing to crowd Hirsch’s little sitting room, which was frayed and unloved to begin with, and put him on the back foot.
The ceiling fan chopped at the stale air. ‘Pull up a pew,’ Hirsch said.
Hansen glanced disparagingly at the sofa before perching as if fearing the fabric would soil him. ‘Op-shop chic, mate?’ he said.
Vita Roesch said, ‘Now, now, Robert.’ She turned to Hirsch. ‘A quick word and we’ll be on our way.’
She sat on the other end of the sofa; a woman of forty with the lean, searching look of a hunter, offset by a multicoloured cotton sundress that showed sleek, tanned legs and shoulders. It all brightened up the sitting room, anyway.
Hirsch remained standing. ‘Tea? Coffee? Cold drink?’
‘Water, please,’ Roesch said.
‘Water, mate,’ Hansen said. He sat back finally, surrendering to the sofa, a small man with pouchy cheeks and the tidy precision of a banker: a man who’d look brushed and combed whatever he did. Out on the street, your gaze would pass over him. But you’d look twice at Senior Sergeant Roesch and wonder when she’d come gunning for you.
Hirsch strolled through the archway leading to the kitchen nook and made a production out of opening and closing overhead cupboard doors and running the tap, and when the Sydney detectives were sufficiently disarmed by that bit of domestic flimflam, he sneaked a photograph of them on his phone. Then he filled three glasses, returned to the sitting room and sat opposite Roesch and Hansen. His fingers twitched: the print of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, on the wall behind the Sydney detectives, needed straightening.
