Peace

by Garry Disher

  Less confident than he sounded: ‘There’ll be something.’

  The big metal cabinet on the back wall of the Flanns’ main shed. He was pretty keen to get a look inside that.

  Half an hour later, only Hirsch and Jean Landy remained. Landy had a quiver on. ‘My first official search.’

  ‘Don’t get too excited. It’s generally dirty, dusty and thankless,’ Hirsch said. ‘You see things you can’t unsee. You—’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Things.’

  Like violent porn, mouldy food, shit-smeared walls… Once he’d been searching a drug-couriering great-grandmother’s bedroom and tripped over a brimming chamber pot.

  Mid-afternoon now. The New Year’s Eve drunks would be well on their way. Hirsch had been working all day; he’d be working through to the early hours. ‘You on duty tonight?’

  Landy nodded. ‘Patrolling the mean streets of Redruth.’

  Hirsch decided he liked her. He eyed her patrol car. ‘Convoy, or come with me?’

  She was practical. ‘Convoy, in case I have to head back in a hurry.’

  The replacement HiLux drove exactly like Hirsch’s shot-up one. He headed down Hamel Road to the Tiverton road, Landy behind him, and half an hour later they were at the Flanns’ miserable cluster of house and sheds. Watching Hirsch select the house key from the bunch he’d confiscated after the arrest, Landy said, ‘Looks like no one’s lived here for years.’

  Hirsch grunted. Brenda Flann was a nightmare, but at least she’d had a smattering of pride in the place; perhaps even some vague maternal streak. With her in hospital, Adam on the run and Wayne out scouting the countryside, the house, yard and sheds had grown forlorn surprisingly quickly.

  Once inside, they made a rapid search of the obvious areas—under beds, in drawers and wardrobes—then the usual hiding places for people’s miserable secrets—in freezer packets and flour tins, taped to the undersides of drawers, under floorboards.

  Such meagre lives, Hirsch thought. No books, barely any magazines. Clothes worn too long between washes. Greasy water in the kitchen sink, tide marks in the bath and the toilet bowl. There was a small stash of pot in an old tobacco tin, but nothing else to suggest inner lives apart from a vast new TV, a couple of Xbox consoles and an eBay receipt for a military-tactical rifle sling from a Kentucky gun shop.

  That left the sheds.

  In one, remnants of hay, a set of rusty harrows and an old Massey Ferguson on perished tyres. In the other, nothing of note but that shiny steel cabinet behind the sheets of plywood. ‘Tucked away,’ observed Landy, ‘but not in an obvious way. At a second glance you’d think it was a locker for expensive tools.’

  ‘There probably are expensive tools in it,’ Hirsch said.

  Landy completed the thought: ‘But not his.’

  They drew on crime-scene gloves. Hirsch found the correct key, turned it in the lock and tugged gingerly on the handle.

  ‘Expecting a booby trap?’

  ‘It’s been known,’ he said.

  They weren’t blown to kingdom come and the first thing they saw was a child’s tricycle missing its saddle. Scraps of Christmas wrapping clinging to the frame.

  ‘Got him,’ said Hirsch.

  He told Landy the story and watched fear, pity and sadness flicker on her face as she pictured Christmas Eve at the Rennie house.

  Stacked upright in an open space behind the bike were three fishing rods, a whipper-snipper, an archery bow and a couple of cricket bats. Next to it, a set of shelves: toolboxes, an electric sander, a bowsaw, chainsaws and a leaf blower.

  Landy reached in, tilted one of the chainsaws. ‘There’s a name texta’d on this: T. Wesley.’

  ‘The Porters Lagoon guy,’ Hirsch said.

  Landy grunted in satisfaction. ‘We’ve got Mr Flann up, down and sideways.’

  For thieving, Hirsch thought. We need to put that murder weapon in his hands. We need Adam’s testimony. Just then Landy’s mobile chirped. She checked it, muttered, ‘Didn’t think I’d get reception out here.’

  Hirsch guessed. ‘The boss wants you.’

  ‘Brawl in the main bar of the Wheatsheaf.’

  ‘You go, I’ll finish up here.’

  When he was alone, Hirsch photographed the contents of the cabinet and locked it again. He took the long way back to Tiverton; called in at the little house on Bitter Wash Road.

  ‘Thought I’d wish you happy new year for tomorrow.’

  ‘On account of you’ll be busy,’ Wendy said. She took his arm and steered him down the corridor. ‘You need a shower.’

  ‘On the nose?’

  ‘Scrambled eggs and bacon when you’re done.’

  Their relationship was oftentimes brisk, Hirsch barely getting a word in. ‘Breakfast food?’

  ‘It’ll get you through the night.’

  When he stepped out of the ensuite bathroom, a towel around his waist, the spare uniform he kept hanging in her wardrobe had been draped over the bed. No sign of that day’s sweat-stained mess: no doubt soaking in the laundry sink.

  The eggs and bacon washed down by strong black tea, the imprint of Wendy’s lips on his, Hirsch headed for town. Checking Kitchener Street automatically as he passed the shop, he saw a silver station wagon and a journalist in a short-sleeved white shirt interviewing Mr Cromer. Good luck with that, Hirsch thought. He’d been hoping the vultures were gone for good, but maybe pony mutilation had unexpected shelf-life.

  As he parked outside the police station, the reporter came running up. ‘Constable Hirschhausen? If I might have a word?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Hirsch said, ‘I have things to do.’

  ‘Any nearer to catching whoever mutilated Mrs Washburn’s horses?’

  I am, actually, Hirsch thought.

  ‘It’s been said that the same person was responsible for the killings out on Hamel Road.’

  Hirsch turned around in the act of unlocking the front door. A car shot into town, saw the HiLux in the driveway of the police station, lurched to an anxious crawl and trundled through as if butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth.

  ‘Your views on that, Constable Hirschhausen?’

  ‘A busy night coming up, you understand,’ Hirsch said, staring at the reporter, who faltered, seeing something daunting in him. Hirsch nodded. ‘Have a good night, you’ll be busy yourself,’ he said, and disappeared inside the police station.

  Airing his office and the rooms he lived in, Hirsch was catching up on emails and phone calls when a text came in from Gemma Pitcher: C u tomorrow afternoon.

  He replied: C u then and went out to keep the peace.

  By 8 p.m. he was patrolling, south to Mount Bryan, north to Terowie, calling in at the pub in each town, taking a swing in and out of their side streets. Then a fast trip back to Tiverton: apparently a guy was swinging a machete around in the pub.

  Machete, pub, New Year’s Eve—a recipe for disaster. But when Hirsch had parked nose-up to the wonky veranda post and hurried into the main bar, he found only cheery noise and heightened amusement.

  ‘All over, mate,’ Carl Bagshaw said.

  ‘Dealt with it,’ his brother said.

  Hirsch glanced at the patrons: a couple of station jillaroos, a handful of farmers and farmhands, a driver for the lucerne seed business, the primary school headmaster, the town’s beautician. The publican was pouring beer. Behind him, on the other side of the U-shaped bar, was the lounge, the tables taken by a faintly more genteel crowd: mums, dads, kids and grandparents. Like a Saturday night, except with the electric charge that lingers after a bit of drama.

  Kevin Henry was the least amused. No one had been hurt; hiring the Bagshaw twins for crowd control had paid off. But there had been an incident, hard on the heels of Brenda Flann’s parking trick. ‘Could’ve been nasty.’

  He gestured at the sodden towel running the length of the bar. ‘Machete’ was stretching it: Hirsch recognised the weapon as a World War II bayonet, rust-pitted and blunt-looking. His grandfather h
ad brought one back from Borneo in 1945.

  ‘What happened?’

  One Bagshaw twin glanced at the other. ‘This bloke came in.’

  ‘Pissed as a fart.’

  ‘Trolleyed.’

  ‘Waving that around.’

  ‘Said, “Where is she?” We said, “Who?”’

  ‘He didn’t say. Wife? Girlfriend?’

  ‘Never seen him before.’

  Hirsch cut in, lifting his voice above the noise: ‘Anyone recognise him?’

  A lull, then a murmur of denials and headshakes.

  ‘Okay, did anyone see where he went?’

  More headshaking, but one scrap of information: the maniac had driven away in an old Subaru wagon.

  ‘When I took the blade off him,’ Ivan said, ‘he just burst into tears and scarpered.’

  ‘Anyone other than you touch the bayonet?’

  ‘No, only me.’

  Hirsch lifted it off the bar with a handkerchief around his fingers, placed it in the Toyota and returned to make the rounds of the patrons. Did you see what happened? Did you know him? Had you ever seen him before? Film him, by any chance?

  One blurry photograph: a short, barrelly guy, about forty, shorts and a wifebeater singlet. None of the women knew him.

  No damage, no bloodshed, but a lethal weapon had been brandished. Hirsch would have it tested for fingerprints, see if the guy was in the system.

  The rest of his night was uneventful. Hirsch patrolled his domain, and, as far as he could tell, no crimes were committed, or regulations infringed. May that be a harbinger for the new year, he thought.

  35

  THE FIRST OF January. Hirsch slept in. So did everyone else.

  Then, early afternoon, he offered his second happy new year of the season.

  ‘Yeah, happy new year.’ Gemma Pitcher’s response was clear and confident, a sense almost of grace in her heavy round face. The boys, seated on either side of her, barely muttered. All three kids looked bleary. Wherever they’d been hiding, they’d given the new year a thorough welcome.

  Hirsch had decided to use his sitting room for this: private, not too formal—but also not too much like home, with the police station just through the door behind them. ‘I’ll need to speak to each of you alone at some stage,’ he said, knowing that in a perfectly managed police operation he’d have split them up immediately and gone in hard against each one.

  Gemma shrugged; Adam scowled; Daryl looked as gormless as ever.

  ‘But let’s just establish the main facts. First, where have you been the last few days?’

  ‘We don’t want to get them in trouble,’ Gemma said.

  ‘That won’t happen. It’s just to satisfy my curiosity.’

  ‘My cousin’s.’

  ‘Did your mum know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where?’

  Gemma shrugged, the stretched neck of her black T-shirt halfway down one fleshy shoulder. ‘Does it matter?’

  Probably not. Hirsch took out his phone, found the snap of Lavau. ‘Do you recognise this man?’

  Gemma peered. ‘He’s the one come in the shop.’

  Hirsch nodded. ‘Thought he might be.’

  ‘Who is he? He going to come after me?’

  Hirsch his head. ‘Nope. Dead.’

  ‘Okay,’ Gemma said, unconcerned. The boys looked cowed and sullen. Young.

  The next stage would need a light touch. Go in too hard and the kids would clam up. ‘Just to deal with a couple of other matters first,’ he said, fixing on Daryl, ‘did you guys spray-paint Mr and Mrs Dunner’s woolshed, by any chance?’

  The Cobb boy merely looked more vacant. Adam Flann gave a delayed blink, a little frown. ‘Who?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. How about copper wiring, copper pipes, can you tell me anything about that?’

  Adam hardened. ‘We never did no copper.’

  ‘What about Wayne? Was he into stealing copper?’

  ‘Nup.’

  Hirsch made a mental note: check Wayne’s prints against the ones found on the crime-scene tape at the barn.

  ‘What about Kip?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Fuller’s dog, over on Munduney Hill. It went missing a few weeks ago. Know anything about that?’

  Gemma knew about Kip being found on the road. Affronted, she looked at the boy seated on her left, the boy on her right. ‘They wouldn’t hurt a dog.’

  But Daryl stirred, a light coming on. ‘Him? He went mental at us.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Hirsch asked. The mild tone that meant business.

  Daryl realised he’d said too much and subsided.

  ‘Daryl? When was this?’

  A shrug. ‘Ages ago.’

  ‘You were there with Adam and Wayne?’

  Another shrug. Hirsch checked Adam, expecting him to shut his friend up.

  Interesting. The boy was all tight wilfulness behind his veneer of boredom.

  Gemma intervened. She clasped Daryl’s gingery hand. ‘It’s okay, Daz. We talked about this. You have to tell him.’

  Daryl was silent. Gemma sighed and said, ‘They told me they done the Fullers, but Kip freaked them out.’

  ‘Is this true, Daryl?’

  Daryl lifted his head. ‘He went mental. His chain broke.’

  ‘You almost had an arse full of teeth,’ Hirsch said, expecting a grin, but the kid remained blank. ‘Did you guys steal anything?’

  ‘Wayne took a shovel.’

  ‘Did you always go out with Wayne and Adam on these expeditions?’

  A head shake.

  Hirsch turned to the other boy. ‘Adam? Did you go with Wayne each time?’

  Adam lifted his chin. He stared at Hirsch with a thin, hard smile: ‘Not worth the hassle not going with him.’

  Hirsch imagined the boy’s home life. Bullied by the older brother, father in jail, some scant stability and home comforts from Brenda—when she wasn’t on the grog. ‘Okay, what about Mrs Washburn’s horses?’

  ‘We never done that! Never would.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hirsch said. ‘But what about Wayne?’

  ‘Nah,’ Adam said, as if a spot of horse mutilation would have been more trouble to Wayne than it was worth.

  ‘How about Mr Wesley, over near Porters Lagoon?’

  Adam had to think about it. ‘Chainsaw?’

  Hirsch nodded. ‘Did Wayne have a particular grudge against the Fullers or Mr Wesley or—’ he slipped in the name ‘—Mrs Rennie?’

  Adam shrugged. ‘Not that I know of. They were just, you know, like, in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Isolated properties.’

  ‘Yeah. Before Dad went to jail, we used to go spotlighting.’

  Driving around at night, picking out a fox in a beam of light and shooting it. ‘Is that how you found places to rob?’

  Adam nodded. ‘Wayne would go, “What about this place? What about that place?” and Dad would say yeah or nah.’

  Hirsch grunted. ‘Okay, let’s now talk about what happened on Christmas Eve.’

  Adam shrank. Daryl looked half-asleep. Gemma straightened, a square-shouldered heft that said Hirsch should watch himself, she’d be looking out for her boyfriend.

  Easy does it, Hirsch thought. ‘Daryl, did you go out with Wayne on Christmas Eve?’

  Daryl had to think about it. ‘No.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ affirmed Gemma. There was the merest hint of emphasis.

  ‘But you did, Adam?’

  Adam seemed to look for a way to shade his answer. In the end, he nodded.

  ‘Did you get out of the ute at any stage? Go inside the house?’

  ‘Nup.’

  ‘Wayne did?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The lady come out the shed when Wayne was cutting the phone line and he got a shock and got the gun out,’ Adam said flatly. ‘He told me to stay where I was and chased her inside and just, you know, started shooting.’

/>   ‘Why did he do that?’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘I will. Why do you think he did that?’

  ‘He was flying, man.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  The answer seemed obvious to Adam. ‘Ice.’

  ‘Does he use often?’

  ‘When he can get it.’

  ‘Every time you’ve gone out?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘So he went in shooting. Then what happened?’

  ‘Freaked me out.’

  Hirsch found himself offering the boy a defence. ‘You were scared of your brother.’

  Gemma caught it. She glanced at Adam and nudged him. He said, ‘He’s fucking scary, man. Always having a crack at me.’ He lifted his T-shirt. A mottled bruise under the ribs.

  ‘Did he steal anything?’

  ‘Yep. A toolbox, a phone and a kid’s bike. I never touched nothing.’

  ‘He took photos?’

  Adam winced. ‘He showed me.’

  ‘Did you both go home after that?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And the next day? Boxing Day—I saw you with Wayne in the creek, remember.’

  ‘He freaked out when he heard on the news there were two kids missing. He thought they might of seen him and said we had to find them before anyone else did.’

  ‘Adam had no choice, he was that scared,’ Gemma said, hugging Adam hard against her cushiony torso. ‘But soon as he got a chance, he rang me, and I come and got him.’ She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t going to let him get blamed for everything.’

  36

  TWO SOLICITORS PRACTISED in Redruth. By mid-afternoon on that first day of the new year, Hirsch had arranged representation for each of the boys in their interviews with Homicide Squad detectives at the Redruth police station.

  After dropping them there, he continued through town and out to the Wesley farm above Porters Lagoon. He showed Trevor Wesley two arrays of photographs. The sun, dropping on the other side of the valley, flared on a stretch of water not yet evaporated in all the days of heat.

  Wesley was clear. ‘That one.’

  Wayne Flann. ‘How about this lot?’ said Hirsch.