by Garry Disher
Hirsch snorted. Soufflés were known to collapse, hard on the outside and nothing in the middle. “So what are these allegations?”
Rosie began to chip at a fleck of cheese on her pizza crust. Shapely hands, Hirsch realized. That was inconvenient. He dragged his eyes away. They’d had fun in bed, one night when it was all over, but love wouldn’t do today, here under the sun. Yet he couldn’t gaze upon vines and vegetable beds and other diners forever, so he watched Rosie struggle with herself. She was vivid and round and lit within, normally, her fine black hair flashing, her scarlet nails and lips avid for experiences. She was probably an affront to the men she investigated and treated seriously by no one.
“Anonymous tip-off,” she said.
“Saying …?”
She looked fully at him, eaten up, you could see it in her face and upper body. “No one will tell me anything, but I’ve gleaned they think you pilfered stolen goods from the evidence safe at Paradise Gardens. Apparently they have serial numbers.”
“What kind of items?”
“No idea. Drugs? Cash?”
Her face twisted. She almost reached across the redgum and took his wrist. “Paul, they seem dead certain. Is it true? Will they find something?”
“Sure,” Hirsch said, and he fished out his phone, pressed the photo gallery icon and handed it over. “Scroll through.”
He watched a pretty forefinger flick the screen. “The first aid box in my car,” he said. “The phone is an iPhone 5, and the cash amounts to two and a half grand in hundreds.”
She continued to scroll. “Serial numbers.”
“Yes. Phone and cash.”
A twist of frustration. “It’s all going to match, isn’t it?”
“Without a doubt.”
“Paul, tell me straight, did you pinch this stuff?”
“Fuck you, Rosie.”
She slid the phone back across the table. “But who’s going to believe you stumbled upon this? They’ll think you took these photographs just in case, a weak attempt to say you were set up.”
“Possibly,” Hirsch said.
A young woman came by with a tray and a smile, a little frown when Hirsch bent his upper body over the phone. “Get you anything else? Coffee? Sticky date pudding’s on special.”
“Sticky date, please,” Rosie said.
“Coffee,” Hirsch said.
When the waitress was gone, tight black jeans winking at him, Rosie gestured at the phone. “They’ll use this to discredit you. Quine has plenty of friends. Even the people I work with. You should have brought everything with you and logged it in with me.”
Hirsch took up his phone again. “Got a little movie to show you.”
He found the file containing the CCTV footage of the woman lurking around his car. Pressed PLAY and sat back to watch DeLisle’s face.
She breathed out. “Quality’s not great, but …”
“But it’s clear what she’s doing, and time and date are embedded in the original, and I have a statutory declaration from the shopkeeper whose camera took this.”
“Who is it?”
Hirsch told her. “No idea.”
“Kropp’s wife?”
Hirsch went very still. He looked hard at Rosie. “It’s not Kropp’s wife, she’s Thai, but one might ask why you mention his name.”
DeLisle shut down. “I have my reasons. Could this be the wife of one of the others? Nicholson? Andrewartha?”
“One might wonder how you happen to know the names of everyone stationed at Redruth,” Hirsch said. “You have been checking up on me.”
Rosie DeLisle shrugged, a shrug that said volumes to Hirsch. Well, fuck them all. “When am I supposed to face the music?”
“You’ll get an email.”
“Not even a phone call.”
“A phone call to ensure you got the email.”
Hirsch would have to tell Kropp he wouldn’t be available next week. “How long for?”
“Two or three days.”
“How will they run it?”
“They’ll say some irregularities have cropped up, no big deal, but we need your help sorting them out. They’ll start by taking you through your history at Paradise Gardens CIB, let you explain everything away, the corruption, etcetera, etcetera, then just when you’re feeling secure, hit you with the phone and the cash.”
He could see the doubt was still there. He threw a twenty onto the table and left.
CHAPTER 9
HIRSCH WAS BACK IN Redruth by 4:30. Rather than drive through the town, keeping to the highway, he turned off, intending to reach Tiverton via the back roads that ran north and west of the town. A couple of properties on his watch list lay out there: an elderly farm widow and her schizophrenic son, and a farmhouse rented to a handful of kids who’d dropped out of city life and been accused of sabotaging wind farm turbines.
But his information was dated: the widow had died and the farm sold and the son taken in by a sibling, and the dropouts had returned to the city. Hirsch drove on, warm and slow from his lunch and the sun, and made the final turn back toward the highway. All of the roads out here were winding dirt nightmares like the Bitter Wash, so he wound down his window for a stay-alert breeze.
He came around a bend and a silver Lexus shot out of a driveway ahead, fishtailing as it gathered speed and spat pebbles at him, raised a choking dust cloud. He backed off, hoping the dust would dissipate, and then accelerated gradually. He was now twenty seconds behind the Lexus, the road otherwise empty, the air still, the dust dense, not budging. But the road coiled around the hillsides and dipped in and out of the erosion channels and so he glimpsed the Lexus now and then, before the dust intervened again. The driver was powdering along and Hirsch found himself muttering, “Too fast for the conditions of the road, pal. Slow down before you kill yourself.”
Then about one kilometer before the Barrier Highway intersection, the Lexus sideswiped a guardrail. Hirsch saw the driver over-correct, the car shooting back to the center of the road, brake lights flaring, and he was pretty sure the driver had seen the HiLux behind him, a dim shape in the rearview mirror. The guy didn’t stop but flicked around the next bend.
Fuck it. Hirsch accelerated, approaching the bend in careful stages, and found the Lexus in the middle of the road, doors open, the dust settling around it.
He braked, switched off, got out. So much drama, you’d expect an orchestra of panicky sounds, but the air was still and silent, only two hot engines ticking as they cooled. Then Hirsch’s dust rolled over him and the stink of it was in his nose with his own diesel fumes.
When it cleared he saw a woman alight from the driver’s seat, swinging one leg out of the footwell, then the other, emerging with the kind of fluttery relief you’d expect of a driver who’d had a close call. Or an actor.
“Oh, hello there. Whooh! My heart’s going pitter-patter.”
She walked the ten meters toward Hirsch, a flirty blonde full of smiles to turn your heart over. She was about thirty and, in a nod to spring, wore a darkish, short-sleeved cotton dress, knee-length over her tanning-salon, tennis player legs.
She toed the dirt cutely with her sandaled foot. Red toenails. “Talk about a lucky escape. These gravel roads are quite treacherous.”
Hirsch smiled, nodded, clicked his tongue commiseratively.
“Sorry about the guardrail. Of course I’ll pay to have it mended.” She turned to eye the car. “My husband and I have insurance.”
Now the husband was emerging, grinning like a madman, shaking his head at Hirsch, one bloke to another. “If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times …”
“Oh, Mike,” the wife said fondly. She rolled her eyes and turned on her smile for Hirsch, finger-hooking quotation marks in the air: “Drive according to the conditions of the road.”
“Well, sweetheart, now you know firsthand what it means. Mike Venn,” the husband said, sticking out his hand. “And this is Jess, my wife.”
“Both of you, kno
ck it off,” Hirsch said.
Venn glanced at his wife, at Hirsch. “I beg your pardon?”
“You, sir were driving, and you swapped places with ol’ Jess here.”
“He did no such thing!”
“You’ve no doubt seen the drunk driving ads on TV,” Hirsch said. “Every police vehicle is a booze bus. You can be breathalyzed on the spot.”
The woman was astounded. “You think we’ve been drinking?”
“I can smell it on you,” Hirsch said.
“A glass to celebrate a property sale, nothing more,” Venn said.
The wife could have left it at that. Her nose was exquisitely and maybe even naturally shaped, and it quivered now, a terrier after prey. “What are you, some jumped-up little Hitler?”
“I’m sure if you run your mouth long enough I’ll come up with another charge,” Hirsch said. He fetched a couple of breath-test kits from the HiLux, picturing the drama playing out behind his back. She glares at her husband, he glares at her, fury, a touch of panic, a pantomime of Make it go away and Who do we know?
He returned stony-faced and gleeful. “Blow into this, please, sir.”
“But I wasn’t driving.”
“Don’t worry, I’m testing both of you. I can’t have one drunk driver replaced by another, now can I?”
Both Venns registered over .05. Hirsch announced this, and asked, “Is there someone you can call?”
“Come on, we’re clearly not drunk, and the road’s not exactly crawling with vehicles.”
“You hit a guardrail, sir, and you were driving under the influence of alcohol. It would be irresponsible of me to allow you behind the wheel again today. What if you killed someone?”
“I was driving,” the wife said.
“Knock it the fuck off,” Hirsch snarled.
The clouds were high and fat and white, the sky vividly blue, promising a change but glorious just now. Hirsch sought relief in the heavens, thinking there was no dust up there, only down here, where he walked. He mentally listed the charges among those available to him. Giving a false statement to police, driving a vehicle while under the influence, reckless driving, and so on.
He spelt it out to Venn, and asked again: “Do you have someone who can drive you home? In your car, preferably, for it’s a hazard sitting here.”
“You clearly don’t know how things work in the bush,” Venn said, hot in the face. “We give and take, live and let live, out here. We make allowances. It works.”
Hirsch held up a warning finger. “Before I forget, how many demerit points do you have on your license, Mr. Venn?”
That shut his mouth.
“Mike needs his license,” his wife said. “He’s the Dalgety agent. He drives two or three hundred kilometers a day sometimes.”
“If he knew he’d accumulated enough points to lose his license, why did he drink and drive?” Hirsch asked, telling himself he was a fool to get into it with them.
“The property market’s quite depressed so we were thankful to steer a property sale to fruition,” Venn said.
“And if you’d killed yourself? Killed your wife? Worse still, killed a kid on his bike?”
“All right! You’ve made your point. And my point is, my wife was driving.”
Hirsch glanced curiously at Venn. “It’s your intention to contest these charges before the magistrate?”
“Too right.”
“You’ll testify that your wife was driving.”
“Sign a statutory declaration if I have to.”
Hirsch turned to Jessica Venn. “You intend to perjure yourself before the court?”
She tilted back her nose, a woman forever intent on being disappointed or hard done by. “Not perjury. I was driving.”
“If you continue with this,” Hirsch said, “and your husband loses, then I will charge you with perjury there and then, and I hope you know it may earn you a jail sentence.”
“You don’t scare me, jumped-up little Hitler.”
WELL, THAT WAS A gorgeous experience. Coming out just north of Tiverton, Hirsch decided to head on to Muncowie.
He found a town more depressed than Tiverton, but laid out like it, with one shop, one pub and a handful of houses on either side of an abbreviated grid of stubby, broad streets. About eight streets in total, four running east-west, four north-south. Small houses, some built of local stone, others of rusting corrugated iron in the old three-room settler style, the rooms running from the front to the back with a chimney on a side wall and a dunny in the backyard. Weedy yards, cars on blocks. Hirsch felt deeply fatigued.
The pub was long and squat, the dusty cream outer wall sitting dark and deep behind a vine-hung veranda. A tin West End Bitter sign rattled in the wind. A couple of panes in the fanlight above the front door were cracked and cobwebby. The veranda floor had once been painted red but the color had retreated over the decades, revealing glassy worn concrete—a good surface if you wanted to crack a head open.
He pushed into the pub, stepping from the concrete to creaky floorboards. Nail heads glinted brightly here and there, despite the curtained gloom of the front bar. The air was layered with stale beer fumes, cigarette smoke and the odors of rural work: diesel, petrol, grease, oil, sweat and animal odors, dung or lanoline or blood or all of it. Deeply ingrained and years old, guessed Hirsch, because the two old boozers and one publican at the bar didn’t account for it.
They saw his uniform and the publican said, “Reckoned you’d be in before too long. Pour you a drink?”
It was said with a crooked eyebrow so Hirsch took a stool and rested his elbows on the bar and said, “Lemon squash.”
“Lemon squash, lemon squash,” said the publican as if the drink and its ingredients were beyond him.
“Or a Bloody Mary.”
“That I can do,” the publican said, sticking a glass under a spigot and flipping a lever. Lemon squash frothed palely into the glass. “Ice?”
“Hundred percent lemon squash.”
The publican leaned back against the wall behind him, a small, narrow, beaming, efficient character, his arms folded arms above a neatly molded belly. “There goes my profit.”
Hirsch took him in, seeing the kind of bustler who has virtually no personality beyond dishing up a patter of humor and inoffensive insults as he served drinks. He’d know your name and what you drank but you’d never learn a thing about him beyond the smile and the tight ship he ran. Possibly there was nothing to know. He’d have a history of pub management and ownership behind him, here and there around the state. You wouldn’t know why he’d chosen to buy your local pub, or why it was time for him to move on again, or why he’d left the last one, and there’d be no point in asking.
Hirsch toasted the publican and the two drinkers, bleary old-timers in crumpled work clothes and whiskers, cigarettes smoldering in the cramped ashtray on the bar between them. They were halfway through tall glasses of beer that might have been sitting there for days, weeks. They weren’t drinkers but drink nursers. And yarners.
They had questions and a few half-truths about the death of Melia Donovan so Hirsch filled some of the gaps, keeping his words, tone and delivery low-key. He was hoping to read something in their responses, a tut-tut and a rueful head shake if they thought it just another tragic loss of a young life, or a flicker of something darker if they knew her or the circumstances of her death.
He got the former. “Poor bloody kid,” they said. “Like to get hold of the mongrel what hit her.”
“Does her name ring a bell?”
“Not to me,” the publican said.
“Donovan,” nodded one of the drinkers, precipitating a to- and-fro with his mate about who Melia’s mother, father, uncles, aunts and cousins might have been, drawing pretty much on hearsay, it seemed to Hirsch, but one thing was clear, the lineage wasn’t covered in glory.
“Did you see her in here on Saturday night or anytime Sunday?”
The publican gave a good impression of outrage. “A
kid, you say? I don’t serve no kids.”
“She would have looked older,” Hirsch said, and described Melia Donovan, her size, coloring, hair.
“Mate, we don’t get that many kids in here. Maybe of a Saturday we’ll get a couple of young blokes in after the footie or the cricket, but they hardly ever bring their girlfriends with them or stay for long. They head up to Peterborough or across to Jamestown or down to Redruth, not the other way around.”
“Arse end of the world,” grinned one of the old-timers.
“So your first inkling,” Hirsch said, “was when the bloke came in asking to use your phone.”
“That’s the size of it,” the publican said.
Hirsch left his card on the bar. “If you see or hear anything, give us a call,” he said, and went out to doorknock the town.
He got nowhere, heard nothing, and returned to the highway.
ANOTHER DEAD END IN Tiverton. There was no answer at the Donovan house, no Commodore, no battered Mazda in the driveway.
But Hirsch met Yvonne Muir, the neighbor who’d been comforting Leanne Donovan the previous day. “Yoo-hoo,” she called, a thin, edgy figure where her husband was solid and comfortable, and she came across her yard and stopped at the side fence—but still in motion, her hands patting her hair, smoothing her dress, centering her necklace. She took a deep breath and said, “You’re the new policeman. You met my husband yesterday.” She added, in an expense of strength and feeling, “Has something happened?”
Hirsch shook his head. “A follow-up visit, that’s all.”
With an air of tiptoeing through the proprieties, Muir said, “She’s at her mother’s today. In Jamestown. Back tomorrow.”
Hirsch didn’t pursue it. “Have you known Mrs. Donovan for long?”
“Ten years. More.”
“Are you friends, would you say?”
“Friends and neighbors. Are you sure nothing’s wrong? It’s not Nathan, is it? You leave that boy alone.”
Hirsch was tired. Needing to cut through the thickets, he said, “Mrs. Muir, I’m helping investigate Melia’s accident, that’s all. A few questions and I’ll be out of their hair.”
