Bitter Wash Road Read online

  Leanne Donovan cried out. The coroner put her hand to her throat, opened and closed her mouth. Leanne and her son thrust back their chairs and stumbled out of the hall, followed by Yvonne Muir.

  The coroner, unsettled, said, ‘I hereby formally open the inquest into the death of Melia Anne Donovan on or about Saturday the twentieth of September and I will presently adjourn these proceedings to enable the police to complete their inquiries and for any criminal prosecution arising to take its proper course.’

  She sat at last, removing her glasses. ‘What I must do today is confirm the identity of the deceased and the location, time and cause of death. Witnesses, including the pathologist and police members, will give evidence in regard to these matters and then my officer will give a brief summary of the circumstances, as far as these can be ascertained.’

  The coroner replaced her glasses. ‘As I said, I have made my visit to the scene of Ms Donovan’s death, and I hope that opening the inquest here, in her home town, will encourage as many of her friends and family as possible to come forward and assist this court, and the police, to find the person or persons responsible for her death.’

  Kropp half-turned his huge head to Hirsch. Hirsch read the accusation: he’d already put a spoke in that wheel by allowing Gemma Pitcher to do a flit.

  ‘Anyone giving testimony will be speaking under oath and may subsequently be required to make a formal statement to police. Of course, this is not to say you need see this morning’s proceedings as in any way fraught with meaning and consequences. I wish merely to discover the truth.’

  Hirsch heard backsides shift on the flimsy seats. He didn’t think anyone had anything much to say, except to establish the groundwork and express grief.

  Nancarrow was called first. He explained why he’d been driving south along the Barrier Highway and how he’d found the body. The coroner had no questions, and called Hirsch, who read from his notebook: times, the date, distances, the movement of personnel, the recovery of the body. Plenty of cop phrases like ‘female deceased’.

  ‘Then I remained at the scene until accident investigators arrived.’

  ‘Had a formal identification been made at this stage?’

  ‘Dr McAskill stated that he knew the deceased.’

  ‘You relied on his identification?’

  Hirsch glanced around at Kropp. Kropp held his hands wide, so Hirsch returned to the coroner. ‘Sergeant Kropp is in charge of the investigation and will provide further detail in regard to this matter, but I do understand that he, like Dr McAskill, knew the deceased and later viewed the body and had no reason to doubt Dr McAskill’s identification.’

  The coroner was scribbling. She looked up. ‘I am able to confirm that another method of identification has subsequently confirmed the visual identifications of Dr McAskill and Sergeant Kropp, namely dental records. Constable Hirschhausen, you may step down. I call Sergeant Exley.’

  Exley summarised his team’s findings at the accident scene: no tyre tracks or skid marks, no identifiable fragments from the vehicle that had struck Melia Donovan.

  ‘Was more than one vehicle involved?’

  ‘If you mean, was she knocked over by one vehicle and run over by subsequent vehicles, there was no evidence at the scene to support or disprove that scenario.’

  McAskill was called. A man full of clarities and certainties, he confirmed identity, injuries and cause of death. ‘I submit that she was struck with some force by one vehicle, the impact sufficient to kill her and throw her body to the area where she was found. The locus of the impact was her right hip, arm and trunk, which might indicate that she’d had her back to the vehicle and was in the act of turning to face it when hit. There was also a massive injury to the head, which in my experience indicates that she was flipped up and into the windscreen or onto the roof of the vehicle before tumbling off the road verge.’

  ‘Were there indications of third-party violence to the deceased apart from vehicle impact injuries?’

  In other words, had she been choked, stabbed, punched, burnt with cigarettes, tied up, poisoned, raped...

  ‘There were not.’

  ‘And the toxicology findings?’

  ‘Indications of alcohol and cannabis use.’

  ‘Sufficient to cause disorientation?’

  ‘In my opinion, and taking account of her slight body mass, yes.’

  Kropp was called. He confirmed identification and outlined the police investigation. He also disclosed that Melia Donovan was an inveterate hitchhiker.

  The coroner thanked him and, as he returned to his seat, said, ‘That completes the initial formal input. It remains for me to invite members of the community to step forward.’

  The chairs shifted minutely.

  She waited, glancing keenly at their faces. ‘Very well, this inquiry is adjourned.’

  ‘All rise,’ the officer said.

  ‘Fucking waste of a morning,’ muttered Kropp. ‘Find her slag of a friend, all right?’

  ‘I’m in the city next week, Sarge,’ Hirsch reminded him. ‘The Quine inquiry.’

  Kropp screwed his face at the floor, not looking at Hirsch.

  ~ * ~

  12

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, Hirsch attended Melia Donovan’s funeral. A service at the tiny Catholic church, followed by a procession of cars, lights on, to the cemetery on the hill, a windswept patch of red dirt, busy ants and gumtrees. Everyone wept; the kids from the high school were inconsolable, although Wendy Street was doing her best. Katie toed the dirt, standing next to Jack Latimer and his mother, and a couple aged in their sixties. Maternal grandparents?

  Hirsch stood well back. He felt sad, but didn’t mourn. He tried not to look as if he was watching people. Other than the schoolkids there were men and women, young and old. He could not name a tenth of the people there, but they all knew him. One or two nodded; others glared, symptomatic of the district’s rancorous undertow. Bob Muir asked him to come to the get-together afterwards, tea and cakes in the hall, but Hirsch declined. Wendy Street caught his eye, gave him a little wave.

  ~ * ~

  That afternoon he was called to a farm contractor’s property a few kilometres outside the town. The man’s work was largely seasonal: ploughing and harrowing, crop sowing, reaping, carting, hay baling. He mended fences and bores, crutched sheep, put up sheds, you name it. Leading Hirsch across a dirt yard to a collection of implement, hay and tool sheds, he said, ‘Feast your eyes on that.’

  The door to a small tin structure had been jimmied open, the wounds raw in the metal skin. ‘I was at that poor lass’s funeral and come back to this. The bastards pinched me son’s trail bike, plus some of me tools. Chainsaw, brushcutter, cans of fuel, saw, plane, pipe wrench...’ He glared at Hirsch. ‘I bet I’m not the only one. The pricks were at the service. They clocked who else was there, knew we’d be out for a couple of hours, the cemetery and the rest of it, and snuck off and robbed us.’

  Quite likely. Hirsch gave the man an incident report number for his insurance company, made no promises, and returned to town. Two more calls came in, people returning from the funeral to find broken windows, doors prised open, tools, computers and TV sets missing.

  A truck or a ute, thought Hirsch, returning from the last call. In a land of trucks and utes.

  ~ * ~

  THE HILUX WAS THROWING a long shadow as Hirsch returned to town, the fence posts and power poles striping the paddocks. He found a dusty Holden parked outside the police station, a woman piling out of the driver’s seat, clutching a mobile phone. ‘Thank God. I tried calling the number you pinned to the door but I had no signal.’

  Hirsch recognised her from the funeral, the older woman with Alison and Jack Latimer. ‘Something wrong?’

  She looked comfortable, greying, grandmotherly; but she was in a state now, wringing her hands. ‘It’s my son-in-law, he’s come round making a scene and I’m scared someone will get hurt.’

 
; ‘Lead the way. Is it far?’

  She was already climbing into the Holden. ‘Better if you came with me, then I can explain.’

  Hirsch thought about it. Would he need anything from the HiLux? Was this likely to end in a car chase?

  ‘Hurry,’ the woman said.

  No, probably not. He slid into her passenger seat, belted himself in. ‘May I have your name?’

  The woman shot away from the kerb, no signalling or mirror checking. Then again, Barrier Highway was always quiet. ‘Heather Rofe. Our daughter appeared on our doorstep during the week with her youngest, asking if they could stay for a while. Her marriage hasn’t been the happiest so of course we said yes, but her husband keeps ringing her to come home, and a little while ago he turned up, yelling and swearing.’

  ‘Your daughter is Alison Latimer?’

  ‘Yes. How do you know that?’

  ‘We met briefly,’ Hirsch said. He paused. ‘Is her husband violent, Mrs Rofe?’

  A ragged sigh. ‘I’m not sure. Ray can be overbearing, I know that much.’

  Hirsch sat back as Heather Rofe swung the car into a short street beyond the Catholic church. He counted four houses on either side, the end house on the border of farmland. Eight old houses choked with cottagey shrubs and peeling gums, small-town houses that never opened the front curtains or spoiled the quiet. A beefy green Range Rover was angled outside the end house. The man on the path between the little gate and the front door was tall, solid, wound tight, dressed for a reconciliation in grey trousers, black shirt and a sports coat. An older man stood at the door, barring him.

  Rofe pulled into the kerb and Hirsch climbed out, adjusted his uniform cap and approached the house. He stopped at the garden gate, eyeing both men, who eyed him in return, the householder mostly unreadable but, sensed Hirsch, relieved— with an undertone of I probably could have handled this. Raymond Latimer was different, flexing his hands, a rampager not rampaging but coiled like a spring.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Hirsch.

  Latimer ignored him. ‘Heather, you fetched the police?’

  ‘Sir,’ Hirsch said, ‘your business is with me now.’

  Latimer shook his head like a reasonable man pushed to the limit by fools. ‘You’re not needed here. We can sort it out ourselves.’

  Huge, flexing hands. Hirsch watched the hands, the torso, for a hint of the man’s intentions. Alison Latimer’s husband was savagely shaven at this late stage of the afternoon, wearing his best casual gear. A big, practical man. Out of costume now, but no joke, despite the tidy comb tracks raked across his skull. Regarding Hirsch with a kind of exalted fury, in fact, as if he’d never been challenged like this. Hirsch felt an intense expectation. His fingers flicked over the equipment strapped to his belt. He gauged distances.

  ‘You hear me? We can sort this. No need for the police. A civil matter.’

  ‘Ray,’ said Heather Rofe, ‘you were scaring us. I had to fetch the police.’

  ‘That’s bullshit Heather and you know it.’

  Heather Rofe’s husband said, from the veranda, ‘Banging on the door, shouting and swearing, we felt threatened, Ray. You said some pretty terrible things.’

  ‘Heat of the moment, Keith. I only want to speak to Allie, then I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘Not now, not today. Give her a bit of time.’

  ‘I think she’s had enough time already. It’s a coward’s way out, just slinking away from home without talking it over with your husband. I think it’s in everyone’s interest if Allie comes home with me now.’

  ‘You’re frightening her,’ Heather Rofe said. ‘And you’re frightening Jack, poor little thing.’

  With an effort, Latimer put aside the fury. He shook his head and stomped out onto the footpath in a huge, martyred capitulation. ‘Unbelievable. A concerned husband and father tries to find a solution to a family difficulty and everyone gangs up on him and then the police are called.’

  Heather Rofe slipped past him to join her husband. ‘Allie needs time, Ray, all right?’

  ‘A day? A week? What?’

  ‘Time,’ Rofe said and pushed her husband ahead of her into the house. Hirsch sensed that the daughter and grandson were in there, peering through the curtains.

  Latimer was about to climb into the Range Rover. ‘Sir, a quick word before you go?’

  The man paused, taking a cold, summarising interest in Hirsch. ‘You’re the new cop. Just so you know, your superior’s a very good mate of mine. All right?’

  ‘I’m not fully convinced that you won’t hassle these people again, Mr Latimer.’

  Hirsch expected hostility. What he got was a smile. ‘I know all about you, you prick.’

  Hirsch waited. Waiting had become one of the chief conditions of his life. He waited right through a stream of oblique and wrathful abuse because he’d heard it all before. At the end of it he nodded, said ‘Sir,’ and walked past Latimer to enter the Rofes’ yard. He heard the Range Rover drive away as he lifted his knuckles to knock.

  Heather opened the door. ‘I can’t thank you enough.’

  ‘Do you wish to take out a court order against him, Mrs Rofe?’

  She smiled. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  Hirsch gave her his card. ‘Call me any time.’

  ~ * ~

  13

  ‘GOT CHURCH THIS morning?’

  Hirsch’s parents had church every Sunday morning. The question was part of a pattern: he would call after breakfast, ask about church, catch up on what his sister was up to in the UK, ask after everyone’s health, who his parents had seen lately...Every Sunday, and running behind the chatter were Hirsch’s overpowering sense memories, aroused by their voices: the smell of eggs and bacon on weekends, his father’s cigarettes, the play of light in the little hill towns above Adelaide, the stutter of the lawn sprinklers.

  And their unspoken question: Are you really on the take, Paul?

  Then they’d sign off, but this time Hirsch said, ‘I should get there sometime after lunch.’

  ‘Drive safely,’ his mother said.

  ~ * ~

  Two and A half hours to Adelaide, then a quick climb into the hills, the road fast until he turned off for Balhannah. Cooler air up here, scented with spring grasses. He’d struck some Sunday-lunch traffic but the road was quiet now. Greenery pushed in on him from both sides, and he was wool-gathering, not fully engaged, when the siren whooped.

  A patrol car, in snarling white and martial black. A ninety k zone and Hirsch was doing eighty-five. All his electrics worked: brake light, indicator light. No broken lenses. No failure to stop back there at the crossroads, no failure to give way. So Hirsch woke up pretty quickly, the daydreams dissipating like smoke.

  If they wanted to pat him down they’d find the Beretta around his ankle and no paper to go with it.

  He pulled over onto the verge and sat there, motor running, watching the rearview mirror. Two figures on board, but the angled windscreen gave him no more than shapes, heads and shoulders. Time passed and Hirsch felt for the pistol and tucked it against his thigh, under a flap of his street directory. They could have been calling it in, he supposed, but didn’t seriously think so. Or they had their windows down and were gauging sounds, here above the plain, in the land of little hill towns and doubling-back, up-and-down roads. You’d soon hear a vehicle coming. If you were here to kill Hirsch, you’d want to wait until the coast was clear.

  A car did come, an unmarked white Holden. Hirsch watched it crawl past, pull over and reverse until he was hemmed in. He cranked a cartridge into the firing chamber. Flicked the safety off.

  Nothing happened, and then something happened. There were four men in the Holden, plainclothes, and one of the rear passengers held up a mobile phone, waggling it at Hirsch without revealing more than a white shirt cuff under a dark suit sleeve and a shaven bullet head.

  Was he to expect a phone call? Make a phone call? Hirsch took his Motor
ola from the dash cradle, clamped it against the windscreen, his way of saying, ‘Your move.’

  The slumbering screen woke with sound and light. Hirsch said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello?’ his mother said.

  So Hirsch said, ‘Hello,’ wondering how the pricks had managed to network the call.

  When there was no response, he said, ‘Mum, it’s me.’

  She didn’t hear him and her hearing was perfect. The line was clear and her handset was new, a cordless he’d given his parents last Christmas. Something else was going on. The next time she spoke—’Hello,’ and ‘Is anybody there?’—she sounded frightened.