Bitter Wash Road Page 20

  Hirsch nodded. ‘How did you get involved with Mr Latimer?’

  ‘We have an adjoining fence. There was a grass fire just after Christmas and part of the fence needed replacing.’ She shrugged. ‘We got talking.’

  ‘Grass fire.’

  ‘Passing motorist tossed a cigarette out the window? I don’t know. Does it matter?’

  ‘You got talking.’

  Armstrong revealed some feeling for the first time. ‘Look, he paid me some attention. I didn’t go looking for it but it found me. It was nice.’

  ‘Will you continue to see him?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  ‘How well do you know Sergeant Kropp?’

  ‘Your boss, Sergeant Kropp? Is that the Sergeant Kropp you mean?’

  Hirsch faced off the challenge with a smile. ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s mates with Ray.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ said Hirsch flatly.

  Finola Armstrong was bored with him. ‘Got work to do,’ she said, walking away from him, her rear shapely, a smudge of engine oil on the seat of her jeans and one pocket torn. God Hirsch was lonely.

  ~ * ~

  Loneliness was more powerful than his scruples, sensibilities and good manners. Otherwise he wouldn’t have slowed as he drew adjacent to Wendy Street’s driveway. Nothing. No Volvo. Of course: the holidays were over; she’d be standing at the head of some classroom, pointing at the board.

  ~ * ~

  21

  THAT AFTERNOON HE doorknocked the little street where Alison Latimer had spent her last few days alive. Had anyone seen Mrs Latimer on Sunday morning, or at any time on Saturday? No one had. Had anyone seen an unfamiliar or a familiar but out-of-place car parked at or near the house at any time in recent days? Had anyone heard anything? Hirsch also invited speculations: all he got was some vague admiration of the Latimers and remarks on how well Alison had done for herself, shame about how depressed she’d been the past couple of years.

  He left the Rofes alone for now.

  ~ * ~

  The world turned over. On Tuesday morning Hirsch investigated the suspected theft of a hundred ewes. He found them in a neighbour’s paddock, the neighbour apoplectic about the state of the complainant’s fences. He calmed everyone down, returned to the town and called on the Rofes.

  Heather answered, looking wrung out with grief. ‘You knocked on some doors yesterday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Learn anything?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  She shook her head, opened the gap in her front door. ‘Come and have a cup of tea with us.’

  Hirsch removed his cap and followed her through to the kitchen. Keith was there as if he was always there, still stunned, more rumpled. Heather gazed at him with a flicker of pity and irritation, told Hirsch to sit.

  Hirsch drew back a chair. ‘I’ve been asked to prepare a brief for the coroner.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m afraid I need to ask about Alison in a more formal context.’

  Heather turned from the sink, waved the wet spout of the kettle at him. ‘Formal context? Or formal whitewash?’

  The spring sunlight lit her from behind, gauzy through the little window above the sink. Hirsch had never seen so many curtained windows before moving to the bush. He said, ‘There’s no easy way to say this, but in the absence of foul play, everything will hinge on Alison’s mental state in recent months—actual and perceived.’

  ‘Well, that depends on who you listen to,’ Keith said, stirring at last. His wife moved to him, her thigh against one shoulder and her hand reaching around to his other. As Hirsch watched, some of the man’s meekness and bewilderment evaporated.

  ‘Right now,’ Hirsch said, ‘I’m listening to you.’

  ‘And we’re biased.’

  ‘So are her husband and father-in-law,’ Hirsch said.

  Keith cocked his head, then twisted around to share a silent communication with his wife. Asking if I’m worth talking to, Hirsch thought.

  Heather gave a micro-nod and said, ‘Alison these last few days was more buoyant than we’ve ever seen her.’

  Suicides often seem that way because they’ve come to a decision, Hirsch thought. ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘A few weeks ago she inherited some money from a great aunt,’

  Keith said.

  ‘She began to see it as a lifeline.’

  ‘She wanted us to have some of it—’

  ‘We said no, use it to start a new life.’

  Hirsch watched and listened: Heather, Keith, Heather, Keith. They’d probably been doing it for forty-odd years.

  ‘May I ask how much it was?’

  ‘A hundred and sixty thousand.’

  ‘Had she told her husband?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Heather said.

  ‘He’d have made her pay it all into the farm,’ added Keith.

  Hirsch thought it was likely Ray Latimer did know about the inheritance. ‘Had she told him she wanted a divorce?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it a difficult decision for her?’

  Heather gave him a look. ‘You mean she felt so awful she killed herself?’

  ‘How did Mr Latimer take it?’

  ‘He told her the only way she’d leave him would be in a box,’ Heather said, and stared at Hirsch, daring him.

  ‘Did the boys know about the inheritance and/or the divorce?’

  Husband and wife glanced at each other. ‘She told Jack while they were here,’ Heather said. ‘Maybe Craig knew and didn’t approve and so he stayed with Ray, we don’t know. Certainly Ray poisoned the poor kid’s mind against Allie.’

  Her eyes were wet with sorrow, misery and fury. Hirsch said, ‘I will have to talk to both boys sooner or later.’

  ‘If those men let you.’

  Hirsch nodded that he pretty well understood what he was up against. ‘When Alison came here with Jack, did you think that was it, she was never going back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not even to thrash out the details?’

  ‘Well, we told her to let a lawyer do that. But she hadn’t been able to bring all her things with her. She would’ve gone back for the rest of her things at some stage.’

  ‘She didn’t indicate that she’d do that on Sunday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But what about Craig? She missed him, surely? Was she prepared to have the boys split up like that, Jack living with her, Craig with Ray?’

  Husband and wife glanced at each other as if to acknowledge that nothing was neat. ‘We’re sure Craig would have wanted to live with her eventually.’

  ‘Meanwhile...’

  They shifted uneasily there on the other side of the kitchen table. Hirsch pushed it: ‘Wasn’t it upsetting for your daughter, knowing she might have to challenge her husband for custody, knowing Craig chose him over her?’

  ‘They were things that could have been worked out in time,’ Heather said.

  Hirsch saw movement and a grey cat padded into the room. Spotting him, it displayed apparent outrage, contempt and fear in one swift turnaround, its tail flicking as it fled the room.

  ‘You have doubts,’ Keith said.

  Hirsch didn’t, not really. But he wanted to present a tight brief to the coronial hearing, one that would not be challenged by Kropp, McAskill or the lawyers that Leonard and Raymond Latimer would certainly bring to court with them.

  ‘You say you found the door locked when you returned on Sunday?’

  ‘We never lock it.’

  ‘But was Alison in the habit of locking it as she came and went?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Remember that she hadn’t lived here for some time and was in the habit of locking her house at the farm,’ Hirsch pointed out, not sure if that were true or not.

  Keith shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘She arrived here with a suitcase?’

  �
��Two cases, a big one for Jack, all his clothes and toys and school things, and a weekender for herself.’

  So why, thought Hirsch, had she repacked? And why the larger case?

  ‘I’d like to go back to her previous suicide attempt.’

  Hirsch saw reluctance. They knew the earlier attempt gave credence to the view that their daughter had got it right this time.

  ‘She’d been unhappy,’ Heather said finally.

  ‘No light at the end of the tunnel.’

  ‘Ray and that damn father of his, they made her life a misery.’

  Rather than swivel his gaze—Heather, Keith, Heather, Keith— Hirsch sipped his tea. It was tepid. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Ordered her around.’

  ‘Monitored everything she did, every trip, every dollar spent.’

  ‘And she got a creepy feeling if she was ever alone with Leonard.’

  Hirsch nodded. ‘I understand that she tried to shoot herself and Ray stopped her in time.’

  ‘Ray? No, his mother. Meredith.’

  ‘His mother?’

  ‘She died late last year.’

  ‘Do you know the circumstances?’

  ‘You think they go around bumping off all the women in the family?’ Heather gave a grim laugh. ‘Cancer.’

  ‘The circumstances of the suicide attempt.’

  Heather was patting her husband’s shoulder absently. ‘Allie was in her car.’

  ‘At the old hut?’

  ‘No, she hated it there. Out in the paddock.’

  ‘Meredith was looking out her window and wondered what the car was doing there.’

  ‘The men were away at a clearing sale.’

  ‘She had a bad feeling and ran down the hill and found Allie just sitting there and talked her out of it.’

  ‘Sitting there with a rifle between her knees?’ asked Hirsch.

  Silence, and then Heather said, ‘This changes things. You think she finally did it.’

  Hirsch was non-committal. ‘Tell me more about Meredith Latimer.’

  ‘Lovely woman. Life was no bed of roses, but she stood up to Leonard.’

  ‘Were she and your daughter close?’

  ‘They were at the end.’

  ‘Allie nursed her in her final months.’

  ‘Did she feel it keenly when Meredith died? The only support she had within the family?’

  ‘I know what you’re trying to imply,’ Heather Rofe said, ‘and you’re wrong.’

  ~ * ~

  Next, the Latimers. Hirsch spent the remainder of Tuesday and all of Wednesday attempting to make contact with Ray or his father. In between patrolling his district, delivering a summons, taking reports, signing statutory declarations and investigating the theft of a drum of diesel fuel, it was a time of frustration. The Latimers failed to answer phone messages or knocks on the door of either house, and had strangers running interference, telling him to come back next week or leave the poor beggars alone.

  Then on Thursday morning Hirsch knocked at the son’s door and Leonard Latimer answered. He looked very master-race in his pastoralist’s uniform of cream moleskins, R. M. Williams boots and khaki shirt; a bull of a man, with wide, sloping shoulders and a thick neck.

  Hirsch removed his cap. ‘Mr Latimer, my name is—’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  Hirsch gave him a grave little nod. ‘First, may I say how sorry I am. I know you were fond of your daughter-in-law.’

  He knew no such thing, he just wanted to stir. And Leonard was stirred, his short grey hair bristled. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I was wondering if I might have a word with Raymond. Is he in?’

  ‘Nope.’

  It might have been true. The family car was missing; silence, a sense of absence, seemed to come leaking out around the patriarch’s large frame. Hirsch pictured the older man’s life now, no daughter-in-law to bully or do his cooking and shopping.

  ‘Then perhaps I could have a word with you?’

  ‘I’m busy.’

  Leonard was dressed for town, not work. Did he work, get his hands dirty, track dust and mud over his daughter-in-law’s carpets? Hirsch glanced at the man’s hands. Short, blunt fingers, the nails remnant stubs.

  ‘It won’t take a moment,’ he said.

  Leonard continued to scowl. His face had no other expression; it was the face his family saw day in and day out, seamed by long years of anger, irritation and sunburn. Pugnacious chin; barrelly chest; arms bowed as if bristling for a punch-up. Keeping his own features open and pleasant, Hirsch moved one hand closer to the equipment hanging from his belt. ‘It’s just that I’m preparing a brief for the coroner,’ he said.

  ‘You? It should be Kropp.’

  ‘It’s me,’ Hirsch said, shrugging as if to say: Can’t do anything about it.

  ‘We’ll see about that. It needs someone senior. It needs someone who knows us.’

  Hirsch put some steel into his voice. ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  Latimer seemed ready to throw a punch. But maybe that was his default position. Without altering expression he said, ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Perhaps you can tell me something of Alison’s state of mind?’

  A car passed by on Bitter Wash Road. Leonard cocked his head as if to identify the beat of the engine, then switched to Hirsch again. ‘She was a mess.’

  Hirsch got out his notebook and said, and wrote, ‘A mess.’ He looked up. ‘In what way, precisely?’

  Latimer eyed the notebook. ‘In a way that caused her to shoot herself, what do you think?’

  ‘She was depressed?’

  ‘Depressed, agitated, anxious, suicidal.’

  ‘She expressed these feelings to you?’

  ‘I could tell. So could Ray. So could the kids, for that matter.’

  ‘What if I were to inform you that others have said she’d been quite upbeat before her death?’

  ‘That bitch across the road, you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been told by more than one source that Mrs Latimer was intending to divorce your son. Leaving home was the first step to doing that.’

  Nothing altered in Leonard Latimer’s chemistry. ‘News to me.’

  ‘Your son didn’t tell you? I’m astonished.’

  ‘I didn’t know anything about any divorce talk.’

  ‘If Alison had divorced your son, how would that have affected the business?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Legal fees,’ Hirsch said, ‘settlement costs, alimony. You’re already struggling, money-wise, can’t pay your bills. You’d be forced to sell part of the farm.’

  ‘All academic now,’ Latimer said.

  No satisfaction, slyness or triumph, just the bald truth. Hirsch opened his mouth for another question and heard voices within the house. Looking past Leonard’s shoulder, he said, ‘Are Ray and the boys inside?’

  ‘Leave us alone. We’re grieving. And for your information the property’s not struggling.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll pop in later.’

  ‘Perhaps you won’t. The undertaker’s bringing Allie home tomorrow and on Saturday we’re cremating her.’

  They’d released the body? Hirsch pocketed his notebook. Away to the east a helicopter clattered into view, running along the line of wind turbines on the ridge. Maybe it’s partly down to the turbines, Hirsch thought. None had been erected on Latimer soil, meaning no rental income. But in the nick of time had come news of Alison’s inheritance—except that rug had been pulled from under their feet when she announced she was getting a divorce and taking her money with her.

  Leaving Finola Armstrong with her adjoining property and wind farm income.

  Hirsch beamed at Leonard. ‘I expect your son will soon find arms to comfort him.’

  ~ * ~

  Hirsch went back and logged on to his e-mails. He read the one from Rosie DeLisle first. Letting you know that Jennifer Dee�
�s father was best mates with Reid. The suicide hit him hard, so looks like the daughter decided to do something about it. ‘But what are you going to do about her’, muttered Hirsch.