Bitter Wash Road Read online

  ‘Don’t fucking turn your back on me,’ Nicholson said.

  Hirsch tried walking towards the sunlight, but Nicholson confronted him, his big paw around the woman’s forearm. ‘Meet Bree, arsehole. Bree, meet the cunt who dobs in his mates.’

  Hirsch said, ‘How old are you, Bree?’

  ‘You prick, you absolute fucking prick.’

  The punch was fast and stone hard, winding Hirsch. He staggered, bent over, and, after a second, spewed the spring water over the floor and his shoes. He was a good target like that and Nicholson booted his backside.

  ‘Nick,’ wailed the girl, ‘stop it.’

  Nicholson ignored her, dancing around Hirsch, aiming kicks. ‘Dog. Maggot. Slime ball. She’s old enough, arsehole.’

  Hirsch found a spot of oily floor and sat, his back to the leg of a metal bench. Getting his wind back he said, ‘Bree, do you have a driver’s licence?’

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ screamed Nicholson. ‘Eh? Get out of my fucking face.’

  The man’s spittle flecked Hirsch’s lapels and face. Hirsch swiped his forearm across his cheeks and mouth, the girl saying, ‘Nicko, don’t, let’s just go.’

  She looks about nineteen, Hirsch thought, taking in the hacked-about hair, skinny arms, a tattoo on one shoulder, rings piercing her poor pink flesh here and there. There was nothing unusual about her, she was just a young woman cowed by a bully. And he’d seen her before, he realised, serving food at the Woolman on the night of the football final.

  Nicholson loomed over him. ‘Stay the fuck away from me and my girlfriend and my business, all right?’

  ~ * ~

  When Hirsch climbed to his feet he hurt in half a dozen places. He looked a complete fool, and he knew his uniform was a wreck. Judd and his employees had melted away, leaving the hint of silent laughter. The air in the shed was superheated and dense and silent and the noon sun, a fat block of it angling a short distance in at the doorway, was lighting up dust motes. Hirsch walked stiffly into that light, out into the fresh air.

  One of the panelbeaters stood beside the HiLux, dangling the keys. Hirsch expected taunts but what he got was, ‘Few things you should know.’

  ‘Yeah? What?’

  ‘Bree’s good people, doesn’t deserve the hassle.’

  ‘I’m not going to hassle her.’

  The man nodded. He was narrow faced, saturnine, slow and deliberate. ‘Nicholson’s another matter.’

  Hirsch waited. He placed a hand on the hot metal for support. Removed his hand again.

  ‘Him and Andrewartha,’ the man said.

  ‘I understand they work here in their spare time.’

  ‘The odd job, yes.’

  He was glancing around now, feeling eyes on his back, so Hirsch reached for the keys as if they were not having this discussion. He murmured, ‘Kropp’s part of it, too?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Probably. Behind the scenes.’ His eyes shifted. ‘I will deny this.’

  ‘Uh huh. How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Taken care of. We handle all the police repairs and servicing.’

  Hirsch put away his wallet. ‘Okay.’

  He knew enough now. Judd, getting all of the department’s business in the area, probably overcharged and shared the skim with Kropp and his boys. The after-hours work would be cash in hand. And there were always crash scenes, vehicles needing a tow, the police well placed to advise distressed motorists where they could get their car fixed.

  Hirsch nodded his thanks and climbed behind the wheel. The interior was baking hot. ‘Melia Donovan.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I’ve heard talk of a car crash, an older boyfriend.’

  ‘Can’t help you.’

  ~ * ~

  By mid-afternoon Hirsch was back in Tiverton, running a hose over the HiLux in the narrow driveway beside the station house. He squirted and swiped at the panels, trying to get rid of road dust and panelbeaters’ grime. Presently he heard voices, high and sweet, cars, and car doors slamming: school was letting out across the road.

  He straightened his back to watch.

  Today, in the midst of spring sunshine and honest physical labour, and surrounded as he’d recently been by sudden death, he wanted reminders of blamelessness. Some kids were kicking a football around, watched by a teacher who kept glancing at her watch. Then a figure separated from the others. Katie Street. She was coming to see him, he realised. She stopped, looked left and right along the empty highway, and ran across, halting abruptly on the footpath.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said, glancing around for her mother.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Waiting for your mum?’

  Katie looked briefly stricken and confused. Until recently, Hirsch realised, the person who’d dropped her off and picked her up from school most days had been Alison Latimer. Not only that, she’d been a regular visitor at the house across the road. They would have been close. ‘Come and wait with me in the yard,’ he said.

  She entered reluctantly, Hirsch making no big deal of it but turning off the hose and dropping the chamois in the murky bucket beside a back tyre. ‘Would you like a drink? A snack?’

  She did what kids do, shrugged elaborately, wanting the treats but not prepared to say so outright.

  ‘I’ve got Coke and Tim Tams.’ Left behind by the previous tenant. He hadn’t checked the use-by dates.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Stay there.’

  He came back with two cans and the packet, both safe to consume. They sat companionably on the front step, where the sun warmed them as the world went by, what there was of it now that most of the parents had come and gone across the road. Hirsch eyed Katie surreptitiously. She chewed, brushed at crumbs, jumped when he crackled his empty can. Not to be outdone, she crackled hers.

  Jack Latimer is off school for a few days, he thought; meanwhile, I’m a kind of security until her mother arrives to collect her. Or there’s something she wants to tell me.

  It came finally, the voice almost a whisper: ‘I didn’t shoot Alison.’

  ‘Good grief, of course not, no one thinks you did.’

  He didn’t have the language or the know-how to explain a suicide to a child. Then again, why shouldn’t she be told? And maybe she had been told. That led him to secondary thoughts: What if Alison Latimer had been shot in her car, then carried to the hut? Or shot in her house, ditto. Or shot at her parents’ house, ditto.

  Then Katie was up and running, out onto the footpath. ‘Mum! Mum!’

  Wendy Street had been about to turn into the school when she caught sight of her daughter. She braked, swung the Volvo around and parked at the kerb. Gazing hard at Hirsch, she got out, passed around the front of her car and clamped Katie against her thigh. ‘Hello, darling girl,’ she said, eyes busy. She took in the school, the dripping HiLux, the Coke cans and Hirsch, establishing a narrative from the evidence. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘Unexpected staff meeting.’

  She was inviting an explanation, and Katie sensed that. ‘I just came over to say hello.’

  ‘Did you.’

  ‘We had a treat. Coca-Cola and Tim Tams.’

  Wendy shuddered. ‘Nectar of the gods. Well, I’d better get you home.’ She didn’t move but watched Hirsch intently, Katie glued to her side. ‘I understand you’ll be briefing the coroner.’

  Hirsch acknowledged that he was, adding, ‘It would help if I could have a word with you sometime.’

  ‘Come for dinner,’ Katie said.

  Her mother paused for a beat, recovered, and said, ‘There you have it. Dinner. Six-thirty—country hours.’

  ~ * ~

  23

  COUNTRY FOOD: LAMB chops and vegetables.

  Then at eight-thirty, Katie in bed, they talked, Hirsch in an armchair, Wendy on the sofa, separated by a heavy rug on polished floorboards. Bookshelves to waist height lined three walls, with photographs, prints and a single water
colour arranged in the spaces above. No television—that was in a sunroom at the back of the house. Hirsch checked the book titles: biographies, photography, art, travel, and a mix of good fiction and crap. No cookbooks, and none that he’d seen in the kitchen, thank the lord above. Vases, a couple of small brass gods from some trip to South-East Asia.

  Street was watching. An ironic flicker in her face and voice she said, ‘Pass muster?’

  Hirsch gave her a faint grin. ‘Nice room.’

  ‘For an interrogation.’

  ‘A chat.’

  ‘A chat,’ Wendy said, and stretched her limbs and arranged herself along the length of the sofa. Hirsch was pretty sure she was having fun with him. Her gaze was sleepy with a hint of humour.

  ‘Fire away.’

  Hirsch took a breath. ‘The popular consensus is that Mrs Latimer committed suicide.’

  Wendy Street dropped her mild smartarse act. She swung upright, tears filling her eyes, a faint glistening in the dim light of the floor lamp beside her. ‘Can’t we call her Alison?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And as far as I’m concerned, she didn’t kill herself.’

  Hirsch shifted in his chair. ‘You were close?’

  ‘Katie and I moved here four years ago and I met her pretty much straight away. We became friends. Walking distance from each other. And she was lonely.’

  ‘What can you tell me about her? Her health. Moods.’

  ‘I know what you’re getting at. Look, now and then she complained of stiffness in her hand, maybe arthritis. She said the wind turbines got to her, especially at night. If there was an easterly wind blowing she’d wake up in shock with her heart pounding. She said the sleep deprivation was getting to her.’

  Hirsch thought of his own reaction to the turbines. ‘I had a strange feeling when I stood by one of the turbines the other day. Like I was seasick.’

  ‘Yet other people aren’t affected. Katie and I sleep like babes.’ A shrug. ‘There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of a syndrome. It’s the noise, apparently, and low-frequency soundwaves.’

  ‘Her husband and sons weren’t affected?’

  ‘No. But her mother-in-law was. These wind farms have split families, you know. Ray and his father were dead set on getting turbines on the property; they were ropeable when the company decided on Finola Armstrong’s place instead.’

  ‘This syndrome: could it have affected Mrs Lat...Alison so much that she’d take her own life?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘I can’t overlook the fact that she made a previous suicide attempt.’

  ‘Look, when I first met her, Allie was very timid. She opened up gradually and admitted things weren’t great in her marriage and that she felt depressed. She’d have panic attacks and heart arrhythmia, she got very down sometimes. I told her to talk to her doctor about anti-depressants, but she shied away from that. I think she was scared her husband would find out. Then about a year ago she was found with a gun as if she intended to shoot herself.’

  ‘Did she ever talk of suicide to you?’

  ‘She told me once she wished she could end it all. At the time I thought she meant she wanted to get out of the marriage. I still think that. I don’t think she was saying she wanted to kill herself.’

  ‘Why didn’t she just leave? Ask for a divorce?’

  ‘The boys, I suppose. And she was afraid. No skills to speak of, no money, and there are no jobs for an unskilled woman her age around here.’

  ‘But she did walk out a couple of times, went to stay with her parents?’

  Wendy struggled with her throat, trying to swallow. ‘Once late last year, and again last week.’

  ‘What did her husband do or say? Her father-in-law, for that matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. But Ray did say to her, all the time, “The only way you’ll leave here is in a box.”‘

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The statement sat there between them. ‘Did he hit her? Did you see evidence of it or did she ever mention it?’

  ‘No, but I wondered. She’d hold herself stiffly sometimes. Did the autopsy find any unexplained bruises on her?’

  Hirsch knew he didn’t have to answer that. ‘No.’

  ‘I’m surprised. But let’s say he had hit her in the past. What was she going to do about it? She can’t report him to the police: he’s mates with them. Footy club mates, what’s more.’

  Hirsch said carefully, ‘And you don’t have a high opinion of the Redruth police. Even if Mr Latimer didn’t have ties to them.’

  She shrugged. ‘They’re bullies.’ Then her face altered, sharpened. ‘It can’t hurt to tell you: I intend to call a public meeting about them—a protest meeting.’

  Hirsch said slowly, ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ve been in touch with your superintendent.’

  Hirsch said, ‘Good.’

  She squinted at him, not satisfied, as if she suspected he already knew. To deflect her he said, ‘How was Alison this past week? She left home again, like before, but did she seem downhearted about it?’

  ‘The opposite, I can’t describe it. Upbeat, even elated, as if her eyes had been opened. She was going to ask for a divorce.’

  She hadn’t been upbeat the day Hirsch met her. More like a doll: stiff, cold, powerless. He’d been in uniform, however, so she probably distrusted him, saw him as siding with her husband and Kropp.

  ‘Did she tell you she’d come into an inheritance?’

  ‘Of course. She knew it wasn’t enough to buy a house in the city, but was enough to buy time somewhere, get settled, look for a job. Breathing-space money. Running-away money.’

  ‘Did her husband know about it?’

  ‘Motive, right?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘He knew.’

  A child’s troubled cough floated down the hallway. Wendy stiffened, head cocked, ready to take to her feet. There was no follow-up cough. She relaxed again, gave Hirsch a crooked smile, and said, ‘The Latimers are rich, right?’

  Hirsch nodded cautiously. ‘They appear to be.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Wendy said. ‘Appear to be. But it’s all tied up in land and equipment. The Latimers are big spenders. The biggest and best tractor, the biggest and best shearing shed, the biggest and best stud ram.’

  ‘Alison told you this?’

  ‘It’s common knowledge.’

  ‘What did Alison say about it?’

  ‘She told me there was never enough household spending money. Always plenty for a new truck or another parcel of land, but she was never allowed to spend anything on the house. The fridge was on its last legs, the carpet needed replacing, the curtains had been there since the year dot. It did her no good to complain or beg. She said her father-in-law was a real control freak. He’d go through her supermarket receipts and ask why hadn’t she bought no-brand tissues, why such expensive shampoo.

  ‘Ray put up with it?’

  ‘Everyone did. Of course, Ray’s been learning at his father’s knee. He’s like his dad, bad tempered, a heavy drinker, a tyrant at home. Rarely has...had, a kind word for Allie. He used to snap his fingers to get her attention.’

  ‘I know the type.’

  Wendy shuffled forward on the sofa. ‘Look, everyone sees Ray as the life and soul of the party, community spirited, an all-round good bloke. But in private it’s a different story. Allie said he was cold—indifferent—to her side of the family, and he’d barely talk to her or the kids except to lay down the law.’

  Hirsch pictured Raymond Latimer standing over his sons and his small-boned wife, weaving threats, his voice low and insinuating when it wasn’t raised, his big fingers twisting and flicking. The image came strongly and felt real. ‘The other day Jack seemed terrified that I’d tell his father he’d been shooting the rifle.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Do you think Ray hits his sons?�
�

  ‘According to Allie, no, it’s all verbal. Yelling, belittling...Especially Craig. You should hear him at football matches. The parent from hell.’

  ‘Everything comes back to football.’

  Hirsch said it lightly, but Wendy wasn’t amused. ‘Football, cricket, tennis in a pinch, in that order. And because Tiverton’s too small to field its own teams, the locals play for Redruth.’ She shot Hirsch a mirthless grin. ‘And that’s how Ray Latimer became best mates with your sergeant.’