Bitter Wash Road Page 23

  Hirsch returned the grin.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘Ray was a district champion when he was young. He was going to play for a league team. Then he hurt his knee and the big dream came to nothing. Now he’s trying to relive it through Craig. He keeps pushing the poor kid, but Craig’s hopeless at sport, quite uncoordinated, and his heart’s not in it. I bet he wishes he was still at boarding school where Ray can’t bully him.’

  Hirsch noted that. ‘Why isn’t he?’

  Another grin devoid of humour. ‘The official line is, homesickness. Actually they pulled him out to save on school fees.’

  ‘We keep returning to money.’

  ‘Don’t we. I think there was money, a generation or two ago, but Leonard and Ray have spent it all, there have been droughts, costs have risen, incomes have fallen...’

  Pretty much what Ray Latimer had told Hirsch. ‘Apparently they owe money here and there,’ he said, thinking of Tennant, the Tiverton shopkeeper.

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  Hirsch tried to see all the angles, feel the atmosphere in the Latimer household. ‘So Craig was taken out of boarding school and now he’s at Redruth High.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How does he feel about that?’

  ‘I see him in the yard and the corridors, looking lost and miserable. I’ve tried to talk to him, but he avoids me. Ray told him to stay clear, probably. I’m a bad influence, I think—some leftie feminist rabblerouser who might put ideas in his head like I did Alison.’

  Yeah, she’d be full of that. Hirsch gave her a crooked smile. ‘How does Craig get to school?’

  ‘Hah! Exactly. Here I am, just across the road, willing and able, but he takes the bus.’

  ‘And life for Jack?’

  ‘You noticed his bad foot? That saves him from the worst of it. He was never going to be a football champion. But I imagine he’s just as browbeaten as Craig.’

  They fell silent. Hirsch said, ‘Tell me more about Ray.’

  ‘Well, he’s a Latimer.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The Latimer men have a certain reputation. The moment I moved in here Leonard dropped by to introduce himself, welcome me to the district. That’s nice, I thought, until he backed me up against the fridge and felt me up, wondering if I got lonely with no man in my life.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Shoved him away, told him I’d report him to the police, to which he replied, “Good luck with that.” I haven’t had much to do with him since.’

  Hirsch bit his lip. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, is Katie’s father...?’

  ‘Died. Car crash.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She shrugged but she also blinked. ‘Anyway, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. Before long, Ray made his move. Ray favours a more subtle approach. The double entendre, the insinuation, the accidental brushing against you. I’m expecting Craig to have a go next.’ She waved one arm agitatedly. ‘Sorry, scrub that.’

  Hirsch said, ‘Did, or does, Ray put the moves on other women?’

  ‘Is that a trick question? Everyone knows about Saturday night.’

  Hirsch held his palm up. ‘Country grapevine. Put it this way: has he been at it for a while? Did Alison know about Finola Armstrong or his other women, if any?’

  ‘Ray would taunt her. He’d stay out all night, come home without showering, make phone calls and not bother to hide what it was about.’

  ‘What a prince,’ Hirsch said. He tried to find his way into his next question. ‘What’s your take on Finola Armstrong?’

  ‘Well, it’s easy to condemn someone, isn’t it? I don’t like her much, but that has nothing to do with her sleeping with Ray Latimer. I just don’t warm to her. Too hard edged and pragmatic. If it doesn’t involve the seasons or the harvest or stock prices, she’s got nothing to say for herself. But she is a widow, after all. She was left with a farm to run and has made a success of it.’

  ‘A practical woman.’

  Wendy laughed harshly. ‘If you mean she’d stage a suicide to solve a problem, I just can’t see it. I mean, what problem?’

  ‘Removing her rival in love.’

  ‘So she could land Raymond Latimer? It’s the other way round: Allies death will solve his problem.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Please, Hirsch, look closer to home. Ray and his father are these good old boys, pillars of the community, local gentry. Underneath it, they’re awful men.’

  She’d called him ‘Hirsch’. He liked it. ‘But so far everyone with a motive also has an alibi.’

  ‘They paid someone.’

  Hirsch looked at her. Anyone else, he would have scoffed. The meal sat pleasantly in him and the light was warm and dim. Music played softly, an iPod on a shuffle—The Waifs right now, and Hirsch, lulled by the song, didn’t want to go home. He stared at Wendy with her legs folded beneath her, one shapely foot resting along her thigh, and she stared at him. And there was a moment, but Hirsch let it run out like sand, with the result that Wendy, harking a little crossly to the song, said, ‘Are the wicked going to wail and weep?’

  ~ * ~

  24

  OCTOBER GATHERED ITS skirts and raced past.

  Alison Latimer’s funeral attracted half the district and seemed to Hirsch an expression of confusion and heartache, an occasion that sundered, not cemented, the community. A gritty wind blew and the ants raced in the red dirt and he didn’t see any hired killers lurking. The days were longer now and the sun had heat in it, and old farmers in the churchyard informed Hirsch that it was ‘going to be a long, hot summer,’ sniffing the air cannily. He dared not laugh. What did he know about disturbances of the bones, the air?

  ~ * ~

  He settled into his small-town role of stern father, kindly father, father-confessor, bloke next door and go-to guy. All of the locals had his mobile number and some found a reason to call it. Or they knocked on his door if the HiLux was parked in the driveway. They wanted him to find their missing stock, sheepdogs, fence posts, fuel drums, motorbikes and mothers suffering from dementia. And he drove all the time, sometimes three hundred kilometres a day, investigating thefts, introducing himself at remote farms, checking on the alcoholic shearer who had a history of violence, the intellectually disabled forty-year-old whose mother and sole caregiver had just died, the alternative-healing woman who’d threatened wind farm workers, the schizophrenic who’d stopped taking his pills. He made a dash to Redruth with a gasping teenager whose asthma inhaler had run out while her parents were away in the city. He administered breath tests, doorknocked people who’d failed to renew their car registrations, had a quiet word with kids seen doing burnouts—once in front of the police station. He intercepted a ute with a stolen stud ram on board. Even helped an elderly couple get their shopping home.

  It wasn’t all police work. One day he confessed to a mild fondness for tennis and found himself on the tennis club committee, where he was quizzed on any letter-writing or bookkeeping skills or experience he might have. He could have been everyone’s mate, but the secret to being a cop in a small rural community—the secret and the pity—was to get close to the locals but not too close. And it was never close enough.

  ~ * ~

  Thus his settled life. What wasn’t settled were the deaths of Melia Donovan and Alison Latimer, and they ate at him. While the accident investigators widened their search for a suspect vehicle, contacting crash repairers and hospitals, viewing CCTV tapes along Barrier Highway from Broken Hill to Adelaide, Hirsch kept the pressure on Gemma Pitcher’s mother, extended family, friends and enemies. Had Gemma made contact? Phone calls? Letters? E-mails? Anything on Facebook? Was there a favourite town or holiday spot she’d liked in the past? Old boyfriend? He phoned the far-flung contacts and visited those closer to.

  He also called in on Leanne Donovan. He had nothing to tell her. She asked him not to come again.

  ~ * ~<
br />
  The rest of his time was spent keeping others off his back.

  DeLisle, Croome, Kropp, Spurling, all wanting updates or action. He wished Wendy Street would call, wanting an update.

  ‘I need to speak to Ray Latimer, Sarge,’ he told Kropp.

  ‘Lay off a while longer. Let the family grieve.’

  ‘He’s your mate. Ask him to phone me.’

  ‘Lay off, I said.’

  ~ * ~

  Then one day Wendy Street did call. She was friendly, but brisk, as if snatching a moment in her busy day, and related a bit of remembered conversation with Alison Latimer before signing off with a bright, ‘See ya!’

  Feeling unmoored, Hirsch replaced the handset. He stared at the dusty calendar, replaying the call. Had he heard a tentative quality threaded through the breezy voice, Wendy drawing on a measure of courage to phone him? More courage than I’ve got, he thought gloomily. Then immediately berated himself for projecting his pathetic hopes and fears onto her. It was entirely possible that she didn’t feel the same flicker of attraction and therefore had no trouble making the call, and if there’d been anything in her voice it was a kind of resignation: she had information to impart, but clearly not to Kropp, and that left Hirsch.

  When it came to tying yourself in knots, Hirsch could tie for Australia. He grabbed a pen and his notebook and pressed down hard on the page:

  October 29, 3.30 p.m., telephone call from Wendy Street, recalling two statements made by Alison Latimer early this year: ‘Ray thinks Jack got his bad foot from my side of the family’ and ‘Ray keeps saying a good stud manager culls animals that weaken the strain’.

  Nasty, but it didn’t prove a crime had been committed.

  ~ * ~

  And Spurling dropped in again, insisting on coffee and a biscuit this time.

  ‘Like what you’ve done to the place,’ he said, gazing around Hirsch’s sitting room.

  Painted the walls, got a carpet cleaner in, replaced the curtains and light shades, hung a couple of Tiverton Primary School Community Art Fair watercolours. Wildflowers somewhere out east. The Razorback under boiling black clouds, shot by a bolt of sunlight.

  ‘Putting down roots, sir,’ said Hirsch from the kitchen.

  ‘Good on you.’

  Hirsch came in with a tray. Spurling settled himself on one of the armchairs, tatty under a patchwork quilt cover from the same art fair. He patted the fabric. ‘Very pretty, Constable.’

  ‘Made by one of the mothers at the school across the road,’ Hirsch said, pouring the coffee.

  Spurling nodded. ‘My wife’s into this kind of thing: needlework, tapestry, patchwork...’ His slender fingers stroked a tiny square of blue with white polka dots, then he glanced up at Hirsch. ‘Sit down, Paul, for god’s sake. I’m not going to bite you.’

  Hirsch dropped into the other armchair. ‘Sir.’

  Spurling blew on the surface of his coffee. ‘But you will recall that I asked to be kept updated on your Redruth colleagues.’

  ‘Sir.’

  A little steel in the voice now: ‘Nothing to report, it seems. Why is that, Constable?’

  Hirsch shifted in his chair. ‘Things have been a bit hectic, and I haven’t had anything to do with them lately.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Spurling said, his disbelief evident. He crossed his legs, spread his arms on the quilt cover. ‘The Street woman’s going ahead with her public meeting. No date set, but goodness, what a lovely experience that’s going to be.’ He waited.

  Had Hirsch jolted at hearing the name? He held his tongue. He didn’t want to fuck things up when the superintendent was emerging as his only potential ally in the whole mess.

  Spurling broke the impasse with a curt laugh. ‘Mr Inscrutable. Where are we with the suicide? The coroner can’t proceed until the police hand him a brief.’

  ‘The thing is, sir, I don’t think it was a suicide.’

  ‘Ah. All right, spit it out.’

  Hirsch expressed his doubts and frustrations: the car, the rifle, the trampled-upon scene. The diamond ring. Alison Latimer’s hand. Her clean shoes. The ballistics report, the pathologist’s findings.

  ‘You’re light-on for evidence,’ Spurling observed. ‘Where’s the car?’

  ‘Sitting in the impound lot.’

  ‘Might not be too late to have it printed and tested for fibres and fluids.’

  Hirsch shook his head. ‘I tried that. No joy. The windows were open, condensation had formed, too much time had elapsed.’

  ‘You took photos?’

  ‘Printed them out,’ Hirsch said, handing Spurling a folder.

  The superintendent flipped through them, stopping occasionally, glum and unimpressed. ‘It had been raining, from memory?’

  ‘A couple of days earlier.’

  ‘Stray tyre impressions? Shoe prints?’

  ‘Tyres, no. As for foot traffic, half of Christendom traipsed over the area.’

  A pause, Spurling assessing Hirsch. ‘You think it’s suspicious that her shoes are clean.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what we’ll hear in court, Constable, is that people don’t abandon their instincts. Here’s a neat, tidy woman who, even though intending to shoot herself, didn’t want to get dirty. She skirted around the mud, kept to the grass.’

  Hirsch made a noise of grudging agreement. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘The same applies to the diamond ring. She didn’t want it to get damaged or lost or lifted by light fingers. You say she knew about firearms?’

  Hirsch shrugged. ‘Farmer’s wife. Country woman.’

  ‘Still,’ mused Spurling, ‘not the most common way for a woman to kill herself.’

  ‘Exactly, sir,’ Hirsch tapped his forefinger on one of the photographs. ‘And see the way her thumb’s still hooked inside the trigger guard?’

  ‘That’s hardly compelling.’

  ‘But she had a problem with that hand, a weakness, couldn’t straighten her fingers or thumb very well. Meanwhile her prints are on the stock and butt—but not the barrel.’

  Spurling shook his head. ‘She did have some movement in that hand, yes? And it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that she held the rifle around the trigger area with her right hand and manoeuvred the barrel tip into her mouth with the left hand holding the stock rather than the barrel.’

  Hirsch grinned, rueful. ‘You’d be a good defence barrister, sir.’

  Spurling leaned in with a tiny smile that mirrored Hirsch’s. ‘Constable, I’m anticipating the questions that might get asked at the inquest—or at trial, if it gets that far, and it seems to me you don’t have anyone in the frame for a crime.’

  ‘Sir.’ Hirsch hated to admit it. At the back of his mind was the thought that he’d paid too much attention to Wendy Street’s viewpoint. Sympathetic because he was attracted to her.

  ‘And remember that brain injuries cause peculiar behaviour. So does the intent to commit suicide.’ Spurling paused. ‘Was she checked for GSR?’

  ‘A few flecks.’

  ‘There you go.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel right, sir.’

  Spurling sat back, mildly exasperated. ‘Okay, was there anything else about the scene, the body?’

  ‘She had some bruises and abrasions, sir.’

  ‘Suggestive of...?’

  Hirsch gave a little grimace, thinking of the terse pathologist. ‘Of being manhandled.’

  ‘Or of falling over, falling against the hut,’ Spurling said. ‘Get a second opinion.’

  ‘She’s been cremated.’

  ‘Ah. Well, I suppose you can always get someone else to look at the pathologist’s findings.’ He gave an apologetic shrug and got to his feet. On the way out he said, ‘For god’s sake, Paul, get that flaming vehicle washed.’

  ~ * ~

  The days passed, Hirsch patrolled. On a couple of occasions he was in town at lunch or going-home time, and found himself watchin
g out for Katie Street and Jackson Latimer in the schoolyard across the highway. Forty kids, ranging from five to twelve, full of din and discord as they flowed out of the buildings and across the playing field or into waiting cars. Sometimes they were the town’s only source of sound. He’d pick out Katie Street by her animation, a quick flash of movement and intelligence. He’d pick out Jack Latimer, stunned and lost.