Bitter Wash Road Read online

  ‘She lives here,’ Metcalfe said, glancing at his daughter with a level of sadness.

  Chatterton was a pixie, a wisp, slender, her black hair cropped to a cap around her skull. Jeans, a scrap of T-shirt that showed her pale stomach. She looked no more than seventeen, but Hirsch knew she was twenty-five.

  He smiled at her. ‘Someone pinched your dad’s car just before he got back last week?’

  She nodded, and Hirsch wondered if she didn’t trust her voice.

  Metcalfe patted her knee while watching Hirsch with suspicion. ‘Why are the South Australia police interested?’

  Hirsch kept it vague. ‘A car matching the description was seen in the vicinity of an incident in the Redruth area.’

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ Chatterton whispered.

  Hirsch wondered about the surname. Mother’s name? Maybe she was married. ‘I’m not suggesting it was you, I just need to eliminate the car.’

  ‘Consider it eliminated,’ Metcalfe said. ‘Sandy wouldn’t have taken it out.’ He had a sweet, benighted face, a powerful frame and sun-scorched skin. Like Bob Muir, a quiet, slow, tolerant man who’d probably never committed a crime in his life. The daughter was a different matter. She’d begun exhibiting meth twitches as she sat there, her skin crawling. She looked unfinished, a wraith beside her big father, and could barely meet Hirsch’s eye.

  ‘Sandy,’ he said gently, ‘what day did you discover the car was missing?’

  ‘Tuesday, when I got home from work.’

  ‘She does odd jobs for the council,’ Metcalfe said.

  ‘And you flew in from overseas the next day?’ Hirsch asked him.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You reported it to the police, Sandy?’

  She jiggled, blinked and managed a nod. Metcalfe patted her knee fondly, but there was a tightness in him. ‘She’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘But she’s had a rough trot these past few years. Husband used to knock her around. Health issues.’

  Like addiction. She was barely holding it together now, and Hirsch thought she might fracture if he pushed. He smiled a smile that said he understood and hadn’t come to judge. What he wanted to say was: ‘You sold your dad’s car to buy drugs, right?’

  Instead he said, ‘Did the neighbours see anything?’

  Sandra Chatterton shook her head violently.

  ‘Not her fault,’ Metcalfe said.

  The stress was there in his voice. As if he thought the sky might fall in if he didn’t hold it up and he’d been holding it up for years and years and one day it would fall in despite his best efforts. He rested his solid hand on his daughter’s knee, great pain in his deeply recessed eyes.

  Sam Hempel had seen a black Chrysler bearing Daryl Metcalfe’s plates parked at a house in the mid-north of South Australia as far back as September: over two months ago. Katie Street and Jack Latimer had seen it too, passing through Tiverton. And Katie had seen it again, a few days later, as if it hadn’t left the district, or had returned.

  ‘Do you know anyone down in South Australia, Sandra?’

  She shook her head so hard the cropped hair seemed to ripple.

  He said off-handedly, ‘You’ve never been to parties down there?’

  Another violent shake.

  ‘What is this?’ Metcalfe demanded, uneasy, his high forehead damp.

  Then an alteration in him. He looked fully at his daughter, full of regard and suffering and forgiveness. ‘Sandy?’ he said, his voice a loving, low rasp, pebbles slipping off a shovel.

  It was enough to flip her. Her head dropped, her hands went to her ears. ‘I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You sold the car to buy drugs?’ her father asked gently.

  ‘No, I swear.’

  ‘You owed people for drugs?’

  ‘No!’

  Hirsch was content to watch and listen. An old drama was playing out, the devoted father, the beloved daughter and her demons.

  ‘I went on a trip,’ she muttered.

  Metcalfe glanced at Hirsch as if seeking permission to continue. Hirsch gave him a nod.

  ‘Where, sweetheart?’

  ‘I wanted to see the sea.’

  Hirsch could understand that. He said, ‘The nearest water is Port Augusta.’

  ‘I went there and then I went a bit further.’

  ‘When was this?’

  Sandra Chatterton’s knee jiggled. Hirsch could see the poor thin bone inside the fabric of her jeans. ‘My birthday.’

  The father looked pained. ‘Beginning of September.’

  ‘What happened, Sandy?’

  ‘I ended up in Port Pirie.’

  You could usually get a deal in a port town, Hirsch knew. A deal with a big shiny car as collateral. ‘And?’

  ‘I hooked up with these guys,’ she told her father, full of apology.

  He patted her knee.

  ‘I wasn’t using, Dad, honestly. I’ve been getting my act together. But it was my birthday, and you know, you weren’t around...’

  ‘It’s all right, sweetie.’

  ‘We got busted,’ Chatterton said.

  Hirsch said carefully, ‘By the police in Port Pirie?’

  ‘We were in this motel room, not making any noise or anything, not really partying or anything, and they came storming in.’

  ‘You were charged? Fined? Jailed?’

  ‘One of the guys I was with got six weeks. I think the other one was undercover, he just disappeared.’

  ‘You?’

  She squirmed. ‘Because me and Dad’ve got different last names and my ID shows my old address I couldn’t prove I was driving Dad’s car. They rang the police here, who talked to the neighbours, who said Dad was overseas and the house was empty.’ Voice and face said she’d spent her life feeling pretty much invisible.

  ‘They accused you of driving a stolen car?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They confiscated it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Hirsch was starting to feel uneasy. ‘Who did, Sandy?’

  ‘This high-up guy who said maybe he could keep me out of jail if I’d, you know, do stuff.’

  High-up guy. Hirsch felt a roaring in his ears, all light blotted out. ‘A senior policeman?’

  ‘I told him I was HIV-positive so he wouldn’t touch me,’ Chatterton said. She looked beseechingly at her father. ‘I’m not, Dad, promise.’

  ‘Smart thinking, sweetheart,’ Metcalfe said, patting his daughter’s hand and giving Hirsch a complicated look: guardedness, pity and an undertow of steel.

  Battling to keep his voice steady, Hirsch said, ‘Can you tell me what this man looked like?’

  ‘Tall, dark hair. Maybe fifty?’ She went on until Hirsch noticed the taste that was building in his mouth.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Okay, Sandy, I’m going to give you some names: umm...Ringling, Wearne, Spurling, Herman, Ingleton—’

  ‘Spurling.’

  Hirsch sat there. He looked at Metcalfe. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Metcalfe, but there are certain things I have to ask Sandy—’

  Metcalfe folded his arms. ‘I’m staying. That all right, sweetheart?’

  His daughter rested her shoulder against his. She seemed calmer now, sweet and safe, and Hirsch thought he could see what Spurling would have seen in her, a gamine appeal.

  ‘When this man said maybe he could keep you out of jail, what, exactly, was he proposing?’

  She told him: parties with some fun guys, clothes, all kinds of drugs, holidays...’In return for some modelling and film work,’ she said. ‘Sex, of course.’

  ‘And he let you go?’

  Sandy Chatterton was frightened again, tinged a little with outrage. ‘He said he knew where I lived. I had no money. I had to hitch back.’

  You were lucky though, Hirsch thought. Other women haven’t been so lucky.

  ~ * ~

  32

  DURING THE THREE-AND-A-HALF-HOUR d
rive back to Tiverton, Hirsch mentally outlined the case he’d present to DeLisle and Croome.

  Melia Donovan first.

  Melia is adventurous, suggestible, anxious to please, her head easily turned by a man with money and charm. Coulter spends some time, money and charm on her, flatters her, lets her drive his car, gives her a fun time: alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, sex. Gradually introduces her to a group of men who like to party with underage girls. Perhaps she’s reluctant, so he holds the shoplifting charge over her head, threats of youth detention.

  Or he used Gemma Pitcher to bring Melia on board. Were the girls friends before this? There was the age difference; but there weren’t many teenage girls of any age in Tiverton. Maybe it was inevitable they’d gravitate to each other.

  Or Gemma recruited Melia Donovan off her own bat. To curry favour with the men? To share the sense of...whatever it was she’d been feeling? Shame? Reflected glory? Melia being the pretty one, the sexy one? Hirsch would ask Gemma those questions—if he could find her, if she wasn’t dead. The country out east was polka-dotted with mine shafts.

  Something had gone wrong at the party—some abuse, something a bit too weird—with the result that Melia had grabbed her clothes and run. What was Gemma’s reaction? We’ve all been there, Melia. Just suck it up? Or was she sympathetic, but too scared to intervene? Either way, she wouldn’t have been complicit in what happened next.

  ~ * ~

  Hirsch remembered three things about the day Melia Donovan’s body was found.

  One, as soon as Dr McAskill finished his examination he’d walked a few metres out of earshot and made a phone call.

  Two, McAskill then drove to Tiverton, where he not only broke the news to Melia’s mother but also made contact with Gemma Pitcher—who later disappeared.

  Three, Kropp showed up.

  None of it was coincidental. It all stemmed directly from events at the party. McAskill witnesses the incident between David Coulter and Melia Donovan. He sees Coulter chase after her. When she’s found dead at the side of the road a few hours later, it’s natural for him to believe Coulter killed her. Coulter assumes it’ll be treated as an accident and leaves it at that, but McAskill knows it’s a problem for everyone. It needs to be contained. So he calls Kropp. And Kropp duly contains Hirsch, by ordering him to stay put at the scene, giving McAskill time to contain Gemma Pitcher, probably by threatening her.

  Meanwhile, Kropp ensures that McAskill will perform the autopsy. Good result all round.

  ~ * ~

  Hirsch headed south, the kilometres rolling beneath him and the sun beating down, the light permanently watery out ahead on the Barrier Highway, mica-bright at the edges, broken-glass bright.

  The story unrolled like the highway. What the men hadn’t foreseen was a suspicious wife. Alison Latimer followed her husband, worked out what was going on and confronted him. I want a divorce. Half the farm, or I’ll see you in jail.

  Latimer panics, calls the others. They’ll all go down if Alison Latimer contacts the police, because it won’t be her husband’s mate Kropp she contacts. It’ll be police in Adelaide.

  He doesn’t want to kill her, but what’s the alternative? And there’s a bonus: his money problems solved. Nice little inheritance; no divorce payout; one less mouth to feed.

  Plus, she’s got a history of instability.

  But who would have pulled the trigger? The Latimer men had been careful to construct unbreakable alibis. The old man taking his grandsons away for the weekend. Ray making a big public appearance with his girlfriend at the football final, then getting so obnoxiously drunk he’s thrown in the lockup overnight. Easy enough for Kropp and his crew to arrange. The icing on the cake is Constable Hirschhausen, who has no stake in the matter and no relationship with Raymond Latimer, and who will be Latimer’s alibi for the later part of the morning.

  So who abducted and then shot her? Not Kropp: he was in Redruth. Not Nicholson or Andrewartha. No one in their right mind would rely on those clowns to organise a hit. McAskill? Coulter? Logan? Venn?

  Maybe. Hirsch couldn’t see it. He kept coming back with bitter certainty to Spurling. Knowledge of evidence and police procedures. Enough seniority in the region to give him some control over the investigation and the information that flowed from it. Smart, cautious enough to make sure he’s in a position to contain and monitor—to disarm—anyone who might show signs of independent thinking. That’s why he’d got Hirsch to prepare the brief for the coroner. An outsider, easily cut out from the pack.

  Spurling could have asked Kropp to prepare the brief, though. Why hadn’t he? The chance that the press or someone in HQ would question Kropp’s impartiality? The rumbles about Kropp’s policing methods had been getting louder, complaints becoming more public. Maybe he just wasn’t a safe bet.

  Managing Hirsch was a much better idea.

  It was a pity for Spurling that McAskill couldn’t have performed the Latimer autopsy as well, but there was no way a small-town doctor would get a gunshot death.

  Hirsch’s phone rang in the car cradle. He pulled over, buffeted by the wind of a passing truck. One bar of reception.

  ‘Where are you?’ Rosie DeLisle demanded.

  ‘Halfway between Redruth and Broken Hill.’

  ‘Can hardly hear you.’

  Hirsch tilted the phone, then himself. In the end he got out and walked along the miserable verge. ‘Is that better?’

  Another buffeting truck, grit stinging him and a hawk slipping across the sky.

  ‘Not much. Listen, don’t talk, just wanted to fill you in. We had quite a chat with your boy—though his story’s a bit all over the place.’

  ‘Sam’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.’

  ‘What? I can hardly hear you. Anyway, it’s all on record now, so we sent him home.’

  ‘What about the burglary charges?’

  ‘What? Listen,’ Rosie shouted, ‘just letting you know we’ve found connections between some of these heroes. Venn, Coulter, Logan and Latimer all boarded at St Peter’s. Logan met McAskill when they shared a house together at university. There’ve been complaints lodged against all of them at one time or another. Several against Coulter, according to the chief magistrate. Refusal to grant a police application for an AVO against a violent ex-con who was stalking his wife...Overturned a protection order against some school bullies...’

  Hirsch thought that sounded like the Coulter he’d met. A crummy small-town solicitor who’d developed a gorgeous sense of his rightness in the world when he became a magistrate. No wonder Kropp didn’t like him. But what about Kropp?

  ‘What about Kropp?’

  ‘Who? Kropp? Don’t know,’ Rosie said. ‘Nothing on file except policing complaints. How are you doing on the Chrysler?’

  ‘Tracked it down to Broken Hill. Owned by a guy there whose—’

  ‘What?’ Rosie sounded peeved. ‘Sorry, Paul, didn’t catch a word of that. Look, call me when you get a better signal.’

  ~ * ~

  Hirsch climbed behind the wheel again. Nose down, the sun pouring through the glass, fatigue settling in him.

  He tried to get inside Spurling’s skin. A man of precision and no little charm. A crisp bureaucrat harbouring a creep, a satyr, within. Huge ego. A man who selects and rejects, controls and judges. He’s been at it for a long time, Hirsch thought, and nothing’s ever gone wrong. He’s become complacent.

  He’s been the area commander for a long time. Maybe as long as Kropp’s been the Redruth sergeant? Roughly the same age, so they might have known each other since the academy. Or served together early on, stayed in touch. Knew each other; knew each other’s...tastes.

  Hirsch saw the web of interests. Spurling and Kropp and his boys. Kropp and the locals—businessmen, the football club, the landed gentry. Hirsch wondered idly what the courthouse tension between Kropp and Coulter and Logan had been about. He’d know once the arrests were made.

  Finally
, the Chrysler.

  An out-of-state car, none of the locals knew it and it hadn’t been reported stolen. The owner was overseas. A perfect set of wheels for Spurling. He could come and go without anyone thinking anything but interstate driver, passing through. There were always New South Wales cars on the Barrier Highway.

  Except that two children had seen the car, and it had frightened them half to death.