Bitter Wash Road Read online

  Hirsch gave his own version of the abbreviated nod. ‘How about we leave it as a friendly caution. It would have been different if someone had been hurt or the bullet had gone through the roof of my car.’ He paused. ‘Think of the paperwork.’

  He got a smile from her but it was brief, her upper teeth worrying her bottom lip again. She cast a troubled look at the children, watching closely. They knew some kind of deal was being worked out.

  ‘I don’t know the how—I don’t know where the gun was or where they found the bullets or whose idea it was—but I think I know the why.’

  A car passed by on Bitter Wash Road, tyres crushing the short-lived paste of rainwater, dust and pebbles. Hirsch heard it clearly, and now he noticed the country odours: eucalyptus, pine, the roses, the grass and pollens, a hint of dung and lanolin. He realised his cut hand was stinging. All of his senses were firing, suddenly.

  ‘Pullar and Hanson,’ he said.

  Her mouth opened. ‘They told you about the car they saw yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wendy folded her arms. ‘It probably wasn’t Pullar and Hanson, I know that, but the point is, they are scared. Ever since it’s been on the news, Katie’s been keeping a scrapbook. Jack has nightmares. The shooting is self-protection.’

  A burst of staticky squawks and crackles issued from the HiLux. ‘Excuse me.’ Hirsch reached in and picked up the handset. Sergeant Kropp, demanding to know his current location.

  ‘Poking around, Sarge,’ Hirsch said, watching Wendy Street return to the veranda. ‘No sign of anyone shooting a gun.’

  ‘Well, get your arse up to Muncowie. Make contact with a Mr Stewart Nancarrow, on his way down to Adelaide from Broken Hill, driving a white Pajero with New South Wales plates, somewhere on the highway there.’

  Hirsch scribbled the information in his notebook. ‘The reason?’

  ‘A body beside the road.’

  ~ * ~

  3

  HIRSCH’S FIRST THOUGHT was: Pullar and Hanson, the kids were right, and he felt a kind of dismay mingled with excitement. ‘Suspicious?’

  ‘Probable hit-and-run.’

  Hirsch made the mental adjustment: not Pullar and Hanson. ‘Nancarrow?’

  ‘No. He claims he stopped by the road for a leak, saw a dead woman lying in the dirt.’ Kropp paused and added, ‘Dr McAskill’s on his way up there.’

  ‘I’m on it, Sarge.’

  Hirsch placed the handset in the cradle. The women and their children were watching him from the veranda. ‘Got to go,’ he called, climbing behind the wheel. He got a nod for his pains, a couple of half-hearted waves.

  Pausing at the front gate, Hirsch fed ‘Muncowie’ into the GPS. It directed him not back to the highway, as he’d expected, but further out along Bitter Wash Road, which eventually made a gradual curve to the north, smaller roads branching from it. One of them looped west onto the Barrier Highway a short distance north of Muncowie.

  It was a shorter route, Hirsch could see that from the map. Unsealed for most of the distance.

  After twenty minutes, he found himself skirting around the Razorback, driving through red dirt and mallee scrub country, the road surface chopped and powdery where it wasn’t ribbed with a stone underlay. Very little rain had fallen here last night; it was as if a switch had been flicked, marking the transition from arable land to semi-desert. Leasehold land, one-hundred-year leases defined by sagging wire fences, sand-silted tracks and creek beds filled with water-tumbled stones like so many misshapen cricket balls. You might find a fleck of gold in these creek beds if you were lucky, or turn your ankle if you were not. It was land you walked away from sooner or later: Hirsch saw a dozen stone chimneys and eyeless cottages back in the stunted mallee, little heartaches that had struggled on a patch of red dirt and were sinking back into it.

  Ant hills, sandy washaways, foxtails hooked onto gates, a couple of rotting merino carcasses, a tray-less old Austin truck beneath a straggly gumtree. Weathered fence posts and the weary rust loops that tethered them one to the other. He saw an eagle, an emu, a couple of black snakes. It was a land of muted pinks, browns and greys ghosted by the pale blue hills on the horizon.

  That was what he saw. What he didn’t see, but sensed, were abandoned gold diggings, mine shafts, ochre hands stencilled to rock faces. A besetting place. It spooked Hirsch. The sky pressed down and the scrub crouched. ‘It’s lovely out there,’ one of the locals had assured him during the week, waiting while Hirsch witnessed a statutory declaration.

  He passed in and out of creek beds and saw a tiny church perched atop a rise. What the fuck was it doing there, this shell of a church? Ministering to other stone shells, he supposed, left by the men and women who’d settled here and failed and walked away.

  Hirsch fought the steering wheel, the gear lever, the clutch. His foot ached. Even the HiLux struggled, pitching and yawing inflexibly, taking him at a crawling pace through the back country. You had to hand it to technology, the GPS giving him the shortest route but blithely unaware of local conditions. It would take him forever to reach Muncowie at this rate, longer if he holed the sump or punctured a tyre.

  Then he was out on the highway. Muncowie 7 according to the signpost. He made the turn, heading south, the valley less obvious here, the highway striping a broad, flat plain. It gave Hirsch a sense of riding high above sea level, the sky vast and no longer pressing down, the hills a distant smear on either side. Meanwhile the crops, stock and fences were marginally better than the country he’d just passed through, more and greener grass, less dirt, as if he’d passed across the rain shadow again, moved from unsustainable life to a fifty-fifty chance of it.

  And then in the emptiness he saw another car. Black. It drew closer.

  Not a Chrysler. A Falcon, he saw as it passed.

  Hirsch thought about Pullar and Hanson. In terms of timing, geography and logic, it wouldn’t make sense for them to have headed down here. Travel two thousand kilometres in a reasonably distinctive vehicle, away from the country they knew? Hirsch couldn’t see it. But he could see how the men might hunt in a place such as this. They had been preying on roadhouse waitresses along the empty highways, housewives and teenage daughters on lonely country roads.

  ~ * ~

  IT HAD STARTED AS a local backblocks story, a Queensland story— albeit a vicious one—which quickly went viral when Channel Nine muscled in, giving the killers a voice. Back in August a forty-year-old Mount Isa speed freak named Clay Pullar and an eighteen-year-old Brisbane cokehead named Brent Hanson raped and murdered three roadhouse waitresses over a two-week period. Police tracked the men to a caravan park in northern New South Wales but arrived too late. They found the body of a Canadian hitchhiker roped to a bed. Further sightings placed the men in Cairns, Bourke, Alice Springs, Darwin...Nothing definite until they broke into a farmhouse near Wagga, where they raped a teenager in front of her trussed-up parents and fled north with her to a property across the border and along the river at Dirranbandi.

  Feeling pleased with himself, Pullar phoned Channel Nine on his mobile phone. He’d just managed to prove who he was when the signal failed, so Channel Nine dispatched a reporter and a cameraman by helicopter, which set down on the back lawn long enough to leave a satellite phone, and took off again, circling overhead. Pullar appeared. Even through the long pull of the camera lens he looked tall, gaunt, hard, insane. He grinned and waved, showing stumpy teeth, grabbed the phone, returned to the farmhouse, and began to explain himself. An exclusive, a live interview, you couldn’t ask for better. Fuck ethics, the public had a right to know. Fuck sense, too; Pullar made absolutely no sense but was full of frothing lunacy.

  The police took thirty minutes to arrive. They surrounded the house, jammed the signal, chased the helicopter away—and waited. Night fell. They tried to talk to Pullar and Hanson. After a few hours of silence it occurred to them to rush the house...

  They found an elderly man and woman uncons
cious and the Wagga teenager naked and traumatised. No sign of Pullar and Hanson, who had fled, on foot, to a neighbouring property where they stole a beefy black Chrysler 300C station wagon. By daybreak they were hundreds of kilometres north, apparently heading for Longreach. Another rape-and-murder team might have swapped the Chrysler for a less obvious car at the earliest opportunity; Pullar, back on the phone to Nine, had said, ‘Man, this car has got some serious grunt.’

  ~ * ~

  Hirsch squinted, the sun was beating hard and the road shimmered with mirages. Now a collection of tumbledown houses appeared, set two hundred metres off the highway. Muncowie the sign said, an arrow pointing to the little side road that took you there, to a place that seemed to have no function. Rusty rooftops, tired trees, sunlight breaking weakly from a windscreen.

  Then Hirsch was through the town. A kilometre further on a white Pajero appeared, parked at the side of the highway. A man was resting his rump against it; dark heads showing inside the vehicle, behind tinted glass. Hirsch cruised to a stop, switched off and got out, stretched the kinks in his back. He could see the Pajero occupants more clearly now: a woman in the passenger seat, looked like two kids in the back. Roof racks piled with roped-down luggage.

  The driver, coming around to meet him, offered a huge paw.

  ‘The name’s Nancarrow, I called triple zero.’

  Powerful forearms, a nuggetty chest, sun-damaged skin, sunglasses propped above a high, shiny forehead. From Broken Hill, according to Kropp. A mine worker? ‘Heading south for a holiday?’ Hirsch asked. ‘You and the family?’

  ‘Two weeks,’ Nancarrow said.

  Hirsch strolled around to the front of the Pajero, eyed the bumper, the left and right panels. Dust, smeared insects, no dents or blood. ‘You spotted a body?’

  Watching him, Nancarrow said, ‘Down there.’

  The bitumen ran high here, raised a couple of metres up from the pocked soil, the erosion channels. Grass tussocks and a couple of hangdog mallee trees were nearby, clinging to the rim of a shallow depression. If you were a male who’d stopped for a piss, that’s where you’d do it. Two damp patches side by side in the dirt. Father and son?

  As if in answer, Nancarrow said, ‘Me and my son went down there for a leak and saw her.’

  Hirsch glanced uneasily at the Pajero. Nancarrow said, ‘It’s okay, he’s little. I told him the lady had fallen over and the ambulance would come soon and take her to the hospital.

  ‘Did either of you touch her?’

  ‘Christ, no. All I wanted to do was get my kid back to the car before he got too curious.’

  ‘How did you call triple zero? Is there a mobile signal here?’

  ‘Nup, dead. Zilch. I called from the pub.’ He gestured vaguely back along the road.

  Hirsch nodded and slipped in another question. ‘Who is she?’

  Nancarrow blinked. ‘What? Who...? How would I know?’

  ‘Perhaps she was travelling with you? Your neighbour, babysitter, niece? A hitchhiker you picked up?’

  ‘I know where you’re coming from, and the answer’s no. I stopped for a quiet leak by the side of the road and saw a woman lying there, end of story.’

  Hirsch nodded glumly. Maybe they’d know her back at the pub. ‘Thanks for reporting it. Thanks for waiting.’

  Nancarrow gave him a sad if crooked smile. It said, ‘Sooner you than me, pal,’ and ‘Sorry I wasn’t more help,’ and ‘Thank Christ I can go at last.’ Maybe even, somewhere in there, ‘Poor woman, whoever she is.’

  ~ * ~

  Hirsch noted Nancarrow’s contact details. When he was alone, he grabbed the Canon stored in his glove box and stepped carefully to the rim of the depression, trying not to disturb the layers of dirt, pebbles and flinty stones. The dead woman lay a short distance in from the edge. He ran his gaze over the surrounding dirt. Last night’s showers had left a speckled crust, meaning prints would show clearly. Hirsch saw no boot or shoe prints, no drag marks, just the fine tracings where animals and birds had circled the body. A fox or a wild dog had gnawed at her forearm, a crow had pecked out the visible left eye. Ants had found her. Flies. Clearly she was dead, but Hirsch was obliged to check.

  He took a series of photos first, the scene from all angles, then perspective shots: the body in relation to the road, a nearby culvert, the township on the other side of a stretch of exhausted red soil. Finally he stepped down into the shallow bowl, crouched and felt for a pulse. Nothing. Her clothes were still damp.

  He straightened, stepped away from the body.

  She was struck while walking or hitching by the side of the road and fell into the hole; she fell from a moving vehicle; she was tossed from a moving vehicle; she was killed elsewhere and tossed down here from the road.

  She lay as if sleeping, face down, her chest to the ground but her left hip cocked and her legs slightly splayed, one bent at the knee. Her right arm was trapped under her right hip, and her right cheek was stretched out in the dirt as if she were looking along her outflung left arm: looking blindly, Hirsch thought, thinking of the eye socket. Maybe her other eye was intact, tucked into the dirt. There was very little blood.

  He took another series of photographs, focussing on the clothes. Tight black jeans, a white T-shirt, a tiny fawn cardigan, bare feet in white canvas shoes. The T-shirt had ridden up to reveal a slender spine, a narrow waist, the upper string of a black thong. Bruising and abrasions. A silver chain around her neck. No wristwatch but craft-market silver rings on her fingers, and in her visible ear a silver ring decorated with a Scrabble piece, the letter M.

  What about ID? Hirsch couldn’t see a bag or wallet anywhere. If she was struck by a vehicle, and knocked or carried some distance, then her bag or wallet would be further along the road. Time for that later.

  He crouched, peering at the area of waist and spine between the low-riding jeans and the scrap of T-shirt, and saw a small manufacturer’s tag on the thong. Her underwear was inside out. He crab-walked closer to the body and lifted the T-shirt: a rear-fastening black bra, fastened with only one of the two hooks.

  None of that proved anything. It was suggestive, that’s all. He could think of plenty of scenarios to explain it, some of them innocent. For example, she’d dressed in a hurry, she’d dressed in darkness, she was short sighted, she was careless or drunk, she’d dressed in a cramped space, like the rear seat of a car.

  Or someone else had dressed her.

  He peered at her back, but couldn’t read anything into the surface damage. Dirt on her bare ankles and arms, dirt on her cheek. But you’d expect dirt if she fell or was tossed by tyres—or by hand—down a dirt incline. That’s all he could tell. Dr McAskill would do the rest.

  Now Hirsch brought himself to examine her head. The outraged eye socket stared back at him as he stared at a small, fine-boned face. Small, slack mouth, tiny teeth and a swollen tongue. A pert nose. A bruised, misshapen cheek. Something had hit the girl pretty hard, and he noticed he was thinking girl, not woman—the designation given him by Kropp and Nancarrow. She’s maybe sixteen, thought Hirsch. Somewhere between mid and late teens.

  Then he wandered along the road in each direction. He found a small fabric bag twenty metres from the body, strap and flap torn, still damp. He photographed it in situ and then fossicked around the contents. A wallet with $3.65 in coins, a tampon, tissues, chewing gum, a packet of cigarettes—two left, disposable lighter, supermarket receipts. No phone. In the wallet a Redruth High School student card belonging to Melia Donovan, year 10. A hand-written card under a clear plastic window confirmed the name and gave a Tiverton address.

  So, fifteen? Sixteen?

  ~ * ~

  Hirsch waited for the doctor to arrive. He wanted to walk back to Muncowie and knock on doors, but couldn’t leave the body unattended. He glanced at his watch: 1 p.m. A bus passed, heading north, Perth on the sign above the windshield. A couple of cars, a handful of semis. Hirsch thought of their tyres, their b
ull bars.

  When a silver Mercedes appeared twenty minutes later, decelerating, he stepped into the road, one hand raised. The car pulled in opposite the HiLux and an unhurried, neatly-put-together man got out, hauling a doctors bag. He crossed the road, stopped when he got to Hirsch. ‘Constable Hirschhausen.’

  ‘That’s me.’

  The doctor stuck out his hand. ‘Drew McAskill.’

  He was about fifty, fingers of grey in his brown hair, dressed in a tan jacket, dark trousers, white shirt and blue tie. His hand was pale, scrupulously clean, no sign of sun damage, hard labour or mishaps, which put him at odds with the men, women and children Hirsch had encountered so far in the bush. People out here were generally blemished. Farm grime under fingernails, garden scratches, schoolyard scrapes, sun wrinkles, dusty trouser cuffs, tarnished watch straps and gammy legs. To top it off, McAskill wore gold-rimmed glasses. The overall effect was slightly scholarly.