Bitter Wash Road Read online

  The spotless hand slipped in and out of Hirsch’s grasp. ‘I understand I’m to pronounce on a body?’

  McAskill ran a medical practice in Redruth and was on call for the local police. In cases of suspicious death, he’d request an official police pathologist from Adelaide, but otherwise he was there to save department pathologists a six-hour round trip. ‘I’ll show you,’ Hirsch said, turning to go, thinking with a hidden grin that this precise, fussy man was about to get dirt on his nice clothes.

  ‘Hold your horses.’

  Handing him the doctors bag, McAskill returned to the Mercedes and took out a blue forensic jumpsuit and booties. A car passed as he dragged them on, the driver and passenger gawking.

  ‘Ready when you are.’

  Hirsch led the doctor along the road until they were adjacent to the body. ‘There.’

  McAskill nodded brusquely. ‘Not hidden, but you’d have to be almost on top of her to spot her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Treading carefully, McAskill edged around the rim of the depression and paused. ‘Melia Donovan.’

  ‘Sure? The damage to her face...?’

  The doctor was adamant: ‘No. It’s Melia, without a shadow of a doubt.’

  Hirsch looked around at this broad, flat, sparsely nourished corner of the world, population about ten, and wondered how McAskill and the girl had ever intersected. He was about to ask when McAskill said, ‘She came into the surgery a couple of times. You’d have met her eventually. She’s a Tiverton girl. God knows what she was doing up here.’

  Now the doctor stepped into the hollow. He crouched, felt for a pulse, poked and prodded for a while. He took the temperature of the body, rolled it onto its back, flexed the arms and legs. ‘Well, I’m pronouncing death.’

  Hirsch scribbled time, date, location, names and circumstances in his notebook. ‘How long?’

  McAskill shrugged. ‘Rigor is mostly gone. Animal damage. She’s been here a day or two.’

  ‘Since Saturday night, early Sunday?’

  McAskill stood, frowned. ‘Possibly. The autopsy should establish time of death with more accuracy.’

  Both men gazed at the slack limbs. Hirsch crouched for another look at the thin, unformed, pretty face. The right eye was intact. Hirsch, leaning closer, said, ‘Is that petechial haemorrhaging?’

  McAskill said primly, ‘The red spots? I’ll know more when I perform the autopsy.’

  Hirsch straightened. ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Fifteen? Sixteen?’

  Hirsch said carefully, ‘Family circumstances?’

  ‘Only what I’ve heard via local gossip. There’s no father on the scene. The mother’s a drinker, succession of boyfriends.’

  ‘Siblings?’

  ‘An older brother.’

  Hirsch jotted the names in his notebook. ‘What can you tell me about Melia?’

  McAskill grimaced. ‘Pretty wild.’

  Hirsch pictured the girl’s home life. He could see the patterns, the dimensions. No stability, older boys sniffing around, the mother’s boyfriends, too. Maybe drugs and booze.

  ‘But a sweet kid,’ McAskill said. ‘Struggled at school, wagged it pretty often—I’d sometimes see her hitchhiking in the middle of the day. Arrested a couple of times for shoplifting.’

  ‘Boys, men?’ asked Hirsch.

  ‘Who knows?’ McAskill said.

  He crouched again and rotated the head on its stem. ‘Broken neck.’ Then he lowered the head and palpated the flesh and bones of the torso, chest and spine. ‘Christ,’ he muttered, but didn’t elaborate.

  Finally he let her go and, still squatting on his heels, said, ‘Massive internal injuries. Broken ribs and spinal cord damage and no doubt some trauma to her major organs.’

  ‘She hasn’t been punched?’

  McAskill shook his head. ‘Nothing like that. If I was to hazard a guess I’d say she was run over.’

  ‘Run over, or knocked down?’

  ‘I take your point. Indications are she was upright when it happened, and I’d guess the force of it tumbled her in to the windscreen. I’ve seen it before.’

  ‘Facing away—hit from behind?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait for the autopsy, but my feeling is she was in the act of turning around.’

  ‘So no way of knowing if it was deliberate or not?’

  McAskill grinned. ‘Got your work cut out for you.’

  He stood, brushing dust from his hands. ‘Would you like me to notify the family? I am their doctor.’

  Hirsch didn’t think about it for long. ‘Thanks—though I will need to speak to them myself, eventually.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Both men looked up at the road, hearing a motor. ‘The hearse,’ McAskill said.

  He turned to Hirsch. ‘As I said, she liked to hitchhike. Did it a lot, if that’s any help to you. Anywhere, any time. I even gave her lifts myself. Everyone did, just ask around. A sweet kid who sometimes had a bit too much to drink, drugs if she could get hold of them. I can see her staggering along the road with her thumb out, trying for a lift home, and you know the rest.’ He gave Hirsch a look, partly philosophical, partly distasteful, partly grieving.

  ‘A lift home from here?’ said Hirsch.

  ‘That’s for you to find out, sorry,’ McAskill said.

  The doctor scrambled up onto the road to greet the hearse. Hirsch stood where he was, ruminating. How did she get here? Had she been at the pub? A party at a nearby house? Someone brought her here, and later this same someone couldn’t or wouldn’t take her home, so she set out to hitchhike in the early hours and was hit by a vehicle that failed to stop. Or it wasn’t an accident, she was killed elsewhere and dumped here.

  He climbed up onto the road. The hearse driver and his offsider were dragging out a stretcher. McAskill was in his car, a mobile phone clamped to his ear.

  ~ * ~

  When the hearse had left and he was alone, Hirsch turned to the HiLux, and the first thing he saw was a crack in the windscreen, a shallow crater and a couple of minor tributaries, smack in the middle. Roadside gravel flipped up by a passing car or truck. Life on the frontier.

  Sighing, he called Kropp. The sergeant was a couple—or possibly a couple of dozen—steps ahead of him. ‘About time, hotshot. Melia Donovan, of this parish.’

  Hirsch waited a beat. ‘The doctor told you?’

  ‘Finger on the pulse.’

  ‘You knew her, Sarge?’

  A snake in his voice, Kropp said, ‘I been here twelve years, of course I fucking knew her. Caught her shoplifting more than once.’

  ‘Apparently she liked to hitchhike.’

  ‘Everyone knew that.’

  Hirsch waggled his jaw in thought. ‘We’ll need to know if she was drugged or raped or beaten...Maybe some of her injuries aren’t consistent with vehicle impact...Stuff like that.’

  ‘What, you’re back in plain clothes?’

  ‘Come on, Sarge.’

  ‘She’ll be in good hands. McAskill will do the right thing by her.’

  Hirsch was doubtful. ‘Shouldn’t the body go down to the city?’

  ‘McAskill’s been slicing and dicing for years.’

  ‘Okay. So who briefs the coroner?’

  ‘Me, sunshine, all right? What I need you to do is stay put until the accident team arrives, then head on back to Tiverton and follow up on McAskill’s visit to the family. Think you can manage that?’

  ‘Sarge,’ said Hirsch.

  But Kropp had already hung up. Hirsch returned to the hollow. After a fruitless examination of the dirt that had been hidden by the body itself, he made a head-down search of the highway for a few hundred metres north and south, both sides. Looking around for anything that might have belonged to Melia Donovan or the vehicle that had delivered her here or the vehicle that had killed her. Anything, he told himself, but preferably something like a fragment of glass indicator lens with the
ID number intact. There was nothing in the dirt verges, so he walked back over the bitumen. Still nothing, and no skid marks. From his work with crash investigators in the past he knew to look for dual tyre skid marks, or the scuff marks that indicate loss of control, or the skip marks of a shuddering trailer.

  Nothing.

  So he ran crime-scene tape around the area and sat down to wait.

  ~ * ~

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON before the accident investigators arrived. Hirsch wanted to hang around and talk about what he’d been thinking but they ignored him. Two men and one woman conscious of the dwindling light, the sun smearing itself across the horizon, long shadows playing visual tricks. They took their photos, measured distances, crouched and poked and grid-searched and marked up their diagrams.

  ‘You’re blocking the light,’ the female officer said. Her tone indicated she knew exactly who Hirsch was.

  ~ * ~

  4

  THE DONOVAN HOUSE was classic 1960s small-town architecture: squat, low, double-fronted. Stubby eaves, a tiled roof, a carport, and floor-to-ceiling windows in buckling aluminium frames. It crouched in unmown grass, hedged by a rusty gas barbecue, a banana lounge, a listing red Mazda. A fence line of crumbling bricks on either side separated it from the neighbouring properties: a similar but spotless house, and a vacant lot.

  Hirsch waded through weeds to reach the warped front door, the red paint losing against the elements. He knocked on the cheap plywood. Waited, knocked again. A wind had picked up since the morning. It bent the trees and, out where the Bitter Wash Road pushed into the dry country, clouds were shouldering the Razorback.

  ‘No offence, mate, but I’d leave it for now.’

  Hirsch turned. A blockish male shape at the shadowed end of the veranda, taking unhurried stock of him and quietly smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘McAskill gave her a sedative. The wife’s sitting with her and I’m keeping the snakes away.’

  ‘Snakes?’ Hirsch said, heading along the cracked veranda.

  ‘Well, a worm. Reporter for the local rag. I have to warn you he got a photo off Leanne and he’ll probably sell it to the Advertiser.’

  ‘It happens,’ Hirsch said, sticking out his hand, announcing his name.

  ‘Wondered when I’d set eyes on you,’ the smoker responded. ‘Bob Muir.’

  Muir’s hand was a hard slab thickened by years of manual labour, fingers like stubby cigars, but dry, warm and gentle. A square head with heavy lids over intelligent eyes. ‘Live next door,’ he said.

  Hirsch nodded. They found themselves standing side by side, staring out at the miserable front yard and the HiLux at the kerb.

  ‘The doc said someone run over Melia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Poor bloody kid.’

  Hirsch could hear muted sobbing inside, another voice murmuring, and said, ‘Maybe you could fill me in on the family?’

  Muir went very still. Protective. Then he shrugged. ‘Do my best.’

  He jerked his head, indicating that Hirsch should follow him a few paces into the front yard. The better light revealed a man with a few years on him, forties probably. A tough hide, barrelly torso and small backside, dressed in comfortable faded jeans and a khaki shirt. Greying hair cropped short around the fringes of his big, genial skull.

  Before Hirsch could ask his first question, Muir said, ‘She was hitching?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  Muir slid his gaze at Hirsch. ‘Possibly?’

  ‘Questions remain.’

  ‘Is that right.’

  ‘It’s possible she was hitching and a vehicle hit her. All I can say is she was found lying in a hollow near the side of the road and not noticed until today.’

  Muir took the cigarette from his mouth. ‘Poor little cow.’ He turned to stare across the quiet rooftops of the town, a flat skyline interrupted by the grain silos at the railway station. ‘Okay, ask your questions.’

  ‘What do you know about her movements over the weekend?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘All right, what can you tell me about her?’

  ‘Known her all her life.’

  Hirsch brought out his phone, pretending to check the screen. Waited for the patient man beside him to go on.

  ‘A bit wild.’

  ‘So I understand,’ said Hirsch.

  ‘Nothing mean or nasty. Sweet kid, in fact. Just a bit unmanageable.’

  ‘What about her friends?’

  An unhurried individual, Muir drew patiently on his cigarette. ‘You mean boyfriends.’

  ‘Any friends.’ Hirsch paused. ‘Older friends.’

  ‘Older friends. There was a whisper she was seeing someone older, but they broke up. Me and the wife, there were times we wanted to step in, but you can’t, can you.’

  ‘Any names come to mind? Friends, ex-boyfriends, anyone at all?’

  Muir stared at him and finally said, ‘Good friends with Gemma Pitcher.’ He checked his watch. ‘Works in the shop, you might just catch her.’

  Hirsch bought his groceries there, since there was nowhere else, and recalled a solid pudding of a girl stacking shelves or sitting at the cash register. If asked to bet on it he’d say she was a lot older than Melia Donovan. ‘They’re at school together?’

  Muir shook his head. ‘Gemma left school two or three years ago.’ Acknowledging Hirsch’s point he added, ‘There are only six or seven teenagers in the whole town, mostly boys. It’s not as if Melia and Gemma were spoiled for choice.’

  Hirsch nodded. No jobs, no night life. Net migration would be out of the district, not in. ‘Were they close?’

  ‘Thick as thieves, always off somewhere.’

  ‘How did they get around?’

  ‘Gemma drives.’

  ‘Parties? The pub?’

  Muir gave him a long look. ‘Wouldn’t have a clue.’

  ‘Any other names you can think of?’

  ‘I stay out of it, mate.’ Muir paused. ‘Come to think of it she did turn up one day last month with a black eye, said she’d been in a bit of a crash, said it was nothing.’

  Check accident reports, insurance claims, local panelbeaters.

  ‘What else? There’s a brother, isn’t there?’

  Like a massive ship turning on the ocean, Muir stepped around to face Hirsch. ‘Mate, what’s your angle here?’

  He stood close, crowding Hirsch, more animated suddenly. Hirsch could smell shaving cream, talcum powder, cigarette smoke and the heat of a day’s work. Not unpleasant: honest smells, given off by a decent man who was hot under the collar right now.

  ‘If you’re a mate of Kropp’s…’

  The vehemence was barely there but it registered. Hirsch put some edge in his voice: ‘Mr Muir, what are you trying to tell me?’

  But Muir had subsided, hands in his pockets, face turned away, muttering.

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  Muir said, very plainly, ‘Kropp and his boys like to take the Abo kids out into the bush, give them a good hiding and let them walk home.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Muir studied him, then finally nodded. ‘Maybe you don’t. There are two kids in the family. Melia, white father, and Nathan, black father. Both long gone.’

  He flicked his cigarette away. ‘Filthy habit.’

  Both men stared at the butt. Then Muir gestured at it, saying, ‘Maybe you should fine me for littering. And when you’ve done that, breathalyse me every time I leave the house. Then scream in my face for jaywalking.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘You wouldn’t need a reason, not if you’re one of Kropp’s boys.’

  Hirsch didn’t want to get into it. ‘I’d better speak to this Gemma.’

  Muir gazed at him levelly. ‘Like I said, she works in the shop.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Hirsch said. He stopped. ‘Is Nathan inside with his mother?�
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  ‘Leave the poor bugger alone.’

  ‘I fully intend to,’ Hirsch said in his reasonable voice, ‘after I ask him about his sister’s movements on the weekend.’