Bitter Wash Road Page 6

  Then the man grinned unpleasantly and stood. ‘That crack in your windscreen? Get it fixed.’ He paused. ‘Know why?’

  Hirsch’s mind raced. Roadworthiness? He guessed, ‘Anything we don’t tolerate in the citizenry, we don’t tolerate in ourselves, maybe?’

  ‘Aren’t you a boy scout. Try Redruth Automotive.’

  Then Kropp was gone and Hirsch heated and ate his lasagne— talking, for want of another candidate, to the less comfortable of the two chairs.

  ~ * ~

  6

  WHAT WAS WRONG with him? Those kids this morning had seen a woman hovering around his car. He dumped his dirty plate in the sink and hurried out to the Nissan with a torch, a rag, a pair of latex gloves. After a moment’s thought, he went back for a couple of evidence bags.

  He started at the boot and moved forwards: toolbox, spare tyre well, under the boot carpet. Then the parcel shelf, under the rear seat, inside the door cavities, under the front seats, glove box. He found what he was looking for in an ancient, forgotten first-aid box, but continued his search inside the engine bay, just in case. Nothing there.

  He returned to the first-aid box. An iPhone and a bundle of cash. First he photographed both items in situ, then removed them. Still some juice in the phone; it was an iPhone 5 in perfect nick. He scrolled through until he came to a screen showing the IMEI number, photographed it. The cash amounted to $2500 in hundred-dollar notes. He took the rubber band off the bundle and photographed each note, twenty-five serial numbers. Finally he stowed everything in one of the evidence bags.

  The time was six-thirty. Hirsch returned to the shop, still toting the evidence bag. Tennant had a CCTV camera above the petrol bowser. Might get lucky.

  He found the shopkeeper switching off lights. Tennant frowned at the evidence bag. ‘You want a refund on your dinner?’

  ‘Ha, ha. The camera above your bowser: does it work?’

  ‘It works.’

  ‘Video or hard drive?’

  ‘Hard drive.’

  ‘I need to see footage from Friday, mid-morning.’

  Tennant was confused. ‘Somebody broke in? I’m not missing anything.’

  With a just-routine air, Hirsch said, ‘Someone put a note under my door, no big deal, something about a tax cheat, as if that’s the police’s business, but if the lens range and angle allows it, I might get an idea who left the note, put a flea in their ear.’

  Stop babbling, he told himself.

  ‘Tax cheat?’

  ‘Not you,’ Hirsch assured the shopkeeper.

  Irritated, Tennant took him to the back room and showed him the equipment and how to run a search. He wanted to hover, so Hirsch said, ‘Police business.’

  ~ * ~

  HE WAS IN LUCK: Tennant’s camera had been angled to cover the bowser, but also showed the footpath and part of the police station. He saw a woman of slight build and above average height, shoulder-length fair hair swinging around her neck and cheeks, moving rapidly. No clear shot of her face, damn it all. Of course it helped that he rarely locked his old bomb, but she was in and out of his car inside a minute.

  Hirsch found Tennant at the front door, anxious to lock up and go home. ‘Finished?’

  ‘I need to buy a memory stick.’

  ‘Really? You found something?’ Tennant said, intrigued, unlocking a drawer, fishing around in it and coming up with an eight gig stick. ‘This do you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I can show you how to copy the footage.’

  ‘I’ll be right.’

  So Tennant charged Hirsch twice what the device was worth and waited in a sulk at the door.

  ~ * ~

  Where to stow the phone and cash? If Internal Investigations officers searched his car now—which was presumably the point— and found nothing, they’d tear the house, office and HiLux apart. And he knew and trusted no one here.

  Hirsch walked around to the rear of the station, poked his head over the side fence, into the old woman’s back yard. It was overgrown by weeds and roses, the little garden shed mute testament to her inability to keep up anymore. He clambered over the fence. Concealed everything in an empty paint tin, taking reasonable care not to disturb the dust that covered it.

  ~ * ~

  Back in his office, Hirsch dialled an Adelaide number.

  ‘We need to meet.’

  Sergeant Rosie DeLisle said tensely, ‘You bet we do. In fact, I was about to call you.’

  That made Hirsch tense. ‘What happened?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Hirsch knew then that the Internals had some fresh purgatory in store for him: new evidence, a new slant on old evidence, something like that. Rosie had always been straight with him; ultimately she’d gone into bat for him, but he’d always skated on thin ice, the sessions he’d had with her.

  ‘I’m being set up.’

  ‘Is that a fact,’ she said flatly.

  ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.’

  ‘Not over the phone.’

  ‘That suits me. I can be in the city by ten.’

  ‘Tonight? No thanks. Tomorrow afternoon sometime.’

  ‘That works for me.’

  ‘Somewhere off the beaten track, Paul.’ She named a winery in the Barossa Valley. ‘One o’clock.’

  ‘You think your colleagues don’t visit wineries?’

  ‘Not this one.’

  ‘Ah, somewhere nice,’ Hirsch said. ‘Boutique. You sure you’re not on the take?’

  ‘Just be there, all right?’

  ~ * ~

  Tuesday morning, and Hirsch had things to do before he attended Kropp’s briefing in Redruth. He was on the road by seven-forty, the sun laid out along the eastern horizon. A washed-clean day with vivid green on both sides of the road, the birds soaring. He lifted his forefinger to oncoming drivers, who didn’t expect it from a cop. Halfway down the valley he turned right onto the road to Clare, the only town of any size in the area. It had an agency of his building society and it had a phone shop. He visited the building society first, withdrawing $2500 in hundred-dollar bills, leaving himself with $164.65 until payday. Then he went to the phone shop.

  Hirsch had bought his present phone there three weeks ago on Kropp’s advice. ‘The first thing you need to know is we get shit mobile reception up here,’ the sergeant had said. ‘As much as I find it amusing to think of you stranded in the middle of nowhere with a flat tyre and no signal bars, the department would take a dim view, so get yourself a decent phone, all right?’

  ‘Maybe the department could spring for a satellite phone, Sarge.’

  ‘Don’t push your luck with me, sunshine.’

  What Hirsch remembered about the phone shop was the box of parts behind the counter: old GSM phones, cracked touch-screens, scarred plastic cases, dead batteries, iPhones with the guts stripped out.

  He drove back to Tiverton with the cash and an iPhone 4 that wouldn’t power past the boot logo. Cost him a completely outrageous $150, and now he had $14.65 to his name.

  Half-expecting officers from Internal Investigations to jump him, half-fearing to learn they’d already carried out their search, he reached into the Nissan, found the first-aid box exactly where he’d left it, and stowed the broken phone and his hard-earned cash inside it.

  ~ * ~

  7

  HIRSCH PINNED HIS mobile number to the front door and headed back down the valley to Redruth. Forty minutes of wheat and canola crops spread between the distant blue ranges and finally signs of habitation, then he was drawing into a town of pretty stone buildings folded through a series of hillocks. Started as a copper-mining town in the 1840s, it was a pastoral centre now. The Cornish Jacks were long gone, leaving behind flooded mine shafts, some cottage rows and a legacy of names like Redruth and Truro. Hirsch had explored the old mine when he first arrived. Bottomless pools of water in an enchanted shade of blue; mine batteries, sheds and stone chimneys
sitting licheny and eroded on the slopes above the town.

  Soon he was making a shallow descent to the town centre where the shops, a pair of pubs and a garage were arranged around an oblong square containing a statue to the war dead and a tiny rotunda on a stone-edged lawn. The building frontages were nineteenth century but the hoardings and signage were purely modern, a mishmash of corporate livery in different colours and fonts. Then he was through the square and entering an abbreviated side street, directed to the police station by a sign and an arrow. At the kerb on both sides of the street were police vehicles: two four-wheel-drives, Kropp’s Ford and two patrol cars.

  The time was eleven-forty-five. He parked and went in. This station was no converted house, it was a dedicated red-brick building with a lockup, several rooms and a large rear yard, but inside its foyer-cum-waiting room Hirsch found a front counter like his own: scarred wood, wanted posters and out-of-date notices on the wall, a couple of desks and filing cabinets in the dim corners.

  The counter was staffed by a middle-aged man in civilian clothing, an auxiliary support officer whose job it was to greet the walk-ins, hand out forms, take reports, do the filing. A dull, sleepy man, he emitted a quiver of interest when Hirsch gave his name. ‘Ah, Constable Hirschhausen. Through that door.’

  He pointed, and Hirsch found himself in a region of cramped rooms at the rear of the station: Kropp’s office, a small tea room, a briefing room, an interview room, storage area, files. At the end of the corridor was a steel door leading to the lockup. Drawn by voices, movement, a spill of light, Hirsch headed for the tea room.

  It fell silent the moment he appeared in the doorway. Two men stared at him stonily: the Redruth constables, Nicholson and Andrewartha. Hirsch gave a face-splitting grin, just to rile them. ‘Hi, guys!’

  Nicholson said, ‘Maggot,’ showing a mouth crowded with tiny teeth. He was fleshy and pink, his face veined.

  Hirsch grinned again and turned to Andrewartha. Another from the porcine family, this one had moist, red-budded lips that seemed shaped to blow kisses. He stuck a stub of a finger to his temple, cocked his thumb and said, ‘Pow.’

  ‘Good to see you, guys,’ said Hirsch, pushing through.

  ‘Arsehole.’

  Two rickety plastic tables in the room, one strewn with paper cups, sports papers and skin mags, the other bearing an urn and a percolator. Hirsch poured coffee into a paper cup. Nicholson jostled him.

  ‘Whoops, sorry mate, clumsy of me.’

  Hirsch poured another cup. He grabbed a stale donut and ducked around Nicholson’s tree-trunk form to stand beside the refrigerator, stashing coffee and donut on the top of it and fishing out his phone. He angled the screen and ran his fingers; not looking at the others but ready to fight if that’s what they wanted.

  Then, an alteration in the air, a tremor of awareness passing through Nicholson and Andrewartha, a quick subterranean nastiness. Glancing up, Hirsch saw a young female officer in the doorway, pink, tense, sprucely ironed.

  ‘Morning.’ Her voice was low and raspy, but a squeak of nerves ran through it.

  ‘Did someone say something?’ Andrewartha asked, cocking an ear.

  ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ Nicholson said. He flared his nostrils: ‘Hang on, there’s a whiff in the air.’

  The newcomer flushed, but was game. ‘Maybe you’ve got a dose of hay fever...or a dose of something.’

  ‘Now, what is that smell?’ said Nicholson. ‘Got it! Feminine hygiene product.’

  ‘You would know,’ Andrewartha said, jostling him.

  Both men pushed past her into the corridor, their voices fading along it: ‘They reckon she’ll root anything on two legs.’

  ‘Four legs.’

  That left Hirsch alone in the room with her. She glanced at him without hope or interest. ‘Okay, give it your best shot.’

  Hirsch headed for the percolator. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Coffee and spit, right?’

  ‘Tea and spit if you’d prefer.’

  He read her name tag, Jennifer Dee, and waited. A slender woman of almost his height. Fine bones and sharp features on a narrow face, an impression of tightness reinforced by her hair, raked back savagely and caught in a short ponytail. She looked obstinate yet nervy.

  Dee was watching him right back, unblinking and intense. Abruptly a shift occurred. ‘Weak black, no sugar.’

  ‘Coming up. Donut?’

  She came nearer, moving awkwardly, a young woman not yet quite comfortable with herself. Pretending she didn’t know him when everyone knew him. ‘I could do with a sugar hit.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Hirsch said.

  He served her. They stood there awhile. Swallowing a mouthful, Hirsch said, ‘You weren’t stationed here when I checked in last month.’

  She shook her head. ‘Just started.’

  ‘They’re giving you a hard time?’

  ‘I can handle it.’

  As if responding to an invisible signal, they sat at the empty table. Hirsch swiped the top with his sleeve, the surface layer of crumbs, racehorses and crotches and tits giving way to scratched initials and scorch marks. He raised his cup, said, ‘Cheers,’ and a moment later Kropp was snarling from the doorway.

  ‘Both of you get your arses in the briefing room, and I mean now! He was propped there glaring, one big hand on each upright of the door frame as if to work his chest muscles.

  ‘Sarge,’ said Hirsch, echoed by Dee.

  They grabbed their paper cups and plates and followed Kropp to the briefing room, where Nicholson and Andrewartha lolled in steel chairs. Both men stared contemptuously, but Hirsch, who had been stared down by experts, blew a couple of kisses and selected the chair next to Nicholson. Dee was obliged to sit beside Andrewartha. He scooted his chair away from her.

  Kropp stood at the end of the table, slapping a white pointer against his thigh. ‘If you people are quite ready.’

  ‘Sarge.’

  ‘Let’s get to it.’

  The sergeant propped his hands on the back of his chair, full of scowling impatience. ‘I’ve got a guy coming in from the accident squad, but until then here’s what we know: sometime on the weekend a kid from Tiverton was killed by a hit-and-run driver up near Muncowie.’

  He straightened, turned to the board and wall map behind him, and touched the tip of his pointer to a photograph clipped from that day’s Advertiser. ‘This is her, Melia Donovan. Some of you know her.’

  Nicholson nudged Andrewartha. ‘Some better than others.’

  ‘If you idiots could stop fooling around.’

  ‘Sorry, Sarge.’

  Kropp paged through a mess of paperwork on the table. ‘Got the preliminary autopsy here somewhere.’

  That was quick, Hirsch thought. A blowfly droned through the room, smacking the window behind him. He could hear the town out there, voices and car doors slamming and the hiss of airbrakes and a radio tuned to a talkback show in the house next door.

  Kropp looked up, frustrated. ‘Mr Hirschhausen.’

  ‘Sarge?’

  ‘Go to the file room, see if I left an A4 envelope in there. Marked Donovan autopsy.’

  ‘Sarge.’

  Hirsch saw but couldn’t read the look on Dee’s face. He winked at Andrewartha as he went out.

  Went to the wrong door at first, almost opened it before he saw the sign pinned at chin height: You enter here with good looks and the truth. You don’t get to leave with both. Hirsch snorted: interview room. The next door was marked Files. He entered, spotting the envelope immediately, public service non-colour, flap open, angled across the top of a filing cabinet. He spotted the hundred-dollar note on the floor a moment later, when he was halfway across the room.

  ‘Seriously?’ he said.

  Pocketing the note, he collected the envelope and handed it to Kropp in the briefing room. ‘Here you go, Sarge.’

  Seated again, arms folded benignly, he settled back to listen to
Kropp.

  Then smacked his forehead. ‘Almost forgot. Found this on the floor.’ He contorted in his seat, turning onto his left hip and, sticking his right leg out, gained access to his trouser pocket. He fished out the hundred, waved it, passed it to Nicholson. Everyone watched its progress down the table.

  ‘It was on the floor?’

  ‘Sure was. Should I take it to the front desk and log it in?’