Bitter Wash Road Read online

  Both Venns registered over .05. Hirsch announced this, and asked, ‘Is there someone you can call?’

  ‘Come on, were clearly not drunk, and the road’s not exactly crawling with vehicles.’

  ‘You hit a guardrail, sir, and you were driving under the influence of alcohol. It would be irresponsible of me to allow you behind the wheel again today. What if you killed someone?’

  ‘I was driving,’ the wife said.

  ‘Knock it the fuck off,’ Hirsch snarled.

  The clouds were high and fat and white, the sky vividly blue. Promising a change, but just now glorious. Hirsch sought relief in the heavens, thinking there was no dust up there. He mentally listed the charges available to him. Giving a false statement, driving under the influence, reckless driving...There were a few.

  He spelled it out to Venn, and asked again: ‘Do you have someone who can drive you home? In your car, preferably. It’s a hazard sitting here.’

  ‘You clearly don’t know how things work in the bush,’ Venn said, hot in the face. ‘A bit of live and let live, give and take. We make allowances. It works.’

  Hirsch held up a warning finger. ‘Before I forget, how many demerit points do you have on your licence, Mr Venn?’

  That shut his mouth.

  ‘Mike needs his licence,’ his wife said. ‘He’s the Dalgety agent. He drives two or three hundred kilometres a day sometimes.’

  ‘If he knew he’d accumulated enough points to lose his licence, why did he drink and drive?’ Hirsch asked, telling himself he was a fool to get into it with them.

  ‘The property market’s quite depressed so we were thankful to steer a sale to fruition,’ Venn said.

  ‘And if you’d killed yourself? Killed your wife? Worse still, killed a kid on his bike?’

  ‘All right! You’ve made your point. And my point is, my wife was driving.’

  Hirsch glanced curiously at Venn.

  ‘It’s your intention to contest these charges before the magistrate?’

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘You’ll testify that your wife was driving.’

  ‘Sign a statutory declaration if I have to.’

  Hirsch turned to Jessica Venn. ‘You intend to perjure yourself before the court?’

  She tilted back her nose, a woman forever intent on being hard done by. ‘Not perjury. I was driving.’

  ‘If you persist with this,’ Hirsch said, ‘and your husband loses, then I will charge you with perjury there and then, and I hope you know it could earn you a jail sentence.’

  ‘You don’t scare me. Jumped-up little Hitler.’

  ~ * ~

  Well, that was a gorgeous experience. Entering the highway just north of Tiverton, Hirsch decided to head on to Muncowie.

  He drove into a town more depressed than Tiverton, but laid out just like it. One shop, one pub and a handful of houses on either side of an abbreviated grid of stubby, broad streets. About eight in total, four running east-west, four north-south. Small houses, some built of local stone, others of rusting corrugated iron in the old three-room settler style, the rooms running from the front to the back with a chimney on a side wall and a dunny in the back yard. Weedy yards, cars on blocks. Hirsch felt deeply fatigued.

  The pub was long and squat, the dusty cream outer wall sitting dark and deep behind a vine-hung veranda. A tin West End Bitter sign rattled in the wind. A couple of panes in the fanlight above the front door were cracked and cobwebby. The veranda floor had once been painted red but the colour had retreated over the decades, revealing glassy worn concrete—a good surface if you wanted to crack a head open.

  He pushed into the pub, stepping from the concrete to creaky floorboards. Nail heads glinted brightly here and there, despite the curtained gloom of the front bar. The air was layered with stale beer fumes, cigarette smoke and the odours of rural work: diesel, petrol, grease, oil, sweat and animal odours, dung or lanolin or blood or all of it. Deeply ingrained and years old, guessed Hirsch, because the two old boozers and the publican at the bar didn’t account for it.

  They saw his uniform and the publican said, ‘Reckoned you’d be in before too long. Pour you a drink?’

  It was said with a crooked eyebrow so Hirsch took a stool and rested his elbows on the bar and said, ‘Lemon squash.’

  ‘Lemon squash, lemon squash,’ the publican ruminated, as if the drink and its ingredients were beyond him.

  ‘Bloody Mary, then.’

  That I can do,’ the publican said, sticking a glass under a spigot and flipping a lever. Lemon squash frothed palely into the glass. ‘Ice?’

  ‘Hundred per cent lemon squash.’

  The publican leaned back against the wall behind him, a small, narrow, beaming, efficient character, his arms folded above a neatly moulded belly. ‘There goes my profit.’

  Hirsch took him in, seeing the kind of small-time bustler who has virtually no personality beyond dishing up a patter of humour and inoffensive insults as he served drinks. He’d know your name and what you drank but you’d never learn a thing about him beyond the smile and the tight ship he ran. Possibly there was nothing to know. He’d have a history of pub management and maybe ownership behind him, here and there around the state. You wouldn’t know why he’d chosen to buy your local pub, or why it was time for him to move on again, or why he’d left the last one, and there’d be no point in asking.

  Hirsch toasted the publican and the two drinkers, bleary old-timers in crumpled work clothes and whiskers, cigarettes smouldering in the ashtray on the bar between them. They were halfway through tall glasses of beer that might have been sitting there for days, weeks. They weren’t drinkers so much as drink-nursers. And yarners.

  They had a few questions and knew a few half-truths about the death of Melia Donovan, so Hirsch filled some of the gaps, keeping his words, tone and delivery low key. He was hoping to read something in their responses, a tut-tut and a rueful head shake if they thought it just another tragic loss of a young life, or a flicker of something darker if they knew her or the circumstances of her death.

  He got the former. ‘Poor bloody kid,’ they said. ‘Like to get hold of the mongrel that hit her and just drove off.’

  ‘Does her name ring a bell?’

  ‘Not to me,’ the publican said.

  ‘Donovan,’ nodded one of the drinkers, precipitating a to-and-fro with his mate about who Melia’s mother, father, uncles, aunts and cousins might have been. Pretty much all hearsay, it seemed to Hirsch, but one thing was clear, the lineage wasn’t covered in glory.

  ‘Did you see her in here on Saturday night or any time Sunday?’

  The publican gave a good impression of outrage. ‘I don’t serve kids.’

  ‘She would have looked older,’ Hirsch said, and described Melia Donovan, her size, colouring, hair.

  ‘Mate, we don’t get that many kids in here. Maybe Saturdays we’ll get a couple of young blokes in after the footy or the cricket, but they hardly ever bring their girlfriends with them. Don’t stay long either. They head up to Peterborough or across to Jamestown or down to Redruth, not the other way around.’

  ‘Arse end of the world,’ grinned one of the old-timers.

  ‘So your first inkling,’ Hirsch said, ‘was when the bloke came in asking to use your phone.’

  ‘That’s the size of it,’ the publican said.

  Hirsch left his card on the bar. ‘If you see or hear anything, give us a call,’ he said, and went out to doorknock the town.

  He got nowhere, heard nothing, and returned to the highway.

  ~ * ~

  Another dead end in Tiverton. There was no answer at the Donovan house, no Commodore, no battered Mazda in the driveway. But Hirsch met Yvonne Muir, the neighbour who’d been comforting Leanne Donovan the previous day.

  ‘Yoo hoo,’ she called, a thin, edgy figure where her husband was solid and comfortable. She came across her yard and stopped at the side fence—but
still in motion, her hands patting her hair, smoothing her dress, centring her necklace. She took a deep breath and said, ‘You’re the new policeman. You met my husband yesterday.’ She added, in an expense of strength and feeling, ‘Has something happened?’

  Hirsch shook his head. ‘A follow-up visit, that’s all.’

  With an air of tiptoeing through the proprieties, Muir said, ‘She’s at her mother’s today. In Jamestown. Back tomorrow.’

  Hirsch didn’t pursue it. ‘Have you known Mrs Donovan for long?’

  ‘Ten years. More.’

  ‘Are you friends, would you say?’

  ‘Friends and neighbours. Are you sure nothing’s wrong? It’s not Nathan, is it? You leave that boy alone.’

  Hirsch was tired. Needing to cut through the thickets, he said, ‘Mrs Muir, I’m helping investigate Melia’s accident, that’s all. A few questions and I’ll be out of their hair.’

  ‘Please go easy on them.’

  It was an entreaty, yet with some steel in it. ‘Okay,’ said Hirsch carefully, inviting an explanation.

  ‘That family’s been through a lot,’ the woman said and she whisked back into her house.

  ~ * ~

  Hirsch slipped his card into the door jamb and walked back to the highway.

  Inside the general store the air currents moved sluggishly, the day’s warmth coming to a head. Two cars parked snout-up to the shop veranda, two customers browsing with baskets hanging from their elbows. A teenage girl he didn’t know was at the cash register, waiting.

  Hirsch said, ‘Is Gemma here?’

  Her mouth opened slowly, she moved her head slowly. ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Hirsch made his way to the tiny back office. Since yesterday the space had shrunk: hard against the walls were bundles of unsold magazines, the titles torn away, and sundry cartons of cigarettes. Tennant was behind the desk; Eileen Pitcher in the only other chair.

  ‘Well, look who’s here.’

  Hirsch ignored the shopkeeper. ‘Mrs Pitcher?’

  Eileen Pitcher sat knees together, a cigarette in one raw-boned hand, refusing to meet Hirsch’s eye or return his greeting. He crouched where she couldn’t avoid him. ‘Is Gemma at home, Mrs Pitcher?’

  The woman moved then, drawing powerfully on her cigarette. ‘All your fault.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Hirsch said mildly.

  ‘She was that upset last night.’

  ‘After my visit?’

  She gave him a what-are-ya? look.

  ‘Where is she, Mrs Pitcher?’

  ‘She’s run off, that’s where she is,’ Tennant said behind him.

  Hirsch knee-creaked until he was upright again. ‘Did she say where she was going?’

  Cigarette bobbing in her mouth, smoke dribbling up the curve of her cheek and into her narrowed eyes, Eileen Pitcher leaned over to fish in her cardigan pocket. The note was warm and read: Mum I love you but I have to go away for a while don’t worry about me I am fine I will ring you I need space I done nothing wrong remember that I love you your daughter Gemma.

  ‘Have you tried calling her?’

  ‘Goes to voicemail.’

  ‘Mrs Pitcher, is there anything we should be worried about here?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did she call anyone last night or this morning?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Did she pack a bag? Clothes, shoes, toiletries?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Things you’d expect her to take?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Tennant.

  ‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ Hirsch said. ‘She’s upset, it’s only natural. But sometime soon I will need to have a chat with her about Melia’s movements on the weekend.’

  ‘Thought you already done that,’ the mother said.

  ‘It was a preliminary chat,’ Hirsch said. ‘I could see she was too upset to go on.’

  ‘My daughter doesn’t know nothing about nothing.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Hirsch said. ‘Just a formality.’

  He glanced at Tennant. ‘If you could give me a moment with Mrs Pitcher...’

  The shopkeeper didn’t like it. ‘I keep an eye on Eileen and Gemma. They don’t need any aggravation.’

  ‘That’s not my intention.’

  ‘Go easy, okay?’

  ‘Mr Tennant.’

  ‘All right, all right, I’m going.’

  When he was gone, Hirsch closed the door, crouched by the woman’s knees again. ‘Mrs Pitcher, is this Gemma’s handwriting?’

  Pitcher began to tremble, full on, her free hand plucking at her top button, ash falling from her cigarette. ‘Of course it is, what do you mean, are you saying she—’

  ‘When did you find the note?’

  ‘When I got home just now.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I help out down the pub.’

  ‘Where was the note?’

  ‘Kitchen table.’

  ‘Had Gemma locked up before she left?’

  Pitcher jetted smoke across the room. ‘That girl never locks up, never turns off lights, never picks up after herself...’

  ‘Was anything disturbed or out of place?’

  ‘You’re making me scared.’

  ‘Standard questions, Mrs Pitcher.’

  ‘You think something’s happened to her.’

  ‘Heavens no,’ Hirsch said. ‘But there will be an inquest eventually and Gemma might be called and it would be good if we were all on the same page.’

  How many times in his career had Hirsch waffled on like that? It was part of being a cop, he supposed. ‘How about,’ he said, ‘you make me a list of her friends, anyone, family included, who she might visit or call. We’ll contact them together.’

  ‘She’s gone off in me car. Can’t you put out a whatchamacallit, alert?’

  ‘Do you wish to report it stolen?’

  Pitcher worried at it. ‘Will that get her into trouble?’

  ‘It might.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you survive without a car for a few days?’

  The woman slumped. ‘I’ll need it eventually.’

  ‘For now,’ Hirsch said, ‘let’s concentrate on those calls.’

  ~ * ~

  They used her kitchen phone.

  The house was as stuffy as the store, what air there was laced with cigarette smoke and emanations from the kitty litter heaped by the laundry door. As Eileen compiled the list of names and numbers, Hirsch made the calls. He figured it would be harder for people to knock back a policeman. Fifteen calls: aunts and uncles, adult cousins, school friends, grandparents, getting him nowhere.

  Hirsch gave up. Maybe her Facebook page would reveal her whereabouts. ‘Does Gemma have a computer?’

  Laptop, Eileen said, taking him to a bedroom that was pretty much furnished by a floordrobe and an unmade single bed. Hirsch didn’t bother stepping over the clothes. There was a printer but no sign of a laptop.

  He returned to the police station. The first-aid box was missing from the boot of his car.

  ~ * ~

  10

  HIRSCH GOT OUT of bed at six-shitty on Wednesday, drained a coffee and decided on some exercise: stretches, then a walk around the town.

  Tiverton seemed deserted. Perhaps country people didn’t walk or jog? He took their point: they knew the place, they worked hard at physical labour all day; what was the point? A couple of passing motorists eyed him, curtains twitched and mad dogs raced as he invaded fences and hedges. He gazed benignly at the school, the little grain business along a side street, the Catholic church and the Anglican, various back and side yards, chook sheds, a skeletal horse on a patch of dirt. Galahs screeched in the gumtrees and it occurred to him that he’d not been hearing the sounds of big city life these past three weeks. No traffic, no hoons with sound systems,
no voices spilling from cafés. Only galahs in the trees.

  Back in the office, he fired up the computer. One e-mail, headed Quine hearing: starting Monday, 10 a.m. sharp, Hirsch was obliged to present himself at the hearing into allegations of corruption against Senior Sergeant Marcus Quine and other detectives of the Paradise Gardens CIB.