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  Five minutes later, he was parked outside the Gwynnes’ house and knocking on their door. Joyce answered, and, as always, seemed to fall back as if he was carrying news of a death in the family. ‘Paul,’ she murmured, an acutely shy woman with short, wispy grey hair and thick-lensed glasses.

  She rallied. ‘I heard about Nan’s ponies…’

  Hirsch would have to deal with days of this. He was the law, he’d be able to fill in all the gaps. He gave her a non-committal nod.

  ‘Nasty business,’ Joyce Gwynne said harshly, as if he’d said it wasn’t.

  Hirsch nodded and proffered the Santa suit. ‘I’m just returning this. Tell Martin it was very kind of—’

  ‘Paul!’

  The intrusion and eclipse were seamlessly choreographed; Martin Gwynne appeared in the hallway behind his wife and tucked her out of sight in the same movement. She seemed to evaporate, leaving a hint of floral perfume and muffled footsteps back in the dark reaches of the house.

  Hirsch tried again. Thrusting the suit at Martin, he gabbled, ‘Just returning this, many thanks, it’s been washed.’

  Gwynne took the costume automatically, his mind sharply on other matters. ‘I hope you’re looking at those two boys.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Mark my words, there are times when a rap over the knuckles is worse than useless. An apology? Really, Paul. That was always going to rub them up the wrong way.’

  ‘Early days, Martin…Look, I’ve got to dash. Thanks again for the suit.’

  Martin looked down at it for the first time, bundled over both forearms. ‘There was a shopping bag, I believe?’

  ‘Oh? I’ll look for it. Better go,’ Hirsch said, gabbling again.

  ‘It’s a blight, you know that, don’t you?’

  Afraid that Gwynne was getting biblical on him, Hirsch waved and nodded madly as he made his way down the path and out to his police 4WD.

  Sergeant Brandl called to tell him she’d arrived at the scene with the ‘children’. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Still in town, about to drive out to—’

  ‘That can wait. I need you to show the forensics fellow where you found the stolen copper. He’s got another job on but he can give us five minutes.’

  Hirsch said, ‘Okay,’ but she’d already shut him down.

  He found the forensic van waiting for him at the corner of the Barrier Highway and Kitchener Street, one lazy arm waving him on when he appeared, and the two vehicles headed out of town. A few minutes later they’d parked at the farmhouse and Hirsch was standing at the edge of the hard pan of dirt in front of the barn.

  He strove for an apologetic tone. ‘I put up crime-scene tape and called it in, but when I checked the next day, the skip was gone.’ If you’d got off your lazy arses…

  The forensic technician picked up the implication. ‘Mate, we’ve had a spate of thefts—Christmas presents, mostly.’ He stared at the ground inside the barn. ‘Not much to go on.’

  Hirsch shrugged. The tech switched his attention to the tattered strands of tape. ‘Might get prints off that, I suppose.’

  My prints at least, thought Hirsch.

  11

  BEFORE HE COULD head out east, Hirsch was called back to help doorknock the town. Feeling pushed and pulled, the day no longer his, he returned to Tiverton, where he found his sergeant trying to soothe the CIB detective. Comyn was chafing.

  ‘You’re telling me there’s a husband?’

  ‘A bit of a hermit, apparently,’ Hilary Brandl said calmly. She was a lean woman with a loping stride and dry, brown hair cut in a convenient bob.

  ‘Wonderful,’ Comyn said. He shot Hirsch a sour look. ‘And yesterday a couple of town kids are forced to apologise for stealing her ute. Suspects crawling out of the woodwork, and I’m shorthanded.’

  ‘So let Constable Hirschhausen do the follow-up,’ Brandl said. ‘My constables and I can help you here.’

  She wore the lightweight summer uniform, a size too big, as if she’d lost weight, but had a habit of plucking at her shirt and pants as if she disliked the sensation of the fabric against her skin. ‘He knows the district inside and out.’

  I wish, thought Hirsch, standing back while they negotiated. One of Sergeant Brandl’s young constables stood sentry at Nan Washburn’s driveway, the other was guarding the crime-scene tape, which had been moved to the entrance to Kitchener Street. Not going to be enough, Hirsch thought, to keep the gawkers and ghouls away.

  Then Comyn was looking at him. ‘Constable Hirschhausen.’

  Hirsch approached. He nodded, wary. Beads of perspiration stood out on Comyn’s upper lip and temples. The heat of the day and the heat of arguing with Sergeant Brandl. It was tricky: she outranked Comyn, but she was uniformed police and it was CIB’s case. ‘Yes, senior constable?’

  With some distaste, Comyn said, ‘You were CIB before you got busted?’

  I didn’t get busted, Hirsch thought. I found myself in a corrupt suburban CIB squad that got busted. Some of the shit stuck to me, and I was sent to Hicksville as punishment. He said nothing. Screwed an expectant look onto his face.

  Comyn went on: ‘You’ve already questioned one kid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  Hirsch summarised, concluding: ‘I don’t think he did it.’

  Comyn waved that aside—he’d question Daryl Cobb himself. ‘The other kid lives out in the sticks somewhere?’

  ‘Just a few minutes away.’

  ‘And Mrs Washburn’s husband?’

  ‘Out in the sticks somewhere,’ Hirsch said.

  Comyn gave him a look. ‘Time is a factor. I need you to take statements from both individuals.’ He turned to Brandl. ‘Sergeant, if you and one of your constables can help me with the doorknock?’

  That’s what I’ve been suggesting all along, her face seemed to say. ‘Certainly.’

  Hirsch got directions from Nan Washburn, promised not to harass or frighten her husband, and walked back down Kitchener Street to where he’d parked the police HiLux. A Channel 9 outside-broadcast van was arriving as he climbed behind the wheel. Not his headache.

  Late morning now. He’d interview Adam Flann first, then Craig Washburn. Given that the latter was camped on the banks of Mischance Creek, in the general area of Hope Hill, he could look in on Denise Rennie and her daughter too.

  After five kilometres of bumping along a narrow gravel road full of blind corners, corrugations and erosion channels, heading directly into a sun that flared on the lone windscreen of an oncoming farm ute, glass shards in the ditches, mica in the dirt and gravel, he breasted a rise and headed down into a dip in the hill folds. The Flanns lived in a pale green cube-shaped fibro structure, its iron roof standing up in steep surprise from a veranda closed in on all sides. Two small farm-implement sheds, an empty dog pen choked with weeds, ragged pine trees, a listing water tank. The property also consisted of a hundred hectares of stony hillside that might run a mob of sheep if you were ambitious, hard-working and able to keep up a supply of hay—which ruled out the Flanns.

  Reaching the bottom of the slope, Hirsch coasted into the driveway. Here the neglect and helplessness were more pronounced. A wheelless Datsun Bluebird crouched in a patch of star thistles; an old latch-door refrigerator yawned at the weeds, a trap for small children; a trailer more rust than sheet metal sat piled with bald car tyres beside the front steps.

  No sign of Wayne Flann’s Holden ute.

  Hirsch got out, locked up, approached the house. This was the time he hated most: alone in a land of suspicion, ignorance and untamed dogs. But the whole property was still and soundless and seemed to gather folds of apology, not belligerence, about itself.

  He knocked, knocked again, and eventually walked around to the rear. The back veranda had been converted into a sleepout and someone was in there, moaning. Hirsch hesitated: it wasn’t pain, it was exertion. With an unmistakeable erotic note.

  What now? He stood back, observing proprieties, a
nd waited. The sounds escalated, then stopped. He waited to be sure and then cleared his throat.

  ‘Adam? It’s Paul Hirschhausen. I need a minute.’

  The whole world tensed, the whole world shot him an alarmed look, and then a voice that sounded like Gemma Pitcher’s shouted, ‘Don’t come in!’

  Right.

  ‘Okay,’ Hirsch said.

  He waited. She’ll be his alibi, then? Unless both of them spent the small hours hacking up tiny horses.

  No, not Gemma. A few moments later she emerged from the house, scarcely able to meet his gaze. Embarrassed, he thought, but not ashamed. And as those first awkward seconds unfurled, she continued to shed her shy, pudgy shop-assistant persona. She took charge. Her hair was frazzled, her puffy face sleepy and slack with satisfaction, her fleshy legs mottled and bed-creased under the huge T-shirt. But it was with dignity and nerve that she reached a hand back through the door and gently tugged Adam Flann out onto the struggling couch grass. Adam had pulled on a pair of khaki boardshorts. He was also creased and dishevelled but, Hirsch had to concede, beautifully put together. Flicking Hirsch a sulky shy look, he stood hard against Gemma’s side and their hands found each other. His thumb caressed her knuckles.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Hirsch said.

  They waited.

  ‘I’ll explain why in a moment, but I need to speak to each of you separately.’

  Adam went tight. ‘Is it Mum?’

  Gemma wrapped an arm around him, waiting.

  ‘As far as I know, she’s fine,’ Hirsch said. ‘Adam? Would you mind coming over here a minute?’

  He took the boy to a pair of once-green plastic lawn chairs, which looked over nothing but a fraying clothesline and a dozen empty fuel drums. ‘Sit.’

  They sat, Adam shooting Gemma anxious looks. All of his smartarse confidence was gone—as if, having surrendered himself to vulnerability in his bed a short time earlier, he was yet to recover.

  ‘May I ask your movements last night?’

  The old Adam flickered into view. ‘I never done nothing.’

  ‘Just tell me what you did, and when, and I’ll be on my way.’

  Flann’s expression was flat-out sceptical. ‘I’m old enough,’ he said.

  Is he talking about having sex with Gemma? ‘Yes,’ Hirsch said.

  Adam chewed his bottom lip. ‘Me and Gemma went to the Christmas thing, you know, when you rode the horse.’

  ‘Okay.’ They hadn’t been on Katie’s video, but that was true of other people too.

  ‘Then we come back here.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Wayne.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘Straight after.’

  ‘Did you go out again?’

  ‘Wayne did. Me and Gemma stayed here.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hirsch said, getting to his feet, ‘stay put while I have a quick word with Gemma.’

  Hirsch crossed the grass again. Gemma said, with some heat, ‘He never did nothing wrong. He apologised and everything.’

  ‘Take it easy. I just need to know your movements last night.’

  ‘Me? I was with Adam at the Christmas street thing. You saw us, right?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then we came here.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In Wayne’s ute.’

  ‘Did any of you go out again? The pub? A drive around? A party?’

  She shook her head determinedly. ‘Nup. Stayed here.’

  ‘Wayne?’

  ‘He might of gone out,’ Gemma said, lifting and dropping her heavy shoulders. ‘Wasn’t here when I went to the toilet this morning. Why? What’s he done? What do you think me and Adam’ve done?’

  Hirsch turned, beckoned. Adam joined them.

  ‘In the early hours of this morning, someone attacked Mrs Washburn’s ponies.’

  He waited. He watched. Gemma’s hand crept into Adam’s again and he saw both kids trying to get a handle on the news. Gemma said, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean some of the ponies are dead, and some are badly injured.’

  ‘Shot?’ said Adam.

  ‘Hacked with an axe or a machete or some kind of large blade.’

  Hirsch waited again. Tears welled in Gemma’s eyes. Adam was slower to take it in, and when he did, he wrapped Gemma in his arms.

  He looked at Hirsch. ‘I would never do that. And me and Gemma were here all night.’

  ‘Would Wayne do it?’ Hirsch asked, even as he knew that brother would always protect brother in this family.

  Adam’s face was shut tight. ‘Not him, neither.’

  Gemma piped up. ‘Wayne called Adam a fuckwit for stealing Nan’s ute. Said it served him right he had to apologise.’

  ‘Yeah. He couldn’t care less about her horses,’ Adam said.

  ‘But he did go out at some stage?’

  Adam toed the dirt and shrugged. ‘Probably to the pub.’

  Hirsch knew he’d just heard a lie, but where was the lie? Wayne had lied to Adam? Adam had lied to protect Wayne? And Adam had merely speculated, not made a statement. Everyone lied, every day—especially to the police. A one-off, outright lie, from someone unused to lying, could often be identified and disproved. Constant and habitual lying was harder to recognise, let alone challenge, because the liar no longer saw a distinction between a lie and the truth. They were all just words deployed in the interests of survival. In any case most people lied some of the time, generally layering it with the truth to deflect blame, to sugar-coat their cowardice or stupidity.

  Separating the two could be a headache. And right now Hirsch was sure of Adam Flann’s innocence in this matter, at least.

  He nodded his thanks, wished them good day, and drove further into the back country.

  Out where the bare red dirt was swept by the wind, the roads were rutted tracks. Eyeless stone ruins could be glimpsed through the stubby mulga trees or stood becalmed on a stony plain that would never nourish a grain crop, let alone a sheep. Stone everywhere: as white quartz reefs in the paddocks; as flat, erupted slabs around which Hirsch steered his police 4WD; as pebbles that pinged in the wheel arches when he picked up speed; and as rounded, water-tumbled rocks the size of footballs and tennis balls in the creek beds. Or as fieldstones harvested for long-ago farmhouses, barns, fences and stockyards.

  He barely climbed out of third gear for the first half hour, the HiLux creaking and flexing like a stiff little ship in pitching seas, but eventually he reached a lonely intersection where a bunch of dead flowers rested on the grassy verge. Someone had died in a car wreck here, meaning that other poor souls continued to grieve. A short time later he passed a muddy dam where, according to Bob Muir and others in the town, a toddler had drowned. A landscape imprinted with death, thought Hirsch. Hopes died and people died. Mrs Keir’s ‘natives’, children, motorists, gold fossickers, tourists. Some who wandered into the dry country intending never to return. A murder might pass unnoticed and undetected out here, he thought. Nowhere here is neutral. It’s loaded, complicit.

  He braked at a T-intersection. A sign pointed to Mischance Creek (Ruins) in one direction and Mischance Creek in the other. ‘You want the creek itself,’ Nan Washburn had told him. ‘Drive until you see a wagon wheel, it marks the track to Craig’s camp, if not Craig himself.’

  Out of curiosity, Hirsch checked the ruins first. Nothing much to see. Mischance Creek had been a tiny settlement of houses a century ago but now was mostly stone walls sinking back into the red soil. He U-turned and headed in the opposite direction and turned off at the wagon wheel. A hundred metres down a rutted track he came to the creek and Craig Washburn’s campsite. Hirsch was impressed. The main structure was a long caravan, squat and square, shaded under an extensive thatched roof supported by treated-pine poles. Palm tree fronds, he realised. In a clearing on one side of it, an array of solar panels and a battery. On the other side, an old rustbucket Kingswood parked under a slanted corrugated-iron roof fitted with a downpipe to an i
ncongruous new poly tank the colour of the sky.

  He got out, stretched the kinks in his spine, and wandered over to the car. It didn’t look serviceable and there were no other vehicles that he could see. Two heavy-duty blue work shirts drying on a cord stretched between a couple of gum trees. A bucket with a hole-stippled base strapped to a tree—a showerhead? Tidy piles of used food tins and plastic and glass bottles. He crossed a dirt patch where bull ants teemed and examined the recyclables. Soup. Milk. Mineral water. No beer, wine or spirits.

  The place felt deserted. Hirsch lifted his nose and sniffed cautiously, not wanting to detect decomposition on the wind. He sensed nothing. A man lived here but barely made an impact on the wider area, it seemed to him. He knocked on the door to the caravan. No answer. He tried the door—unlocked—and found himself stepping into a spartan world of folded bedding, textbooks and notepads, a metal detector on a rack above a sofa. No dust, odours, spills or clutter.

  All that was left was to follow the creek. It was mostly dry. No running water, but reedy pools every hundred metres or so. In the distance, the pink-smudge Tiverton Hills. On either side, red soil flats with sparse mulga scrub and bleached dead grass. He came to a bend where a broad stretch of stagnant water showed between bulrushes. Small creatures had scribbled their tracks over a tight crescent of mud. Human footprints, too. Hirsch continued to follow the creek bank, and eventually the shape of a man coalesced beside a narrow cutting. It was probably fast in full flood; now it merely trapped a small pool.

  He stopped to watch. Washburn—if that’s who it was—wore a khaki shirt, trousers and a greasy Akubra hat. Kneeling with his back to Hirsch he was tearing at the dead grass that fringed a stone slab flat on the ground. That completed, he proceeded to swipe away dust and stalks with a new-looking banister brush.

  Hirsch coughed. The man said, ‘I knew you were there. Subtle as a mob of cattle.’

  He stood and turned, revealing a seamed, whiskery face and heavy-rimmed glasses repaired with black electrical tape. Blue binder-twine in his belt loops. He removed the glasses and folded them into his shirt pocket, shrewd eyes watching Hirsch. Then he beckoned with a jerk of his head.