Bitter Wash Road (27 page)

He stepped into the museum. An elderly man turning the pages of a newspaper greeted him curtly. The main display was a diorama of the copper mine. Miners’ picks hung on the walls. Shovels, brass telescopes, spears, boomerangs and woomeras. Christening gowns, napkin rings and porcelain shepherds crammed into glass cabinets. Old shop mannequins dressed in 1850s trousers, dresses, bonnets, shawls. Tables laden with crockery and knotty green and blue glass bottles. Bentwood chairs. Lamps. And several pieces from more recent times: a pedal radio, an inky school desk, dozens of photographs: Army volunteers in 1917 and 1942, shearing sheds, prize Merino rams, the cricketer Garfield Sobers visiting the primary school in the early sixties.

People would move house, or their old back-roads grandfather would die, and the museum would get anything that wasn’t wanted, didn’t work or couldn’t be sold to a second-hand dealer. It wasn’t quite junk, and was even halfway interesting, but Hirsch’s interest didn’t stretch past fifteen minutes. He left, aware of the grouchy gaze of the curator. The town’s hatred of Kropp and his boys was rubbing off on him, too.

~ * ~

Hirsch was sauntering back
along the main street, draining a bottle of water, when his phone pinged:
Yr cars ready.

He found the HiLux parked on the forecourt of Redruth Automotive, looking dusty and hand-printed with grease but with a spotless new windscreen. He entered the dimness of the panel-beating shed, benign, unprepared for the meaty forefinger that stabbed him in the chest.

‘Butt out of my business, all right?’

Hirsch jumped in fright, dropped into a panicked half crouch.

Nicholson laughed. ‘What, you’re going to try karate on me? You a martial arts expert now?’

Hirsch straightened. They were all watching from the shadows, the overalled men and Judd and a young woman he didn’t recognise. Ignoring Nicholson, he said to Judd, ‘Keys in the ignition?’

Clearly Judd had called Nicholson and was expecting something else to happen. ‘Er, yep, good to go.’

‘Don’t fucking turn your back on me,’ Nicholson said.

Hirsch tried walking towards the sunlight, but Nicholson confronted him, his big paw around the woman’s forearm. ‘Meet Bree, arsehole. Bree, meet the cunt who dobs in his mates.’

Hirsch said, ‘How old are you, Bree?’

‘You prick, you absolute fucking prick.’

The punch was fast and stone hard, winding Hirsch. He staggered, bent over, and, after a second, spewed the spring water over the floor and his shoes. He was a good target like that and Nicholson booted his backside.

‘Nick,’ wailed the girl, ‘stop it.’

Nicholson ignored her, dancing around Hirsch, aiming kicks. ‘Dog. Maggot. Slime ball. She’s old enough, arsehole.’

Hirsch found a spot of oily floor and sat, his back to the leg of a metal bench. Getting his wind back he said, ‘Bree, do you have a driver’s licence?’

‘What the fuck is this?’ screamed Nicholson. ‘Eh? Get out of my fucking face.’

The man’s spittle flecked Hirsch’s lapels and face. Hirsch swiped his forearm across his cheeks and mouth, the girl saying, ‘Nicko, don’t, let’s just go.’

She looks about nineteen, Hirsch thought, taking in the hacked-about hair, skinny arms, a tattoo on one shoulder, rings piercing her poor pink flesh here and there. There was nothing unusual about her, she was just a young woman cowed by a bully. And he’d seen her before, he realised, serving food at the Woolman on the night of the football final.

Nicholson loomed over him. ‘Stay the fuck away from me and my girlfriend and my business, all right?’

~ * ~

When Hirsch climbed to
his feet he hurt in half a dozen places. He looked a complete fool, and he knew his uniform was a wreck. Judd and his employees had melted away, leaving the hint of silent laughter. The air in the shed was superheated and dense and silent and the noon sun, a fat block of it angling a short distance in at the doorway, was lighting up dust motes. Hirsch walked stiffly into that light, out into the fresh air.

One of the panelbeaters stood beside the HiLux, dangling the keys. Hirsch expected taunts but what he got was, ‘Few things you should know.’

‘Yeah? What?’

‘Bree’s good people, doesn’t deserve the hassle.’

‘I’m not going to hassle her.’

The man nodded. He was narrow faced, saturnine, slow and deliberate. ‘Nicholson’s another matter.’

Hirsch waited. He placed a hand on the hot metal for support. Removed his hand again.

‘Him and Andrewartha,’ the man said.

‘I understand they work here in their spare time.’

‘The odd job, yes.’

He was glancing around now, feeling eyes on his back, so Hirsch reached for the keys as if they were not having this discussion. He murmured, ‘Kropp’s part of it, too?’

The man shrugged. ‘Probably. Behind the scenes.’ His eyes shifted. ‘I will deny this.’

‘Uh huh. How much do I owe you?’

‘Taken care of. We handle all the police repairs and servicing.’

Hirsch put away his wallet. ‘Okay.’

He knew enough now. Judd, getting all of the department’s business in the area, probably overcharged and shared the skim with Kropp and his boys. The after-hours work would be cash in hand. And there were always crash scenes, vehicles needing a tow, the police well placed to advise distressed motorists where they could get their car fixed.

Hirsch nodded his thanks and climbed behind the wheel. The interior was baking hot. ‘Melia Donovan.’

‘What about her?’

‘I’ve heard talk of a car crash, an older boyfriend.’

‘Can’t help you.’

~ * ~

By mid-afternoon Hirsch was
back in Tiverton, running a hose over the HiLux in the narrow driveway beside the station house. He squirted and swiped at the panels, trying to get rid of road dust and panelbeaters’ grime. Presently he heard voices, high and sweet, cars, and car doors slamming: school was letting out across the road.

He straightened his back to watch.

Today, in the midst of spring sunshine and honest physical labour, and surrounded as he’d recently been by sudden death, he wanted reminders of blamelessness. Some kids were kicking a football around, watched by a teacher who kept glancing at her watch. Then a figure separated from the others. Katie Street. She was coming to see him, he realised. She stopped, looked left and right along the empty highway, and ran across, halting abruptly on the footpath.

‘Hello there,’ he said, glancing around for her mother.

‘Hello.’

‘Waiting for your mum?’

Katie looked briefly stricken and confused. Until recently, Hirsch realised, the person who’d dropped her off and picked her up from school most days had been Alison Latimer. Not only that, she’d been a regular visitor at the house across the road. They would have been close. ‘Come and wait with me in the yard,’ he said.

She entered reluctantly, Hirsch making no big deal of it but turning off the hose and dropping the chamois in the murky bucket beside a back tyre. ‘Would you like a drink? A snack?’

She did what kids do, shrugged elaborately, wanting the treats but not prepared to say so outright.

‘I’ve got Coke and Tim Tams.’ Left behind by the previous tenant. He hadn’t checked the use-by dates.

‘Okay.’

‘Stay there.’

He came back with two cans and the packet, both safe to consume. They sat companionably on the front step, where the sun warmed them as the world went by, what there was of it now that most of the parents had come and gone across the road. Hirsch eyed Katie surreptitiously. She chewed, brushed at crumbs, jumped when he crackled his empty can. Not to be outdone, she crackled hers.

Jack Latimer is off school for a few days, he thought; meanwhile, I’m a kind of security until her mother arrives to collect her. Or there’s something she wants to tell me.

It came finally, the voice almost a whisper: ‘I didn’t shoot Alison.’

‘Good grief, of course not, no one thinks you did.’

He didn’t have the language or the know-how to explain a suicide to a child. Then again, why shouldn’t she be told? And maybe she had been told. That led him to secondary thoughts: What if Alison Latimer had been shot in her car, then carried to the hut? Or shot in her house, ditto. Or shot at her parents’ house, ditto.

Then Katie was up and running, out onto the footpath. ‘Mum! Mum!’

Wendy Street had been about to turn into the school when she caught sight of her daughter. She braked, swung the Volvo around and parked at the kerb. Gazing hard at Hirsch, she got out, passed around the front of her car and clamped Katie against her thigh. ‘Hello, darling girl,’ she said, eyes busy. She took in the school, the dripping HiLux, the Coke cans and Hirsch, establishing a narrative from the evidence. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘Unexpected staff meeting.’

She was inviting an explanation, and Katie sensed that. ‘I just came over to say hello.’

‘Did you.’

‘We had a treat. Coca-Cola and Tim Tams.’

Wendy shuddered. ‘Nectar of the gods. Well, I’d better get you home.’ She didn’t move but watched Hirsch intently, Katie glued to her side. ‘I understand you’ll be briefing the coroner.’

Hirsch acknowledged that he was, adding, ‘It would help if I could have a word with you sometime.’

‘Come for dinner,’ Katie said.

Her mother paused for a beat, recovered, and said, ‘There you have it. Dinner. Six-thirty—country hours.’

~ * ~

23

COUNTRY FOOD: LAMB chops and vegetables.

Then at eight-thirty, Katie in bed, they talked, Hirsch in an armchair, Wendy on the sofa, separated by a heavy rug on polished floorboards. Bookshelves to waist height lined three walls, with photographs, prints and a single watercolour arranged in the spaces above. No television—that was in a sunroom at the back of the house. Hirsch checked the book titles: biographies, photography, art, travel, and a mix of good fiction and crap. No cookbooks, and none that he’d seen in the kitchen, thank the lord above. Vases, a couple of small brass gods from some trip to South-East Asia.

Street was watching. An ironic flicker in her face and voice she said, ‘Pass muster?’

Hirsch gave her a faint grin. ‘Nice room.’

‘For an interrogation.’

‘A chat.’

‘A chat,’ Wendy said, and stretched her limbs and arranged herself along the length of the sofa. Hirsch was pretty sure she was having fun with him. Her gaze was sleepy with a hint of humour.

‘Fire away.’

Hirsch took a breath. ‘The popular consensus is that Mrs Latimer committed suicide.’

Wendy Street dropped her mild smartarse act. She swung upright, tears filling her eyes, a faint glistening in the dim light of the floor lamp beside her. ‘Can’t we call her Alison?’

‘Sure.’

‘And as far as I’m concerned, she
didn’t
kill herself.’

Hirsch shifted in his chair. ‘You were close?’

‘Katie and I moved here four years ago and I met her pretty much straight away. We became friends. Walking distance from each other. And she was lonely.’

‘What can you tell me about her? Her health. Moods.’

‘I know what you’re getting at. Look, now and then she complained of stiffness in her hand, maybe arthritis. She said the wind turbines got to her, especially at night. If there was an easterly wind blowing she’d wake up in shock with her heart pounding. She said the sleep deprivation was getting to her.’

Hirsch thought of his own reaction to the turbines. ‘I had a strange feeling when I stood by one of the turbines the other day. Like I was seasick.’

‘Yet other people aren’t affected. Katie and I sleep like babes.’ A shrug. ‘There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of a syndrome. It’s the noise, apparently, and low-frequency soundwaves.’

‘Her husband and sons weren’t affected?’

‘No. But her mother-in-law was. These wind farms have split families, you know. Ray and his father were dead set on getting turbines on the property; they were ropeable when the company decided on Finola Armstrong’s place instead.’

‘This syndrome: could it have affected Mrs Lat...Alison so much that she’d take her own life?’

‘No. Absolutely not.’

‘I can’t overlook the fact that she made a previous suicide attempt.’

‘Look, when I first met her, Allie was very timid. She opened up gradually and admitted things weren’t great in her marriage and that she felt depressed. She’d have panic attacks and heart arrhythmia, she got very down sometimes. I told her to talk to her doctor about anti-depressants, but she shied away from that. I think she was scared her husband would find out. Then about a year ago she was found with a gun as if she intended to shoot herself.’

‘Did she ever talk of suicide to you?’

‘She told me once she wished she could end it all. At the time I thought she meant she wanted to get out of the marriage. I still think that. I don’t think she was saying she wanted to kill herself.’