Bitter Wash Road (16 page)

‘Nothing. No follow-up.’

Gaddis smiled at him and pressed a button on the AV controls. Scratchy sounds filled the air. ‘Static. Clearly your recording didn’t work, so why should there be a follow-up?’

‘It did work,’ Hirsch said. He removed his laptop from his briefcase. He cranked the volume up and pressed play. The room heard his voice, and another voice saying, ‘Five hundred now and a hundred and fifty a week, whaddaya reckon to that?’

‘Trevor Dean,’ Hirsch said. ‘Big Trev.’

Gaddis swallowed. ‘Has that recording been authenticated?’

‘No.’

‘Formally lodged?’

‘No.’

‘Then why—’

‘Having determined that Quine was corrupt, I got into the habit of making two copies of everything,’ Hirsch said. ‘I have never deviated from that.’

The grey-faced man glanced at Gaddis and back at Hirsch, so that Hirsch wondered if he had an ally here.

‘Moving right along. In your year at Paradise Gardens did you not see a great number of successful CIB actions?’

‘Yes.’

‘Robberies investigated, witnesses questioned, raids mounted, arrests made?’

‘Yes,’ Hirsch said, and added, over Gaddis’s attempts to ask a new question, ‘But more often than not the team returned empty-handed from a so-called “sure thing” or carrying drugs and stolen goods that were never properly logged into the evidence safe.’

Gaddis, tensely red, said, ‘More on that evidence safe later. What makes you so sure of these accusations, if you were manning the phones or whatever it was you were doing?’

‘I got curious. One day I saw Detective Constable Reid make a call on his mobile before one of these raids that amounted to nothing. The next day he left his phone in the charger while he went to the pub, so I checked his call log. He’d called another mobile phone. After work I went to the address they’d raided and started calling the number. I heard a phone ringing and found it in a rubbish bin. The idiot who’d dumped it hadn’t cleared any of his personal information: photos, texts, Google account, calls made, calls received. He’d been the target of the raid and Reid had tipped him off.’

‘Do we take your word for this?’

After all, Reid was dead. Facing imprisonment, he’d shot himself. Not my concern, Hirsch thought, and he held his briefcase aloft. ‘If you like I can show you screen shots of Reid’s phone and the phone I found in the bin.’

‘Surely you gave this material to an Internal Investigations officer? Sergeant DeLisle, were you shown any of this material?’

She was slightly behind Hirsch and he heard her cough and shift in her chair, and to save her he said loudly, ‘Things have a habit of getting lost.’

This must have seemed like an escape route to Gaddis. With a smirk he said, ‘Lost by Sergeant DeLisle?’

‘No, not by her, by others under your command.’

The man with the unhealthy skin said, ‘Getting back to these CIB raids. What happened when Senior Sergeant Quine’s team
did
recover drugs and valuables?’

‘Never properly logged, sir. Partial descriptions, under-reported quantities, that kind of thing.’

‘Did you come to any conclusions regarding this?’

‘It’s my belief Quine and his mates would keep a portion of the drugs and the valuables and later sell them.’

‘To the Comancheros.’

‘The Comancheros preferred the drugs over the diamond earrings.’

Someone laughed. The grey-faced man said, ‘Do you have proof that the squad kept aside stolen items for sale?’

Hirsch squirmed a little. ‘I attended a raid in which a large amount of stolen jewellery was recovered. I was later handed a Rolex watch from that haul.’

‘Did you sell it?’

‘No.’

‘Did you declare it to a senior officer?’

‘No.’

‘You kept it.’

‘In my locker,’ Hirsch said. ‘I didn’t know what to do about it.’ And Quine was clever, appealing, Hirsch would admit only to himself. He ran rings around defence barristers and made headline arrests of genuinely bad people, and Hirsch—isolated, marriage failing—had felt himself drawn to the man for a while.

‘You did nothing?’

‘I made a note for my own files,’ Hirsch said, waving his briefcase again. ‘Time, date, personnel involved, serial numbers and so on.’

‘You held onto the watch.’

‘Yes.’

‘It was found months later when your locker was searched.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tying you effectively to the other members of the team.’

Hirsch said nothing.

Gaddis said, ‘So the others trusted you by this time?’

‘Not entirely, but they’d stopped thinking about me. I mean they were less cautious around me. As I said, part of the furniture.’

‘In the first inquiry,’ the grey-faced man said, ‘Senior Sergeant Quine’s barrister argued for some of the squad’s actions as “noble-cause” corruption. Would you care to comment on that?’

‘Well, I know what it is.’ Hirsch curled his lip. ‘It’s a weasel word for fabricating evidence in order to get a conviction in cases where you know someone’s guilty but can’t prove it.’

‘Did you see Senior Sergeant Quine fabricate evidence in order to secure a conviction?’

‘He boasted of it.’

The pale man said, ‘We have statements from other sources that Senior Sergeant Quine also misplaced evidence or concocted false statements in order to protect his informants or the criminals he did business with. Can you speak to that?’

Hirsch wasn’t sure what was going on. Gaddis wasn’t happy with this line, but said nothing. And who these other sources were, Hirsch had no idea. He said so.

The grey-faced man sat back, a little deflated, but said, ‘You got into the habit of keeping meticulous records while serving at Paradise Gardens?’

‘Yes.’

‘What things did you record and how were they stored?’

‘Photographs and audio recordings,’ Hirsch said. ‘Lists, copious lists.’

‘Of?’

‘Businesses that offered freebies. The quantities of drugs or valuables seized on raids versus the quantities later listed at trial. Vehicle registrations. Phone numbers. Plus my own recollections of events: what was said and done, by whom, and where and when, together with my doubts and suspicions.’

‘No one saw you do this?’

‘No.’

‘It must have been well hidden.’ Meaning the raid on the station and on his house had not uncovered anything—except the Rolex.

‘I used an internet storage site,’ Hirsch said.

Then he had to explain how the system worked. Gaddis asked, ‘Did you ever store material written by Senior Sergeant Quine?’

‘No.’

‘Tape recordings of the things he or his team said?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘The squad was preternaturally suspicious and wary. They rarely communicated by phone, paper or electronic means.’

‘So your records are limited.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘It has been shown that Senior Sergeant Quine invested in restaurants, bars, home units, racehorses, the share market...Do you have similar investments?’

‘I have a ten-year-old Nissan,’ Hirsch said, which raised a bit of a snigger from the bleachers.

Gaddis said, ‘Tell the members of this hearing about your involvement with Ms Eliza Ley.’

Arsehole. Hirsch swallowed. ‘She’s a lawyer.’

‘A
drug
lawyer.’

‘Yes. I didn’t know that at the time.’

Eliza Ley was simply a pretty but harried-looking barrister he’d seen around the courthouse or visiting remand prisoners from time to time. They got talking. Hirsch found her appealing in a scatty kind of way. The tabloid press intimated that she was appealing in a big-breasted kind of way, but Hirsch thought she was smart, too. They met for drinks a few times and then later for sex. He’d not known until it was too late who she was. He tried to explain this now.

‘You were slow on the uptake?’ Gaddis said.

‘Yes.’

‘Your wife left you as a result?’

‘We’d effectively left each other long before that,’ Hirsch said. ‘She moved out as a result.’

Gaddis was enjoying himself. ‘So you shared a drug lawyer’s bed and knew nothing about her?’

‘Not until I was warned,’ Hirsch said.

He’d been sitting in the pub, minding his own business, when two senior drug squad detectives, venomous with it, slid into the booth, book-ending him. ‘Eliza Ley,’ one of them said.

‘What about her?’

They told him: cops in her pocket, drug-dealer boyfriend, fucking Quine on the side, photos to prove it. ‘You’re getting sloppy seconds, mate.’

Gaddis was saying, ‘And you expect us to believe you had no idea who this woman really was and what she was doing?’

‘Not until it was too late.’

‘What else did the detectives tell you?’ asked the grey man.

‘They’d noticed a pattern. If one of her clients appeared on a possession charge, Quine would go in to bat for him, appear in court saying, “We’ve misplaced that evidence, your honour,” or “We have no objection to bail in this matter, your honour.” They’d raid known meth labs and there’d be no drugs or equipment or cooks or dealers.’

‘They believed Senior Sergeant Quine was passing on information?’

Pillow talk was how one of the drug squad officers had put it, squeezing Hirsch’s upper leg under the table. Fingers like steel clamps.

‘When in fact it was
you
passing on information,’ Gaddis said.

‘No.’

‘You were advised to drop Ms Ley?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did she do or say as a result?’

In all honesty, Hirsch felt Eliza had been hurt that he’d stopped returning her calls. But he didn’t tell Gaddis that. He didn’t say that he’d grown more vigilant, changing his locks, buying the little Beretta, obtaining a silent number and a new mobile. And he absolutely stopped drifting into the grey areas of police work. When his cousin asked him to run a numberplate after a traffic altercation, Hirsch refused. He also refused to protect a school friend from an irate creditor—and just as well, for the friend had turned out to be a cheat and a liar.

Gaddis said, ‘We have mobile phone records showing that you made several calls to drug dealers.’

‘I’ve explained that,’ Hirsch said. ‘Ms Ley made those calls.’

‘When your back was turned I suppose?’ sneered Gaddis. ‘Lots of things happen when your back is turned, don’t they, Constable Hirschhausen.’

~ * ~

15

THAT WAS MONDAY and Tuesday.

On Wednesday Gaddis returned to the Rolex.

‘Why was the watch given to you, do you think?’

‘To implicate me. To make me one of theirs.’

‘And were you? One of theirs?’

‘No. Perhaps they thought so.’

And yet Hirsch had shared some of the squad’s contempt for the justice system; the weak, partisan and unjust nature of courts, judges, magistrates. He felt some sympathy with the notion of taking shortcuts, bending the rules, to obtain justice. Or at least punish someone. The feeling of us-against-them, an instinct to belong, had grown in him.

‘You didn’t wear the watch?’

‘No.’

‘It merely sat in your locker, ready to be found.’

‘Yes.’

Officers from the Internal Investigations division had raided the Paradise Gardens police station right on the morning shift change, nabbing staff going off and on duty. Those on sick leave were taken at home. The building was cleared, locks changed, computers and files seized. Then the place was searched. Drugs were found in gym bags, guns in the ceiling cavities, bundles of cash in the air conditioning vents. Previously missing files, tapes and evidence bags were discovered under different case numbers.

‘You could have declared it. It’s now known that the officer in charge of Paradise Gardens was not involved in the corruption. You could have gone to Internal Investigations.’

‘I didn’t know who to trust. I believed then and I believe now that elements in Internal Investigations are supportive of Senior Sergeant Quine.’

Gaddis said and did nothing, a quality of stillness that seemed like fury to Hirsch.

‘Instead you started babbling your innocence once the inquiry began.’

The initial inquiry sat for ten months. Hirsch had turned over his records, starting with his taped conversations with Big Trev, the publican, who’d already been named during the inquest. Hirsch was gratified to learn that the Internals already knew most things— that his material mostly confirmed that knowledge. He felt less like a dog and a maggot, he supposed.

One by one Quine’s crew went down, committed to stand trial, until only Quine and Hirsch were left. Then things got dirty. Late-night phone calls, gravelly voices asking if his mother, sister, niece were in good health? Bullets in his letterbox, a truckload of cement dumped in his driveway. Breathalysed three times in one week.