Hell to Pay (13 page)

The coroner thanked him and, as he returned to his seat, said, “That completes the initial formal input. It remains for me to invite members of the community to step forward.”

The chairs shifted minutely.

She waited, glancing keenly at their faces. “Very well, this inquiry is adjourned.”

“All rise,” the officer said.

“Fucking waste of a morning,” muttered Kropp. “Find her slag of a friend, all right?”

“I’m in the city next week, Sarge,” Hirsch reminded him. “The Quine inquiry.”

Kropp screwed up his face at the floor, not looking at Hirsch.

ON SATURDAY MORNING, HIRSCH attended Melia Donovan’s funeral. A service at the tiny Catholic church, followed by a procession of cars, lights on, to the cemetery on the hill, a windswept patch of red dirt, busy ants and gum trees. Everyone wept; the kids from the high school were inconsolable, Wendy Street attempting to console. Katie toed the dirt, keeping company with Jack Latimer and his mother and a couple aged in their sixties. Maternal grandparents? Hirsch stood well back. He felt sad, but didn’t mourn. He watched, not wanting to appear that he was. Other than the schoolkids there were men and women, young and old. He could not name a tenth of the people there, but they all knew him. One or two nodded; others glared. Bob Muir asked him to come to the get-together afterwards, tea and cakes in the hall, but Hirsch declined.

T
HAT AFTERNOON HE WAS
called to a farm contractor’s property a few kilometers outside the town. The man’s work was largely seasonal: plowing and harrowing, crop sowing, reaping, carting, hay baling. He mended fences and bores, crutched sheep, put up sheds, you name it, and leading Hirsch across a dirt yard to
a collection of implement, hay and toolsheds, said, “Feast your eyes on that.”

The door to a small tin structure had been jimmied open, the wounds raw in the metal skin. “I was at that poor lass’s funeral and come back to this. The bastards pinched me son’s trail bike, plus some of me tools, a chainsaw, brush cutter, cans of fuel, saw, plane, pipe wrench …” He glared at Hirsch. “I bet I’m not the only one. The pricks were at the service. They clocked who else was there, and knew we’d be out for a couple of hours, the cemetery and the rest of it, and snuck off and robbed us.”

Quite likely. It was a city crime but no reason why it wasn’t also rural. Hirsch gave the man an incident report number for his insurance company, made no promises and returned to town. Where two more calls came in, people returning from the funeral to find broken windows, doors prised open, tools, computers and TV sets missing.

A
truck or a ute
, thought Hirsch, returning from the last call. In a land of trucks and utes.

F
IVE THIRTY NOW, THE
HiLux threw a long shadow as Hirsch returned to town, the fence posts and power poles striping the paddocks. He found a dusty Holden parked outside the police station, a woman piling out of the driver’s seat, clutching a mobile phone. “Thank God. I tried calling the number you pinned to the door but I had no signal.”

Hirsch recognized her from the funeral, the older woman with Alison and Jack Latimer. “Something wrong?”

She was comfortable, greying, grandmotherly, but in a state and wringing her hands. “It’s my son-in-law. He’s making a scene and I’m scared someone will get hurt.”

“Lead the way. Is it far?”

She was already climbing into the Holden. “Better if you came with me, then I can explain.”

Hirsch thought about it. Would he need anything from the HiLux? Would this end in a car chase? “Hurry,” the woman said,
so he slid into her passenger seat, belted himself in. “May I have your name?”

The woman shot away from the curb, no signaling or mirror-checking. Then again, Barrier Highway was always quiet. “Heather Rofe. Our daughter appeared on our doorstep during the week with her youngest, asking if they could stay for a while. Her marriage hasn’t been the happiest so of course we said yes, but her husband keeps ringing her to come home, and a little while ago he turned up, yelling and swearing.”

“Your daughter is Alison Latimer?”

She was astounded. “Yes. How do you know that?”

“We met briefly,” Hirsch said. He paused. “Is her husband violent, Mrs. Rofe?”

A ragged sigh. “I’m not sure. Ray can be overbearing, needs to get his own way, I know that much.”

Hirsch sat back as Heather Rofe swung the car into a short street beyond the Catholic church. Hirsch counted four houses on either side, the end house on the border of farmland. Eight old houses choked with cottagey shrubs and peeling gums, small-town houses that never opened the front curtains or spoiled the quiet. A beefy green Range Rover was angled outside the end house. The man on the path between the little gate and the front door was tall, solid, wound tight, dressed for a reconciliation in grey trousers, black shirt and a sports coat. A middle-aged man stood at the door, barring him.

Rofe pulled into the curb and Hirsch climbed out, adjusted his uniform cap and approached the house. He stopped at the garden gate, eyeing both men, who eyed him in return, the householder mostly unreadable but, sensed Hirsch, relieved—with an undertone of
I probably could have handled this
. Raymond Latimer was different, flexing his hands, a rampager not rampaging but wound tight as a spring.

“Gentlemen,” said Hirsch.

Latimer ignored him. “Heather, you fetched the police?”

“Sir,” Hirsch said, “your business is with me, now.”

Latimer shook his head like a reasonable man pushed to the limit by fools. “You’re not needed here. We can sort it out ourselves.”

Huge, flexing hands. Hirsch watched the hands, the torso, for a hint of the man’s intentions. Alison Latimer’s husband was savagely shaven at this late stage of the afternoon, wearing his best casual gear. A big, practical man out of costume, but no joke, despite the tidy comb tracks raked across his skull. Regarding Hirsch with a kind of exalted fury, in fact, as if he’d never been challenged like this. Hirsch didn’t feel trepidation, exactly, but an intense expectation. His fingers flicked over the equipment strapped to his belt. He gauged distances.

“You hear me? We can sort this. No need for the police. A civil matter.”

“Ray,” said Heather Rofe, “you were scaring us. I had to fetch the police.”

“That’s bullshit, Heather, and you know it.”

Keith Rofe said, from the veranda, “Banging on the door, shouting and swearing, we felt threatened, Ray. You said some pretty terrible things.”

“Heat of the moment. I only want to speak to Allie, then I’ll be on my way.”

“Not now, not today. Give her a chance.”

“What about me? When’s anyone going to give me a chance? That’s the coward’s way out, leaving home without talking it over with your husband. I think it’s in everyone’s interest if Allie comes home with me now.”

“You’re frightening her,” Heather Rofe said. “You’re frightening Jack, poor little boy.”

Latimer put aside the fury. He shook his head and stomped out onto the footpath in a huge, martyred capitulation. “Unbelievable. A concerned husband and father tries to find a solution to a family difficulty and everyone gangs up on him and the police are called.”

Heather Rofe slipped past him to join her husband. “Allie needs time, Ray, all right?”

“Time? A day? A week? What do you mean, time?”

“Time,” Rofe said and pushed her husband ahead of her into the house. Hirsch sensed that the daughter and grandson were in there, peering through the curtains.

Latimer was about to climb into the Range Rover. “Sir, a quick word before you go?”

The man paused, taking a cold, summarizing interest in Hirsch. “You’re the new cop. You can’t do anything to me, Kropp’s a mate of mine, all right?”

“I’m not fully convinced that you won’t hassle these people again, Mr. Latimer.”

Hirsch expected hostility. What he got was a grin. “I know all about you, you prick.”

Hirsch waited. Waiting had become one of the chief conditions of his life. He waited right through a stream of oblique and wrathful abuse because he’d heard it all before. At the end of it he nodded, said “Sir,” and walked past Latimer to enter the Rofes’ yard. He heard the Land Rover drive away as he lifted his knuckles to knock.

Heather opened the door. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“Do you wish to take out a court order against him, Mrs. Rofe?”

She smiled. “That won’t be necessary.”

Hirsch gave her his card. “Call me anytime.”

“GOT CHURCH THIS MORNING?”

Hirsch’s parents had church every Sunday morning. His asking was part of a pattern: he would call after breakfast, ask this question, catch up on what his sister was up to in the UK, ask after everyone’s health, ask who his parents had seen lately … Every Sunday, and running behind the chatter were Hirsch’s overpowering sense memories, aroused by their voices: the smell of eggs and bacon on weekends, his father’s cigarettes, the play of light in the little hill towns above Adelaide, the stutter of the lawn sprinklers.

And their unspoken question:
Are you really bent, son?

Then they’d sign off, but this time Hirsch said, “I should arrive sometime after lunch.”

“Drive safely,” his mother said.

T
WO AND A HALF
hours to Adelaide, then a quick climb into the hills, the road fast until he turned off for Balhannah. Cooler air up here, scented with spring grasses. He’d struck some Sunday-lunch traffic but the road was quiet now, lunchgoers sprawled at home or in cafés. Greenery pushed in on him from both sides,
and he was woolgathering, not fully engaged, when the siren whooped.

A patrol car, in snarling white and martial black. A 90 km/h zone and Hirsch was doing 85. All his electrics worked: brake light, indicator light. No broken lenses. No failure to stop back there at the crossroads, no failure to give way. So Hirsch woke up pretty quickly, the daydreams dissipating like smoke.

If they wanted to pat him down they’d find the Beretta around his ankle and no paper to go with it.

He pulled over onto the verge and sat there, motor running, watching the rearview mirror. Two figures on board, but the angled windscreen gave him no more than shapes, heads and shoulders. Time passed and Hirsch felt for the pistol and tucked it against his thigh, under a flap of his street directory. They could have been calling it in, he supposed, but didn’t seriously suppose it. Or they had their windows down and were gauging sounds, here above the plain, in the land of little hill towns and doubling-back, up-and-down roads. You’d soon hear a vehicle coming. If you were here to kill Hirsch, you’d want to wait until the coast was clear.

A car did come, an unmarked white Holden. Hirsch watched it crawl past, pull over and reverse until he was hemmed in. He cranked a cartridge into the firing chamber of his pistol, safety off.

Nothing happened, and then something happened. There were four men in the Holden, plain-clothed, and one of the rear passengers held up a mobile phone, waggling it at Hirsch without revealing more than a white shirt cuff under a dark suit sleeve and a shaven bullet head.

Was he to expect a phone call? Make a phone call? Hirsch took his Motorola from the dash cradle, clamped it against the windscreen, his way of saying, “Your move.”

The Motorola screen, slumbering, woke with sound and light. Hirsch said, “Hello.”

“Hello?” his mother said.

So Hirsch said, “Hello,” wondering how the pricks had managed to network the call.

When there was no response, he said, “Mum, it’s me.”

She didn’t hear him and her hearing was perfect, the line clear and her handset new, a cordless he’d given his parents last Christmas, so something else was going on. The next time she spoke—“Hello” and “Is anybody there?”—she sounded frightened.

“Mum!” shouted Hirsch, knowing it was futile.

“What do you want?” his mother was saying. “Why are you doing this to us?”

“Mum,” Hirsch said, and there was a click and the man in the backseat of the white car waved two devices at him, phone and digital recorder.

“Brave,” Hirsch snarled, “taking it out on my mother,” but the white car was streaking away. The patrol car pulled out, too, pausing for a moment alongside Hirsch. A woman in the passenger seat. She shot him with her finger and then passenger and driver were gone, being juvenile with the siren again.

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER
H
IRSCH
said, “Have you been getting anonymous calls?”

“We didn’t want to worry you, dear.”

The house sat at the end of a quiet side street and was indefensible. No alarms or window bars, flimsy locks, a bedridden old woman on one side, a weedy paddock on the other, a plant nursery behind them. Hirsch prowled from window to window and tugged at his parents’ blinds and curtains.

“You’re making us nervous, dear.”

“When did the calls start?”

“A few days ago,” his mother said.

She worked for the ambulance service, a narrow, rangy, nail-nibbling woman used to dealing with drunks, addicts, the scared and the deranged. Her love for Hirsch was absentminded, as if she were not quite sure how she’d come to give birth to him.
Never mean or cross or negligent, just practical and distracted, and closer to his sister.

“Did you report it?” he said.

Hirsch’s father cocked his head tiredly, a man as rawboned as his wife, still in his churchgoing pants and shirt. He was a farrier and had the dents, scars and arthritis to prove it. He said, in his mild rumble, “As soon as we give them the name Hirschhausen, what’s going to happen, son, do you think?”

Saying plenty between the lines
, Hirsch thought. “I think it’d be a good idea if both of you went away for a few days.”

“Few days.”

“Until the end of the week. Or sooner. As soon as I’ve finished giving evidence I’ll call you on one of your mobiles.”

His mother came and gave him a hug. It was there and gone. “I don’t think that will be necessary, dear.”

There was something about the main sitting room window. Hirsch crossed the room. He said accusingly, “New glass. Fresh putty.”