Hell to Pay (33 page)

Instead he said, “Did the neighbors see anything?”

Sandra Chatterton shook her head violently.

“Not her fault,” Metcalfe said.

The stress was there in his voice, as if he feared the sky would fall in if he didn’t hold it up, and he’d been holding it up for years and years and one day it would fall in, despite his best efforts. He rested his solid hand on his daughter’s knee and, in his eyes, deeply recessed in their sockets, was pain.

The incontrovertible truth was that Sam Hempel had seen a
black Chrysler bearing Daryl Metcalfe’s plates parked at a house in the mid-north of South Australia as far back as September. Katie Street and Jack Latimer had seen it, too, passing through Tiverton. And Katie had seen it again, a few days later, as if it hadn’t left the district, or had returned.

“Do you know anyone down in South Australia, Sandra?”

She shook her head so hard the flat limp hair flew.

He said gently, “You’ve never been to parties down there?”

Another violent shake.

“What is this?” Metcalfe demanded, uneasy, his high forehead damp.

Then an alteration in him. He looked fully at his daughter, full-wattage regard and suffering and forgiveness. “Sandy?” he said, his voice a loving low rasp, pebbles slipping off a shovel.

It was enough to flip her. Her head dropped, her hands went to her ears. “I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry.”

“You sold the car to buy drugs?” her father asked gently.

“No, I swear.”

“You owed people for drugs?”

“No!”

Hirsch was content to watch and listen. An old drama was playing out, the devoted father, the beloved daughter and her demons.

“I went on a trip,” she muttered.

Metcalfe glanced at Hirsch as if seeking permission to continue. Hirsch gave him a nod.

“Where, sweetheart?”

“I wanted to see the sea.”

Hirsch could understand that. He said, “The nearest water is Port Augusta?”

“I went there and then I went a bit further.”

“When was this?”

Sandra Chatterton’s knee jiggled. Hirsch could see the poor thin bone inside the fabric of her jeans. “My birthday.”

The father looked pained. “Beginning of September.”

“What happened, Sandy?”

“I ended up in Port Pirie.”

A port can mean drug importation
, Hirsch thought. A deal, a shiny big car as collateral. But when he thought about this particular port town, a kind of dread crept in, unrelated to Sandra Chatterton and drugs. He couldn’t quite name it. “And?”

“I hooked up with these guys,” she told her father, full of apology.

He patted her knee.

“I wasn’t using, Dad, honestly. I’ve been getting my act together. But it was my birthday, and you know, you weren’t around …”

“It’s all right, sweetie.”

“We got busted,” Chatterton said.

Hirsch said carefully, “By the police in Port Pirie?”

“We were in this motel room, not making any noise or anything, not really partying or anything, and they came storming in.”

“You were charged? Fined? Jailed?”

“One of the guys I was with I think was undercover, he just disappeared. The other one, he got six weeks.”

“You?”

She squirmed. “Because me and Dad’ve got different last names and my ID shows my old address I couldn’t prove I was driving Dad’s car. Plus they rang the police here, who talked to the neighbors, who said Dad was overseas and the house was empty.”

Voice and face said she’d spent her life feeling invisible and overlooked.

“They accused you of driving a stolen car?”

“Yeah.”

“They confiscated it?”

“Yeah.”

“Who did, Sandy?”

“There was this one guy there said maybe he could keep me
out of jail. I said ‘I’m HIV positive,’ so he wouldn’t touch me.” She looked at her father. “I’m not, Dad, promise.”

“Clever of you.”

“What happened then, Sandy?”

“I hitched home.”

Hirsch said carefully, “When this man said maybe he could keep you out of jail, what was he proposing?”

Chatterton told him, her voice and delivery chopped about but reaching an end point eventually. And, as she spoke, growing animated, Hirsch thought he could see what Spurling saw in her, a gamine appeal.

DURING THE THREE-AND-a-half hour drive back to Tiverton, Hirsch mentally outlined the case he’d present to DeLisle and Croome.

Melia Donovan first.

Melia was adventurous, suggestible, anxious to please, her head easily turned by a man with money and charm. The magistrate spent some time, money and charm on her, flattered her, let her drive his car, gave her a fun time: alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, sex, gradually introduced her to a group of men who liked to party with underage girls. Perhaps she caviled, so he held the shoplifting charge over her head, threatened youth detention.

Or he used Gemma Pitcher to bring Melia on board. Had the girls been friends before this? The age difference made it unlikely. Yet there were not many teenage girls of any age in the town, so maybe it was inevitable they’d gravitate toward each other.

Or Gemma recruited Melia Donovan of her own volition. To curry favor with the men? To share the sense of shame or degradation, if that’s what she’d been feeling? To earn some reflected glory, Melia being the pretty one, the sexy one?

Hirsch would ask Gemma those questions—if he could find her, if she wasn’t dead. The country out east was littered with mine shafts.

Something had gone wrong at the party—some abuse, some rottenness, one of the men overstepping the mark—with the result that Melia had grabbed her clothes and run. What had Gemma’s reaction been?
Been there, done that, suck it up, Melia
? Or had she been sympathetic, even horrified, but too scared to speak out or intervene? Either way, she couldn’t have expected or condoned what happened next.

H
IRSCH REMEMBERED THREE THINGS
about the day Melia Donovan’s body was found.

One, as soon as Dr. McAskill had finished his examination he’d walked a few meters out of earshot and made a phone call.

Two, McAskill then drove to Tiverton, where he not only broke the news to Melia’s mother but also made contact with Gemma Pitcher.

Three, Kropp had shown up.

Hirsch constructed a story around them. McAskill had been a witness to the incident between David Coulter and Melia Donovan, and he’d seen Coulter chase after her, so it would be natural for him to believe Coulter killed her. Coulter must have thought it would be ruled an accident and left it at that, but McAskill knew it was a problem for everyone. It needed to be contained. So he called Kropp. Kropp would know what to do. And Kropp promptly contained Hirsch by ordering him to stay put at the scene, giving McAskill time to contain Gemma Pitcher, possibly by threatening her.

Meanwhile it was arranged that McAskill would perform the autopsy: further containment. He could overlook evidence and skew findings. His pronouncements would be accepted.

T
HAT’S HOW
H
IRSCH SAW
it as he headed south, the kilometers rolling beneath him and the sun beating down, the light
permanently watery at the far extremes of the Barrier Highway but mica bright at the edges, broken-glass bright.

The story unrolled like the highway. What the men hadn’t foreseen was a suspicious wife. Alison Latimer followed her husband, worked out what was going on and confronted him.
I want a divorce. I want half the farm or I’ll see you in jail
.

Alarmed, Latimer told the others. They’d all go to jail if Alison Latimer contacted the police. And it would be Kropp she contacted—Kropp, her husband’s mate—but police in Adelaide.

The only way out was to kill her. And the beauty of that was it solved the Latimers’ money problems. The inheritance, no divorce payout, and one less mouth to feed.

She had a history of instability, so why not mock up a suicide?

But who would have done it?

Clearly great attention would focus on the Latimer men, so they’d need unbreakable alibis. The old man’s was easy: He’d take his grandsons away for the weekend. Meanwhile Ray would make a show of appearing with his girlfriend at the football final and celebrating afterwards, obnoxiously drunk, so drunk he’s thrown into the lockup overnight and appears in court the next morning. Easy for Kropp and his crew to arrange, and the icing on the cake is Constable Hirschhausen, who has no stake in the matter, no relationship with Raymond Latimer, and will be Latimer’s alibi for the later part of the morning.

So who abducted and then shot her? Not Kropp: he was in Redruth. Not Nicholson and Andrewartha, surely? They weren’t reliable. McAskill? Coulter? Logan? Venn? Hirsch couldn’t see it. He kept coming back to Spurling, a policeman, who knew about evidence and police procedures. And his seniority in the region would give him some control over the investigation and the information that flowed from it.

But he’s a man of overweening ego. He can’t conceive of making a mistake. He can’t conceive that a man like Hirsch—disgraced copper—would start raising doubts on the very afternoon
the body was found. Doubts about the victim’s shoes, motives, position, car, weapon … 
So the prick needed to contain and monitor me
, Hirsch thought,
and the best way to do that was get me to prepare the brief for the coroner
. Hirsch, a man demoted, friendless and new to the mid-north, ignorant of its ways and its secrets.

Spurling could have asked Kropp to prepare the brief, but there was always the chance that the press or someone in HQ would question the wisdom of that, argue that as a friend of the husband he’d be partisan. And the rumbles about Kropp’s policing methods were widening, complaints were becoming public.

Managing Hirsch was a much better idea.

It was a pity for Spurling that McAskill couldn’t have performed the Latimer autopsy as well, but there was no way the authorities would give a gunshot death to a small-town doctor.

Not like a hit-and-run.

Hirsch’s phone rang in the car cradle. He pulled over, buffeted by the wind of a passing truck. He had one bar of reception.

“Where are you?” Rosie DeLisle demanded.

“Halfway between Redruth and Broken Hill.”

“Can hardly hear you.”

Hirsch tilted the phone. In the end he got out and walked along the miserable verge. “Is that better?”

Another buffeting truck, grit stinging him and a hawk slipping across the sky.

“Not much. Listen, don’t talk, just wanted to fill you in. We had quite a chat with your boy—though his story is a bit all over the place.”

“He’s not the brightest knife in the drawer.”

“What? Listen,” Rosie shouted. “Just letting you know we’ve found connections between some of these heroes. Venn, Coulter, Logan and Latimer all boarded at St. Peter’s College. Logan met McAskill when they shared a house together at university. There have been complaints lodged against all of them at one
time or another. Several against Coulter, according to the Chief Magistrate. For example, he refused to grant a police application for a court order against a violent ex-prisoner who was stalking his wife, and overturned a protection order against some kids who were bullying another at school.”

Hirsch thought he understood this aspect of Coulter. A crummy small-town solicitor, he’d developed a gorgeous sense of himself when appointed magistrate. No wonder Kropp disliked him. But what about Kropp?

“What about Kropp?”

“Don’t know how he fits in,” Rosie said. “But he has been there for at least twelve years. How are you doing on the Chrysler?”

Hirsch told her.

“Sorry, didn’t catch a word of that. Call me when you have a better signal.”

H
IRSCH CLIMBED BEHIND THE
wheel again. Nose down, the sun pouring through the glass, fatigue taking hold.

He tried to get inside Spurling’s skin. A precise bureaucrat but a creep, a satyr, within. Huge ego. A man who selects and rejects, controls and judges.
He’s been at it for a long time
, Hirsch thought,
and nothing’s ever gone wrong, so he’s grown complacent
.

He’s been the area commander for a long time. As long as Kropp’s been the Redruth sergeant? What’s the connection between them? They’re roughly the same age, so might have known each other since the academy. Or served together early in their careers and stayed in touch. Knew each other, knew the other’s proclivities
.

Hirsch saw the web of interests. Spurling and Kropp and his boys. Kropp and the locals—businessmen, football club members, the landed gentry. Hirsch still didn’t know what the courthouse tension between Kropp and Coulter and Logan meant, but guessed he’d know once the arrests were made.

F
INALLY, THE
C
HRYSLER
.

An out-of-state car, none of the locals knew it and it hadn’t been reported stolen. The owner was overseas. Spurling could come and go without anyone saying, “Who’s this?” Rather, people would think, “Interstate driver, passing through.” After all, there were always New South Wales cars on the Barrier Highway, heading south for a holiday by the sea, heading north again when it was over.