Hell to Pay (7 page)

“Don’t be a cunt, son. But, yeah—and to see you’re settling in okay, your lovely new quarters.”

Hirsch motioned to the stiff chair that faced his desk, but Kropp shook his head. “No thanks. Somewhere more comfortable, think you can manage that?”

Hirsch pictured his living quarters and doubted it. “Come through.”

The connecting door led to a short corridor and a shut-in smell, no natural light, boxes hard against the wall. Edging past, Kropp said, “You’ve been here what, three weeks already? You’re not going anywhere else, Sunshine, so you might as well unpack.”

“Had my hands full, sir.”

The corridor opened on to the cramped sitting room. “Get your wife to do it,” Kropp said, stopping to give his meaty head a theatrical smack. “Oh, forgot, she left you, I seem to recall.”

“Kind of you to remind me, Sarge,” Hirsch said, his voice full of light cadences. He opened the curtains without improving anything. He switched on the overhead light. Dust motes floated. This was a loveless place and Hirsch sometimes found himself talking to the furniture in the dark hours. Dumping Saturday’s
Advertiser
from one of the armchairs, he sat in the other, better, armchair. Kropp eyed the remaining chair and lowered himself as if freezing his sphincter muscle.

“Tea?” said Hirsch. “Coffee?”

The sergeant shook his head, thank Christ. “This hit-and-run. Anything leap out at you?”

“She was hitching home and a vehicle hit her. Or she was killed elsewhere and dumped. Until I know what she was doing there I—”

“What’s this ‘I’ shit? Team effort. Oh, I forgot, you don’t do team effort.” Kropp leaned his forearms on his knees and stared at Hirsch. “Let the accident boys deal with the evidence and
we
will work out a plan of action to answer your questions about her movements, okay?”

“Sarge.”

“Meanwhile I want you down in Redruth at noon tomorrow for a briefing.”

“Sarge.”

Hirsch waited, Kropp watching as if to chase him if he ran.

Then the man grinned crookedly and stood. “I’m off. That crack in your windscreen? Get it fixed.” He paused. “Know why?”

Hirsch’s mind raced. Roadworthiness? Then he guessed: “Anything we don’t tolerate in the citizenry, we don’t tolerate in ourselves, maybe?”

“Aren’t you a sweetheart. Try Redruth Automotive.”

Then Kropp was gone and Hirsch heated and ate his lasagna, so alone that he talked to the furniture.

WHAT WAS WRONG WITH him? Those kids this morning had seen a woman hovering around his car. He dumped his dirty plate in the sink and hurried out to the Nissan with a torch, a rag, latex gloves and, after a moment’s thought, a couple of evidence bags.

Started at the boot and moved forward: toolbox, spare tire well, under the boot carpet, then parcel shelf, under the rear seat, inside the door cavities, under the front seats, glove box. He found what he was looking for in an ancient, forgotten, unused first aid box, but continued his search inside the engine bay, just in case. Nothing there, so he returned to the first aid box.

An iPhone and a bundle of cash. First he photographed both items
in situ
, then removed them. Still some juice in the phone; it was an iPhone 5 in perfect nick. He scrolled through until he came to a screen showing the IMEI number, photographed it. The cash amounted to $2500 in hundred-dollar notes. He dismantled the bundle and photographed each note, twenty-five serial numbers. Finally he stowed everything in one of the evidence bags.

The time was six thirty. Hirsch returned to the shop, still
toting the evidence bag. Tennant had placed a CCTV camera above the petrol bowser. Might get lucky.

He found the shopkeeper switching off lights. Tennant frowned at the evidence bag. “You want a refund on your dinner?”

“Ha, ha. The camera above your bowser: does it work?”

“It works.”

“Video or hard drive?”

“Hard drive.”

“I need to see footage from last Friday, mid-morning.”

Tennant was confused. “Somebody broke in? I’m not missing anything, and I would have known, I was here then.”

With a “just routine” air, Hirsch said, “Someone put a note under my door, no big deal, something about a tax cheat, as if that’s the police’s business, but if the lens range and angle allows it, I might get an idea who left the note, and I can put a flea in their ear.”

Stop babbling
, he told himself.

“Tax cheat?”

“Not you,” Hirsch assured the shopkeeper.

Showing doubt and irritation, Tennant took him to the back room and showed him the equipment and how to run a search. Wanted to hover, so Hirsch said, “Police business.”

H
IRSCH WAS IN LUCK
: Tennant’s camera had been angled to cover the bowser, but also showed the footpath and part of the police station. He saw a woman of slight build and above average height, shoulder-length fair hair swinging around her neck and cheeks, moving rapidly. No clear shot of her face, damn it all. Of course it helped that he rarely locked his old bomb, but she was in and out of his car inside a minute.

Hirsch found Tennant at the front door, anxious to lock up and go home. “Finished?”

“I need to buy a memory stick.”

“Really? You found something?” Tennant said, intrigued,
unlocking a drawer, fishing around in it and coming up with an 8-gig version. “This do you?”

“Fine.”

“I can show you how to transfer the footage.”

“I’ll be right.”

So Tennant charged Hirsch twice what the device was worth and waited in a sulk at the door.

W
HERE TO STOW THE
phone and cash? If Internal Investigations officers searched his car now and found nothing, they’d tear the house, office and HiLux apart. And he knew and trusted no one here.

Hirsch walked around to the rear of the station, poked his head over the side fence, into the old woman’s backyard. It was overgrown by weeds and roses, the little garden shed mute testament to her inability to keep up anymore. He clambered over the fence. Concealed everything in an empty paint tin, taking reasonable care not to touch it, disturb the dust that covered everything.

B
ACK IN HIS OFFICE
, Hirsch dialed an Adelaide number.

“We need to meet.”

Sergeant Rosie DeLisle said tensely, “You bet we do. In fact, I was about to call you.”

Making Hirsch tense. “What happened?”

“You tell me.”

Hirsch knew then that the Internals had some fresh hell in store for him: new evidence, a new slant on old evidence, something like that. Rosie had always been straight with him, ultimately gone into bat for him, but he’d always skated on thin ice, the sessions he’d had with her.

“I’m being set up,” he said.

“Is that a fact,” she said flatly.

“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

“Not over the phone.”

“That suits me. I can be in the city by ten.”

“Tonight? No thanks. Tomorrow afternoon sometime.”

“That works for me.”

“Somewhere off the beaten track, Paul.”

“I embarrass you,” Hirsch said, meaning,
I taint you
.

“Something like that,” DeLisle said. She named a winery in the Barossa Valley. “One o’clock.”

“You think your colleagues don’t visit wineries?”

“Not this one.”

“Ah, somewhere exclusive,” Hirsch said, “boutique. Are you sure you’re not on the take?”

“Just be there, all right?”

T
UESDAY MORNING, AND
H
IRSCH
had things to do, places to be, before he attended Kropp’s briefing in Redruth. He was on the road by 7:40, the sun smeared along the eastern horizon. A washed-clean day with vivid green on both sides of the road, the birds nesting or soaring. He lifted his forefinger to the oncoming cars, which didn’t expect it from a cop. The morning was still. All movement seemed concentrated here, on the Barrier Highway, but he sensed the potential for movement away from it—in the birds along the wires, the cow paused in the act of chewing her cud, the farmhouses crouched behind cypress hedges.

Halfway down the valley he turned right, onto the road to Clare, the only town of a decent size in the area. It had an agency of his building society and it had a phone shop. He visited the building society first, withdrawing $2,500 in hundred-dollar bills, leaving himself with $164.65 until payday. Then he went to the phone shop.

Hirsch had bought his present phone there three weeks earlier, on Kropp’s advice, Kropp telling him, “The first thing you need to know is we get shit mobile reception up here. As much as I welcome the idea of you stranded in the middle of nowhere with a flat tire and no signal bars, the Department would take a dim view, so get yourself a decent phone, all right?”

“Maybe the Department could spring for a satellite phone, Sarge.”

“Don’t push your luck with me, Sunshine.”

What Hirsch remembered about the phone shop was the box of parts behind the counter: outmoded GSM phones, cracked touchscreen Androids, flip phones with loose keypads, scarred plastic cases, dead batteries, iPhones with the guts stripped from them.

He drove back to Tiverton with the cash and an old iPhone 4 that was stuck at the boot logo. Cost him $150, which he thought outrageous. Now he had $14.65 to his name.

Half expecting officers from Internal Investigations to jump him, half fearing to learn they’d already carried out their search, he reached into the Nissan, found the first aid box exactly where he’d left it, and made the swap.

THEN HE PINNED HIS mobile number to the front door and headed back down the valley, reaching Redruth forty minutes later. Wheat and canola crops all the way, spread between the distant blue ranges, and finally signs of habitation and he was drawing into a town of pretty stone buildings folded through a series of hillocks. Copper had been mined here in the 1840s but it was a pastoral center now, the Cornish Jacks long gone, leaving behind flooded mine shafts, some cottage rows and a legacy of names like Redruth and Truro. Hirsch had explored the old mine when he first arrived, seeing bottomless pools of water an enchanted shade of blue, and mine batteries, sheds and stone chimneys sitting licheny and eroded on the slopes above the town.

Soon he was making a shallow descent to the town center, where the shops, a pair of pubs and a garage were arranged around an oblong square consisting of a statue to the war dead and a tiny rotunda on a stone-edged lawn. The building frontages were nineteenth-century but the hoardings and signage were purely modern, a mishmash of shapes, colors, fonts and corporate livery. Then he was through the square
and entering an abbreviated side street, directed to the police station by a sign and an arrow. At the curb on both sides of the street were police vehicles: two 4WDs, Kropp’s Ford and two patrol cars.

The time was 11:45. He parked and went in. This station was no converted house but a dedicated red brick building with a lockup, several rooms and a large rear yard, but inside its foyer-cum-waiting room Hirsch found a front counter like his own: scarred wood, wanted posters and community notices on the wall, a couple of desks and filing cabinets in the dim corners.

The counter was staffed by a middle-aged man in civilian clothing, an auxiliary support officer whose job it was to greet the walk-ins, hand out forms, take reports, do the filing. A dull, sleepy man, he gave off a quiver of interest when Hirsch gave his name. “Ah, Constable Hirschhausen. Through that door.”

He pointed, and Hirsch found himself in a region of cramped rooms at the rear of the station: Kropp’s office, a small tearoom, a briefing room, an interview room, storage area, files. At the end of the corridor was a steel door leading to the lockup. Drawn by voices, movement, a spill of light, Hirsch headed for the tearoom.

Which fell silent the moment he appeared in the doorway. Two men stared at him stonily: the Redruth constables, Nicholson and Andrewartha. Hirsch gave a face-splitting grin, just to rile them. “Hi, guys!”

Nicholson said, “Maggot,” showing a mouth crowded with tiny teeth. He was fleshy and pink, his face squeezed and veiny.

Hirsch grinned again and turned to Andrewartha. Another from the porcine family, this one had moist, red budded lips that seemed poised to blow kisses. He stuck a stub of a finger to his temple, cocked his thumb and said, “
Pow
.”

“Good to see you, guys,” said Hirsch, pushing through.

“Arsehole.”

Two rickety plastic tables in the room, one strewn with paper
cups, sports papers and skin magazines, the other bearing an urn and a percolator. Hirsch poured coffee into a paper cup. Nicholson jostled him.

“Whoops, sorry mate, clumsy of me.”

Hirsch poured another cup. He grabbed a stale donut and ducked around Nicholson’s tree-trunk form to stand beside the refrigerator, stashing coffee and donut on the top of it and fishing out his mobile phone. He angled the screen, he ran his fingers, not looking at the others but ready to fight if that’s what they wanted.

Then, an alteration in the air, a tremor of awareness passing through Nicholson and Andrewartha, a subterranean nastiness and quickness. Glancing up, Hirsch saw a young female officer in the doorway, pink, tense, sprucely ironed.

“Morning.”

Her voice was low and raspy, but a squeak of nerves ran through it.

“Did someone say something?” Andrewartha asked, cocking an ear.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Nicholson said. He flared his nostrils: “Hang on, there’s a whiff in the air.”

The newcomer flushed, but was game. “Maybe you’ve got a dose of hay fever … or a dose of something.”

“Now, what
is
that smell?” said Nicholson. “Got it! Female hygiene product.”

“You would know,” Andrewartha said, jostling him.

Both men pushed past her into the corridor, their voices fading along it:

“They reckon she’ll root anything on two legs.”

“
Four
legs.”

Leaving Hirsch alone in the room with her. She glanced at him without hope or interest. “Okay, give it your best shot.”

Hirsch headed for the percolator. “Coffee?”