Bitter Wash Road (24 page)

‘Sir.’

Spurling assessed Hirsch briefly, then turned to go. He stopped at the front door. ‘Your fleet vehicle: get a new screen fitted.’

‘Sir.’

‘And get it washed. It’s filthy.’

~ * ~

Instead, Hirsch got it
filthier, heading out along Bitter Wash Road again.

The Latimer house and yard were still choked with cars, but the Port Pirie detectives had been and gone, and in the meantime the Latimer children had returned with their grandfather. Hirsch found them in the main room, standing with Ray Latimer at the centre of a constantly moving press of people. Without being sure of his intentions, he began to edge through to them, pausing to grab a sausage roll from a table crammed with sandwiches, sponge cakes, beer and juice bottles, wine flagons.

The Latimer men spotted him and stiffened, acutely aware of his progress through the crowd. Why was that? They locked eyes with him, as if only they and Hirsch existed on earth, betraying nothing but stillness and vigilance. Two powerfully made, big-jawed, proprietorial men.

Then Kropp was back in Hirsch’s face, red, beery and emotional. ‘I thought I told you to piss off.’

‘Just seeing if you wanted a hand, Sarge.’

‘Is that a fact. I can read you, pal.’ He poked Hirsch in the chest. ‘You lay off, understand? That’s an order.’

Hirsch, glancing past Kropp, saw Raymond Latimer and his father watching the exchange. They didn’t smile to see Hirsch get his comeuppance, didn’t look relieved. Nothing. He wondered what vaunting disappointments and ambitions drove them.

‘Well?’

‘Sarge, if you must know, a few things bother me.’

‘Is that a fact, Nancy Drew.’

‘Mrs Latimer had some odd bruises on her, Sarge. No mud on her shoes. What if this house is a crime scene? Or, if she was snatched from her parents’ house, then
that
is a crime scene. The hut, the rifle, her car...We need prints, blood samples, tyre impressions.’

Kropp looked like he couldn’t believe his ears. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

Hirsch was distracted by an abrupt movement at the corner of his vision. He turned. Raymond Latimer had collapsed onto the sofa with his sons, Jack burrowing into his chest as if wanting to slip inside him, Craig shoulder to shoulder and looking stunned. All three looked reduced: damp, blotchy, all animation gone.

‘Look at them,’ Kropp said.
‘Look
at them.’

‘All I’m saying is—’

‘The Port Pirie boys took all the samples and photos they need. Meanwhile you keep out of it. This is a peaceful community. You, you’re a traveller here. Passing through.’

~ * ~

20

MONDAY BEGAN WITH Kropp on the line, in a mild froth. ‘Just been talking to the super.’

Hirsch said nothing. He could hear yelling across the road, doors slamming: the school holidays were over.

‘I’m warning you: the Latimers are decent people visited by tragedy, and Spurling or no Spurling, I’ll have your guts for garters if you step out of line.’

‘Yes, Sarge.’

‘Why the hell he put you on it, I don’t know. The mind boggles.’

‘Sarge, I’m as surprised as you are.’

‘Arselicker.’

Hirsch heard impotence in the sergeant’s voice. ‘I’ll tread lightly, Sarge.’

~ * ~

Hirsch propped his feet
on the desk, notebook in his lap, not writing but thinking.

In his view there were three essential truths to police work: most crimes go unpunished; most crimes are solved not by forensics but chance, an admission or a word in your ear; and detection matters less than piecing together rumours and random scraps of information.

Still, a bit of method didn’t hurt. Scrawling
Interviews
at the top of a blank page, he made a list: the Latimer clan; Alison’s parents and sister; her doctor; her neighbours; her friends. Not knowing all of their names yet, that’s how he listed them, by role and title.

Wendy Street should be able to help: friend and neighbour.

But he suspected he’d get mainly emotional, partial and impressionistic evidence from these people, proof of nothing, and it might very well lead him to one conclusion, that Alison Latimer took her life while the balance of her mind was disturbed, or however coroners liked to word it these days.

He flipped over the page and made another list:
Formal Evidence,
namely the autopsy findings and forensics. What would her body, clothing, car, parents’ house, own house, rifle and the Tin Hut reveal about her death?

Finally, gut impressions. He stared at the ceiling, formulating them in his mind. The death didn’t seem right to him, or to her parents or Wendy Street. Were his guts listening to them or to his own rumblings? On the surface, there was little evidence to suggest homicide, plenty to suggest suicide. Alison Latimer knew how to handle a rifle, he’d seen it himself, and she’d made a prior suicide attempt. No suicide note. But that didn’t mean anything: plenty of people took their own lives without explaining themselves. Meanwhile, what about her spotless shoes, the bruises, her thumb in the trigger guard? Why the Tin Hut? Why spend her final seconds in a place that freaked her out? On the other hand, those who might want her dead—her husband, her father-in-law, maybe even the older boy—had unshakeable alibis.

Who else? A secret lover? Wendy Street might know.

Hirsch jotted scenarios:

She committed suicide.

She was snatched from her parents’ house, subdued by force, taken to the Tin Hut and shot dead, the body and gun arranged to suggest suicide.

Ditto, but she was accidentally killed during the struggle and so on.

She was lured to the farm, or the Tin Hut, and killed by accident or design and the body and gun arranged to suggest suicide.

Alison Latimer was a slight woman but not frail. Could a woman have killed her?

And so Finola Armstrong’s name surfaced again. Hirsch found her address in the phone book, locked up and headed out to Bitter Wash Road.

~ * ~

Armstrong’s house was stone
with a wash of cement over it, painted white once upon a time but now mostly dust and mould, the veranda iron rusty. It sat among pine trees so high and cramped they robbed the sun, their needles starving the garden and choking the gutters. Hirsch had never seen such a miserable building, and wondered at the man or the woman, a couple of generations ago, who’d decided the pines and the cement were a good idea. The sheds, on the other hand, were in the open and expressed the busyness of a working farm.

He mounted gloomy steps. There was a hollow wind, mournful where it wrapped around the chimney, eaves and veranda posts. He was about to knock on the front door when Finola Armstrong appeared from behind a rainwater tank, removing canvas gloves. Hirsch stepped down from the veranda and eyed her carefully: jeans, a checked shirt, a scowl and an odour of diesel and silage.

She stopped a metre from his chest. ‘I guessed you’d be dropping by.’

‘Did you?’ said Hirsch.

‘Don’t be coy.’

‘Okay, well, perhaps you could tell me your movements after I saw you at the motel on Saturday night?’

Armstrong tilted her head, revealing a smear of chaff dust along her jaw that he itched to wipe away. ‘You’d like me to say I went home in great turmoil, deciding that all my problems lay with Alison Latimer, and that I got up the next morning and did her in.’

‘Well, that would simplify matters. Is that what happened?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think she was murdered?’

‘Not for me to say, but I doubt it.’

‘What did you do after I left you on Saturday night?’

‘Didn’t stay in that dreadful motel, that’s for sure.’

‘You went home?’

‘I
was
in turmoil, but going home wasn’t going to fix it. I went to my sister’s.’

Hirsch patted his jacket pocket for pad and pen, fished them out, clicked the pen, found a blank page. He could feel her eyes on him.

‘Ready?’ she asked, a glint in her eye. She gave him address, phone numbers and names: sister, brother-in-law, nieces.

‘They can all verify etcetera, etcetera?’

‘They can.’ She tilted her head again. ‘Are you treating it as suspicious, the death?’

‘Covering bases,’ said Hirsch blithely. ‘Preparing a brief for the coroner.’

‘Uh huh. Bill Kropp thinks it’s suicide.’

Letting him know who her friends were. ‘Getting back to Saturday night.’

‘I was upset. Cross. Couldn’t think clearly. Told myself—not for the first time—that I should end it. So I went to the only person who’d listen and talk sense to me about it.’

‘After midnight.’

‘She’s my sister,’ Armstrong said.

‘You stayed the night?’

‘I stayed two nights. Got back this morning.’

By now Hirsch had pretty much discounted her. She was a hard, brusque woman—notwithstanding her need of sisterly comfort— and seemed essentially truthful. A straightforward woman, even if her love life wasn’t.

Or maybe in her mind it was. ‘What was your understanding of the Latimers’ marriage?’

‘Am I a slut, do you mean? Secretly sleeping with another woman’s husband? He told me the marriage was over, she wanted a divorce.’

‘When did he tell you that?’

‘Ages ago. The beginning of the year, when we first hooked up.’

‘Did Mrs Latimer know about you?’

Armstrong shrugged. ‘We didn’t shove it in her face, but yes, she did.’

‘Did she have words with you about it? Angry words, upset words?’

‘I barely knew the woman. Don’t get me wrong, I think her death’s a dreadful thing, it’s sad on all levels. Those poor boys. Her parents.’

Hirsch nodded. ‘How did you get involved with Mr Latimer?’

‘We have an adjoining fence. There was a grass fire just after Christmas and part of the fence needed replacing.’ She shrugged. ‘We got talking.’

‘Grass fire.’

‘Passing motorist tossed a cigarette out the window? I don’t know. Does it matter?’

‘You got talking.’

Armstrong revealed some feeling for the first time. ‘Look, he paid me some attention. I didn’t go looking for it but it found me. It was nice.’

‘Will you continue to see him?’

‘Mind your own business.’

‘How well do you know Sergeant Kropp?’

‘Your boss, Sergeant Kropp? Is that the Sergeant Kropp you mean?’

Hirsch faced off the challenge with a smile. ‘Yes.’

‘He’s mates with Ray.’

‘Is that a fact?’ said Hirsch flatly.

Finola Armstrong was bored with him. ‘Got work to do,’ she said, walking away from him, her rear shapely, a smudge of engine oil on the seat of her jeans and one pocket torn. God Hirsch was lonely.

~ * ~

Loneliness was more powerful
than his scruples, sensibilities and good manners. Otherwise he wouldn’t have slowed as he drew adjacent to Wendy Street’s driveway. Nothing. No Volvo. Of course: the holidays were over; she’d be standing at the head of some classroom, pointing at the board.

~ * ~

21

THAT AFTERNOON HE doorknocked the little street where Alison Latimer had spent her last few days alive. Had anyone seen Mrs Latimer on Sunday morning, or at any time on Saturday? No one had. Had anyone seen an unfamiliar or a familiar but out-of-place car parked at or near the house at any time in recent days? Had anyone heard anything? Hirsch also invited speculations: all he got was some vague admiration of the Latimers and remarks on how well Alison had done for herself, shame about how depressed she’d been the past couple of years.

He left the Rofes alone for now.

~ * ~

The world turned over.
On Tuesday morning Hirsch investigated the suspected theft of a hundred ewes. He found them in a neighbour’s paddock, the neighbour apoplectic about the state of the complainant’s fences. He calmed everyone down, returned to the town and called on the Rofes.

Heather answered, looking wrung out with grief. ‘You knocked on some doors yesterday.’

‘Yes.’

‘Learn anything?’

‘Afraid not.’

She shook her head, opened the gap in her front door. ‘Come and have a cup of tea with us.’

Hirsch removed his cap and followed her through to the kitchen. Keith was there as if he was always there, still stunned, more rumpled. Heather gazed at him with a flicker of pity and irritation, told Hirsch to sit.

Hirsch drew back a chair. ‘I’ve been asked to prepare a brief for the coroner.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m afraid I need to ask about Alison in a more formal context.’

Heather turned from the sink, waved the wet spout of the kettle at him. ‘Formal context? Or formal whitewash?’