Hell to Pay (25 page)

Hirsch pushed his plate away. He left the café, strolled around the little square, bought the
Advertiser
, read it in the rotunda. Barely forty minutes had elapsed. He strolled into an op shop and immediately out again. Why did all op shops have an out of tune radio playing in the background? His fingers had itched to adjust the dial.

The little hillsides above the square beckoned and he found himself climbing narrow streets between stone walls dating from the 1850s. Jasmine scented the air, dense on back fences, and fake diamonds glinted where the sun struck the adzed stone.

Then down to Redruth Creek. According to a pamphlet in a plastic stand beside a plaque, huts had appeared along the creek in 1843, when Colonel Frome was surveying the northern reaches of the colony, but there was no town until 1850, when a shepherd, Alfred Tiver, spotted traces of copper oxide in the local stone. South Australia might have foundered if not for the mine. Twenty years later, the shafts were depthless blue pools of water that defeated the pumps, and the Cornish Jacks had migrated to other towns and mines, but not before the hillsides and flatlands had been denuded of trees, the timber consumed by the boilers or staked against the pressing earth deep under the ground.

“Huh,” said Hirsch.

He crossed an iron bridge, guided by a map on the back fold of the pamphlet. Here near the bank of Redruth Creek was a square of miners’ cottages with a common area in the middle, tiny tenement houses with undersized doors and windows set in thick blank walls. They didn’t look the least Australian to Hirsch’s eye but straight out of old Cornwall. Tourist accommodation now, according to the pamphlet.

Finally he followed the map to the museum halfway uphill from the town. It was a converted boiler shed, probably freezing in winter and stifling in summer but not so bad this morning. Upslope from it were great excavations in the hillsides, nude stone remnant walls and chimneys and deeply rusted iron
frames and gantries. Hirsch stopped before entering. Below him the town threaded peacefully through the valley folds, a series of peaceful red roofs and oleander bushes. The hillsides looked bare. There was no wind. A hawk floated. There were no people about, no tourists or tourist buses in the car park or hikers approaching along the Heritage Track, which wound through to the mine from the ruins of the colonial-era jail near the creek.

He stepped into the museum, greeted curtly by an elderly man who turned the pages of a newspaper. The main display was a diorama of the copper mine. Miner’s picks hung on the walls, together with shovels, brass telescopes, spears, boomerangs and woomeras. Old shop mannequins displayed mid-nineteenth-century trousers, jerkins, dresses, bonnets and shawls. Tables were laden with crockery and knotty green and blue glass bottles. Bentwood chairs. Lamps. An 1851 edition of the
Adelaide Observer
. And several pieces from more recent times: a pedal radio, an inky school desk, photographs of Army volunteers in 1917 and 1942 and of the cricketer Garfield Sobers visiting the primary school in the 1950s. Here and there were glass cabinets crammed with silver napkin rings and sugar bowls, christening gowns and porcelain shepherds. People would move house, or their old back-roads grandfather would die, and the museum would get anything that wasn’t wanted, didn’t work or couldn’t be sold to a secondhand dealer. It wasn’t quite junk and was even halfway interesting, but Hirsch’s interest didn’t stretch past fifteen minutes and he left, aware of the grouchy gaze of the curator, proof the town’s hatred of Kropp and his boys was rubbing off on him.

H
IRSCH WAS SAUNTERING BACK
along the main street, draining a bottle of water, when his phone pinged:
Yr cars ready
.

He found the HiLux parked on the forecourt of Redruth Automotive, looking dusty and hand-printed with grease but with a spotless new windscreen. He entered the dimness of the
panel-beating shed, benign, unprepared for the meaty forefinger that stabbed him in the chest. “Butt out of my business, all right?”

Nicholson. Hirsch went into a half-crouch.

Nicholson laughed. “What, you’re going to try karate on me? You a martial arts expert now?”

Hirsch straightened. They were all watching from the shadows, the overalled men and Judd and a young woman he didn’t recognize. Ignoring Nicholson, he said to Judd, “Keys in the ignition?”

Clearly Judd had called Nicholson and was expecting something else to happen, not this. “Er, yep, good to go.”

“Don’t fucking turn your back on me,” Nicholson said. “Arsehole, sticking your nose in.”

Hirsch tried walking toward the sunlight, but Nicholson confronted him, his big paw around the woman’s forearm. “Meet Bree, arsehole. Bree, meet the cunt who dobs in his mates.”

Hirsch said, “How old are you, Bree?”

“You prick, you absolute fucking prick.”

The punch was fast and stone hard, winding Hirsch. He staggered, bent over and, presently, hurled the spring water over the floor and his shoes. He was a good target like that and Nicholson booted his backside.

“Nick,” wailed the girl, “stop it.”

Nicholson ignored her, dancing around Hirsch, aiming kicks. “Dog. Maggot. Slime ball. Bree’s
nineteen
, arsehole. Old enough.”

Hirsch found a spot of oily floor and sat, his back to the leg of a metal bench. Getting his wind back he said, “Bree, do you have a driver’s license?”

“What the fuck is this?” screamed Nicholson. “Eh? You nuts? Butt out of my business.”

The man’s spittle flecked Hirsch’s lapels and face. Hirsch swiped his forearm across his cheeks and mouth, the girl saying, “Nikko, don’t, let’s just go.”

She does look nineteen
, Hirsch thought, taking in the hacked about hair, skinny arms, a tattoo on one shoulder, rings here and there in her poor pink spongy flesh. She wasn’t unlovely, just a young woman cowed by a bully. And he’d seen her before, he realized, serving food at the Woolman on the night of the football final.

Nicholson loomed over him. “Stay the fuck away from me and my girlfriend and my business, all right?”

W
HEN
H
IRSCH CLIMBED TO
his feet he ached, felt impotent and knew his uniform was a wreck. Judd and his employees had melted away. The air in the shed was superheated and dense and silent and the noon sun, a fat block of it angling a short distance in at the doorway, was lighting up dust motes. Hirsch walked stiffly into that light, out into the fresh air.

One of the panel-beaters stood beside the HiLux, dangling the keys. Hirsch expected taunts and contempt but what he got was, “Few things you should know.”

“Yeah? What?”

“Bree’s good people, doesn’t deserve the hassle.”

“I’m not going to hassle her.”

The man nodded. He was narrow-faced, saturnine, slow and deliberate. “But Nicholson’s another matter.”

Hirsch waited. He placed a hand on the hot metal for support. He removed his hand again.

“Him and Andrewartha,” the man said.

“I understand they work here in their spare time.”

“The odd job, yes.”

He was glancing around now as if he had eyes on his back, so Hirsch reached for the keys as if they were not having this discussion. He murmured, “Kropp’s part of it, too?”

“Strictly behind the scenes. I will deny all this.”

“Uh-huh. How much do I owe you?”

“Taken care of. We handle all the police repairs and servicing.”

Hirsch put away his wallet. “Okay.”

He knew enough now. Judd, getting all of the department’s business in the area, probably overcharged and shared the excess with Kropp and his boys. The after-hours work would be cash in hand. And there were always crash scenes in the area, vehicles needing a tow, the police well-placed to advise distressed motorists about Redruth Automotive.

Hirsch nodded his thanks and climbed behind the wheel. The interior was baking hot. “Melia Donovan.”

“What about her?”

“I’ve heard talk of a car crash, an older boyfriend.”

“Can’t help you.”

O
R WON’T
. B
Y MID-AFTERNOON
Hirsch was back in Tiverton, wielding a hose in the narrow driveway beside the station house. Squirted and swiped, trying to rid the metal of road dust and panel-beaters’ grime. Presently he heard voices, high and sweet, cars and car doors slamming: school was letting out across the road.

He straightened his back to watch. Today, in the midst of spring sunshine and honest physical labor, and surrounded as he’d recently been by sudden death, he wanted reminders of innocence or blamelessness. Some kids were climbing into cars, others were kicking a football around, watched by a teacher who kept glancing at her watch. Then a figure separated from the others. Katie Street. She was coming to see him, he realized. She stopped, looked left and right along the empty highway, and ran across, halting abruptly on the footpath.

“Hello there,” he said, glancing around for her mother.

“Hello.”

“Waiting for your mum?”

Katie looked briefly stricken and confused. Grief, Hirsch realized. Until recently the person who’d dropped her off and picked her up from school most days had been Alison Latimer. Not only that, she’d been a regular visitor at the house across the road. Inevitably a closeness had developed. “Come and wait with me in the yard,” he said.

She entered reluctantly, Hirsch making no big deal of it but turning off the hose and dropping the chamois in the murky bucket beside a back tire. “Would you like a drink? A snack?”

She did what kids do, shrugged elaborately, wanting the treats but not prepared to say so outright.

“I’ve got Coke and Tim Tams.” Left behind by the previous tenant. He hadn’t checked the use-by dates.

“Okay.”

“Stay there.”

He came back with two cans and the packet, both safe to consume. They sat companionably on the front step, where the sun warmed them as the world went by, what there was of it now that most of the parents had come and gone across the road. Hirsch eyed Katie surreptitiously. She chewed, brushed at crumbs, jumped when he crackled his empty can. Not to be outdone, she crackled hers.

Jack Latimer is off school for a while
, he thought.
Meanwhile, I offer security until her mother arrives to collect her. Or she has something to say
.

It came finally, the voice almost a whisper: “I didn’t shoot Alison.”

“Good grief, of course not, no one thinks you did.”

He didn’t have the language or the know-how to explain a suicide to a child. Then again, why shouldn’t she be told? And maybe she had been told. That led him to secondary thoughts: What if Alison Latimer had been shot in her car, then carried to the hut? Or shot in her house, ditto. Or shot at her parents’ house, ditto.

Then Katie was up and running, out onto the footpath. “Mum! Mum!”

Wendy Street had been about to turn into the school when she caught sight of her daughter. She braked, swung the Volvo around and parked at the curb. Gazing hard at Hirsch, she got out, passed around the front of her car and clamped Katie against her thigh. “Hello, darling girl,” she said, eyes busy, taking
in the school, the dripping HiLux, the Coke cans and Hirsch, establishing a narrative from the evidence. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Unexpected staff meeting.”

She was inviting an explanation, and Katie sensed that. “I just came over to say hello.”

“Did you.”

“We had a treat. Coca Cola and Tim Tams.”

Wendy shuddered. “Nectar of the gods. Well, I’d better get you home.”

She was watching Hirsch intently, Katie glued to her side. “I understand you’ll be briefing the coroner.”

Hirsch acknowledged that he was, adding, “It would help if I could have a word with you sometime.”

“Come for dinner,” Katie said.

Her mother, nonplussed, recovered and said, “There you have it. Dinner. Six thirty—country hours.”

COUNTRY FOOD: LAMB CHOPS and vegetables.

Then at eight thirty, Katie in bed, they talked, Hirsch in an armchair, Wendy on the sofa, separated by a heavy rug on polished floorboards. Bookshelves to waist height lined three walls, with photographs, prints and one watercolor arranged in the spaces above. No television—that sat in a sunroom at the back of the house. Hirsch checked the book titles: biographies, photography, art, travel and a mix of good and crap fiction. No cookbooks, and none that he’d seen in the kitchen, thank the lord above. Vases, a couple of small brass gods from some trip to Southeast Asia.

Street was watching. An ironic flicker in her face and voice she said, “Pass muster?”

Hirsch gave her a faint grin. “Nice room.”

“For an interrogation.”

“A chat.”

“A chat,” Wendy said, and stretched her limbs and arranged herself along the length of the sofa. Hirsch was pretty sure she was having fun with him. Her gaze was sleepy with a hint of humor.

“Fire away.”

Hirsch took a breath. “The popular consensus is that Mrs. Latimer committed suicide.”

Wendy Street dropped her mild smartarse act. She swung upright, tears filling her eyes, a faint glistening in the dim light of the floor lamp beside her. “Can’t we call her Alison?”

“Sure.”

“And as far as I’m concerned, she
didn’t
kill herself.”

Hirsch shifted in his chair. “You were close?”

“Katie and I moved here four years ago and I met her pretty much straight away. We became friends. Walking distance from each other, and I think she was lonely.”

“What can you tell me about her? Her health. Moods.”

“I know what you’re getting at. Look, now and then she complained of stiffness in her hand, maybe arthritis, and she said the wind turbines got to her, especially at night when an easterly wind was blowing. She’d wake up in shock with her heart pounding, she said, and suffered from sleep deprivation.”

Hirsch thought of his own reaction to the turbines. “I had a strange feeling when I stood by one of the turbines the other day. Like I was seasick.”

“Yet other people aren’t affected. Katie and I sleep like babes. Which is not to deny what you and Allie felt. There’s anecdotal evidence of a syndrome due to the noise and low-frequency soundwaves.”