Hell to Pay (27 page)

DeLisle, Croome, Kropp, Spurling, Wendy Street, all wanting updates or action.

“I need to speak to Ray Latimer, Sarge,” he told Kropp.

“Lay off a while longer. Let the family grieve.”

“He’s your mate. Ask him to phone me.”

“Lay off, I said.”

Wendy Street would call to say, “I’ve remembered something,” and relate a bit of recalled conversation, something Alison Latimer had said about her husband. None of it proved intent, or that a crime had been committed.

A
ND
S
PURLING CALLED HIM
regularly. Dropped in again one day, insisting he be briefed in Hirsch’s sitting room this time.

“Like what you’ve done to the place.”

Painted the walls, got a carpet cleaner in, replaced the curtains and light shades, hung a couple of Tiverton Primary School Community Art Fair watercolors: wildflowers somewhere out east, and the Razorback under boiling black clouds but shot by a bolt of sunlight.

“Putting down roots, sir.”

“Sure you are,” Spurling said.

The area commander settled himself on one of the tatty armchairs, tatty under a patchwork quilt cover from the same art fair. “Remember I asked you for updates on your Redruth colleagues?”

“Sir.”

“I am yet to hear from you, Constable Hirschhausen. Why is that?”

“Been busy,” Hirsch said, “and I haven’t had anything to do with them lately.”

Spurling grunted. “The Street woman’s going ahead with her public meeting. No date set, but goodness, what a lovely experience that’s going to be.”

He stared at Hirsch. Hirsch held his tongue.

“Mr. Inscrutable. Where are we with the suicide? The coroner can’t proceed until the police hand him a brief.”

“The thing is, sir, I don’t think it was a suicide.”

“Here we go. All right, spit it out.”

Hirsch expressed his doubts and frustrations: The car, the rifle, the trampled upon scene. The diamond ring. Alison Latimer’s hand. The ballistic report, the pathologist’s findings.

“You’re light-on regarding evidence,” Spurling observed. “Where’s the car?”

“Sitting in the impound lot, as far as I know.”

“May not be too late to have it printed and tested for fibers and fluids.”

Hirsch shook his head. “I tried that. No joy. The windows had been left open, condensation had formed, too much time had elapsed.”

“You took photos?”

“Printed them out,” Hirsch said, handing Spurling a folder.

The superintendent flipped through them, stopping occasionally, glum and unimpressed. “It had been raining from memory?”

“A couple of days earlier.”

“Unexplained tire impressions, shoe prints?”

“Tires, no. As for foot traffic, half of Christendom traipsed over the area.”

A pause. Spurling said, “Yet her shoes are clean.”

“Exactly.”

“I know what you’re thinking, but in court they’ll argue that people don’t abandon their instincts. Here’s a neat, tidy woman who, even though intending to shoot herself, didn’t want to get dirty. She skirted around the mud, kept to the grass.”

“Maybe.”

“The same applies to the diamond ring. Didn’t want it to get damaged or lost or lifted by light fingers. You say she knew about firearms?”

Hirsch shrugged. “Farmer’s wife. Country woman.”

“Not the most common way for a woman to kill herself.”

“No. And look at this.” Hirsch poked his forefinger on one
of the photographs. “See the way her thumb’s still hooked inside the trigger guard?”

“That’s hardly compelling.”

“But she had a problem with that hand, a weakness, couldn’t straighten her fingers or thumb very well. Meanwhile her prints are on the stock and butt, but
not the barrel
.”

Spurling said, “Again, not compelling. She did have some movement in that hand, yes? And it’s not beyond the realms of possibilities that she held the rifle around the trigger area with her right hand and maneuvered the barrel tip into her mouth with the left hand holding the stock rather than the barrel.”

“You’d be a good defense barrister, sir.”

“Constable, I’m anticipating the questions that might get asked at the inquest—or at trial, if it gets that far, and it seems to me you don’t have anyone in the frame for a crime.”

Hirsch grunted. At the back of his mind was the thought that he’d paid too much attention to Wendy Street’s viewpoint, sympathized because he was attracted to her. “Fair enough.”

“And remember that brain injuries cause peculiar behavior. So does the intent to commit suicide.” Spurling paused. “Was she checked for GSR?”

“A few flecks.”

“There you go. She shot herself.”

“It doesn’t feel right, sir.”

“Anything else on the body?”

“Some bruises and abrasions.”

“Suggestive of …?”

Hirsch shrugged. “Of being manhandled.”

“Or of falling over, falling against the hut,” Spurling said. “Get a second opinion.”

“She’s been cremated.”

“Ah. Well, I suppose you can always get someone else to look at the pathologist’s findings.”

Spurling got to his feet. On the way out he said, “Get that flaming vehicle washed.”

T
HE DAYS PASSED. IF
Hirsch happened to be at the police station at lunch- or going-home time, he found himself watching out for Katie Street and Jackson Latimer in the schoolyard across the highway. Forty kids, ranging from five to twelve, and full of din and discord as they flowed out of the buildings and across the playing field or into waiting cars. Sometimes they were the town’s only source of sound. He’d pick out Katie Street by her animation, a bright ribbon of movement and intelligence. He’d pick out Jack Latimer, stunned and lost.

Get that flaming vehicle washed
 … Hirsch was obliged to wash it once or twice a week these days, and one Friday in late October, as he sloshed and sluiced with sudsy water, the dust a stubborn film that reappeared in streaks and deltas whenever his back was turned, he heard Katie say, “Put some elbow grease into it.”

Hirsch turned. “Care to show me how?”

“I will if you pay me top dollar.”

She was full of life there in his driveway. Jack was with her, slow, dazed, hesitant, and it occurred to Hirsch that she’d dragged him with her in an effort to jolt some life into him.

As if I could help
, he thought. “You only want me for my Tim Tams,” he said, thinking
Christ, why did I say that?

Katie toed a weed. “Can we wait here till Mrs. Armstrong comes?”

“Sure.”

Finola Armstrong? Hirsch supposed it made sense. She lived not far from the children and there would be occasions—after-school staff meetings, for example—when Wendy Street might be delayed. But why couldn’t Ray or his father do the school run occasionally? Too busy? Women’s work?

“You guys like a treat while you wait?”

Katie Street was game. She crossed the yard with a toss of her head.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Hirsch said, indicating the
front step. He went in, came out with a tray of drinks and biscuits.

But Jack Latimer was hovering at the gate, staring down the road, seeming lost, as though unsure of the steps to take now.

“Jack?”

The boy stepped from his good foot to his bad, good foot, bad. “What if she comes and can’t find us?”

“Mrs. Armstrong gets a bit cross,” Katie explained.

Hirsch could picture it: The impatience, stiffness and social awkwardness of Finola Armstrong. Seeing the boy wither a little, he joined him at the gate, risked dropping a hand on his shoulder. “How about it, Jack? Coke and a Tim Tam?”

But the high school bus was pulling up outside Tennant’s. Two girls and three boys alighted, their shirts half out, socks at ankle height, shoes scuffed, hair this way and that, one girl tugging her hemline from crotch to mid-thigh before her parents caught her. The five moved off, one girl down a side street, the other into the shop with two of the boys, the fifth to the end of the veranda, beside the mailboxes. Craig Latimer. He looked slumped, unhappy, wound tight, and Jack seemed to shrink further at the sight of him, giving Hirsch a glimpse of the great gulfs in the family: the grandfather on the hill, the father at the bottom of the hill or out wildcatting with his women, the older boy giving off waves of anger, the younger boy waves of desolation.

Then Finola Armstrong’s Honda came hurtling into town. It stopped for Craig and was speeding the short distance to the side street entrance of the primary school when Jack hobbled out of Hirsch’s gate, waving his arms.

Armstrong braked, U-turned, Jack stepping back to avoid it, onto Hirsch’s toes. “Sorry!”

He looked aghast at what he’d done. Hirsch clasped his shoulders gently, a brief, bolstering contact, and nodded to Armstrong through the side window of the car. Craig was in the back. Jack joined him.

Then Katie was skipping past, crying “See ya!” and getting
into the front with Armstrong. She was a light in darkness, a ribbon of brightness, too good for her glum neighbors.

Hirsch decided to say hello. Walking around to the driver’s window, he was watched by Armstrong, who scowled and with reluctance wound her window down. Not hostile, not wary, just affectless, a placid quality to her sun-damaged face.

“Helping out?” he said cheerily.

That’s when her whole being altered. It was as if she thought him dim or uninformed. And that’s when he saw Alison Latimer’s diamond ring on one careworn, farm-chapped hand. She gave a secretive smile. “You could say that.”

Hirsch gave her roof a little slap and stepped away from the car. Katie waved, the boys didn’t. He returned to his yard and sluiced more mud onto the driveway, trying not to think too hard about what had just happened.

H
IS NEXT VISITOR WAS
Jennifer Dee.

She banged through the main door of the police station at the end of the first week of November, startling Hirsch in the act of taking down fly-specked public notices, tiny spiders under a couple of them.

“You bastard, I’ve lost my job because of you.”

Hirsch stepped down from his stool before she kicked it out from under him. He eyed the door to his office, the door to his apartment, the front door. She was a slight, teary woman but fired up, and he didn’t want to tussle with her in an enclosed space.

Yeah, but she’d brought it upon herself. “You were fired because you planted evidence on me.”

“They showed me the tape, you can’t even tell it was me.”

Her eyes were red, she was trembling, perspiration dampness under her arms and at her neck. Hirsch said, “Would you like a beer? It’s beer weather.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Beer. Juice, tea, coffee …”

She actually stamped her slender foot. “Bob Reid died because of you.”

“Bob Reid died because he shot himself in the head.”

Perhaps no one had spoken to her frankly yet. She put her hands across her stomach as if he’d hit her. “Because his life was ruined.”

“He ruined his own life. He let Quine corrupt him, and when he got found out, he couldn’t cope with the strain.”

“He only got found out because of you.”

“Listen to yourself, Jenny. Are you saying it would have been okay for him to go on stealing and lying and perverting justice? Besides, Internal Investigations knew all about him before they spoke to me.”

“You’re lying.”

She ran out and he didn’t follow her. Living with her departing words is what his life would always be. It’s what people believed.

COULTER, THE CIRCUIT MAGISTRATE, rotated through the district every couple of weeks and at noon on a Friday in mid-November, a day dry and dusty, building in heat, Hirsch headed down Barrier Highway for the Venn drunk-driving case. On the outskirts of Redruth he noticed the first of several posters on power poles and crumbling walls:
POLICE METHODS IN REDRUTH, VOICE YOUR CONCERNS
and a date in December. He was surprised: Surely Nicholson and Andrewartha went around ripping them down?

Venn and his wife were waiting on the steps together with a man Hirsch recognized as the lawyer Ray Latimer had used the day his wife was murdered. He should have walked right on by but got his phone out, thumbed the camera icon and made straight for the little group, snapping as he went.

Stopping on the step below them—at a disadvantage, psychologically—he said, “I repeat my warning, Mrs. Venn: if you persist in claiming you were the driver, I’ll arrest you for perjury.”

The Venns were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, well-dressed, people for whom nothing went wrong. Jessica Venn took a pace
toward Hirsch on thin, stabbing heels, the tendons flexing in her toned legs. A fight! She was spoiling for it. “You jumped-up little—”

The lawyer touched her sleeve. “Jess …”

“Well he is.”

Now the lawyer fixed on Hirsch, his eyes devoid of moral light. “Was that a threat I heard, Constable Hirschhausen? Directed at my client? As though I, an officer of the court, were invisible?”

“Perjury is perjury,” Hirsch said. He stuck out his hand, not sure if the man would shake with him. “And you are?”

The lawyer was obliged to hunch over, reach down. The grip was firm, almost spilling over into a test. Hirsch took stock. They were of an age, the men who ran Redruth, he decided. Early to mid-forties, confident, smooth, full of secret knowledge. This one wore a costly grey suit, stiff white cotton shirt and a paisley tie. Paisley was coming back? No one had told Hirsch. A very clean man, dark-haired, buffed to a shine. Hirsch glanced down at the slender hand: a centimeter of white cuff, a hint of neat, black, expensive wrist hairs curling there.