Peace

by Garry Disher

  ‘Come and look.’

  ‘Are you Mr Washburn?’

  ‘I am. Come and look.’

  He’s more canny than crazy, thought Hirsch, approaching Washburn and his stone slab.

  ‘Shepherd’s son,’ Washburn said. He’d been clearing a gravestone.

  The slab, mossy and eroded, read, James son of Geo. Taken by the Flood 5 April 1875 Aged Six Years and the Angel Sayeth Unto, every carven S tilted forward as if straining at the torrent. The rest had been worn away and Hirsch felt an infinite sorrow, a rush of feeling, the place and the past fully there in him. He heard a scream—but it was only a bird, hunting. He straightened, stumbled a little, turned and, hands on his knees, found himself peering into a pool of water trapped below the bank. His face stared back with murky intent.

  Washburn grabbed his elbow. ‘Careful, it’s not stable.’

  Hirsch stepped back to safer ground. He was hot in the sun, his sweat salty.

  He gathered himself and said, in a rush, ‘Mr Washburn, I’m Paul Hirschhausen, based in Tiverton, where your wife lives.’

  Anxiety crept over Washburn’s grizzly old-codger face. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ soothed Hirsch. ‘But may I ask you where you were last night?’

  Washburn couldn’t believe his ears. ‘Where would I be?’

  ‘You were here?’

  ‘If you mean my caravan, yes. No driveable car, Sonny Jim, no pushbike, no horse, no magic carpet, no broomstick, no—’

  Okay, a bit crazy, thought Hirsch. ‘Thank you. Now, the reason I’m here, some of Nan’s ponies were slaughtered last night, and—’

  ‘You said she was fine!’ Washburn was horrified. ‘She can’t be fine. Let’s go.’

  He set out for the caravan, half-running. Hirsch trailed him. He didn’t know what to do. Obviously, he could drive Washburn to town, but how might the guy react when he got there? What if Yvonne and Nan hadn’t been fully forthcoming about his equilibrium?

  ‘Mr Washburn, I—’

  Washburn stopped and whirled around. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’ve been told I’m nuts. But I’m not a threat to anyone. I just can’t stand people for long. The way they’re unable to leave things alone…’

  He glanced about uneasily, as if the surfaces and boundaries of the creek and the nearby hills, roads and fences, were shifting. With effort, he gathered himself and said, ‘For what it’s worth, I still love Nan. She loves me. We understand each other. And right now she needs me. Just give me a minute to pack a bag.’

  ‘All right,’ Hirsch said. ‘And I’ll need to make a brief stop along the way.’

  Hope Hill Road was seven kilometres from the Mischance Creek ruins, and when they got there, Craig Washburn said, ‘Are you sure about the number? Sounds far too high to me.’

  Hirsch checked his notebook again. ‘Fifty-eight Hope Hill Road.’

  ‘Who lives there?’

  ‘People named Rennie.’

  ‘Huh,’ Washburn said, with an intonation that Hirsch couldn’t interpret.

  ‘Know them?’

  ‘I keep to myself.’

  Hirsch turned around where the road petered out and headed back along it. Thirty kilometres in length. No towns, only farms and station properties—seven in total.

  ‘Why would she lie to me?’ muttered Hirsch.

  Washburn shot him a wry look. ‘Maybe I’m not the only one wants to be left alone.’

  They rode back to Tiverton in companionable silence, the weeds and the stones drifting past their windows until cultivated land appeared. It seemed anomalous to Hirsch. The road dipped and rose and turned in on itself, acknowledging the unruly contours of the land, while Douglas Keir and all who’d come after him had tried to stamp some symmetry onto it: straight fences, driveways and cypress hedgerows, ninety-degree angles, perfect rectangles of wheat stubble. And bright new galvanised rooftops here and there, as if the future mattered, even as the past was proximate and unsettling, stamped in stone: the grave of a shepherd’s son, an abandoned hut, a Ngadjuri rock carving. Yet Craig Washburn lived contentedly out in that country. Now, as they descended from the hills onto the Tiverton flats, he seemed to shrink in his seat. Boundaries closing in on him, thought Hirsch. Or he’s gearing up for the horror.

  12

  THEY ROLLED THROUGH the town. Hirsch’s trip into the back country had taken hours, and now it was late Saturday afternoon. A second outside-broadcast van was parked near the entrance to Kitchener Street, and it looked as if a handful of locals were guarding the crime-scene tape alongside Constables Landy and Medlin, Sergeant Brandl’s ‘children’.

  Craig’s agitation increased. Close to panicking, Hirsch realised, seeing the heaving chest, the claw-like opening and closing of hands. ‘Craig?’

  ‘I can’t…I can’t…’

  Hirsch did not stop but trundled to the northern end of the town and turned left onto the first farm road. All the while, he kept up a low, calming patter: ‘Breathe deeply and slowly…I’ll have you with Nan in just a minute…We’ll go in the back way…Deep, slow breaths…’

  It began to work, Washburn eventually sitting easier in the passenger seat. Hirsch drove for two hundred metres, glancing to his left until he judged they were adjacent to the rear of Nan’s property, separated from her stable block by a stretch of just-harvested wheat.

  ‘Okay?’

  Washburn nodded.

  They got out, climbed over a wire fence and crossed the paddock, the soil baked red and hard between rows of stiff, bleached stubble. ‘Watch out for snakes,’ Washburn said.

  A good sign, Hirsch thought, if he’s able to apprehend the world and the welfare of another man in it. So long as we can keep him sheltered.

  Then they were in Nan’s yard and already Hirsch could see that someone had been busy. The carcasses were gone; fresh soil had been raked over the blood pools. Expecting Washburn to notice, he turned to the man reassuringly, but Washburn was running to the railing fence with a little cry and Radish, trailed by the ponies, was trotting to greet him.

  Hirsch had always believed you could read a dog’s face. Now he was reading joy, or something like it, on Radish’s.

  Nan and Yvonne emerged from the back veranda, trailed by Detective Comyn, who immediately grabbed Hirsch by the arm. ‘Over here.’

  In the shade of a rainwater tank, his voice low, tense, he said, ‘You took your sweet time.’

  Hirsch explained.

  Comyn wasn’t interested. ‘Did he do it?’

  ‘No,’ Hirsch said, outlining Craig’s alibi.

  Comyn gave another of his grunts, watching the tableau at the railing closely, as if hoping the surviving horses would finger Craig Washburn, rear up in terror at the sight of him and charge to the bottom corner of their paddock. But the scene was calm, Washburn stroking necks and snouts while the women patted his back.

  Comyn sighed and shook his head. He spotted the roof of the HiLux in the distance. ‘Used your brains, I see. Fucking media.’

  ‘Did they film anything?’

  ‘Nothing for them to film. Knowing they might send in a drone or a chopper or come in over the back fence like you did, I had a word with Mrs Washburn and the vet, and the upshot was a few of the locals carted the bodies off in a truck and delivered a load of topsoil.’

  ‘Good thinking.’

  ‘And Mrs Washburn—brave lady—walked down and fronted up to the cameras a couple of hours ago. No histrionics, no blame, just a few facts. Didn’t take questions.’

  But Hirsch knew that even with a victim statement, and without visuals, the evening news broadcasts would milk the story for all it was worth. ‘Tomorrow could get messy.’

  ‘A pleasant Sunday outing for some people,’ Comyn said. ‘Too bad there’s nothing to look at.’

  They were almost chatting like equals, Hirsch’s lower rank and pariah status forgotten.

  ‘About tomorrow…’

  ‘Reinforcements,’ Comyn said. ‘G
rudging reinforcements, a handful of reinforcements, and not till about nine in the morning.’

  Port Pirie and Clare would each send a car and two officers, he said. Meanwhile he was due back at Port Pirie and Sergeant Brandl and her constables were about to go off-duty. A hard little grin: ‘That leaves you, pal, on the front line, all night long.’

  ‘Terrific,’ Hirsch said.

  What he didn’t say, but wondered, had the area commander underestimated the incident? Thinking, who cares about a couple of mutilated horses?

  Hirsch could answer that—about ninety-nine per cent of the population. Turn a blind eye to people hurting each other but weep buckets over an abandoned puppy.

  ‘With any luck, tomorrow will be a fizzer,’ Comyn was saying, ‘but a bit of crime-scene tape’s not going to stop anyone and nor is a wire fence, so: strategy.’

  He laid it out for Hirsch. Beg, borrow and steal roadworks trestles and planks from the district council depot to block off the entrance to the street. Arrest anyone who came onto Mrs Washburn’s land. A politely antagonistic approach to gawkers.

  ‘Politely antagonistic?’ said Hirsch, half-warming to the Port Pirie detective.

  ‘Let them see you photographing faces and numberplates. If they want to know why, smile and say we fully expect the culprit to come back and gloat over his handiwork.’ He shrugged. ‘Could even be true.’

  ‘The good old us-and-them approach to police work,’ Hirsch said.

  As darkness crept in, Hirsch—now the sole representative of law enforcement in the town—stood morosely at the entrance to Kitchener Street, contemplating his phone. He was supposed to celebrate Christmas with Wendy and Katie tonight: their place, a sleepover.

  He dialled, Wendy answered, he explained. ‘Another thwarted roll in the hay.’

  A tiny but significant hesitation. ‘They warned me not to get involved with a cop. You warned me.’ Trying to make light, not quite succeeding.

  She’s disappointed, Hirsch thought. She almost never was, when his work intervened. But she might be forgiven for feeling something at Christmas time—for wanting to spend some time with him. And he might be forgiven for wanting that, too.

  He found himself stumbling: ‘I’ll make it up to you after Christmas. I’ll—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, her voice warm again. ‘If you can’t come to us, we’ll come to you.’

  He liked that about her. She didn’t dwell, she found positive alternatives. ‘That’d be great.’

  ‘But we won’t man the barricades.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Mother and daughter reached the police station at seven-fifteen with the makings of a stir-fry. Katie asked where her Christmas present was as soon as she got out of the car.

  ‘I can see I’ve trained you well,’ Hirsch said, putting his arm around her while Wendy looked on, familiar with their routines by now. Giving Hirsch a complicated look. As if to say, don’t take me for granted. As if to say, sorry about earlier.

  Hirsch shot her a look of his own then turned to Katie. ‘More to the point,’ he said, ‘where’s my present?’

  ‘It’s so big we needed a truck.’

  ‘And the truck broke down.’

  ‘Got lost. No one knows where it is.’

  The banter died away and was replaced by a strange shared anxiety, as if a malign force had rolled across the highway from Nan Washburn’s street.

  ‘Let’s eat,’ Hirsch said, ushering them into the police station.

  They dined in his backyard, wearing paper hats and reading aloud their lame Christmas-cracker jokes. Then present-giving: from Wendy a history of the mid-north written by a retired headmaster of the high school where she taught maths, from Katie a CD she’d burnt for him titled Old Fart Songs. They exclaimed pretty convincingly over his gifts to them, and finally Wendy was saying, ‘We’d better go, early start in the morning.’

  Out on the footpath again, the highway silent, insects flickering in the street lights, Hirsch kissed them goodbye. ‘Safe trip, speak to you Christmas Day.’

  ‘If not before,’ Wendy said, her warm shape briefly pressed to his.

  Then she stepped back a little and gazed at him straightforwardly. ‘On Thursday Katie and I are going to my brother’s for a post-Christmas lunch. We’d like you to come with us.’

  Her brother and his family lived in Morgan, she said, on the River Murray, and wouldn’t be attending the main Christmas gathering that year. ‘They usually don’t,’ she said balefully, ‘so we go to them. Otherwise I’d never see them.’

  They never come to see you, Hirsch thought. ‘I’d love to.’

  She laughed. ‘…Because I’ve made it sound so inviting.’

  Another round of hugs and then the two of them were in the car, Wendy sketching a goodbye wave, Katie waggling her iPhone in one of its new cases. Hirsch felt their absence at once, like a chilled space in the warm night air, and then they were nothing but receding tail-lights.

  He crossed the highway, feeling bereft, tethered to nothing, a man of no account. Nan’s street was quiet and empty beyond the barrier, and the town slumbered. He wandered back to his rooms behind the police station and his phone beeped for an incoming text. Martin Gwynne: Re tomorrow, quick reminder, working bee at 9, dinner 6.30.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  Sunday, 6 a.m., and Hirsch walked the town. He’d not been called overnight, and the highway was empty. Slipping aside a trestle, he walked up Kitchener Street and into Nan Washburn’s driveway. The house and yard were silent, the horses standing at the rail, tossing their heads to see him—not in fear, he thought. He walked back to the highway and in and out of the side streets. The air was clean and mild, and nothing stirred but Hirsch and the morning birds.

  The Clare police car arrived at 8.30, the Port Pirie car at 8.40, Sergeant Brandl’s children—scowling at Hirsch as if this was all his fault—at 8.55. Coffee and a briefing on Ed Tennant’s shop veranda. The only vehicles to pass through the town were a tour bus, a road train of hay and a handful of vehicles wearing inland dirt—headed for church services; making an early start on Christmas travel. Then Martin Gwynne’s Camry rolled by and Hirsch remembered the tennis-club working bee.

  His mood dropped instantly. One—Martin Gwynne. Two—surely he had the best excuse you could think of for getting out of it? Three—would anyone other than Martin be there, this close to Christmas? Four—he was due at Martin’s for dinner at six-thirty; surely that would do? Five—Martin Gwynne.

  Time passed. A couple of gawkers gathered at the barricade and a Channel 10 cameraman and reporter were turned away from Nan’s back fence—which didn’t stop them from filming the stable block, yard and surviving horses—but otherwise the town was quiet. Maybe the afternoon would be more hectic: it was a Sunday morning, after all.

  Ten o’clock. No wind in the air now, just heat. The kind to set up a snap and a crackle in gum trees, timber beams and iron roofs. The briefing over, Hirsch left the newcomers to police the town and walked around to the tennis courts. Only six pairs of hands there—usually a working bee would attract twenty or more—Martin and Joyce, the former looking pointedly at his watch, Bob Muir, the primary school head—and the Bagshaw twins, who greeted Hirsch with sly humour.

  ‘Hirsch, mate,’ Ivan Bagshaw said. ‘Pop by in the morning…’

  Carl Bagshaw completed the thought. ‘…with the patching truck.’

  ‘Fill your driveway potholes,’ Ivan said. He was lubricating the net-tightening winder, Ivan stirring a tin of white marker paint.

  Hirsch glanced uneasily at Martin, who was hovering nearby with the air of a foreman. ‘That’d be great.’

  ‘Crack of dawn,’ Carl said.

  ‘I’ll be ready.’

  The brothers were employed by the council to maintain roads, replace bullet-holed speed signs, repair broken swings and prune the war memorial roses. Unhurried, sleepy-eyed men who, with racquets in hand, were quick, precise doubles sharks. Off cou
rt, they viewed the world as mildly amusing: not much mattered, no point in trying to change things. They drove Martin Gwynne to distraction.

  And now Martin was telling Hirsch he’d be helping repair the nets. ‘Quickly now.’

  The nets were beached at one end of the main court, ready to be unfurled for mending. ‘There’s needle and thread in the box.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You didn’t think to bring leather gloves?’

  No, Hirsch hadn’t thought to bring leather gloves—or any kind of gloves. His life was full of things he hadn’t thought to do, and things he knew he ought to have done.

  ‘I’ve got a spare pair in the ute,’ Carl Bagshaw said, ambling away with a lazy wink.

  Hirsch gave them an hour of his time, then returned to Kitchener Street.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Nothing all day, nothing they couldn’t manage, and Hirsch, conferring by phone with Comyn and Brandl, sent everyone home at 4 p.m. He’d leave the barricade in place for a couple of days, but the weekend was over, and it was Christmas in a couple of days’ time, so he wasn’t expecting a last-minute influx of bored rubberneckers.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon sluicing back-country dust from the wheels and panels of the HiLux, phoning his parents and contemplating the dingy walls of his office. Start painting the walls, or chill out with a beer?

  That was easy. A short time later he was reading his present from Wendy under the ceiling fan, a beer at his elbow. The book proved to be more absorbing than he’d expected. The Keir family was there, Keir homestead, the Redruth copper mine, the Cornish miners, in text and photographs. The Razorback draped in snow; a field of wildflowers out east; the shepherd’s son’s grave; a Ngadjuri grinding stone; a bushfire in the Tiverton hills. He flicked through to the index: Muirs and Bagshaws had been in the district since records began.

  Armed with Christmas chocolates and a bottle of Clare Valley riesling, Hirsch knocked on the Gwynnes’ door at six-forty. He heard Martin on the other side: ‘Can you get that, Mother?’ Then Joyce Gwynne was opening the door with a curious bob—half shy curtsy, half sheer terror—and not meeting his gaze. Proffering the chocolates and wine, Hirsch said, ‘Hope I’m not too late?’