by Garry Disher
‘Have to do a damn sight better job than us,’ Muir said, ‘trampling over everything.’
‘Yes, Bob, but as Paul said, they won’t get here for some time,’ Gwynne said. ‘Meanwhile it’s imperative that we conduct line searches.’
He’s going to say time is of the essence, Hirsch thought.
‘Time is the critical factor here,’ Gwynne said. ‘It could mean the difference between two dead girls and two live ones.’
‘Mmm hmm,’ Muir said.
Hirsch shot him a look. Neutral. Steadfastly sweeping the ground with his gaze. Irritation in the set of his head.
They came to a ford, the creek bisecting a dirt road. Hirsch glanced at his map: Hope Hill Road. Before they could cross, Martin Gwynne snapped, ‘What are these idiots doing?’
The Flann brothers, approaching along the bed of the creek from the other direction. They stopped, Wayne offering a sleepy smile. ‘Constable Hirschhausen, sir.’
Hirsch wanted to say, don’t be a smartarse, but it would be wasted on Flann, who was lastingly derisive to everyone. He was slim, loose-limbed; on the surface a charmer, but no one was fooled. Women saw, beyond the good looks, a certain deadness and turned away. Men were wary.
Now, a little .22 rabbit rifle slung over one shoulder, he was wearing a tight khaki T-shirt with rolled sleeves, oil-stained jeans and elastic-sided boots. With the firearm, and his dark hair, lean face, olive-toned skin and lithe grace, he might have been playing a role. Not the hero, though.
Ignoring the rifle for now, Hirsch looked past Wayne to Adam. He seemed to be hiding behind his brother’s shoulder. ‘All right, Adam?’
‘He’s fine,’ Wayne said.
Martin Gwynne cut in. ‘Are you part of the official search? If not, how can we know that every area has been thoroughly checked?’
Flann smirked. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? I know what I’m doing.’
Hirsch touched Martin’s forearm warningly. ‘How far up did you boys start?’
‘Three or four k’s.’
‘See anything?’
‘Nope.’
‘I suggest you register with Sergeant Brandl at once,’ Gwynne said.
‘That’s what you suggest, is it?’ Flann said. ‘Good to know.’
Hirsch said, ‘Why the rifle?’
Wayne Flann gave a smile and a slow roll of his shoulders. ‘Don’t know if you’d noticed, but we’ve got a murderer running loose. Plus, snakes.’
He glanced at his feet, and Hirsch’s feet, then scanned the nearby dead grass. Hirsch scanned too, despite himself.
Which made Flann grin. ‘Be prepared, mate, that’s my motto.’
‘A shotgun would be better against a snake,’ Hirsch said, eyeing the rifle, a corner of his cop brain registering that it wasn’t the murder weapon.
‘Haven’t got one, you know that.’
Hirsch nodded. One of his duties was checking firearm licences and storage. He needed to get Flann to stow the gun away without publicly embarrassing him. He was grateful when Bob Muir murmured, ‘Wayne, it’s not a good look, walking around with a gun. Not after what’s happened.’
Not harsh. Not denigratory. Advising caution and good sense; sounding like a wise father. Hirsch saw a shift in Wayne, a nod of acceptance. ‘Yeah, okay.’
‘Anyway, good to see you both,’ said Muir. ‘How about you register with Sergeant Brandl and join one of the search parties so there’s no doubling up?’
The Flann boys climbed out of the creek, Adam giving Hirsch and Muir a swift grimace of apology before following his brother across the paddock to the house on Hamel Road. ‘What’s the betting they don’t register?’ Martin said.
Hirsch shrugged. He didn’t say that Wayne wasn’t a team-player kind of guy.
‘I don’t trust those Flann boys.’
‘Oh? Why’s that, Martin?’ Muir said.
‘The older one especially. The way he looks at you.’
Hirsch understood. The lazy grace and flat-eyed insolence. He kept walking. And then Martin was grabbing at his sleeve. ‘Have you looked at him for the horse mutilations, Paul?’
‘Martin, can we keep our minds on the search?’
‘It’s just that they’re very clannish, that family. I can well see the older boy getting back at Nan because she humiliated his little brother.’
Hirsch ignored him. Mid-morning now, the sun relentless. He’d almost drained his water bottle, and saw that the others had, too. He pointed. The Mischance Creek ruins were ahead, half-a-dozen lonely chimneys tethered to collapsed walls; a couple of corrugated-iron roofs held down by rusty nails and pointless doggedness.
‘Let’s find some shade and take a break. I’ll call Sergeant Brandl and ask her to send us more water.’
They walked on. A short time later, Hirsch grew aware that Delia Paley had stopped pacing him along the bank of the creek. Thinking her ankle strain had worsened, he looked up. Her face shone with discovery and expectation. ‘Shoe prints,’ she said. There was a tremor in her voice.
‘Secure the scene and wait,’ Comyn told Hirsch when he called it in. ‘The dogs are up and running. If they lead the handlers to you, then we’ll know for sure.’
‘We need water.’
‘Just wait, all right?’
Hirsch joined the others in the stingy shade of a crumbling wall. They all stared at the creek bank, where a patch of powdery dirt held prints: shoes with patterned soles, and tiny bare feet. The girls had paused there, Hirsch thought. Maybe the older one had carried the younger one. She’d have been wearing sandals or runners if she was still awake, helping her mother wrap the tricycle. When the shooting stopped she ran inside, snatched the little one from her bed and made a run for it. Got to the road, set her down to rest and…
And apparently vanished. No other prints that Hirsch could see. If someone had stopped to pick them up was it the killer? No scuff marks in the dirt. Too exhausted to struggle?
Fifteen minutes later he saw the handlers and their dogs, shapes shimmering and coalescing on the flatland between Mischance Creek and the kill house. Their progress was inexorable, destination inevitable. Standing to greet them, he saw the dogs halt, run their noses along the ground, try to catch fugitive scents in the air. The end of the line. They panted, gulped, sat. One of the handlers called: ‘This is as far as they went.’
Hirsch nodded glumly. He knew the road itself wouldn’t reveal anything useful. He’d driven along it yesterday. This morning, Wayne Flann had driven along it; half the volunteers had driven along it. He looked up in the crazy hope that one of the airborne searchers might magically spot the vehicle that had saved—or snatched—the girls twelve hours earlier.
The volunteers straggled in. They were given tea, oranges, sandwiches that curled in the heat. And Hirsch was told he needed to get his arse down to Redruth.
‘Sarge?’
‘The incident room’s up and running in the town hall, and a Homicide inspector wants a word.’
‘Now?’
‘Soon as you can get down there.’
Hirsch climbed back into the Toyota and drove away. Heading, he supposed, into the teeth of another bollocking.
18
IT WAS MID - AFTERNOON by the time Hirsch reached Redruth. The main street, which would have been deserted on any normal Boxing Day, was crammed with marked and unmarked police cars, vans and SUVs—all nose-up to the kerb outside the town hall–shire offices. He rolled on by and found a parking spot outside the Wool-pack, the pub opposite the rotunda. Cutting across the square, touching the little rotunda for luck along the way, he headed uphill again.
Climbed the steps to the town hall entrance and into cooler, dimmer air. The creaky old ballroom had been transformed: phones, computers, desks; officers in shirtsleeves peering at screens, making calls, rippling their fingers over keyboards. It was like the floor of a stock exchange: an air of controlled panic. Hirsch glanced upwards. Dusty sunlight crept in from windows high on the walls. Lovely wainscoting
, lovely pressed ceiling, and emotion surged through him as he recalled the walls and ceilings of the house on Hamel Road.
He swallowed and approached a plain-clothed officer wheeling in a whiteboard. ‘Can you point me to whoever’s in charge?’
She took in his dusty boots and trousers, the tidemarks of sweat on his shirt. Pointed to a long desk behind partition walls in a corner of the ballroom. ‘Inspector Kellaher.’
Hirsch could see two men conversing on the far side of the desk, their chairs turned to each other. He crossed the room, the old polished floorboards creaking under his feet. It continued to be used as a ballroom—he’d attended the high school ball with Wendy a few months back—but his first experience of the room had been a public meeting, local people objecting to the thuggish enforcers then stationed at the Redruth cop shop. It had worked: the thugs were replaced by Brandl and her little team.
He knocked on one of the partitions and stepped in. ‘Inspector Kellaher? Constable Hirschhausen, sir. I was told to report.’
The older man looked at his watch. White shirt, blue tie, sleeves rolled back on hard, veined forearms. A solid man with a bulky jaw and a shrubbery of brown hair salted with strands of grey. About fifty, his face stretching with tension as he leaned over the desk and tilted his chin up at Hirsch. ‘I expected you some time ago.’
Hirsch wasn’t going to let that go unanswered. ‘I was taking part in a line search, sir. Quite some distance away.’
Kellaher grunted, then gestured at the man next to him. ‘Sergeant Dock.’
Dock stood. About thirty, dressed in a pearl grey open-necked shirt and tight charcoal trousers. A sleek man with carefully styled dark hair. Leaning across the table, he offered his hand, but with faint amusement, as if in anticipation of trouble coming Hirsch’s way. The handshake brisk, dry. He settled back in his chair with little adjustments of his shirt and trousers. A man who can’t abide creases, thought Hirsch. A man who walks around thinking about his next pair of sunglasses.
‘Sit,’ Kellaher said.
One chair faced the senior men—intended for me all along? Hirsch wondered. It was a straight-backed but bendy plastic thing. ‘Sir.’
Kellaher stared at Hirsch awhile with fathomless eyes. It was an old interrogation trick, one that, from some people, was difficult to wait out. Remorseless, distant, exposing your faults. Hirsch faltered: he glanced at Dock, who gave him the ghost of a sharkish smile. Both men wanted to unsettle him, in their different ways. Hirsch began to feel that an air of suspicion hung over everything he’d said and done or would say and do.
When Kellaher finally spoke his voice was hushed and intense. ‘I understand you had a history with the dead woman and her family?’
‘Not as such, sir. I met her briefly, with her youngest child.’
‘Explain.’
Hirsch began by describing the toddler-in-the-car incident, then readied his phone to replay the recording he’d made on the way to the hospital. ‘You’ll hear my voice, the voice of the woman known to me as Denise Rennie—and Doctor Pillai. And briefly the child singing.’
They listened. Hirsch paused the recording. ‘Two things: she mentioned her husband, but none of the other children. And the address she gave me was false, as I found out a few days later, when I tried to find it.’
Dock said harshly, ‘Any reason why you tried to find it?’
‘My job,’ Hirsch said mildly. ‘I make two long-range patrols each week, checking up on people.’
With a look at Dock, the inspector said, ‘And what did you make of that, Constable Hirschhausen?’
Hirsch was intrigued. Kellaher seemed to be inviting him to give his five cents’ worth. As he thought about his answer, phones rang behind him, voices called, someone laughed.
He drew a breath. Said, ‘Given what’s happened, her earlier behaviour seems significant. Also, the request for a welfare check came directly to Sergeant Brandl’s mobile from police headquarters in Sydney. As if they already knew who to contact if the family disappeared from the radar. It all seems to indicate the family was in hiding.’
‘A tidy line of logic,’ Dock said, still twinkling on Hirsch’s flank.
Kellaher gave an almost undetectable grimace. Straight-bat player, Hirsch decided. But how far to trust him? ‘Sir, is there a husband or boyfriend? Were they hiding from him?’
‘Can’t tell you—because I don’t know. I’m hoping for answers when officers from Sydney get here later today.’
‘Witness protection, maybe?’ said Hirsch.
‘Constable, I don’t know. What else can you tell me?’
Hirsch suspected the two men did know at least a little more. They were probably receiving updates from their Homicide Squad colleagues at the kill house, too. He changed tack. ‘It could be that Mrs Rennie was recognised from a YouTube clip I, ah, starred in.’
Kellaher wasn’t amused. ‘It’s certainly possible.’
So, he’s seen the clip, Hirsch thought. ‘And someone recognised her and came looking.’
‘Do you feel some responsibility, Constable Hirschhausen?’ Dock said.
Hirsch ignored him, addressed Kellaher. ‘A young woman who works in the Tiverton shop said a man came in asking if she knew where the woman from the video lived.’
‘Description?’
‘She was vague. Average, in his forties.’
‘We’ll need to speak to her,’ Kellaher said.
‘It might help if I sat in,’ Hirsch said. ‘She knows me.’
‘Everyone knows you,’ Dock said.
Now we come to it, Hirsch thought. He decided to face it head-on. ‘Eighteen months ago I was unlucky enough to find myself in a corrupt outer-suburban CIB squad. It was disbanded. Some of the shit stuck to me and I was demoted to uniform and stationed up here in the bush. End of story.’
‘Not end of story. You didn’t keep your mouth shut.’
Hirsch leaned forward. ‘Friends of yours wind up in jail, did they sergeant?’
‘Enough,’ Kellaher said. He breathed out. ‘You were first on scene yesterday evening, Constable Hirschhausen, and you spent this morning there. Kindly describe what you saw. Feel free to speculate.’
Hirsch recounted his discovery of the bodies, his search of the sheds and nearby paddocks, the morning’s line search with volunteers, the footprints. He concluded: ‘It seems the girls escaped on foot and were later picked up by the side of the road. By the killer or a local weirdo or someone passing by—who knows. Where they are now, I have no idea. They could be lying dead somewhere, someone’s sheltering them, or they’re tied up in the boot of a car.’
Kellaher selected the contacts on his phone and passed it to Hirsch. ‘Add your details.’
Hirsch complied. Kellaher said, ‘Go home and take the rest of the day off. Get the shopgirl ready for interview tomorrow. Sharp at noon.’
‘Bring her here?’
‘That’ll only intimidate her. Home turf, noon tomorrow.’
‘Sir.’
Hirsch paused. ‘Any ballistics results, sir?’
Kellaher cocked his head. ‘Heavy calibre rifle, that’s all I know at this stage. Why?’
Hirsch thought of Wayne Flann and his little .22 rabbit gun. ‘What I thought, sir, judging from the size of the wounds.’
Hirsch walked downslope again, the sun blasting him between the shoulder blades. He was thinking only of a shower as soon as he got home. Aloe vera on his sunburn. Clean set of clothes, cold beer. Dinner with Wendy and Katie—then he thought, damn, he’d promised to drive up to the river with them tomorrow. He agonised: the task force was in full swing and would manage without him—but it was important to be the go-between in the Gemma Pitcher interview.
Outside-broadcast vans had filled the town square. He climbed into the cab of the Toyota and drove slowly home along the Barrier Highway. Lengthening shadows striped the land; the glare was intense. Next up on his old fart’s CD was Canned Heat, ‘On the Road Again’. Hirsch listened through to
the end, then tried the radio.
The five o’clock newsreaders were running with the story. He flicked from station to station: ‘What evil links these sleepy communities?’…‘The sisters are feared abducted’…‘Abducted, feared murdered’…‘Believed to be originally from Sydney.’ And sure enough, one newsreader had the YouTube connection.
Then a pundit: ‘We can’t rule out the possibility that one offender is responsible for both massacres—and yes, they are massacres.’
‘Someone escalating? Horses, then people?’
‘Can’t be ruled out. The methods are dissimilar, but the…the rage, an excess of emotion of some kind—sexual frustration? That’s evident at both sites.’
Hirsch switched off. All he wanted was his lover’s arms around him, her familiar scent: banish the melancholy, bring back some peace, briefly, to his life. At least until he told her he had to work tomorrow.
19
THURSDAY.
Hirsch passed from death-like slumber to full alertness in an eyeblink, but could not work out why. He didn’t know where he was. And, in the next instant, did know: he was in Wendy Street’s bed, and deep habit had jerked him awake. His limbs and brain wanted to charge into the dawn light that slipped through her slatted window blind. He turned his head. She was sound asleep and her face, the scent of her, his memories of their lovemaking, let him downshift into slumber again.
Or was that a different memory, of an earlier time? His eyes popped open again. They had made love; they’d been loving with each other, but…Had Wendy been holding back? She knew how difficult it had been, finding the bodies. She understood that he had to stay behind today—and she’d known what she was getting into, dating a policeman. But it was clear she didn’t always like it.
Hirsch closed his eyes and then it was 9 a.m. and he was swiping at his face.
Swiped again. What was happening to him? Opened his eyes and Katie Street was kneeling beside the bed, tickling him with a feather. She was expressionless, as if watching an experiment.