Hell to Pay

by Garry Disher

  “Pullar and Hanson,” he said.

  Her mouth opened. “They told you about the car they saw yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  Wendy folded her arms. “It probably wasn’t Pullar and Hanson, I know that, but the point is, they are scared. Ever since it started, Katie’s been keeping a scrapbook. Jack has nightmares. The shooting is self-protection.”

  A burst of staticky squawks and crackles issued from the HiLux. “Excuse me,” Hirsch said.

  He reached in, picked up the handset, and it was Sergeant Kropp, demanding to know his current location.

  “Poking around, Sarge,” Hirsch said, watching Wendy Street return to the veranda. “No sign of anyone shooting a gun.”

  “Well, get your arse up to Muncowie. Make contact with a Mr. Ian Nancarrow, resident of Broken Hill, driving a white Pajero with New South Wales plates, somewhere on the highway there.”

  Hirsch scribbled the information in his notebook. “The reason?”

  “A body beside the road.”

  CHAPTER 3

  HIRSCH’S FIRST THOUGHT WAS: Pullar and Hanson, the kids were right, and he felt a queer kind of dismay mingled with excitement. “Suspicious?”

  “Possible hit-and-run.”

  Hirsch made the mental adjustment: not Pullar and Hanson. “Nancarrow?”

  “No. He claims he stopped by the road for a leak, saw a dead woman lying in the dirt.” Kropp paused and added, “Doctor McAskill’s on his way up there as we speak.”

  “I’m on it, Sarge.”

  Hirsch placed the handset in the cradle. The women and their children were watching him from the veranda. “Got to go,” he called, climbing behind the wheel. He got a nod for his pains, a couple of halfhearted waves.

  Pausing at the front gate, Hirsch entered “Muncowie” into the GPS. It directed him not back to the highway, as he’d expected, but further out along Bitter Wash Road, which eventually made a gradual curve to the north, smaller roads branching from it—one of which looped west onto the Barrier Highway a short distance north of Muncowie.

  Shorter, Hirsch could see that from the map, but unsealed for most of the distance.

  After twenty minutes, he found himself skirting around the Razorback, driving through red dirt and mallee scrub country, the road surface chopped and powdery where it wasn’t reefed and ribbed with a stone underlay. Very little rain had fallen here last night; it was as if a switch had been flicked, marking the transition from arable land to semi-desert. Leasehold land, one-hundred-year leases defined by sagging wire fences, sand-silted tracks and creek beds filled with water-tumbled stones like so many misshapen cricket balls. You might find a fleck of gold in these creek beds if you were lucky, or turn your ankle if you were not. It was land you walked away from sooner or later: Hirsch saw a dozen stone chimneys and eyeless cottages back in the stunted mallee, little heartaches that had struggled on a patch of red dirt and were sinking back into it. Anthills, sandy washaways, foxtails hooked onto gates, a couple of rotting merino carcasses, a tray-less old Austin truck beneath a straggly gum tree, and weathered fence posts and the weary rust loops that tethered them one to the other. He saw an eagle, an emu, a couple of black snakes. It was a land of muted pinks, browns and greys, with the pale blue hills smudging the horizon, Muncowie on the other side. That was what he saw. What he didn’t see, but sensed, were abandoned gold diggings, mine shafts, ochre hands stenciled to rock faces. A besetting place. It spooked Hirsch. The sky pressed down and the scrub crouched. “It’s lovely out there,” one of the locals had assured him during the week, waiting while Hirsch witnessed a statutory declaration.

  He passed in and out of creek beds and saw a tiny church perched atop a rise. What the fuck was it doing there, this shell of a church? Calling to other stone shells, he supposed, left by the men and women who’d settled here and failed and walked away from it all.

  Muttering, “I’m just a boy from the suburbs,” Hirsch fought the steering wheel, the gear lever, the clutch. His foot ached. Even the HiLux struggled, pitching and yawing inflexibly, taking him at a crawling pace through the backcountry. You had to hand it to technology, the GPS giving him the shortest route but blithely unaware of local conditions. It would take him forever to reach Muncowie at this rate, longer if he holed the sump or punctured a tire.

  THEN HE WAS UPON the highway. MUNCOWIE 7, according to the signpost. He made the turn, heading south, the valley less obvious here, the highway striping a broad, flat plain. Driving down it gave Hirsch a sense of riding high above sea level, the sky vast and no longer pressing down, the hills a distant smudge on either side. Marginally worse crops, stock and fences up here, from what Hirsch could see, but better than the country he’d just passed through. More and greener grass, less dirt. It was as if he’d passed across the rain shadow again, moved from unsustainable life to a fifty-fifty chance of it. Not that he saw many signs of habitation, only a dusty ute driven at practically a walking pace, an old farmer at the wheel. Where did the geezer live? Hirsch could see no farmhouses close to the road, only gateways indicating homes back in the foothills of the blue range that stretched all the way to Wilpena Pound.

  And then in the emptiness he saw another car. Black.

  But not the black Chrysler.

  Hirsch thought about it. In terms of timing, geography and logic, it wouldn’t make sense for Pullar and Hanson to make their way down here. Travel two thousand kilometers in a notorious vehicle, away from terrain they knew? Hirsch couldn’t see it. But he could see how the men might hunt in a place such as this, for they preyed on roadhouse waitresses on the empty highways, housewives and teenage daughters on lonely country roads.

  IT HAD STARTED AS a vicious backblocks story, a Queensland story, which quickly went viral when Channel 9 muscled in, giving the killers a voice. Back in August a forty-year-old Mt. Isa speed freak named Clay Pullar and an eighteen-year-old Brisbane cokehead named Brent Hanson raped and murdered three roadhouse waitresses over a two-week period. Police managed to track the men to a caravan park in northern New South Wales, but arrived too late, and found a Canadian hitchhiker roped to a bed. Further sightings placed the men in Cairns, Bourke, Alice Springs, Darwin … Nothing definite until they broke into a farmhouse near Wagga, where they raped a teenager in front of her trussed-up parents and fled north with her to a property across the border and along the river at Dirranbandi.

  Feeling pleased with himself, Pullar phoned Channel 9 on his mobile phone. He’d just managed to prove who he was when the signal failed, so Channel 9 dispatched a reporter and a cameraman by helicopter, which set down on the back lawn long enough to leave a satellite phone, and took off again, circling overhead. Pullar appeared, and even through the long pull of the camera lens he looked tall, gaunt, hard, insane. He grinned and waved, showing stumpy teeth, grabbed the phone, returned to the farmhouse, and began to explain himself. An exclusive, a live interview, you couldn’t ask for better, think of the dollars rolling in, fuck the ethics, the public had a right to know. Fuck sense, too, for Pullar made absolutely no sense but was full of frothing lunacy.

  The police took thirty minutes to arrive. They surrounded the house, jammed the signal, chased the helicopter away—and waited. Night fell. They tried to talk to Pullar and Hanson. After a few hours of silence it occurred to them to rush the house …

  They found an elderly man and woman unconscious and the Wagga teenager naked and traumatized and no sign of Pullar and Hanson, who had fled, on foot, to a neighboring property. Here they stole a beefy black Chrysler 300C station wagon and by daybreak were hundreds of kilometers north, apparently heading for Longreach. An intelligent rape-and-murder team might have swapped the Chrysler for a less obvious car at the earliest opportunity, but Pullar, staying in touch with Channel 9, had said, “Man, this car has got some serious grunt.”

  HIRSCH SQUINTED. THE SUN was beating hard and the road shimmered with mirages, and now a collection of tumbledown houses appeared, set two hundred meters off the hi
ghway. MUNCOWIE the sign said, an arrow pointing to the little side road that took you there, to a place that seemed to have no function. Rusty rooftops, tired trees, sunlight breaking weakly from a windscreen.

  Then Hirsch lost interest in the town. The Pajero was ahead of him, parked at the side of the highway, a man with his rump against it, dark heads showing inside the vehicle, behind tinted glass. He cruised to a stop, switched off and got out, stretched the kinks in his back. He could see the Pajero occupants more clearly now: a woman in the passenger seat, at least two kids in the back. Roof racks piled with roped-down luggage.

  The driver, coming around to meet him, offered a huge paw.

  “The name’s Nancarrow, I called it in.”

  Powerful forearms, a nuggety chest, sun-damaged skin, sunglasses propped above a high, shiny forehead. A Broken Hill mine worker? “Heading south for a holiday,” asked Hirsch, “you and the family?”

  “Two weeks,” Nancarrow said.

  Hirsch strolled around to the front of the Pajero, eyed the bumper, the left and right panels. Dust, smeared insects, but no dents or blood. “You spotted a body?”

  Watching him, Nancarrow said, “Down there.”

  The bitumen ran high here, raised a couple of meters off the pocked soil, the erosion channels. Grass tussocks and a couple of hangdog mallee trees were nearby, clinging to the rim of a shallow depression, and if you were a male and wanted to piss, that was where you’d do it. Two damp patches side by side in the dirt. Father and son?

  As if in answer, Nancarrow said, “Me and my son went down there for a leak and saw her.”

  Hirsch glanced uneasily at the Pajero. Nancarrow noticed and said, “It’s okay, he’s little. I told him the lady had fallen over and the ambulance would come soon and take her to the hospital.”

  “Did either of you touch her?”

  “Christ no. All I wanted to do was get my kid back to the car before he got too curious.”

  “How did you call triple zero? Is there a mobile signal here?”

  “Nup. Dead. Zilch. I called from the pub.”

  Hirsch nodded and slipped in another question. “Do you know her?”

  Nancarrow blinked. “What? Know her? Why would I know her?”

  “Perhaps she was traveling with you? Your neighbor, babysitter, niece, a hitchhiker you picked up?”

  “I know where you’re coming from, and the answer’s no. I stopped for a quiet leak by the side of the road and saw a woman lying there, end of story.”

  Hirsch nodded glumly. Maybe they’d know her over at the pub. “Thanks for reporting it. Thanks for waiting.”

  Nancarrow gave him a sad if crooked smile. It said “Sooner you than me, pal,” and “Sorry I wasn’t more help,” and “Thank Christ I can go at last.” And maybe even, “The poor woman, whoever she is.”

  HIRSCH NOTED THE MAN’S contact details and, when he was alone, grabbed the Canon stored in his glove box and stepped carefully to the rim of the depression, trying not to disturb the layers of dirt, pebbles and flinty stones. The dead woman lay a short distance in from the edge. He ran his gaze over the surrounding dirt. Last night’s showers had left a speckled crust, meaning prints would show clearly. Hirsch saw no boot or shoe prints, no drag marks, but animals and birds had circled the body, leaving fine tracings behind them. A fox or a wild dog had gnawed at her forearm, a crow had pecked out the visible left eye. Ants had found her. Flies. Clearly she was dead, but Hirsch was obliged to check.

  He took a series of photos first, the scene from all angles, then perspective shots: the body in relation to the road, a nearby culvert, the township on the other side of a stretch of exhausted red soil. Finally he stepped down into the shallow bowl, crouched and felt for a pulse. Nothing. Her clothes were still damp.

  He straightened, stepped away from the body.

  She was killed elsewhere and tossed down here from the road; she was struck while walking or hitching by the side of the road and fell into the hole; she fell from a moving vehicle; she was tossed from a moving vehicle.

  She lay partly facedown, her chest to the ground but her left hip cocked and her legs slightly splayed, bent at the knees, as if she were running. Her right arm was trapped under her right hip, and her right cheek was stretched out in the dirt as if she were looking along her outflung left arm: looking blindly, Hirsch thought, remembering the eye socket. Maybe her other eye was intact, tucked as it was into the dirt. Very little signs of blood.

  He took another series of photographs, taking in tight black jeans, a white T-shirt, a tiny fawn cardigan, bare feet in white canvas shoes. The T-shirt had ridden up to reveal a slender spine, a narrow waist, the upper straps of a black G-string. Bruising and abrasions. A silver chain around her neck. No wristwatch but craft-market silver rings on her fingers, and in her visible ear a silver ring decorated with a Scrabble piece in the letter “M.”

  That made Hirsch think about ID. He couldn’t see a bag or wallet anywhere. If she was struck by a vehicle, and knocked or carried some distance, then bag or wallet would be further up or down the road. Time for that later.

  He crouched, peering at the area of waist and spine between the low-riding jeans and the scrap of T-shirt, and saw a small manufacturer’s tag on the G-string. Her underwear was inside out. He crab walked closer to the body and lifted the T-shirt: a rear-fastening black bra, fastened with only one of the two hooks.

  None of that proved anything. It was suggestive, that was all. He could think of plenty of scenarios to explain it, some of them innocent. For example, she’d dressed in a hurry, she’d dressed in darkness, she was shortsighted, she was slapdash, she’d dressed in a cramped space, like the rear seat of a car.

  Or someone else had dressed her.

  He peered at her back, but couldn’t read anything into the surface damage. Dirt on her bare ankles and arms, dirt on her cheek. But you’d expect dirt if she fell or was tossed by tires—or by hand—down a dirt incline. That was all he could tell. Dr. McAskill would do the rest.

  Now Hirsch brought himself to examine her head. The eye socket stared at him as he stared at a small, fine-boned face, small, slack mouth, tiny teeth and a swollen tongue. A pert nose. A bruised, misshapen cheek. Something had hit the girl pretty hard, and he was thinking girl, not woman—the designation given him by Kropp and Nancarrow. She’s maybe sixteen, thought Hirsch. Somewhere between mid and late teens.

  Then he wandered along the road in each direction. He found a small fabric bag twenty meters from the body, strap and flap torn, still damp. He photographed it in situ and then fossicked around the contents. No mobile phone, but a wallet with $3.65 in coins, a tampon, tissues, chewing gum, a packet of cigarettes, disposable lighter, supermarket receipts. The only ID was a Redruth High School student card belonging to Melia Donovan, Year 10. A card under a clear plastic window confirmed the name and gave a Tiverton address.

  So, fifteen? Sixteen?

  HIRSCH WAITED FOR THE doctor to arrive. He wanted to walk across the highway and knock on doors, but couldn’t leave the body unattended. He glanced at his watch: 1 P.M. A bus passed, heading north, PERTH on the sign above the windshield. A couple of cars, a handful of semis. Hirsch thought of their tires, their bull bars.

  When a silver Mercedes appeared, twenty minutes later, decelerating, he stepped into the road, one hand raised. The car pulled in opposite the HiLux and an unhurried, neatly-put-together man got out, hauling a doctor’s bag with him. He crossed the road, stopped when he got to Hirsch. “You must be Constable Hirschhausen.”

  “That’s me.”

  The doctor stuck out his hand. “Drew McAskill.”

  He was about fifty, fingers of grey in his brown hair, dressed in a tan jacket, dark trousers, white shirt and blue tie. His hand was pale, scrupulously clean, untouched by the sun, hard labor or mishaps, which put him at odds with the men, women and children Hirsch had encountered so far in the bush. People out here were blemished a little: farm grime under fingernails, garden scratch
es, schoolyard scrapes, sun wrinkles, dusty trouser cuffs, tarnished watch straps and gammy legs. To top it off, McAskill wore gold-rimmed glasses, and the overall effect was ascetic.

  The spotless hand was barely in and out of Hirsch’s grasp. “I understand I’m to pronounce on a body?”

  McAskill ran a medical practice in Redruth and was on call to the local police. In cases of suspicious death, he’d call in an official police pathologist from Adelaide, but otherwise he was there to save department pathologists a six-hour round-trip. “I’ll show you,” Hirsch said, turning to go, thinking with a hidden grin that this precise, fussy man was about to get dirt on his fine hands and clothes.

  But McAskill surprised him. “Hold your horses.”

  Handing him the doctor’s bag, McAskill returned to the Mercedes and took out a blue forensic jumpsuit and cloth booties. A car passed as he dragged them on, the driver and passenger gawking.

  “Ready when you are.”

  Hirsch led the doctor along the road until they were adjacent to the body. “There.”

  McAskill nodded brusquely. “Not hidden, but you’d have to be almost upon her to spot her.”

  “Yes.”

  Treading carefully, McAskill edged around the rim of the depression, paused, and announced, “Melia Donovan.”

  “The damage to her face … You won’t need DNA or dental records?”

  The doctor was adamant: “No. It’s Melia, without a shadow of a doubt.”

  Hirsch looked around at this broad, flat, sparsely nourished corner of the world, population about ten, and wondered how McAskill and the girl had ever intersected. He was about to ask when McAskill gave him the answer: “She came into the surgery a couple of times. You’d have met her eventually. She’s a Tiverton girl. God knows what she was doing up here.”