by Garry Disher
She didn’t hear him and her hearing was perfect, the line clear and her handset new, a cordless he’d given his parents last Christmas, so something else was going on. The next time she spoke—“Hello” and “Is anybody there?”—she sounded frightened.
“Mum!” shouted Hirsch, knowing it was futile.
“What do you want?” his mother was saying. “Why are you doing this to us?”
“Mum,” Hirsch said, and there was a click and the man in the backseat of the white car waved two devices at him, phone and digital recorder.
“Brave,” Hirsch snarled, “taking it out on my mother,” but the white car was streaking away. The patrol car pulled out, too, pausing for a moment alongside Hirsch. A woman in the passenger seat. She shot him with her finger and then passenger and driver were gone, being juvenile with the siren again.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER HIRSCH said, “Have you been getting anonymous calls?”
“We didn’t want to worry you, dear.”
The house sat at the end of a quiet side street and was indefensible. No alarms or window bars, flimsy locks, a bedridden old woman on one side, a weedy paddock on the other, a plant nursery behind them. Hirsch prowled from window to window and tugged at his parents’ blinds and curtains.
“You’re making us nervous, dear.”
“When did the calls start?”
“A few days ago,” his mother said.
She worked for the ambulance service, a narrow, rangy, nail-nibbling woman used to dealing with drunks, addicts, the scared and the deranged. Her love for Hirsch was absentminded, as if she were not quite sure how she’d come to give birth to him. Never mean or cross or negligent, just practical and distracted, and closer to his sister.
“Did you report it?” he said.
Hirsch’s father cocked his head tiredly, a man as rawboned as his wife, still in his churchgoing pants and shirt. He was a farrier and had the dents, scars and arthritis to prove it. He said, in his mild rumble, “As soon as we give them the name Hirschhausen, what’s going to happen, son, do you think?”
Saying plenty between the lines, Hirsch thought. “I think it’d be a good idea if both of you went away for a few days.”
“Few days.”
“Until the end of the week. Or sooner. As soon as I’ve finished giving evidence I’ll call you on one of your mobiles.”
His mother came and gave him a hug. It was there and gone. “I don’t think that will be necessary, dear.”
There was something about the main sitting room window. Hirsch crossed the room. He said accusingly, “New glass. Fresh putty.”
“A brick,” his father said.
“When?”
“Friday night. We found it when we came back from seeing a film in town.”
“Had it repaired yesterday morning,” his mother said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We’re telling you now.”
“No, you’re telling me because I noticed it now. And don’t say you didn’t want to worry me.”
“Well, we didn’t.”
“Just a rock?”
“A rock would have been too subtle for us,” Hirsch’s mother said, “so it was accompanied by a note, in case we missed the point.”
“Let me guess: ‘Tell your son not to testify.’ ”
“Along those lines,” Hirsch’s father said.
His mother said, “ ‘Tell your cunt of a son to do the decent thing and keep his trap shut.’ ”
Hirsch had never heard his mother say the word and saw a glint in her eye. She was a bluffer, his mother, but under it he realized that she was worried, and he remembered her fear on the recorded phone call. Her manner was unchanged, her voice, but she was holding herself too tightly.
“Mum, please, talk sense into Dad. Go up north for a few days.”
His parents owned a time-share apartment on the Gold Coast. School holidays were finishing so they might have the place to themselves.
“Do you think your pals would hurt us?” his father said.
“If it would hurt me, yes,” Hirsch said, collapsing into an armchair, his body tired of the tension. Planted his feet firmly, held his arms out wide, a way of saying, Am I getting through to you?
The cuffs of his jeans rode up and his father saw the Beretta on his ankle. “Oh, son,” he said, the color draining from his face.
Embarrassed, Hirsch stood until the cuffs draped over his shoes again. “A precaution.”
“Pretty serious precaution.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Hirsch said. “If I stay the week with you, as planned, I put you, not to mention the house, at risk. If I stay somewhere down in the city, I leave you here exposed. And if I stay with you I won’t be around during the day. So I’m begging you, take a holiday for a few days. Call in sick. When it’s all over they’ll have no more cause to threaten you.”
“But they could come after you.”
“I’ll manage.”
“Not if you get locked up, you won’t,” Hirsch’s father said.
Inviting—begging—Hirsch to say that wouldn’t happen, he wasn’t a dirty cop.
Hirsch looked at his mother, she looked at her husband. “Karl,” she said.
“Eva,” he said.
THEY WERE GONE BY late afternoon, a late cancellation on a houseboat based at Renmark on the Murray River. Meanwhile Hirsch supposed he was still a magnet. He didn’t want to be killed in his childhood bed for his parents to find, so he booked into a pay-by-the-hour motel somewhere on South Road and paid for four nights in advance. The reservations clerk was troubled. He couldn’t work Hirsch out, compared to the men and women who paid by the hour, the transients, but nothing surprised her in the end and she had low expectations of human behavior. It’s just that Hirsch didn’t look like a man with no expectations.
“Will that be cash or card?”
“Cash,” Hirsch said.
And he had to turn around and hunt for a cash machine. He knew the transaction would trigger a record, but no one would know where the cash went after that. Unless there was a tracking device on his car. It did Hirsch’s head in, all that thinking, and he almost forgot he still had to drive back into the hills first thing in the morning, collect his parcel from the Balhannah post office.
CHAPTER 14
MONDAY.
Hirsch arrived early and, marking time, saw Quine, Quine wearing the look of a man setting off on a raid, strolling in his languid, dangerous way toward one of the out-of-bounds corridors that filled police headquarters. You didn’t mistake Quine for a teacher, surgeon or shopkeeper; he was a cop, tall, proprietorial, unimpressed, full of unschooled intelligence. Not good-looking—his features were too irregular—but the lopsidedness of his smile, when it appeared, rendered him attractive. Hirsch sank in his foyer armchair, hoping he hadn’t been spotted.
But Quine stopped abruptly, seemed to sniff the air. He turned on his heel. And now he was cutting toward Hirsch, full of sharkish amusement. He halted. He grinned, no humor in it, his eyes like fractured marbles, his face constructed of harsh planes and shadows. He said nothing. Hirsch gazed at him blankly, then suddenly picked his nose, really sticking his finger in. Quine moved off again.
THEY GRILLED HIRSCH IN a room suited to savagery, a corporate blond wood and cream-walled kind of room, with a nondescript carpet, a side table holding a water jug and glasses, the scent of cleaning agents and aftershave. Two glum senior officers sat at the head of the room, facing down Hirsch, who sat alone at a small, centrally placed table, a briefcase containing his laptop and the cash and the iPhone at his feet. He’d requested and been denied a lawyer: not necessary, just a few formalities, okay? And sitting in, ranged along the side walls, were a handful of officers from the various squads whose activities Quine had compromised in some way: drugs, armed robbery, fraud …
Rosie DeLisle was there, too, next to a woman who seemed tangled in distaste and fury, as if she loathed Hirsch. Short-haired, solid, gruff, a scof
fing look on her face if he happened to catch her eye. He thought he knew all the Internals, but didn’t know this woman, and shot Rosie a querying glance, Who’s your friend? Rosie gave him a whisper of a shrug, as if it were none of his business, don’t worry his pretty little head.
A prosecutor, maybe? Or someone from a specialist squad with some dirt on him, real or imagined?
ROSIE’S BOSS, AN INSPECTOR named Gaddis, asked the first question. He was thin and ferrety and perfect for the job, his long fingers tapping next to an AV control box. “What was your first impression of Paradise Gardens?”
Paradise Gardens was one of Adelaide’s bleak new outer suburbs: cheap housing, struggling young families, a high welfare dependency but few welfare services, a volatile ethnic mix, job scarcity and nothing for the kids to do, including catch a bus or a train anywhere. But Gaddis hadn’t meant the suburb, he meant the Paradise Gardens police station, which was dysfunctional. But what came first, the dysfunctional police station or the dysfunctional suburb?
“I was new to detective duties, sir, and had no clear expectations.”
Gaddis gave him a stop stonewalling look. “In an early interview you said you felt ‘an atmosphere’ soon after joining Senior Sergeant Quine’s CIB team at Paradise Gardens. What did you mean by that?”
Hirsch thought he might as well give a straight answer. “Canteen and locker conversations would dry up whenever I showed my face,” he said, “as if I wasn’t trusted, and I wondered if they saw me as a spy.”
Gaddis gave Hirsch a poor you look. “Did this atmosphere improve over time?”
“Eventually.”
The other interrogator, a man who looked drawn, ill, said, “Please elaborate.”
Conscious that he sounded a bit pathetic, Hirsch said, “At first the shunning was quite overt. I was rarely invited along on raids or to social events, for example, but left to man the CIB phones. That situation improved over time, but only to the extent that I was taken for granted, like part of the furniture.”
“You were a junior officer, untried,” Gaddis said, “and someone had to be on call at the station.”
Nice try, Hirsch thought. He said nothing.
The other man said, “These social events: dinner parties? Barbecues?”
“Dinner parties, barbecues, strip clubs, four-hour lunches and nightclubs,” Hirsch said.
Someone laughed. Gaddis snarled, “By nightclub I take it you mean the Flamingo?”
“Yes.”
“A club owned by the brother of a Comancheros bikie gang member,” Gaddis said, “so wouldn’t you expect CIB interest in the place?”
“The Paradise Gardens CIB was only interested in sex and money: the girls in the back room, the pole dancers, the kickbacks and the Comancheros who bought the cocaine Quine had filched from the evidence locker.”
“Senior Sergeant Quine,” Gaddis said. He moved right along. “Presumably you did more than man the phones all the time. You performed some CIB duties?”
“Yes.”
“Such as?”
“I helped to investigate minor crimes. Burglaries, noise complaints.”
“When investigating one such noise complaint, did you accept a bribe of five-hundred dollars?”
“That is a lie,” Hirsch said. “We were shorthanded and I was sent to look into an after-hours pub noise complaint. The publican offered me five-hundred dollars to turn a blind eye. My curiosity was piqued, so I accepted the money and immediately logged it in at the station, along with a written report. I then informed Quine, sorry, Senior Sergeant Quine. It’s in my report.”
“We have been unable to find that report, Constable Hirschhausen.”
“Is that a fact.”
Gaddis, at his oiliest, said, “You’re not doing yourself any favors, taking that attitude.”
Hirsch ignored him. “In addition to handing me five-hundred dollars, the publican took me into a back room where people were playing poker and roulette. I was invited to join in. I declined, saying I had another call to investigate. It’s all in my report.”
“Which no one can find. When you reported to Senior Sergeant Quine, what did he say?”
“He said, ‘Big Trev offered you a bribe? Doesn’t sound like him.’ I then told Quine—”
“Senior Sergeant Quine.”
“I then told Quine that we should raid the pub’s gambling room. For all we knew, there could have been rooms set aside for prostitution. Quine said we needed to be better prepared, and suggested I see Big Trev again, wearing a wire.”
“His name is Senior Sergeant Quine.”
“He doesn’t deserve the respect implied,” Hirsch said.
Gaddis breathed out. “Did you go to the pub again, wearing a wire?”
“A week later. I was offered another five-hundred dollars. In fact, a weekly payment was suggested.”
“You had this on tape?”
“Yes.”
“You gave it to Senior Sergeant Quine?”
“I did.”
The other man coughed. He was grey-faced and Hirsch couldn’t read him. “What transpired?”
“He called me in two days later and said the equipment must have been faulty, all he could hear was static. I offered to write it up from my notes. He said, ‘Yeah, why don’t you do that,’ and so I did.”
“More paperwork that seems not to exist,” Gaddis said. “Then what happened?”
“Nothing. No follow-up.”
Gaddis smiled at him and pressed a button on the AV controls. Scratchy sounds filled the air. “Static. Clearly your recording didn’t work, so why should there be a follow-up?”
“It did work,” Hirsch said. He removed his laptop from his briefcase. He cranked the volume up and pressed play. The room heard his voice, and another voice saying, “Five hundred now and a hundred and fifty a week, whaddaya reckon to that?”
“Big Trev,” Hirsch said.
Gaddis swallowed. “Has that recording been authenticated?”
“No.”
“Formally lodged?”
“No.”
“Then why—”
“Having determined that Quine was corrupt, I got into the habit of making two copies of everything,” Hirsch said. “I have never deviated from that.”
The grey-faced man glanced at Gaddis and back at Hirsch, so that Hirsch wondered if he had an ally here.
“Moving right along. In your year at Paradise Gardens did you not see a great number of successful CIB actions?”
“Yes.”
“Robberies investigated, witnesses questioned, raids mounted, arrests made?”
“Yes,” Hirsch said, and over Gaddis’s attempts to ask a new question, added, “But more often than not the team returned empty-handed from a so-called ‘sure thing’ or flush with seized drugs and stolen goods which they never properly logged into the evidence safe.”
Gaddis, tensely red, said, “More on that evidence safe later. What makes you so sure of these accusations, if you were manning the phones or whatever it was you were doing?”
“I got curious. One day I saw Detective Constable Reid make a call on his mobile before one of these raids that amounted to nothing. The next day he left his phone in the charger while he went to the pub, so I checked his call log. He’d called another mobile phone. After work I went to the address they’d raided and started calling the number. I heard a phone ringing and found it in a rubbish bin. The idiot who’d dumped it hadn’t cleared any of his personal information: photos, texts, Google account, calls made, calls received. He’d been the target of the raid and Reid had tipped him off.”
“Do we take your word for this?”
After all, Reid was dead. Facing imprisonment, he’d shot himself. Not my concern, Hirsch thought, and he held his briefcase aloft. “If you like I can show you screenshots of Reid’s phone and the phone I found in the bin.”
“Surely you gave this material to an Internal Investigations officer? Sergeant DeLisle, were you shown any of th
is material?”
She was slightly behind Hirsch and he heard her cough and shift in her chair, and to save her he said loudly, “Things have a habit of getting lost.”
This must have seemed like an escape route to Gaddis. With a smirk he said, “Lost by Sergeant DeLisle?”
“No, not by her, by others under your command.”
The man with the unhealthy skin said, “Getting back to these CIB raids. What happened when Senior Sergeant Quine’s team did recover drugs and valuables?”
“It was never properly logged, sir. Partial descriptions, under-reported quantities, that kind of thing.”
“Did you come to any conclusions regarding this?”
“It’s my belief Quine and his mates would keep a portion of the drugs and the valuables and later sell them.”
“To the Comancheros.”
“The Comancheros preferred the drugs over the diamonds.”
Someone laughed. The grey-faced man said, “Do you have proof that the squad kept aside stolen items for sale?”
Here Hirsch squirmed a little. Quine was a powerful man inhabiting a seductive world, and when the personalities are compelling and the stakes high, when you’re adrift in life, you can be seduced. Quine was clever, appealing, he ran rings around defense barristers and made headline arrests of genuinely bad people, and Hirsch—isolated, marriage failing—had felt himself drawn to the man for a while.
But could he confess wrong without losing rightness? “I attended a raid in which a large amount of stolen jewelry was recovered. I was later handed a Rolex watch from that haul.”
“Did you sell it?”
“No.”
“Did you declare it to a senior officer?”
“No.”
“You kept it.”
“In my locker,” Hirsch said. “I didn’t know what to do about it, who to turn to.”
“You did nothing?”
“I made a note for my own files,” Hirsch said, waving his briefcase again. “Time, date, personnel involved, serial numbers and so on.”
“You held on to the watch.”
“Yes.”
“It was found months later when your locker was searched.”