by Garry Disher
The creek had retreated to a stretch of fetid mud between muddy pools, the edges dense with dying reeds. Sheep had tried to reach the water, churning the damper soil. A dead sheep floated in the largest pool and a live one struggled feebly to escape. No one but Hirsch noticed it.
He said, “You clowns aren’t farmers.”
“What?” said Raymond Latimer. They were on the flat area beside the hut’s crooked chimney and he punched the shotgun butt into Hirsch’s stomach. “What would you know?”
Hirsch got his breath back. “You’ve run the place into the ground. All that money poured into the latest toy, big shots in the district, you can’t even pay your grocery bills, you’re a laughingstock.”
“Fuck you.”
“You’re pathetic the way you’ve always let your old man call the shots as if he were clever or deserving of respect.” Hirsch tutted, shook his head. “You’re just a sad little pedophile, that’s how you’ll be remembered.”
Stretching it but, right now, goading these losers, driving a wedge between them, was all Hirsch had. What he got out of it was a bit of confusion and outrage and another blow to the guts.
Spurling looked on, irritated. “Do we have to do this? Why are you even listening to him? Get on with it.”
“Yeah, get on with it, Raymond. Take orders, it’s what you’re good at. Spurling cleaned up your mess now it’s your turn to clean up.”
“I don’t take orders from anyone.”
“Just shut the fuck up, Ray. Stop listening. Put him out of his misery.”
Hirsch ignored both men, gazing curiously at Leonard, the queer blankness in the man. “You must be proud of your boy, Len.”
Leonard blinked, character, life, returning to his face, and they all saw it, a flicker that dismissed the son.
“Dad?” said the son. He looked at the shotgun as if it were a gadget beyond his figuring.
“Can’t you idiots see what he’s doing? Shoot him, Raymond, for fuck’s sake.”
“Yeah, take another order, Ray.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Raymond said, jutting his sulky jaw at the dry grasses.
“Come on, Ray,” Hirsch said, “it’s easy, just another staged suicide, and we know how expertly your wife’s was staged. You’d think a cop would know how, but old Spurls here made one error after another. Let you down, didn’t he? Maybe you’ll do a better job, though why anyone would think I’d come out here and shoot myself with another man’s gun, I don’t know. Did you idiots think it through?”
“Yeah, we thought it through,” Spurling said. “You’re going down a mine shaft, hotshot. No one will ever find you.”
“Same as you did with Gemma, right?”
“What? No. Don’t know where she is.”
“Yeah, right,” Hirsch said. “Meanwhile they have all your names, guys. You three, Venn, Logan, Coulter, McAskill …”
Ray looked hunted. “Who has?”
“Sex crimes.”
“He’s lying,” Spurling said.
“How does he know our names then?”
“Ray, shoot the prick, all right? You owe me.”
The shotgun was a hot potato and Ray Latimer tried to shove it into his father’s hands. “I can’t, Dad. You do it.”
“It was your fucking wife got us into this,” Leonard said.
“You got him into it, Lenny boy,” Hirsch said. “You knocked him around all through childhood, gave him sick ideas about sex and women so he’d go along with you and this other sick fuck.”
“One of you kill him,” Spurling said.
Ray Latimer continued to push the shotgun at his father, who backpedaled, saying, “The fuck are you doing? Grow up, you snivelling great calf.”
“You must be so proud, Supe,” Hirsch said.
Spurling, distracted and disgusted, said, “What?”
“The caliber of your fellow pedos.”
“You don’t know anything about it,” Spurling said, watching the Latimer psychodrama. He glanced at his watch, yelled, “We haven’t got all day. One of you had better come and shoot this cunt.”
Hirsch was churning and thought he’d vomit. He swallowed, swallowed again and kept his voice even: “I suppose you’ve got Kropp running damage control. He’ll send in a report about my mental state, plant some evidence, disappear my car.”
Spurling frowned at him, half an eye on the Latimers. “What? Kropp? What are you on about?”
“Kropp’s not involved?”
Spurling snorted. “Kropp’s got nothing to do with any of this. The man’s a disgrace.”
“And you’re not?”
One eye on the Latimers, Spurling said, “Some time in the next few weeks your HiLux will be found out in the dry country with an empty fuel tank. Your phone will be on the seat, flat battery. You wandered off, lost all sense of direction, no water, blazing sun, delirious, you probably fell in a mine shaft.” He paused, smiled at Hirsch. “Meanwhile I’ll poke around in your office files.”
And manage the flow of information, Hirsch thought. Paint me as corrupt after all, or off on an erratic course of my own, willfully misreading evidence, trying to atone for my crooked past. He felt ill and drained and couldn’t breathe and thought of Alison Latimer, her panic attacks and arrhythmia.
Spurling shouted, “What are you arseholes doing?”
Leonard and Raymond Latimer were enacting a strange, sad, wordless dance, the son pressing the shotgun onto his father almost as if proffering a gift and seeking an embrace, the father disgusted with him.
Then Leonard snatched the gun, shoved his son in the chest with it and swung it neatly to his shoulder, the bore swinging around on Hirsch.
A little voice crying from the rocks across the creek, “Stop it.”
From Hirsch’s point of view, it was a good thing that Katie Street then clarified her point by shooting Leonard with what he assumed was the missing Latimer rifle.
THE BULLET PUNCHED INTO the patriarch’s belly and he oofed in surprise and pain. He doubled over. He took one step back, and another, tossed the shotgun weakly away and lowered himself to the ground, taking the weight with his right hand. The collapse was slow, economical, almost graceful. All stared; no one said anything.
Ray Latimer moved first, starting toward his father as if wanting to give comfort but expecting to be lashed for it, and, too late, Spurling swung around on Hirsch with the rifle. But Hirsch wasn’t there, he’d uncoiled from the starting block, leading with his shoulder. He took the superintendent full on, driving the air from his lungs. Hirsch heard the rifle crack in his ear, and then he was deaf, the bullet whining off over the rocks on the other side of the creek. Thinking, I hope Katie kept her head down, he began a dance for possession of the rifle as crazy as the Latimers’ for the shotgun. He spun around and around with Spurling, spinning the man at the wall of the hut. He was young and he was fit; Spurling was a desk jockey. The superintendent smacked against the rusty metal and bounced off, limp suddenly. Hirsch snatched the rifle.
First he backed away until all three men were inside his field of fire. Then he called, “You can come out now.”
Katie Street’s spectacular impudence and daring had ebbed a little. She emerged edgy, ready to run, taking stock before picking her way across the creek bed. Now she was running toward Hirsch, stepping wide of Leonard Latimer as if he might still harm her. She reached Hirsch. She got as close to him as she could.
He hugged her thin shoulders briefly. “Where’s the gun?”
She pointed across the creek at the rocks. “Over there.”
“Just as well you pinched it.”
She was a little indignant. “No one would listen to me about that car. Lots of times I saw it. Today I saw it go in Mr. Latimer’s place.” She pointed toward the Vimy Ridge gates.
“You’ve been hiding the gun all this while?”
She toed the dirt. “In my tree house.”
“Listen, girlie,” Spurling said, “this is a very bad man. Go and tell
your mother to call the police.”
“He is the police,” Katie said, and Hirsch could feel her warmth pressing against his hip.
CHAPTER 34
TWO DAYS LATER, HIRSCH debriefed with Wendy Street over a glass of wine, Wendy holding her glass to the light a little crookedly, saying a little slurringly, “I have to say my daughter seems quite phlegmatic about shooting a man. ‘Mr. Latimer was going to shoot Paul so I shot him.’ ”
“Just as well she did,” Hirsch said. “Just as well she’s not agonizing over it.”
They were in the kitchen, late afternoon, Bob Dylan drifting from the speakers, They’re selling postcards of the hanging. The sun, seeking a way in past the blind above the sink, lit Wendy’s hair, the finer, flyaway strands so burning in the light that Hirsch wanted to reach out and tame them.
“A counselor’s been offered, but I don’t know that she needs one. What do you think?”
He almost answered, “You know her better than me,” but that was too easy. He glanced at Katie, who was belly-down, chin-up before the TV set in the adjoining sunroom. “She’s clearly suffering.”
A twist of a smile, Wendy saying, “Joking aside, what if the enormity of it hits her one day?”
Hirsch took a chance and reached his hand out. Her hand was a warm claw under his. “All you can do,” he said, “is listen and watch and not make a big deal about it if she raises the issue.”
“Not make a big deal about it as in it’s okay to shoot people or not make a big deal about it as in don’t make her anxious and guilty?”
Hirsch was pretty sure she was smiling so he said, “Oh, the former.”
Now she grew serious. “At least she didn’t kill him. But what happens officially now?”
“She’ll have to answer questions: where the gun came from, why she’d had it, why she shot it, that kind of thing. You’ll be allowed to sit with her. Bring in a lawyer if you think things are straying into dangerous territory. But given her age and the fact the gun hadn’t been secured by the owner and the fact she saved my life, then I don’t think any action will be taken.” He paused. “Ray, on the other hand, may face some kind of firearms offense in addition to everything else.”
Katie wandered in. She stood close to Hirsch’s chair, bumping her shoulder against his in absentminded affection. Wendy smiled at her. “Okay, sweetie?”
“Peachy.”
And she wandered back to the TV.
Hirsch said, “You going ahead with the public meeting?”
“Sure. Superintendent Spurling won’t be there for obvious reasons.”
“They’ll send someone in his place.”
“The point is I want them to send someone in Sergeant Kropp’s place—and Constable Nicholson’s and Constable Andrewartha’s. Despite everything that’s happened, the situation in Redruth hasn’t altered.”
Hirsch nodded. Kropp had been strangely quiet. A few weeks ago—a few days ago—the sergeant would have been ranting on the phone for Hirsch to tell his girlfriend to back off. “Can I ask you something?”
Wendy Street tensed, slipped her hand out from under his, and Hirsch wondered, with sadness, if she were readying herself to rebuff him. He blushed. “I met you on a Monday, the second week of the September school holidays.”
She still looked tense. “That sounds about right.”
“Alison was with you.”
“Yes. Where are you going with this?”
“Bear with me. On the Saturday—in other words, two days before that—she’d followed her husband to a house just on the other side of Redruth where several men, including her husband and father-in-law, were having sex with Melia Donovan and Gemma Pitcher and possibly others we don’t know about.”
“Yes …?”
“As we understand it, she accosted Ray. He probably told his father, who told the others, and it was agreed she had to go.”
“Didn’t have anything to do with the inheritance after all,” Wendy said.
“Icing on the cake, though,” Hirsch said. “The thing is, I have a witness who saw Melia Donovan running from the house in distress, naked, carrying her clothes and shoes.”
The tension hadn’t ebbed. “And …?”
“This witness said that David Coulter chased Melia in his car and knocked her down.”
Wendy tightened against the air between them. “You think Allie should have said something?”
Hirsch said, “It’s just that I’m surprised she didn’t. Was she that browbeaten, or that single-minded about leaving her husband, that she’d fail to mention something like that?”
“How do you know she saw it? It was nighttime, she might not have had a clear view, she might already have left.”
“True.”
“All I know is, she was upbeat about leaving Ray and getting a divorce.”
“She didn’t mention that she’d followed Ray, had her suspicions confirmed, nothing like that?”
“No.”
“She looked tense the day I met her. Scared.”
“Wouldn’t you be? She assumed you were a mate of Kropp’s. We all did.”
Hirsch winced.
“Maybe,” Wendy said, placing her hand over his this time, “she did follow Ray, saw all the cars there, heard music or whatever and assumed he’d gone to a party. He’d always flaunted his other life, this was just more of the same, she felt ashamed and embarrassed and didn’t tell me about it.”
“You’re probably right.”
“What’s Coulter saying? Did he admit to running over Melia?”
“Dunno, it’s out of my hands.”
“Gemma will know.”
“If I can find her,” Hirsch said, thinking of those mine shafts dotting the country behind the Razorback.
AND THEN ONE DAY Gemma Pitcher was seen in town. When word got through to Hirsch it was a Sunday, his day off. Wearing his board shorts and a T-shirt, he came knocking.
Gemma’s mother answered with her sullen face, as if life was a disappointment, including her daughter’s return.
Or maybe it’s me, Hirsch thought. “Is Gemma in?”
“Are you taking her out?”
“I beg your pardon?”
The woman looked him up and down. “She’s too upset to go out.”
Hirsch shook his head, thinking that he should have worn his uniform. Men, including policemen, came knocking on this door from time to time, asking for Gemma, so why should I be any different? “It’s a work matter, Mrs. Pitcher.”
“I need her to help with dinner,” grumbled the woman.
But she took Hirsch through to the sitting room, where Gemma was watching one of the Twilight movies, DVD discs and covers strewn around the TV set and across the carpet.
“Hello, Gemma,” he said. “Movie marathon?”
Gemma was staring dazedly at the screen, as if she’d been doing it for half of her life. Possibly she has, Hirsch thought. Her mouth hung open, and she lolled rather than sat, dressed in a short top and tights, the fabric stretched to within a millimeter of tolerance and revealing her soft white belly.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Hirsch said, watching the mother, who flashed him a look of bitterness and defiance before backing out of the room. Presently she could be heard in the kitchen, smacking dishes about in lieu of love or regard. Hirsch said, “Gemma, I need to ask you some questions.”
“What for?”
Hirsch stared at her. “I have a better question: How come you’re surprised I want to ask you some questions?”
Gemma looked at him blankly, as if astonished. “But it’s all over, it was on the news.”
Hirsch wondered how her mind worked. He sat beside her, sinking into the sofa cushions and against over-soft, over-round teenage flesh. He edged away hastily. “Gemma, obviously we have questions to ask you. You might have to give evidence in court. You might face charges yourself.”
Beside him the girl was suddenly no longer soft but a dense, tight shape. She swallowed con
vulsively.
“Gemma?”
Full of tidal anxieties, her face sulky and damp, she said, “I done nothing.”
“Gemma, I need to know who introduced Melia to this thing you had going with those men who have been charged, Coulter and Venn and Logan and the others. Was it you?”
“I didn’t want her there. Who do you think they all preferred?”
The fifteen-year-old beauty, not the plain, bovine eighteen-year-old. “Did you try to dissuade her?”
“Huh?”
Hirsch sought inspiration from the stale air. “Did you try to convince her it was the wrong thing to do?”
“Her? Yeah, right.”
“She was stubborn?”
Gemma snorted.
“You haven’t answered the question: who got her involved?”
Her voice came, without conviction: “Mr. Coulter.”
“How?”
“Me and her got done for shoplifting and he let us off and asked Mel out.”
“Was she his girlfriend? Did they go out?”
“Yeah, but, you know, they had to keep it secret.”
“For how long?”
Gemma heaved her heavy shoulders. “I dunno, a while. Few weeks.”
“Just to be clear, they were having sex?”
Gemma couldn’t believe he’d be so naive. “Like I said, they were goin’ out.”
“How long after he started going out with her did he ask her to one of your parties?”
The shoulders heaved again. “It wasn’t like she went to lots of them.”
“That first time, did you tell her what kind of party it would be?”
“No.”
“You didn’t try to warn her?”
“I would of got into trouble.”
“With who? Melia?”
“No—Mr. Coulter. He said I had to hold her hand. He said he could still drop me in the shit because of the shoplifting and that.”
“Was she shocked, upset, when she realized what was happening?”
Gemma snorted. “Not her.”
“Did you give her a lift or did Mr. Coulter collect her or collect both of you?”
“Me.”
“He couldn’t let himself be seen with you?”
“Yeah.”