Bitter Wash Road (17 page)

Dirty in court, too. Quine’s barrister cited the Rolex and accused him of holding a grudge, turning on the other squad members because he hadn’t got his fair share. Hirsch thought that was a bit self-defeating, since it implied the barrister thought his client was guilty, but no one else remarked on it. Other accusations were thrown at him: failing to call witnesses, losing crucial evidence, accepting bribes and gifts, leaks to the media. And those calls to drug dealers made on his phone.

Meanwhile Quine remained on his feet while his squad went down. Two constables jailed, two committed to stand trial, a senior constable on the run, and the constable named Reid had shot himself.

The only good thing to come out of it was a kind of understanding in Hirsch. Police officers could drift over time, he saw. It wasn’t always or entirely conscious; more like a loss of perspective. Real and imagined grievances festering; a feeling that the job deserved greater and better public recognition. Or at least perks, rewards. More money, more or better sex, a promotion, a junket to an interstate conference. Greater respect in general. Cynicism set it. The bad guys always got away with it, and the media hammered the cop who took a bribe rather than recognised the one who helped orphans. So why wouldn’t you take shortcuts? Bend the rules?

‘Are you paying attention, Constable Hirschhausen?’

Hirsch blinked. ‘Sir.’

‘You’d like us to believe that you were tainted because you were an innocent member of a corrupt squad? That you naively supported a corrupt senior officer, not knowing the full extent of his corruption?’

Hirsch was wary. It was coming now. ‘Yes.’

Gaddis was wearing a dark blue suit today, with a pale blue shirt and mid-blue tie knotted fatly at the base of his scrawny throat. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and they glinted. He was a spotless man at odds with Grey Face, who was yet to speak this morning and looked washed-out, badly shaven and creased. He sat unmoving where Gaddis was full of motion, taking a box from the floor and crossing the room to where Hirsch was seated.

He spilled an iPhone and some bundled cash onto the table. ‘These items were found concealed inside your private motor vehicle late last week. Perhaps you can account for them?’

Hirsch took out a pen and poked at the phone, then the cash. ‘Never seen these before.’

Gaddis was delighted. ‘Oh, really? You expect us to believe that?’

Hirsch shrugged. ‘Believe what you like: I have never seen these items before.’

‘Have a closer look.’

So Hirsch, using his handkerchief, lifted the phone from the table, held it in his palm and pressed the power button. He watched as the screen lit up. ‘An iPhone 4,’ he said at last. He was having fun but didn’t show it. ‘Apparently they had antenna issues.’ He peered at it. ‘Seems to be stuck on the boot logo. Maybe you could get a few dollars for it on eBay.’

‘Stop arsing about,’ Gaddis said. Reading from a file, he said, ‘That is an iPhone 5 that was last seen in the Paradise Gardens evidence safe, along with the cash.’

‘Really? This is the latest iPhone?’ Hirsch twisted around in his seat. ‘Anyone got a five?’

Amused, Rosie DeLisle crossed the room, proffering her phone, looking spruce and intemperate in a swirling skirt. Hirsch compared them. ‘See? The five is longer and thinner. This is a four. Easy mistake to make.’

He shot Rosie a look as he returned her phone:
Hope he doesn’t take it out on you.
She smiled and went back to her seat. Hirsch turned his attention to Gaddis, seeing a change in his manner. He was shooting glances at a man standing at the back of the room. The man went out.

Hirsch smiled at Gaddis. ‘I mean, your investigators did check the IMEI number, right? Checked the IMEI of this phone against the one that was supposed to be in the evidence locker?’

Strangling his words, Gaddis said, ‘I would have thought the first-aid box a strange place to keep a phone and two and a half thousand dollars.’

Hirsch shrugged. ‘Like I said, I have no idea what these items were doing in my car, if indeed they were there in the first place.’

Gaddis waved a folder at him. ‘My officers conducted a proper search, every stage photographed and witnessed, with no breaks in the chain of custody.’

‘Oh,’ Hirsch said. ‘Fair enough. So you’d have a record of all the serial numbers of each hundred-dollar note?’

Gaddis didn’t bite. He froze, then left the room, giving off a ‘someone’s fucked up’ air. The grey man contemplated Hirsch. Fidgeting and murmurs. Then Gaddis came back. He said, ‘Are you pulling a swiftie on us, Constable? A dishonest man must expect dishonesty in others. You thought you’d embarrass the department by swapping the phone and the cash?’

‘Well, you do investigate devious people, sir,’ Hirsch said. He reached into the briefcase, took out his laptop. ‘Like the devious person on this bit of CCTV footage. It shows a woman opening my car and leaning in. Don’t know who she is. Your daughter, sir? Did you put her up to it?’ He peered at the screen. ‘She’s got a little of your nervy manner.’

~ * ~

Afterwards Rosie DeLisle
grabbed him.

‘You are such a smartarse. Gaddis is furious.’ She gave him a twist of her mouth. ‘You come out ahead, don’t you? I assume the cash they found is yours? You’ll keep the original cash, change a hundred every time you buy something? You get the latest iPhone too, I guess.’

‘We’ll see,’ Hirsch said.

Rosie shrugged. ‘Either way, the stink isn’t going away anytime soon.’

‘Fuck them,’ Hirsch said.

‘Another day,’ Rosie said. ‘Someone I want you to meet.’

She grabbed him by the forearm, dragged him to where the hostile woman hovered. ‘Paul, this is Inspector Croome.’

Hirsch went very still. Was this some new bullshit, coming on top of being grilled by Gaddis for three days?

‘From?’ he said. All things would flow from knowing which department Croome represented.

Croome’s eyes were like pebbles. ‘Sex crimes.’

Hirsch flinched. He’d had his share of underwhelming sexual encounters, but didn’t think he’d broken any laws.

Rosie took pity. Her pretty hand rested on his forearm. ‘We’d like you to stick around for another twenty-four hours.’

‘Is that a request?’

‘Not entirely,’ Croome said. She handed Hirsch a slip of paper. ‘Be at that address at noon tomorrow. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going, don’t let yourself be followed.’

~ * ~

16

FEELING HE’D AMUSED himself sufficiently, Hirsch relinquished the original iPhone and $2500 to Rosie, together with his photographs of them
in situ.
He obtained a written receipt and returned to his motel.

The next day he took a succession of short taxi trips, ending up in the parking area of a strip of shops in Tea Tree Gully. Walked through a door marked
Maintenance
and up a flight of stairs. Knocked on the only door at the top.

Rosie DeLisle answered, leading him into a sitting room decorated in 1970s motel. ‘Nice.’

‘Safe house.’

Croome was standing by the window. ‘Sit please, Constable.’

There were armchairs and a sofa but Hirsch chose a stiff chair at the little corner dining table. With a glance at each other, the women joined him. ‘Inspector Croome has a request,’ Rosie said.

‘Why the cloak and dagger?’

‘Things will move easier and quicker if you sit and listen and shut the fuck up,’ Croome said.

She still thinks I’m bent, Hirsch thought, or at least a bit deviated. ‘Language.’ He folded his arms. ‘Fire away.’

‘You’re stationed at Tiverton.’

Hirsch said nothing. She hadn’t asked a question, merely stated the bleeding obvious. That was probably his personnel file in her lap. Croome shot a look at Rosie DeLisle as if wanting her to run interference.

‘Paul,’ DeLisle said, leaning her slender elbows on the table.

‘Yes?’

‘The inspector would like you to tell us about Sergeant Kropp and his crew.’

The anger came on quickly, as it often did these days, but Hirsch expressed it coldly, a withdrawal. ‘I’m not a spy. I’m not a whistle-blower.’

‘No one’s saying you are.’

‘Everyone’s saying it. And you’re about to ask me to blow the whistle.’

‘Paul,’ Croome said, ‘we have a situation and no means of monitoring it.’

‘Sex crimes? Kropp and his boys?’

‘I’ll explain in a minute,’ Croome said. She was back-pedalling now; she’d expected this to be easier. ‘First, do you think you could, ah, paint us a picture?’ She glanced at Rosie. ‘Internal Investigations have received several complaints about the Redruth police but what we lack is context.’

Hirsch stared at her. ‘Before I say or do anything I need to know if either of you are acquainted in any way, shape or form with Sergeant Kropp, Constables Nicholson or Andrewartha, or the new woman, Jennifer Dee. No bullshit, okay?’

‘No connection,’ Croome said.

‘Never served with them?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not a second cousin or ex-girlfriend or ex-academy buddy with any of them?’

‘No.’

He glanced at Rosie DeLisle. ‘You?’

‘Never met them, Paul, never served with them, no relationship with them at all.’

Hirsch chewed on his bottom lip

Croome said, ‘Please Constable, it’s very important.’

Hirsch liked her better when she didn’t use his name. ‘I can give you local gossip, that’s all.’

Croome’s face said she’d noted the fancy footwork. If he was merely repeating gossip, he wasn’t a spy or a whistle-blower. ‘All right.’

Hirsch gathered himself. ‘Look, they’re not popular. Arrogant, heavy-handed. And this is a sleepy country town. It could be argued that Kropp’s been there too long. He’s networked his way into it so thoroughly and has so much power, he tends to think of the place as his.’

‘Like Quine?’ Rosie said.

Hirsch nodded. ‘Like Quine.’ He considered his words: ‘Kropp likes order,’ he said. ‘That’s his style. But he and the others overdo it with the speed traps, the breathalysers...On-the-spot fines, screaming in people’s faces even if all they’ve done is jaywalk.’

Then he recalled the way Nicholson and Andrewartha had talked about Melia Donovan and her brother. How they treated Jenny Dee. He cocked his head at Croome. ‘If you’re a female you’re probably a bit of a target.’ He thought about it. ‘Or black.’

They fell silent. Is Kropp another Quine? Hirsch wondered. He pictured the full, frothing intensity of Quine, the stamp of his unimaginable expertise, but couldn’t quite match Kropp with that. Yet they were both hard men, and those could be found in police stations all around the country.

‘Care to elaborate?’

Hirsch’s instinct was to shut up. Impressions were dangerous if there was no substance to them. But impressions were all he had. ‘I don’t have hard facts. I don’t know any of the local girls.’

‘Yes you do,’ Croome said, and Hirsch didn’t like the way she said it. He waited.

‘Melia Donovan and Gemma Pitcher.’

Hirsch waited. Was the older man in Melia Donovan’s life a local copper?

‘Paul,’ Rosie said, ‘it’s been alleged the Redruth officers demand sexual favours from young girls in return for dropping charges they might be facing. Minor charges like shoplifting, drunkenness, possession...’

‘So if you could get a bit closer to your colleagues,’ Croome said, ‘you—’

Hirsch ignored her and flared at DeLisle. ‘The term “false pretences” comes to mind. I’ve helped you people enough. Consider this meeting over.’

‘Paul,’ said Rosie soothingly, ‘there’s someone we’d like you to meet.’

Croome got to her feet and entered a short corridor at the end of the room. She tapped on a door, cracked it open, stuck her head in. Hirsch heard murmurs and then she was standing back and making a this-way gesture with one arm.

A teenage girl emerged.

‘Nothing to be frightened of,’ Croome said, gently ushering the girl to the sofa and settling her into it. Rosie left the table and sat beside her, giving the girl a smile of warm brilliance, then Croome sat, and now Hirsch had the three of them staring at him from the sofa.

‘Paul, I’d like you to meet Emily Hobba.’

Hobba looked barely fifteen but might have been older. She was pretty in an unformed, second-glance way, with a kid’s open round face, long brown hair falling from either side of a ragged centre part. Her frame was thin, almost bony, inside a lilac T-shirt, a scrap of floral mini-skirt and half a dozen clanking bangles. She caught him looking and gave him a lopsided smile, a hint of dark artfulness in her eyes. Startled, he struggled not to return it. It wasn’t quite neutral, that smile.

And as if she’d immediately forgotten him, Hobba took out a mobile phone and began working it, texting crazily with a faint grin. Hirsch glanced at Croome, then Rosie. Raised an eyebrow. They shrugged minutely as if to say,
It’s the way it is, nothing we can do about it.

Rosie placed a hand on Emily’s forearm. Long, tanned, slender fingers. Hirsch looked away from them, concentrated as she said, ‘Late last year, Emily got involved in a...’ she hesitated. ‘A scene involving some other young girls and a number of men.’