Bitter Wash Road (35 page)

‘Dunno who drove it. New South plates, but.’

‘It was a New South Wales car?’

‘Yeah. Big black thing.’

‘Let’s go back to Melia Donovan. Coulter drove off with her in the boot of his car.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I wasn’t gunna stick around.’

‘What time was this?’

‘I dunno, late. Midnight, maybe.’

‘Sam, when we found Melia, she was fully dressed.’

He shrugged. ‘Come runnin’ out starkers but had all her gear with her.’

Hirsch pictured it, the empty road in the moonlight, clumsy hands dressing a limp body before throwing it into a ditch. ‘Can you think of a reason why David Coulter would drive all the way up to Muncowie to dump the body?’

‘Easy, ‘s where I live. Me mum does, I mean.’

Hirsch closed his eyes. For want of a few key questions, he thought. And when he’d asked Leanne Donovan if she knew of anyone in her daughter’s life from Muncowie, why hadn’t she mentioned Sam Hempel?

Because Sam wasn’t her daughter’s friend, he was Nathan’s.

‘But what’s the connection? What’s it got to do with Coulter that you live there, or you did?’

‘Frame me, what else?’

Not impossible, Hirsch thought. If you were sick and devious. Melia told Coulter about Sam. Probably shared a laugh with him over the sad boy who had a crush on her.

‘Saddle up: we’re going for a drive.’

~ * ~

They took Sam’s car.
The wrong people might recognise Hirsch’s Nissan, and they’d certainly know the HiLux. Hirsch drove. The Commodore was difficult to start and it stalled a few times, then took a long while to reach ninety, at which speed it shook so hard Hirsch had to back off to eighty-five. His seat sagged. Dope, cigarette and beer odours, deep in the fabrics, came alive with his body heat. A sun-bleached dog nodded its head on the dashboard, the steering wheel belonged on a racing car and the fuel gauge didn’t work. Take your hands off the wheel and the car drifted to the right. Correction:
leapt
to the right.

‘Nice wheels.’

‘Piece a shit,’ Sam said.

Down the long, shallow valley between hills and crops to Redruth. The road shimmered. Hirsch had never seen so many mirages before this bush posting. A farmer stood in a corner of his wheat, rubbing a grain head between his palms, and then they were trundling past, waiting for the next little bit of rural business.

‘Soon be harvest time,’ Hirsch said, as if he had any idea.

Sam’s bottom jaw peeled away from the top. It was entirely possible that he’d lived here all his life and had no sense of its patterns. A Pioneer bus passed, another farmer, this one kicking at a clod of dirt, crows along a wire, some dust out there in the blue-smudge hills.

Then they were passing through Redruth. Hempel directed Hirsch out past the motel and up a side street that became a dirt road leading up into one of the town’s many hills. Over a rise, Hempel saying, ‘That one.’

A little collection of newer houses far apart, semi-farmland, small garden sheds, clumps of ornamental and native trees and a couple of reedy ponds, mostly mud now. Outside the house Sam indicated was a leaning sign staked in unmown grass.
For Sale Venn Realty.

That made sense.

The house itself was sizeable, a pale brick structure about twenty years old, a little outmoded but solid, roomy, semi-secluded.

Hedges and shrubs.

Hirsch stopped the car. ‘Where were you hiding?’

Sam pointed. The hedge was a bulky stripe of dark green along the eastern flank of the house.

‘Mrs Latimer?’

A gateway fifty metres west.

‘You recognised her car, or did you actually see her?’

‘Both.’

‘Did she see you?’

‘Dunno. Don’t think so.’

‘She didn’t go inside, remonstrate with her husband?’

‘What?’

‘Sam, did she get out of the car and go into the house?’

‘Not while I was there.’

Spied on her husband, and a day or two later she’d gone to live with her parents. And a few days after that she had died. Been killed. Had she confronted Ray?
I saw you. I know what you’re up to.

‘Where was the Chrysler?’

Sam pointed to the driveway, a grand sweep of gravel. ‘They were all parked along there.’

‘A big black Chrysler with New South Wales plates.’

‘Yeah,’ Sam said. And he rattled off the number.

~ * ~

31

IT WAS AFTERNOON now. Hirsch delivered Sam to Croome and DeLisle in Adelaide and headed back to Tiverton. A five-hour round trip. Lengthening shadows striped the crops, the highway, the hillsides. More birds on more wires. An air of waiting, of things drying, turning to dust.

It was late afternoon before he could begin tracking the black Chrysler. The New South Wales vehicle registry told him the car belonged to one Daryl Metcalfe, a Broken Hill address. One fine for speeding, but not in the Chrysler.

Next Hirsch contacted the main Broken Hill police station, jumping through various hoops until finally a sergeant agreed to talk to him.

‘That car was reported stolen.’

The logical question was, ‘By Pullar and Hanson?’

‘What? No. Same kind of car, I guess. No, Pullar and Hanson haven’t set foot in Broken Hill to the best of my knowledge. Plus their Chrysler was found burnt out near Townsville, wasn’t it?’

‘Okay, so…’

‘So the car you’re asking about was reported stolen here last week.’

Last week? Hirsch tried to digest that. ‘Who reported it?’

Hirsch heard the clicking of keys. ‘Woman called Sandra Chatterton.’

‘According to the DMV it’s owned by a Daryl Metcalfe.’

‘Goodness, you have done your homework,’ sneered the Broken Hill sergeant. He paused and Hirsch pictured him reading a screen. ‘According to this, Chatterton is Metcalfe’s daughter. She’s looking after his place while he’s overseas for six months.’

That ruled Metcalfe out. But what other men did Chatterton have in her life?

Or maybe no one borrowed the car—maybe Sandra Chatterton was another Gemma Pitcher or Melia Donovan.

‘If it’s the same car,’ Hirsch said, ‘someone was driving it in my neck of the woods back in September.’

‘And that’s significant how?’

‘A suspicious death.’ Hirsch thought about it and said,
‘Two
suspicious deaths.’

‘Want us to look into it?’

‘Have to clear it with my boss, who will talk to your boss,’ Hirsch said.

~ * ~

At
six the next morning, Hirsch, wearing his police uniform, was driving his Nissan north along the Barrier Highway. He guessed he’d be breaching regulations in a few hours’ time, conducting South Australian police business across the border in New South Wales, but he was pretty close to not giving a shit about the niceties these days. It might be days, weeks, before requests moved through official channels, and wearing a uniform would help when he questioned Chatterton. And her father, if he’d returned from overseas.

Still, he shifted a little uncomfortably, picturing Superintendent Spurling’s response if he found out.

Three and a half hours, 350 kilometres, glued to the speed limit across an ochre landscape, under a vast sky. Eagles, stone chimneys silhouetted, an inclination to stone and grit, not dirt. Stone reefs, smudges of bluebush, saltbush, mallee scrub and lone demented ewes. A hawk diving, a crow watching. Road trains, trucks, cars, the emptiness ahead and behind and shimmering lakes that dematerialised as the highway slipped beneath him. Hirsch didn’t like any of it, not exactly, but it felt less alien than it had when he first set foot out here. Not home, but a place vaguely familiar to him.

He’d never been to Broken Hill. It was both modern and old, bright and dull, smaller and richer and shabbier than he’d imagined. Plenty of dusty four-wheel-drives and older sedans and station wagons on streets named for the mineral wealth it was built on: Gypsum, Garnet, Argent, Silica, Calcite...Not a lot of green in the garden beds. Local colours: dusty reds and greys and olives. A baking noon sun.

~ * ~

Daryl Metcalfe’s house was
a low burnt-brick building with a blinding, unpainted corrugated iron roof, mostly dead garden and empty carport. And he’d not long returned from his travels, keen to tell Hirsch all about his long-service leave working for a United Nations outfit in sub-Saharan Africa. ‘My field’s water: conservation, drainage, irrigation, well-sinking...’

They were in the man’s sitting room, Metcalfe about fifty, blockish but fit looking. A widower looking for some meaning in his life, Hirsch thought.

He glanced at the young woman beside Metcalfe on a huge green leather sofa, sinking into it, you’d struggle to get out. ‘And Sandra’s been looking after the place while you were away?’

‘She lives here,’ Metcalfe said, glancing at his daughter with a level of sadness.

Chatterton was a pixie, a wisp, slender, her black hair cropped to a cap around her skull. Jeans, a scrap of T-shirt that showed her pale stomach. She looked no more than seventeen, but Hirsch knew she was twenty-five.

He smiled at her. ‘Someone pinched your dad’s car just before he got back last week?’

She nodded, and Hirsch wondered if she didn’t trust her voice.

Metcalfe patted her knee while watching Hirsch with suspicion. ‘Why are the South Australia police interested?’

Hirsch kept it vague. ‘A car matching the description was seen in the vicinity of an incident in the Redruth area.’

‘Wasn’t me,’ Chatterton whispered.

Hirsch wondered about the surname. Mother’s name? Maybe she was married. ‘I’m not suggesting it was you, I just need to eliminate the car.’

‘Consider it eliminated,’ Metcalfe said. ‘Sandy wouldn’t have taken it out.’ He had a sweet, benighted face, a powerful frame and sun-scorched skin. Like Bob Muir, a quiet, slow, tolerant man who’d probably never committed a crime in his life. The daughter was a different matter. She’d begun exhibiting meth twitches as she sat there, her skin crawling. She looked unfinished, a wraith beside her big father, and could barely meet Hirsch’s eye.

‘Sandy,’ he said gently, ‘what day did you discover the car was missing?’

‘Tuesday, when I got home from work.’

‘She does odd jobs for the council,’ Metcalfe said.

‘And you flew in from overseas the next day?’ Hirsch asked him.

‘That’s right.’

‘You reported it to the police, Sandy?’

She jiggled, blinked and managed a nod. Metcalfe patted her knee fondly, but there was a tightness in him. ‘She’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘But she’s had a rough trot these past few years. Husband used to knock her around. Health issues.’

Like addiction. She was barely holding it together now, and Hirsch thought she might fracture if he pushed. He smiled a smile that said he understood and hadn’t come to judge. What he wanted to say was: ‘You sold your dad’s car to buy drugs, right?’

Instead he said, ‘Did the neighbours see anything?’

Sandra Chatterton shook her head violently.

‘Not her fault,’ Metcalfe said.

The stress was there in his voice. As if he thought the sky might fall in if he didn’t hold it up and he’d been holding it up for years and years and one day it would fall in despite his best efforts. He rested his solid hand on his daughter’s knee, great pain in his deeply recessed eyes.

Sam Hempel had seen a black Chrysler bearing Daryl Metcalfe’s plates parked at a house in the mid-north of South Australia as far back as September: over two months ago. Katie Street and Jack Latimer had seen it too, passing through Tiverton. And Katie had seen it again, a few days later, as if it hadn’t left the district, or had returned.

‘Do you know anyone down in South Australia, Sandra?’

She shook her head so hard the cropped hair seemed to ripple.

He said off-handedly, ‘You’ve never been to parties down there?’

Another violent shake.

‘What is this?’ Metcalfe demanded, uneasy, his high forehead damp.

Then an alteration in him. He looked fully at his daughter, full of regard and suffering and forgiveness. ‘Sandy?’ he said, his voice a loving, low rasp, pebbles slipping off a shovel.

It was enough to flip her. Her head dropped, her hands went to her ears. ‘I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry.’

‘You sold the car to buy drugs?’ her father asked gently.

‘No, I swear.’

‘You owed people for drugs?’

‘No!’

Hirsch was content to watch and listen. An old drama was playing out, the devoted father, the beloved daughter and her demons.

‘I went on a trip,’ she muttered.

Metcalfe glanced at Hirsch as if seeking permission to continue. Hirsch gave him a nod.