HIRSCH CROUCHED, WONDERING if he and Hansen were about to become the fulcrum of each other’s worlds. He shaded Hansen’s face with his hat, and asked the question.
‘Why?’
Hansen’s voice weakened. ‘The older girl can ID her as the one who shot her father.’
And I showed her a photo of Roesch sitting on my sofa, Hirsch thought. No wonder she was on edge.
Hansen, staring dazedly at the snake, now looked up at Hirsch. ‘Do you know where the girls are? Have you always known?’
‘Found them this morning,’ Hirsch said. He explained about Craig and the dugout.
Hansen coughed. ‘They’ve been there the whole time?’
‘Yes.’ Hirsch paused. ‘Rob, I need to see they’re all right.’
Hansen was agitated. ‘I know she’s coming,’ he said, the words tangling on lips and tongue. ‘You need to watch out.’
Hirsch glanced back along the creek, undecided. Hansen—or Craig and the girls? ‘I’ve got pressure bandages in the car. I’ll run you to hospital. But I need to check the dugout.’
‘Go,’ Hansen said, rallying, then he leaned to one side and vomited neatly, unfussily, a thin gruel that darkened the dirt. The acrid smell rose. He lifted his head to Hirsch and croaked, ‘Go.’
Hirsch stood. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Hansen gasped, ‘Feel pretty bad, mate. My head. I’m going to chuck again.’
Hirsch had no knowledge of the mechanics of snakebite death. Given the amount of venom in Hansen, a cardiac arrest of some kind? Very soon? He squeezed Hansen’s shoulder. ‘I’ll call an ambulance, we’ll meet it halfway.’
Call triple-zero as soon as he had mobile reception, is what he meant. He couldn’t radio it in, with the HiLux’s radio still fucked. A repair job for Bob Muir…Christ, why was he thinking that at a time like this? ‘Sit tight,’ he said. He placed his hat gently over the flushed face.
Then he ran, checking the grass and the dirt the whole way: snake-watching ingrained in him now. And as he ran, he recast Roesch’s second visit to his little suite of rooms behind the police station. She’d been trying to get him on-side and Hansen offside. He was supposed to distrust Hansen, and warm to her because she’d confided in him. And she’d have wanted him close, because he was closest to everything that had happened. He’d met Denise and her youngest kid, he’d found the bodies. For all she knew, he was hiding something or unwittingly holding some key information. A person steeped in secrecy and manipulation would expect secrecy and manipulation in others, he thought.
Stumbling past the caravan—still no sign of Roesch’s car—he continued downstream to the dugout. Waiting a moment, hoping they’d heard him, he called softly, ‘Craig? Louise?’
Nothing. Gone already. Or lying there dead. Sick, jittery, Hirsch clambered up the hand- and footholds. Reached the lip of the dugout, chanced a quick look in. Empty. Climbed down again.
They must have left as soon as he’d driven off with Wayne Flann. Louise and her poker face. Despite his fine words, she knew why Vita Roesch had come. She knew it wasn’t finished.
Hirsch had to trust them to be safe, to be wise. He ran back to the HiLux and bumped along the creek bank to where he’d left Hansen. Fished around for the pressure bandages and bottled water and slid down into the creek where Hansen lay unmoving.
Dead.
Hirsch checked for a pulse, but it was unmistakeable. Hansen lay in the loose, collapsed attitude of death, flat on his back, eyes open, head angled to one side. He’d vomited again: a crusty mess of it around his mouth, down his shirt front and on the ground. And he’d evidently tried to call for help: one hand, slack in death, nursed his mobile phone.
Hirsch retrieved it, the movement animating the screen, revealing Hansen’s final action. Not calling. Recording.
Hirsch took out his own phone, checking automatically for reception, and began to photograph the dead man and the site of his death. The legs, the riddled snake, the blood-splashed stones. Then he hauled Hansen up the bank and draped him along the back seat of the HiLux and strapped him in. He glanced uneasily along the creek. There was no need to rush now—not for Hansen. But Roesch…
He’d call for backup when he had a signal. Right now he needed to find Craig and the girls.
They would have run downstream, not back to Craig’s camp—the first place someone like Roesch might look—so he drove along the creek as far as he could go. Wayne Flann’s ute was parked in a patch of dead grass—both doors open, windows down, curiously. Hirsch got out, approached cautiously: no one inside it, no loose ignition wires. The ground was baked too hard for shoe prints, but that didn’t mean the girls and Craig hadn’t been here. Meanwhile, any evidence it might contain could be contaminated or degraded by the sun, the wind and the dust that forever lifted from the plains. He wound up the windows, shut the doors.
The terrain beyond the ute was impassable, the creek petering out. Hirsch felt the perversity of the day: a sense of control removed from him; of waiting for something worse to happen. All he could think to do was drive, and he found himself bumping along in Flann’s wheel tracks across the dirt and grass to a gate on the Tiverton road, the smell of vomit hanging in the air.
The hayshed. He parked between the gate posts and ran across to the listing walls. The hay was rotting but he found a hidden nest among the bales; an empty spring-water bottle, not a speck of dust on it.
Where now? Prowl up and down the roads? Their instinct would be to head for Tiverton. Back in the Toyota, he placed Hansen’s phone in the bracket on his dashboard, and set it to play the man’s dying declaration.
At first, only ambient sounds crackled from the little speaker: a breeze in the grass stalks; a tree heat-flexing; a crow cawing. Then Hansen’s voice emerged: slow, reedy, a man becoming weak.
Denise Rennie, he said, was a New South Wales police civilian analyst working with Federal Police and Vita Roesch and other Major Crimes detectives on a large-scale arms and drugs smuggling ring comprising immigration agents, bikie gangs, Border Force officers and bent police. Along with the smuggling there were ancillary crimes including extortion, bribery and money laundering.
At the midpoint of the investigation, an attempt was made on Rennie’s life—she was shot at by a motorbike pillion passenger—and the family was placed in witness protection near the town of Moree, in northern New South Wales, until the trials.
Six weeks later her husband, Neil, was shot dead at home.
Normally he’d not have been there—he worked part-time for the shire—but he and the older girl, Louise, were home sick. Louise witnessed the shooting and recognised the shooter as her mother’s work colleague, Vita Roesch. She escaped from the house with a mobile phone and called her mother, who was out shopping with the other children.
The family fled. They made no contact with anyone for eighteen months. ‘Except,’ Hansen said, slurring his words, ‘Denise made a classic angry-idiotic move—she called Roesch and told her she was going down. You could say Vita was highly motivated after that.’
Roesch, a major player in the very crime ring she was investigating, was in a position to manage the flow and storage of information. She’d have known when Denise Rennie was getting too close.
‘Then back in October,’ Hansen said, ‘Denise made contact with us.’
She was cagey and she was patient: started with untraceable thirty-second calls from public phones to her dead husband’s Dog Squad friends. Quick, in-and-out questions, random times of the day and night, until she reached Hansen’s boss and decided she trusted him. Hirsch imagined those calls: she must have driven all over the state looking for phone boxes.
‘The money was running out and she was lonely I guess, and sick of living out in the sticks and worried about her kids’ futures,’ Hansen said, ‘but mainly she was pissed off about something she’d read online.’
Her old case, adjourned when she disappeared, had been reopened in a watered-down form: minor charges only, against a handful of baggage handlers and couriers. What about the main players? What had happened to all that evidence she’d gathered?
‘Vita Roesch happened to it,’ Hansen said. He coughed, spat, groaned.
Then Denise had dropped her bombshells. Not only had she saved some of that evidence to cloud storage but her daughter could ID Roesch as the shooter of her husband.
‘The boss set up a team to investigate Roesch. Small, hush-hush.’
Hansen became Denise Rennie’s point of contact. He talked her through ways to bring the family in. How their ongoing safety would be secured. How Roesch and anyone involved with her would be kept in the dark.
‘This went on for about three weeks. She was paranoid about wiretaps, call monitoring, email hacking, so I talked her into getting a satellite phone.’ A pause while Hansen coughed wetly. ‘I don’t know where it is now. It wasn’t at the house, and Lavau didn’t have it.’
Here Hirsch experienced an odd sense of time and place dislocation. Hansen hadn’t known about Wayne Flann.
Finally, Denise Rennie revealed her address and Hansen obtained a number for Sergeant Brandl, just in case. Then, less than a week later, the Hamel Road murders. Hansen was sent to South Australia to monitor Roesch and safeguard the girls, if they could be found.
Hirsch imagined Roesch’s eighteen months of gnawing anxiety—and then, the YouTube post, like a gift from god. She sends Lavau, but by the time he reaches the mid-north, Wayne Flann’s been and gone. Lavau would have reported back to Roesch, saying that whoever had shot Denise and Nick Rennie had either snatched the daughters or let them escape. What would Roesch have made of that? Someone in the organisation acting on their own initiative—one of her bikie mates going rogue? She would have told Lavau to stay put, keep his eyes and ears open, until her arrival. Her reason for being there? Ostensibly to safeguard the smuggling-ring investigation; actually to contain and mop up. And work out what the hell was going on.
‘She tried to seize Denise’s computers et cetera, but your people wouldn’t have it.’
Hansen’s voice grew weaker. ‘There never was a man in a silver Passat. Classic Roesch misdirection. But Lavau was part of it and I think she shot him. He’d have been a liability if you’d caught him that day. I remember she made herself scarce for a few hours.’
A long silence. Then: ‘Christ, I feel like shit. Head hurts. And I…ah…coupla things you need to know. I looked into Lavau yesterday. He was at the academy with Roesch. Twenty years ago, no contact since. But his file says he went to Barrenjoey High School. That’s a name you don’t forget…anyway, back when Neil Rennie was shot, when we were looking closely at everyone on the team, I remember one of the support staff…same school.’
Hirsch was making mental notes as he drove. Tell Hansen’s boss.
He waited for more from Hansen, but all he heard were the birds and the wind again, and, some time later, the sounds of his own feet scrabbling down the bank to find a dead man.
Just as he reached to switch off Hansen’s phone, it rang. Hansen’s boss? Roesch? Hirsch slowed down and glanced at the screen. The caller ID simply said Denise.