Hell to Pay Read Free Page A

child time to mark details. But what details had marked
this
vehicle out from the others that passed the school every day, the farm utes, family cars, grain trucks, interstate buses?
    It was a black Chrysler, that was what. A car in the news, driven by a pair of killers.
    Not a common car—but not rare either, and Hirsch argued that now. “I think those men are still in Queensland.”
    “Whatever. Can we just go?”
    Hirsch glanced at the rearview mirror, seeking Jack’s face. The boy shrank away.
    “Suit yourselves,” Hirsch said, checking the wing mirror and pulling onto the road.
    Speaking of observant children …
    “Did you kids happen to see anyone hanging around outside the police station late last week? Perhaps putting something in the letter box?”
    They stared at him blankly and he was thinking the question beyond their ken when the girl said, “There was a lady.”
    “A lady.”
    “But I didn’t see her putting anything in the letter box.”
    “Was she waiting to see me, do you think?”
    “She looked in your car.”
    Hirsch went very still and braked the HiLux and said lightly, “When was this?”
    “Morning recess.”
    Hirsch went out on patrol every morning, and someone would have known that. “What day?”
    Katie conferred with Jack and said, “Our last day.”
    “Last day of term. Friday.”
    “Yes.”
    Hirsch nodded slowly and removed his foot from the brake pedal, steering slowly past the fallen branch. Seeing Katie Street peer at it, he had a sense of her mind working, putting the narrative together—his stopping the HiLux, getting out and hearing a stray bullet fly past his head. As if to check that he wasn’t sporting a bullet hole, she glanced across at him uneasily. He smiled. She scowled, looked away.
    Then she said tensely, “We’re not lying.”
    “You saw a woman near my car.”
    Now she was flustered. “No. I mean yes. I mean we saw the black car.”
    “I believe you.”
    She’d heard that before, a doubting adult. “It’s true!”
    “What direction?”
    She got her bearings, pointed her finger. “That way.”
    North. Which made little sense if Pullar and Hanson had been in the car she saw—not that Hirsch could see that pair of killers leaving their comfort zone to drive all the way down here to Daggy Sheep, South Australia.
    Still sensing Hirsch’s doubt, Katie grew viperish: “It was black, it was a station wagon and it had yellow and black New South Wales number plates, just like in the news.”
    Hirsch had to look away. “Okay.”
    “And it was a Chrysler,” said Jack.
    Feeling lame, Hirsch said, “Well, it’s long gone now.”
    Or not, if it had been the Pullar and Hanson car. The men liked to target farms on dirt roads off the beaten track. Suddenly Hirsch understood what the children had been doing: they’d been shooting Pullar and Hanson.
    He steered gamely down through the washaway and up around the next bend, to where Bitter Wash Road ran straight and flat for a short distance, the children mute and tense. But as he neared the red roof and the green, Katie came alive, snapping, “Jack’s place.”
    A pair of stone pillars, the name VIMY RIDGE on one, 1919 on the other, the oiled wooden gates ajar. Imposing, but Hirsch supposed that a lot had occurred since 1919, for everything was weatherworn now, as if the money had evaporated or been spent on more pressing needs. A curving gravel driveway took him past rose-bordered lawns, oleander bushes and a palm tree, all of the road dust washed off by last night’s rain, ending at a lovely stone farmhouse: local stonework in shades of honey, a steep green roof and deep verandas, in that mid-north regionalstyle not quite duplicated elsewhere in the country, and sitting there as though it belonged. Hirsch eyed it appreciatively. He’d grown up in a poky terrace on the baked streets of Brompton—not that the miserable little suburb was miserable any longer, now the yuppies had remade it.
    He pocketed his