Bitter Wash Road by Garry Disher

body over the phone. ‘Get you anything else? Coffee? Sticky date pudding’s on special.’
     
    ‘Sticky date, please,’ Rosie said.
     
    ‘Coffee,’ Hirsch said.
     
    When the waitress was gone, tight black jeans winking, Rosie gestured at the phone. ‘They’ll use this. Quine has plenty of friends. Even the people I work with. You should have brought everything with you and logged it in with me.’
     
    Hirsch took up his phone again. ‘Got a little movie to show you.’
     
    He found the file containing the CCTV footage of the woman lurking around his car. Pressed ‘play’ and sat back to watch DeLisle’s face.
     
    She breathed out. ‘Quality’s not great, but...’
     
    ‘But it’s clear what she’s doing, and time and date are embedded in the original, and I have a statutory declaration from the shopkeeper whose camera took this.’
     
    ‘Who is it?’
     
    ‘No idea.’
     
    ‘Kropp’s wife?’
     
    Hirsch went very still. He looked hard at Rosie. ‘One might ask why you mention his name.’
     
    DeLisle shut down. Eventually she said, ‘Could this be the wife of one of the others? Nicholson? Andrewartha?’
     
    ‘And one might wonder how you happen to know the names of everyone stationed at Redruth,’ Hirsch said. ‘Unless you’ve been checking up on me.’
     
    Rosie DeLisle shrugged, a shrug that contained volumes. Well, fuck them all. ‘When am I supposed to face the music?’
     
    ‘You’ll get an e-mail.’
     
    ‘Not even a phone call.’
     
    ‘A phone call to ensure you got the e-mail.’
     
    Hirsch would have to tell Kropp he wouldn’t be available next week. ‘How long for?’
     
    ‘Two or three days.’
     
    ‘How will they run it?’
     
    ‘They’ll say some irregularities have cropped up, no big deal, but we need your help sorting them out. They’ll start by taking you through your history at Paradise Gardens CIB, let you explain everything away, the corruption, etcetera, etcetera, then just when you’re feeling secure, hit you with the phone and the cash.’
     
    She’d told him. But the doubt was still there, he could read it in her. He threw a twenty onto the table and left.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    9
     
     
     
     
    HIRSCH WAS BACK in Redruth by four-thirty. Rather than drive through the town, he turned off the highway, intending to reach Tiverton via the back roads that ran north and west of the town. A couple of the properties out there were on his watch list: an elderly farm widow and her schizophrenic son, and a farmhouse rented to a handful of dropout city kids who’d been accused of sabotaging the wind farm turbines.
     
    His information was out of date: the widow had died and the farm was sold, the son taken in by a sister; the dropouts had returned to the city. Hirsch drove on, warm and slow from his lunch and the sun, and made the final turn back towards the highway. All of the roads out here were treacherous dirt nightmares like the Bitter Wash, so he wound down his window for a stay-alert breeze.
     
    He came around a bend and a silver Lexus shot out of a driveway ahead, fishtailing as it gathered speed and spat pebbles at him. He backed off, hoping the dust would settle, and then accelerated gradually. He was twenty seconds or so behind the Lexus, the road otherwise empty, the air still, the dust dense, not budging. But the road coiled around the hillsides and dipped in and out of the erosion channels. He glimpsed the Lexus now and then before the dust intervened again. The driver was powering along, too fast for the conditions, and Hirsch found himself muttering, ‘Slow down before you kill yourself, pal.’
     
    Then about one kilometre before the Barrier Highway intersection, the Lexus sideswiped a guardrail. Hirsch saw the driver overcorrect, the car shooting back to the centre of the road, brake lights flaring, and he was pretty sure the driver had seen the HiLux behind him, a dim shape in the rearview mirror. The guy didn’t stop but flicked