Bitter Wash Road by Garry Disher Page B

spelled it out to Venn, and asked again: ‘Do you have someone who can drive you home? In your car, preferably. It’s a hazard sitting here.’
     
    ‘You clearly don’t know how things work in the bush,’ Venn said, hot in the face. ‘A bit of live and let live, give and take. We make allowances. It works.’
     
    Hirsch held up a warning finger. ‘Before I forget, how many demerit points do you have on your licence, Mr Venn?’
     
    That shut his mouth.
     
    ‘Mike needs his licence,’ his wife said. ‘He’s the Dalgety agent. He drives two or three hundred kilometres a day sometimes.’
     
    ‘If he knew he’d accumulated enough points to lose his licence, why did he drink and drive?’ Hirsch asked, telling himself he was a fool to get into it with them.
     
    ‘The property market’s quite depressed so we were thankful to steer a sale to fruition,’ Venn said.
     
    ‘And if you’d killed yourself? Killed your wife? Worse still, killed a kid on his bike?’
     
    ‘All right! You’ve made your point. And my point is, my wife was driving.’
     
    Hirsch glanced curiously at Venn.
     
    ‘It’s your intention to contest these charges before the magistrate?’
     
    ‘Too right.’
     
    ‘You’ll testify that your wife was driving.’
     
    ‘Sign a statutory declaration if I have to.’
     
    Hirsch turned to Jessica Venn. ‘You intend to perjure yourself before the court?’
     
    She tilted back her nose, a woman forever intent on being hard done by. ‘Not perjury. I was driving.’
     
    ‘If you persist with this,’ Hirsch said, ‘and your husband loses, then I will charge you with perjury there and then, and I hope you know it could earn you a jail sentence.’
     
    ‘You don’t scare me. Jumped-up little Hitler.’
     
    ~ * ~
     
    Well, that was a gorgeous experience. Entering the highway just north of Tiverton, Hirsch decided to head on to Muncowie.
     
    He drove into a town more depressed than Tiverton, but laid out just like it. One shop, one pub and a handful of houses on either side of an abbreviated grid of stubby, broad streets. About eight in total, four running east-west, four north-south. Small houses, some built of local stone, others of rusting corrugated iron in the old three-room settler style, the rooms running from the front to the back with a chimney on a side wall and a dunny in the back yard. Weedy yards, cars on blocks. Hirsch felt deeply fatigued.
     
    The pub was long and squat, the dusty cream outer wall sitting dark and deep behind a vine-hung veranda. A tin West End Bitter sign rattled in the wind. A couple of panes in the fanlight above the front door were cracked and cobwebby. The veranda floor had once been painted red but the colour had retreated over the decades, revealing glassy worn concrete—a good surface if you wanted to crack a head open.
     
    He pushed into the pub, stepping from the concrete to creaky floorboards. Nail heads glinted brightly here and there, despite the curtained gloom of the front bar. The air was layered with stale beer fumes, cigarette smoke and the odours of rural work: diesel, petrol, grease, oil, sweat and animal odours, dung or lanolin or blood or all of it. Deeply ingrained and years old, guessed Hirsch, because the two old boozers and the publican at the bar didn’t account for it.
     
    They saw his uniform and the publican said, ‘Reckoned you’d be in before too long. Pour you a drink?’
     
    It was said with a crooked eyebrow so Hirsch took a stool and rested his elbows on the bar and said, ‘Lemon squash.’
     
    ‘Lemon squash, lemon squash,’ the publican ruminated, as if the drink and its ingredients were beyond him.
     
    ‘Bloody Mary, then.’
     
    That I can do,’ the publican said, sticking a glass under a spigot and flipping a lever. Lemon squash frothed palely into the glass. ‘Ice?’
     
    ‘Hundred per cent lemon squash.’
     
    The publican leaned back against the wall behind him, a small, narrow,