Free Hell to Pay by Garry Disher Page A

THEY TALKED .
    When it all went wrong for Hirsch, he’d been stationed at Paradise Gardens, an outer Adelaide police station, an unwitting member of a corrupt CIB team headed by a senior sergeant named Marcus Quine. After the arrests, after the raid and the charges and the media frenzy, Rosie DeLisle had been the Internal Investigations officer assigned to question him. “One officer per corrupt detective,” she’d told him at the time, “and we all swap notes at the end of the day, adding to our picture of what you shits have been up to.”
    “Nice.”
    And she told him to shut up. It was clear she thought he was scum. And then, days, weeks later, her mood lightened.
She trusts me
, Hirsch thought—
or, at the very least, is entertaining doubts
.
    Finally she’d expressed these doubts to Hirsch. “Will you give evidence against Quine?”
    “No.”
    She’d gnawed her lower lip, then confessed that she’d recommended no further action be taken against him. “But my colleagues don’t agree with me, and it doesn’t necessarily let you off the hook.”
    Not off the hook to the extent that a whiff clung to him, and he was demoted and posted to the bush. And for all he knew, no one but Rosie and his parents had faith in him. And when Quine and the others were charged and punished—variously sacked and jailed, with one senior constable committing suicide—it was asked why Paul Hirschhausen had got off so lightly. The answer was clear: he was a turncoat, a dog, a maggot, and, for all he knew, no one but Rosie and his parents had faith in him.
    And maybe I’ve lost Rosie
, he thought now, noting a withholding quality in her, misgivings shading her face as she drained her shiraz.
    She slapped down her glass. “Sometime soon, maybe as early as next week, you’ll be invited to police headquarters to face another round of questions.”
    “Invited.”
    “
Ordered
, Paul, ordered.”
    “Why?”
    “To answer fresh allegations.”
    “Against me?”
    “Yes. At the same time, Quine’s not exactly been twiddling his thumbs.”
    Hirsch had heard it on the grapevine, Quine the master manipulator beating Rosie and her colleagues into exhaustion with a battery of freedom-of-information requests and demands for daybook entries, diary entries, files, notes, statements, records, reports, memos, emails, video and audio recordings, computer discs and memory sticks, and any and all correspondence, however vaguely connected to his twenty years in the employ of South Australia Police. A futile exercise if undertakenby anyone else, but Quine had got away with a lot for a long time and he might get away with this.
    “He’s saying the case against him is a soufflé,” Rosie said.
    Hirsch snorted. Soufflés were known to collapse, hard on the outside and nothing in the middle. “So what are these allegations?”
    Rosie began to chip at a fleck of cheese on her pizza crust. Shapely hands, Hirsch realized. That was inconvenient. He dragged his eyes away. They’d had fun in bed, one night when it was all over, but love wouldn’t do today, here under the sun. Yet he couldn’t gaze upon vines and vegetable beds and other diners forever, so he watched Rosie struggle with herself. She was vivid and round and lit within, normally, her fine black hair flashing, her scarlet nails and lips avid for experiences. She was probably an affront to the men she investigated and treated seriously by no one.
    “Anonymous tip-off,” she said.
    “Saying …?”
    She looked fully at him, eaten up, you could see it in her face and upper body. “No one will tell me anything, but I’ve
gleaned
they think you pilfered stolen goods from the evidence safe at Paradise Gardens. Apparently they have serial numbers.”
    “What kind of items?”
    “No idea. Drugs? Cash?”
    Her face twisted. She almost reached across the redgum and took his wrist. “Paul, they seem dead certain. Is it true? Will they find something?”
    “Sure,” Hirsch said, and he