Free Hell to Pay by Garry Disher Page B

fished out his phone, pressed the photo gallery icon and handed it over. “Scroll through.”
    He watched a pretty forefinger flick the screen. “The first aid box in my car,” he said. “The phone is an iPhone 5, and the cash amounts to two and a half grand in hundreds.”
    She continued to scroll. “Serial numbers.”
    “Yes. Phone and cash.”
    A twist of frustration. “It’s all going to match, isn’t it?”
    “Without a doubt.”
    “Paul, tell me straight, did you pinch this stuff?”
    “Fuck you, Rosie.”
    She slid the phone back across the table. “But who’s going to believe you stumbled upon this? They’ll think you took these photographs just in case, a weak attempt to say you were set up.”
    “Possibly,” Hirsch said.
    A young woman came by with a tray and a smile, a little frown when Hirsch bent his upper 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 at him, Rosie gestured at the phone. “They’ll use this to discredit you. 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?”
    Hirsch told her. “No idea.”
    “Kropp’s wife?”
    Hirsch went very still. He looked hard at Rosie. “It’s not Kropp’s wife, she’s Thai, but one might ask why you mention his name.”
    DeLisle shut down. “I have my reasons. Could this be the wife of one of the others? Nicholson? Andrewartha?”
    “One might wonder how you happen to know the names of everyone stationed at Redruth,” Hirsch said. “You have been checking up on me.”
    Rosie DeLisle shrugged, a shrug that said volumes to Hirsch. Well, fuck them all. “When am I supposed to face the music?”
    “You’ll get an email.”
    “Not even a phone call.”
    “A phone call to ensure you got the email.”
    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.”
    He could see the doubt was still there. He threw a twenty onto the table and left.

CHAPTER 9
    HIRSCH WAS BACK IN Redruth by 4:30. Rather than drive through the town, keeping to the highway, he turned off, intending to reach Tiverton via the back roads that ran north and west of the town. A couple of properties on his watch list lay out there: an elderly farm widow and her schizophrenic son, and a farmhouse rented to a handful of kids who’d dropped out of city life and been accused of sabotaging wind farm turbines.
    But his information was dated: the widow had died and the farm sold and the son taken in by a sibling, and 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 toward the highway. All of the roads out here were winding 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, raised a choking dust cloud. He backed off, hoping the dust would