Darkening Skies Part 15

'So how do we keep you alive? Where to from here?'

'Steve and Kris are in the interview room,' he told her. 'We're going to work through everything we know so far.'

'Steve's still on the case?'

'Yes and no. Ordered off duty today. Now called back on for temporary protection duties. For me.'

She immediately saw the advantage. 'So, we can work on the case with him.'

'Yes. For this afternoon, at least.'

Doing something, anything, practical to keep him safe might help her forget the moments of sheer terror when she'd thought him hurt a or worse. She made a credible attempt at a grin. 'Let's go and work, then.'

The police station was tiny, a few rooms joined to the cottage and all built a century or so ago, when policing was a much simpler business.

In the small interview room, Steve laid the photographs out in date order, covering the table. Kris wheeled in a whiteboard from her crowded office and positioned it against the wall, making best use of the limited s.p.a.ce. Mark brought in a couple of the plastic chairs from the reception area and Jenn sank on to one of them, giving him a grateful smile.

Mark pulled up the chair next to her. With the four of them around the table, the room was crowded and she was acutely aware of Mark only inches away. On the surface he appeared calm, composed, but she sensed the tension in him, humming like a tightly drawn string.

Jenn hauled her brain into journalist mode. Much easier to deal with the firm ground of facts and process, questions and answers, than the quicksand of emotions and unknowns.

First, establish the playing field. 'Is Detective Haddad coming?' she asked.

Steve glanced up from sorting the photographs. 'Not yet. Not for a while. She'll be busy with forensics and the Feds for at least a couple of hours.'

'Mark said you were ordered off duty. Why?'

'Because I've already been on for eight days straight. Nasty domestic-violence case earlier in the week. I was supposed to be rostered off Friday and over the weekend.'

'Did Haddad order it?' She was beginning to feel like an interrogator, and Steve noticed, shooting her a glance that told her he'd only respond if he chose. But he answered her question.

'Nope. Regional Inspector's orders, not Haddad's. She's got lead on the murder investigations, though. I'll be "local liaison". So, since I've been called back in to babysit Mark, I plan on doing my job.' He gave a wolfish grin. 'First time I've been given official permission for my local liaisons.'

Kris snorted. 'In your dreams, Steve. You don't have time for that kind of liaison.'

Jenn watched the good-natured humour flow between them. Colleagues and friends. Given the tough investigations they'd dealt with in the past couple of years, the trust and respect for each other must have been earned, and Mark's ease with them reflected the same regard. A good sign that she could trust them.

'Yeah, well, I'd dream about it if I had time to sleep,' Steve retorted. 'So, let's get cracking and get this b.a.s.t.a.r.d identified and locked up.' The humour vanished and he stepped to the whiteboard, picking up the pen to draw a circle in the centre of the board, jotting the words 'fatal accident' inside it. 'Okay, let's a.s.sume that this is the connection a the accident in which Paula Barrett died. Now, up here a because we don't know yet how it's connected a we've got the series of photographs of s.e.xual activity, over years.'

'The Boheme Club,' Jenn said. 'Wolfgang called it that.' She took out her notepad. 'Here are the words he said a I think I've got them right. "Boheme club" and "s.e.x". "Taught Dan ... develop ... photos".'

'A s.e.x club in Birraga?' Kris mused. 'Hard to believe.'

'Yeah, well it was the seventies when those photos start,' Steve pointed out. 's.e.xual revolution, free love, the pill and no AIDS.'

Beside her, Mark added, 'Plus the demographics were different then. Larger population, on average much younger. While a lot of young people went to the city for university, a much higher proportion of them came back to work in the district than is the case now.'

'Okay, so ripe conditions for s.e.xual experimentation, I guess.' Steve scrawled 'Boheme Club' on the whiteboard. 'And someone photographed it. What did Wolfgang say about developing the photos?'

Jenn repeated the words, 'Taught Dan ... develop ... photos.'

'That's got to be Dan Flanagan,' Steve said, and no-one disagreed. He laid his finger on the image of a younger Dan. 'But why would Wolfgang teach Dan to develop photos?'

Jenn had already thought it through. 'They're not the kind of photos you could get commercially printed, then or now. Wolfgang was a skilled photographer and developed his own images, so he'd be the obvious person to ask, wouldn't he? He had the equipment, the skills, the dark room already set up. Maybe he was part of the club. He said something about it going bad.'

'The combination of Dan Flanagan, s.e.x and bondage is definitely bad,' Kris said dryly.

Mark rested his elbows on the table, his fingers intertwined tightly. 'We need to find out more about this club. Who was in it, where they met. I need to know how my parents were involved.'

'Have you had any word from them yet?' Steve asked.

'Nothing yet. I'll check again in a little while.'

He spoke evenly enough, but again Jenn felt the underlying tension in him. The sooner they had some response from Caroline and Len, the better. In the meantime, they had to keep following the leads they had.

She tapped on some of the words she'd written. 'Wolfgang mentioned a convent. But it can't be the Birraga convent a that's in the centre of town next to Saint Joey's, and the nuns were still there into the nineties at least.'

Mark nodded in agreement. 'Sister Brigid moved out last year, into the nursing home. She was the last nun in the convent. She might know if there was ever another convent, though.'

'I'll get someone to ask her,' Steve said.

Jenn reached for the image of Dan Flanagan and Gerard McCarty emerging from the doorway. With the lens zoomed on them, not a great deal of the building showed. 'In the meantime, does anyone recognise this place? Have ideas where it might be?'

'There's really only the doorframe, isn't there? Maybe colonial era, if you look at the brickwork over the door,' Kris said. 'But, do you know what strikes me about the image? The other photos a they're taken nearer the subjects, in the same room. This one isn't. It's a surveillance photo.'

It was obvious when compared with the other images. Jenn kicked herself for not noticing before.

'I agree,' Steve said. 'So, who's doing the surveillance? Wolfgang? And why?'

Jenn looked at Wolfgang's last words, searching for a pattern, significance, possibilities. 'He mentioned blackmail. "Club, convent, went bad, blackmail, hurt Marta." I a.s.sumed someone was blackmailing him, threatening Marta. But I don't know a maybe he was blackmailing them?'

'Or gathering evidence against them,' Mark suggested quietly.

'Finding a way to take back the upper hand,' Kris agreed. 'Information becomes power. That was Gil's strategy when he couldn't do anything else.'

'Is Gil around?' Mark asked. 'Does he know anything about this aspect of Flanagan's activities?'

'He'll be back in a couple of hours,' Kris said. 'He's taken Megan and Esther Russell to Esther's sister in Dubbo. He's worried about Megan's safety.'

Megan. Gillespie's daughter. Jenn still had difficulty believing it a the rough, wrong-side-of-the-tracks youth now the unexpected father of a teenage girl. And the lover of a police sergeant. That, she found easier to believe; although friendly, Kris had a rock-solid core, tough without being harsh, and, Jenn had the impression, a strong but pragmatic sense of justice, of right and wrong.

Steve stepped up to the whiteboard again, tossing over his shoulder, 'You can bet I'll be grilling Gil the minute he gets back. You can use your subtle feminine wiles on him after I've finished with him, Kris.'

'Nothing subtle about my interrogation techniques,' she retorted with a grin.

Jokes, black humour, teasing, sarcasm a Jenn had seen them used again and again between teams of soldiers, doctors, aid workers ... a protective mechanism, armour for dealing with unceasing death and darkness.

His sense of responsibility never faltering despite the humour, Steve slid back into serious mode in an instant. 'We've got a lot to cover, so we'll need to divide tasks. Jenn and Mark, you two grew up here, and Mark's got a good eye for faces, so I want you to go through each photograph and see if you can identify anyone else. Also, I need a full list of anyone who might have had some involvement with the accident or the aftermath. Kris, you and I need to start checks on the main players, including Wolfgang. I want to know more about him, and where he fits into this. We need to map connections, starting with working out who in the district would know how to wire up a car bomb.'

'They wouldn't need to know,' Kris pointed out. 'There's probably a thousand sites on the internet with instructions.'

Jenn's fingers gripped tightly on her pen. The heat of the room pressed in on her, and she had to fight the instinct to run, to get out of there. 'Someone knows,' she said, and even to her own ears her voice sounded choked. 'Someone around here knew, well before the internet existed.'

Steve and Kris waited, eyes on her, but Mark's hand rested on her shoulder, connecting with her, giving her strength. In the face of disbelief and threats she'd stayed silent for more than twenty years. But now it mattered, now she had influence and respect, and with the spotlight on past events the truth might be uncovered. As long as she had the courage to crack open old wounds and speak out.

'My parents died in a car-bomb explosion. Just up the road at the showground. My father knew explosives from his army work, and the Coroner ruled it as a murderasuicide. I was only twelve years old, and no-one believed me that it couldn't have been.'

She'd never believed ... so that was the reason for the forbidden topic of her parents' death. He'd only been thirteen when the wild-eyed, too-wary girl moved into Mick's cottage and started to catch the school bus with Paula. Be very gentle with her, his mother had said, and he read the local papers and knew the stories going around a that Peter Barrett hadn't been himself when he'd brought his wife and daughter from the Holsworthy army base to Dungirri for a Christmas family visit, so despondent that he'd rigged his car to explode.

So, Mark had been polite and friendly to the new girl, avoiding any mention of the incident, and even threatening to use his fists a couple of times on schoolmates who tried to taunt her. But it was months before she'd begun to let anyone, even Paula, see beyond the hard sh.e.l.l of emotional armour. The only time Mark had made any comment about her parents' deaths, a few years later, she'd responded coldly that he had no idea what he was talking about.

A heavy concern for a young girl to carry, alone. And she still carried it, behind the forced toughness that protected her from the world. That protected her from the hurt of caring. That kept her alone.

Three months ago, before Gil's return to Dungirri and the exposure of the district's dark underside, before Jenn had walked back into his life, he would have continued to believe the Coroner's report about the death of Peter and Susannah Barrett. But now ... He kept his attention fully on Jenn, only peripherally aware of Steve and Kris on the other side of the table. 'You believe they were murdered?' he asked.

'Yes. I was there.' Her voice stayed flat, dead. 'We'd camped at the showground over Christmas. Jim lived just across the road back then. It was early morning and we'd packed up ready to go. Mum went to dump the rubbish in the bins and I went to the loo. As I was walking back I heard Dad call out, "Come, on honey, we've got to get on the road," as he got into the car. And then it exploded. I was thirty metres or more away, but Mum was much closer. And Dad ... I saw-' She stopped, swallowed hard. 'He didn't stand a chance.' Her breathing rapid, she shoved her chair back and stood at the small window, hugging herself as she stared out.

Mark exchanged glances with Steve and Kris, but they stayed silent, giving her a moment. Although he'd always known she'd been there at the time, he couldn't imagine seeing it, watching a parent die in that way. No wonder she'd withdrawn, refused to talk about it. And no wonder that his close escape this afternoon had distressed her. She didn't have to imagine what could too easily have happened.

She turned abruptly to face them, blueagrey eyes burning with feeling. 'If he wanted to blow us all up, why didn't he wait twenty seconds longer until we were in the car with him? Why explosives, when he could have shot us, or killed us quietly in any number of ways? He was a career soldier, for G.o.d's sake; he knew how to kill effectively. A car bomb set off prematurely doesn't make sense on any level. Except murder.'

Except murder. The little Mark had known about the incident shifted into a new light. The Flanagan family's intimidation and corruption business stretched back decades. Given the suggestions of vice, s.e.x and perhaps blackmail going back further a to before he was born a perhaps the Barretts' deaths did warrant review. 'You're right. It doesn't make sense. But is it linked to any of these other issues? Kris, Steve a can we get hold of the reports from the time?'

'The Coroner's report will be available, but it might take time,' Steve said. 'I don't think they're on computer that far back.'

'You said no-one believed you,' Kris asked Jenn in her straightforward but respectful way. 'Did the police interview you?'

Jenn dragged a strand of hair back, sagging against the wall by the window. 'I remember a policewoman at the hospital, but I was pretty distraught. She came again the next day with a detective but ... well, looking back now, their questions were all leading questions. My parents had been arguing, hadn't they? My dad was in a bad mood, wasn't he? I was just a kid, though, and I didn't realise for a while that everyone was blaming Dad.'

Kris winced. 'You didn't speak to anyone else? Your uncles? A counsellor? A teacher?'

'Mick. Once.' Bitterness hardened her words. 'He told me to shut the f.u.c.k up and that if I spoke about it again he'd have me locked up as a loony. I saw the school counsellor once. She told me I was making up stories because I didn't want to believe my dad had tried to kill me and I had to accept it. Jim ...' She shook her head. 'I don't know what Jim thought. He just said things had got complicated for Dad, but the best thing I could do for him and Mum was to leave it, get on with my life.'

Complicated? An ambiguous term from a man who, in Mark's experience, had always been honest and didn't mince words.

'The Coroner's report won't be much use,' Jenn continued. 'I requested a copy years ago. According to his commanding officer, my father had suffered mood swings and irritability since returning from a UN mission in Afghanistan a month before his death. It was years before the war, a mine-clearing mission after the Russians pulled out. My parents' marriage was under some strain, and there were witnesses here who said he was acting out of character and argumentative.' Tense, shaking with constrained emotion, she pushed herself away from the wall. 'I need some fresh air.'

Mark rose to go with her but she shook her head as she pa.s.sed, and he let her go.

Steve waited until her footsteps receded before he asked, 'What do you reckon, Mark? Do you remember much about it?'

Restless, he went to the window she'd been standing by only moments before, the security grille and mesh blurring the view of the Memorial Hall next door. 'I'm only a year older than Jenn. My parents and I were visiting my grandfather in Lightning Ridge for Christmas when it happened. I remember a fair amount of hushed talk, conversations broken off suddenly when I came into the room.' And now he wished he'd been the kind of kid to eavesdrop a or at least to push for more answers. 'I stayed with my grandfather for another few weeks, as I usually did over summer. When I came home, Jenn had come to stay with Mick's family in the cottage at Marrayin, and my mother asked me to be kind to her. All the talk among the Dungirri kids was that her father had killed himself and her mother, and that he'd tried to kill her. I felt pretty bad for her.'

'Did you know her parents?' Steve asked.

'Not really. He'd joined the army and left before I was born. They'd visited town a couple of times. I remember Jenn at a Dungirri Christmas Tree party once a we were maybe eight, nine years old.' Funny how he'd noticed her, even then. A quiet, pretty girl with brown plaits; she'd joined in a few of the games with her cousins but then drifted to the shade of a tree, absorbed in the book she'd received from the Santa who'd visited the party.

Steve took notes. 'Do you know who her parents' friends here were?'

'I don't remember much at all. Peter seemed more like Jim than Mick. Reliable, steady. Her mother a I can recall her sitting with some of the older women at that Christmas party. Esther Russell, Eleni Pappas, Jeanie Menotti-' The mention of the last name sparked a thought. 'We should ask Jeanie.' He indicated the photos, still spread on the table. 'We should ask her about all of this. She's been here all her life, and people trust her, confide in her. She doesn't gossip, but it may be that she'll have some more pieces of the puzzle.'

'I was thinking the same thing,' Kris said. 'I'll go and call her, see if she can come down.'

Would his mother have confided in Jeanie? About s.e.x and bondage and perhaps blackmail? He doubted it, doubted she would have shared that kind of secret with anyone a except, perhaps, his father.

He closed his eyes, everything that had once seemed solid in his youth shifting now he viewed it from a different perspective. His parents were close, loved each other ... but what if the underlying stress that had always characterised their relationship stemmed not from financial worries or the demands of running a large enterprise, but from something far more personal?

The image of his mother haunted him. Bondage and discipline, dominance and submission a some couples might seek that kind of edge in a relationship, might be happy, might love those roles, but every instinct said that his parents weren't among them. Respect, honour, fidelity, love, compa.s.sion, service a those were the values they lived by, and in everything they'd been equal.

He clenched his fists tight on the window sill, anger burning, threatening his control. Someone must have compelled his mother to that ultimate submission, and he needed to know who, why and how a and he needed to see them pay for it.

Wolfgang's photos and words implicated Dan Flanagan, or at the very least suggested his involvement. Although the police had yet to come up with hard evidence, Mark believed Flanagan was responsible, through his sons and a.s.sociates, for decades of extortion, corruption and blackmail.

The possibility that the extortion had extended to s.e.xual services affecting his mother and other women sickened him, angered him. But if Peter and Susannah Barrett had been murdered, if Flanagan was somehow responsible for that and for the shadows Jenn had carried in her eyes since she was twelve years old, then he deserved nothing short of the harshness of life in a maximum security prison, and Mark would do everything in his power to make that happen.

THIRTEEN.

Jenn sat on the back step of Kris's place, rubbing the ears of Rosie the dog, who, after some reservation, had come to lie close to her. The soft warmth of Rosie's fur, the gentle pressure of the canine body against her hip and the simplicity of patting a trusting dog began to work their calming effects on her whirling emotions.

She'd doubted her father. The realisation hit hard. On one level she'd believed in his innocence all along, but beneath that ... at some point in her twenties she'd started to doubt, and she'd not pursued the issue as an adult. He had come home from Afghanistan a changed man. It was supposed to be a training mission, to train local forces in ordnance recognition and basic mine-clearance techniques following the end of Soviet rule. But in the couple of weeks between his return and their Dungirri visit, she had memories of him telling his mates, with the macho, laugh-it-off att.i.tude of so many men, that there'd been a few close calls. His hands shook sometimes, he took to roaming the house at night and although he tried to be happy, even at twelve she'd recognised it as a performance.

Post-traumatic stress? Possibly. Probably. Maybe his army records could tell her. The evidence given by his commanding officer in the Coroner's report certainly suggested it. And perhaps that's why she hadn't pursued it. That, and because it would have meant returning to Dungirri, and she hadn't been ready to do that.

But the arguments between her parents had only started during those few days in Dungirri over Christmas. Rosie nudged her hand, reminding her to keep patting. She dug her fingers into the soft fur again, ma.s.saging gently while she tried to think, to put things in order. Those arguments a they'd been subdued, disagreements rather than fights, frustration rather than anger, her mother's patience stretching thin. Hushed exchanges when they thought Jenn was out of earshot or asleep. Some tension between them, but not enough to erase all their smiles, their tender touches. Her mother had always had a nurse's faith in the importance of touch, of physical connection, and she'd taught her tough soldier husband the power of gentleness.

Now Jenn thought about it, whatever issue worried them, it wasn't marital strife. That last night, after she'd gone to bed, she'd seen them through the mosquito flap, standing together in the moonlight, holding each other, laughing lightly, kissing long and deeply. Joy and contentment, not despair or depression. She'd fallen asleep happy.

Eight hours later they were both dead.

'How could anyone think it of him, Rosie?' she murmured. 'How could I have doubted him?' The dog sat up, licked her face and Jenn snuggled her cheek into the fur, her arm around the gentle animal. 'He loved her, Rosie. He loved me. No way could he have wired the car to kill us and then kissed her like that.'

She stayed there, hugging the dog, the old confusion and uncertainty dissolving. And although fresh sorrow for her parents and their cut-short lives welled, she didn't need to cry. They'd lived and loved and laughed, and now she had those memories back, untarnished, unshadowed.

Except for the knowledge that her father's reputation had, in his death, been maligned. That, she would restore. Once they'd untangled the murky past, once they'd found the truth about Paula's death and Mark was safe, then she'd keep digging and asking questions and working to clear her father's name. She had the skills, the position and the persuasive powers to make the authorities sit up and take notice. Rosie licked her face again, as if in agreement with her thoughts.

The sun had shifted, eating away the shade of the porch, and the heat p.r.i.c.kled on her skin, hot on her head and Rosie's fur.

'Come on, Rosie girl. I'll move you to the end there, where it'll stay shady.'

She refastened Rosie's chain to another post a metre away, and moved the water bowl close, giving her another pat.