Darkening Skies Part 2

Jim a not your uncle or Mr Barrett or something similarly formal. Small towns, rural communities a she hoped he didn't only know Jim because of his youngest son's arrest and conviction. 'He's still unconscious. They're taking him to radiology for scans now.'

'Good. Can you spare a few minutes to tell me what happened?'

'Yes.' Anything had to be better than just sitting and waiting.

He ran a quick eye over the others in the emergency department a the kid with the broken arm and his father, the dizzy elderly lady and her daughter a and indicated the exit.

'There's a garden outside where it's quiet. Let's talk there.'

Close to the solstice, it wasn't yet dark, the light tinged with gold. Long shadows stretched across the gra.s.sed area between hospital buildings. The sweet scent of honeysuckle hovered in the air. Detective Fraser chose one of the outdoor tables, and although she would have placed him in his mid-thirties, with a toned and fit-looking body, he eased down on to the bench seat with a suggestion of weariness in his movements.

'So, Ms Barrett, I presume you're the Jennifer Barrett? International award-winning journalist?'

She inclined her head. 'Yes.'

She didn't ask how he knew. Not many people recognised her outside the frame of a TV screen, but Dungirri was a small town and some of the older folk probably still proudly claimed her as one of their own.

'Jim's spoken of you,' Fraser said. 'And sometimes I have time to watch the news. I guess you're here because of Mark's announcement?'

'I am. I have questions I want answered.'

An almost-grin cracked the hard lines of his face. 'You and me both,' he said dryly. 'So, take me through what happened today. What time did you arrive at Marrayin?'

He didn't make notes but he listened attentively while she recounted the events in order, facts only, clear and precise. A detective who referred to Mark by his first name might be a useful contact, so she would give him the information he needed now, freely and fully.

'You said you saw the intruder?' He interrupted her to clarify. 'Can you describe him?'

'I only saw a silhouette, blurred through the textured gla.s.s in the window. I had the impression of a man in a light-coloured top and darker trousers, but I can't give you more detail than that.'

'How long after you saw him did you enter the house?'

'Maybe three or four minutes. I went around the back to see if he or anyone else was there.'

When she described finding Jim, barely conscious, and dragging him away from the fire, the panic she'd suppressed at the time rose again and threatened her steadiness.

'Take your time,' the detective said, and she regained control by concentrating on him, on observing his body language and responses to a.s.sess how he interpreted what she told him. Usually she asked the questions; she knew the techniques, the tricks, the ways to draw a subject into saying what they didn't want to say.

Steve Fraser was cool and confident, and although he listened carefully he didn't necessarily believe her. He listened to find the holes in her story.

'You seem pretty familiar with the place,' he said, when she told him about remembering the fire extinguisher in the kitchen and using it to slow the fire.

He might be on first-name terms with some of the locals now, but he couldn't know all the history. 'When I was a teenager, my uncle worked on the property and we lived in one of the cottages. Paula and I were good friends with Mark. We used to spend a lot of time in the homestead.'

'The three of you were friends? But you didn't go into Birraga with them on the night of the accident?'

'No, I didn't.' Clear and truthful, and she could give him a legitimate reason why, even if she kept the real reason to herself. 'A friend of Paula's was playing in a band at the Royal Hotel and she wanted to see him. I wasn't eighteen, and anyway, I had other things to do.'

'Did you see them before they left?'

She recognised the real question: Did she know if Mark had been drinking? 'No.' Another truthful answer. 'I saw him about five o'clock that afternoon. But I was out when he came to pick up Paula around eight o'clock.' Out on purpose. Sitting by her mother's grave in the Dungirri cemetery, walking home afterwards in the last light of the long summer day.

'You lived with Mick and his wife?'

'Yes. They were my guardians after my parents died.'

Fraser grimaced in a show of silent sympathy. Clearly he knew Mick. 'Why Mick and not Jim?'

The explanation she'd been given, time and again, remained carved in her memory. 'A single father with two teenage sons was not considered a suitable placement for a twelve-year-old girl.'

'Was Mick as wrecked then as he is now?'

More sympathy, or a leading question to a.s.sess her and establish her history in the district? 'I haven't seen or spoken to him since I left Dungirri after Paula's funeral. I'd have described him then as a bitter non-achiever who blamed his lack of success on everyone and everything but his own weaknesses.'

d.a.m.n it, a little more emotion there than she'd intended to reveal. Yes, she was bitter, too. But she'd left it mostly behind her, hadn't let it hold her back from achieving her goals.

Fraser had to have noticed, but kept his expression bland. 'What about Mick's wife? I've not heard much about her.'

'Shotgun wedding, hopeless marriage,' Jenn answered without emotion. 'Doctor Russell had half the women in Dungirri doped to oblivion on anti-depressants, and Freda was one of them. Paula remembered her when she was younger, more together, but I only knew her as a vague, absent woman. She died some years ago.' Unmourned, as far as Jenn was concerned. She'd sent flowers to the funeral out of respect for Paula's memory. That was it. She shoved away the unexpected spike of old anger and pinned the detective with a firm gaze. 'I don't see how these questions are relevant to your current investigation, Detective.'

He shrugged off the rebuff. 'As a result of the new information Mark provided to the Police Commissioner yesterday, the investigation into your cousin's death has been reopened and I'm preparing a brief for the a.s.sistant Commissioner. Given Mark's public announcement this morning, I have to consider that the fire may be connected. So, everything is relevant.'

Especially the presence of two of Paula's relatives at the scene before witnesses arrived. Oh, yes, she could read him. The sympathy, the soft approach. He wanted her to slip up, to incriminate herself or Jim.

'My uncle has suffered a head injury, presumably inflicted by the man I saw. Jim's worked for the Strelitz family for many years. There is no way he would have lit that fire.'

Fraser lounged against the back of the bench. 'Sweetheart, I can't tell you how often I hear friends and family protest that so-and-so couldn't have committed a crime. Jim was there, he has motive, and he also has a history a he and his boys laid into Gil Gillespie when he first came back to town a few months ago.'

Oh, that very deliberate sweetheart annoyed her. Exactly as he intended. She unclenched her teeth and aimed to correct the record.

'I'm not sure what you're talking about, Detective. It was Sean and his mafia mates who a.s.saulted Gillespie. Not Jim and Paul.'

He dismissed her objection with a shake of his head. 'You obviously aren't up to date with all the family news. Days before Sean's "mafia mates" got hold of Gillespie, your male relatives had an impromptu welcome-back party for him when they ran into him at the pub. Luckily for them, Gillespie refused to make a complaint.'

Jenn swallowed back her humiliation. 'If Jim had issues with Mark, he'd have it out with him face to face, as he apparently did with Gillespie, not inflict wanton destruction.'

'And what about you? You were there, and it could be said that you have motive, too.'

His goading words sparked her overload of stress and frustration into barely contained rage. 'Detective,' she said coldly, choosing her words with care, 'I'm an experienced journalist. In the same way that you most likely know how any number of corrupt actions could be taken, although you wouldn't take them yourself, I know exactly how the reputation of a man like Mark Strelitz could be dragged through the mud and left there, whether the police investigation finds him lily-white or not. So, believe me, if I wanted to destroy Mark, I'd choose a far more effective way than setting fire to his house.'

Before Fraser could answer, his phone beeped and a single glance at the screen wiped the smug grin from his face. With a quick apology he excused himself and moved away to take the call.

Jenn dropped her head into her hands at the table and fumed. That d.a.m.ned c.o.c.ky, good-at-his-job detective had undermined her control with a few well-placed barbs. And she'd let him rile her and probably come across as a vindictive b.i.t.c.h, although she'd meant to stress the opposite. There were strategies she would never take. Not even if Mark proved to be a lying, manipulative b.a.s.t.a.r.d, responsible for Paula's death.

The bright white lights of the hospital blurred Mark's vision after the half-hour drive in the darkness, his tired eyes gritty from smoke and his gut churning. Now the buzz of engines and pumps and voices in his ears had become machine beeps and the clattering of medical trolleys and the low urgent voices of the emergency department, dealing with someone in crisis.

The elderly woman sleeping on one bed, and the child with a wrist brace sitting up in another clearly weren't the crisis. It took him a moment to locate Jenn, standing by a wall, staring at a curtained-off cubicle, her arms wrapped tightly around herself and her face as white as the bandage on her hand.

Once, he would have simply taken her in his arms and hugged her. Now, he stopped two paces from her, with no idea how she would react to him away from the urgency and commotion of the fire.

'Jenn?'

Deep in her thoughts, she turned her head slowly. 'Mark.' She bit at her lip. 'He's deteriorating. Skull fractures. Major brain damage. Paul's ...' She nodded towards the cubicle. 'Paul's saying ...' Her face crumpled into grief, and she held her hand against her mouth to halt her pain from overflowing, unable to say the word.

Saying goodbye. A hard lump formed in his throat, his mouth dry and tasting of ashes. He reached a hand out to touch her arm, but Jenn flinched and turned away, struggling for composure.

The rejection tore at him even as he understood it. His own sorrow at her news added to the other losses twisting painfully in his chest, and he wanted to strike them away, pound out his frustration, shout a denial. Not Jim. Proud, hard-working, knowledgeable Jim. He should have retired soon, had years yet to play with his grandkids, see his youngest son reform and do him proud like his eldest. Not this.

One of the monitors in the cubicle began an insistent beep and the curtain billowed outwards as people moved within. Jenn took a hasty step forward, but then stopped as a woman said, 'He's arresting again. Get the crash cart.'

'Paul?' Another woman spoke gently.

'No. He wouldn't want it.' Mark almost didn't recognise Paul's voice, low, harsh, cracking. 'Let him go.'

Jenn's shoulders shook, and when Mark put his arms around her this time she turned into him, burying her face against his shoulder, sobs racking her body. She wasn't thinking, and he could have been anyone, just then, but they stayed that way while a solemn nurse slipped out from behind the curtain and someone switched off the beeping machine, and there was only silence except for Jenn's m.u.f.fled sobs, and the gulping breaths of Paul, struggling not to cry.

THREE.

In the staff kitchen Mark stirred a heaped teaspoon of sugar into each mug of coffee. Sugar for shock. Whether it was medically sound or an old wives' tale, he didn't care. They'd all had an emotionally and physically draining night, and weren't yet ready for the long drive home. The boost of caffeine and energy wouldn't hurt.

He carried the three mugs back to the small meeting room a nurse had shown them to. Just outside, Paul spoke on the phone with his wife Chloe, stoic and withdrawn, while inside the room Jenn wrote on a notepad she'd borrowed from the nurse.

Hadn't that always been the way she'd coped with challenges? Transform them into written words; order, arrange and a.n.a.lyse the events and the issues. Report objectively and thoroughly. Even in high school, that had been her trademark style a and her strategy to rationalise her emotions.

He'd seen her on television regularly, the familiar pa.s.sion for her work enlivening the features she'd always thought plain beside Paula's prettiness. She still kept her chestnut hair long, caught back in a practical ponytail, and although she often wore basic make-up for the harsh eye of the camera, she wore none now. But plain? No, in his eyes she'd never been plain.

She barely looked up as he placed her mug on the table, but he could see the moisture on her cheeks, the tightly held damp tissue she still needed.

'The detective will need a statement,' she said, the flatness in her tone amplifying rather than belying her emotional turmoil.

'Steve sent a message a few minutes ago that he's on his way,' Mark told her. 'But the written statements can wait, Jenn. You can do it tomorrow, or whenever you're ready.'

'I need to do it now.'

He stood by the window, looking out on to the dimly lit garden between the hospital buildings. He mentally made lists of things to do, people to notify, the words and phrases to include in his witness statement a anything to avoid grappling with his own response to Jim's death.

Emotionally there'd been a great deal for one day: the media conference first thing this morning announcing his resignation, the reaction to it, the long drive home, the fire, Jim's injury and death ... and Jenn, sitting at the table a metre from him, back in his life, bringing with her the unsettling strangeness of being so near and yet so distant from the one person who'd ever understood him completely.

Nostalgia for his long-gone youth? No, not just that. Their friendship had been close and deep. Despite the different paths they'd taken and all his life experiences since then, he sometimes missed that closeness.

But he'd travelled a long way from the idealism of his youth, and even if some of the girl he'd known remained in the successful, highly respected journalist, Paula's ghost and his role in her death stood between them now.

He heard the gentle clunk of her mug against the table, and the breathy intake, not quite controlled. 'I keep thinking I shouldn't have moved him,' she said, grief shadowing her blue a grey eyes. 'I knew he had a head injury. He shouldn't have been moved.'

Mark pulled out a chair opposite her and straddled it. This he had been over a hundred times already while making the coffee, rationally cataloguing every alternative, every what-if. But no other course of action had been possible. 'Jim didn't die because we moved him, Jenn. He died because someone bashed him on the head at least twice and broke his skull.'

'Paramedics couldn't have got to him in time,' Paul said from the doorway. 'I'm glad he wasn't left in that fire.'

So was Mark. There'd be plenty of nightmares, but at least Jenn would be spared additional gruesome images on top of the ones that might still haunt her.

Firm footsteps approached along the corridor, and Steve Fraser tapped on the door before entering. Uncharacteristically solemn, he expressed his condolences to Paul and Jenn briefly but with sincerity. No longer the cavalier, c.o.c.ksure detective who'd first worked in the district two years ago, Steve's voluntary return after personal failure and his subsequent work had earned Mark's respect, despite his sometimes flippant manner.

Jenn accepted the condolence with a nod of acknowledgement, but as she laid the pen aside on the table and watched Steve, her lips pressed tightly together. Wary, or fighting for composure? Mark couldn't tell.

'I'm sure we all want to get to the bottom of what happened,' Steve said. 'I know this is a bad time, but I'd like to go over a few things with you all, if that's okay.'

Yes, Mark wanted to piece together the events, find the person responsible for Jim's death. None of the rest of it mattered, compared to that.

Paul and Jenn nodded mutely, and Steve dragged out a chair and sat down. 'The first thing I want to know is, why was Jim there? He doesn't normally work at Marrayin, does he?'

Not a line of enquiry Mark wanted Steve to waste time pursuing, and it could be easily dealt with. 'He works for Strelitz Pastoral. He manages the Gearys Flat property-' d.a.m.n. He should have said managed, past tense. With a twist of pain he continued, 'But the Marrayin manager left last month, so Jim's been keeping an eye on things there whenever I had to go away. He could have been there for any number of reasons a checking water or stock, dropping off mail or supplies. I've notified WorkCover,' he added. 'They're sending an investigator in the morning.'

At the end of the table, Paul broke his silence. 'He was resigning.'

'Resigning?' It shouldn't have surprised him; shouldn't have felt like another knife twisting in his chest. They'd parted cordially enough on Wednesday after Mark had told Jim the news, but even then he'd noticed the new strain tensing the previously comfortable friendship. If he'd been thinking more clearly, had less on his mind, he might have expected it.

'It's because of Sean,' Paul continued. 'He was already on suicide watch before Dad saw him yesterday. Guilt at what he did to Gillespie is eating him hard. Harder now he knows that Gillespie was innocent. Dad promised to stay in Wellington for a while, to be close to Sean. Help him get through his sentence.' His face haggard, Paul ran a hand through his hair. 'I guess I'll have to do that now.'

Mark rose and went to the window again, leaning on the sill and staring out into the darkness. He'd only thought to do the right thing. Clear Gil's name, have the investigation reopened, find out if he was responsible, and take whatever punishment was demanded of him. If he'd kept quiet, or handled it differently, Jim wouldn't have been at Marrayin today. And now the Barretts a all of them, Jim, Paul, Sean and Jenn a were paying the price of that decision.

Sean at risk of suicide? Jenn could hardly imagine the cheeky, irreverent cousin she remembered falling so deeply into depression. But then, she couldn't imagine him getting mixed up with organised crime and beating Gil Gillespie almost to death with a metal pipe, either, and yet he'd done that and more back in September. Jim's emails hadn't been full of detail, but from a cafe in Tashkent she'd looked up the court reports of the evidence and Sean's guilty plea at his committal hearing, the words distant and unreal, unconnected to her. Only Jim's diligent cards and notes every birthday and Christmas a not her own efforts a had kept the family connection alive after she'd left Dungirri behind her at seventeen.

And in the phone message she hadn't heard until her plane landed in Sydney last night, Jim had pleaded with her to come. Now there was only Paul and Sean a Sean suicidal in prison, and Paul overwhelmed with responsibility. Jenn shut her eyes against the light, swamped by the desperate desire to wake up, somewhere, anywhere else. Family ... G.o.d, she didn't know how to do family.

Paul sat at the end of the table, holding his grief behind a face carved into stone, still wearing his grimy RFS T-shirt and fire-fighting trousers. Hard-working, dependable Paul. Their fearless Grandfather Barrett would have been proud of his namesake. Whereas she ... she'd fought some hard battles in some of the world's h.e.l.lholes using words as her weapons, but she'd chosen those battles. Not this one.

She owed it to Jim to try. She might be a failure at family but she had other skills, and unearthing the truth might help them all.

Would it help Mark? He stood by the window, tense and silent, his once-white business shirt discoloured by soot and sweat. The brown-haired, brown-eyed good looks of his teenage years had deepened in maturity, but the media images she'd seen over the years didn't capture the intense reality of his presence. The five o'clock shadow, dishevelled appearance, and the large, work-roughened hands emphasised his authenticity.

Authenticity? The word had sprung to mind, but did it still apply? The truth used to be important to him. The law used to be important to him. Truth, honour, compa.s.sion, conciliation, justice: the values that had defined him in his youth. Or so she'd once believed. She didn't know what she believed now a about his sudden confession, and the convenient amnesia a but although he'd lost his career today, his home, and a friend, evidence of his concern for others was there in the mug of coffee in her hands, in his quiet presence.

They'd all fallen silent, each deep in their own thoughts. Even the detective, who might simply be giving them s.p.a.ce but who seemed almost as drained as the rest of them.

Paul pushed his chair back suddenly and stood. 'I can't stay here,' he said. 'I have to tell the kids about their grandpa, after I see Mick. And I've got to get to Wellington by the morning to tell Sean.'

Jenn almost offered to go with him but he was already walking towards the door on his way to his wife and family who knew him far better than she did. He paused with his hand on the doorframe, desolation in his eyes. 'Catch the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who murdered my father, Fraser.'

They all listened to the heavy tread of his fire-fighting boots take the thirty paces down the corridor to the exit.

Answers. They all needed answers, and she needed to do something, make some order of the jumbled thoughts in her head. Focus on the questions and establish the facts ... and take the lead and prod the detective away from any more irrelevant questions about Jim.