Darkening Skies Part 4

The screen door thwacked behind her, and a man in black leathers stepped inside, lifting a motorbike helmet off his head. Gil Gillespie. Except for the absence of insignia or tattoos, he carried the hard air of the roughest biker. Most of her contemporaries had steered clear of him as teenagers, although she'd always suspected that his bad reputation exceeded reality. But still not a man she'd ever want to have as an enemy.

He threw Johnno a brief, withering look. 'Oh, shut it, Dawson. I'm not frigging blackmailing Mark.' He tossed a nod to the watching crowd. 'Mark's telling the truth. Although he's a b.l.o.o.d.y idiot for saying anything at all. It's in the past. I told him there's no point bringing it all up again.'

The two men faced each other, equal in height, Gillespie slightly broader in build than Mark's lean, muscular frame. Their similarities and contrasts struck her: same age, different backgrounds, different personalities, yet both with an unshakeable strength a acquired by one through years of adversity, the other from an inner core of integrity and emotional intelligence.

'The point,' Mark said, with the formidable calmness of certainty, 'is that you went to prison for a crime you didn't commit. That needs to be set right.'

Gillespie gave a shrug. 'The way I see it, there was no crime, and that's what I told Fraser today.' No crime?

Jenn stepped in front of him as he started towards the bar. 'My cousin died that night, Gillespie.'

Too late to rephrase her words, she remembered that this was the man Sean had almost killed. She saw recognition in his face and his dark eyes considered her coolly. Yet he spoke politely enough. 'Sometimes accidents happen. A swerve to avoid a 'roo, a blown-out tyre a it's happened to all of us. Believe me, Jenn Barrett, I'm more than sorry about Paula. But her death a I doubt that was a crime. It was what happened afterwards that was the crime.'

He walked around her, conversation finished, and all those who'd been watching fell back a step, clearing his path to the bar. He went behind it without hesitation, saying to the barman as he pa.s.sed through to the kitchen, 'You got those figures for me, Liam?'

She had no clue why that prompted a whole new round of whispers and hushed discussion, and she didn't bother trying to figure it out, but at least attention drifted away from her and Mark. A headache pounded alongside a million conflicting thoughts, the room suddenly hot and stuffy, and a whiff of smoke from her own clothes made nausea rise.

'Are you okay?' she heard Mark ask as the room wavered in front of her eyes. 'Can I get you something?'

'No. Thanks. I'm just going to ...' She could scarcely form a coherent sentence. Go upstairs. Wash. Sleep. Maybe even cry. Not necessarily in that order. 'I'll phone you. Tomorrow.'

It was what happened afterwards that was the crime.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow she would find out what Gillespie meant, and what Mark and Fraser had alluded to earlier. She would demand answers from them. Answers about the old crime and the new a Paula's death, and Jim's.

The homestead lay dark in the moonlight. Jagged remains of the roof speared into the midnight skyline around the two original chimneys, still standing. Tomorrow, after the arson investigator and insurance a.s.sessor had been, he'd check what might be salvageable. But tonight the house was out of bounds, surrounded by police tape.

The empty manager's cottage, over in a grove of trees a hundred metres from the main house, would have to be his residence until the homestead was habitable again a if it ever was.

Unable to settle, he set to work, selecting basic camping gear from the storage shelves in the garage. A camping lantern provided good light in the machinery shed while he checked over the generator. With the power line to all the outbuildings and the cottage running off the main house, he'd be reliant on the generator for days, maybe longer.

When he'd loaded it on to the back of the farm ute he went in search of some rope to tie it down for the short trip a and noticed for the first time, on one of the benches, a cloth-wrapped bundle.

The knitted lace edging on the tablecloth a yes, he knew what it was. But how the h.e.l.l had it got here?

He cleaned the grease off his hands with some metho and rinsed them at the water tank before he undid the loose knot in the vintage fabric and opened it out on the seat of his car.

A lump formed in his throat as he lifted out each item. His grandfather Josef's flute, salvaged from the wreckage of his family home in Poland, bombed in 1939. A teddy bear, pieced from sc.r.a.ps of sheepskin by his grandmother in a displaced-person's camp after the war. A photograph of the two of them, teenage sweethearts reunited in a migrant camp in Sydney. Josef's war medals, the tablecloth itself, embroidered with the delicate flowers of the old country during the voyage to the new country, and the necklace of black opal he'd made his wife from the first gems he'd found at Lightning Ridge.

Jenn. It must have been Jenn who found them, saved them. No-one else here would have understood their significance, but she'd known the story of each item, had even interviewed his grandfather for a piece she'd written for an essay compet.i.tion.

He folded the cloth neatly and wrapped the treasures in a plastic bag, protected from dust and grease. His grandparents had created a new life with little more than these few belongings, their courage, determination and their love. His own trials today were insignificant beside theirs. He would find his way through, and as they had rebuilt the struggling property they'd purchased, he would rebuild Marrayin, with similar determination and hard work. But alone.

The grove of trees around the manager's house blocked the haunting sight of the homestead's altered outline, but there were more than enough poignant memories at the cottage. With thoughts of Jenn fresh in his mind as he unpacked the ute he could almost see her here, working at the desk by the window in the room she'd shared with Paula, or reading in an old armchair on the veranda.

Not much point remembering any of that. Jennifer Barrett had travelled a long, long way from Marrayin.

By the time the eastern sky began to lighten, he had the generator connected and running, and power to light the house and recharge his phone and laptop. Although he'd put a camping mattress and swag in a bedroom, he gave up any idea of sleeping and had a cold shower instead to wash away the ash and smoke. The day ahead would be busy, and before the investigators arrived he needed to go and feed Jim's dogs and bring them back here.

The sun edged over the top of the scrub as he drove into Dungirri, turning to the right a block before the pub, intending to take the causeway across the creek and the short cut to the Gearys Flat property that Jim had managed for more than a decade.

But as he drove along the quiet, narrow street an elderly woman ran unsteadily out from the garden of a house, her pink floral dressing gown clutched around her, waving at him to stop.

Esther Russell, panicked and crying.

He caught her in his arms but she flailed at him, trying to grab his hands.

'It's Edward. Oh, Edward. You must help him. I just found him and I can't ... please, you have to come. He can't be ...'

Mark sprinted up the driveway. The Russells' house had once been the grandest in Dungirri, a Federation residence on a two-acre block, bordered by hedges. Now the once-extensive gardens were dead, dying or overgrown, with only a small area of lawn and garden beds in front of the house maintained.

Doctor Russell lay in his maroon dressing gown by a straggling rose bush, his walking stick a few metres away, the garden hose still dribbling water into a freshly weeded border.

Mark dropped to his knees beside him, felt his wrist for a pulse. Nothing. He reached to check again at the neck, and stopped. The old man's eyes stared blankly, his face lifeless above the twisted, torn collar of his pyjamas, with bloodied scratches and a rough red mark around his neck.

Not a heart attack or stroke or something one might expect in an elderly man. He'd been strangled by a garrotte. Murdered.

Mark stood up carefully, towering over the lifeless body of the doctor who had taken the blood sample in Birraga hospital after Paula's death and certified it as Gil Gillespie's blood a when Gil was sixty kilometres away locked in the Dungirri cell.

Edward Russell was dead, and so was any chance that he would finally reveal the truth of whose blood he had taken that night long ago, and why he'd lied about it.

FOUR.

The couple in the room next to Jenn's were having a d.a.m.ned fine time. Unfortunately, their bed creaked and the bed frame thumped rhythmically against the thin wall. Jenn dragged the lumpy pillow over her head to shut out the noise and the daylight, and wished she was still asleep. Seven hours of stifling, restless sleep wasn't enough, and her body clock was still on Central Asia time, convinced it was the middle of the night.

Jim was dead. The knowledge kept hitting her, each time freshly painful, each pain the sharp pointer of a hard truth: she had never acknowledged, to him or to herself, how significant he'd been in her life. Too late now to finally understand and be grateful for his stable, quietly supportive presence throughout her years with Mick and Freda, even though he'd had two boys of his own to raise alone. Too late to remember that there had always been some small, meaningful gift for Christmas and her birthday; to remember the silent rock of his strength in the aftermath of Paula's death.

He'd found expressing emotion difficult, had never to her knowledge used the word 'love' ... but Jim had done his d.a.m.nedest to be family. And she'd repaid that real, selfless love by leaving, by scribbling short notes once or twice a year, by being too busy with important stories to heed his unspoken need for help when Sean had lost his soul and all sense and done the unthinkable.

Somewhere just outside the window, a kookaburra cackled maniacally, long and loud. It might as well have been cackling at her. She felt like s.h.i.t, physically exhausted and aching; emotionally a writhing mess of sorrow, anger, regret, guilt and self-loathing.

And next door in room three they were still at it. Thump, thump, thump. Oh, yes, life always went on around sorrow, but she wasn't in the mood to feel happy for them. In room one on the other side, a mobile phone rang. And rang. Someone muttered a few swear words before it stopped.

Jenn groaned and reached for her own phone to check the time. Seven o'clock. No way now to get back to sleep. She tossed off the sheet and dragged herself upright. Whether she was ready or not, her day had started. Jim was dead, and she'd left it far too late to return the support he'd given her. But Paul ... Paul had his own family, as well as the responsibility of Sean and Mick, and maybe it was past time she shouldered her share of that responsibility.

The thought of checking on Mick made her nauseous.

Bathroom. To the left around the veranda. Another shower might help rid her body of the memory of smoke and ash and refresh her mind enough to face the day. And Mick.

She pulled on jeans with the singlet she had slept in before venturing out through the French doors into the daylight and the view of anyone pa.s.sing on the street. About as much privacy here as staying in a camping ground ... or a refugee camp. She'd done the latter more than once for work, and intellectually she knew she had no cause at all to be grumpy about the comparative luxury of the Dungirri pub. But she indulged in the self-pity anyway, wishing for the privacy and comfort of four stars instead of the shared 1960s bathroom with its faded pink and black tiles.

Just outside the bathroom she heard a door slam below, and caught sight of a woman in police uniform running down the street. A police officer running? Her instincts kicked in, honed in places where a running police officer signified danger, and she leaned over the veranda rail to see where the woman ran. The road past the school; a short street with a dozen or so houses, leading to the dirt road that crossed the creek at the causeway. An SES vehicle came around the corner past the pub and took the same road as the policewoman.

Common sense told her that here, in Dungirri, it was probably something mundane, like a car getting bogged in the sand on the causeway. Not a bomb or a shooting or an insurgent strike. No danger, and nothing to do with her.

No excuse for avoiding Mick. Better do it before she chickened out entirely. She showered quickly and returned to her room to dress, heading downstairs within ten minutes.

In the back bar a called the bistro these days a self-serve breakfast ingredients were laid out on a long table: a selection of cereal, juice, fruit and bread alongside a toaster, coffee plungers, teapots and an urn. Whoever ran the place obviously believed in a reasonable quality of coffee.

It had been too long since she'd eaten a decent meal, and caffeine deprivation had already set in, but her stomach still roiled.

As she paused in the doorway, someone pounded down the stairs, two at a time. Gillespie, his phone to his ear. 'She's still at your place? Good. Keep her safe. I'm on my way.' As he pa.s.sed Jenn and headed out the door, he added, 'Yeah, there's trouble.'

A motorbike roared to life moments later and sped off.

Jenn hesitated. A policewoman running, the SES who also doubled as paramedics, and 'trouble' involving Gillespie and someone close to him. Too much coincidence for fifteen minutes on a Sat.u.r.day morning. And given Gillespie's connections to Paula and Mark, and the attack on Jim last night ...

Breakfast had to wait. The bike had already disappeared from view, so she followed the direction the police officer had taken.

The SES vehicle, a police car and a ute blocked off the road outside Doctor Russell's house. The once-trimmed hedge around the large garden had grown high and wild, hardenbergia and honeysuckle threading rampantly through it, effectively hiding the grandest residence in Dungirri from view. Jenn had been inside that hedge just twice, both times sent away without stepping foot in the house. Although Barbara Russell had been a kind, quiet girl in the same year at school as Paula and Mark, Doc Russell did not permit his only daughter to mix outside school with her social inferiors, and Mrs Russell rarely defied her husband's wishes. According to the doctor's rigid social hierarchy, the Barretts were somewhere near the bottom, and even Mark didn't rate highly due to his Polish grandparents' refugee background. Barbara might as well have been the princess in the tower.

Jenn stopped across the road, where she could see in through the open gates along the driveway. The police officer she'd seen earlier was just outside the gate, speaking on her phone, but Jenn's attention zeroed in on a policeman straightening up from draping a blue plastic sheet over something on the ground. A body. It had to be a body. The doctor? Or Mrs Russell? The doctor must be well into his eighties and his wife some years younger a Barb had been a late baby a so maybe this was an entirely natural event.

But 'natural' didn't mesh with Gillespie's Yeah, there's trouble, nor his dash to keep someone safe.

She didn't notice the man in the shade of the trees at the corner until he moved into the sunlight and walked towards her.

Mark. Mark, on a Dungirri street first thing in the morning instead of at home at Marrayin. Another puzzle.

They met halfway, outside one of the more modest houses on the other side of the road. Mark must have been home since last night, because he'd changed and washed away the soot and grime, and shaved. But in his drawn face and the shadows under his eyes she didn't see much evidence of sleep or rest.

'Do you know who's ... ?' she asked.

'It's the doc,' he said. 'I was on my way to look after Jim's dogs when Esther ran out on to the road. She'd just found him.'

'So, it was you who called the police?'

'Yes. That's Kristine Matthews, the local sergeant.'

Jenn could read the signs. A police sergeant, finishing one call, immediately making another. And the sergeant's offsider covering the body with a plastic sheet and tying crime-scene tape across the driveway. Both of them a and Mark as well a tight-lipped, with solemn faces and tense body language.

'It wasn't a natural death, was it?'

Mark's momentary pause told her the answer even before he said, 'No.'

Trouble. She couldn't yet see how or why the old doctor's death was significant, but the sunshine and twittering birds in the garden in front of them seemed out of place, a too-stark contrast to the grimness of the scene across the road.

'How-' She caught herself and didn't finish the pointless question. 'You're not going to tell me that, are you?'

His brown eyes looked straight into hers. 'No.' Direct, but there was no offence in that intense honesty. Of course he wouldn't tell her a a journalist a what he'd seen until after the police had decided which details to release. If then.

But he didn't move away, or offer any other comment. He just turned away from the road, rested his forearms on the fence-rail beside her, and waited.

Waited for her to ask a question he could answer.

Why would anyone want to kill Edward Russell? No, that would only invite conjecture. Besides, the doctor had been an arrogant, misogynistic, prejudiced old b.a.s.t.a.r.d. A general practice in Dungirri, rostered on call at Birraga hospital, one of only three doctors in the district back then. He might have retired now but ...

Birraga hospital. Gil Gillespie. Trouble. A puzzle piece snapped into place.

'He signed the blood-alcohol report, didn't he? The one that convicted Gillespie.'

'Yes. That's on the public record.'

With nothing happening across the road, she also turned away from it, resting an elbow on the rail to face Mark.

'It's less than twenty-four hours since you held that media conference and already someone's burgled your place, Jim's dead, and now the man who certified that disputed report is dead. That's a lot of coincidences, Mark. In fact, it might lead one to suspect that someone is trying to tie up loose ends.'

Shadows crossed Mark's face as he considered his answer. 'I knew there was a possibility that the public announcement might send those behind the corruption running scared, but I wanted to make sure that Gil's name was cleared without doubt,' he said. 'I weighed it up, a.s.sessed the risks, made my decision, and made the announcement. Because if there were to be any repercussions, I expected them to be targeted at me.' His tightly clasped hands betrayed his tension but his voice remained even. 'I was wrong. Mrs Russell is grieving for her husband, and Jim ... I'm so very, very sorry, Jenn, that he got caught up in this. You and Paul and Sean, Chloe and the kids a he's such a huge loss to you all.'

Some of his media critics had a.s.sumed that because of his self-control, his compa.s.sion was scripted, a mere performance. Others viewed his compa.s.sion and honesty as weaknesses. Jenn knew better a both about the boy he'd been, and the man she'd watched from a distance. She knew that he cared deeply about people and issues and put others' needs first. And that his outward control masked not an absence of genuine emotion, but his own deep feelings that he kept to himself, alone, private.

She knew that he grieved for Jim. 'You reminded me last night that moving Jim didn't kill him,' she said. 'Your announcement didn't kill him, either.'

'Not directly, no,' he conceded quietly, but the weight of responsibility still clouded his eyes. 'Although I can't help but think if I'd just gone to the police would things be different? I need to ensure that there's no more risk to anyone.'

She focused on him, putting aside the immediacy of her own jumbled emotions of the past day, and tried to consider the events from an objective perspective. 'Listen, Mark, I may have flung a thesaurus of swear words in your direction when I first received your messages, and questioned your sanity yesterday when you dropped your resignation bombsh.e.l.l so publicly, but thinking about it rationally, of course you did the right thing, the right way.'

She'd covered political scandals, criminal investigations, old crimes and corruption aplenty and was more than familiar with the hundreds of ways the truth could be obscured. 'We both know that if you'd done it quietly,' she continued, 'if you hadn't resigned, chances are the reopened investigation would have been swept under the carpet, bogged in bureaucracy or become a juicy media scandal muddying the facts. And all the while whoever's behind this would have heard about it anyway, and they'd still be cleaning up a but with a whole lot less police and public scrutiny.'

After a long moment of reflection on her words, Mark pushed up from the fence, stood straight, close in front of her, raising a hand as if to brush her cheek the way he'd done, so long ago. He dropped it, but he didn't drop their eye contact.

'Thank you, Jenn.'

Simple words, from a complex man. As she stood there, close to him, she remembered, understood now, why few people forgot an encounter with Mark. 'Personable', 'charming' a no, the words they often used didn't come anywhere near the truth. When Mark Strelitz looked at a person, he saw them. Not just eye contact, but a total focus and awareness, instinctively seeking the person beyond the face and words. Right now he saw her, Jenn, not the public persona but the girl she'd been and the woman she'd become. An intensity of connection that worked both ways a if she opened her eyes enough to see it.

He was a private person, but not secretive. It was all there, in his eyes, the depth and complexity, the compa.s.sion and integrity that defined him.

And he'd driven the car in which Paula had died.

The growl of a motorbike engine coming closer provided a welcome distraction from the uneasy jangle of her thoughts.

Despite the helmet she recognised Gillespie on the bike, with a young girl riding pillion behind him in T-shirt and leggings, a long dark ponytail hanging down her back. They stopped near the police sergeant, who hugged the girl and called over the constable to escort her around the side of the house and inside, avoiding the plastic-covered heap in the driveway.

But it was the sergeant and Gillespie who interested Jenn. She couldn't hear their words, but their body language spoke volumes. Unguarded concern on the sergeant's face, very little s.p.a.ce between them, Gillespie's hand gentle on her shoulder.

Intimacy.

Gillespie at the pub, seven a.m. phone call, policewoman leaving hurriedly ... it all added up. They'd been in room one, next to her.

'Gillespie and a cop?' she muttered in a low voice.