Darkening Skies (20 page)

As she copied the folder across, from his view over her shoulder Mark read the name of the second folder: ‘Bohème’. The faintest spider-web of a memory brushed the edge of his awareness but vanished before he could grasp it.

‘Open the Bohème folder, Jenn.’

‘Just about to,’ she said.

Most of the files listed were named in some sort of code: six numbers, two or more letters. Dates perhaps – but if so, some related to the 1970s, long before digital photography. More than forty files, all images.

Jenn clicked on the first file.

‘Shit,’ said Steve.

Mark shifted slightly so that the glare from the overhead light didn’t fall on the dark, under-exposed image. A black-and-white picture of a naked woman lying among cushions on a bed, her arms above her head … tied? … her legs spread wide. Nothing subtle or artistic or beautiful. Mark found the
implied power of the photographer over the powerlessness of the woman repugnant.

‘I don’t …’ Jenn shook her head and opened the next file. Then the next, and the next, working her way through the list.

More of the same kind of image, but with different women, different positions, their faces out of shot, some covered by blindfolds. A few included a naked male in the frame – but never a male face – and intercourse occurring. Intercourse – or rape? Mark saw little evidence of pleasure, and his disgust and anger increased with each image.

‘I thought this guy was supposed to be some type of artist,’ Steve objected. ‘This is just porn. Bad bloody porn.’

Mark didn’t argue the definition. ‘But why did Wolfgang give these images to you, Jenn? Along with the accident photos?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think … Listen, I’ve seen some of his work online. I researched erotic art for an article years ago. He does beautiful images, respectful, often in the natural environment, showing reverence for both people and nature. This stuff – it isn’t even well framed, or properly in focus. There’s no skill in this.’

‘You’re suggesting someone else took them?’ Steve asked.

‘Yes.’

Steve’s phone burst into an incessant ring, and he swore and excused himself to take the call, answering it with a ‘Yes, sir,’ as he walked out the emergency-room door.

With a little more space, Mark pulled up his chair again. Not only could he see the screen better, he could see Jenn’s face too. Brows drawn in concentration, she gnawed at her lip as
she stared at the file list. The oxygen mask hung around her neck, forgotten. As he’d forgotten his. He didn’t put it back on.

‘If it’s dates – years and months – some of these images are decades old and must have been scanned from originals,’ she said. ‘There’re no clothes to date fashions, but the hairstyles … see, this one could well be the seventies. Can’t really see her face, though, or her make-up. And see the last-modified dates? Looks like the files were created or modified on two consecutive days – July thirteenth and fourteenth – almost five months ago.’

Five months ago. Before Gil Gillespie had returned and the Flanagans’ criminal activities had been exposed. Forty years after the first image was taken, if the date codes were correct. The woman in it might be in her sixties now.

‘Can we take a look at the accident folder again?’ Mark asked. He leaned forward to see more clearly, resting a hand on the bed beside her. He’d become accustomed to the smell of smoke that hung around him – both of them – but he caught another waft of it, and Jenn’s hand moving on the track pad still wore the dressing from yesterday. Stark reminders of the dangers they’d survived. Of the dangers she’d faced that all, ultimately, came back to his announcement and the accident with Paula. The accident images and these images, Dan’s veiled threats, Wolfgang’s caution – he had to ensure her safety from whatever had been unleashed.

Jenn looked up from the screen at him, eyes narrowed by her frown. ‘All the accident images were created around the same time as the other folder. July. Why July? Did anything happen then?’

‘I can’t think of anything significant. It was before Gil returned.’

‘July. Five
months … oh, shit. Marta died five months ago. Wolfgang’s wife. He told me at the pub. They’d been together forever.’

He now remembered skimming the obituary. He’d known Marta only a little better than he’d known the more private Wolfgang. There’d been an exhibition of her work at the Birraga Art Society five or so years ago – the first local recognition of the talent in their midst. From their brief meetings he recalled a shy, self-effacing woman, who’d studied under a master potter in Germany before emigrating decades ago. And in the rubble or whatever remained of his Birraga office he had a set of her coffee mugs, the rich brown decorated with the salt-glaze technique in which she’d specialised.

‘So, if Marta’s death prompted him to scan the old photos, why?’ Jenn thought aloud.

She sat there in the hospital bed, still with irritation reddening her eyes, dust and ash marking her T-shirt, and asked him why a man had delayed taking action on incriminating photographs until the woman he’d loved was gone.

‘Perhaps he was protecting her. If these images represent illegal activity, then their existence is a threat to whoever’s behind it. Gil was intimidated into pleading guilty because someone threatened to hurt Jeannie. If Marta was threatened, or Wolfgang was afraid they’d get to him through her, that might have kept him quiet.’

‘Until it didn’t matter anymore.’

‘Yes.’

‘We need to talk to him.’

‘Yes. Or
Steve does.’ If Steve didn’t, Mark would. He made that a silent vow. He had to find out from Wolfgang where the danger came from, so that he could protect Jenn, protect them all from it.

‘But we still don’t know what the connection is between the images in the Bohème folder and the accident.’ Jenn’s gaze drifted back to the screen, and the list of files. ‘Okay, there’re two – three – here from the year of the accident.’ Her fingertips brushed over the track pad as she selected the files, and they opened in quick succession, one after another, tiling on the screen.

A woman, kneeling naked on a patterned carpet with her hands tied behind her, her head forward in submission, dark hair falling loose around her shoulders. Two more of the same woman, from different angles, curtains on a floor-length window visible in one, only a little of her face visible in the last, her face turned and shoulder raised as if flinching from something.

Mark’s breath froze in his chest. ‘Zoom it. There.’

As that portion of the image grew, so did the eyes of the woman, and the scar on her shoulder became clear. The scar she’d carried since she’d been thrown from a bolting horse at a barbed-wire fence when Mark was just a kid.

‘Oh Jesus … oh fuck,’ breathed Jenn. ‘Is that—’

The ice in his chest spread, and the room around him narrowed to just those few square inches of screen, to the image that he could find no way to comprehend.

‘Yes,’ he said somehow, his voice strangled inside his head. ‘That’s my mother.’

Mark stayed
silent a long time, his gaze fixed on the screen, on the image that felt to Jenn like a punch slamming into her gut every time her eyes were drawn back to it. Caroline Strelitz. Beautiful, self-assured, capable; as at home on a horse mustering cattle on the plains as presiding over an elegant dinner table or a meeting of the Dungirri Country Women’s Association. And kind and encouraging to two girls lacking a strong female role model. She’d never been motherly or physically affectionate – neither of Mark’s parents had been demonstrative, even towards him – but Caroline’s practical advice on a few occasions, her down-to-earth expectation that a girl could – should – be whatever she chose to be, had stuck in Jenn’s mind all these years, a reinforcing echo when she’d needed it of her own mother’s principles.

To see Caroline in such a position of capitulation, of degradation, made absolutely no sense, and felt like a violation. She passed the laptop to Mark.

‘I’ll
have to phone them,’ he said at last, closing down the screen, as if he too had seen more than enough. ‘I’ll have to ask her what this is about.’

She didn’t envy him that conversation. ‘Where are they?’

‘South America. This year they’re building a school in Bolivia. Last year it was a clinic in Chile. They spend most of their time on charity projects in out-of-the-way places.’ He exhaled a tight breath. ‘I doubt I’ll get on to them straightaway. I haven’t even been able to tell them about the fire at Marrayin. I’ll have to leave another message, but at least they might have time to get over the shock of it all, to prepare themselves before they call me back.’

Not a conversation any man should have with his mother, prepared or not. Also, she wondered whether giving them time to prepare a response in these possibly sordid circumstances might take them further away from the truth, rather than closer to it.

Damn it, when had she become such a cynic? Caroline and Len Strelitz had always been active, respected members of the community, both taking on leadership roles in numerous spheres. Caroline in the CWA, on the Dungirri Shire Council before it amalgamated with Birraga, and on the Birraga Hospital Board; Len in the Rural Fire Service, in the local branch of the Farmers’ Federation, and in livestock research programs in conjunction with Harry Fletcher, the local veterinarian and Beth’s father.

The Fletchers. Aside from her brief encounter with Beth, Jenn hadn’t thought of them in years. They’d been close friends of Caroline and Len. Probably their closest; they’d certainly visited Marrayin more than anyone else in the time Jenn lived on the property. Barbecues, dinners, informal visits – hardly a week went by without them getting together. And Beth had stayed at Marrayin when her parents went to conferences overseas, a significant indication of trust by her protective parents. If Caroline had confided in a friend, it would most likely have been Beth’s mother, Sylvia.

‘If you
can’t get on to your folks, would it be worthwhile asking Sylvia Fletcher?’ she suggested.

‘Maybe. But it’s not the kind of topic I want to broach with anyone other than my mother initially.’

‘The police will ask questions. Steve will … if you tell him you recognised her.’ Would she tell Steve, if Mark didn’t? No, not yet. Not tonight, anyway.

Mark dropped his head on to his hands and rubbed his uninjured temple. ‘I’ll tell him.’

One more horrendous task on top of everything he’d already faced. The deep lines of fatigue on his face and the dust streaking pale lines in his brown hair gave her a glimpse of how he would age in ten, fifteen years. Had he slept at all last night? She doubted it.

‘Why don’t you leave it until morning?’ she said gently. ‘You look exhausted.’

‘No, this could be something key. Steve needs to know. But first I’ll phone and leave a message for them.’ He reached to the pocket of his shirt. ‘I’ll go outside where it’s quiet.’

‘I’ll go through the images again while you’re doing that,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if I can piece together any pattern, make any sense of the file names.’ Like the two-letter code after the numerical section of the file name. Her fingers itched to open the laptop again, but she’d wait until Mark left. In her distraction earlier she hadn’t properly registered the file names on his mother’s photos, but now she recalled seeing the suffix ‘CN’. Caroline Napier? All the locals knew her maiden name – half of them had called her by it – as generations of her family had held another prominent grazing property west of Birraga, at least until drought and illness took their toll.

‘Will you
be okay here for a few minutes?’ Mark asked.

‘Of course,’ she said, but he hesitated for a moment until Rhonda returned, carrying a box of dressings.

‘Doctor Cameron said the radiology reports shouldn’t be long,’ she told them as she crossed to a storeroom.

The pain in Jenn’s ankle had eased considerably and once the X-rays confirmed that it wasn’t fractured she would leave, as long as Mark’s scans didn’t reveal any problems. Getting back to Dungirri might be difficult tonight – she assumed her car would be a smoking wreck – but even a night in a Birraga motel was preferable to a night in the hospital. She’d coped, so far, because of the distraction of Wolfgang’s images, but the prospect of staying all night here, in the dark and quiet with nothing to occupy her thoughts except the memories of both her mother and Jim dying in this room … she couldn’t bear to contemplate it.

She pulled Steve’s computer back on to her lap and skimmed the list of files again. No other files with the suffix ‘CN’, but one with a longer alpha/numeric code, ending with six letters – CNLSGM. From the year of Mark’s birth, if she interpreted the date code correctly, and among the earliest images. More initials? It could be. CN for Caroline, LS fitted Len Strelitz, but she couldn’t think of anyone with the initials GM.

She opened
the file. Another black-and-white image. A party scene. If her mouth hadn’t been dry she’d have whistled. Some party. In the corner of the image, a man sat naked, playing a grand piano. Not surprisingly, Jenn didn’t recognise the slim torso and buttocks, or the semi-dressed couple draped over the piano groping each other.

But in the centre of the image, Caroline stood, young and pretty in a clinging seventies-style halter dress, a champagne glass in her left hand. The man holding her from behind had his face buried in her neck, one hand possessively low on her abdomen, the other cupping her breast. Unsmiling, her face was turned away from him, towards another man. Len Strelitz. Len, leaning against a wall in a half-unbuttoned shirt, drinking from a wine glass, his face tight with anger.

CNLSGM – she’d been right. Caroline Napier, Len Strelitz, and GM … who the hell was the man embracing her in that predatory, controlling grasp? She could see no sign of a ring on Caroline’s hand, but Len’s reaction and her pleading look at him signalled their interest in each other.

No-one else in the image seemed worried by, or even aware of, the undercurrents between the three in the striking tableau. Around them, the piano player, the groping couple, and a quartet of people sitting on the floor with a guitar and a bong partied on, oblivious.