Darkening Skies (9 page)

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 – and Mark as well – 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 journalist – 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 bastard. 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, assessed 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 – he’s such a huge loss to you all.’

Some of his media critics had assumed that because of his self-control, his compassion was scripted, a mere performance. Others viewed his compassion and honesty as weaknesses. Jenn knew better – 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 bombshell 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 – 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’ – 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 – 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 compassion 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 space 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.

Mark folded his arms, unsurprised by the scene they’d just witnessed. ‘Yes. Kris and Gil fell for each other pretty hard when he first came back to Dungirri, a few months ago.’

‘But wasn’t he caught up in the mafia?’

‘Not through choice,’ Mark said. ‘And we’ve had our own tangled web of organised crime around here for a long time, Jenn. Gil might have walked a fine line sometimes through necessity, but it seems he stayed on the right side of the law.’

Unlike Sean, who’d fallen for the promises and the money and the power of corruption and committed acts she couldn’t reconcile with the boy she’d known.

Maybe there was more to Gil Gillespie than she’d thought.

‘Who’s the girl?’

‘Long story. The short version is, Barbara had a daughter, adopted out as a baby. Barb died of cancer a few years back, the adoptive parents died, and Megan is here with her grandparents.’

‘And Gillespie?’

‘Is her father,’ he said calmly.

Jenn stared at him, searching for signs that he was joking. Gil Gillespie
and the cop was hard enough to figure, but Gil and Barbara Russell …

‘How the hell did
that
happen?’

For the first time since she’d been back, she saw a flicker of his old grin. ‘The usual way, I presume,’ he said. ‘It seems Barb didn’t share her father’s prejudices. Two decent, lonely teenagers can find a lot in common, given the opportunity.’

A hazy memory re-emerged: a summer night, teenagers gathered at the swimming hole on Dungirri Creek for an impromptu party, and Barbara joining the crowd, a little upset, a little defiant, a little nervous. Someone said she’d argued with her father and walked out. She’d been just as much an outsider as Gillespie, and no-one quite knew how to treat her. Except, perhaps, Gillespie, who lived and worked cutting timber with his violent father a few kilometres from town, and rarely had the chance to mix with his peers.

Two lonely teenagers, something in common, and the opportunity … she remembered seeing them talking, sitting together on a log at the edge of the crowd. One night, one party – it had to have been then, because Gillespie was arrested the next night – and now there was a teenage girl.

Oh, there but for the grace of a functioning condom … She felt her cheeks suddenly heating. Damn it. Why the hell was she blushing over something so long ago, so natural and normal for the teenagers they’d been?

She slid a glance at Mark, but he watched the couple across the road, deep in his own thoughts, oblivious to the memories fresh in hers.

That long-ago afternoon, just
after his eighteenth birthday, in the old shearers’ quarters, the sweet, shy, gentle loving between them, and the heart-tearing sorrow that followed it when she told him she was determined to leave Dungirri soon …

He didn’t remember anything about that week. None of it. That bittersweet afternoon was gone, wiped from his mind along with the memories of the accident and Paula’s death.

Two decent, single adults could find a lot in common, too. Not only sex. And in the case of Kris and Gil, Mark could see the strengthening of the deep physical and emotional attraction he’d witnessed develop between them during Gil’s return to Dungirri back in September. Respect, friendship, intimacy, commitment, love – it was all there, in a lively match of temperament and personalities, of values and ideals. No wonder Gil had voluntarily left witness protection to return to town again last week.

All the more reason Mark needed to stand his ground and see Gil’s name completely cleared. He owed it to Gil, and he owed it to Kris, one of his closest friends, to do what he could to enable their relationship to flourish.

He and Kris had never been lovers – never
wanted
to be lovers, either of them – but their friendship had sustained
them through some of Dungirri’s darkest times, since she had arrived in the district five years ago. He trusted her completely: as a police officer, as a community leader, as a friend. In the twenty or so minutes since she’d arrived on the scene at the Russells’, she’d spoken sympathetically with Esther, handed her to the care of Beth and Karl from the SES, instructed her constable, Adam, and made calls and given orders. Other than conveying the basics of the situation, Mark hadn’t talked with her. Some time he’d undoubtedly get a good-hearted blasting from her for making his public announcement without warning her first, but for now all her concern – and his – focused on the murder of the doctor and its implications.

Gil rode off, and Kris strode across the road to them, a frown narrowing her eyes. A frown directed at Jenn.

Mark made the introductions, although it was clear that Kris had already figured Jenn’s identity.

‘The police will release a media statement later this morning, Ms Barrett. Until then there will be no comment.’

Jenn matched every ounce of Kris’s professional firmness. ‘Sergeant, you needn’t worry. I’m in Dungirri for personal reasons, and I’m just as invested in discovering the truth in this matter as you are. It’s family business, not work, and I’m not at all interested in rushing to be first on the morning news with no more than a headline about a suspicious death.’ She gave Kris a restrained but genuine smile, one capable professional woman to another, and then turned to Mark. ‘When you’re finished here, can you let me know? I’ll need to get my car from your place.’

Of course she’d want her car. He mentally juggled timeframes and tasks. ‘I’ll have to wait for Steve Fraser, so I’ll probably be here at least an hour yet, maybe longer. Then I still have to go out to Jim’s place.’