Darkening Skies (25 page)

I can’t lose you. S
till in shock, her natural guard lowered, her thoughts and emotions were probably as raw and tangled as his. But her confession hit him like an electric shock – part stun, part pain, partly a jolt of energy and life into emotions he’d suppressed for years.

She was babbling like an upset kid, when
he
was the one who had narrowly escaped death and must be feeling the shock. Where was her control, her consideration?

There were questions in the brown eyes that studied her for a long moment, but whatever he was feeling, he kept it to himself behind a gentle smile and a light response. ‘Believe me, I’m going to do my best to stay alive. Definitely my preference over the alternative.’

How could she be angry, or fall to pieces, faced with his calm courage and humour?

She relaxed a fraction, the worst of the initial shock wearing away. She had to get herself together and ready to deal with the challenge they faced.

‘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 – 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 space. 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 bastard 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 assume that this is the connection – the accident in which Paula Barrett died. Now, up here – because we don’t know yet how it’s connected – we’ve got the series of photographs of sexual activity, over years.’

‘The
Bohème Club,’ Jenn said. ‘Wolfgang called it that.’ She took out her notepad. ‘Here are the words he said – I think I’ve got them right. “Bohème club” and “sex”. “Taught Dan … develop … photos”.’

‘A sex club in Birraga?’ Kris mused. ‘Hard to believe.’

‘Yeah, well it
was
the seventies when those photos start,’ Steve pointed out. ‘Sexual 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 sexual experimentation, I guess.’ Steve scrawled ‘Bohème 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, sex 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 – 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 – 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 assumed someone was blackmailing him, threatening Marta. But I don’t know – 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 – 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 – 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 murder–suicide. 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 – 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 shell 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.