Darkening Skies (28 page)

‘Maybe I will. From the crowd there at lunchtime, the prospect of him buying doesn’t seem unpopular.’

‘Liam and Deb have done a great job these past couple of months. But give Gil time. He only came out of witness protection and returned again a week ago.’

When Jim had picked Jenn up off the floor, bruised, bleeding and crying after Mick’s beating on the day after Paula’s death, he had taken her to Jeanie Menotti.

The few days she’d stayed with Jeanie in the flat above the Truck Stop Café were something of a blur, but she did remember Jeanie’s gentle care of her and her down-to-earth common sense. A safe harbour, emotionally and physically, for a battered young soul, and practical help in fetching her clothes and books from Mick’s house and giving her a lift to Birraga to catch the bus out of the district for good after the funeral.

Jeanie was the type of person who glued a community together, someone people knew they could turn to in need. Compassionate, empathetic, non-judgemental, she’d always been a friend to those who needed one, and Jenn could only imagine the secrets she held in trust.

When Jeanie arrived at the police cottage she greeted Mark with a motherly kiss on the cheek and Jenn with a warm embrace.

‘You’ve
done so well, Jenn. Congratulations on all your achievements.’ Jeanie gripped her hand tightly between two arthritis-gnarled hands, her blue eyes shining into Jenn’s. ‘Your parents raised a fine young woman, and would be so, so proud to see the kind of journalist you’ve become. We’re all very proud of our Dungirri girl.’

Jenn’s eyes moistened. Jeanie had known her parents, so her assurance that they would be proud mattered, went beyond the empty words others had said throughout her life. And seeing Jeanie again somehow brought the memory of her parents closer, a connection of friendship as much as history. Jeanie had known her father all his life, and his parents before him; she’d known Jenn’s mother only since her marriage, but they’d become friends on Dungirri visits and Susannah had spoken of her liking and respect for the older woman.

When this mess was untangled, Mark safe, the truth uncovered, perhaps she could come back to Dungirri and spend some time with Jeanie, find out more about her parents through Jeanie’s eyes.

Come back to Dungirri?
Jenn momentarily reeled at the thought. Not one she’d ever expected to entertain without some compulsion.

She dismissed it to concentrate on the here and now. When they were seated at Kris’s kitchen table – more comfortable than the sterile interview room – she broached the reason they’d asked her to come. ‘Jeanie, we need your help. I think Kris told you that Wolfgang Schmidt was shot this morning?’

Jeannie nodded, tight-lipped. ‘I knew him a little. I knew Marta better.’

‘Wolfgang
gave me some photos. Most are not his own work – they’re more … disturbing. Some go back a long time. There are photos of the accident too – not only was Gil framed, but it looks like the car was interfered with, and that caused the crash. But that was covered up in the reports. We think there’s a connection between the earlier photos and the accident cover-up, but we’re not sure how or what.’

Mark poured tea from the pot he’d made. ‘Jeanie, I can’t get on to my mother at the moment. Did she ever talk to you about … about a group or a club called Bohème?’

‘Ah … Bohème.’ Jeanie leaned back in her chair, clasping the mug he’d passed her. ‘It still rears its ugly head.’

Jenn stirred sugar into her own tea, watching the older woman’s troubled face. ‘What can you tell us?’

She and Mark stayed silent while Jeanie arranged her thoughts. Although the stifling heat outside warmed the room, the sweet tea soothed in a familiar, calming way.

‘In the sixties, early seventies … you weren’t born then, you mightn’t understand what it was like. Change was everywhere. Students rioted in Paris, astronauts landed on the moon, there were mass demonstrations against Vietnam, and Woodstock and increasing wealth convinced a generation that they could do anything, be anything. You might not believe it to look at them now,’ she said with a wry smile, ‘but many of your parents’ generation had something of a wild youth, experimenting with alcohol, drugs, sex. They were the first generation in Australia to have easy access to university education, and many of the locals went to the city to study. The pill enabled sexual freedom, and magazines – everyone – talked about sex in a way that we
never had before. Birraga was no different from anywhere else. Young people went to uni, travelled more, and came back with new ideas and a taste for adventure. And so Bohème was born.’

‘Do you know who was involved in it?’ Mark asked.

‘I’m a little older,’ she said, ‘and I already had everything I ever wanted in Aldo. But no-one in Bohème invited ordinary folk like us. It was a small, private social group – not even a formal club – and it involved young people from wealthier backgrounds. Professionals, grazing families, business people.’

‘People with money to spend,’ Jenn said, adding, ‘or to be separated from.’

‘Yes. It started out happily enough. Social gatherings, parties and … excitement, you could say, of various sorts. But as things got darker, people tried to leave – and found that what had happened there would continue to haunt them.’

‘There are some photographs of my parents, and of my mother,’ Mark said. ‘Before I was born, and much later – not long before my accident. She got caught in it, didn’t she?’

Jeanie looked down at her hands clasped in front of her, and the clock on the wall ticked off several seconds. ‘Mark, you will have to ask your mother about those photographs. It’s her story to tell, not mine.’

If Jeanie held a confidence she kept it. But maybe if she knew what was at stake … Jenn reached over and covered the woman’s hand with hers. ‘Jeanie, Mark’s sent messages to Caroline, but she’s in the wilds of Bolivia. We can’t wait until she gets back to civilisation. Not only was Wolfgang murdered this morning, but Mark nearly was, too – someone planted a bomb under his car.’

‘Oh dear God,’ Jeanie
murmured, reaching with her spare hand to take Mark’s.

‘Doctor Russell, Wolfgang, Mark – someone is trying to silence people with a connection to the accident,’ Jenn urged. ‘We need to know who was behind the club, the blackmail, and probably the cover-up of the accident. I think Caroline would forgive a breach of confidence to protect her son, don’t you?’

Jeanie considered for a long moment, holding both their hands, before she squeezed them gently and withdrew. A sip of tea, a deep breath in, and she spoke. ‘I don’t know the whole story. As I understand it, when she was young – around the time she started seeing your father, Mark – her own father, Charlie Napier, was deeply in debt, facing bankruptcy, and she succumbed to pressure from someone for sexual favours in return for leniency on the debt. I don’t know who he was, but he introduced her to the club.’

Jenn exchanged a glance with Mark. Gerard McCarty, bank manager. Gerard McCarty, in the old photo with his arm around an uneasy Caroline, and Len looking on, angry. A puzzle piece fitted neatly into place.

‘My father followed her there, didn’t he?’ Mark asked, his voice strained.

‘I don’t know about that, but there was trouble of some sort. Your parents married not long after, and your Napier grandparents sold up their property around that time and retired.’

‘Granddad Napier spent a lot of time out at Lightning Ridge with Pop Josef after he retired. He said it kept him away from the bookmakers. Gambling’s a nasty addiction.’

‘It is,’ Jeanie
agreed. ‘Sadly, Charlie Napier’s not the first and won’t be the last to have lost a farm that way.’ She took another sip of tea. ‘Anyway, to get back to your parents, Mark, years later, after they’d developed Marrayin into a successful property and expanded into more property, your mother asked me, in a roundabout way, if I knew any ways to deter a blackmailer. I’d managed to extricate the Truck Stop Café from Flanagan’s protection-money racket, and I told her how – by gathering evidence and holding it over him.’

‘You had evidence against Dan Flanagan?’ Jenn asked, unable to keep the hope from lighting her voice.

‘Not specifically against Dan, no. He kept a safe distance and did everything through bully boys. That’s why he’s still walking free when his sons are in prison,’ she replied, a hard edge on her usually gentle tone. ‘But with Gil’s help I collected enough to hold Flanagan’s boys off.’

An unlikely crime-fighting duo, the compassionate elderly woman and the rough teen, but Jeanie’s story correlated with Gil’s information. In her memories of the cafe, Jenn recalled the taciturn youth who’d worked to fill tanks and keep the place clean while the rest of the teens ate hamburgers and laughed at the tables … yes, she could see how that partnership, that loyalty had developed.

‘Did my mother say what the blackmail was?’ Mark asked.

Always ‘my mother’, Jenn noticed, and rarely if ever ‘Mum’.

‘No, she didn’t say specifically, but it was something that went back to the early trouble, and she was afraid for your father, willing to do anything to protect him. But the price was high, requiring regular “payments”, and she was desperate to
get out of it. I advised her to go to the police, but she said she couldn’t, that they’d destroy Len. That was a couple of weeks before your accident, Mark.’

Mark’s face was drawn, anger in his clenched hands, his white knuckles. But he kept his voice low and even. ‘Was Flanagan behind it?’

‘It was no secret that your parents and Dan were rivals, in the legal side of Dan’s businesses, anyway. But I remember her saying that there were far more dangerous criminals than thugs like Dan.’

Worse than Dan? Jenn thought of the photographs, and shuddered. ‘Do you know what she did to get out of it?’

Again Jeanie considered her answer. ‘I knew Marta Schmidt a little, and I knew there was more to Wolfgang than he let on. Marta hinted that he’d taken on the Bohème Club. I suggested to Caroline that she contact them. I didn’t see her alone for some weeks after that, until after you’d come back from hospital in Newcastle, Mark. But she said she’d resolved it, and she never mentioned it again.’

‘Blackmail … hurt Marta
.’ Wolfgang’s words echoed in Jenn’s mind. A threat to Marta would have been reason enough for him to take on the club, to get his hands on the photographs he’d taught Dan to develop long ago, and to gather evidence in surveillance photographs. And if he’d known that Caroline was being blackmailed, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that he’d taken photos of Mark’s accident. Assumptions, yes, and she had no proof connecting it all yet, but it made a logical sense, fitted all they knew.

Caroline
might have ‘resolved’ her problem with Wolfgang’s assistance, but questions still tugged at Jenn. Was it resolved before the accident, or after? Did she resolve it permanently? Did Len know? And did it have anything to do with Caroline and Len leaving Dungirri and handing everything over to Mark when he finished university? That had struck her as strange, for a fit and healthy couple barely near retirement age.

But if Caroline had endured forced sex – damn it, call it what it was,
rape
– that would be reason enough for any woman to want to leave the district. Jenn’s stomach churned. They might be getting closer to answers, but none of them were easy to bear.

Jenn still had questions for Jeanie, and although she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answers she sucked in a breath and asked, ‘Do you know if … if my father ever had anything to do with Dan Flanagan?’

Jeanie turned her teaspoon over on the table and took a long time to answer. ‘I think he did some work for him. Before he joined the army. It was decades ago, Jenn. He ran a little wild like many young men, but he straightened out and made your grandparents proud.’

Aware of Mark near her, his wordless gaze reading her intention and giving her courage, she asked, ‘Do you believe my father did it, Jeanie? Killed my mother?’

Jeanie sat up straighter, her hand warm over Jenn’s. ‘I believe he was a good man, Jenn. I don’t know what happened or why, but he loved your mother and you. I’ve never doubted that.’

I’ve never doubted that
… The words eased some of the ache in her heart, and made her more determined to find the truth, clear her father’s name.

Jeanie embraced
her affectionately before she left. ‘Don’t go running away again without coming to see me. And,’ she drew Jenn’s head down and kissed her forehead, as if in benediction, ‘be careful, and look after each other.’