Darkening Skies (5 page)

He shrugged off the
rebuff. ‘As a result of the new information Mark provided to the Police Commissioner yesterday, the investigation into your cousin’s death has been reopened and I’m preparing a brief for the Assistant Commissioner. Given Mark’s public announcement this morning, I have to consider that the fire may be connected. So, everything is relevant.’

Especially the presence of two of Paula’s relatives at the scene before witnesses arrived. Oh, yes, she could read him. The sympathy, the soft approach. He wanted her to slip up, to incriminate herself or Jim.

‘My uncle has suffered a head injury, presumably inflicted by the man I saw. Jim’s worked for the Strelitz family for many years. There is no way he would have lit that fire.’

Fraser lounged against the back of the bench. ‘Sweetheart, I can’t tell you how often I hear friends and family protest that so-and-so
couldn’t
have committed a crime. Jim was there, he has motive, and he also has a history – he and his boys laid into Gil Gillespie when he first came back to town a few months ago.’

Oh, that very deliberate
sweetheart
annoyed her. Exactly as he intended. She unclenched her teeth and aimed to correct the record.

‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Detective. It was Sean and his mafia mates who assaulted Gillespie. Not Jim and Paul.’

He dismissed her objection with a shake of his head. ‘You obviously aren’t up to date with all the family news. Days before Sean’s “mafia mates” got hold of Gillespie, your male relatives had an impromptu welcome-back party for him when they ran into him at the pub. Luckily for them, Gillespie refused to make a complaint.’

Jenn swallowed back her
humiliation. ‘If Jim had issues with Mark, he’d have it out with him face to face, as he apparently did with Gillespie, not inflict wanton destruction.’

‘And what about you? You were there, and it could be said that you have motive, too.’

His goading words sparked her overload of stress and frustration into barely contained rage. ‘Detective,’ she said coldly, choosing her words with care, ‘I’m an experienced journalist. In the same way that you most likely know how any number of corrupt actions
could
be taken, although you wouldn’t take them yourself, I know exactly how the reputation of a man like Mark Strelitz could be dragged through the mud and left there, whether the police investigation finds him lily-white or not. So, believe me, if I wanted to destroy Mark, I’d choose a far more effective way than setting fire to his house.’

Before Fraser could answer, his phone beeped and a single glance at the screen wiped the smug grin from his face. With a quick apology he excused himself and moved away to take the call.

Jenn dropped her head into her hands at the table and fumed. That damned cocky, good-at-his-job detective had undermined her control with a few well-placed barbs. And she’d let him rile her and probably come across as a vindictive bitch, although she’d meant to stress the opposite. There
were
strategies she would never take. Not even if Mark proved to be a lying, manipulative bastard, responsible for Paula’s death.

The bright white lights of the hospital blurred Mark’s vision after the half-hour drive in the darkness, his tired eyes gritty from smoke and his gut churning. Now the buzz of engines and pumps and voices in his ears had become machine beeps and the clattering of medical trolleys and the low urgent voices of the emergency department, dealing with someone in crisis.

The elderly woman sleeping on one bed, and the child with a wrist brace sitting up in
another clearly weren’t the crisis. It took him a moment to locate Jenn, standing by a wall, staring at a curtained-off cubicle, her arms wrapped tightly around herself and her face as white as the bandage on her hand.

Once, he would have simply taken her in his arms and hugged her. Now, he stopped two paces from her, with no idea how she would react to him away from the urgency and commotion of the fire.

‘Jenn?’

Deep in her thoughts, she turned her head slowly. ‘Mark.’ She bit at her lip. ‘He’s deteriorating. Skull fractures. Major brain damage. Paul’s …’ She nodded towards the cubicle. ‘Paul’s saying …’ Her face crumpled into grief, and she held her hand against her mouth to halt her pain from overflowing, unable to say the word.

Saying goodbye.
A hard lump formed in his throat, his mouth dry and tasting of ashes. He reached a hand out to touch her arm, but Jenn flinched and turned away, struggling for composure.

The rejection tore at him even as he understood it. His own sorrow at her news added to the other losses twisting painfully in his
chest, and he wanted to strike them away, pound out his frustration, shout a denial. Not Jim. Proud, hard-working, knowledgeable Jim. He should have retired soon, had years yet to play with his grandkids, see his youngest son reform and do him proud like his eldest. Not this.

One of the monitors in the cubicle began an insistent beep and the curtain billowed outwards as people moved within. Jenn took a hasty step forward, but then stopped as a woman said, ‘He’s arresting again. Get the crash cart.’

‘Paul?’ Another woman spoke gently.

‘No. He wouldn’t want it.’ Mark almost didn’t recognise Paul’s voice, low, harsh, cracking. ‘Let him go.’

Jenn’s shoulders shook, and when Mark put his arms around her this time she turned into him, burying her face against his shoulder, sobs racking her body. She wasn’t thinking,
and he could have been anyone, just then, but they stayed that way while a solemn nurse slipped out from behind the curtain and someone switched off the beeping machine, and there was only silence except for Jenn’s muffled sobs, and the gulping breaths of Paul, struggling not to cry.

In the staff kitchen Mark stirred a heaped teaspoon of sugar into each mug of coffee. Sugar for shock. Whether it was medically sound or an old wives’ tale, he didn’t care. They’d all had an emotionally and physically draining night, and weren’t yet ready for the long drive home. The boost of caffeine and energy wouldn’t hurt.

He carried the three mugs back to the small meeting room a nurse had shown them to. Just outside, Paul spoke on the phone with his wife Chloe, stoic and withdrawn, while inside the room Jenn wrote on a notepad she’d borrowed from the nurse.

Hadn’t that always been
the way she’d coped with challenges? Transform them into written words; order, arrange and analyse the events and the issues. Report objectively and thoroughly. Even in high school, that had been her trademark style – and her strategy to rationalise her emotions.

He’d seen her on television regularly, the familiar passion for her work enlivening the features she’d always thought plain beside Paula’s prettiness. She still kept her chestnut hair long, caught back in a practical ponytail, and although she often wore basic make-up for the harsh eye of the camera, she wore none now. But plain? No, in his eyes she’d never been
plain
.

She barely looked up as he placed her mug on the table, but he could see the moisture on her cheeks, the tightly held damp tissue she still needed.

‘The detective will need a statement,’ she said, the flatness in her tone amplifying rather than belying her emotional turmoil.

‘Steve sent a message a few minutes ago that he’s on his way,’ Mark told her. ‘But the written statements can wait, Jenn. You can do it tomorrow, or whenever you’re ready.’

‘I need to do it now.’

He stood by the window, looking out on to the dimly lit garden between the hospital buildings. He mentally made lists of things to do, people to notify, the words and phrases to include in his witness statement – anything to avoid grappling with his own response to Jim’s death.

Emotionally there’d been a great deal for one day: the media conference first thing this morning announcing his resignation, the reaction to it, the long drive home, the fire, Jim’s injury and death … and Jenn, sitting at the table a metre from him, back in his life, bringing with her the unsettling strangeness of being so near and yet so distant from the one person who’d ever understood him completely.

Nostalgia for his long-gone youth? No,
not just that. Their friendship had been close and deep. Despite the different paths they’d taken and all his life experiences since then, he sometimes missed that closeness.

But he’d travelled a long way from the idealism of his youth, and even if some of the girl he’d known remained in the successful, highly respected journalist, Paula’s ghost and his role in her death stood between them now.

He heard the gentle clunk of her mug against the table, and the breathy intake, not quite controlled. ‘I keep thinking I shouldn’t have moved him,’ she said, grief shadowing her blue – grey eyes. ‘I knew he had a head injury. He shouldn’t have been moved.’

Mark pulled out a chair opposite her and straddled it.
This
he had been over a hundred times already while making the coffee, rationally cataloguing every alternative, every what-if. But no other course of action had been possible. ‘Jim didn’t die because we moved him, Jenn. He died because someone bashed him on the head at least twice and broke his skull.’

‘Paramedics couldn’t have got to him in time,’ Paul said from the doorway. ‘I’m glad he wasn’t left in that fire.’

So was Mark. There’d be plenty of nightmares, but at least Jenn would be spared additional gruesome images on top of the ones that might still haunt her.

Firm footsteps approached
along the corridor, and Steve Fraser tapped on the door before entering. Uncharacteristically solemn, he expressed his condolences to Paul and Jenn briefly but with sincerity. No longer the cavalier, cocksure detective who’d first worked in the district two years ago, Steve’s voluntary return after personal failure and his subsequent work had earned Mark’s respect, despite his sometimes flippant manner.

Jenn accepted the condolence with a nod of acknowledgement, but as she laid the pen aside on the table and watched Steve, her lips pressed tightly together. Wary, or fighting for composure? Mark couldn’t tell.

‘I’m sure we all want to get to the bottom of what happened,’ Steve said. ‘I know this is a bad time, but I’d like to go over a few things with you all, if that’s okay.’

Yes, Mark wanted to piece together the events, find the person responsible for Jim’s death. None of the rest of it mattered, compared to that.

Paul and Jenn nodded mutely, and Steve dragged out a chair and sat down. ‘The first thing I want to know is, why was Jim there? He doesn’t normally work at Marrayin, does he?’

Not a line of enquiry Mark wanted Steve to waste time pursuing, and it could be easily dealt with. ‘He works for Strelitz Pastoral. He manages the Gearys Flat property—’ Damn. He should have said
managed
, past tense. With a twist of pain he continued, ‘But the Marrayin manager left last month, so Jim’s been keeping an eye on things there whenever I had to go away. He could have been there for any number of reasons – checking water or stock, dropping off mail or supplies. I’ve notified WorkCover,’ he added. ‘They’re
sending an investigator in the morning.’

At the end of the table, Paul broke his silence. ‘He was resigning.’

‘Resigning?’ It shouldn’t have surprised him; shouldn’t have felt like another knife twisting in his chest. They’d parted cordially enough on Wednesday after Mark had told Jim the news, but even then he’d noticed the new strain tensing the previously comfortable friendship. If he’d been thinking more clearly, had less on his mind, he might have expected it.

‘It’s because of Sean,’ Paul continued. ‘He was already on suicide watch before Dad saw him yesterday. Guilt at what he did to Gillespie is eating him hard. Harder now he knows that Gillespie was innocent. Dad promised to stay in Wellington for a while, to be close to Sean. Help him get through his sentence.’ His face haggard, Paul ran a hand through his hair. ‘I guess I’ll have to do that now.’

Mark rose and went to the window again, leaning on the sill and staring out into the darkness. He’d only thought to do the right thing. Clear Gil’s name, have the investigation reopened, find out if he was responsible, and take whatever punishment was demanded of him. If he’d kept quiet, or handled it differently, Jim wouldn’t have been at Marrayin today. And now the Barretts – all of them, Jim, Paul, Sean and Jenn – were paying the price of that decision.