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.
THREE
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 Just outside, Paul spoke on the phone with his wife Chloe, stoic and withdrawn, while inside the room Jenn wrote on a notepad she’d borrowed from the nurse.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.
Sean at risk of suicide? Jenn could hardly imagine the cheeky, irreverent cousin she remembered falling so deeply into depression. But then, she couldn’t imagine him getting mixed up with organised crime and beating Gil Gillespie almost to death with a metal pipe, either, and yet he’d done that and more back in September. Jim’s emails hadn’t been full of detail, but from a cafe in Tashkent she’d looked up the court reports of the evidence and Sean’s guilty plea at his committal hearing, the words distant and unreal, unconnected to her. Only Jim’s diligent cards and notes every birthday and Christmas – not her own efforts – had kept the family connection alive after she’d left Dungirri behind her at seventeen.
And in the phone message she hadn’t heard until her plane landed in Sydney last night, Jim had pleaded with her to come. Now there was only Paul and Sean – Sean suicidal in prison, and Paul overwhelmed with responsibility. Jenn shut her eyes against the light, swamped by the desperate desire to wake up, somewhere, anywhere else. Family … God, she didn’t know how to do family.
Paul sat at the end of the table, holding his grief behind a face carved into stone, still wearing his grimy RFS T-shirt and fire-fighting trousers. Hard-working, dependable Paul. Their fearless Grandfather Barrett would have been proud of his namesake. Whereas she … she’d fought some hard battles in some of the world’s hellholes using words as her weapons, but she’d chosen those battles. Not this one.
She owed it to Jim to try. She might be a failure at family but she had other skills, and unearthing the truth might help them all.
Would it help Mark? He stood by the window, tense and silent, his once-white business shirt discoloured by soot and sweat. The brown-haired, brown-eyed good looks of his teenage years had deepened in maturity, but the media images she’d seen over the years didn’t capture the intense reality of his presence. The five o’clock shadow, dishevelled appearance, and the large, work-roughened hands emphasised his authenticity.
Authenticity? The word had sprung to mind, but did it still apply? The truth used to be important to him. The law used to be important to him. Truth, honour, compassion, conciliation, justice: the values that had defined him in his youth. Or so she’d once believed. She didn’t know what she believed now – about his sudden confession, and the convenient amnesia – but although he’d lost his career today, his home, and a friend, evidence of his concern for others was there in the mug of coffee in her hands, in his quiet presence.
They’d all fallen silent, each deep in their own thoughts. Even the detective, who might simply be giving them space but who seemed almost as drained as the rest of them.
Paul pushed his chair back suddenly and stood. ‘I can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘I have to tell the kids about their grandpa, after I see Mick. And I’ve got to get to Wellington by the morning to tell Sean.’
Jenn almost offered to go with him but he was already walking towards the door on his way to his wife and family who knew him far better than she did. He paused with his hand on the doorframe, desolation in his eyes. ‘Catch the bastard who murdered my father, Fraser.’
They all listened to the heavy tread of his fire-fighting boots take the thirty paces down the corridor to the exit.
Answers. They all needed answers, and she needed to do something, make some order of the jumbled thoughts in her head. Focus on the questions and establish the facts … and take the lead and prod the detective away from any more irrelevant questions about Jim.
‘Detective, as I told you earlier, when I went into the office, there were papers on the floor and the desk and the filing cabinet drawers were open. It gave me the impression that the intruder had been searching for something.’
Fraser gave her a sharp look that said he read her tactic, but he took the prompt anyway. ‘Did Jim say anything to you? Did he tell you that there was someone there and that he was attacked?’
‘He was barely conscious. He only said a few words, and they were mumbled. But he did say “fight”, and if you look at his hands you’ll see some bruising on his knuckles. And I think you’ll agree, Detective, that it’s very difficult to hit oneself on the back of the head hard enough to do serious damage.’
Fraser conceded the point with a slight nod. ‘Okay, let’s assume for the moment that Jim confronted an intruder – the person you reported seeing leaving the house. Have you any idea what they might have been searching for, Mark? Were there valuables in the room? A safe, maybe?’
Mark turned slowly, considering the question. ‘No, nothing valuable. There’s no safe in there. And the computer equipment is nothing special – a few years old.’
And now it was just piles of molten plastic and metal. Jenn hoped he had a sound back-up system in place. ‘What about files or documents?’ she asked, tossing an unapologetic look at Fraser. ‘Filing cabinets and paperwork wouldn’t usually be the first place a thief looks for valuables. Are there any parliamentary papers or reports someone might want to get their hands on?’
‘Not at the house. Confidential papers stay in Canberra, or are locked up in my office in Birraga. But there’s been nothing sensitive lately.’
‘What about—’
‘Did you—’ Jenn spoke at the same moment as Fraser, continuing when he stopped, her train of thought running on an express line. ‘Did you have anything relating to the accident?’
‘Yes. A copy of the police file.’
Fraser forgot police etiquette and swore. ‘How the hell did you get one so quickly? Archives told me two weeks.’
Mark shook his head. ‘I’ve always had it. I requested it a month or so after the accident.’
‘Why?’ Jenn asked. It had never occurred to her back then to ask for the police report. Gil Gillespie was already in prison, having pleaded guilty to drink driving. There’d been nothing more to find out.
Mark wrapped both hands around his coffee mug, leaning back against the window with so much weariness in his face that she almost felt guilty asking questions. ‘It was just after I got out of hospital. I couldn’t remember anything. I hoped something in the report would prompt my memory, bring it back. But it never did.’
She dropped her gaze from his. If the amnesia was a lie, he was telling it convincingly. She wanted him to be telling the truth. Maybe he was.
‘Please tell me,’ Fraser said, ‘that you have a back-up copy of that report somewhere safe.’
‘Several electronic copies. With off-site back-ups. But Steve, I’ve been over it again, several times this past week. There’s nothing in it that contradicts the official story.’ He shifted his gaze to her. ‘Jenn, if you know anything, anything at all, please tell Steve.’
‘I don’t. I’ve already told him that I didn’t see you that evening, so I’m no help.’ No help to anyone, Steve or Mark, in piecing together what had happened. She needed to get it all straight in her head, line up the facts. ‘The report says Gillespie was driving? And drunk?’
Mark’s legal education showed in the careful way he chose his words, as though he were on the stand in court. ‘It states he was the driver, yes. And that he recorded a blood-alcohol reading of point one-four.’
‘But there was some mix-up with the blood test, wasn’t there?’ she pushed, remembering the reasons for Gillespie’s release from prison. Reasons she’d been angry about at the time. ‘That’s why his conviction was quashed after a couple of years. An error recording the time, wasn’t it?’
‘At the time the test was recorded as
being taken here at the Birraga hospital, Gil was, according to the custody records, still in the Dungirri police cell, sixty kilometres away.’
Still those precise, factual words. Nothing she couldn’t find out from public records. But all that precision highlighted what he hadn’t said. He hadn’t agreed that it was an error. If it wasn’t an error … her sluggish brain processed that slowly. If it wasn’t an error, someone had deliberately framed Gillespie.
Steve took advantage of her pause to reassert control of the conversation. ‘Mark, you made a very public announcement this morning, and although you were circumspect in your comments to the media, I’ve read the statement that you sent to the Commissioner that details your concerns and the conversation with Gillespie. This afternoon someone allegedly—’ Jenn caught the warning look he shot at her, ‘broke into your office, went through papers and set fire to the place. Maybe they’re unconnected, but in the absence of other evidence or explanations, I’m thinking not.’ He paused and aimed a questioning tilt of the head at Mark. ‘Who knows that you have the report?’
‘I haven’t spoken of it to anyone since I received it. But I presume some police and perhaps some others around at the time may have known I’d requested it.’
‘Perhaps some others?’ More subtext … and Fraser nodded and seemed to understand.
She didn’t. Yet. ‘The statement you sent to the Commissioner – can I see it?’
For a moment, she thought Mark would say yes. The instinct was there, a flicker in his brown eyes. But the moment passed and he shook his head. ‘The matter’s with the police now, Jenn. I made my public statement.’
Oh, that stung. Caution or distrust? Did he think she would race to publish it?
‘Paula was like a sister to me,’ she objected. And you were my closest friend. ‘I have a right to know.’
Darkening Skies Page 4