by Helene Young
He sighed. ‘I’m not asking your mother if I can stay at her place. I’ll see you tomorrow. Where are you working?’
‘Fish R Biting. Fish and chip shop.’
‘I thought you were setting up a restaurant.’
‘I am, but there are bills to pay along the way.’ The phone beeped with an incoming message. She ignored it.
‘Darcy, why do you make it so hard on yourself? I can loan you the money. You know that. I supported you and Duo, sent customers your way.’
‘Stirling, let’s not discuss that right now. Bottom line is tomorrow I’ll be working until about eight. I’ll swing past the pub then and we can have a drink or a late dinner. The food’s good at The Cove.’
‘Don’t you get a break during the day?’
‘Look, sorry but I have to go. I’m expecting a call. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.’ She hung up without waiting for a reply. She wasn’t going to waste her precious battery life going around in circles.
‘Your father’s coming here?’ Conor looked wary.
‘Yep, tomorrow I’m being graced with a royal visit.’
‘He hasn’t been back in how many years?’
‘Sixteen. Right after my friend drowned.’ The swell of grief and despair hit her like a wall. For all her bravado, the dark pain was still there, the belief that she was responsible for Grant’s crazy behaviour. If she hadn’t told him she didn’t want to sleep with him, none of it would have happened. It didn’t matter that she was sixteen and he was nineteen. If she hadn’t fought him, scratching at him with her nails, insisting she wanted to go home, he wouldn’t have started the motor without checking that the ropes were all secure. Those ropes wouldn’t have ended wrapped around the rudder and the props. They wouldn’t have found themselves caught in bad weather without power and steering. Grant wouldn’t have died, because they wouldn’t have needed rescuing in the first place. It didn’t matter that her infatuation had turned to hatred when he’d tried to undress her. It didn’t matter that she’d vowed never to see him again. He didn’t deserve to die.
And if her father’s star footballer hadn’t died, then maybe Stirling wouldn’t have rejected her so completely.
She was confident none of that suffocating emotion showed on her face. She’d spent too many years learning to keep her expression politely neutral. Five times she’d walked away from relationships, loathing herself for the neediness that sent her chasing after the wrong men, seeking approval that never came. Her doomed relationship with Dylan had begun and ended for this very reason.
‘I’m sorry.’
Conor’s hand on her upper arm startled her. The warmth of it made her skin tingle as his strong fingers curled around her muscle. She could smell soap and a tang that made her think of freshly cut grass. There was sympathy in his dark eyes. And an intensity that left her breathless. She didn’t pull away.
When he leant in and laid smooth lips against her cheek, her eyelids fluttered closed. She reached up and touched his cheek, feeling the silky skin of a fresh shave and the angular jut of high cheekbones. He drew in a deep breath as though he was inhaling her, savouring her, and she turned her head to meet his lips. There was a moment’s hesitation before the kiss deepened and she felt desire ignite through her body. She struggled to temper it, recognising she was crossing a line, that tomorrow morning’s recriminations might well destroy any comfort tonight might bring.
His hands moved lightly to her hips, giving her room to pull away but still anchoring her so their clothes brushed, the heat of their bodies mingled. It would only take a small movement to close that gap and press herself against him, to both take and give comfort. But she didn’t move, held by the moment, the desire in his kiss. He nipped at her lower lip, captured her tiny gasp and drew her closer as the tip of his tongue slid over hers.
Her phone rang and she pulled back, groping for it as her cheeks flamed.
‘Darcy, what are you doing?’ Noah’s words made her wince and she tipped her head back. What the hell was she doing?
‘We’re at the whaling station. Where are you?’ She knew she sounded breathless.
‘This crash is a god-awful mess. Four dead already, a couple still trapped in their cars and a fleet of ambulances trying to battle their way through the traffic jam to get here. The medevac chopper’s just left with another one for Bundy, but some of these people . . .’ His voice trailed off before he cleared his throat. ‘I’ll be here all night so there’s nothing I can do for you, Darcy. Just don’t leave the whaling station, please, not until I collect the guys from the airport tomorrow morning.’
‘Ring me when you finish, whatever time. We need to talk, Noah.’
‘Take care, Darce. And don’t trust anyone, especially not your mate.’
‘See you, Noah.’ Steady, reliable Noah, whose voice normally made her heartbeat quicken this time made it slow, gave her space to breathe.
‘I’m sorry. That was wrong,’ Conor said. He seemed embarrassed as she slipped the phone into the pocket of her denim shorts. ‘You looked so beautiful but so sad. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.’
‘Forget it.’ She managed a wry smile. ‘We’re both out of sorts. Help yourself to more food and please, don’t leave.’
‘You locked the gate, remember?’
‘Good!’ she replied with a quick smile, her cheeks still flushed. ‘I’m just going to do a quick check around outside. I’ll be back.’ He didn’t try to stop her.
In the brisk night air, as her eyes grew accustomed to the dark Darcy sifted through the facts. Conor Stein knew her father and Rod Reeves. Both men had coached rugby league teams at Banksia Cove in the 1980s. Both had left town not long after Grant’s death. Both had built high profiles and fortunes in Sydney. ‘Conor Stein,’ she said out loud. She’d read that name somewhere. Maybe it was the shooting of his wife and daughter.
She walked around to the front of the restaurant and perched on a low wall. Her phone was down to sixty percent, but she figured it was worth it. She typed in Conor Stein and got a few thousand hits for various social media sites. She tried his name with ‘shooting’. This time the search engine gave her different options: CONOR STEIN, WOMAN AND CHILD MURDERED IN GANGLAND HIT.
‘That’s him,’ she muttered, clicking on an article from the ABC.
The story had three photos attached. A younger, sleek Conor, hair cut short and fashionably tousled, blue tie perfectly knotted and his smile wide, stared out at her. The next photo was a head and shoulders shot of a glamorous woman, wearing an evening dress and glittering earrings. She was looking straight at the camera, her chin up and her eyes wide. The last photo showed a girl, almost a teenager, who’d inherited her mother’s beautiful looks. Her smile was shy, as though it didn’t get used as often as it should. Her head was tucked to one side and she squinted as though the bright sun was blinding her.
Darcy read on.
‘A gangland-style hit is believed to be responsible for the death of the wife and daughter of a chief executive of Reeves International Constructions. Doctor Annabel Stein, 41, a paediatric physician, and Lily Stein, 10, were gunned down outside the young girl’s school. There were no witnesses to the shooting and according to a police spokesman it had all the hallmarks of an organised-crime killing.
‘Mr Conor Stein is the Chief Financial Controller at RIC and has been in that position for two years. He’s not been available for comment. Mr Rod Reeves has praised his senior accountant as a man of the highest integrity. He said he and his company were deeply shocked by the murder of Mr Stein’s family. Police investigations are continuing. People with information should contact Crime Stoppers . . . ’ The article was dated a little over two years ago.
Met Rod Reeves a couple of times? Darcy snorted. Conor wasn’t telling fibs – he was outright lying to her.
She typed in Rod Reeves and found a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, an exposé on some of the union battles RIC had been involved in on its building sites. It was a litany o
f breaches, which in at least two cases had led to the death of RIC employees. There was also mention of Rod Reeves’ gambling habits, including astronomical sums sunk into betting on football games, games of all the codes played in Australia. His name cropped up again in an article about match-fixing. The charge against a rugby league player stuck, but the case against Reeves, along with several other men, was yet to go to trial.
‘I knew Reeves was a first rate jerk,’ Darcy said, looking across the timber decking as she tried to digest it all. Was Conor Stein in Banksia Cove for a reason? She searched for the date of the hearing. Two weeks away.
She got to her feet and followed the faint glow of the path around the building, then cut across the lawn to the caretaker’s building. Conor was sitting at the table where she’d left him
Darcy stood across from him and leant on the table, took a deep breath. ‘Please tell me that by some quirk of fate the man I ended up rescuing from his sinking yacht is not trying to bring down Rod Reeves because of match-fixing in the NRL. That would be too much of a coincidence and I don’t believe in fate.’
Conor looked up at her through those thick dark lashes. ‘Rod Reeves will hang himself eventually, regardless of what I do. It’s more complex than that. I planned to stop off at Bundaberg, but maybe the fates brought me here to Banksia Cove instead. I’m sorry.’
There was something he wasn’t saying, something in his demeanour that screamed a warning. It hit her and she grabbed for a chair. ‘Stirling? My father’s involved as well? You’re going to bring down Stirling . . .’
17
Noah’s police radio squawked with yet another enquiry about the road closure. Choking smoke swirled under the glare of spotlights, shrouding the fire trucks that loomed over the accident site. The jaws-of-life continued to dismantle one of the cars although it was too late for the occupants of the contorted sedan. The injured had left the scene in a fleet of ambulances or helicopters. A rural fire truck was struggling to contain the blaze that was threatening to spread into nearby grazing land. From there it would inevitably end up in the tall stands of eucalypts and once that happened they’d be battling an out-of-control bushfire.
This was a full-scale disaster, not just a road accident. Noah’s brain was foggy with exhaustion as he coughed again and wiped his face with the back of his hand. The chill in the air wasn’t enough to dry the sweat on his face. Fourteen vehicles were caught in the fiery blast as the giant truck carrying oversized machinery ripped down the side of a petrol tanker, opening it up like a box cutter through cardboard.
Traffic in both directions got caught in the blaze. Eight cars, a ute, a mini-van and two more trucks had been unable to avoid the explosion and the death toll had reached ten. The driver of the oversize truck and his guard from the escort vehicle were in shock, huddled in a police car. No one had time to drive them anywhere and the next ambulance was still twenty minutes away. Noah felt sorry for the poor bastards. Police Forensic Crash Unit would make sense of the scene, but they were still several hours away. One of the challenges of rural policing was the tyranny of distance. Everything took time but it wouldn’t matter who they determined was at fault, the driver still had to live with the guilt. Noah would have preferred to get him off the scene as soon as possible, but there were too many injured who needed help first. The highway was likely to remain closed for at least another twelve hours. That cut the lifeline that ran north and south down the Queensland coast. Detours were long and complicated from this point. He knew that the snaking queue of parked vehicles either side of the site would by now stretch for several kilometres. Someone needed to go down the line and tell them the road wasn’t going to be opened any time soon.
He looked around for one of the young constables from Bundaberg, but couldn’t see any more fluoro police vests. They were probably off trying to escort tow truck operators to the scene. There simply weren’t enough resources in a regional area like this to deal with so much carnage. He’d called in a crane to lift the remains of the mining truck and it was on its way from Gladstone, but at the speed something that large travelled, it was still a couple of hours away at best. He took more photos of the scene, knowing every piece of evidence would need to be examined to establish the cause. Someone would have to be held accountable and that would take a long time to establish.
His boots crunched on shards of debris as he made his way over to the Fire Chief. The air was thick with an intense mix of fuel, burnt rubber, grass fire and that unmistakable stench of charred flesh. Everyone involved in tonight’s clean-up would live with the horror for months, even years, to come. Maybe the distress, the anger, the sorrow never really went away, simply accumulated in a dark corner of the mind, Noah thought. At what point did the lid, jammed down so tightly, pop and allow all that poison to flood out? He hoped he never found out.
‘Simon, do you have any more resources heading in?’
‘Mate, the Hervey Bay brigade should be here within an hour. The traffic jam stretches for k’s. And you know what it’s like. People do U-turns without looking, people and their dogs wandering all over the bloody road. They’ll get here as fast as they can, but it’s going to take time.’
‘You reckon you’re going to be able to control the grass fire?’
‘As soon as we get the final two out of this mess, we’ll focus on it. Not that we’ve got much foam left and there’s not a hydrant in sight. We can head up to one of the farms and put water in the tank, but there’s not even a creek with enough flow to allow a pump to run.’
‘And this looks like fog not rain rolling in,’ Noah replied, glancing up at the layer of cloud above them that glowed red from the fire and flashing emergency lights.
‘Think you’re right. No help from the heavens. What a god-awful mess.’
‘Once we do clear the vehicles, how long to clean up the road?’
The fireman shook his head. ‘Couple of hours at least. They moved all the equipment up past Miriam Vale recently to repair the highway there. Two weeks ago all the gear we need to get this sorted was in a depot two k’s down the road.’
‘Two weeks ago the speed limit was forty through here with the road works. We wouldn’t have been standing here at all.’
The fireman sighed. ‘You’re right.’
With a final screech the tortured metal pulled apart. For an instant the firemen were motionless as though drawing a collective breath. Then with a rush they began the gruesome task of retrieving the occupants. Simon headed over to the vehicle. Noah saw Elijah, one of Rosie’s extended family manoeuvring to fit into the twisted frame. He was the lad who’d headed south to play football. A badly torn calf muscle had ended his career and he’d slid off the rails. A chance meeting with Noah had put him back on track and into the Fire Service. He’d been home in the Cove for four years. Rosie still fretted over him.
Noah watched as Elijah cut through the webbing of the seatbelt. A horrible job at the best of times, let alone at one a.m. after a five-hour battle to save the driver and her passenger had failed. There was nothing more Noah could do here. As he walked to his squad car his thoughts turned to Darcy again. The break in his heart had never quite mended when she ran away and shut him out. That year was a raw painful memory. His anger had driven him. Anger at Stirling, anger at Grant and, if he was honest with himself, anger and disappointment that Darcy had chosen Grant instead of him.
He’d won a bravery award for dragging a woman out of a burning car seconds before it exploded. In truth, it had had nothing to do with bravery and everything to do with not caring whether he lived or died. When Grace finally caved in and handed over Darcy’s address, he’d almost chickened out. He’d walked up and down outside that dilapidated block of flats knowing Darcy might well reject him again. When he finally burst into a room that reeked of stale cigarettes and alcohol the look on her face was thanks enough. It had still taken another couple of years before he and Darcy were really friends again. He’d accepted that they’d never be more than
that, but it didn’t stop him dreaming, didn’t stop him wanting more. The easy familiarity of their friendship was back. He chivvied her like an older brother, even while his heart ached. Maybe he could cope with that, maybe he couldn’t.
On the other side of the highway the Rural Fire Brigade still battled the fire which had crept closer to the stand of trees. He could see lights on the back end of the blaze. Hopefully they could contain it after all. His radio crackled and he responded to a call. Someone in a car was trying to force their way through the backlog of cars on the highway because they were convinced their daughter was in one of the vehicles. The young constable sounded overwhelmed. Positively identifying some of the victims would take days, leaving next of kin in limbo. The details of the vehicles that could be identified had all been called through. In houses scattered the length of Australia’s east coast, people would be waking up to a knock on their door as their lives irrevocably changed. Even for those lucky to survive tonight’s inferno, the journey back to normality would be long and hard.
By the time Noah reached the police roadblock the constable was physically restraining a middle-aged man who had tears running down his cheeks.
‘Sir, please, you need to calm down.’ Noah stood in front of him, using his height and breadth to take charge.
‘Just let me through,’ the man yelled. People from the vehicles closest were standing around staring, but no one had tried to intervene.
‘No, sir. The injured have all been taken to hospital already and the site is still not safe. Let me walk you back to your car.’ The man tried to shake off Noah’s hand, but the policeman had a good grip. ‘This way please. You can tell me why you think she’s been involved in the accident.’
