Darkening Skies

by Parry, Bronwyn

  After placing the microfilm back in its box, she collected her pages from the printer, glancing over them to check they’d printed all the text. She stopped abruptly, her eye drawn to the photo of the accident.

  The low quality of the microfilm made the image grainy and she stared at it, blinking salty eyes to try to make out the detail. No, to be certain she needed the original image. Now she just had to find out if Clem or Larry were still around, and if she could get it.

  With the arson investigator, WorkCover inspector, insurance assessor, police forensic officers and Steve all arriving, the driveway soon filled with vehicles. Mark answered their initial questions and then left them to their work. Stand around passively watching while they picked over the remains of his home? No, not when he had a property to run, and no-one to help him do it.

  Jim’s dogs leapt with ears-up eagerness on to the tray on the back of the quad bike. They knew Mark and accepted direction from him, keen to work. Out in the sun-hot paddocks checking water troughs, dams and stock, his physical restlessness found some ease. He wished he could spread that ease to the crowded, racing activity of his thoughts, but planning what needed to be done on the property only added another layer to the discordant chorus of concerns in his head.

  The sale of two hundred steers just before the manager left a few weeks ago meant that Marrayin wasn’t heavily stocked at present, but he had heifers to move from one paddock to another, this season’s calves to be marked and, he discovered when he reached the east river paddock, a mob of feral goats and a trampled fence to deal with.

  He prioritised tasks, made plans. First priority – phone Karl and offer him some casual employment. He’d already proved to be a good worker. Mark would have to go over his finances and see if he could juggle things to offer Karl something more permanent, or at least regular. Like most rural communities, limited employment opportunities in the district meant that Dungirri’s younger people left for larger towns and cities, but if the town were to have a future, it needed people like Karl to stay. Mark would do what he could to enable that.

  He rode along the river and up past the stockyards to the three long-empty workers’ cottages, and the old shearers’ quarters. He left the quad bike under a tree to check inside. There was some basic equipment and tools stored there, plus a fridge in the old kitchen for days when a few people were down here working. And there were memories.

  Jenn kept coming to his thoughts, each part of the property holding recollections of working, playing, and exploring the landscape with her. Always Jenn stood out more than Paula, although he could still see, too, the warmth of Paula’s smile, hear her teasing him with the cheeky confidence of their four weeks’ age difference. He never minded, because she needed all the confidence she could find within. But Jenn, for all her reserve and emotional armour, had a stronger sense of self and certainty. From horse riding to mustering, school work to journalism, if she set her mind to something she usually succeeded.

  But she’d never smiled enough. She still didn’t. Granted, there hadn’t been anything to smile about since yesterday and no reason for her to smile at him now, but he wished he could see her again as she had once been, whooping with exhilaration after a good gallop, or sitting here on the old shearers’ kitchen table, sweating from a day’s work in the yards, tossing her head back to glug down a bottle of water, laughing as he tipped it to spill on to her face.

  He blinked hard to dislodge the image. Nothing but dust and daydreams here now, and he had no time for any of them. Fatigue descending on him, he moved leaden feet out into the sunshine again. At the tank stand he splashed water over his head and face and gulped several mouthfuls from his cupped hands, pouring some into the enamel dish kept there for the dogs and placing it down for them.

  Beyond the sound of their slurps he idly tuned in to the usual background noises – the ever-present buzz of insects; a flock of galahs squabbling; a few cattle in the large wool-shed paddock mildly protesting another’s transgression. But those last sounds were coming from the wrong direction. Unless the cattle were behind the wool shed …

  He called the dogs and started the quad bike. The track from the road to the stockyards passed the disused wool shed and he rode up there, expecting to see the beasts come into view. Instead he found a gate that should have been shut swinging wide open, and around twenty young steers calmly grazing along the roadside.

  Hadn’t Jenn said last night that she thought she’d heard a car down this way?

  He stopped on the track. Damn it. It would have been easy enough for the arsonist to leave his vehicle here and approach the house unseen, able to ensure that no-one was around before he broke in.

  To preserve any tyre tracks or other evidence at the gate, Mark went back to the stockyards and out on to the road across the stockyard grid. On his command, the two older dogs, Maggie and Rosie, flanked the cattle but he kept the youngest one, Dash, at his heel, and between them they made short work of moving the cattle into a paddock across the road.

  On his way back along the road up to the homestead Mark stopped to close the wool-shed gate, avoiding touching it where someone might ordinarily handle it. Twenty cattle milling around the gate had churned up the track and obliterated tyre prints, but if there were fingerprints on the gate, he wanted them saved for the crime-scene officers. As he dropped the chain over the hook, something small and white caught his eye in the grass near the base of the gate post. He knelt to see it better. A cigarette butt. He didn’t smoke. Jim didn’t smoke. It might not be relevant … but it might.

  When he arrived back at the house the crime-scene officers were packing up their gear, but on hearing his suspicions Sandy Cunningham sent his offsider down to see what she could find.

  ‘The arson investigator has finished and so have we,’ Sandy told him. ‘You can go into the safe parts of the house to salvage things, but not that whole front part – what’s left of the roof could be unstable. Wouldn’t be anything worth salvaging in there, anyway, I’m afraid.’

  The insurance assessor, a solemn man in his fifties, echoed the warning. ‘I’ll arrange for a structural engineer to come out on Monday. You can go into the kitchen, and that east wing from the second room down, but the rest is unsafe. I’ll be in touch early next week with the report.’

  The kitchen and the east wing – three guest rooms and a sitting room – were all that remained. He might as well keep to his plan to stay in the manager’s cottage.

  His boots crunched on the gravel driveway as he walked along in front of the house to see the state of his bedroom through the remains of the veranda. Yes, they were right. Nothing much left there but charred memories.

  Who? Who had broken in, searched through his papers, fought with Jim, and set the office alight? Who had known the property well enough to enter via the wool-shed gate? He still refused to believe that Jim could have been responsible for the fire. Mick? Perhaps. He knew the place – but then, so did plenty of other people. There had been tens, possibly hundreds of people over the years who had worked on or visited the property. Shearers, when they’d still run sheep; livestock truckers every few months; station hands and fencers; fuel and feed-truck drivers … the list went on and on.

  No easy answers there. He veered his thoughts to practicalities and plans. Clothes. He had Canberra clothes down in the cottage – not much use here, but at least he’d have a suit for the funerals. He needed work clothes and some everyday gear, and food, since the perishables in the fridge would be well gone from the heat. Bedding he could get from the guest rooms. Likewise some furniture. Computer equipment could come from his office in Birraga. And he’d need fuel for the generator since the fuel truck wouldn’t be out this way again for at least a week.

  ‘Bit of a bloody mess, mate,’ Steve said behind him.

  ‘Yes. But I’ve got enough left to get by. It could have been worse.’ Jim’s death still cut sharply into his emotions, but at least Jenn was okay, when she so easily might have been killed.


  ‘I’ve just heard from Adam,’ Steve commented. ‘Mick Barrett’s in the clear for this. Adam was throwing him out of the pub yesterday evening at the time your intruder was lighting fires. And this morning Frank Williams was watering his garden before six and he saw Mick in his house across the road. Frank went over to check on him, because he was on something of a bender last night, and made him coffee.’

  ‘You couldn’t get a much more reliable alibi than Frank.’ Retired accountant, president and driving force of the new Dungirri Progress Association, and member of numerous community groups in the district – he was a man Mark respected a great deal.

  ‘Nope. It’s as solid as a rock.’

  Unlike his own, non-existent alibi. Steve gave no indication that he seriously considered him a suspect, but the fact that no-one could confirm his whereabouts before either crime hung in Mark’s awareness.

  ‘I’ll need to go into town to get some supplies and more fuel for the generator,’ he told Steve. ‘If you don’t need me anymore.’

  ‘No. I’m heading back to Birraga myself. Got a few things to follow up.’

  He didn’t offer anything more and Mark didn’t ask. Police business, and for all that Steve had been more open with him than a stranger might have, he had no role in the investigation other than as a witness.

  Mark respected the law and the judicial process. But two men had died, and he’d do whatever he could to ensure that no-one else did.

  The front door of the Gazette office was closed and locked – not surprising on a Saturday afternoon. But the vintage sports car parked outside was typically Larry, and through the window Jenn could see the overhead fan circling. She rapped on the window using her old signature rhythm for after-hours entry.

  When Larry pulled open the door he stared, mouth dropping open, for a good three seconds.

  ‘Jenn Barrett?’ Incredulity slid into pleasure, and his face lit up with a wide grin. ‘Jenn bloody Barrett, what the hell are you doing here in the back of beyond? Come in, come in.’

  The computer screens on the desks were bigger and the office chairs had morphed from dark brown to muted green-grey upholstery, changes that seemed reflected in Larry himself, carrying extra kilos, his hair grey and receding.

  ‘So, look at you, living the dream, hey? Foreign correspondent, travelling the world.’

  ‘The fantasy doesn’t bear much resemblance to the reality,’ she said. ‘Long hours, a lot of travelling, and no glamour. Just as Clem warned me. Is he still around?’

  ‘Clem? Retired five years ago. Then had a heart attack a couple of years back when he was out fishing with some mates. Not a bad way to go.’

  For a quiet man who’d struggled with his health but loved fishing and the outdoors? ‘Not a bad way at all,’ she agreed, ‘but I’m sorry he’s gone. I would have liked to have seen him again.’

  Larry poured her a mug of coffee from the ever-warm pot and waved her to a seat by his crowded desk, moving a couple of manila folders to a side table behind him as they sat. ‘So, where has the intrepid Jennifer Barrett been reporting from lately?’

  ‘Central Asia. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. Doing a series of reports about gas and water issues.’

  His chuckle bubbled, just as she remembered it. ‘Jeez, Jenn. No need to go all the way to the ’Stans. If you want to do stories on gas and water rights, we’ve got plenty of them here.’

  She nodded in agreement. Here and everywhere. Energy, water, food production – fundamentals for twenty-first century living, and potential battlegrounds for control and exploitation. ‘At least you don’t have several nuclear-armed nations vying for control of the resources.’

  ‘Maybe not. Yet. But where there’s money and big business involved, there’s always a story to tell.’

  His knowing grin and hints piqued her interest but she quashed it and moved on. ‘There’s only one issue I’m interested in here, Larry.’

  Lounging back, hands clasped behind his head, under the pretended casualness he watched her shrewdly. ‘Mark Strelitz and his out-of-the-blue resignation.’

  ‘Yes. What do you know, Larry? What’s your reading of it?’

  ‘I could ask you the same thing. I’m not the one who knows him well.’

  ‘Knew him well,’ she corrected. ‘As teenagers. There’s been plenty of water under the bridge since then.’

  ‘Actually, more drought than floods round here,’ he teased her lightly. A classic Larry avoidance strategy.

  ‘If I wanted a rainfall report, I’d look it up online,’ she said. ‘What’s your take on Mark’s resignation?’

  ‘You can look that up online, too. Breaking news goes out digitally now.’ His eyes sparkled with the pleasure of sparring with her again.

  She took a sip of the strong black coffee and considered him carefully. ‘I didn’t ask for the paper’s take on it. I asked for yours.’

  ‘Why? Are you covering the story?’

  ‘No. I’m on leave. Paula was my cousin, so this is purely personal for me. And I’m asking for your opinion because you’ve been here all these years, you know Mark, his work and what goes on in this district far better than I do.’ Unblinking, she kept her eyes on his. ‘And because you reported the accident originally.’

  He didn’t shift in his chair, or look away, or fidget with anything. He held her gaze steadily, serious now. ‘I did.’ But that steadiness when he’d teased her a moment before, along with his brief answer alerted her.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she said.

  He gave a casual shrug. ‘There’s not much to tell. Wolfie and I were covering Carols by Candlelight at Anzac Park when Clem paged us. We went out there, but it was dark and not much to see since the police wouldn’t let us close. The ambulance had gone, Gillespie had already been arrested, and the cops were just waiting for the forensic people. Wolfie took a few shots with the telephoto lens, and that was it. I put the report together mostly from the police statement.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you still have Wolfgang’s photos?’

  ‘The photos?’ He rubbed his chin, thinking, then shook his head. ‘Nah, I doubt it. He was still shooting film back then, so it would have been negs or hard-copy prints, and there’s not enough space to keep such old files. Clem did a big cleanout before he retired.’

  All reasonable, on the surface. And she would have believed him, if she hadn’t glimpsed Mark’s name on the folder he’d moved out of sight, and seen the edge of a printed photograph not quite tucked in. Of course there’d be a file – paper or digital – relating to Mark. There would have been one well before his election, covering all his community involvement. And knowing the kind of newspaper man Clem had been, in any cleanout all documents relating to Mark would have gone into that file. Even at a paper as small as the Gazette. Especially at a paper this size, serving a regional community that had overwhelmingly elected Mark as their federal representative, twice.

  Larry could be telling the truth. Maybe the photos had been discarded long ago. She knew from her own experience helping out in the office that filing had not been the strength of any of them. So she didn’t challenge him on it. Yet.

  ‘What’s Wolfgang doing these days?’ she asked. ‘Is he still around?’

  ‘Yeah. Rumour has it he makes a bit on the internet from his photography, but God knows how, since every second person has a digital camera now and thinks they’re a porn artist.’

  ‘Erotic art photography. The good work is quite different from porn.’

  ‘It’s all just boobs and bits, if you ask me.’ He grinned. ‘But then, I’ve never been accused of being an artist. He never tried to drag you into his sleaze, did he?’

  ‘No.’ Larry’s teasing and innuendo had bordered more on sleaze than Wolfgang’s polite distance. ‘He knew I was under eighteen, and he never discussed that work with me. A couple of people – a year or two ahead of me – did model for him after they left school. I heard the money was good but it didn’t tempt me. I kn
ew the career I wanted. Having nude images of me floating around wouldn’t have helped it.’

  ‘Always were single-minded, weren’t you?’

  ‘I still am.’

  ‘And now you’re asking questions about a long-ago accident.’

  ‘It seems that the wrong man went to prison. I want to find out why.’

  ‘I’m not so sure Gillespie was innocent. It’s a damned shame that Strelitz decided to fall on his sword. But I doubt they’ll turn up anything new after all this time, let alone anything substantial enough to charge him.’

  ‘Did you hear about the fire at Mark’s homestead last night?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s why I’m here, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Jim Barrett was your uncle, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jenn. I didn’t know him well, but he showed a lot of dignity during the police business around his son being charged with attempted murder. Do you know anything more about the circumstances? Or about the incident in Dungirri this morning?’

  Sometimes she shared information. Other times she kept what she knew close, and right now she didn’t plan on enlightening Larry about anything she’d seen. He could use his own sources and skills. Instead she showed him one of her sweetest smiles. ‘I’m sure the police will release a statement in due course.’

  He laughed out loud. ‘Oh, Jenn, you have grown up, haven’t you, honey?’

  Not many people called her ‘honey’ and got away with it, but she let it slide this time. For all his faults, she owed him for his early encouragement and belief in her. ‘I’ve learned from the best, Larry.’ She rose from her chair. ‘Now, I’d better let you get on with reporting the news.’

  With a promise to catch up for a drink some time, she headed for the door, turning back as she pulled it open. ‘By the way – the photo of the car at the accident site in the newspaper? The inset image of Mark is partly over the rear wheel. I was only looking at it on microfilm, so not great quality, but it kind of looks like the rear wheel isn’t there.’