Mark carried another box to the ute and slid it on to the tray. ‘I can understand why people think that way.’ And so he’d left the graffiti there, instead of spending time cleaning it off this afternoon. ‘The I-don’t-remember explanation from politicians is more than overused.’
‘Yep,’ she said dryly. ‘You may be the only politician in the history of the world who has used it legitimately.’
He replayed her words again in his head to make sure he’d heard them correctly. Confident, unequivocal, unambiguous. His mood lifted. ‘You believe me.’
‘Yes, I believe you. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’ She clasped her bag closer to her body and glanced up the street. ‘Might be best if we go inside.’
Observing her caution, he closed the door firmly behind them.
When she saw six years worth of paperwork stacked by the door, her old quicksilver smile lit her face and she teased, ‘Have you been waiting for the filing elf, Mark?’
Despite everything, he couldn’t help but grin in return. ‘Are you volunteering?’
‘Oh, not me. I’m all for the paperless office. Not that I’ve achieved it, yet.’
‘Me neither.’ He held open the tellers’ gate for her. ‘Come on through to my office, and tell me what you’ve found.’
‘Does the police file have photos of the accident site?’ she asked.
‘One. Not very clear.’
‘I think I have more. And I want to see them.’
More photos of the accident … he couldn’t see why that might be important, but he didn’t press her. She’d come to him, and he valued the trust and the renewed ease between them despite the circumstances.
As he led her towards his office, from outside came the sudden rev of an engine under strain, and a movement beyond the high, timber-framed window caught his eyes – a small flash of light flying through the air, and the crash of glass breaking.
He bolted back for the door and yanked it open. Flames spread over the back of his ute, the boxes well alight, heat already radiating.
‘What the—’ exclaimed Jenn, just behind him.
No time to say the words. A Molotov cocktail. And four twenty-litre plastic containers of fuel on the back of the vehicle, less than three metres from them.
He slammed the door shut, grabbed her hand and dragged her behind the timber barrier of the counter, pushing her down to the floor and dropping on top of her as two explosions in quick succession blasted glass, bricks and flames all around them.
NINE
She didn’t want to open her eyes; she just wanted to curl into the foetal position and scream and scream to block out the echoing all-too-familiar noise in her head – the multi-layered instantaneous sounds of a car exploding; plastic, metal, tearing, burning, bursting through the air, sounds playing again and again and again from her memories and nightmares, the images of her father, her mother—
No. Not this time. The panic in her brain didn’t quite dull her awareness of here and now, of memory and reality. No images, other than the fire on the tray of the ute. No-one in the car this time.
Breathe. She had to breathe and think and—
Her brain snapped back into full mindfulness. Searing pain in her left ankle. Heat. A roar underneath the ringing in her ears, acrid smoke clogging her nose and mouth. She opened her eyes to the hell of wild orange flames in the swirling dust and smoke. Like yesterday. Not like yesterday. Flames all around her. A heavy weight on top of her, immovable. Panic surged again and she struck out with her hand, tried to move, tried to shout, anything to get out of here.
The weight on her shifted and strong hands rolled her back, closer against the counter, and it was Mark thrusting a handkerchief into her hand, lightly pressing her fingers and the cloth against her mouth. Mark, protecting her with his body. The flickering light reflected in his eyes, and on the blood trickling down his face.
‘Are you hurt?’ He gripped her shoulder, his face tight as he rapidly looked over her for injuries.
Part of her still reeled in panic but rationality started to regain control. They were alive. They might have a chance. She tried to move her ankle, couldn’t help wincing, but it functioned. ‘I can walk.’
Walk or burn – the stark reality left no choice. Fire was quickly surrounding them, the brochures and information sheets near the window dispersed by the blast, a thousand lit matches among the debris of wood, brick, paper and plaster. Flames grew everywhere. One of the chairs at a desk already flared high, and she could hear the growl of fire in the reception area as a choking black smoke filled the room.
Mark coughed, and waved in the direction of his private office, where they’d been heading just seconds ago. ‘Extinguisher by the door. Wait here.’
Gulping in a breath from the clearer air near the floor, he crossed the room in a crouching run beside the counter, kicking burning debris out of his way. He had the extinguisher off its hook within seconds, blasting a spray of flame suppressant around, dousing flames between her and the door.
She shifted to a crouch, her weight on her good foot, bracing herself to move.
‘Keep down,’ Mark called, and she crawled along the floor for the length of the counter, her head low, through the smoke and heat towards him.
With the door closed, she couldn’t see if whatever was beyond was alight, but they could not stay here. As Mark continued to douse the flames around them, she reached up to touch the door handle – warm but not blistering. Mark motioned her to the protected side of the door, and signalled her to pull the handle as he readied a blast from the extinguisher.
There were no flames directly behind the door, no sudden back draft, and she limped after him into a corridor, dragging the door closed behind her. To their right, the door to his office was open, with fire taking possession of the room and smoke swirling into the corridor.
Mark sprayed around the doorway of the office with the extinguisher, clearing it temporarily of flame, and with his shirt tail wrapped around his hand, he grasped the handle and yanked it closed.
The shut doors gave them slight protection, dulling the sounds and softening the garish light. There was less smoke here, but she struggled to draw breath, her throat and lungs still raw from yesterday now not coping with burning-fuel fumes. A coughing fit took hold of her, doubled her over, made her gasp for air between racking coughs. Pain and smoke blurred her vision, dark spots danced before her eyes, and her knees hit the floor, then her hands. Crawl. She’d have to crawl out of here. If she could.
She could hear Mark coughing, his own smoke inhalation as bad as hers.
Her lungs screamed for air and her injured ankle scarcely worked, buckling under her weight so that Mark had to half-carry her, but she forced herself to move, and they staggered together down the corridor, a green exit sign dimly visible through the smoke. He dragged her the last few metres, fumbled for awkward seconds with the lock before it finally gave, and pushed her out into the fresh air of the back lane.
‘Careful – steps,’ he said, his arm a vice around her waist, the only thing preventing her from falling down the steep stone stairs.
The air was cooler on her face, but she couldn’t breathe it, and the stairs faded out of focus and then out of her vision as she slipped into blackness.
Mark caught her weight before she collapsed to the ground. His own chest struggling for air, fear for her safety and pure adrenaline kept him going, lifting her and forcing his legs to carry her beyond the burning building. His eyes glued to her face, he watched intently for signs of breathing, of a pulse. She had to breathe. He had to make her breathe. Ten seconds, fifteen … far enough away to be safe for now, he dropped to one knee, then the other, lowering her to the stairs leading into another building.
She moved her head, coughed, muttered a swear word, and the surge of relief at seeing her taking in air almost made him light-headed.
‘Hold still, Jenn. You’re safe.’ The words grated against his raw throat. ‘You’re safe now.’
She tried to push herself up anyway but groaned and closed her eyes and he shifted so that he cradled her head in his arm.
He could hear sirens in the distance but his vision centred on her, nothing else. Her hair fell back from her face, faint bruising visible on her jaw and cheek from Mick’s assault, and her lips moved as she tried to swallow. He kept his fingers lightly on her wrist, monitoring her pulse. Other than her ankle, he could see no injuries from the explosion, no burns, but she’d collapsed, fainted, and that worried him.
Her reddened eyelids fluttered open again and she looked straight up into his face. ‘Mark. You’re bleeding.’
‘I’m okay.’ He wiped a new trickle of blood off his cheek with the back of his hand. His head pounded, every breath clawed through his throat and lungs, his eyes stung, but it didn’t matter. He had to get an ambulance for Jenn.
Lifting her head gently, he moved from under her. ‘Just lie here, Jenn. Get your breath back. I’ll go for help.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she protested, but he didn’t wait to argue with her.
He pulled his phone from his pocket to call an ambulance but he could hear sirens of emergency vehicles approaching. Ignoring the drumbeat throbbing in his head, he forced himself to run up to the main street to direct them around to the lane. About to turn the corner, he almost barrelled into someone running towards him. Steve Fraser. He’d probably come straight from the police station in the next street after hearing the explosion. Steve grasped him by the arm. ‘Mark! Thank God. Is there anyone else in there? There’re two cars.’
‘Jenn’s out – around here.’ When he turned he saw her sitting up and clasping her ankle. So much for resting. ‘Need an ambulance.’
‘Already coming,’ Steve said. ‘Call went straight in when I heard the explosion.’
Echoing his words, the resounding crash of structure collapsing rolled through from the street, and the back door to his office building blew open, less than twenty metres from Jenn. If the fire spread …
Jenn clambered to her feet in the few seconds it took Mark to reach her, Steve close behind him.
‘Just strained,’ she insisted breathlessly when he put his arm around her to take some of her weight. ‘Not broken. I can hop.’
By unspoken agreement, one on either side of her, Mark and Steve supported her, almost carried her, so that even her good foot hardly touched the ground as they hurried up the lane to the safety of the main street. Mark flagged down the ambulance as it approached and it pulled in beside them.
In the flurry of questions and oxygen masks and monitors, Mark sat on the old stone gutter and kept Jenn in his sight while a paramedic helped her on to a gurney and attended to her. Gary Meadows, the senior paramedic, gave him an oxygen mask and hunkered beside him to inspect the wound on his head.
‘Do you know what hit you?’ he asked.
‘No idea. Could’ve been anything.’ A piece of glass, fragment of brick or wood or metal. Something larger would have knocked him out or killed him.
‘We’ll take you both down to the hospital. Doc Cameron will want to take a look at you.’
Scans and observations for the next few hours – standard drill for head injuries, and he’d go along with it for a short while because he understood the risks and wasn’t stupid. And because they’d take Jenn there, and he would stay until assured she wasn’t badly injured.
Mark inhaled more of the oxygen and attempted to slow his adrenaline-loaded metabolism. His pulse rate and blood pressure still spiralled higher than normal, chafing for action. His thoughts raced just as fast, questions of who and how and why spinning without answers, but he kept coming back to the one stark fact: Jenn could have died. She could have died or been badly burned or injured more severely in the blast. He scarcely believed that they’d both come out of the inferno alive.
She lay on the gurney, her hair dark against the white pillow, eyes closed, but even with the oxygen mask obscuring much of her face he could see her wince as Gary’s offsider wrapped a brace around her ankle.
He started to stand, to go to her, but Gary pushed him down with a firm hand on his shoulder.
‘I can see another cut on your head, round the back here.’
Mark acquiesced only because he had no place by Jenn’s side. She’d shown clearly enough over the years that she didn’t need or want him.
Now that Gary had drawn attention to the back of his head, he registered the small stinging pains against the background of other aches.
Gary made quick work of checking and cleaning blood from the cut and although his professionalism never faltered, in the absence of his usual steady chatter Mark sensed the new distance, as if their many years’ acquaintance and their several seasons together on the Birraga cricket team no longer counted.
Something cool pressed against his skin, and Gary confirmed he had more than the current incident on his mind when he abruptly asked, ‘I don’t suppose the blow to your noggin has knocked your memory back?’
‘It doesn’t usually happen like that,’ Mark explained. ‘The memories are gone, never laid down in my long-term memory.’ And he had to live with that empty space, rely on others to fill in the gaps. Like an ambulance officer who’d been at the scene. ‘Were you on duty, the night of the accident?’
‘Me? No. It was a month or two before I moved to Birraga.’
‘Do you know who was?’
‘Shorty Cooper, I think. Not sure who was with him. Might have been the guy I replaced. Sad case, that was. Depression, stress, trauma – I don’t know what the problem was but it got to him bad and he ended it.’
Dead. Another potential witness no longer able to talk. Coincidence or something else? Mark’s suspicions kicked up a few notches. Even more so because Shorty – six-foot-five Will Cooper – had left the ambulance service after a year or two, taken over his father’s car yard, and married Dan Flanagan’s daughter.
Closing her eyes to regain some sort of equilibrium didn’t shut out reality, or Mark’s conversation with the ambulance officer. Gary, he’d called him. It shouldn’t surprise her that Mark was on first-name terms with just about everyone.
It got to him bad and he ended it … One of the paramedics who attended the original accident was dead? She opened her eyes, gripping her fingers tighter around her bag containing the newspaper reports and Wolfgang’s images. Larry evasive and scared, an ambulance officer dead, and Wolfgang telling her to be careful? And all three of them witnesses to the scene of the accident.
Rationally, that added up to quite enough to invoke suspicion, justify questions. But, off kilter from the shock of the explosion and close escape, the uneasiness rising within her didn’t need rational justification.
Gary and his colleague were doing paperwork at the door of the ambulance. She beckoned to Mark and pushed the oxygen mask up as he rose quickly and came to her side, resting a hand on the edge of the gurney, but not touching her. For all that she could cope alone, didn’t need anyone, a small part of her craved that human connection, and noted its absence.
Not important. The situation had become life-and-death last night, with Jim’s passing, this morning with Doc Russell’s, and now even more imperative with Mark’s and her close call. Her voice was still as croaky as a crow’s but that gave her an excuse to whisper, ‘Where did Fraser go?’
‘Not far. Just over there.’ He nodded towards the intersection. ‘Talking with a constable.’
‘Tell him to come to the hospital. With a laptop. Please. We need to see – to copy – the images. Before something else happens.’
The harsh line of his mouth and unsmiling eyes reflected her unease. ‘Yes. I was thinking the same thing. I’ll go and tell him.’
He left his oxygen mask on the mattress and walked away, responding to Gary’s protest with the assurance he’d be back in a minute.
‘We’ll get you both down to the hospital,’ Gary told her, as they readied the gurney and loaded her and it into the ambulance.
<
br /> Birraga hospital. Again. The prospect made her even more nauseous than the smoke inhalation did and she had to fight the wild urge to scramble off the mattress and escape the ambulance to the open space outside. She bit her lip, willing the tears of desperation away. Just for a couple of hours. Just until she could breathe comfortably. Just until Mark’s head wound was examined and X-rayed, because she doubted he’d stay at the hospital if she didn’t. She’d worked among death and danger in war zones and natural disasters; she’d confronted criminals and powerful people and unravelled corruption and vice. Birraga hospital contained nothing that threatened her.
Except her memories and the pain of her past.
She caught a glimpse of Mark through the open door, and heard Gary ask, ‘Are you okay to ride in the front?’
‘Yes, sure.’ He stepped into her view, hand on the door as he looked in at her. ‘You’re okay in there?’ She wasn’t, but she nodded anyway, and he added, ‘Steve’ll come as soon as he can.’
Gary filled in more paperwork during the short distance down the main street to the hospital. It was just three minutes before the ambulance stopped outside the emergency department. Gary slid the gurney out into the fresh air, and Mark was waiting, walking in through the automatic doors alongside her.
Conscious of his head injury and the pallor beneath his tan, she wanted to protest that he should be lying on the gurney, not her, but in her distracted state she’d left it too late, and they were already inside.
At least the nurse who’d been on duty last night recognised her and directed Gary to take her to the cubicle furthest from the bed where Jim had died. Mark took a seat by her side instead of following instructions to take the next bed. Dishevelled and grimy with dust and ash, his eyes reddened with irritation, blood drying on his neck and shirt – he had to be feeling as shitty as she did, but even in boyhood he’d put others first. Put her first.
A rare man, Mark Strelitz, and she should be thanking him for saving her life, for getting her out of the inferno, for staying with her … yet the words were sucked in to the whirlpool of her emotional overload and she hated her own inadequacies, her failure at something so simple.
Darkening Skies Page 13
