Darkening Skies Read online

  Also by Bronwyn Parry

  As Darkness Falls

  Dark Country

  Dead Heat

  Darkening Skies

  BRONWYN PARRY

  Copyright

  Published in Australia and New Zealand in 2013

  by Hachette Australia

  (an imprint of Hachette Australia Pty Limited)

  Level 17, 207 Kent Street, Sydney NSW 2000

  www.hachette.com.au

  Copyright © Bronwyn Parry 2013

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be stored or reproduced by any process without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

  978 0 7336 2550 3

  978 0 7336 2829 0 (ebook edition)

  Cover photographs courtesy of Getty Images and Bigstock

  Cover design by Design By Committee

  Contents

  Also by Bronwyn Parry

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bronwyn Parry

  PROLOGUE

  Gil Gillespie. Mark Strelitz stopped listening to the elderly gent sharing his forthright views with him and glanced across Birraga’s main street again. Definitely Morgan ‘Gil’ Gillespie, sitting at a table outside Rosie’s cafe in broad daylight. No longer in witness protection, or wherever he’d been these past few months.

  Gil was someone he needed to see, to speak with. Attempting to maintain some level of courtesy, Mark extricated himself from the conversation he’d been caught in with a promise to look into the matter further, and shook hands with his constituent before he hastened across the street.

  Gil rose as he approached, the violent beating he’d endured months ago still evident in the stiffness in his left arm, his eyes narrowed with the same wariness he’d always carried. Growing up they’d never been close, the gulf between their lives too great, and Gil’s experiences since then had given him few reasons to trust easily. Three years in prison, then fifteen managing a pub in inner-city Sydney and trying to keep it out of mafia influence. A stark contrast to Mark’s life – studying at university, managing the family pastoral company and grazing properties, and six years serving his outback region as an independent member in federal parliament.

  But Gil’s stance against the mafia in Sydney and their connections in Dungirri, when he’d returned a few months ago, had earned Mark’s respect. He’d held the mafia at bay for years but they’d used bent police and local thugs with grudges to get at him, almost beating him to death.

  Mark held out his hand. ‘Gil! I didn’t know you were back.’

  ‘I just arrived.’

  ‘It’s good to see you. Everyone was worried for a while there.’ Worried he wouldn’t survive the night, after he’d been flown out by air ambulance following a police raid to rescue him. ‘You’re well?’

  Mark could have bitten his tongue. Small talk, awkward and out of place with Gil, who rarely practised the social customs that had become natural to Mark.

  Nevertheless, Gil answered with only a hint of irony, ‘Much better.’

  ‘Great to hear it.’ Mark paused. Forget polite enquiries. He had to grasp this opportunity, find answers to the questions that haunted him. Answers only Gil could give him. ‘Gil, would you have a few minutes? There’s a matter I’ve been wanting to discuss with you.’

  Gil hesitated. ‘Yeah, I guess so. I don’t have to be anywhere until six.’

  ‘Thanks. My office is just round the corner – shall we go there?’

  His staff had gone home and the electorate office was deserted but for the two of them. The afternoon sun through the west-facing windows overpowered the air-conditioning, so Mark poured cool drinks and showed Gil into his office.

  Mark looked down at his hands, at the glass in them. What happened in this conversation could change everything. Probably would change everything.

  ‘Gil, I need to ask you about the accident, with Paula.’ The event that tied them together. Eighteen years, half a lifetime ago for them, but not for Paula Barrett, her vibrancy extinguished forever when the car smashed into the tree.

  Gil stilled, wary, but Mark ploughed on. ‘I’ve never regained my memory of it,’ he explained. ‘The medicos think I probably never will. It’s just a black hole in my head. But the thing is … ever since the other month, when you were here, I’ve had dreams, quite often. Always the same – a bloody kangaroo glaring at me in the headlights, a horrendous crunch as we hit the tree.’ He paused and took a mouthful of the cold drink, his throat tight. Then he looked Gil straight in the eye, determined to uncover the truth. ‘The scene I see – it’s always from the driver’s seat. I was driving that night, wasn’t I?’

  Gil stood abruptly, walked to the window and gazed out. ‘It’s just a dream,’ he said.

  ‘I have to know for sure, Gil. I don’t know if what I’m dreaming is a fragment of memory or just my imagination. I don’t remember anything between my birthday the week before and waking up in the hospital. But seeing you again has triggered something in my head. The dream keeps coming again and again and again, and I need to know whether it’s real or not.’

  ‘Leave it, Mark.’ Gil still didn’t look at him, his back rigid, his low voice a rough warning.

  A warning Mark ignored. He rose from his seat and pressed harder for an answer. ‘Can you swear to me that you were driving, Gil? Can you do that?’

  Gil finally turned to face him. ‘It’s ancient history, now. Just let it be.’

  No denial. There would never be a denial. The truth was there in Gil’s unwavering dark eyes and Mark felt the shift in his life, in what he understood about himself, almost as a physical sensation. ‘Why?’

  Gil didn’t respond.

  ‘Damn it, Gil, why?’ Mark demanded. ‘Why did you tell them it was you?’

  Gil let out a slow breath, and the words came with it, tumbling out after years of silence. ‘I didn’t. The old sarge – Bill Franklin – was the first one there, and by then I’d got you out of the car and was doing what I could for Paula. I couldn’t get to her through her door so I was kneeling in the driver’s seat, and Franklin just assumed at first I’d been driving. Then Paula died at the scene and they didn’t know if you’d make it, and everyone was angry, and although Franklin knew by then it was you, not me – well, I guess he figured it was better to blame the feral kid than the town favourite.’

  It made sense; more sense than the lies told and maintained for years. ‘But why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘I was just a kid, an outcast, and way out of my depth.’ Gil grimaced, and for a moment Mark saw the shadow of the isolated youth in the hardened man. ‘It was … made clear to me that I was to carry the blame. And then the first night in the remand centre, the threat was delivered – comply, or Jeanie would suffer. I thought I had no choice. The days went by and you never said anythi
ng to contradict the story. No-one would have believed me without your back-up, and I couldn’t risk anything happening to Jeanie.’

  Jeanie Menotti – the one adult who’d given Gil a chance, employed him at her Truck Stop Café, demonstrated her belief in him. Whoever was behind the cover-up had threatened her to gain Gil’s compliance. Mark clenched his fists tightly, the harshness of Gil’s experience worse than he could have guessed. And all his fault.

  ‘Gil, I wish I knew what to say. “Sorry” is nowhere near enough.’

  ‘You don’t need to say sorry or any other shit,’ Gil said, hard and blunt. ‘It’s done and gone years ago, and you weren’t involved. They stuffed up the rigging of evidence, and the conviction was quashed. I don’t have a record. There’s nothing to fix. There’s no bloody point in bringing it up after all this time.’

  No point? Gil had served three years in prison before being able to prove that the damning blood-alcohol report couldn’t have been his blood.

  ‘There is if it was my fault,’ Mark said firmly, no doubt in his mind. ‘Had I been drinking, Gil? Was I drunk?’

  Gil ran a hand through his hair. ‘You weren’t drunk,’ he said. ‘I was hitching and you offered me a ride. I was only in the car ten minutes or so before the smash. Paula had a bottle of something, offered it around, but you didn’t have any.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I wasn’t already over the limit.’ It didn’t mean that the blood-alcohol report wasn’t his.

  ‘I saw no sign of it. Look, Mark, the accident was just that, an accident, no-one’s fault. Not yours or mine or Paula’s or any bloody kangaroo’s fault. So don’t go being all high-minded and doing anything stupid.’

  Stupid? No, he wasn’t about to do anything stupid. But justice mattered, truth mattered, and it was his responsibility to clear Gil’s name and make the truth known.

  The black hole in his memory swirled, a chasm that might yet swallow his life.

  ONE

  Twenty-four hours on a plane followed by a hot, sleepless night, packing quickly in the early morning and almost nine hours on the road from Sydney to Dungirri, and still Jenn Barrett’s brain grappled to make sense of yesterday’s out-of-the-blue email and the phone message that played on a continual loop in her mind on the long drive.

  ‘Jenn, it’s Mark Strelitz. I hope you get this before you hear it on the news. I need to tell you … Gil Gillespie came back to town again last week and I finally had the chance to talk to him about the accident. I still have no memory of it because of the head injury, likely never will. But, Jenn – I was driving, not Gil. I have to set the record straight and make sure the investigation is reopened.’

  Memories and emotions she’d long ago buried crawled out of their graves and whirled around the stunning fact of Mark’s revelation: he had been driving when her cousin Paula was killed eighteen years ago. Mark, not Gil Gillespie.

  Mark, whose friendship had been the one steady rock in her adolescence. Whose affection she’d eventually rejected. Who had been one of the reasons she’d caught the bus out of Dungirri at seventeen, the day after Paula’s funeral.

  So much for her vow, back then, never to return.

  The gravel road wound through the last kilometre of the thick, dry, Dungirri scrub, and the old familiar tension coiled around her spine as she crossed the low wooden bridge over the creek and into the town.

  A willy-willy stirred up dust and dead leaves and swirled across the road ahead of her. Dust and death. They still clung to Dungirri, the terminal illness of economic and social decay evident in boarded-up shop windows, long-empty houses and scarcely a soul in sight, the main street almost as dead as the cemetery she’d just passed.

  Why the hell had she agreed to come back to this godforsaken hole?

  Because of the desperation in her Uncle Jim’s voice in his phone message last night, the pleading of her cousin Paul’s email. Proud men, both of them, not the kind who could easily ask for help, but out of their depth with this sudden news and worried how Paula’s father Mick would respond.

  But Jenn hadn’t come back just for their sakes. She needed to find out the truth behind Mark’s unexpected confession. Unexpected and very public – at a brief lunch stop in a roadhouse somewhere along the way she’d seen the news of his press conference this morning blaring out from the TV – his shock resignation as an independent member of parliament, and the reopening of the police investigation at his request.

  She gritted her teeth against a wave of nausea. Greasy takeaway food on top of jetlag, fatigue and stress hadn’t been one of her better decisions.

  ‘Get a grip,’ she muttered. ‘It’s only bloody Dungirri. You can sort out this mess and then leave again.’

  Approach it like a story. Use her skills as a journalist. Be objective, rational. Behave as if Paula hadn’t been her cousin, sister, friend. As if Mark were just another politician with a convenient case of amnesia.

  At the end of the block, a couple of cars were parked outside the Dungirri Hotel, a ‘For Sale’ sign attached to the upper veranda, and across the road, a sign advertising ice-cream stood on the path in front of the old general store.

  Undecided about what to do or where to go first, she turned into the street beside the shop and parked in the shade of a tree. As she climbed out of the air-conditioned car, the dry December heat hit her, sucking moisture from her skin. Her legs and back stiff from hours of driving after a day in planes yesterday, she walked back to the corner to stretch her muscles.

  Apart from slight movement in the leaves on the trees along the street, nothing stirred in the hot afternoon. A bulldozer parked across the road marked the recent demolition of Jeanie Menotti’s Truck Stop Café, burned in a fire. A gaping hole in a once-familiar streetscape.

  Old habits resurfaced but she refused to allow her gaze to linger on the dilapidated buildings of the Dungirri showground, or the grassed area of the overgrown show ring where she and her parents had once camped while visiting family. Where everything had changed in one terrifying, soul-ripping moment, condemning her to five years in her Uncle Mick’s uncaring guardianship in Dungirri.

  A crow rose above the showground, black against the bright sky, its harsh caw so desolate in the stillness that Jenn had to close her eyes against the wave of old grief.

  Dust, desolation, death – that about summed up her memories of Dungirri.

  Steeling herself against the temptation to simply turn around, walk back to her car and drive away, she eyed the hotel from across the street. Time hadn’t been kind to it, and she would bet that the accommodation was basic. She could decide later if she would risk staying there, or head into the larger town of Birraga, sixty kilometres further west.

  Right now she needed to bury her memories again, find her objectivity and focus on making some sense of this mess. Sitting in the car, she jotted on a notepad the facts as she knew them from her Uncle Jim’s emails over the past few months and the news reports she’d seen. Fact one: Gil Gillespie’s return to Dungirri almost three months ago. Fact two: Gillespie’s revelations of connections between the Calabrian mafia Russo family from Sydney and the Flanagans, local shady business family and thugs led by wealthy businessman Dan and his sons. Drugs, blackmail, coercion – all the usual organised crime, and she’d seen more than enough of it, all the world over. Fact three: Her cousin Sean’s involvement with the Flanagans and the Russos, and his assault on Gillespie, believing him responsible for their cousin Paula’s long-ago death.

  She paused with her pen on the page so long that the ink ran, forming a blot. There lay the crux of Jim’s and Paul’s concerns – how Mark’s confession would impact on Paul’s brother Sean, guilt-ridden and in prison, and on her Uncle Mick, Paula’s father.

  She didn’t give a fraction of a damn about Mick, but the others – yes, maybe she did. Or maybe this was just personal, about her own needs, her own questions.

  Fact four: Gillespie’s return to the district from witness protection a week ago, Mark’s
meeting with him and subsequent public confession and resignation today, after informing the Barretts privately yesterday.

  And in that line of her scrawled writing lay the focus of most of her questions and her journalist’s scepticism. What the hell had gone on during that conversation between the two men? Exactly what had prompted Mark to throw away his career so abruptly?

  She tossed her pen and notebook on to the passenger’s seat and yanked the car door shut. The best place to find the truth was at the source. And the source, in this case, lived fifteen minutes beyond Dungirri.

  She ignored the catch in her breathing and started the car. Ask questions, investigate, find the truth. She’d been preparing herself for this meeting all day, thrusting her fond, youthful memories of the boy she’d been half in love with firmly into the past; they were irrelevant now.

  The three blocks of the town’s main street disappeared into her rear-view mirror and the road ahead ran straight west into the flat, mostly cleared farmland towards Birraga. Only pockets of scrub and the eucalypts lining the road remained, the paddocks brown and withered in the summer sun.

  All familiar, this road she’d travelled hundreds – probably thousands – of times. She battled the unsettling sense of being thrust back eighteen years in time by looking for the changes. The old O’ Connell wool shed, flattened in a storm when she was a kid, had been replaced by a new steel machinery shed. The Dawsons had installed solar panels on the homestead roof. The property next door to them had new fences.

  Small, incremental changes. Nothing that disturbed the shape of the land; the paddocks stretching for kilometres, the cone of Ghost Hill towering over the plains, the green smudge of trees in the distance marking the Birraga River, snaking its way across the country.

  A kilometre or so before Ghost Hill she slowed, shifting down a gear, indicating for the turn-off even though there were no other cars around to notice.

  As she made the turn on to the dirt road, a wave of nostalgia caught her unawares. The kurrajong trees still shaded the short row of mail boxes and the tilting corrugated-iron shelter where she’d waited, day after day, with Mark and Paula for the school bus into Birraga High. Despite all the frustrations and unhappiness of her youth and her Uncle Mick’s resentful guardianship, she, Paula and Mark had shared good times and a strong friendship.