Authors: Bronwyn Parry
Darkening Skies
As Darkness Falls
Dark Country
Dead Heat
BRONWYN PARRY
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
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
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 anything 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.
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.