Darkening Skies (35 page)

‘Calum, do you know Mark? He’s just over there. Go and ask him to help you find Dana.’

She kept hold of Ollie, turning his face away from the scene. She might have tried talking to him but if he didn’t like noise … she tried humming a lullaby, a song her mother
had taught her, the melody gentle and soothing. Gradually he quietened, and when Mark brought over Calum and a teary Dana with a dressing on her arm, Jenn stayed with them, sitting on the dirt by the road in the shade, reassuring them while police, emergency services and frantic parents arrived in a constant buzz of movement and noise.

When Chloe arrived, Calum recognised her car and flagged her down before she reached the bus. She dropped to her knees beside her children, tears running down her cheeks, trying to hug them and inspect them for injuries all at once, pulling them back into her arms, all together, and telling them again and again how much she loved them.

No longer needed there, Jenn left the children in her care. Her cousins would be all right. Other children might not be so fortunate.

When she offered help, a paramedic asked her to squeeze into a cramped space in the bus and hold an IV bottle for one of the children. Cody, someone told her, so she held his small hand and talked to him although he was barely conscious. Cody Pappas, the name on the nearby lunchbox read.

She didn’t know how long she knelt there with Andrew and Erin’s son in the stuffy heat, thick with the odour of blood. She couldn’t cry, couldn’t fall apart, not here. They all needed her to be strong: Cody, the children, their parents, the emergency-services teams working around her – especially those still trying to release Gemma, the young teacher, from the crumpled front of the bus. She had an IV drip now, and pain meds, and was conscious and clung to Karl who stayed with her in the wreck, holding her hand, telling her she’d be on the Royal Flying
Doctor Service plane to Sydney as soon as the rescue team cut apart the bus to get to her.

A paramedic tapped her on the shoulder. ‘We can take him out now. His parents are just outside.’

Her legs cramped, she stumbled out of the way, out of the bus. Someone helped her through the window, on to the ground. Andrew. She didn’t know what to say but managed a weak smile of thanks and staggered a few metres away, so Cody’s parents wouldn’t see her fall apart and think the worst. She pressed her hand against her mouth, stifling the sobs.

Arms steadied her, closed around her. Mark. She hid her face in his shoulder and gulped for even breaths.

‘The kids are all alive, Jenn,’ he said. ‘Mostly minor injuries. We’ll all get through this, okay?’

She nodded, wanting to believe him.

‘Mark?’ The voice came from a short distance away.

Steve. More formal than usual. She turned to see him, his face grey, his shirt dirty and blood spattered.

‘Mark, there’s a major-incident investigator being flown in from Sydney, due in fifteen minutes, and he’s going to want to interview you. It’s a double fatality. And it’s standard procedure that, since your vehicle was involved in the accident, you have to be breathalysed.’

Breathalyser. Investigation. Fatalities. The implications of the words made her reel. They’d want someone to blame. Both the other drivers were dead, and Mark was already under a cloud.

From the paleness of Mark’s face as he nodded wordlessly, the same thought had occurred to him.

‘The
accident was not Mark’s fault, Steve,’ Jenn insisted. ‘And he hasn’t been drinking.’

Steve’s sharp glance reminded her that he was both Mark’s friend and a police officer. ‘That’s why I’ve asked Leah Haddad – a neutral person – to breathalyse you, Mark. She’ll also take you into Birraga for the formal interview and blood samples if necessary. We’ll make sure our facts are fully documented. I suggest we go find her right now. The national media has already scrambled, and we’ll have TV choppers landing any minute. The last thing we need is a photo of you blowing into the breathalyser on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow.’

The
investigator’s offsider interviewed Jenn thoroughly, pinning down every small detail, every aspect of the drive between Marrayin and the accident. Inconsequential things, such as whether the radio was on, whether the windows were open, through to the more significant ones – how many times the truck hit the car, how hard it hit, when the car started to swerve off the road, how Mark had tried to avert the accident. Presumably so he could check her story against Mark’s for consistency.

Then he asked her about Mick. She hadn’t realised, in the chaos and urgency of the crash scene, who had driven the truck. Steve told her, on the drive to Birraga, after Leah had insisted that she and Mark be transported separately.

‘He was my uncle. For five years he was my guardian until I left town when I was seventeen. He was an emotionally and sometimes physically abusive alcoholic, and I did not set eyes
on him again until Saturday morning, when he assaulted me. Karl Sauer and Mark witnessed that assault.’

‘Did you report this assault to the police?’

‘I discussed it with Sergeant Matthews shortly afterwards, but I decided against making a formal complaint. Now I regret that decision.’ If she’d reported the assault, perhaps Mick would have been arrested, or at least formally warned to keep away from her. Would that have been enough to stop him from waiting on the Birraga road near Mark’s place for the car half the town knew she was driving? Had he been waiting for her or for Mark?

She was nauseous and thirsty, her head ached, and although she’d washed as best she could in the police station bathroom she still had blood on her clothes and the smell of it in her nostrils. But she owed it to the kids on the bus, to the Dungirri community, to help the police get to the truth of the accident.

‘Sergeant, my uncle was drinking and quite irrational in his anger towards me and towards Mark on Saturday morning. I believe he hated me for being alive instead of his daughter. He behaved in a similar way immediately after her death, which was one of the reasons I left and didn’t come back until now. Now, please, unless you have more questions, I’d like to see Mark, and then go to the hospital.’

Suddenly all concern, he asked, ‘Are you injured? In pain? You should have informed me.’

‘I’m okay. But I’m worried about my young cousins. And my friends’ children.’
And Mark
. Especially Mark. At the crash site he’d been constantly on the go, a calm and reassuring presence everywhere, looking after injured children, connecting parents
with kids, keeping track in all the confusion and activity of the names of children and which towns the ambulances were taking them to, liaising with the incident controller to avoid two kids from the same family being sent to different places. He knew all those kids and their parents. Although he didn’t show it, the stress must have been immense. And then to be interviewed at length …

‘I think Mr Strelitz may be some time,’ the sergeant said. ‘If you wait in the reception area, I’ll have someone drive you to the hospital.’

With officers still out at the accident site, the police station was almost deserted and it was Steve who found her waiting on the hard plastic chair. He collapsed into the chair beside her. ‘Mark’s still with the Inquisitor. Would you like to wait in my office or go to the hospital?’

The Inquisitor? That didn’t bode well. ‘I’ll wait. It may be chaos still at the hospital.’

‘What makes you think it’s not chaos in my office?’

It
was
chaos, with files and papers all over the desk, but at least there were no injured children, and the chair he emptied for her was more comfortable than the ones in the reception area.

‘Listen, Jenn, I haven’t had time to tell you the latest development. I had Larry Dolan from the
Gazette
on my list of people to talk to but I haven’t been able to get on to him. But the Inverell cops contacted us this morning. A man walked into their station yesterday with a box of photos. He said they were evidence the police needed and he had more in the car. He didn’t come back in and a while later the cop wandered out and found a vintage sports car stacked with boxes of photographs.’

‘Larry?’

‘His
car. No sign of him, though. Turns out he cleared out his bank accounts before he went to the police station.’

‘He’s disappeared?’

‘So far. After making sure the police would get the photographs. We’ll put out an alert for him.’

‘The photographs?’

‘From the few they scanned and sent, I’d say it might be the original prints of the Bohème pictures. But there’re thousands of them, apparently. We went out to Dolan’s place early this afternoon. Found the storeroom where they’d been kept. But we also found hard drives full of images of a nastier sort. We’ve given them straight over to the Feds.’

Nasty images that the Feds investigated – there was only one likely interpretation of that. ‘Child pornography?’

‘Yeah. We don’t know for sure it’s Larry’s, though. And we didn’t see any production equipment or kiddy things in the house. Some guys just consume it, don’t create it.’

Certainty settled in the pit of her stomach, along with the sorrow of disillusionment. All the cheek, the showy car, the boyish charm – all hiding a dark and terrible addiction.

‘If someone found out about the porn they could have held it over him.’

‘That’s what I’m thinking. Dan Flanagan’s place has been searched several times since his sons were arrested, all his records seized for examination. The slippery bastard doesn’t keep anything incriminating near him. I’m wondering how many other caches of evidence we’d find if we searched the whole town.’

‘Wolfgang
worked part-time for the
Gazette
. I wouldn’t have said he and Larry were friends, though. But he must have got the photos from Larry, somehow.’

‘Yep. Although whether or not Larry knew is anyone’s guess.’ Steve picked up a pen from his desk and rotated it in his fingers. ‘Interesting thing about your mate Wolfgang, though. We’re trying to track down his next of kin, and we’re not having much luck so far. Other than a local bank account connected to his photographic website and paying his household bills, there’s astonishingly little evidence that Mr Schmidt existed.’

Schmidt. Smith. Pick a common name, one shared with thousands of others, and travel to the other side of the world. There would be a story there, behind the man. Her journalistic curiosity already picked at a few threads … no. Maybe one day, but not now.

They both started at the sound of a door opening down the corridor. Male voices.

‘We’ll be in touch, Mr Strelitz. Thank you for your cooperation.’

She was on her feet and out the door in seconds. Mark walked towards her down the corridor. Exhaustion dragged at his shoulders but he smiled at her. Uncaring who watched, she walked into his arms and held him tightly, and she wasn’t sure if she gave strength or took it or if they created it, together.

‘There’s no problems, Jenn. They just have to go by the book and ask every question. You know, in case those pesky journalists ask awkward questions.’

She understood,
respected the process, even if she and Mark had been the focus of it tonight. But she also knew how easily prejudice or corruption or even incompetence could twist things, obscure the truth, damage lives, and she’d been afraid.

Steve pulled his door shut, jingling car keys. ‘I’m going home to my well-deserved bed,’ he announced behind them. ‘You two are welcome to cras—’ He caught the word and corrected it, ‘
Stay
in my spare room if you like.’

Mark let Jenn answer. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But I need to go to the hospital first.’ Mark nodded, and she continued, ‘Can you drop us off there?’

‘Not a prob. My place is just opposite. Probably the closest parking anyway, with all the crowd tonight.’ He twisted a key off the key ring and tossed it to her. ‘I won’t wait up. Just let yourselves in when you’re ready.’

At Birraga hospital the whole community had swung into action, and Mark could see that despite the scope of the crisis immediate needs were being met. He had the count in his head: two seriously injured adults and two children airlifted to Sydney or Newcastle; nine children with fractures and other injuries sent by ambulance to other towns, including two to Tamworth. Which left twenty children and two adults to be assessed and treated at Birraga – a small hospital with fourteen beds and an aged-care wing with ten.

The small parking area overflowed, and cars were parked all along the adjacent street. In the sporting oval across the road the lights lit it to daylight, and an ambulance waited while the rescue helicopter, rotors loud, came in to land.

Not a
good sign. It meant another child with serious injuries, another family who’d have to travel, find accommodation, juggle jobs and kids and commitments for days or weeks.

The emergency department overflowed into the foyer and the garden, with parents, children, high-school siblings, grandparents and others filling the few tables and garden seats, some sitting on the grass, some standing. On the wide lawn beyond, council staff had almost finished erecting a marquee, the hospital auxiliary had an urn going and Rotary members unloaded chairs from a truck.