Free Darkening Skies by Bronwyn Parry Page A

Mark, Doc Russell did not permit his only daughter to mix outside school with her social inferiors, and Mrs Russell rarely defied her husband’s wishes. According to the doctor’s rigid social hierarchy, the Barretts were somewhere near the bottom, and even Mark didn’t rate highly due to his Polish grandparents’ refugee background. Barbara might as well have been the princess in the tower.
    Jenn stopped across the road, where she could see in through the open gates along the driveway. The police officer she’d seen earlier was just outside the gate, speaking on her phone, but Jenn’s attention zeroed in on a policeman straightening up from draping a blue plastic sheet over something on the ground. A body. It had to be a body. The doctor? Or Mrs Russell? The doctor must be well into his eighties and his wife some years younger – Barb had been a late baby – so maybe this was an entirely natural event.
    But ‘natural’ didn’t mesh with Gillespie’s
Yeah, there’s trouble,
nor his dash to keep someone safe.
    She didn’t notice the man in the shade of the trees at the corner until he moved into the sunlight and walked towards her.
    Mark. Mark, on a Dungirri street first thing in the morning instead of at home at Marrayin. Another puzzle.
    They met halfway, outside one of the more modest houses on the other side of the road. Mark must have been home since last night, because he’d changed and washed away the soot and grime, and shaved. But in his drawn face and the shadows under his eyes she didn’t see much evidence of sleep or rest.
    ‘Do you know who’s … ?’ she asked.
    ‘It’s the doc,’ he said. ‘I was on my way to lookafter Jim’s dogs when Esther ran out on to the road. She’d just found him.’
    ‘So, it was you who called the police?’
    ‘Yes. That’s Kristine Matthews, the local sergeant.’
    Jenn could read the signs. A police sergeant, finishing one call, immediately making another. And the sergeant’s offsider covering the body with a plastic sheet and tying crime-scene tape across the driveway. Both of them – and Mark as well – tight-lipped, with solemn faces and tense body language.
    ‘It wasn’t a natural death, was it?’
    Mark’s momentary pause told her the answer even before he said, ‘No.’
    Trouble.
She couldn’t yet see how or why the old doctor’s death was significant, but the sunshine and twittering birds in the garden in front of them seemed out of place, a too-stark contrast to the grimness of the scene across the road.
    ‘How—’ She caught herself and didn’t finish the pointless question. ‘You’re not going to tell me that, are you?’
    His brown eyes looked straight into hers. ‘No.’ Direct, but there was no offence in that intense honesty. Of course he wouldn’t tell her – a journalist – what he’d seen until after the police had decided which details to release. If then.
    But he didn’t move away, or offer any other comment. He just turned away from the road, rested his forearms on the fence-rail beside her, and waited.
    Waited for her to ask a question he could answer.
    Why would anyone want tokill Edward Russell? No, that would only invite conjecture. Besides, the doctor had been an arrogant, misogynistic, prejudiced old bastard. A general practice in Dungirri, rostered on call at Birraga hospital, one of only three doctors in the district back then. He might have retired now but …
    Birraga hospital. Gil Gillespie. Trouble. A puzzle piece snapped into place.
    ‘He signed the blood-alcohol report, didn’t he? The one that convicted Gillespie.’
    ‘Yes. That’s on the public record.’
    With nothing happening across the road, she also turned away from it, resting an elbow on the rail to face Mark.
    ‘It’s less than twenty-four hours since you held that media conference and already someone’s burgled your place, Jim’s dead, and now the man who certified that disputed report is dead. That’s a lot of coincidences, Mark.