Darkening Skies (37 page)

Vanna held a spiral-bound notebook and pen in her hand. Jenn went with the truth. ‘Right-handed.’

Vanna nodded to the man and he released Jenn’s right hand from the cuffs, leaving her left hand trapped, checking it was secure before he stepped back.

Vanna handed her the notebook and pen.

‘You’re going to write a feature article, Jennifer. One of your strong, well-evidenced accounts of corruption and vice. This one will be about a politician who has led a double life. Mark’s been very good at that, hasn’t he? Who’d have guessed the extent of his corruption and manipulation? You could throw in something personal there – those drugs he experimented with at eighteen. Maybe that’s why you refused to go to Birraga with him and your cousin that tragic night.’

An article damning Mark. Nausea threatened again but she kept her voice steady. ‘You want me to destroy Mark’s reputation?’

‘Yes. You’re good, Jennifer, and a trusted source. You’ll make it headline news across the country.’

‘And if I don’t write it?’

‘That would be rather stupid. And you’re not. You understand perfectly well that you have to be useful to me to stay alive.’

Yes, Jenn understood that. ‘What I don’t understand is why you’re involved in this. What you hope to achieve.’

‘Cleaning up my ex’s mess and protecting my interests, of course. He’s sloppy and impatient, and he’s always thought with his dick more often than not. Him and his stupid friends.’

Information
. Information
meant power, and chained up to the bed she needed all the power she could get. ‘You mean Gerard McCarty?’

Vanna raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘You have been busy, haven’t you? But Gerard at least has his uses – a sharp brain with finances, despite his predilections for violence. Quite a weakness, really, now that he’s not as controlled as he was. So, just a word between us girls, sweetie – I’d keep cooperating if I were you. Stay useful to me. I could use your skills and give you a luxurious life, if you want it. Much better than traipsing through disease-ridden disaster zones.’

‘Work with you?’ She tried to hide her disgust.

Vanna waved a casual hand. ‘A favour here and there. Nothing difficult.’

Favours. Yes, so much corruption worked on the twin currencies of favours and fear. At least the disease-ridden disaster zones were honest work.

‘I’ll think about,’ she lied.

Vanna laughed. ‘Oh, Jennifer, you are so like your father, you know. You’re not very good at lying. Which is unfortunate, because I don’t have much use for all that straitlaced honour.’

Jenn gripped the pen in her hand tightly. ‘You knew my father?’

‘Oh darling, yes, I knew your father. He did some landscaping work for me when he was young and brawny and quite delicious, really. But he ran away and met your mother. A pity, because he was actually quite good in bed and I’d rather have had you for a daughter than the stupid lumps of offspring Dan made.’

Bile burned
Jenn’s throat, harsh and bitter, but she wouldn’t give Vanna the pleasure of seeing her throw up.

‘Did Dan kill him?’

‘Dan?’ She snorted indelicately. ‘Dan didn’t have any say in who I took as a lover. Doesn’t have any say in anything. Oh, I know he swans around like a big man, but you and I, Jennifer, we both know where the real power is. He was never anything more than a tool.’

Vanna. Vanna Flanagan, nee Russo, sister of key figures in the Calabrian mafia in Sydney. But everyone had overlooked her because she was a woman who lived out in a rural area and ran unthreatening beauty salons.
There are far more dangerous criminals than thugs like Dan
.

And Jenn was looking right at her.

Think, think,
think
.

‘Did you kill them? My parents?’

‘Sorry, sweetie, but it had to be done. Your father developed too much conscience and became a threat.’

Jenn closed her eyes, rage burning red in front of them. She’d have happily killed Vanna there on the spot, if she could have, but she needed to focus. She needed to stay alive.

‘What have you done with Mark?’ she asked. A risky question, but if she was going to have any chance of talking her way out of this, she needed to know.

Vanna smiled, with all the enjoyment of a purring cat. ‘The sainted Mark? He’s busy writing his confession.’

He was alive. Jenn kept her face still so that her relief wouldn’t show. ‘His confession?’

‘Yes. Rather
apt to do it here, I suppose. It was an enclosed convent, a silent order, nice and isolated from the world, although I’m sure the priests came to visit and hear whatever tedious sins the sisters confessed. The last one died in the 1960s, though, and there’s been plenty of sinning and little confessing here since then.’

A silent order, long gone. Would anyone remember the convent’s existence, more than forty years on?

Yes
. Hope surged. Yes, if this building housed the Bohème Club. Caroline Strelitz and the other women she’d identified in the photographs – Steve and Leah and Kris had their names – would know where it is. Steve would have known, as soon as he woke this morning, that she and Mark weren’t where they were supposed to be.

She could write the damned article Vanna wanted, but not in a hurry. If she could stretch it out, that might give the police more time to find them. And if she knew where Mark was, they’d both stand a better chance.

‘If I’m going to write a convincing article for you, it will have to be consistent with Mark’s confession,’ she said.

‘I’ll make sure you see a copy,’ Vanna told her with a deadly cold smile. ‘I’ll return in an hour for the draft. Ensure you put your email address and password on it, so that I can deal with any queries for you.’

The lock clicked into place as they left.

An hour. She had an hour, a ballpoint pen and a notebook bound with a spiral of wire. A selection of basic weapons, and a burning, powerful anger.

Vanna allowed
Mark a laptop to write his confession – his own laptop, which he’d left yesterday afternoon in the cottage, before the bus accident. He checked for a wireless signal but, as expected, found nothing.

In the room with the patterned carpet his mother had knelt on, he was instructed to confess to his lies, to his drunkenness causing the original accident and Paula’s death, to knowing that his parents had paid to keep it quiet. Vanna had given him a concise list of other vices to include. A drug habit. A working relationship with Dan, participating with him in bribery, corruption and extortion. Anger with Dan for ruining his life.

‘You’re saying that you want me to implicate your ex-husband?’ he clarified.

Cold, calm and deadly, Vanna crossed one elegant leg over the other in the armchair, two metres from the steel chair he was chained to. ‘Of course. He and his associates have been far too careless. I’m putting a stop to that now. His death at your hands will finally tidy up this mess of his.’

So that’s how she planned it – for the police to find his confession, and two dead bodies.

‘Where is Jenn?’ he asked.

Vanna smiled. ‘She’s doing some work for me for a while. We’re due to leave in an hour, Mark. If you get that confession polished before then I might let you see her before we go. If you don’t, I might rethink my plans about taking her.’

Her goon locked the door behind them as they left. Mark balanced the laptop on his knees with his cuffed hands. Jenn was still there, still alive. He began to type. He wrote as he’d been instructed, the confession of a man torn by guilt and
addiction, no longer able to bear it. The anger he expressed for Dan Flanagan wasn’t a lie. His sorrow and regrets – yes, there was a core of truth in that. At the end, he typed his full name: Mark Joseph Alexander Strelitz. His parents and Jenn would know, maybe even Kris or Steve would pick the deliberate misspelling of his middle name: Joseph instead of his grandfather’s Josef. He hoped, if he didn’t make it, that it would be enough to raise their suspicions and prompt them to ask questions.

He closed the laptop, rested his cuffed hands on it, and steadied his breathing. He had to be ready to take advantage of any opportunity they gave him. They had him at a disadvantage now, but Jenn was still there, somewhere, and he’d snatch any chance to fight to save her. Whatever it took, whatever it cost – he’d fight, kill, die if it gave her a chance to escape them.

Vanna refused to let her see Mark. Not bothering with any further pretence of feeling, she merely took the pages Jenn had drafted and began reading them as she turned to leave the room, pausing at the door to throw an order back to her offsider. ‘Restrain her and take her to the van. He’ll be here soon and he wants her ready to go.’

The guard grinned wolfishly and opened the door of the cupboard. Fear squeezed Jenn’s lungs when she glimpsed the contents – chains, leather bonds, hoods. She didn’t know where Mark was, even whether he was still alive. She had only minutes before she’d be helpless, stuffed in the back of a van and driven away.

The guard didn’t
notice the scratches on the handcuff as he bent to unlock it, or the coil of wire stuffed under the pillow that she’d used to try to unpick it.

An open door, and a pen they’d forgotten about. And Vanna still within hearing, only metres down the passage. Just as he clicked the cuff loose from the bed, she closed the fingers of her right hand around the pen, gripped it tightly, and plunged it into his neck, ramming her left hand over his mouth. He gasped but she covered it with a cry of her own, as if protesting, struggling. Then she rammed his head hard against the wall. If he was faking unconsciousness he was doing it well. She didn’t have to fake her sobs.

She couldn’t find the handgun he’d had last night, but she took his key ring. She paused at the door, then checked the corridor. No sign of Vanna. Three closed doors like hers on either side of the passage. If Mark was behind one of them … no, Vanna’s heels had only come down this way to her room. There was a door at the end of the corridor behind her, but ahead of her Vanna’s heels had tapped around a bend in the corridor.

She tried the door and it opened. Fresh air, light, and two cement steps to the overgrown grass of a yard with a crooked clothesline and a small cleared area surrounded by trees.

The rumble of an engine was coming closer, and she heard tyres crunch on a gravel track. She peered around the corner of the building: one car at the front, and one dark van, plus the car arriving through the scrub. She hadn’t seen or heard anyone except Vanna and the single guard, but this car meant at least one extra.

Three at least
against her. But Mark with her, if she could find him. If he was still alive. He had to be alive.

The car stopped and its doors opened. Dan Flanagan. Gerard McCarty. Walking into the house like two mates about to have a good time.

From a different angle she would probably recognise the front door. The scrubby forest surrounding the house beyond the small clearing would provide good cover for a photographer.

She crept around the back of the building, and stopped when she heard laughter coming from inside. As she came closer to the floor-to-ceiling window she heard Vanna’s voice, and the laughter died.

‘You’ve screwed up again, Dan. If you hadn’t brought Franklin back, this whole mess could have been smoothed over.’

‘He’s an idiot. Now he’s getting old and careless. And I didn’t tell him to—’ The voice broke off abruptly.

‘Didn’t tell him to do what, Dan?’

Mark’s voice. Mark, alive and in that room. Speaking with complete authority. Even if he were bound and about to die he would still retain the self-control, the natural command. He would not cower before them.

Dan tried to laugh it off. ‘He always went off half-cocked. That’s what started this thing years ago. He was supposed to give your parents a warning and instead he almost killed you.’

‘Franklin sabotaged my car? Loosened the wheel nuts?’

‘Oh yes, that was Franklin.’ Vanna sounded bored. ‘And then he panicked when he saw the accident because these dickheads had told him you were not to be touched. So, he thought it was a good idea to frame Gillespie. If he hadn’t come up with that
idiotic scheme, you’d have walked away from any charge and I’d have dealt with Gillespie rather more quietly and effectively, instead of having to get Rhonda to pull some blood from an old alky.’