The Darkest Hour (5 page)

‘Quick!’ someone shouted.

‘Told you it’d be genuine,’ Joe said, grabbing the monitor and drug box.

‘Yelling means nothing,’ she said over her shoulder as she moved towards the group. They didn’t step aside as she drew near and she had to say ‘Excuse me, excuse me’ and butt the back of someone’s leg with the first aid kit to get in.

The man lay on his side, his arms stretched out in front of him. His shirt was soaked with blood, the yellow
Quiksmart Couriers
emblem on the pocket drawing up the liquid. In the glow from the nearby shop windows Lauren saw the deathly pale colour of his face and knew Joe was right.

She knelt and put her hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘How’re you going, mate?’ He opened his eyes and looked at her. She pulled his shirt free from his trousers to find an inch-wide stab wound in his left chest, in the area of his heart. One bloodstained hand reached for her and she took it, squeezed it. ‘What’s your name?’

‘James Kennedy,’ he gasped.

She needed both her hands so she moved his hand to her knee. She could feel his fear and desperation in the grasp of his fingers on her trousers. ‘Do you know what happened? Can you take a deep breath?’ She grabbed a thick dressing from the first aid kit, pressed it over his chest wound and taped it down.

‘Can’t breathe . . . much.’ Blood bubbled on his lips.

‘Are you hurt anywhere else?’

Joe reached around her, putting an oxygen mask on Kennedy’s face, attaching the monitoring electrodes. ‘Back-up or load and go?’ he said in Lauren’s ear.

Kennedy’s skin was slick with sweat. He’d lost a lot of blood externally and who knew how much internally. Lauren calculated the time of a run on lights and siren back to St Vincent’s against the time it’d take another crew to arrive. ‘Let’s load and go.’

Joe ran off for the stretcher. Lauren could feel the press of watching people behind her as she strapped a tourniquet around Kennedy’s bicep and searched his arm for veins. There wasn’t much light. She glanced at his face. He was breathing heavily, his eyes wide open and fixed on hers. She checked the oxygen flowmeter. It was as high as it could go. ‘How’re you feeling, James?’

He shook his head wordlessly.

Joe barrelled through the crowd with the stretcher and pulled the release handles to drop it to half-height. He slapped the carry sheet out on the footpath next to Kennedy and they gently rolled him onto it, then with help mustered from the onlookers they lifted the sheet onto the stretcher.

Once inside the ambulance Lauren jammed her stethoscope into her ears and listened to Kennedy’s chest. Breath sounds were down on the left side. She felt her way over the goose-pimpled, pale flesh of his chest and back and found no telltale crackling indicating air under the skin. She checked the position of his larynx. Pneumothorax, probable haemothorax, but not tensioning. Not at this stage.

‘Am I dying?’ he gasped.

‘Not if I can help it.’

She felt Kennedy’s eyes follow her every move as she took a quick blood pressure, ran off a strip from the cardiac monitor, and checked his oxygen saturation. She propped his arm against her thigh and searched the cold flesh again for veins. His fingers trembled against her elbow.

‘I know I am,’ he said.

‘You think I’m going to sit here and let that happen?’

In the bright light she found a small vein on the back of his right forearm and as Joe accelerated away from the scene she slid the cannula under Kennedy’s skin. She connected up a bag of Hartmann’s and started squeezing the pump chamber, getting the fluid in as fast as she could. She could hear Joe asking Control to tell St Vincent’s they were on their way. She looked into Kennedy’s eyes. ‘Do you know what happened?’

‘I was walking.’ He coughed. ‘A man bumped into me. I felt this.’ He waved a hand towards his chest. ‘A burning pain, not too bad. Then warm, from the blood. Somebody tried to give me mouth-to-mouth while I was lying there.’

‘You were just walking and a man stabbed you for no reason?’

Kennedy closed his eyes. ‘I need you to tell my wife something.’

‘You’ll be able to tell her yourself at the hospital.’

He shook his head and coughed. A fine spray of blood appeared on the inside of the oxygen mask. Lauren saw his heart rate increasing on the monitor screen. She squeezed the pump chamber with one hand and smoothed the other over the cold skin of his free arm, feeling for any hint of a vein. He grasped her hand in his. ‘I need you to tell her,’ he puffed. ‘I need you to write it down.’

At the look in his eyes she nodded. An empty dressing packet lay on the stretcher and she rested it on her knee, pulling her pen from her pocket. ‘Go.’

She was ready to write
I love you
, but instead he said, ‘When we have run our passion’s heat, Love hither makes his best retreat.’

Lauren scribbled the words. ‘When we have run our . . .?’

‘Passion’s heat, Love hither makes his best retreat,’ he finished. He was starting to gasp for air.

Lauren stared at his throat, checking the location of his trachea. A tension pneumothorax would push it to one side as the pressure in his chest built up. It looked central, but the way he was breathing didn’t make her happy. She dropped the paper and pen and reached for her stethoscope.

It was hard to hear his breath sounds when he was grunting and moaning and Joe still had the siren fired up. Lauren pressed the earpieces deeper into her head and shut her eyes to concentrate. She thought the breath sounds were still present on the left side, but only just. She took a quick BP and found it down to seventy systolic. She caught Joe’s eye in the rear-vision mirror and twirled a finger above her head.

Kennedy watched her through half-open eyes. ‘What’s that mean?’

‘Just asking him to turn the aircon on,’ Lauren lied. She felt the lurch as Joe accelerated harder.

Kennedy started to cry. ‘I don’t want to die.’

Lauren smoothed her hand across his forehead. Her bloody glove left a red smear on his cold skin. She could see out the windscreen that they were only minutes from St Vincent’s and she hoped they’d reach it before he arrested. She exchanged the almost-empty fluid bag for a full one and went for the pump chamber again. Kennedy’s eyes closed and he sighed. Thinking it was his last breath, she shot a glance at the monitor at the same time as she grabbed for his neck to feel his carotid pulse.

The rhythm on the monitor continued, and his pulse still fluttered under her fingers. Kennedy opened his eyes. ‘See. You think I’m a goner too.’

She took his hand and held it. ‘We’ll be at the hospital any minute. You just have to hang in there.’

He looked up at the ambulance roof. ‘Write something else for me?’

‘You love her, I know.’

He shook his head, a feeble movement. ‘It’s for the police. I know who stabbed me.’

Lauren grabbed the paper and pen in her free hand.

Kennedy’s hand squeezed her fingers. ‘His name is Thomas Werner.’

Lauren felt like she’d been stabbed too. She stared at Kennedy in horror.

‘Write it,’ he gasped.

‘You’re sure it was him?’

‘Thomas Werner,’ he said, his voice getting louder. ‘Thomas Werner stabbed me!’

Lauren saw Joe look up at them in the mirror. ‘Thomas Werner, I got it.’

‘I saw his face. Right there, against me, in the street. I know him.’ Tears ran from Kennedy’s eyes. ‘God help me, I know him.’

Lauren scribbled on the paper. It was bloodstained from her gloves. She was shaking and blinking back tears.
Thomas Werner, oh Jesus.

‘How do you know him?’ she said.

Kennedy wept. ‘I’m not a good man.’

She scrawled this down too. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The things I did,’ he said. He closed his eyes. He yawned, a sign of his falling blood pressure. She squeezed the pump chamber desperately, and saw through the windscreen the brightly lit
Emergency
sign.

‘Almost there, James.’

He didn’t answer.

‘James!’ She grabbed his shoulder and shook him. He murmured once. On the monitor his heart rate was up to a hundred and ninety. She shook him again and shouted his name. She felt the ambulance jolt over the kerb into the bay outside Emergency. She palpated his external jugular, thinking about the time it’d take to have a go for a line there, whether the benefit of getting it outweighed the delay before going into Emergency. It didn’t, and as soon as Joe pulled up she was disconnecting the monitor leads, ripping off the BP cuff and kicking open the back door.

Inside the resus room they lifted Kennedy onto the hospital bed and Lauren gave her handover to the doctor who scrawled notes and yelled instructions to his staff as she spoke.

‘Last obs were pulse one-ninety, beep seventy,’ Lauren concluded.

‘Hurry with that tube!’ The doctor turned back to her. ‘Got an ID?’

‘Here.’ A nurse held up the wallet she’d pulled from Kennedy’s pants’ pocket. The doctor rushed off and the nurse said to Lauren, ‘You want to copy down his details?’

Lauren looked about for Joe. She needed to know how much he’d heard. ‘I’ll be back for them in a moment.’ She hurried from the resus room. Joe had looked in the mirror when Kennedy was shouting about Thomas, but that didn’t mean he’d heard the exact words. The siren was loud in the cabin, and his mind would have been on the road, not on the back of the truck.

Joe wasn’t in the corridors or the staffroom. Lauren picked up her pace. The crumpled dressing packet was in her pocket. Nobody else had seen it. If he hadn’t heard what Kennedy said, what was she going to do?

She was practically running as she went through the doors to the ambulance bay. ‘Joe?’

‘Here.’ He was standing with a police officer. ‘That was some job.’

‘You think he’ll die?’ the police officer asked.

‘Possibly,’ Lauren said.

‘More like probably,’ Joe put in.

‘But you wrote down what he said?’ the officer asked.

Lauren’s heart shrivelled. ‘What?’

‘The stuff he was saying, about Thomas Werner stabbing him,’ Joe said. ‘You looked like you were writing it down.’

It felt like Thomas had his hands at her throat again. She tried to swallow, and reached into her pocket for the dressing packet.

The officer took it carefully and read what she’d written. ‘This is great.’

Lauren felt faint.

E
lla glanced across at the speedo and was surprised to see they were actually doing sixty.

‘The man’s not going anywhere,’ Murray said.

‘Except maybe . . .’ She pointed skywards.

‘If he’s that close to the edge they’re not going to let us near him anyway.’

Bloody Murray, so full of reason. Ella sat forward in her seat and willed the cars in front of them to move out of their way. She didn’t believe in God but she wasn’t above praying now and then, just on the off-chance it might do some good.
Please keep this guy alive long enough to talk to us.

They’d been talking in the office car park after their evening shift when Ella’s phone rang. DS Kirk Kuiper had said there was a stabbing victim at St Vincent’s, one likely to become a homicide if the reports were accurate, and would they mind popping on over? One of Eagers’s super-duper new crime-fighting initiatives was to get Homicide detectives on the job as soon as possible, the theory being that the quicker their knowledge and experience were brought to bear on the case, the more likely a speedy result. As crime was one of the major platforms of the next year’s election, Ella knew it was an exercise in political grandstanding more than anything – it sounded impressive for the Police Minister to say Homicide was on the case – but she didn’t care. She’d leapt into Murray’s car as it was closest. The previous case they’d worked, the Lachlan Phillips abduction, Murray had been the Commissioner’s liaison so had only ever tagged along, not driven.
Next time we go somewhere important, I drive
.

‘I bet he doesn’t die.’ Murray crawled around a corner. ‘It’ll just be an assault and the local Ds will take it over.’

Ella was so conflicted. It was wrong to hope that he would die, but he’d apparently identified his attacker to the paramedics. What juicier open-and-shut could there be?

When they finally arrived in St Vincent’s Emergency Department they found a uniformed officer leaning over a computer chatting to a nurse. When he saw them he straightened up and held out a man’s wallet. ‘This is the victim.’

Ella opened it and pulled out a driver’s licence. ‘James William Kennedy. He’s fifty-one.’ The dark-haired man stared out at her with a half-smile.

‘I asked Radio for his info,’ the officer said. ‘He’s got a neg driving causing death from three years back – ran a red and killed a woman in her family car. Kid and husband were injured. Nothing else. Got a motorbike in his name, rego LM 326. That address on the licence is still current. And the paramedic gave me this.’ He held out a crumpled piece of paper in an evidence bag. ‘The blood’s all dry.’

Ella took it from him. It was an empty dressing packet and on the back, between the printed brand name and size specifications and the smears of blood, were scribbled the words:
When we have run our passion’s heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. I know who stabbed me. Thomas Werner. Thomas Werner stabbed me. I saw his face. Right there, against me, in the street. I know him. God help me, I know him. I’m not a good man. The things I did
.

Ella felt a shiver run up her spine.

‘VKG gave me various Thomas Werners around the state but none with any record that leaps out.’

‘Is that the paramedic?’ Murray said.

Ella looked where he pointed, at a woman in the paramedic uniform of white shirt and navy trousers writing in a folder at the nurses’ desk.

‘That’s her. Name’s Lauren Yates.’

The paramedic turned in response to hearing her name, and got up and crossed towards them. The front of her shirt was spotted with blood and smeared with dirt and her short dark hair hung lank and sweaty over her forehead. She looked nervous. ‘Hi.’

Ella smiled. ‘Detective Ella Marconi, Detective Murray Shakespeare.’

‘Lauren Yates.’ They shook hands. Lauren’s palm was sweaty.

‘You’re certain this is what he said?’

‘Word for word.’

‘Did he say how he knew this Werner?’

‘When I asked, he said that about not being a good man,’ Lauren said. ‘I asked what that meant and that’s when he said “the things I did”.’

‘He didn’t explain any further?’

Lauren shook her head.

‘How was he? Will he make it?’

The paramedic pulled a face. ‘He’d have to be lucky.’

‘Did he know how bad it was, do you think?’

Lauren nodded. ‘He kept saying he was dying.’

‘Did you agree with him?’

‘I kind of jollied him along a bit, saying not while you’re in my care, stuff like that,’ Lauren said. ‘I don’t like to say, yeah, mate, you’re cactus. But then once I thought he’d stopped breathing, and I grabbed him, and he opened his eyes and said, “See, you know I’m dying too”.’ She stopped.

Ella nodded. If Kennedy lived, at least long enough to talk, she’d ask how he and Werner knew each other, why he thought Werner attacked him. They needed this to build the case. But even if he died, she had in her hand a dying declaration, and before her stood a witness savvy enough to write down word for word what the dying man had said. Ella looked Lauren up and down. She held herself confidently. Something of the nervous look remained but Ella put it down to the circumstances.

She looked at the paper again. ‘What’s this other bit?’

‘He asked me to say that to his wife.’

‘It’s poetry,’ Murray said. ‘It’s from “The Garden”, by Andrew Marvell.’

‘Never heard of him,’ Ella said.

‘It’s about a changing love, and especially about passion. “When we have run our passion’s heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The gods that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race –”’

‘Yes, okay,’ Ella said. ‘Thanks very much.’

‘Excuse me.’ The uniformed officer was behind them. ‘Word just came down that Kennedy died.’

Lauren let out a little sound. Ella saw that she’d gone pale and was blinking back tears. ‘You okay?’

Lauren looked at the floor.

Murray said, ‘I guess it’s tough sometimes, when they go.’

The paramedic’s emotion made Ella feel bad over the excitement bubbling inside her, but only for a moment. This was her job, and the puzzle lay before her just waiting to be put together. She clutched the dying declaration tightly behind her back. She imagined tracking this Werner down, the solid brief of evidence she’d deliver to the DPP, the eventual conviction. The temporary secondment to Homicide would surely become a permanent posting.

Lauren would be fine in a moment. When you saw death all the time, you adjusted to another one PDQ.

She handed Lauren her card. ‘We’ll need to take a proper statement from you tomorrow. What time do you finish?’

‘Eight in the morning,’ Lauren said, taking a deep breath. ‘If I don’t get overtime.’

‘You’ll be right to make it to our office in Parramatta then?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Great.’ Ella held up the dressing packet. ‘Thanks so much for this.’

‘Yes, thanks,’ Murray put in. ‘It’s gold.’

Lauren went back to her paperwork. Ella watched her go, thinking that she as a witness together with the dying declaration weren’t gold. They were way more valuable than that.

‘Ella,’ Murray was saying.

‘Huh?’

‘We’ve got a lot to do.’

She followed him to the door, then glanced back at Lauren at the desk. ‘How good is she going to be on the stand?’

Murray said, ‘Got to catch the guy first.’

Lauren finished the case sheet by writing that Kennedy had given her information about his assailant, which she’d passed on to police. She signed the form and left the hospital copy on the nurses’ desk. It would work its way through the system to meet up somewhere with Kennedy’s file, which she guessed was on its way with him to the hospital morgue.

Outside in the ambulance bay Joe was resting his folded arms on the truck’s bonnet, talking with a couple of paras from Headquarters. Lauren knew the detectives had spoken briefly to him too. She stayed at the rear of the vehicle, leaning against the back door. She wished she’d had a moment in the resus room to hold Kennedy’s hand one more time, to silently say goodbye and promise to give his wife his message. No doubt the police would do so when they went to tell her the bad news, but she thought she would too. If she was in Mrs Kennedy’s shoes, she knew she’d want to speak to whoever talked to her husband last.

Oh, who was she kidding? She sank down onto the step. The real reason she had to see Mrs Kennedy was that Kennedy’s death was her fault. If she hadn’t been fooled by Thomas’s playing dead and let him tackle her and get away so quickly, maybe the cops would’ve seen him. He’d be locked up somewhere nasty, and Kennedy would be alive, not cooling in a drawer in the hospital morgue. She owed Kennedy something now. Facing his widow was the least she could do.

And look where she herself stood. Tomorrow she had to give a formal statement, so before then she had to decide whether to confess that she knew a Thomas Werner right up front, or tell them later, or just keep her mouth shut and hope the police never found her out. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think it through. Thomas’s name wasn’t on Felise’s birth certificate, Kristi having left that part of the form blank as part of her put-the-past-well-behind strategy. Lauren wondered about that terrible bedsit they’d rented, whose name the lease had been in, whether the police could link Thomas and Kristi that way. She was certain Thomas had never been arrested while he’d been here, so he shouldn’t appear in their records. What else could there be? She didn’t know.

She felt bad about hiding what she knew from the police. The services worked together, helped each other, had done so forever, and keeping her mouth shut ate away at the foundations of those relationships. But what choice did she have?

Besides, there was surely more than one Thomas Werner in the world. Lauren tried to imagine an Australian one, washing blood out of his clothes in some suburban Sydney laundry right that moment. One who hadn’t threatened her, who didn’t know her and wouldn’t know how to find where she lived.

She was such an idiot.

She fought tears, tilting her head back when they threatened to spill over, while above her the moths burned themselves on the floodlights.

When Ella and Murray pulled up in Edgecliff Road, crime scene officers were examining the location, taking photos of the bloodstained concrete, digging into rubbish bins and climbing into drains. Four witnesses stood on the footpath some distance away, kept silent and apart by a uniformed officer. Ella wasn’t expecting a whole lot from them. Someone falls over in the street, the first thing you look at is them on the ground, not the person walking casually away.

‘I’ll take the men, you take the women?’ Murray said, already heading for his chosen victims.

Ella took the two women to stand by the well-lit shop windows so she could see their faces. She didn’t expect much, but you never could tell. While it meant something that these people had hung around to tell the uniformed officers what they’d seen, Ella often found witnesses’ enthusiasm lessened as time went by and they considered the ramifications of what they were doing. A man who’d so cold-bloodedly stabbed another in the street was not one they wanted as an enemy, and sometimes they started ‘forgetting’. But at the same time, ordinary people weren’t good liars. You could tell it in their faces, and a little gentle pushing often brought out that last bit of detail.

She chose to start with the older woman, and asked the younger one, a sad-looking woman in her fifties with a brown beehive hairdo, to stay where she was while they walked a few steps further.

She smiled at the woman, guessing she was in her seventies, noting the glasses, the tweed suit, the grey hair in the tight bun. ‘Thank you for waiting, ma’am. I’m Detective Ella Marconi.’

‘I have fish here.’ The woman raised a green enviro shopping bag. ‘Out of the fridge too long, it’s no good.’

‘I’ll make this as quick as I can.’ Ella opened her notebook. ‘What did you see here tonight?’

‘I’d been at my friend’s place, and stopped in at the shops for a piece of fish for tomorrow’s dinner on my way home. Back on the street here I was walking along, slowly, you know, when I heard a strange noise.’

‘A noise like . . .?’

‘Like when one person walks into another, and that one has the wind knocked out of him. An “oof ” noise.’

‘Right,’ Ella said.

‘I turned to see the man fall to his knees then onto his hands. Someone almost trod on him, he went down so fast,’ the woman said. ‘People kept going past him, can you believe it?’

‘I can.’

‘I asked him if he was okay, and he muttered something I didn’t catch. Then somebody else said there was blood, and for someone to ring an ambulance.’

Ella said, ‘So did you see who walked into him?’

The old lady shook her head. ‘I only saw him fall. He was behind me. I turned when I heard the strange noise.’

‘You didn’t notice anybody hurrying away?’

‘There were a lot of people around,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s always in a hurry.’

Just as I thought
. Ella clicked her pen away and got out her card. ‘Thank you for your time. We may be in touch again, but in the meantime please call me if you think of anything else.’