The Darkest Hour Read Free

formal statement; I’ll be in touch if there’s anything else. Lauren nodded and smiled.
    ‘Thanks,’ the detective said.
    ‘No worries.’
    Five months later, on a bright morning in early summer, the Coroner declared Stewart Blake’s death a homicide carried out by persons unknown. The unsolved case would be relegated to a file drawer somewhere, to be taken out by an officer now and again, the pages flipped through, the cover signed and dated, then shoved back into the dark once more.
    Her uniform damp with sweat, Lauren walked from the Glebe Coroner’s Court past the media crews. She wanted to forget the whole thing, forget the way that one lie led to another, then another, and next thing you were holding the Bible and swearing and hoping like hell you could remember the notes you’d scribbled on the Gilly’s paper serviette as soon as you’d left the scene about how you’d described the men you saw, because lies were harder to remember than truth. She’d studied those words for half an hour that morning then burned the paper in the bathroom, flushing the charred remnant and opening the window afterwards and watching the smoke blow out.
    Felise had come in, nose wrinkled. ‘Max’s dad smokes in the bathroom too.’
    ‘I wasn’t smoking,’ Lauren had said, reaching for the brush, smoothing it over the thin silky hair on Felise’s narrow head. ‘I think the smoke came in from outside. Somebody must have a fire in their garden.’
    Felise wanted to climb onto the toilet to look. They’d stood there, Felise’s thin hot arm around Lauren’s neck, her breath warm against her cheek. Lauren had watched her niece’s wide blue eyes move as her gaze roamed the neighbourhood. ‘What can you see?’ she’d said.
    ‘The whole wide world.’
    Lauren had hugged her close.
    How could Thomas even contemplate hurting her?
    How could he call her ‘the kid’, as if she was just
some kid
, and not the centre of the world?
    She could almost feel the slight body in her arms again now as she stood at the lights, almost hear Felise’s giggles over the noise of the traffic rushing along Parramatta Road.
    The kid.
    The light turned green and she strode across the street, sure of herself again.

     
    Detective Ella Marconi turned to the next page in the print-out and rested her forehead in her hand. Across the room Detective Murray Shakespeare was fiddling with the aerial of an ancient radio he’d dug up from somewhere, and the staticky whine of its poor reception made Ella grit her teeth.
    Murray swung the aerial in a wide arc. ‘Stupid thing.’
    ‘Do we really need music?’
    ‘Sit in here all day reading these lists, drive anyone nuts.’ There was a quick blat of sound and he stopped the aerial short, feeling for the spot on the airwaves.
    Ella tried to focus on the page before her. Her eyes blurred and the numbers ran into each other. She felt surrounded, leaned in upon, by the stacks of print-outs looming on the desk beside her. Of all the things she’d imagined she’d get to do in the Homicide Squad, searching for three specific phone numbers in a list of thousands had been strangely missing.
    ‘–
Eagers think he’s doing?
’ a voice shouted from the radio and Murray fumbled for the volume. ‘
Zero tolerance is what’s needed in this country, not the namby-pamby softly-softly approach. Next thing, Eagers and his cronies in State parliament will be offering to hold the hands of the criminals, offering them counselling to help them deal with the traumatic experiences they had as dealers.
’
    ‘We might need something to listen to but that’s not it,’ Ella said. ‘The Family Man’s rantings are more than I can stand.’
    But Murray held the aerial perfectly still.
    ‘
This drug amnesty will do nothing for our country’s youth,
’ the voice barked. ‘
All it does is get rid of some higher dealers for long enough for the ambitious small-timers, the ones who’ve just been given immunity from