Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  We shook hands and he said, ‘So, you’re the boyfriend.’

  ‘That’s right. I just got back, trying to catch up, and I only just learned that you tried to contact me at the time. I’m afraid my father had the wrong address for me in London.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t seem relevant to my inquiries. Should it have been?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So how can I help you?’

  ‘A friend of mine had collected newspaper clippings about the accident, and when I was reading them I happened to notice another item on one of the pages.’ I took my photocopy of the article from my bag and showed it to him.

  He read it. ‘So?’

  ‘Well …’ I was beginning to feel a bit stupid, playing the amateur sleuth, doing exactly what I’d accused Anna of. ‘Luce and the others were studying rare birds and their eggs on Lord Howe, and this boat had just returned from there. It seemed a pretty big coincidence. I wondered if Luce might have … got wind of what they were doing.’

  ‘And the smugglers decided to shut her up by pushing her off the cliff?’ The deadpan way he said it made the notion sound all the more ludicrous, an episode from some adventure of the Famous Five.

  ‘Something like that.’

  He sipped his cappuccino, getting chocolate foam on his upper lip. He licked it, then said, ‘Yes, I noticed that report too. The boat had been at Lord Howe when Lucy was there, and it’s even possible she met them. Unfortunately the eggs that were found on board didn’t come from there—they were endangered cockatoo eggs, Major Mitchell and gang-gang cockatoos that aren’t found on Lord Howe Island. They’d been bought from a dealer in Sydney by an American crew member on board the yacht. The tip-off probably came from a rival dealer. The American was fined twenty thousand dollars, the dealer got three months.’

  ‘Oh.’ At least I didn’t feel quite so stupid, seeing he’d also been interested enough to investigate. ‘So there was no connection to Luce’s disappearance?’

  ‘Not that I could see. You’re trying to find some other explanation for the accident?’

  ‘Just trying to come to terms with it, I guess.’

  ‘Is that a copy of my report to the coroner in your bag, by any chance?’

  I coloured. ‘Yes, it is actually.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re taking this pretty seriously. Let me guess, you’re even wondering if she isn’t dead at all, that maybe the yachties took her off the island somehow and spirited her away.’

  I gaped at him. ‘How did you know that?’ It was barely more than a fantasy that I’d allowed to take shape somewhere at the back of my mind, creeping out in the bleakest hours of the dark night to tantalise and comfort me.

  ‘You said just now “Luce’s disappearance”, not her death.’

  ‘Did I?’ Just like Anna.

  ‘Missing persons are like that. No body, no way to be absolutely certain what happened. People hang on to hope long after I know there is none. And you’re feeling guilty, right? You weren’t there. You never said goodbye.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Just like Mum, I thought. One day I left her sleeping in the hospital bed, and the next she wasn’t there any more. She’d vanished. And I couldn’t even cry properly because all I felt was bitter guilt. I should have done more. I could have been a better son for her.

  ‘Believe me, I’ve seen every kind of pain and grief. I’ve experienced a good many of them myself, too. And I know that there’s only one person who can help you.’

  ‘Really? Who’s that?’ I thought he was going to recommend a psychiatrist or a private detective or something.

  He held me with that steady gaze and said, ‘The Lord Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Oh …’ I was stunned into silence for a moment, then muttered, ‘Um, I don’t think I’m quite ready for that.’

  ‘Well, when you are, you contact me.’ He took a card from his pocket and passed it to me. There was a man’s name and phone number beside a cross. ‘I’ll introduce you to this man, or you can get in touch with him direct. He will lead you to the Lord, and you won’t look back. Trust me, I know.’

  I had been about to tell him about Owen’s confession to Anna, but now I stared dumbly at the card and said nothing.

  ‘And I’ll give you something else to put in that bag of yours, son. Something that’ll help you a lot more than my report to the coroner.’ He reached into his jacket, to the bulge that I’d noticed, and drew out not his service Glock but a copy of the New Testament, which he handed to me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I muttered, not quite sure what to do, but his phone rang and he listened for a moment, then got to his feet.

  ‘I have to go now, but you remember—get in touch with me any time.’

  I shook his hand, and then on impulse added, ‘I’m thinking of going to Lord Howe for a visit.’

  He stared at me, still gripping my hand, then said, ‘Pay your last respects, yes, maybe not a bad idea. Say hello from me to the young copper over there if you see him, Grant Campbell.’

  He turned and walked away.

  13

  I didn’t do much more climbing with Luce and her friends after Frenchmans Cap. Instead she and I found safer ways to fulfil ourselves, moving into a flat together when we returned to Sydney. We were very happy that summer, she spending the days working in the Conservation Biology Centre, me earning money washing dishes in the restaurant next door while trying to get on with my MBA thesis on risk management.

  She liked to tease me about risk management, as if my choice of subject betrayed some aspect of my personality. I don’t mean that she was being critical of me—that summer we each believed the other perfect—so much as hinting that I was in need of some realignment, a process largely achieved on Frenchmans Cap. It was something to do with accepting the intractable nature of things, of experiencing the exhilaration of dangerous reality, of letting go and falling yet still climbing out.

  I saw things a little differently. It seemed to me that climbing perfectly illustrated the centrality of risk management in life. It was an extreme metaphor of everyday experience, in which risk was always present to some degree, but capable of being managed—superbly in her case, clumsily in mine.

  Risk management became sexy in financial circles after the big scandals of the nineties—Baring Brothers, Metallgesellschaft, Orange County, Sumitomo—demonstrated the degree to which the growth of financial derivatives could expose institutions to enormous losses. The ease with which a single trader could lose over a billion dollars and bring down the oldest private bank in London was very scary, and led a lot of people to become interested in how such risks could be managed. My research area was on the computational side, examining case studies using variants of the Black—Scholes—Merton model and Monte Carlo simulations. I tried to explain all this to Luce, but she found it unreal and, I suspect, rather silly. She was amused, though, when I told her that Nick Leeson might have got away with it, had it not been for the Kobe earthquake, which caused a sudden drop in Japanese equities. She seemed to think there was some sort of natural justice in that. After Frenchmans Cap I had a finer appreciation of sudden drops and natural justice, and could see what she meant.

  But by the following June, my master’s almost completed, things weren’t going so well for Luce and me. I blame myself entirely now, although at the time I found all kinds of reasons and rationalisations for my discontent. I was becoming restless, feeling unreasonably restricted and tied down. Perhaps it was a character flaw on my part, something more intractable than even the experience on Frenchmans Cap could cure. One telling symptom of my malaise was a creeping sense of that feeling that Groucho Marx identified when he said that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. It’s more common than we like to admit, that feeling, but made invisible because we don’t seem to have a name for it. We need to borrow one, as we did with schadenfreude, literally harm-joy. Perhaps selbsthassfreude, self-hate-joy. I began to think that there must be something wrong with Luce, s
omething inadequate and unworthy, simply because she loved me.

  One weekend Luce went back to see her father in Orange. I didn’t go, and after finishing at the restaurant on the Saturday night I called in at a student party we’d been invited to. There was a girl there, quite a pretty little thing, who took a great fancy to me. I couldn’t shake her off, and didn’t really want to. I slept with her that night.

  The next day I tried to tell myself it was a trivial thing and didn’t matter. I chased the girl away and told her I didn’t want to see her again, and tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. But when Luce came back and I watched her unpack her bag, talking about her trip, I felt sick with shame. Of course she wouldn’t see it as trivial, no more than I would have done in her place. I wondered how long it would take for her to find out, and thought I should tell her first, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t brave enough. I had a poisonous secret now, and hated myself for it. Every time she came into the room, every time she looked at me, I scanned her face for the knowledge. It became a void between us, a thousand-foot drop that I couldn’t cross.

  Then I got an email from a friend who’d been a year ahead of me at uni. Gary McCall was a New Zealander who, like me, had been steered into quantitative finance by our tutor. Now he was in London, working for the BBK Bank. They were running an innovative new in-house program for their staff, he said, rotating them through a number of the bank’s departments in both London and Frankfurt to get a thorough practical grounding in risk management strategies. He was very enthusiastic; the program was highly regarded and the bank was recruiting. He had been specifically asked by his boss, Lionel Stamp, if he knew of any more like him who might be interested in coming over. Without telling Luce, I said I was definitely interested, and received an application form by return.

  So I decided that I had to leave. I had always assumed that I would have a spell working abroad after I’d finished uni, but now this vague ambition became focused into a compulsion. I had to leave Australia, I told Luce; my career demanded it. She had to finish her honours year, culminating in the field trip to Lord Howe Island. And after that she had been accepted for a master’s in Marcus’s Conservation Biology Centre. We discussed alternatives, her following me to London after she’d done the field trip, or me delaying my departure to go with them to Lord Howe, but nothing was resolved, and there was an emptiness between us when it finally came time for me to leave.

  Anna phoned me the next morning to say that she’d tracked down Pru Passlow, the doctor’s ex-wife. My first reaction was to tell her to forget it, and I described my meeting with Detective Sergeant Maddox, whose thoroughness had begun to make me doubt our ability to discover anything new. But Anna had already arranged to meet Ms Passlow, who was now a lecturer in the Faculty of Nursing at the university, and who had said we could catch her at the university library that morning.

  I picked Anna up at Central and drove her to the campus. It felt very strange going back into the library, the first time since that sweet, intense time over four years before when I had been immersed in my master’s, and in Luce. So redolent was that familiar library smell that my pulse began to race and the arteries in my throat began to swell, as if I might catch sight of her at any moment.

  We tracked Pru Passlow down by Dewey decimal, at 610.73 among the stacks. She seemed a brisk, capable woman, with bright, sharp eyes. We sat around a table and kept our voices low, in deference to the readers in the adjoining carrels.

  ‘So what’s your interest?’ she asked. ‘Are you writing a book or something?’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ Anna said. ‘We were close friends of Lucy’s, but we weren’t with her at Lord Howe. Josh has been in England all this time, and now he’s back, he wanted to speak to some of the people who were there.’

  ‘I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, closure,’ Pru Passlow nodded. ‘Yes, I’m still haunted by it. Never finding her made it seem worse. When was the last time you saw her?’ She directed this at me.

  ‘Um, August the eleventh, about three weeks before she went to Lord Howe. I left for London, and she saw me off at the airport. Actually, we wanted to ask you the same question.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  Ms Passlow had obviously found the Socratic method a good teaching technique—answer a question with another question. That’s Socrates the philosopher, of course; Socrates the dog also uses the method, but he only ever has one question: ‘Can I have something to eat?’

  ‘Well, from what people have told us, she seemed to be depressed and unwell in those last weeks. We wondered if that could have contributed to her accident.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to my ex, have you? What did he tell you?’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  She gave a little smile. ‘And how well did you know Luce, Josh?’

  Luce, not Lucy. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and wondered why she kept asking these questions. ‘Pretty well. No, very well. We were close.’

  ‘I see. I did wonder if there was someone …’

  ‘So when did you last see her?’

  ‘It would save you a lot of time if you just asked the coroner’s office for their report on the inquest, don’t you think?’

  ‘We’ve read it.’

  ‘Well then.’

  She still seemed incapable of giving a straight answer.

  ‘You said you last saw Luce on the evening of September the twenty-eighth, at the party at the Kelsos’ for the yacht crews.’

  ‘Yes I did, didn’t I?’

  ‘That must have been a big party.’

  ‘Social event of the year.’

  ‘Did you get much of a chance to speak to Luce then?’

  ‘Not really. I just noticed she was there.’

  Anna suddenly said, ‘What was making her sick?’

  The abruptness of the question threw the other woman for a moment. ‘You read my husband’s diagnosis, didn’t you? Gastroenteritis.’

  ‘Why are you being so evasive, Pru?’ Anna said. It was a belligerent question, but spoken gently. Then she added, ‘She was pregnant, wasn’t she?’

  Pru Passlow just stared back at her, unblinking.

  I looked from one to the other. ‘Pregnant?’

  ‘Must have occurred to you,’ Anna said, though whether to me or Pru, I wasn’t sure.

  Finally Pru broke eye contact with Anna and gave a shrug. ‘You said it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell the coroner?’

  ‘Luce asked me to keep it to myself, although I did tell my husband. He was very embarrassed. Asked me to keep quiet about it.’

  My head was buzzing, and I had difficulty concentrating on what they were saying.

  Anna said, ‘Embarrassed about what?’

  ‘His misdiagnosis. And the fact that Luce came to me, not him.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  Pru took a deep breath. ‘Dick was in love with her. Horribly, grovellingly, embarrassingly so. Things were pretty bad between him and me at that stage—we went to Lord Howe originally to patch things up after I’d had a stupid affair. We thought it would bring us back together again, the two of us on an idyllic island, but it turned out to be a very bad idea. By the time Luce came along we couldn’t stand the sight of each other. We hadn’t slept together for six months. And, of course, he couldn’t look at any of the women on the island, not in a place like that—everybody would have known about it within ten minutes. We were just about at breaking point, ready to throw it in and return to the mainland, then this beautiful, intelligent, sympathetic girl stepped off the plane.’

  ‘Morning sickness?’ I hissed. ‘Are you sure?’ I felt like the man who was mugged in the library and had to whisper for help.

  Pru turned and looked carefully at me. I understood her caution now.

  ‘She came to see me late in the afternoon of that Thursday, before the party, when she knew Dick wouldn’t be at the hospital. She asked me to test her, so
I did. It was positive. She didn’t say much more other than to ask me to tell no one.’

  ‘Didn’t she say how late her period was?’ Anna said.

  ‘No. And I didn’t ask about the father. She didn’t want to talk.’

  ‘How soon does morning sickness happen, after conception?’ I whispered.

  ‘Usually between two and ten weeks.’

  ‘Did your husband …’ For once Anna seemed to have difficulty finishing a sentence.

  ‘Have sex with her? I honestly don’t know. He was certainly badly shaken up when I told him about the positive test. That was a couple of days after the accident, when it was becoming clear that she hadn’t survived.’

  ‘Did you ask him?’

  ‘Yes, but he didn’t say anything. He just burst into tears. I debated what to do, but in the end I decided I should respect Luce’s wishes.’

  We sat in silence for a long moment, then Anna said, ‘What really happened to Luce, Pru?’

  Pru frowned, as if not sure what to make of that. ‘What the coroner said, presumably. Why? Do you know something different?’

  ‘We’re not sure. Can you think of any other explanation for Luce’s disappearance?’

  ‘No, of course not.’