Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  Bob steered us out into the calm waters of the lagoon, turning the boat south to run parallel to the long beach, several kilometres of deserted golden sand. We passed the end of the airstrip and continued towards the foothills of the first of the two southern mountains, Mount Lidgbird. Here the reef closed in against the shore, and Bob turned us towards the passage between the lines of foaming surf that would take us out into open water. The swell out there was quite heavy after the calm of the lagoon, and we pitched and yawed as we got clear of the reef and turned south again beneath the increasingly formidable basalt cliffs of the mountains.

  I know next to nothing about boats, and I was interested to watch Bob and ask him how things worked—especially the GPS navigation equipment next to the wheel. He was pleased to demonstrate it, pointing out the features on the glowing map of the island on the screen and our position on it.

  ‘So, these figures show our position in degrees?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right, degrees decimal. You can switch the readout to degrees, minutes and seconds if you want …’ he showed me, ‘or to UTM.’

  ‘Neat. What about the reverse? Can you put in a map reference and it’ll show you where it is?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He pointed ahead to a steep valley between the two mountains and handed me binoculars to look for waterfalls. I went back to join Anna and spoke quietly to her.

  ‘I need a couple of minutes alone in the wheelhouse. If we get the chance, see if you can keep him occupied out here.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Not sure yet. Are you all right?’ She looked grey.

  ‘This heaving up and down … I feel a bit sick.’

  ‘Concentrate on the mountains. Look out for waterfalls. See? Over there.’ There were several silver threads of water cascading down the immense black cliffs.

  I stayed with her as we moved under the shadow of Mount Gower, its dark flank looming overhead as we approached the point of South Head. The sombre blackness of the basalt cliffs was oppressive, and as Bob throttled back the engine and turned the boat closer to the shore I realised that this must be the place.

  He joined us and pointed to an area halfway up the sheer wall, where white birds flitted in and out of the shadows. ‘That’s where they were working. I put them ashore on that narrow beach over there.’

  I scanned the cliffs with my camera, then with the binoculars, hoping to see some sign of the protection they might have used to anchor themselves up there, but it was too dark and too high up to make out any details, and the image swayed with the movement of the boat. The idea of working unsecured in such a place seemed unthinkable, and I blurted out, ‘I can’t believe she wouldn’t have had a rope.’

  He shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where did she come down?’

  He pointed to a spot where waves broke against the base of the cliff, sending spume high up the rock face. ‘Reckon that was it. Don’t want to get any closer. The currents are treacherous down this southern tip of the island.’

  Anna gave a little sob and reached into the bag for the flowers. She was looking very pale. She leaned over the side and dropped the blooms over. They drifted away, tiny white petals against the dark water. Then she suddenly gave a retch and ducked her head, being sick.

  As Bob went to her, I backed away towards the wheel-house and began fiddling with the GPS controls. One thing I had managed to do the previous night was memorise the coordinates of Luce’s last entry, but first I had to convert the instrument to UTM readings.

  ‘What’re you up to?’

  I stiffened at Bob’s voice at my shoulder. ‘Oh, sorry, just seeing if I can work this thing. How is she?’

  ‘She’ll feel better in a minute.’

  I nodded, looked up and froze. ‘Holy shit!’

  Ahead of us, glowing in the haze that obscured the southern horizon, I had seen for the first time what looked like the spire of a drowned cathedral rising out of the ocean depths.

  When Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, captain of HMS Supply and then aged thirty, discovered Lord Howe Island, he was careful to do the right thing. He named it after Admiral Lord Richard ‘Black Dick’ Howe, First Lord of the Admiralty. Then he named its highest peak after Rear Admiral John Leveson-Gower, also an Admiralty Lord. The cluster of offshore islands to the north he called the Admiralty Islands, and even named a small island at the edge of the lagoon after his ship’s master, David Blackburn. He gave the second highest peak, rather coyly perhaps, his own middle name. But his surname he reserved for an extraordinary spike of rock lying off to the south. When I first saw it through the boat’s windshield I guessed it might be a kilometre away and perhaps eighty or a hundred metres high. Bob corrected me—it was twenty-three kilometres off and rose an astonishing five hundred and fifty-one metres, the tallest sea stack in the world, a third higher than Frenchmans Cap and one and a half times the height of the Empire State Building—my measures of terrifying altitude since my night on the mountain with Luce. There is a portrait of Henry Ball in the National Library of Australia, one of those little black-and-white Georgian silhouettes, with a rather dandyish quiff of hair standing up on his forehead and what might be either an arrogant or determined set to his lips and the push of his chin. I like to imagine his crew running to the rail as they caught sight of the amazing volcanic fang rearing out of the ocean in that remote place and crying, ‘Bleedin’ heck, what’s that?’ and Henry, studying this vision of Nature Sublime through his telescope, replying, ‘Gentlemen, that is Balls Pyramid.’

  It shook me, I have to admit. Not just the thing itself, but also the absolute certainty that I knew its UTM coordinates. Later in the trip, in calmer water, Anna managed to distract Bob for a couple of minutes while I checked it out on his GPS set, but I already knew I was right.

  ‘Can we go and see it?’ I asked.

  Bob shook his head dubiously. ‘Sea’s a bit rough out there, Josh.’

  ‘But it’s amazing. Can we at least try?’

  He didn’t seem to want to make an issue of it, and said he’d detour that way.

  I went to sit with Anna at the back, plastered with sun cream, as we bounced across the choppy sea, circling out towards the south. I felt a bit mean, for all she wanted was to get back onto dry land, but that couldn’t be helped. As our angle of view slowly shifted we saw that from its flank Balls Pyramid resembled a tall triangular sail, while from end-on it appeared to be a slender spire; so thin in fact that in one place the wind had punched a hole clean through. This ragged tooth was all that was left of a huge volcanic crater rim, and beneath the waves it continued down to the ocean floor, two thousand metres beneath us.

  The sea wasn’t too rough, and once he’d resigned himself to taking us out there, Bob became determined to prove just how inaccessible it was. To begin with, there were the tips of lesser peaks around it, barely breaking the surface, that made it dangerous to approach. Then there was the impossibility of making a landing, there being nowhere a boat could safely moor against the vertical sides. And finally, the thing was too exposed, too sheer, its rock too eroded and crumbly, to safely climb.

  ‘So it’s never been climbed?’ I asked, thinking that would make it even more irresistible to Luce and her friends.

  ‘It was climbed in the 1960s,’ Bob conceded, ‘and once or twice since, but it’s so dangerous that it’s banned now. It’s a bird reserve.’

  We watched vast flocks of gulls floating in the air around its high flanks, and I said, ‘Luce would have loved this place, Bob. Did you ever bring her out here?’

  He ducked his head away as a wave hit us, and adjusted his steering. ‘Nah. She saw it all right, though, from South Head. Couldn’t very well miss it, could she?’

  I thought he was lying. As I took pictures he pointed out some of the features that the first climbers had christened along the steep ridge that ran up to the summit from the south—the twin spires of Winklestein’s Steeple, the Black Tower and the Cheval Ridge, so named because it
was so narrow, with sheer drops on either side, that it had to be traversed as if sitting on a horse, with a leg down each side. I felt sure he’d told Luce the same story.

  We could also clearly see the huge breakers crashing against its base.

  ‘So how did they get ashore?’

  ‘Their boat stood off while one of them jumped in and swam to the rock with a line, then pulled their gear and the others over. But there are sharks, huge sharks, and the waves and currents are bad around here, mate, real bad. Chances are you’d be swept away or bashed against the rocks before you could get out of the water.’

  I could see the difficulties all too clearly, but as we turned back towards Lord Howe I was even more convinced that Luce had stood on that thing. Why was I so sure? There was the map reference in her diary, of course, but it was more than that—I’d felt her presence there. That sounds absurdly fanciful, like Owen seeing her on the mountain before he fell, and Marcus on his terrace, and as we grew further and further away from the Pyramid I tried to convince myself to be rational. But each time I glanced back at it, glowing solitary in the morning sun, the sensation came back, creeping up my spine.

  The wind picked up as we approached Lord Howe, the waves got bigger, and Anna was sick again. Then we were running up the eastern side of the island, Bob pointing out the landmarks among the cliffs and rocky bays. For Anna’s sake, and having spent an extra couple of hours on the detour to the south, we agreed to forgo the fishing, and Bob circled the Admiralty Islands, showing us the wave-cut tunnel through the middle of Roach Island. Seabirds swooped around us, dazzlingly blue, and it was only when they climbed away that we realised they were pure white, coloured by the light reflected off the blue waters. We followed the line of the northern cliffs and circled around North Head to approach a northern passage through the reef. Ahead of us we could see people on the jetty.

  We clambered ashore, unsteady, and thanked Bob. I asked how much we owed him, but he wouldn’t take any money. Instead we bought him lunch at the café, and he suggested we borrow a couple of bikes from the house and spend the afternoon exploring.

  When he’d gone, Anna, a little colour returning to her cheeks, looked at me and said, ‘So, what’s the mystery?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You were up to something. What?’

  I felt suddenly reluctant to tell her. I was uneasy about how she might react, and anyway, sitting there at a café table surrounded by people, my imaginings just seemed utterly fanciful.

  ‘What did you want in the wheelhouse?’ she demanded.

  ‘He had a GPS set in there,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I just wanted to check something.’

  ‘Without him knowing. What was it?’

  So I told her about that last, erratic reading from the diary, and of the significance of WE as against WF. She knew less about maps than I did, and I had to explain it all twice.

  ‘But you thought you could put the numbers into Bob’s navigation system and it would tell you where the place was?’

  ‘That’s right. I thought the WE might have been a mistake, but it wasn’t. When I entered the numbers with WF, I came up with a point in the middle of the ocean.’

  ‘But with WE?’

  ‘Yes, I got a landfall, but not on Lord Howe.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘Near the southern tip of Balls Pyramid.’

  ‘And that wasn’t the same map reading that Owen entered in Carmel’s log?’

  ‘I can’t be sure of that. I didn’t have time to copy down his entries. But they told the inquest they’d been working on the Mount Gower cliffs all that week—there was no mention of Balls Pyramid. And if they did go out there Bob must have taken them in his boat, but he denied it, didn’t he? And he claimed no one had set foot on it for years.’

  Anna rubbed her forehead, thinking. ‘Maybe they were just talking about Balls Pyramid, and Luce looked it up on her equipment and jotted down the coordinates.’

  ‘Yeah, I might have gone with that if she hadn’t also put down the time and the altitude, just like the other entries. One twenty-five in the afternoon, and one hundred and forty-nine metres up. I think I saw the place as we sailed round. Bob called it Gannet Green, a shelf with a bit of vegetation on it.’ I showed her the pictures on the screen of my camera. They were a bit tipsy with the motion of the boat, but you could see it all right.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Josh. The implications …’

  ‘Yes. One little number, and if you interpret it that way, it means that everything that Curtis, Owen, Damien, Marcus and Bob said about that final week is in doubt.’

  ‘Why would they have done it?’

  ‘Because it’s there. Let’s say they’d finished their officially sanctioned project early, at the end of the previous week, so they decide to go out to have a look at this amazing place. Maybe there are birds out there that you don’t find anywhere else. It’s certainly the most fantastic rock climb I’ve ever heard of. But it’s forbidden to land there and there’s no chance the board will consider a scientific study without a proper submission, and that could take months. So they decide to do it on the quiet, only something goes wrong. Luce has an accident, maybe she’s swept away getting from the boat to the shore. They’ll be in deep shit if they say what happened, Bob especially, so they change the place of the accident to where they should have been, where their daily reports said they were.’

  ‘How would they have persuaded Bob to take them out there, to let them land?’

  ‘I don’t know. Money? No. Maybe because he was soft on Luce, and she persuaded him.’

  We were silent for a long time. It sounded almost plausible, but there were details that bothered me. I decided to give the great detective time to mull it over.

  ‘Anyway, if there’s a grain of truth in it, we’ll have to be very careful. I don’t think it’s a story that anybody is going to want to hear. So I propose we do as Bob suggested and go for a cycle, and pretend that everything’s just fine.’

  She nodded agreement. ‘You’re right. And really, if it did happen like that, there’s nothing to be gained from opening it all up again.’

  ‘Right.’ Except that, if it did happen like that, then those five blokes had deliberately conspired to direct the rescue effort twenty kilometres away from where it should have been focused.

  We walked back to the cabin and Anna had a shower and I a couple of beers—our respective ways of recalibrating ourselves to the world. Then we went out to the driveway in front of the house, where half a dozen bikes were stacked against the veranda rail, with helmets piled on the edge of the deck. We selected our mounts, I helped adjust the height of Anna’s seat, and then we wobbled off up the driveway to the road. We turned south, back along the way Bob had first brought us from the airstrip, which we came to after ten minutes. The headwind caught us as we turned onto the long stretch of road that ran parallel to the runway, and we laughed as we battled at barely jogging speed, straining against the wind.

  At the far end the road curved around the end of the airstrip to head back towards the lagoon shore. Dead ahead there was a sand dune, and parked on it a small white four-wheel drive bearing the crest of the New South Wales Police. We pulled off the road and walked our bikes up to it. There was a track through the dunes here, leading down to the sandy sweep of Blinky Beach, the island’s surfing beach. A lone figure was far out among the breakers, and we sat on the tufted grass watching as he caught a wave and coasted in. He looked as if he got a lot of practice.

  He spotted us, and slung his board under his arm and padded up the beach towards us.

  ‘G’day. Grant Campbell,’ he said as we got to our feet. ‘Looking for me?’

  ‘Not specially, Grant,’ I said, and introduced us. ‘We’re friends of Lucy Corcoran, remember her? Who had the accident four years ago?’

  ‘Course I remember.’ He eyed us steadily.

  ‘Guess you don’t get much crime here.’

 
; ‘Nope.’ Grant seemed even more laconic than Bob, and equally aware of our presence on the island.

  ‘I was talking to Glenn Maddox in Sydney recently. He’s a sergeant now.’

  ‘Oh yeah? The big guy.’

  I assumed he was being ironic. Maddox was shorter than any of us. ‘I told him I was thinking of coming out here. He said to say hello.’

  ‘Did he manage to convert you?’ He grinned. ‘How come you were talking to him?’

  ‘Just wanted to check if there’d been any developments.’

  ‘Developments? Like what?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve been overseas for four years. I just wondered if anything new had come up. Anyway, Sergeant Maddox seemed to think us coming here would be a good idea. Help us come to terms with it.’

  ‘And has it?’

  ‘Well, this is only our second day. You were involved with the rescue effort, weren’t you, after she fell?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Were you happy about how it was done?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, did you get all the resources you needed?’

  ‘We had the navy and the air force. By Monday evening we had twenty boats and aircraft out there.’

  ‘Were you involved in directing the search?’

  ‘Me and others.’

  ‘Would you mind taking us through what happened?’

  He sat beside us on the dune, the sand sticking to his black wetsuit, and picked up a piece of driftwood to draw a crescent in the sand. ‘Lord Howe. Bob got a message from them at two that afternoon that Lucy had fallen and was in the water.’ He poked the stick at the bottom of the crescent. ‘He contacted me, then got in his boat and headed down there. I found as many people as I could with boats and sent them down after him. Towards three they reported that there was no sign of her.