Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  ‘Not for all of you,’ I corrected him savagely. ‘Only for her. The rest of you wriggled out of it.’

  He turned away and made to get the boat moving, but I called angrily after him, ‘Sit down, Bob! We haven’t finished yet.’

  He looked back over his shoulder at me, then shrugged and came and sat down again.

  ‘Since you can’t offer a reason for their quarrel, Bob, let me suggest one. It goes like this. You and your brother Harry have a racket going here, collecting rare bird eggs from nesting sites all over the island and selling them to smugglers and dealers, like the American who came visiting on that yacht while Luce and the others were here. Highly illegal, of course, but very lucrative. This must be the most perfect spot on earth to run such a business, but I suppose some exposed sites might be a bit hard to access without being seen. Like on Roach Island, say, with all those lovely endangered grey ternlet nests. But Curtis and Owen had the perfect opportunity to go there with impunity, and so you and Harry paid them to do a bit of collecting for you. And with them being such great climbers, you had the bright idea at the end of their stay to get them to do a bit of prospecting on Balls Pyramid too. Kermadec petrel, was it? Its only nesting site? Very desirable, no doubt. The only trouble was that Luce got wind of it, at the party you threw for the yachties, I think it was. Did she overhear something? She got suspicious, anyway, and finally, on that second visit to Balls Pyramid, she caught Curtis and Owen in the act. When she confronted them they panicked. They had to stop her from telling Marcus what they were up to, or they’d be finished—not just kicked out of uni, but up for a jail term, along with you too, of course.

  ‘Did they talk to you before you set off that day, about their concerns that Luce was on to them? And did you tell them what they had to do if it looked like she’d make trouble? Stage an accident out of sight of Damien and Marcus? But she was too quick for them, wasn’t she? She outran them, but in the end it made no difference. You just left her out here until she was exhausted and had that accident anyway.’

  He’d sat there impassively right through the whole of this, listening to my accusations, showing no surprise or outrage. And when I finished he took a deep breath, rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said, ‘Yep, I reckon you could have something there, mate.’

  His calm was rather scary, and I wondered how I’d miscalculated. Clearly he was going to have to try to do something pretty drastic about us now, and me holding his knife didn’t seem to bother him.

  Then he said, ‘You’ve just got a couple of things back to front. First off, Harry and I don’t deal in eggs. Believe me, in this place you’d be crazy to try anything like that. You’d be found out in no time, and with everybody’s livelihood tied up with wildlife conservation one way or another, you’d be as popular as a dingo in a kindy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Curtis and Owen were involved in something like that, only they weren’t working for me.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Marcus.’

  ‘What? That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Couple of years previously, at the end of one of his visits, I went to see him about something. He was packing up to go, and I caught him unprepared. He was placing eggs in a special foam container in his suitcase. He looked crook when he realised I’d seen it, but then bluffed it out, telling me it was all part of the research project, aiming to start a breeding program back in Sydney. He even showed me how the case had a little heater to keep them alive. Later I asked Carmel, in a roundabout way, how wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a breeding program for the rarer birds on the mainland, and she said it might, but there wasn’t one, and anyway it would be very difficult to get permission to remove eggs from the island to get one started. I decided to keep quiet about it. After all, he was the expert, wasn’t he? Mr Wildlife Conservation himself.

  ‘That was back when Marcus had two good legs, and was leading the fieldwork himself and doing most of the climbing. But four years ago he’d have needed someone else to do the collecting for him.’

  I was stunned. This all sounded horribly plausible. Curtis and Owen were both intensely loyal to Marcus, and it was hard to imagine them getting mixed up in something like this without his knowledge and approval. I looked at Anna, her mouth open, about as gobsmacked as me.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ Bob added. ‘That American you mentioned? Marcus knew him from before. He told me he was an old buddy from when he’d been at university in California.’ He stared at me. ‘Sorry, mate, but if you reckon something bad happened up there that day, you’d better make your inquiries closer to home.’

  ‘What about Damien?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying he was in on it too?’

  ‘What do you think? I’d say so. Not Luce, though. Straight as a die, she was. My guess would be that it was his job to keep her distracted while the others got on with it.’

  ‘Distracted?’

  ‘Yeah. He was her climbing partner, wasn’t he? Can we head back now?’

  Anna and I sat in silence as the great pinnacle shrank away behind us.

  As we approached Lord Howe, Bob turned to us again, and said, ‘So, what do you want to do?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, are you going to ’fess up to stealing Carmel’s boat and landing illegally on Balls Pyramid and forcing dozens of people to spend their weekend searching for you?’

  ‘What’s the alternative?’

  ‘The alternative is that we say you set off on foot, along the base of the cliffs, to try to reach the place Luce was supposed to have fallen, and got lost, or trapped by the tide. Maybe one of you fell and twisted an ankle and couldn’t get back, and the other stayed.’

  Anna and I looked at each other.

  ‘Why would you agree to that, Bob?’

  ‘Because they’ll tear you apart if you tell them the truth, and I don’t fancy the questions you’d have to answer as to why you thought it was so damn important to go out to the Pyramid. As far as I’m concerned, the less said about that place the better.’

  ‘What about Carmel’s boat?’

  ‘I can sort something out, get her a new one.’

  ‘We’d pay for it,’ Anna said quickly. ‘I’d insist on that.’

  It was a moral hazard problem, I suppose, a rather neat one. Bob was offering us a way out of an embarrassing predicament by doing something rather similar to what he claimed he had had to do in relation to Luce, forcing us to admit in effect that we’d have done the same thing in his shoes. It didn’t appeal to me one bit, but I still wasn’t sure about his story, nor whether I trusted any of the Kelsos, and it seemed to me that, without solid evidence either way, we were pretty much in their hands.

  I exchanged a look with Anna. ‘All right?’

  She shrugged. ‘As a matter of fact I do have a swollen ankle.’

  ‘Good,’ Bob said, and turned the boat towards the opening in the reef.

  They made it easy for us to live with our moral turpitude. Everyone was so pleased to see us safely back, falling over each other to look after us, hailing us as heroes and Bob as scarcely less than a saint. And when I thought about it later, lying in a hot bath with a large whisky in my fist, it seemed to me that in a way it was true—our ascent of Balls Pyramid had been fairly heroic, and Bob had saved our lives. But I also couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow he’d been let off the hook. I thought that much of what he’d told us was probably true—Luce going missing on the Friday rather than the following Monday, for instance, would be a risky thing to invent, and seemed to fit with the fact that we hadn’t found anyone else who’d seen her during that period—but was it the whole truth? Once he realised we knew he’d taken Luce to Balls Pyramid this story was about the best he could have come up with to exonerate himself. And I still found his accusation against Marcus hard to come to terms with. I swung between incredulity and sickening doubt. And if it were true, the one I felt most bitter about was not Marcus, wrecked in his Castlecrag cave, but his lieutenant, Damien—
Damien the survivor, in his luxury flat, the father-to-be. I thought of how he’d helped us, tried to steer us away from this, of how solicitous he’d been to Suzi and how he’d groomed Mary.

  The thought of Mary reminded me how long we’d been away, almost a week. When I got out of the bath I phoned her and she assured me that everything was well. I didn’t tell her about our little misadventure.

  That evening Muriel Kelso insisted that we eat with them. We had both been examined by the doctor and Anna’s ankle X-rayed and bandaged, and though he pronounced us reasonably fit, suffering from mild exposure, Muriel still regarded us as invalids. I had been expecting her husband to give us a rough time, but I must say he was quite merciful, even benevolent in the face of our contrition. I laid it on pretty thick, how we’d totally underestimated the difficulties and should have listened to his wise counsel. ‘You must be fed up with the whole bunch of us by now,’ I finished.

  ‘Oh now, that isn’t true,’ Muriel said. ‘What happened to poor Lucy was simply a tragedy, nobody’s fault. And poor Curtis and Owen! No, we feel great sadness, of course, but we can’t alter the past. We just have to live with it. And you say Marcus isn’t well?’

  I said, ‘Not too well, I think. He seems to have left the university on bad terms, and become a bit of a hermit.’

  ‘Oh dear. We knew that he never came back here again to continue his research project, of course, but I don’t see how they could blame him for what happened. And what about Damien? I hear he’s a successful lawyer now.’

  She said this with a certain intensity behind her bright smile, I thought. How had she heard about him?

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said shortly.

  ‘And some lucky girl has finally managed to pin him down, I believe?’ She was watching Anna keenly for her reaction.

  ‘Lucky woman,’ Anna said dryly.

  Muriel smiled to herself, and Stanley changed the subject to more innocuous territory. I was intrigued by Muriel’s interest in Damien, and later, when Stanley excused himself to make some phone calls, and Bob went out to get another bottle of wine, I brought it up again.

  ‘It sounds as if you got the measure of Damien while he was here, Muriel.’

  ‘Oh well, by the time you get to my age you’ve seen most human types. I recognised his straight away. The way he looked at the girls. It’s a handicap, really—makes life exciting, of course, for both him and them, but I do hope he’s settled down now.’

  I heard Bob returning and said quickly, ‘Did he try something on with Lucy, Muriel? That night of the party, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked at me for a moment, then gave her head a little shake. ‘I gave you my advice, didn’t I, Josh? Let it go. The past is gone. Whatever she or anyone else may have said or done, she was always true to herself.’

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? What had Luce said or done that Muriel knew and didn’t want to pass on to me? I wanted to ask her more, but Bob had returned and the conversation switched to the cost of diesel.

  22

  The following day we flew back to Sydney. After a night of deep sleep I’d woken with a general sense of suspended reality, as if I hadn’t quite surfaced from an intense dream. This feeling continued as the little plane rose up into the bright air above the island and banked to the south-west, giving me one last panoramic view. I could make out the white threads of surf along the line of the reef, the shadow of a cloud passing over one of the Admiralty Islands, a tiny boat lying off Neds Beach. And then, as we climbed higher, I caught sight of Balls Pyramid away to the south, stark and solitary. Had we really stood on top of that, Anna and I, just a couple of days before?

  I glanced at her sitting beside me, reading an article in the in-flight magazine about adventure holidays in Tibet, and I smiled to myself, feeling a glow of affection for her. I imagined her going back to the Walter Murchison Memorial Nursing Home, readjusting to the grubby realities of ordinary life, and I suddenly realised how much I would miss her constant presence when we got back. She closed the magazine with a sigh, and dug a book out of her pack—a murder mystery, naturally.

  The surge of people at Sydney airport roused me from my dreamy state like a slap in the face. We fought our way through the crowds to the entrance to the rail station and caught a train into Central. Anna had a twenty-minute wait for a connection to Blacktown, and I bought us coffees and sat with her, reluctant to leave. I guessed that she was feeling something similar. She’d said hardly a word that morning and now she stared at her hands, still raw and swollen from the climbing, and shook her head.

  ‘It’s hard to believe,’ she murmured.

  ‘Yes, like a dream.’

  She looked at me with a frown. ‘We haven’t talked about what we’re going to do now, Josh.’

  A strident voice chanted something incomprehensible over the loudspeakers and the people at the next table jumped to their feet and hurried away.

  ‘No, we haven’t, have we?’ I think we had both been doing our best to avoid it. Perhaps we hoped that a return to the reality of our home turf would put what we’d learned into some kind of perspective, so that we could separate fact from fantasy.

  ‘Damien is going to have to be confronted,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose so.’ Anna sounded as tired as I felt. ‘Do you think he’ll deny everything?’

  ‘Luce’s climbing gear is still out there on Balls Pyramid. The police would find it if they tried to check our story.’

  Her frown became deeper, wrinkling those black eyebrows together. ‘It would destroy his career if we made public what Bob told us, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Very likely he’d go to jail. Marcus too. Maybe Bob. It’d be a big scandal.’

  We sat in silence, then I said, ‘I can talk to him on my own if you like. He might say more if there aren’t any other witnesses around.’

  She looked at me, uncertain, a bit worried. ‘You wouldn’t …?’

  ‘What?’ I laughed. ‘Stick matches up his nails? Don’t worry, I’d just talk to him.’

  ‘Right. You’d be careful, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Course.’ I looked up at the clock. ‘Your train’ll be in soon.’

  She finished her coffee and got to her feet, made to pick up her pack, then changed her mind and suddenly flung her arms around me. ‘Thanks for everything, Josh,’ she whispered.

  ‘Hey, we made a great team, didn’t we?’

  She nodded and broke away. I watched her hoist her pack onto her shoulder and wave goodbye. She mouthed some final message, but it was drowned out by another announcement on the loudspeaker.

  Mary broke off her baking to give me a big hug, too, Socrates circling us excitedly, tail thrashing. I was surprised by how good it felt to be back, to take in the familiar kitchen smells again, and some other deeper, more elusive scent, of old timber perhaps or ancient polish, that seemed to impregnate the whole house.

  ‘And did you find what you were looking for, dear?’

  I gave her the sanitised version I’d prepared, how we’d visited the place where Luce had had her accident, and spoken to the islanders involved, and how kind and helpful everyone had been.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, pushing her hair back from her forehead and leaving a smudge of flour. I sensed her relief. ‘Now you’ve laid the past to rest, you can move on. I’m sure that’s what Lucy would want.’ I realised she must have been worrying about this.

  ‘You’re right. I’ve been thinking I should start looking at the job pages. I’ve been sponging off you for long enough.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’d be lost without my live-in handyman. The bulb blew in that high ceiling on the stair the other night, and I haven’t been able to change it. But you’re right—you should be thinking about your career. And Anna …’ she added cautiously, ‘she’s happy after your trip?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said casually. ‘As happy as she’ll ever be. I think she just needs excuses to get away from that nursing home,’ and I launched into a lurid des
cription of the place.

  Mary laughed. ‘Well, we’ll all end up there, or somewhere like it, in the long run.’

  I unpacked my bag, and found that the sole of my right climbing shoe had split. I threw the pair away, deciding that my climbing days were over, then put a load in the washing machine, and phoned Damien.

  ‘Ah, Josh, you’re back?’ He sounded wary. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Good. I need to talk to you, Damien.’

  ‘Of course.’ He didn’t sound surprised. I wondered if Bob Kelso had already phoned him. ‘Lauren’s going out tonight with her sisters. Why don’t you come round? We can talk in peace.’

  I spent the afternoon catching up on my chores, replacing the light bulb, finishing off the bit of paving I’d been repairing on the terrace, pruning some dead branches in the lilly pilly. And I did check the employment pages in the Herald. I looked at the banking and financial sections, and also contemplated a couple of academic positions, but I didn’t get as far as applying. I thought I’d hold off contacting Damien’s friend.

  I got to his front door soon after eight. He buzzed me in and met me on the landing of the twenty-eighth floor as before, and took me into his flat.

  ‘Drink? Scotch?’

  ‘Thanks.’ I watched him as he fixed them, thinking how amazingly well he’d done in such a short time. Surely he couldn’t have been in practice much more than a year? Two at the most. Already I thought he was beginning to cultivate those little quirks that some lawyers like to affect—a flamboyant curl to the hair, a mild extravagance of dress—to make them distinctive, even a little eccentric. He had great survival qualities, I thought; ambitious, focused, intelligent and charming.

  ‘Here.’ He handed me the tumbler and sat down opposite me. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘So … your trip.’