Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  ‘Yes.’ I found I was holding my breath.

  ‘There was lots of confusing information to sort out in the days after Lucy disappeared,’ he went on. ‘People charging all over the place, rumours of sightings and false alarms. We had to decide what was relevant and what wasn’t. It’s always like that with an investigation of course, but afterwards you wonder. On the day after the accident, the helicopter from HMAS Newcastle flew over Balls Pyramid. They spotted two people who’d landed on the Pyramid from a Zodiac off one of the visiting yachts.’

  ‘Really? Did you find out who they were?’

  ‘Mm. One of them had a beard, the other red hair. Sounded like Damien Stokes and Curtis Read to me. Later on I asked them, and they said they’d wanted to check that Lucy hadn’t been washed up on Balls Pyramid. With the direction of the currents that would have been impossible, of course, and I took it for an innocent mistake. But then you wonder …’

  ‘What do you wonder?’

  He just shrugged.

  ‘Did they find any sign of her?’ I asked.

  He said, ‘No. Well, they couldn’t have, could they?’

  That evening I met Rory in the hallway of the hotel. He regarded me quizzically over the top of his glasses, the way he no doubt considered all dubious witnesses, then asked sombrely if I’d care to join him in a tot of whisky. I didn’t, but I couldn’t think of a reason to refuse.

  We sat in the little bar while he poured the Glenfiddich, then he said, ‘You’ve been to a funeral, I hear. That feller who was the tutor of those climbers, your friends.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Mary must have kept him informed.

  ‘All over now.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘No.’ He repeated, with emphasis, ‘It is all over. The coroner has accepted the police report. There’s no suspicion attached to yourself or Ms Green.’

  I looked at him in astonishment.

  ‘Mary asked me to keep an eye on things. I really think this business …’ He hesitated, then seemed to think better of what he’d been about to say. ‘Mary tells me you’re considering your career options.’

  ‘Well, um, yes,’ I said, and then, since he seemed to expect something more, I added, ‘I enjoyed my experience in London, but I’m not sure that I want to continue in that path.’

  ‘The Venezuelan business, eh?’

  I gawped at him.

  ‘Banker friend of mine at the club,’ he said. ‘He was one of the people your bank tried to cheat. He was interested when I mentioned your name, told me the story.’ And he proceeded to relate it exactly as it had happened.

  I was shocked, though it all seemed rather trivial now, compared with everything else that had happened since. ‘They told me nothing would be said.’

  He chuckled. ‘No use having an anonymous scapegoat. Wouldn’t be believed. You’re quite famous, apparently, in a select circle.’

  I groaned.

  ‘Sometimes these experiences can be the most valuable. And not necessarily a liability—shows you were in the thick of it. Best to move boldly forward now. Put the past behind you.’

  He’d been discussing it with Mary, of course, and this was now the official line. They were really talking about Luce, and my unhealthy obsession with her death. This had to mark the end of it.

  ‘My friend has an interest in a boutique investment company. They specialise in ecological investments—carbon trading, stuff like that? I don’t pretend to understand it. But he thinks your background and experience might be just what they need. You might like to give this chap a ring.’

  He handed me a card, just as Damien had once done. It had very discreet small lettering. I thanked him and promised that I would.

  I assumed that was the heavy agenda business over, but then he came out with the big surprise.

  ‘Er, Mary and I have decided to get married, Josh. Mary wanted to tell you, of course, but I asked her to allow me …’

  It was almost as if he was asking me for her hand or something, and I couldn’t suppress a big grin. He seemed discomfited by this response. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’m just so pleased, Rory. For both of you.’ I didn’t go so far as to say I’d love to have him as an uncle.

  ‘I’m afraid it’ll mean letting the hotel go. Mary’s very reluctant, understandably, but you know about her heart, don’t you? The specialist’s told her she must take it easy, and I intend to make sure she does. I, too, will be retiring, from the bench.’

  ‘I see. Anyway, congratulations.’ I raised my glass.

  ‘Yes, well … it’s been a long time for both of us, but it’s never too late, Josh, that’s the thing.’

  It’d be nice to think so, although Marcus wouldn’t have agreed. Several weeks later I got a call from Suzi. She asked how Damien was, and I told her that he was now at home. I pictured him in his wheelchair on his ledge on the twenty-eighth floor. His brain had been severely damaged by his heart stoppages, and he had not spoken a word since. He was not expected to improve.

  Suzi explained that she hadn’t been in touch with anyone since she’d read about Marcus. She confessed that she’d never felt very comfortable with him. Then she asked if I’d like to call in for a cup of tea or a drink. I must have hesitated, wondering what this was all about, and she added hurriedly that she had a little problem she needed someone’s advice on, and she thought I might be the one.

  I called in the next morning and she made coffee. Young Thomas was playing contentedly, a far cry from the screaming child Luce and I had babysat. We exchanged news without Suzi getting to the point of the visit. Then, when we’d finished our coffees, she asked me to come with her to the backyard, which apparently was where the problem lay. Beyond a sandpit and a small rectangle of grass, Owen had converted most of the backyard into an immaculate vegetable garden. Raised beds were lush with beans and tomatoes, lettuce and silverbeet, and though weeds had begun to invade since Owen’s death, it didn’t look too problematic to me.

  Suzi led me down a central brick path towards the back wall, against which was a compost bin and a small greenhouse. It was filled with potted shrubs, and when I looked through the glass at them I felt a little jolt of recognition. They looked to me like melaleuca, and the last time I’d seen that tight-knit foliage, twisting like green coral, was on Gannet Green, a hundred odd metres up Balls Pyramid.

  ‘You can’t see them now, they come out at night, but Owen brought back these funny kind of stick insects from Lord Howe Island, that time that poor Luce died. He said he shouldn’t have, really, and we mustn’t tell anyone, especially Marcus or Damien. I really didn’t see why, but he was adamant. Only, there are quite a few of them now, and I don’t think I can look after them properly, and I don’t want them getting out—they’re big, you see, and I don’t know if they bite. They’re horrible things, they give me the creeps, and the thought of them getting onto Thomas or the baby … I almost called the pest exterminator, but Owen was so attached to them. I thought I should speak to you first. What do you think I should do?’

  It was a good question. She had no idea how good. For a moment I pondered, the fate of perhaps the rarest creature on the planet in my hands. I decided that if I thought about it for a month I still wouldn’t know what was the right answer, so I just went with gut feeling. Luce had sacrificed her life for these horrible things, after all.

  ‘I know someone at the Australian Museum,’ I said, ‘who I’m sure will be delighted to arrange for them to be taken away.’

  ‘Just so long as we don’t get into trouble.’

  Actually, it was more difficult than I’d anticipated. The nice lady at the museum thought I was playing some kind of practical joke on her, and became convinced I was from one of those candid camera TV shows. She kept peering over my shoulder, expecting a cameraman to burst in. In the end I had to tell her that Marcus had been instrumental in bringing them back from Lord Howe, and had given them to Owen to keep for him. She knew of Marcus’s reputation, and had read about his s
uicide, and she didn’t think that any TV show would be sick enough to exploit his death like that. I wasn’t so sure, but at least she was listening to me.

  And so arrangements were made to give the phasmids a new home, where they would be nurtured, studied and eventually returned to their island. I was there when the team came to collect them, and watched them being teased and coaxed out of their bushes, awkward, archaic but also rather dignified in their survival. There were seven of them in all, and when they were all rounded up I looked at them and thought how bitterly ironic it was that a woman such as Luce should have died for such ugly little creatures. For a moment I felt angry at the grotesque imbalance, and then it occurred to me how much Luce would have appreciated it. You might say they were her bronze sandal.

  26

  I am sitting now with Anna on the hotel terrace with a glass of wine, looking out at the last glimmer of evening sunlight glowing on the far side of Elizabeth Bay after several days of storms. I look at her profile, the thoughtful honest eyes, the little vertical crease at the left edge of her mouth made by her lopsided grin, the small scar on her temple, and I remember the moment, a year ago, when I first caught sight of her standing there at the reception counter.

  We have been discussing some changes she wants to make to our website. I say ‘our’ because I am a partner in this business now, the Harris Hotel, if a relatively dormant one, enabled by a favourable loan from the boutique investment company for which I now work, following Rory’s recommendation. He and Mary are the other sleeping partners, following their wedding, made remarkably boisterous by Rory’s ebullient friends from the legal fraternity. The other partner, and manager, licensee and driving force, is Anna, who bought her stake through the sale of her flat in Blacktown. She lives here now, in Mary’s old apartment upstairs, and I visit frequently, and often stay, increasingly for longer.

  A seagull wheels in overhead. It doesn’t have long scarlet streamers in its tail, nor is it doing cartwheels in the up-draught. This one looks old and battered by the storms, and when it lands with a stagger on the top of the garden wall it sags, as if relieved to have left the ocean behind. I think I understand how it feels.

  She stood panting on the narrow ledge, pressing herself back against the hard surface of the rock. At her feet the second rat lay crushed in the crack in which she had finally cornered it. Five days it had taken her, days of headlong pursuit, of lung-bursting effort and numbing strain. There had been times when she had almost given up, despairing of the impossible task, and at the end her quarry, as exhausted and defeated as herself, had stared up into her face and seemed to welcome its fate.

  She raised the bloody stone with which she’d crushed it, and threw it out into the void. It was all she could manage, a final gesture. She was so exhausted, so dehydrated and weary, her body so depleted, that she could barely think or see.

  Then she heard a voice, far below, calling her name. She tried to answer, but her throat was parched and no sound came. They had heard the stone, clattering down the cliff to the sea, and now they knew where she was. She waited, and gradually made out the sounds of their voices getting closer, calling to each other as they climbed. Curtis, she thought, and someone else, come to make amends. She wondered how they could face her now.

  There had been a time, at the summit, on the very tip of this rocky spike, when she had given way to despair, when the thought of seeing them again had filled her with such hopeless disgust that she had decided to finish with it. How could she bring a child into such a world, where even the finest and the bravest could not be trusted or believed? She had stood on the edge of the pinnacle, arms outstretched, ready to step into the void. But it had been the child that had stopped her. It was a decision she could make only for herself, not for her child. And so she had gone on.

  She looked down at a sudden sound and saw Curtis’s head appear five metres below her.

  ‘She’s here!’ he shouted, and gave her a cautious smile.

  He clambered on up, pulling himself onto her ledge, a little to her right.

  ‘Jeez!’ he gasped, and began hammering an anchor into the rock. He clipped himself to it and called out, ‘On belay,’ then turned to her. ‘Goodness, are you all right? Where’s your gear, for God’s sake?’

  She just stared at him, and his face flushed and he turned away to concentrate on the other climber coming up behind him. It was Damien, she realised. He paused when he came into view, staring straight up at her, and something in his face, a kind of grim emptiness held in place by willpower, chilled her. He worked his way up to her left side, and anchored himself, and said not a word.

  She looked from one to the other, seeing the hesitation on Curtis’s side, the determination on Damien’s. Damien reached for her, but before his hand could touch her she had stepped forward, out into the bright air.

  Author’s Note

  In 1997 a research team reported cloning an immortality gene called MORF4. Four years later the American Geron Corporation patented an immortality gene that encodes telomerase, and in 2003 Scottish scientists discovered the immortality gene Nanog, which was reported by New Scientist to ‘keep embryonic stem cells in a state of youthful immortality’.

  At the time of writing, a few surviving specimens of the Lord Howe Island Land Lobster, the phantom phasmid, Dryococelus australis, once thought to be extinct and now possibly the world’s rarest invertebrate, have been recovered from Balls Pyramid and taken to the mainland, where they are undergoing a breeding program with a view to their eventual return to Lord Howe Island.

  Read on, as Brock & Kolla return

  with a vengeance in the remarkable

  Dark Mirror

  1

  Nigel Ogilvie hurried up the stairs to the Reading Room on the first floor, and made his way, panting slightly, to the big windows overlooking the square. It was a dazzling spring morning, the sun glistening on new foliage bursting from the trees in the central garden, so that it seemed as if King William on his bronze horse was prancing through a brilliant green cloud. Nigel spotted the familiar figure sitting on a bench not far from the statue, her head bent over a book, and watched as she wiped her mouth with a paper napkin, then slowly gathered up the wrapper and drink bottle by her side. He reached into his pocket for his mobile phone and took a picture, capturing the moment as Marion got to her feet and the sun caught her, setting her red hair alight. She began to walk towards the library, tossing her rubbish into a bin. Her coat was unbuttoned, and he watched the swell of her thighs beneath her dress as she strode, head up. Lithe, he thought, that was the word. He felt a small quickening of his heartbeat and turned away, making his way across the Reading Room to where he’d left his book earlier. Settling himself in the red leather armchair, he opened the heavy volume on his knee and waited, eyes unfocused on the text.

  He was finding it hard to concentrate these days, his research not going well. The idea for the project, Deadly Gardens, had been dreamed up by his boss over a boozy lunch, and Nigel was convinced that it wasn’t going to work. For the past week he’d been trying to make something of the gardens that Lucrezia Borgia would have known at Ferrara, Nepi, Spoleto and Foligno, but really, it was a waste of time—Lucrezia had had more pressing things on her mind than gardening. She too had red hair, if Veneziano’s portrait was to be believed, and Nigel imagined that she and Marion might have other things in common—a dangerous attraction, for one.

  Deadly Gardens. He sighed with frustration. He detested Stephen, his boss, a philistine about half his age, who treated him with an amused contempt that made him feel as if he was back at school. But at least the project had provided him with an excuse to hide himself here in the library. He loved the place, a refuge where he could turn off his importuning mobile phone, bury himself in the womb of a million books, snuffle about on the steel grille floors among the stacks, do The Times crossword and—a particular satisfaction—observe the other patrons. Poking about in the memoirs of the dead was fascinating, of course, b
ut there was a particular buzz, a special frisson, about the leisurely observation of lives in which passions were still unresolved, and suffering still to be endured.

  And here she came at last, Marion Summers, making her entrance up the main stair and looking more Pre-Raphaelite than ever, with her long flowing skirt and that mane of thick red hair and complexion so pale—deathly pale this morning—that he could make out the faint blue line of the artery ticking in her throat. She too had her particular place in the Reading Room, at one of the tables, her pile of books next to the small vase of flowers she’d brought in the previous day. He wondered where they’d come from. They were white, and more like wild flowers than the sort of thing you’d find in a florist’s, rather improbable in Central London. What had she been up to last weekend? Was there an admirer out there he didn’t know about?

  He watched her as she approached, trying to hide his eagerness, and wondered if she would glance at him and offer one of her knowing little smiles. They were at least at that stage, although in his imagination they were a good deal further. Stephen would be irate to learn that he had certainly spent more time studying her than the Borgias’ gardens. He knew her borrowing record, her home address, her working timetable, her tastes in soft drinks and sandwiches. He could recall exactly the intonations of her voice when she was puzzled, amused, cajoling the librarians who helped her track down the things she needed. And he had many photographs of her, working here in the library, sitting outside in St James’s Square beneath William III on his prancing horse, and on the bus. And all this he had acquired in secret, without arousing the least suspicion.

  Marion paused beside her table, splaying her fingers on its surface for support. There was a faint sheen of perspiration on her forehead, which was creased by a frown, as if she were trying to make sense of something. She grimaced suddenly, raising a hand abruptly to her mouth and reaching with the other for her chair. But before she could grasp it she staggered, and her hand knocked the vase of flowers to the floor. She doubled over with a moan and sank to her knees.