‘Oh, the dogged way she is when she gets some idea in her head. I gather this was her idea, wanting to get the police report?’
I made a noncommittal gesture.
‘Anna and I haven’t really kept in touch,’ he went on. ‘I was trying to remember if she came to our wedding, but Lauren says not. I can’t remember how I heard about her breakdown. Maybe Curtis or Owen …’
‘Breakdown?’
‘Mmm, two or three years ago. Didn’t you know? Perhaps a delayed reaction to what happened to Luce, I’m not sure. I’m guessing that’s what this is really all about, getting you on side to help her work things out.’
‘Was it serious, this breakdown?’
‘I think so. Not that she was hospitalised or anything. Least as far as I know … Ah!’
Mary had heard our voices and put her head around the door. She recognised Damien, giving him a warm smile, and he got to his feet and stretched out his arms.
‘Mary! How wonderful to see you again.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘I was just saying to Josh how it brought back so many memories coming here. I remember you made us all so welcome and gave us a fabulous lunch—roast lamb.’
‘Did I?’ She laughed, flattered by his charm.
‘And tell me,’ he went on, ‘how are you coping with Mr Chang?’
‘Mr Chang? From Hong Kong? Do you know him?’
‘He’s a client of ours. When he wanted to know where to stay in the city I told him he had to come here. I knew it would be perfect for him. Didn’t he tell you?’
‘Well, no. But he’s one of my regulars now, Damien. I should thank you. He’s such an interesting man.’
‘And very rich.’ Damien chuckled.
I poured Mary a glass of her favourite sauvignon blanc and she took it without shifting her eyes from Damien’s.
‘But I’m so very sorry about your friends, Owen and Curtis, Damien. You must be as devastated as Josh.’
‘Yes … But at least they died doing something they loved.’ I thought that sounded rather glib, and then he added, ‘It’s the people they left behind I feel most sad for, Curtis’s mum and dad are devastated, of course, and as for Owen’s family …’
‘Ah yes.’
‘I went to see them the other day, Suzi and the kids. It was Thomas’s birthday at the weekend, you know. Six. He kept talking about his daddy. Heartbreaking. I felt so inadequate, taking him a little present. What can you say?’
‘Oh, I know. And will they manage financially, now?’
‘I’m helping Suzi with that, negotiating with Owen’s employer and their super fund to get her the best possible deal.’
Mary put a hand on his forearm and gave it a squeeze, a glint of a tear in her eye. I thought guiltily that I might have gone to see Suzi too, but it hadn’t occurred to me. I had no idea it was the boy’s birthday. Frankly, I was amazed at Damien’s thoughtfulness, and began to wonder if I’d misjudged him. Mary was obviously impressed. She said she had things to do in the kitchen, and gave him a big hug when she left.
‘Anyway,’ he said with a sigh, ‘I’ve done what you asked.’ He opened the briefcase he’d been carrying and handed me a thick spiral-bound document. The title read INQUEST INTO THE DEATH OF LUCY CAROLINE CORCORAN. I hadn’t heard of the Caroline before. ‘This is a copy of the complete police report to the coroner. It wasn’t that easy to come by, but anyway, I pulled a few strings and managed in the end.’
‘I really appreciate it, Damien.’
He sat back and took a deep draw on his beer and wiped his mouth. ‘Well, good luck, but don’t let Anna drag you into some morbid soul-searching is my advice. It was a shocking thing, but there’s nothing we can do about it now. Oh, by the way, I ran into one of your old mates the other day. One of your BBK London pals, Brian Friedland.’
‘Oh yes? I didn’t know him well. He’s in Sydney, is he?’
‘Passing through. No, he said you hadn’t been in the same office, but apparently he’s moved over to Risk Management now, working as right-hand man for Lionel Stamp, your old boss, under Sir George whatsisname.’
I felt a chill deep inside me. His voice was casual but he was watching me closely, and smiling. ‘Small world, isn’t it?’
After he left I sat on the terrace with the report. It weighed heavily on my lap, hundreds of pages, tens of thousands of words devoted to Luce’s last hours, but I just couldn’t face it. What was I supposed to make of all that? I remembered the judge sitting in this same cast-iron chair, as reluctant to open the report on his knee, as uneasy perhaps at the futility of finding some needle of truth in such a haystack. I compromised with myself, reading the index. It listed the dozens of statements, diagrams, medical reports, telephone records and other documents compiled by Detective Senior Constable Glenn Maddox of the Homicide Unit, Major Crime Squad, based in Kings Cross, Sydney. Even allowing for the press interest in the case, he seemed to have been extraordinarily thorough. I wondered if it was usual for an accidental death to be investigated by someone from the Homicide Unit.
Then Mary called to me from the kitchen window, having trouble with a blocked sink, and I closed the report thankfully and went to help. Later I decided to take it to Anna at her work the next day. I was curious to see her in that setting, imagining her at the hub of a smoothly operating enterprise, surrounded by crisply uniformed minions and genteel clients. It took a few phone calls to track her down to the Walter Murchison Memorial Nursing Home at Blacktown, and the next morning I drove out there. I didn’t warn her I was coming. I thought I’d surprise her—it was what she had done to me, after all, that first Sunday evening at the hotel.
The original house had been enveloped by a confusing aggregation of new wings and extensions, and these so filled the site that car parking was pushed out into the surrounding suburban streets. I found a space, eventually, and walked back to a driveway that seemed to lead into the nursing home. It ended in a yard blocked with two skips and a row of bins smelling of kitchen waste. Beside them was a large clear plastic bag, filled with shoes. To one side a ramp led up through a small densely planted courtyard. There was a steel gate at the top with a locking mechanism designed to foil the infirm. Eventually I managed to open it without dropping my bulky package, and stepped onto a broad veranda. Clearly I hadn’t found the main entrance. After following the deck around the building for a while I came to a set of glass doors, through which I could make out elderly people seated in a lounge room. There was a keypad beside the doors and a sign that said RING BELL FOR ENTRY. I couldn’t see a bell.
Eventually a tiny grey-haired woman appeared through the glass and tapped in the entry code on the pad on her side. The door opened to a gust of Elvis Presley from a loudspeaker somewhere inside, and I said, ‘Thank you. I seem to be lost. I’m trying to find the manager.’
‘Mr Belmont?’ The woman was smartly dressed in a white blouse and dark suit, and I took her for a member of staff.
‘No, my name’s Ambler.’
‘No, I mean you’re looking for Mr Belmont, the manager?’
‘Oh.’ I wondered if I’d come to the wrong place. ‘No, Anna Green.’
The lady chuckled. ‘Ah, you mean our activities manager. Do you have an appointment?’
‘No. I’m, er, here to deliver something she’s expecting.’
‘Follow me.’
I stepped into the room, my eyes adjusting to a dimmer light. The old people, seated in a circle of assorted armchairs, seemed either asleep or deep in thought, and oblivious to both my arrival and Elvis’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. There was a doorway on the far side, but to reach it we had to cross the circle of vinyl floor, in the middle of which lay a large white blob of something wet. A very shrivelled old man was hunched forward in his chair staring at it, white dribble running down his chin.
‘Oh, Stanley!’ the lady said. ‘What have you done?’
Stanley didn’t respond. At that moment a woman in a green apron passed the door and my helper called out, ‘Maureen,
Stanley’s done it again.’
‘That’ll be right.’ The woman swept in with a mop and set to work while we skirted the circle and made for the door.
‘I’ll take you to the library,’ my friend said. ‘I’m Rosalind, by the way.’
‘You work with Anna, do you, Rosalind?’
‘Not exactly.’ She gave another chuckle. ‘I’m seventy-nine—I’m one of the residents. But I do work with her in a way. I help her look after the library.’
‘And Anna’s in charge of activities, is she?’
‘Yes, she organises the bus outings and bingo and sing-alongs. She’s very efficient. I don’t know what we would do without her. Are you in the aged-care business, Mr Ambler?’
‘No, no. I’m a friend of hers. We were at university together.’
‘Really!’ She stopped and turned to examine me more closely, obviously intrigued. ‘How very interesting. Do you see a lot of each other?’
‘Not exactly. I’ve been abroad, and I’m just catching up with old friends.’
‘Ah. We love Anna dearly, but she is something of a mystery to us. We’d like to learn more. For instance, is it true she was a mountaineer?’
‘Yes, we used to go rock climbing together.’
‘Ah! The two of you?’ She gave me an eager glance.
‘A group of us.’
‘With a rather striking blonde girl?’
‘That’s right. How did you know that?’
‘She used to have a photograph on her desk. You weren’t in it, though.’
She was leading me through a confusing labyrinth of corridors in which every wall seemed to be painted a different colour and none of the furniture matched. In places we came across seated figures whose appearance shocked me, as if a Nazi doctor had administered some grotesque experimental poison that turned people into shrivelled wrecks. Naive of me, but I just hadn’t seen anything like this before. The Nazi doctor was Nature, of course, and the poison was old age and its crushing diseases. There was nothing like this in EverQuest. My guide must have noticed my reaction, because she smiled at me and said, ‘Don’t worry, not much further.’
Finally we reached a door marked LIBRARY, and she stopped and indicated another door nearby with a label ROSALIND on it. ‘My room is close by, you see? So convenient.’
The library door opened into a small room lined with bookcases on three walls, the fourth with tall French windows leading onto another veranda and dense greenery beyond.
‘The library is Anna’s special baby,’ Rosalind said. ‘There were no books here before she came. We used to sit like zombies in front of the TV, but now we have a reading group. We have a section of normal-print books …’ she indicated one wall, ‘as well as large-print books, and over there audio books.’
There were several armchairs, one occupied by a silver-haired woman wearing headphones, who seemed marginally less comatose than the folk in the corridors.
‘Wait here and I’ll see if I can find Anna for you.’
While I waited I idly scanned the authors on the shelves—Sayers, McDermid, Paretsky, Christie, Walters, Lord, Cornwell, Evanovich … It took a moment for the penny to drop. When I opened the covers I found ‘A. Green’ written inside many of them, some yellowing with age. I remembered a conversation with Luce years before, joking about her flatmate’s choice of reading matter. Anna had three kinds, strictly segregated into separate piles on her floor, as if she were afraid they might contaminate each other—coursework textbooks, feminist theory and crime fiction.
‘Anna will be along in a moment.’ Rosalind had reappeared at my side. ‘Do you like murder mysteries, Mr Ambler?’
‘Er, not much. Do you?’
‘Oh yes, I’m an addict—many of us are. And the wonderful thing is that, at our age, we can read them again and again without remembering who done it. Why do you look puzzled?’
‘Well, don’t you find the idea of murder, death, a bit …’ I was embarrassed, but she helped me out.
‘A bit close to the bone?’ She laughed. ‘Not at all. Bring it on, the more gruesome and gory the better. Goodness, I worked for thirty years in the coroner’s office. I saw plenty of the real thing.’
‘Is that right? I bet Anna’s interested in all that. Do you talk to her about your time there?’
‘Yes, of course. She’s always checking forensic details with me to make sure the authors have got it right. Can you tell time of death from stomach contents? Can you fit a silencer to a revolver? That kind of thing.’
‘But what exactly attracts you to stories like this?’
She cocked her head and fixed me with her bright eyes, and said, ‘Resolution, Mr Ambler. Something sadly lacking in the real world, you might say.’
Over her head I saw Anna standing in the library doorway.‘Thank you, Rosalind,’ she said, ‘it’s time for your rest now,’ and my guide smiled sweetly and left.
Anna looked at me cautiously. ‘What are you doing here, Josh?’
‘I’ve brought you the police report. Damien came good; he dropped it in at the hotel.’ I handed her the package, which she took, hesitating for a moment before opening it and reading the title of the report.
‘Have you read it?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Made a copy?’
I shook my head, then followed her to an office further down the corridor. On the way I caught a glimpse of an entrance hall with a receptionist’s counter.
‘What on earth were you doing, coming in the back way?’ The office was tiny and crowded with machines and files. She opened the lid of a photocopier and slid the report in.
‘The entrance wasn’t clearly marked. Where’s your office?’
She shot me a rueful glance. ‘This is it.’ She turned the page. ‘Want a cup of tea?’
‘Where’s the cocktail bar?’
She smiled. ‘Four blocks away. The cluey ones sometimes make it there. Take a seat anyway.’
I cleared a pile of magazines from the only chair and squeezed onto it. ‘How long have you worked here?’
‘A couple of years. I had an aunt living here I used to visit. I started to help out with the bingo games and the outings, and next thing they offered me a job.’ She glanced at my face. ‘What? You think I’m mad?’
‘Well, no, I mean, obviously this is very valuable work. But how the bloody hell do you stand it?’
She bowed her head to the copier. ‘It has its rewards.’Then she added softly, ‘I’m embarrassed.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re comparing this to the exciting life you’ve had, making piles of money in London, and wondering where I went wrong.’
‘Not exactly. It was exciting at times, but also a bit scary, and lonely, too, sometimes. The truth is, things didn’t quite work out as I’d planned—nor did the piles of money.’
‘Oh? What happened?’
‘I’ll tell you one day.’ I cleared my throat and changed the subject. ‘Rosalind showed me the library. She said it was one of your innovations. I’d forgotten how keen you were on detective stories. Still read them?’
‘Mm.’
‘You don’t think, well, that they might be colouring your judgement about what happened to Luce?’
She looked up sharply. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, life isn’t like that, is it? Things are left hanging, unresolved. Like with Luce—no reason for it, just a stupid accident. No body to farewell, no resolution.’
I thought for a moment she might be going to throw the report at me. Instead she turned the page, thumped the document back down onto the machine and said tightly, ‘I heard a dying man confess to killing my best friend, Josh. I’m not fantasising or mixing up fiction and reality. I heard it.’
‘Okay, okay. Sorry.’
‘Anyway, when I’ve finished doing this we can both go away and read it and see what we think, and you can make sure that my judgement isn’t coloured.’
I sat in silence while she finished the job.
She handed me the copy and showed me to the front door. As I stepped out into the fresh air I said, ‘What’s with the shoes?’
‘What shoes?’
‘Outside in the service yard, there was a bag full of shoes.’
‘That’s the incontinents. It runs down their legs and they have to get new shoes.’
I hurried away, thinking that Anna’s grip on reality was probably pretty tight.
6
In other circumstances I’d have just put my humiliating experience with Luce and her friends on the climbing wall down to experience, and gone on to find a new girlfriend somewhere else. But the remarks I’d overheard in the changing room really annoyed me. Those blokes were a couple of years younger than me—I was just starting my master’s, while they were in the third year of their first degree—and I thought they were up themselves. Also there was Luce; I found I couldn’t stop thinking about her. So I decided I’d better get serious.
The following day I went to a climbing equipment shop and blew my budget on some essential items. The most important single thing I would ever own, according to the fanatic who served me, was my rope. We settled on a kernmantle nylon sheath and core, 10.5 millimetres thick, 50 metres long, weighing 3.45 kilograms. Next were the shoes, a pair of all-round, glove-tight lace-ups with sticky rubber soles that would be the next best thing to climbing in bare feet, I was assured. Then there was the harness (a waist belt with separate padded leg loops for a less intrusive fit), the helmet, the chalk bag, carabiners and a book. I decided to leave the slings and quickdraws and all the other arcane devices for another day.
Later I enrolled at an off-campus gym with a climbing wall, where hopefully word of what I was doing wouldn’t get back to Luce and her friends. I started weight training, climbing lessons and jogging, and in the evening memorised the book and practised knots, until I knew my prusik from my klemheist and could tie a figure-eight follow-through in the dark. In my room I fixed up a fingerboard, a piece of timber with strips of wood nailed to it to hang from, to strengthen the grip of my fingers. Later my climbing instructor told me of a concrete retaining wall in a secluded corner of a nearby park, where climbers had glued artificial holds to the surface for bouldering practice. According to my book, bouldering—that is, solo climbing on low rocks or walls without ropes—was the best way to sharpen technique, and I became a regular visitor to the place.
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