Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  ‘So what is he doing now? He said he was involved in some kind of research.’

  ‘No, no.’ Damien said it with a dismissive flick at some breadcrumbs on the white tablecloth. ‘He’s become a recluse, living on an invalid pension. We tried to help him, Curtis, Owen and I, but he’s difficult. He has these mood swings, and he hates the idea of people feeling sorry for him, or giving him charity.’

  Damien put the last piece of barramundi in his mouth, chewed, and then said, ‘When he phoned me, Marcus said something strange. He said Anna told him that Owen made some kind of confession to her, just before he died.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Apparently Owen said that the accident hadn’t happened the way they told it afterwards.’

  He stared at me. ‘Really? You didn’t tell me this before.’

  ‘No. I was a bit sceptical. I think Owen’s brain must have been scrambled by the fall, but Anna is convinced he was lucid.’

  ‘And you really didn’t think it was worth mentioning this to me?’

  There was an unspoken undercurrent here, concerning our places within the group, that I’d allowed myself to overlook, or forget. He was saying that, of all people, he should have been the first to be told, for it had always been his role to take charge and get us organised, whenever that proved necessary. And equally, I guessed this was the reason why we hadn’t told him straight away, because we knew he’d try to take over.

  I shrugged and turned back to my fish, embarrassed in spite of myself. ‘As I say, I don’t know that it can be taken seriously.’

  ‘Well, it was serious enough to confront Marcus with it.’ His grip on his knife and fork tightened.

  ‘We just wanted reassurance from him that Luce wasn’t … wouldn’t have jumped.’

  But he wasn’t to be deflected. ‘What exactly did Owen say?’

  ‘What I just told you, plus he said, We killed her.’

  ‘We killed her?’ he repeated through his teeth. ‘I was there, Josh. I was part of that team, part of we, and you two didn’t think it worth telling me about this?’

  ‘I’m sorry. We would have. We just wanted to get up to speed first on how things were out there.’

  He looked incredulous. ‘You got me to obtain the police report for you, but you didn’t tell me the real reason you wanted it. What was that, some kind of test? You thought I was involved in … what? A murder? A cover-up?’

  His field was commercial law, but it occurred to me that Damien would have made a pretty sharp criminal lawyer.

  ‘No, no, nothing like that.’

  There was an awkward silence, during which he stared at me, then he turned away, shaking his head in disgust. ‘Who else have you told about this?’

  ‘No one. Well, Mary.’

  ‘Don’t you realise how preposterous it is?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘And what motive could we have possibly had?’

  ‘There was one thought that occurred to me.’

  ‘Oh really? I’d like to hear that.’

  ‘Do you know that Curtis and Owen had … a relationship?’

  ‘A sexual relationship you mean? Yes.’ He said it bluntly, as if to emphasise that he would know everything that went on in the group. ‘Why? What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Luce was worried about Suzi. She didn’t like the deceit. I wondered if it was still going on, and she maybe confronted them.’

  ‘So they pushed her down a cliff? That’s laughable.’

  ‘Was it still going on?’

  He hesitated, looked down at his knuckles. ‘I’m not sure about that. Possibly.’

  Another long silence, then I said, ‘Well, it was just a theory.’

  Finally he said, very softly, ‘It doesn’t matter, Josh. Not any more. Curtis and Owen are dead. The rest of us just have to live with it—Suzi, old Corcoran, Marcus, me. Christ …’ He put a hand to his face, wiping his eyes. ‘How do you think I feel, knowing that if I’d been with them that day it might never have happened? I feel guilty as hell.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that,’ I said, not meaning it unkindly, but thinking that his tone wasn’t quite right somehow, more complaining than contrite. ‘In fact I don’t really understand why they did go without you.’

  ‘It was a bright sunny day, we’d already been up and down that cliff several times and they were all confident. They just wanted to finish off the job. They didn’t realise how the heavy rain the day before could have loosened the scree. Look, I don’t believe your theory for a moment, but even if it were true, what’s to be done? Uncover the truth? Confront Suzi with it? Destroy her son’s memory of his father?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No, it’s not really on, is it?’

  We finished our meal in an uncomfortable atmosphere, and as we left the restaurant I asked if he had Suzi’s address. He gave me a dark look.

  ‘It’s okay, I just want to see if I can help.’

  He knew it off by heart, and wrote it on the back of one of his cards for me, with a final warning. ‘We’ve got to move on, Josh. She doesn’t need any of this.’

  He was right, of course. The only trouble was, he wasn’t the only one feeling guilty.

  Risk management had been my area in London. After we parted, as I walked around the quay watching the gulls wheeling over an incoming ferry, it occurred to me that Damien would also make an excellent risk manager. He had been forceful, persuasive, working me into a corner from which I had little choice but to agree with him. But Marcus’s voice kept whispering insistently in my ear, ‘There’s no conspiracy here.’ I’d never heard him sounding needy and cowering before. It had been an unpleasant experience, more so than being pressured by Damien.

  I stopped at a toyshop and bought a handheld electronic Spiderman games unit that the man assured me was perfect for a boy of six, then bought a bunch of roses and some chocolates next door, and made my way to the address Damien had given me. I parked outside, and stared at the blank front door, imagining all the pain and turmoil on the other side, and lost my nerve. I would have started up the engine and driven away again, but then I saw them approaching along the footpath, Suzi pushing the baby in a stroller with one hand and holding Thomas’s little paw with the other. It hadn’t really struck me at the funeral how like his father the boy was, with that serious, studious expression, and the same black hair. In a couple of years I expected he’d be wearing glasses just like his dad, too. I got out of the car and Suzi looked surprised, then glad. We went inside for a cup of tea, and I handed over the gifts. Thomas took to the game as his father might have to a new electron microscope, and after I’d set it up for him he sat in a corner of the room, utterly engrossed. Suzi and I chatted, mostly about London and the places she’d like to visit in Europe one day, and then I escaped. Of course I didn’t bring up any difficult issues. Sitting there, the doubts and suspicions that had been going through my head seemed simply obscene, and I came away convinced that there had to be some other explanation for what her husband had whispered before he died. I went back to the hotel and began to sift through all the material again, determined to find it.

  Anna rang me that evening.

  ‘Did you read the schedule of items of evidence at the back of the coroner’s report?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Among Luce’s possessions on Lord Howe they found a diary. I checked with someone in the coroner’s office. Apparently it was returned to Luce’s father after the inquest closed.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘I think we should have a look at it.’

  ‘Oh look, I said before, Anna, this isn’t some detective mystery with the murderer’s name spelled out in the victim’s diary in invisible ink. If there was anything interesting in it, the police would have picked it up, surely?’

  ‘We won’t know until we see it. It depends what they were looking for. I’ve told Mr Corcoran that we’re connected to the research project Luce was working on, and we need to see if there
was any missing data in the diary.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him? But he knows you, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Luce and I went to boarding school together in Sydney, but I only ever met him once, and again briefly at the funeral. He won’t know what subjects I was doing at uni. He was all right when I called him. Bit cautious, but all right. He said he’ll be available tomorrow, and I’ve arranged to take the day off. Can you make it? If not I’ll go on my own.’

  ‘No, it’s okay, I’ll come. I’ll borrow the car.’ Then I told her about my lunch with Damien, and visiting Suzi.

  ‘He’s right,’ she said finally. ‘I don’t want to do anything that will make things worse for her. But I want to know, Josh. I want to know what happened.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Me too.’

  I followed the old Great Western Highway early the next morning, so that I could pass Ambler’s Pies. It was a pet shop now and I hardly recognised the place, the front rebuilt and the pie removed from the roof. I could see that a giant meat pie might not be the most appropriate symbol for a pet shop, but I felt sad, and wondered what had happened to it. Dad and Pam had long gone, too, their hard-earned cash reinvested in an allocated pension fund and a Winnebago Explorer motor-home, in which they were now roaming the continent with all the other grey nomads.

  I turned off into Blacktown, following the directions Anna had given me, and found her waiting at her front door. At least she didn’t live in the nursing home, but in a flat nearby. She grinned hello as she got in the car, and I felt a touch of warmth at seeing her again. She was wearing a dark green shell jacket that looked identical to the one she’d worn in the Watagans all those years ago.

  We climbed up over the Blue Mountains and down onto the western plains beyond, reaching Orange in time for lunch before our appointment with Luce’s dad. I drove along the wide main street, recently beautified with new street furniture and trees, like every other country town we’d passed through, and found a wood-fired pizza café. She chose a cheese topping and I remembered that she’d been a vegetarian. I asked her if she still was and she said yes. Like Luce, who’d persuaded her that that was the way to go. It was strange to feel the traces of Luce still present in our lives, like footprints on the sand. Luce had had no luck in trying to convert me to vegetarianism, but she did get me to stop smoking, another mute footprint.

  We found Corcoran’s Farm Supplies on the edge of town, housed in several large steel sheds surrounded by a car park dotted with piles of barbed wire, drainage pipes, fencing posts and water tanks. Inside, wide aisles displayed an extraordinary, and to me baffling, range of gadgets that the modern farmer apparently needs. While Anna spoke to the woman behind the counter I learned quite a lot. I had no idea what a calf puller ($59.95) was, for instance, until I saw the illustrative photo of an unfortunate beast with a metal arm stuck up its backside. Then there was the ute dog tether ($14.95), the drench gun ($129.00) and the lightning diverter ($40.12) to protect the energiser on one’s electric fence ($3,447.40 to power 160 kilometres of multiwire fence). I was studying the action of the footrot shears ($54.95) when Anna came to my side. ‘He’s here,’ she said, and picked up a castration ring applicator ($32.95) with rather too much relish for my liking. ‘This place could be a supermarket for the Spanish Inquisition,’ she said.

  Luce’s father was a gaunt and weathered man. He gripped my hand briefly, drilling my face with his eyes (bright blue, like hers) for a moment before turning and leading us up to an office built above the counter. He was wearing moleskins and R.M. Williams Stockyard boots that clumped loudly on the timber stairs. We sat around a plain wooden desk and Anna repeated her story about the research project, and how there was some missing data that Luce might have recorded in her diary or other papers. I felt that her tone, polite but businesslike, was about right. He listened with an inscrutable look on his face, bottom lip thrust forward, and I wondered how this leathery old man could have been the father of such a vital and beautiful daughter.

  ‘So that research business is still goin’ on, is it?’

  ‘We’re just gathering the loose ends.’

  ‘That Fenn feller isn’t involved, is he? They haven’t taken him back at the university, have they?’

  ‘Oh no. He’s not involved any more.’

  He grunted, then stooped to a cardboard box at his side, about the size of a shoebox, and lifted it onto the table.

  ‘This is what the coroner’s office sent me,’ he growled. ‘I haven’t thrown anything away. Couldn’t bring m’self to.’

  It sounded like an opportunity to say something sympathetic about his loss, but Anna didn’t take it, so I mumbled a few words about how sorry we were. He ignored me, and I felt stupid.

  ‘May we look?’ Anna said, after a pause.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He didn’t move, so Anna stood up, reached for the box and slid it towards her. It was roughly sealed with packing tape. Mr Corcoran rummaged in a drawer in the desk and handed her a Stanley knife, with which she cut the tape and looked inside.

  ‘Her clothes and personal things came separately, did they?’ she asked gently. This was getting a bit too forensic for me.

  He nodded. ‘They sent her suitcase back first with the things they didn’t need.’

  Anna lifted out a mobile phone, an electronic notebook and a small address book. There was also a wallet from which Anna systematically unpacked Lucy’s driver’s licence, Medicare and credit cards, her university student card, and a small photo of me. Her father stared at it, then at me, and I gave him a weak, pained smile. This was awful, staring at her things spread out on the table, things scuffed and worn by her fingers.

  ‘No diary,’ Anna said.

  I pointed at the electronic notebook. ‘What about that?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Anna turned it over. It looked old, battered and scratched. There was a loop attached, and I could imagine Luce carrying it clipped to her climbing harness. Anna found the switch and pushed it to ON, but the screen remained stubbornly blank. ‘Looks dead,’ Anna said, and I winced. ‘I wonder …’ she ploughed on, turning to Corcoran. ‘Maybe we could take this to someone who could fix it. See if they can make it work?’

  He stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I reckon not. Could be personal stuff in there Lucy would prefer left alone.’

  ‘It could be exactly what we’re looking for,’ Anna insisted. ‘I can assure you that only Josh and I would see it, and we’d keep any personal things strictly confidential, and return it to you.’

  He shook his head, unmoved.

  Anna seemed about to argue, then shrugged and put it back in the box. She flicked through the address book and put that back, too, and then the wallet and mobile phone. A blue envelope I hadn’t noticed before remained lying on the desk. Anna picked it up and read the name written on the front. ‘It’s to you,’ she said, and looked at me. She handed it over. I stared at it, then at her father, and put it in my pocket.

  When we got back to the car, Anna banged the car door in frustration. ‘Personal stuff. That’s exactly the point. The police probably never got into it. There’s no other reference to it in the report. And I know someone I’m pretty sure could get it open.’

  ‘Not much we can do, Anna. It’s his prerogative.’

  She turned to me and said, ‘Aren’t you going to read her letter?’

  ‘Later.’ I started the engine and we moved off. As we circled to the car park exit I glanced back at the building and saw Corcoran’s face at the upstairs window, staring down at us.

  When we reached the town centre I said, ‘Want a coffee or something before we head back?’

  She shrugged, and I pulled into a parking space outside a different café. While we waited for our coffees I reluctantly got Luce’s letter out of my pocket.

  It was clearly a draft, undated and with words and phrases crossed out.

  Dear Josh,

  I can’t tell you how hard it is to write to you this. I feel
like the last phasmid. so sad. There are so many things I want to tell to you, and no words to say them with though I’ve tried so many times. But today when I was climbing something made me think of Frenchmans Cap. The wind, I think. It broke my heart. How brave we were then??? You said I was a hedgehog and you a fox, and now I have one big thing to tell you.

  That was all.

  Anna was looking at me with concern in her eyes. I handed it to her without a word, because my throat was so tight it hurt to swallow.

  She read, then looked up and said, ‘There was something she wanted to tell you.’

  Yes, I thought: that she didn’t love me any more or that she still did; that I was a bastard or that she wished me well.

  ‘The fox knows many things,’ Anna said, ‘but the hedgehog knows one big thing. What was it?’

  ‘Maybe that she was going to kill herself,’ I said. ‘That’s why the police held onto it, don’t you think? Because it sounds like a suicide note.’

  Anna reached out her hand and gripped mine. ‘No, Josh, I’ll never believe that.’

  ‘Well, we’ll never know.’

  ‘Unless it’s in that bloody diary.’

  The waitress brought our coffees and then Anna said, ‘We were brave at Frenchmans Cap, weren’t we? Fearless.’

  ‘Not exactly. I was terrified.’

  ‘But we did it. We had the nerve to do it, just us. I sometimes think I haven’t got the nerve to do anything like that any more.’

  ‘Damn right.’

  We sipped our coffees in silence, and then she said, ‘I want that diary, Josh.’

  I stared at her.

  She said, ‘What’s the roof of Corcoran’s shed compared to Frenchmans Cap?’

  So we found a hardware barn on the edge of town, a huge place with a vast car park scattered with utes and four-wheel drives. Though inexperienced in this field, we thought we did a pretty good job of equipping ourselves, emerging with a pair of sheet-metal shears, a crowbar, a torch, a builder’s leather tool belt, bolt cutters, a big screwdriver, a long length of rope and a box of disposable latex gloves.