Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  So now here I was, reluctantly agreeing to accompany Anna on her break-and-enter mission, if only because she had reminded me how exciting life had once seemed. After our bit of hardware shopping we went to a pub. She stuck to mineral water, but I felt I needed a couple of stiff drinks in order to go through with this. We had a meal in a very agreeable little restaurant, then watched a dire movie at the local cinema before driving out once more to Corcoran’s Farm Supplies. There were no headlights on the long straight road as we approached the place, and no signs of life within, although the yard around the building was ablaze with security lights. I parked on the shoulder just beyond the chain-link fence, manoeuvring the car into a stand of trees so that it wouldn’t be too obvious from the road. Then Anna loaded the tools into her belt and led the way to the fence, through which I cut an opening.

  I had been worried about dogs, and was relieved that there didn’t seem to be any. I thought Anna was going to have trouble breaking through the doors with the equipment we’d brought, but that wasn’t her plan. Instead she led the way to the rear of the sheds, keeping to the shadows of the yard perimeter. There was a large steel rack built against the back wall, holding fencing posts and other stuff, and forming a convenient platform to get halfway up the wall. She rang my mobile with hers, so that we could be in constant touch with each other, and told me to return to the front of the yard to watch the road. Then she hitched her heavy belt and reached for the frame.

  ‘Hell.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I hissed.

  ‘Bloody jeans. I can’t climb in these. I didn’t come prepared for this.’ So she took off her jeans and handed them to me, and set off again. From the top of the racking she took hold of a square metal rainwater downpipe and began hauling herself up. I got a flash of frivolously polka-dotted panties disappearing over the eaves, then I jogged back to the front fence.

  From there I could see Anna’s dark shape move along the roof, and I guided her over the phone until she was directly above the office, with its window at which I’d caught that last glimpse of Corcoran’s face.

  ‘What now?’ I whispered.

  ‘There’s a skylight …’ She was panting, her breathing harsh in my ear.

  I heard a splintering crack, and watched her outline disappear into the dark shadow of the roof. At the same time a blue light started to flash at the front of the building and an alarm began to shriek.

  How long would it take? I supposed it would be a matter of luck—there could be a police car cruising on the highway nearby, or a security guard patrolling the industrial estate two minutes up the road. I bit my lip and clenched my fists as the minutes ticked by. What the hell was she doing?

  Then I saw headlights on the road, coming fast towards us. When I tried to warn Anna, the noise of the alarm coming through the phone obliterated my words. I shrank back behind a big plastic water tank as the headlights swept across the yard and came to a stop at the gates. Someone moved into the beam. Whoever it was had a key, because the gates swung open and the vehicle, a white ute, lurched forward to the main doors. When the driver got out again the lights caught him, and I recognised the lanky figure of Luce’s father. He transferred something to his left hand, a stick perhaps … no, a gun. I stopped breathing. He was carrying a rifle or a shotgun.

  He unlocked the big front door and rolled it partially open, then stepped inside. The alarm abruptly stopped. Ears ringing still, I spoke softly into the phone. ‘Anna, can you hear me? Corcoran’s arrived. He’s in the building. He’s got a gun.’

  I didn’t know if she’d heard because she didn’t answer, but I did see the office window swing open, and the thin grey lines of a rope snake down the wall. Anna followed, giving me palpitations as she struggled through the tight opening, then slid down the rope. She tugged one end of it and it fell to her feet, where she scooped it up and started running towards me at the gap in the fence. A dog I hadn’t noticed before in the back of Corcoran’s ute began barking furiously, and Anna half turned her head towards it, and at the same time her belt with its load of tools slid down her hips and became tangled with her legs, and she crashed to the ground. Behind her I saw Corcoran reappear at the main door, and I raced over to Anna, grabbed her and the belt and hauled them both towards the fence. There was a shout as we tumbled through, and then a loud bang. Shredded leaves and twigs pattered down on us as we reached the car and hurtled off into the night.

  ‘Wow,’ I finally said, as darkness enveloped us. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was panting, vibrating like a plucked string. ‘I couldn’t find it at first. He’d hidden it behind the filing cabinet.’

  ‘But you got it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What else did you take?’

  ‘Nothing, I’m not a thief.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘So somebody made a forced entry into his building and ran off with his daughter’s electronic notebook, and nothing else? The same notebook he’d refused to give to two visitors earlier in the day?’ She didn’t say anything. ‘You left the wallet, with its photo of me, I suppose?’

  After a long silence she whispered, ‘Yes.’

  Earlier, Bonnie and Clyde had come to mind, but now Laurel and Hardy seemed more like it.

  ‘Sorry.’ She was pulling on her jeans.

  I said nothing. I was wondering what to tell the police who would surely be on my doorstep first thing in the morning. If they didn’t catch us on the highway.

  11

  But they didn’t catch us on the highway, nor, to my relief and surprise, did they come calling the following day. I got on with my chores and waited, but nothing happened. I did read Luce’s note again and again, trying to extract its meaning, without success. And I looked up the word phasmid in the dictionary. It was an insect of the order Phasmida, apparently, a leaf or stick insect, which immediately brought an image of Marcus into my mind as we’d last seen him, all awkward arms and legs. Was that what she was referring to? Was that how he saw himself, the last phasmid? It didn’t make much sense to me, and I wondered about Luce’s state of mind when she’d written that note.

  I continued going back through all the documents I had relating to Luce’s accident, searching for some new angle, and a couple of days later I found it. The first hint of it was in the bottom corner of one of the last newspaper reports of the accident that Anna had photocopied. It was the small heading for another article that was off the page, and it read, LORD HOWE RACE YACHT SKIPPER QUESTIONED. It seemed an odd coincidence to me, and I decided to find out what it was about. I went to the local library and searched through their microfiche copies of the paper until I found it. It was a eureka moment, and I felt that burn of apprehensive excitement you get when you come across something really big. It was almost as if I could sense Luce’s presence at my shoulder.

  Australian Customs and Quarantine officials in Sydney yesterday detained the skipper of a boat recently returned from the Sydney to Lord Howe Island yacht race, after a search of the vessel uncovered a quantity of rare native bird eggs on board. A spokesman for the Australian Customs Service revealed that the search had followed a tip-off, but declined to identify the nationality of the suspect. He said that the illegal international trade in wildlife was estimated by Interpol to be worth $10 billion annually, and was surpassed in value only by drugs and weapons.

  This surely was what I had been searching for. Birds’ eggs were exactly the reason why Luce and the team were on Lord Howe Island—the grey ternlet’s eggs, to be precise. I did remember that much from what Luce had told me. They were carrying out research into its breeding habits, so you could say that she had died on account of the sex life of a small, rather delicate seabird, listed as a vulnerable species in Schedule 2 of the New South Wales Threatened Species Conservation Act. About the only other thing I could remember about the bird was that the sexes were practically indistinguishable, with no plumage varia
tion during the breeding season, which, as I suggested to Luce, might have been one reason they were a vulnerable species.

  And now here was someone recently returned from Lord Howe and accused of smuggling rare birds’ eggs. Had Luce discovered what was going on? Had Curtis and Owen been somehow involved? I scanned the papers for the following days, but could find no further reference to the case. Eventually I gave up and walked back to the hotel, head spinning. The race yachts had arrived at the island on the twenty-seventh of September, I remembered, just five days before Luce’s accident. She had gone to the party that was held for them on the twenty-eighth, and they had helped in the search for her.

  I returned to my room and began going through the police report again, working at it far into the night, until I finally stopped at around four and fell into a troubled sleep.

  The next morning I phoned Anna. She said she’d given Luce’s diary to the computer whiz who serviced the equipment at the nursing home, but hadn’t got a result yet. I told her I had something to discuss with her and we arranged to meet that lunchtime. When I got there she took us to the deserted library room, where she’d arranged a tray of sandwiches.

  She saw how agitated I was. ‘What’s wrong, Josh? Have the police been in touch? Mr Corcoran?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I’ve been doing a bit more digging, and I think I’ve come across something. Look.’ I showed her the print I’d taken of the newspaper article, and she made the connection straight away.

  ‘I couldn’t find any other newspaper reports about the boat, but you see the timing.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Luce would probably have come across this man at the party they had. What are you thinking?’

  ‘Well …’ I rubbed my face, trying to put together the chain of logic that had seemed so compelling the previous night. ‘It seems to me that the smuggler would have had someone helping him on the island, someone who knew the right places and had collected the rare eggs beforehand.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It struck me, going through the police report again, how often the Kelso family crops up. Marcus and the team stayed on their property, went to the party at their house, and were ferried around the island by one of the sons, Bob Kelso, listed as a fisherman. The other son, Harry, runs adventure hiking trips over the mountains at the south end of the island for visitors. You can check out his website.’ I showed her some pages I’d printed off. One had a picture of Harry Kelso and a group of grinning, windswept kids roped together against a panoramic backdrop of rugged scenery.

  ‘I think that’s taken on Mount Gower, near the cliffs where Luce fell.’ I turned the pages of the police report I’d brought until I came to the photographs of the site of the accident.

  ‘Did you look at the index that lists the sources of these pictures?’ I asked.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘There are the ones taken from sea level, blurry views up the cliff, using a telephoto lens by the look of them, from a boat pitching in the swell. Detective Maddox took those, from Bob Kelso’s boat. Then there are the others, closer shots of the area where Luce is assumed to have fallen, much sharper but still difficult to interpret. Curtis, the team’s photographer, took those.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Maddox never went up to the accident scene. He wouldn’t have been able to climb up there. Think about it—the investigating police officer never got within a hundred metres of the accident scene. He just had to take Owen and Curtis’s word for everything.’

  I pointed to one of the views from sea level. ‘The place where Luce disappeared was to the right of this buttress—you can see its shadow. She was out of sight of Curtis and Owen. Up above you can see the forest coming right to the edge of the cliff. It wouldn’t have been impossible for someone else to have abseiled down from there to where Luce was. Someone who knew Mount Gower well, for instance.’

  ‘Harry Kelso?’

  ‘I’m just speculating. But suppose the Kelso boys were doing a bit of illegal trafficking on the side, and Luce overheard them talking to the yachtie at the party, say.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t have kept quiet about it, that’s for sure. She’d have been horrified. She’d have told Marcus.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. Perhaps she only had suspicions and was trying to get proof—remember how she seemed to withdraw in those last days.’

  ‘And Curtis and Owen were involved?’

  ‘That’s possible, I suppose.’ I thought of how they were both always short of cash. ‘Look, this is pure speculation. It probably wasn’t like that at all.’

  ‘Maybe the diary will tell us something, if we can get into it.’

  ‘Yes. The other possibility is to speak to some of the other people who were there at that time. I’m thinking of Sophie Kalajzich, for instance, the girl who cleaned the house they rented and became friendly with Luce. She was on a short-term contract over there, and could be back on the mainland now. There’s a Sydney address given in the statement.’

  I got the number from directory inquiries, and tried it. An answering machine responded, its message giving me the number of Sophie’s mobile. I finally got through to her, saying we were old friends of Luce, and she agreed to see us. She was a model now, doing a job at a photographic studio in Newtown, she said, and we could meet her there and talk between sessions.

  The address was a converted industrial building, grubby brick walls hemming a narrow laneway. Inside, past a flashy little logo, the old structure had been given a veneer of white minimalism. From the entrance lobby we could see through to a dazzlingly lit studio space in which two girls were posing in swimwear. Through another opening, seated models were having their hair and make-up worked over. I saw the expression of bemusement on Anna’s face as she took it all in, as if we’d wandered in on a freak show.

  A woman came past us, heading for the make-up room, and I said, ‘Excuse me?’

  She stopped and turned to me, disconcertingly pretty, but not quite real, a life-size china doll. The industrial brick and steel of the surroundings made the butterfly-bright fabrics and the tanned flesh and the impossible hair seem blatant and somehow embarrassing, even to me.

  ‘We’re meeting Sophie Kalajzich,’ I said. ‘Would you know where she is?’

  ‘That’s her.’ The woman indicated the model in the yellow bikini. ‘I think they’ve nearly finished. Take a seat.’

  I thanked her and we did as she said. There were magazines scattered on a low table beside us. Anna picked one up, touching her hair self-consciously. I was watching Sophie being posed by her photographer across a striped deckchair. She was very thin. Another kind of phasmid.

  Eventually she finished and wrapped herself in a robe and came towards us. We introduced ourselves, and she said she could only give us ten minutes before she’d have to get changed for the next shoot. ‘This isn’t some legal thing, is it?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘Legal?’

  ‘You know, insurance or something. Only I don’t know anything about the accident really. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ I smiled brightly. ‘No, no, nothing like that. What it is, we’re old friends of Luce, and I’ve been in London all the time since it happened.’

  ‘London? Oh, you’re the boyfriend, are you?’ Her eyes lit up with interest.

  ‘She mentioned me?’

  ‘Only briefly. We were discussing men.’ She grinned.

  ‘Ah, well … anyway, when I got back we decided, Anna and I, to try to remember her on the fourth anniversary of her passing with a little book of memories, of people who knew her, especially in that last month. Something for her family to have, you know?’

  Her very full lips turned down as if she’d tasted something unpleasant. ‘Oh, right. That’s really … sweet.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I gave her a sad smile. ‘So if you have one or two memories of her, a shared laugh, a special thing you remember about her, that would be really great.’
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  ‘Um, well, let me see.’ She put a perfectly shaped long nail to her chin and stared upward in thought. ‘She loved her birds, the seagulls, you know? Said she wanted to be as free as them, high up in the air all the time, never coming down to land.’

  I was writing dutifully. She came out with a few more fairly banal memories.

  Then she said, ‘She showed me your picture, standing on the edge of that cliff, you know? And one day I met her out walking, and she asked me to take a photo of her standing in the same sort of position, with the sky behind. I think she wanted to stick it onto your picture, so it would look like they’d been taken together.’

  I stopped writing, a lump in my throat.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she cried. ‘That’s so tactless of me!’ She reached out a hand to touch my arm.

  ‘No … it’s okay, Sophie. It just catches me sometimes, you know.’

  ‘Yes, of course! I’m so sorry. I still have a little cry about her sometimes too.’

  ‘Do you? It must have been terrible for you all when it happened.’

  ‘Oh yes, everyone was devastated. And the boys! Being there when she fell! Watching her … They were a mess. They locked themselves away that night and got totally smashed. Well, you couldn’t blame them.’

  ‘No, of course not. And do you remember how Luce was herself in those last days before the accident? I mean, did she seem depressed or anything?’

  ‘Not really, but I didn’t see her after the party at the Kelsos’ house.’

  ‘Right. I just feel so guilty, not having been there. It helps talking to someone who was.’

  ‘Oh.’ She smiled sympathetically. ‘I can imagine. She did seem a bit run-down physically, you know, like tired? She had a tummy bug, and saw the doctor a couple of times.’

  Sophie had striking, attenuated features, and I guessed that Damien must have made a play at her. ‘I suppose you got to know them all pretty well? Damien?’