Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  Anna was lying beside me on the wet stone, choking. When I put an arm around her and tried to get her upright I felt her whole body racked by convulsive sobs. I held her as they slowly subsided. She was trying to swallow, a hand clutched at her throat, her face distorted in the shadowy light.

  ‘Oh … Josh!’ she finally managed. ‘He tried … to kill me … his hands round my throat … and all the time saying he was sorry …’

  She turned her face against my chest and began to sob again. I stroked her head, soothing her like a baby.

  Finally she pulled away and said, more collected now, her voice hoarse, ‘I couldn’t get a taxi and decided to walk back, but then I got lost in the winding streets … when I finally got here the front door was still open and I went inside. In the back room Marcus was sitting in his chair, Damien crouching beside him. As soon as our eyes met I saw that he knew that Marcus had told us what they’d done. I started to back away, and he called after me to stay, softly, like not to scare me, but then getting angry. I turned and ran. He caught me in the living room … We fell, his hands round my neck, and he was shaking me and choking me, telling me he was sorry he had to do this. There was an empty bottle by my hand. I hit Damien with it and he looked so surprised and annoyed, rubbing his head, and I managed to get up again and run for the door …’

  ‘Can you stand up? I’m going to call the police and an ambulance for you.’

  ‘Josh!’ She gripped my arm. ‘I don’t know if Marcus was alive. He was slumped in the chair—like he was dead.’

  I tried to think. Had I killed him? I said, ‘You go and wait in the car and I’ll go round to the terrace to try and see.’

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  She insisted, and we found the narrow path that led down the side of the house towards the rear. We had to push our way through wet branches and several times lost our footing, but eventually we found ourselves on the edge of the terrace. Light spilled out onto the paved surface through the French windows. We walked over and looked in. There was Marcus, just as Anna had said, slumped in his throne, his pale face tipped forward and to one side, as if asleep. He was no longer wearing the lab coat, and the left arm of his shirt was rolled up above the elbow.

  And there, too, was Damien, seated in the armchair at his side, crouching forward as if trying to fix something that I couldn’t make out. He raised his head and saw us, and for a moment our eyes met and he gave us what appeared to be a sad smile. I could see now what he’d been doing; his left sleeve was rolled up too, and he was pressing the needle of a syringe into his forearm.

  I grabbed the door handle and tried to open it, but it was locked and of a heavy, solid construction. I rattled and banged it and called to him to stop, but he took no notice. We watched helplessly as he went on with what he was doing. I got out my phone and rang for help, then I stepped back and charged with my shoulder. The door burst inward, its glass panels shattering all over the floor as I stumbled in. Anna followed me, and I told her to go and open the front door to meet the ambulance.

  I squatted beside Damien, who was staring at the broken door with eyes bright with tears, preoccupied with some internal experience I couldn’t share. The syringe was empty, and I had no idea what he had taken. I asked him, but he just closed his eyes and smiled. His face had become flushed, and there was a purple bruise forming on the side of his forehead where Anna had hit him. Then something changed. His face darkened and took on a glow of sweat, and he whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Josh. Really.’

  By the time the ambulance arrived I’d found the bottle on the floor beside Marcus, with his hand-printed label: Digitalis (Thevetia peruviana). I gave it to the medics as they went to work on Damien. Marcus, it seemed, was already dead.

  Anna drew me aside as we stood watching them. ‘What are we going to say, Josh?’

  We were discussing this in whispers when the first cops arrived, two uniformed men who took us out to the front room. One sat with us, taking down names and addresses, while the other spoke to the ambos. Then plainclothes police came in, and eventually Detective Sergeant Maddox.

  I wondered afterwards what he must have made of the scene when he first walked in. Apart from the bodies and the smashed French windows and the deranged-looking witnesses, the whole place had an air of chaos, as if some shocking event, an earthquake perhaps, had given it a violent shake. Perhaps he was used to it, for he moved about very calmly, directing the others, then took me aside from Anna, cautioned me, and asked me what had happened. He fixed me with that evangelical eye and told me that he wanted the truth.

  Well, yes. We all say we want that. Anna and I had spent the past weeks searching for it, but now we’d found it I wasn’t sure it was something we could entirely share. I imagined myself standing up in the Coroner’s Court and explaining that the distinguished ecologist Marcus Fenn, who had once climbed a mountain with the great Arne Naess, had decided that, in order to save the planet, one of his students had to be killed. And had then persuaded his other students to carry it out. I imagined the other people in that courtroom—Damien’s wife Lauren, Owen’s wife Suzi, Curtis’s parents—listening to me explain how their sadly missed husband or son was in fact a murderer. I imagined the families that would be fractured by those words. Bob Kelso would be in trouble, and the others would have to re-evaluate their whole lives. Assuming they believed us.

  So I told him the simplified version of the truth that Anna and I had hurriedly decided on. We had returned from Lord Howe Island without finding any definite new facts, but were still troubled by the official account. When we visited Marcus that evening to discuss it with him again, we found him working in his laboratory. He seemed overwrought, and probably drunk. He became highly emotional as we talked about the deaths of Luce, and Curtis and Owen, and he said that he was responsible for them. At one point he became so agitated that I had to physically restrain him. Much of what he said was confusing, but he seemed to imply that Damien knew the truth about Luce’s death. We decided to leave and talk to Damien about this. On the way we became worried that Marcus might harm himself, and Anna decided to return to keep an eye on things. However, in the meantime Marcus had apparently phoned Damien, who had set off for Castlecrag before I arrived at his apartment in The Rocks. By the time Anna got back to Marcus’s house, Damien was there, and Marcus appeared unconscious. Damien became very emotional, physically attacking Anna and driving her out of the house as I arrived. He bolted the door, and when we eventually went around to the back of the house, we saw him inject himself, and tried to stop him.

  No eggs, no phasmids, no Balls Pyramid.

  Maddox asked me to enlarge on certain parts of this account, then went away and took Anna through the same process. There was a spell where he left us in order to direct a photographer and others securing the scene, and then we were taken to the police station at Chatswood. There we were examined by a doctor and a forensic officer, and our clothes were removed. Dressed in overalls, we were separately given cups of tea and biscuits, then formally interviewed on film by Maddox and another detective.

  From time to time I caught glimpses of Anna, through the glass panel in a door, and passing under escort in a corridor, unreal in those white overalls beneath dazzling fluorescent light. We seemed like characters in some TV drama in which we were having to improvise the script. At some point I was allowed to phone Mary, and I explained what had happened and asked if there was a spare room at the hotel for Anna, as I didn’t want her going home alone when we were eventually released. She said, of course, and drove out with a change of clothes for us, cobbled together from my wardrobe and Mary’s.

  It was late when Maddox released us, his final words being a rather Old Testament admonition to reflect before we met again. He clearly wasn’t convinced by what we’d told him.

  25

  We were both exhausted the next morning when we got up after a brief sleep. There was nothing in the papers. We had a quick breakfast and Anna said she had to get home to
go to work. I told her she should call in sick for the day, but she said she couldn’t and I drove her out to Blacktown. There was a very brief news item on the radio, police refusing to release the name of a man found dead in a Castlecrag home the previous night. Foul play was not being ruled out.

  ‘They’re waiting for the pathology results,’ I said, still not quite free of my TV character.

  Anna said, ‘I wonder how Damien is?’ She looked very tired and drawn.

  ‘I’ll find out when I get back, and ring you.’

  ‘Thanks.’ When we reached her flat, she got out of the car and walked to the front door with all the animation of a zombie.

  I phoned the Chatswood police station when I returned, and they told me which hospital Damien had been taken to. The hospital would only say that he was in intensive care, so presumably he was still alive. Then, mid-morning, the front doorbell of the hotel tinkled and Lauren walked in. There were dark rings under her eyes, her hair looked lank and she had on the party frock she’d been wearing the previous evening.

  I took her into Mary’s sitting room and we sat down. I told her I’d tried to call the hospital to ask how he was.

  ‘He’s in a coma, Josh. His heart stopped twice before they got him to the hospital. They’re not sure at the moment whether he’ll live.’

  She was obviously desperately tired, but her voice was calm and level and she seemed very focused.

  ‘I’m sorry. We called for help as soon as we could. I had no idea that was going to happen.’ I also had no idea what she had been told of the situation.

  ‘The reason I’ve come is because I want to know exactly what happened. I want you to tell me everything.’

  The way she said this gave me pause. The young woman gushing over the news of her baby had gone. This was the lawyer, determined to get what she wanted from a potentially hostile witness. I remembered Damien saying that she was brighter than he was. I had the feeling she was considerably brighter than both Maddox and me, too.

  ‘Of course. I don’t know how much Damien has told you about the death of Luce, and then Curtis and Owen, but when I came back from London, I met Anna, who told me a disturbing thing that Owen had told her the night he died.’ I went on to give her the sanitised version that Anna and I had told Maddox the previous night.

  She listened in silence, concentrating on every word, her eyes following each gesture and shift of expression I made, and when I finished she sat back, still watching me, and said, ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re saying that Damien attacked Anna, then barricaded himself in the house and tried to take his own life, because a hysterical Marcus had taken the blame for Luce’s death?’

  I felt my eyes blinking too rapidly, some TV director in my head warning me that I was looking shifty. ‘I believe he had just discovered Marcus, dead, and reacted with shock.’

  ‘No one commits suicide out of shock, Josh, Damien least of all.’ She leaned forward again, drilling me with those deadly dark eyes. ‘I want to know why my husband felt compelled to try to kill himself last night. You know, don’t you?’

  She was amazing. She’d be fantastic in the courtroom, or on TV. The eyes, the voice. I had no choice, really. She held me with those eyes, and I whispered, ‘Yes, Lauren. I believe I do.’

  ‘Then tell me.’

  So I did. I told her everything.

  When I got to the end I said, ‘That’s why he did it, Lauren—he felt he had no choice. He knew we would tell what he had done.’

  Lauren sat rigid, unblinking, trying to absorb the possibility that her husband was a murderer.

  Finally she said heavily, ‘It’s so … bizarre, I suppose it must be true. And why haven’t you told the police?’

  I explained to her. ‘I thought enough people had suffered over this.’

  ‘Then I should thank you. I know Suzi would be devastated … Damien’s parents. So will you stick to your other version?’

  ‘From the way you reacted it doesn’t sound as if we’ll get away with it.’

  ‘Not necessarily. I spent the whole night at the hospital and only spoke a few words to the police. They’ll want to hear my side of things. If I support your story, and tell them that Damien has been very depressed since Curtis and Owen’s accident, they’ll have to believe it. And that’s not necessarily untrue—he has been different since that funeral, since he saw you again. I know he visited Marcus several times, and each time came back very low and started drinking heavily. Perhaps he guessed then that it was all going to come out, what they had done to that poor girl. I can still hardly believe it, that Damien would deliberately—’

  ‘It was Marcus, Lauren. He could do that to people.’ And then, because I’d told her everything else, I added, ‘She was pregnant, apparently.’

  I regretted it as soon as the words were out, and I had to turn away as tears flooded into my eyes. It was an excruciating moment.

  She waited until I’d pulled myself together, then murmured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and left.

  It was hard to concentrate on anything during the following days, waiting for Maddox to return. Once, when I was a very small boy, I had dawdled on my way to school one morning and arrived late. I joined a line of miscreants outside the headmistress’s room. The door opened and we were invited in, one by one, to explain ourselves. As I waited my turn in the doorway I heard the boy in front of me offer his excuse: ‘Please, Miss, my mum woke up late.’ This seemed to satisfy the interrogator, who wrote something in a book and called me forward. I said, ‘Please, Miss, my mum woke up late.’ She wrote it down with a grim smile and I wet myself. It was my first real taste of the awful might of Authority, and now, as the days passed, Maddox took on that mantle, and I awaited his reappearance with dread, certain that he would see through our story with the same perspicacity.

  As a distraction I persuaded Mary to let me take her to a matinee of HMS Pinafore at the Opera House. Mary loved Gilbert and Sullivan, and the weather was fine, so I suggested we walk there, around the bay at Woolloomooloo and up through the Botanic Gardens to Circular Quay. The show was a great success; we sailed the ocean blue, sighed with Little Buttercup at her unrequited love and thrilled to the plot reversal in the final act. The only unexpected thing was the shock I felt when I realised that the name of the captain of the Pinafore was Corcoran. Had I known that? Was that why I’d wanted to go?

  Afterwards we had a glass of champagne on the harbour’s edge. I was disconcerted to spot Damien and Lauren’s balcony up there between the towers, and didn’t catch what Mary was saying at first. It seemed she had been to see her doctor about some symptoms, and he had sent her for tests, which had established angina, so she felt she should catch a taxi rather than walk home. I felt terrible at having made her walk all that way, but she dismissed my apology, saying she was fine really, just a little tired.

  It was the middle of the following week before Maddox invited me over to the police station at Darlinghurst for another chat. I expected apocalyptic wrath, and thought it must be some kind of devious police trick when he seemed mildly satisfied. Finally I came to understand that Lauren had worked her magic on him, and he even expressed some concern that Anna and I may have been traumatised by that last encounter with Damien, whom they now knew had been deeply disturbed for some time.

  There were a couple of angles that he wanted to explore. Apparently Marcus had been cooking up all sorts of stuff in that laboratory of his, including hallucinogenic compounds derived from plants. Maddox wanted to know about the use of drugs in our circle when we were students, and whether Marcus had supplied them. I told him we were no different from others of our age, and that although Marcus had supplied hash on occasions, especially to Curtis, our drug of choice had been alcohol.

  It appeared that Maddox was only really interested in Marcus’s drugs in so far as they might relate to the aspect of the whole case that most intrigued him, which was the hold that Marcus had had over his
students, which he described as messianic. I wasn’t sure that was the word I would have used, but maybe he was right. I found it hard now to pin down the nature of that magnetism, like trying to describe a colour or a taste.

  Marcus’s funeral was a very quiet affair. Damien was still in a coma and Lauren didn’t go, nor did Suzi. Anna and I sat on one side, the deceased’s family on the other. They comprised a cousin and his wife and their two teenage children, who were all rather amazed to have inherited the house at Castlecrag. ‘Very special, of course,’ the wife said. ‘I mean, Walter Burley Griffin and everything. But so much work to be done. And the stuff Marcus accumulated!’ I mentioned the Lloyd Rees print that Luce and I had liked, and offered to buy it, and they said I was welcome to it.

  We didn’t notice Detective Sergeant Maddox at the back of the chapel until we stood up to leave.

  ‘He’s facing the Supreme Judgement now,’ he murmured.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

  ‘Your circle of friends has shrunk mighty small, Josh. You should think hard on that.’ Then, as if changing the subject entirely, he said, ‘I was speaking to Grant Campbell on the phone the other day. He told me about your little misadventure when you were over there recently. I really think you and Anna should consider hanging up your climbing shoes. It’s a dangerous game.’

  ‘Yes, we’ve come to the same conclusion.’

  ‘Funny, it reminded me of something that came up in the Lucy Corcoran investigation.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a strange pinnacle of rock out in the sea to the south of Lord Howe, called Balls Pyramid. You must have seen it.’