Bright Air Read online

  ‘Yes, I’ve been studying your patch of worthless nothing. This is what I’ve got so far.’

  He showed me his book with its entries and calculations under a series of species headings. As he explained the scribbles I began to understand his point—that the area had been teeming with life: ants, lice, spiders, mites, and then increasingly minute specimens, their numbers meticulously totted up, amounting to a whole township, a city quarter of thousands of inhabitants. And then he outlined their mutually intersecting roles, their conflicts and alliances, right down to the personal narratives and dramas the debris scraped out of the shallow hole revealed. There were the fragments of a tiny marsupial vole that had died there, for example, and the traces of a nest of centipedes that had been eliminated by the fiercer ants.

  He didn’t have to spell out the equation he was making, between money-value and life-value. It was a little demonstration, a masterclass, for me, the barbarian economist. I understood this, and even felt rather privileged to have had this effort expended on me. But I also felt that the passion behind the message was not what it had once been, that I was maybe one dumb student too many.

  That evening we retired to the Hibernian Hotel, a massive monument to coalminers’ thirst, built in 1910, and the largest building in the little village it occupied. There Marcus entertained us, while we wolfed down large steaks, with an erudite account of the improbable sexual practices of certain snakes and stick insects, but given the sleeping arrangements—we had four rooms, Luce with Anna, Curtis with Owen, me and Damien, and Marcus on his own—I saw little opportunity to investigate if they might be adapted to humans. Instead his flagrantly grotesque descriptions seemed designed to draw attention to my increasingly desperate longing for the girl on the other side of the table, who seemed oblivious to my surreptitiously yearning looks. However, as we started making our way towards the stairs, Anna came to my side and whispered, ‘Wanna swap?’

  I looked at her in surprise. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Beds.’

  ‘Um … Did Luce …?’

  She looked at me as if I was being a bit slow, and I quickly nodded, feeling a sudden agitation in my chest, a brightening in my gloomy mood.

  She said, ‘Use the veranda. Marcus’ll be roaming around the corridor.’

  The pub was on a street corner, with deep verandas around two sides, onto which all the bedrooms had shuttered doors. By the time I’d cleaned my teeth, Damien was already fast asleep, snoring softly. I turned the key in the veranda door and pushed it open with barely a squeak, and stepped out into the chilly night air. Down below in the street a group of locals was spilling out of the bar, yelling cheerfully at each other as they made their way to their utes. I padded softly along the deck until I came to what I thought was Luce and Anna’s room. Now what? My bare feet were freezing and I had the sudden sickening thought that this was some kind of prank, a trick to maroon me out on the balcony all night. Then the door in front of me clicked open, and Anna slid out. Like me she was wearing a shell jacket over a T-shirt and pants. She grinned at me, gave me a quick peck on the cheek and padded off. I stared after her, then a voice whispered from the door, ‘Hurry up, I’m cold.’

  Luce was wearing a coat, but nothing else. I stepped inside and took her in my arms, and decided that this was just about the best of the eight thousand-odd days I’d spent on the planet.

  I think it was fairly apparent to the others over breakfast the next morning what had happened between Luce and me. I thought I was playing it pretty cool, but each in turn, coming down into the dining room, blinked at the pair of us, then grinned and winked, as if we had neon signs on our heads. I couldn’t read the signs with Anna and Damien, though, and as we carried our bags out to the cars I got a chance to speak to her.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean … good night?’

  She gave me a patient smile and turned away, me none the wiser.

  We returned to the Watagans and, in an unspoken agreement, Anna, Luce, Damien and I switched climbing partners, so that I spent the day climbing with Luce, a breathtaking experience. In the mid-afternoon we made our last ascent together, me exhausted, and I staggered into her arms on the scrubby plateau at the top. She pulled me away from the edge, out of the line of sight of Damien and Anna making their way up below us, and I told her she was beautiful and that I loved her. She smiled and took my hand and led me back into an area of huge boulders and thick clumps of tall grass. We rounded an outcrop, searching for a place to settle, when we were suddenly presented with a sight that stopped us dead. Curtis and Owen were together in a sheltered nook, their climbing helmets and harnesses discarded on the ground nearby. Curtis was on his back, groaning, eyes closed, while Owen knelt over his midriff, head down.

  My shoe sent a stone skittering noisily away and Owen opened his eyes, pushed himself marginally upright and stared at us. For a moment we were frozen, the four of us, then Owen said, ‘Aw, fuck.’

  I muttered, ‘Sorry,’ and turned away, following Luce, already retreating around the outcrop.

  I followed her back to the cliff edge, where Damien was standing now, pulling in the rope on which Anna was secured. I reached for Luce’s hand, feeling the tension in her, not sure what to say. Finally I whispered, ‘Things happen.’

  She turned slowly and stared at me. ‘Poor Suzi.’

  Anna called me the day after I’d visited the nursing home to arrange to discuss the report. We settled on Saturday afternoon at the hotel. I said it’d be private and convenient, but the truth was that I wanted Mary to have time to meet her, and tell me if she thought Anna was making too much of this.

  It was another beautiful warm spring day, the air still, but Anna didn’t like the idea of working on the terrace where we might be interrupted. Instead we moved in to Mary’s sitting room, Anna setting her stuff out on the table like someone preparing for a major presentation. As she was unpacking her bag Mary came in with a pot of coffee. They seemed genuinely pleased to see each other again, as if there had been some earlier bond of understanding or sympathy that they both remembered.

  ‘Josh has told me all about your trip to Christchurch,’ Mary said. ‘You poor thing. It must have been a terrible experience.’ I could see the appraising look in her eye. ‘I’m so sorry you’ve had to deal with all this, Anna. You were a good friend to them, flying out like that. And then to hear that terrible confession. You’re quite sure he wasn’t just confused or hallucinating? People say strange things when they’re drugged and in shock and as desperately ill as he was.’

  ‘I know, I’ve been wrestling with that ever since. It’s just that he was, briefly, so lucid.’

  My aunt nodded sadly. ‘Well, you were there. Couldn’t you speak to someone about it, though? Perhaps the police officer who looked into the matter? We have a regular guest here—a good friend—who’s a Supreme Court judge, and I was saying to Josh that I’m sure he would pull a few strings to help you get the ear of the right person.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ Anna said cautiously. ‘But I think we should try to be as clear as possible in our own minds before we go as far as that.’

  ‘Maybe that’s wise.’ Mary hesitated, unwilling to let it go. ‘Of course, the other aspect of this is, what happens if what Owen said was true? They’re all dead now—Lucy, Curtis and Owen. What good can it do? And think of the possible harm, the distress to Lucy’s family, for instance.’

  ‘But they aren’t all dead, Mary. There were two other people in their group, Damien Stokes and Marcus Fenn. They’re very much alive.’

  Mary looked shocked. ‘Oh, but surely you don’t imagine they …?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well …’ Mary stared at her, then turned to go, catching my eye with a look that I took to be a warning to be careful.

  ‘So, what did you come up with?’ Anna asked as I poured the coffee.

  ‘Not a lot.’ I’d wanted to avoid talking about how Luce had been de
pressed, but in the end it was all I had to say.

  Anna looked at me pointedly. ‘Yes. They shifted their ground, didn’t they? And in the end Damien put the blame onto you.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Was he right, do you think? You saw her after I left, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, she was down. But she wasn’t suicidal. She was looking forward to going on the trip. I mean, she was really fired up about how important the work was, and about doing some climbing, and what a beautiful place it was. Something changed while she was out there. Despite all their protests that Luce wouldn’t have deliberately stepped off that cliff, Damien and the others planted the seed of the possibility. I think it was a smokescreen, in case Maddox found something that didn’t fit the picture of an accident.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  I mentioned Marcus’s description of Luce as impetuous, another smokescreen.

  Anna agreed, but was obviously disappointed by my lack of progress, so I asked, ‘What about you, then? What did you find?’

  She unfolded several large handwritten tables and charts and spread them out. One was a timeline, tracing Luce’s movements on the island according to witness statements, and another was a chart showing the names and connections of all of the people referred to in the police report. A third was a large map of the island locating all the places mentioned. I was impressed. She’d obviously approached it in a methodical, scientific manner, making my casual observations look pretty thin. I put it down to a lack of mental challenge at the Walter Murchison Memorial Nursing Home.

  ‘They arrived on the first of September,’ she said, pointing to the timeline, ‘moving into the same cottage belonging to the Kelso family that Marcus had rented in previous years. During the first two weeks they worked on the accessible small islands off the north end of Lord Howe. Then, when Damien arrived to make up two climbing pairs, they tackled the more difficult cliffs at the south end, below Mount Gower. Each day Marcus would go out with them in Bob Kelso’s boat, and return for them in the evening. They all kept work diaries, which Marcus would compile, day by day, into the research log. The weather was generally good, although there were a number of stormy days, especially towards the end, when they couldn’t go out.

  ‘On Wednesday the twenty-seventh, the ocean-going yachts on the Sydney to Lord Howe race arrived at the island, and on the following evening the Kelsos, who are an important family on the island, threw a party for the yachties, to which Marcus and his team were invited. On the Friday they returned to Mount Gower for what was originally scheduled to be their last day in the field. However, a bad storm blew in on the Saturday, disrupting flights to the island, and because of time lost earlier Marcus decided that they would stay on for a few more days to finish their work. The weather cleared on the Sunday, and on the Monday they lost Luce. The search and police interviews went on for another week.’

  I had been following her finger as she traced this chain of events across the page. Seeing it laid out graphically like that made it easier to get a feel for the pattern. It struck me that there was a sort of congestion towards the end—the arrival of the yachts, the party, the bad weather, the delayed departure—disrupting the even repetition of the previous weeks.

  When I mentioned this, Anna nodded and said, ‘Something else odd about those last few days …’ She pointed to the names written against each day, referring to witness sightings of Luce. ‘After that party on the Thursday night, the only people who mentioned seeing Luce again were the three other climbers, plus Marcus and Bob Kelso, whereas in the days before Thursday, lots of people saw her around—Sophie Kalajzich, Dr Passlow and his wife, the other Kelsos, the National Parks and Wildlife ranger, the people who ran the grocery store …’

  ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘It’s like Luce withdrew, kept herself to herself, don’t you think? As if she wanted to be alone.’

  I thought about it, then I said, ‘I just can’t get over the fact that she should never have been there at all on that Monday. They should all have been back in Sydney by then.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said.

  ‘And they should never have tackled that cliff without Damien. I mean, it’s just so bloody stupid. It shouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘So what are we going to do about it?’

  ‘I wonder if Mary isn’t right, Anna, about how we should be thinking more about the impact on Suzi and the other families if we go on with this. I mean, supposing we did discover something nasty?’

  She frowned at me. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Did Luce ever tell you about something that happened that first time I went climbing with you all at the Watagans? Something about Curtis and Owen?’

  She looked blank and shook her head, so I told her. A couple of days after that weekend, Owen had come to see me. He was in quite a state, desperate to convince me that what we’d witnessed had been a terrible mistake, a moment of madness on his part. He was utterly devoted to Suzi and the baby, he said, and begged me to keep it to myself. I said, fair enough, it wasn’t my business and I had no intention of mentioning it to anyone else, but what about Luce? He’d already seen her, apparently, and she too had agreed to keep quiet, so we left it at that.

  Anna was surprised, but not as much as I’d expected. She’d known that Curtis had had relationships with men, but hadn’t thought about Owen.

  ‘You’re wondering—what if they didn’t stop, if they were lovers when they went to Lord Howe, and Luce threatened to spoil things?’

  ‘She was very concerned about Suzi, and she didn’t believe Owen’s story that it was a one-off thing. Look, it needn’t have been a deliberate plan to kill her; maybe just that she got into trouble and they … hesitated to help, because of this problem. A second would do it, a look exchanged between the two of them, a moment holding back, and then it would be too late.’

  I felt sick talking like this. It seemed all wrong, not the actions of the people I’d known. Surely Luce wouldn’t have pushed them into a corner, and surely they would never have reacted like that if she had. But could I be sure?

  ‘And then I started to wonder about the accident in New Zealand. What do we know about what happened there?’

  Anna frowned. ‘They were roped together, just the two of them, crossing a steep ice slope. The rest of their party could see them, but they were some distance behind. They said Owen, following Curtis, fell and pulled Curtis down with him.’

  I pictured it. ‘Oh, hell,’ I whispered.

  We sat in silence for a long while, then I said, ‘I think we should talk to Marcus.’

  8

  I borrowed Mary’s car, and we drove across the bridge into North Sydney and through the suburbs beyond until we reached the strip of shops at Castlecrag, where I pulled over to consult the map. Outside, people were walking their dogs and sipping lattes at pavement tables, enjoying the sunny Saturday afternoon. But I had a hollow feeling of foreboding in my gut at the thought of meeting Marcus again.

  The area we wanted lay to one side of the main road, on the rocky bushland hillside dropping down to the bays of Middle Harbour. It’s a place unlike any other in Sydney, laid out in the 1920s by the two American architects, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, who had previously won the competition to design the new Australian capital city at Canberra. They were inspired by the dramatic site at Castlecrag, and must have seen some poetic metaphor in medieval castles, for they gave its narrow lanes, winding along the contour lines between rocky outcrops, names like The Rampart, The Bastion and The Bulwark. The Griffins designed a number of the houses in their subdivision, too, and if you think of the quintessential Australian house as being lightweight, open to the landscape, with sunny decks and a tin roof, then these were exactly the opposite—solid cubic bunkers embedded into the hillside like refuges for trolls in a strange land. Marcus’s house was one of these, located at the end of a cul-de-sac in The Citadel, its rough stone blocks almost invis
ibly hunkered down among large boulders and overgrown by gnarled banksias and angophoras. Its walls ended abruptly at a flat roof, like a castle keep, the source of dramatic views down into the ravine leading into Middle Harbour. Seeing it again, rugged and dour, I felt an odd sense of time shifting, as if the front door might open and we’d find the others still inside, laughing and arguing and drinking as before.

  We parked and walked down the narrow sloping drive, flanked by rock green with mould, to the heavy front door. I rapped the brass knocker and we waited, and waited, and then there came the scuffle of a bolt being slid, and the door opened.

  It was as if all his most distinctive features had become exaggerated, eliminating the rest. His leanness had become skeletal, the lines on his face gaunt cleavages, and the long black hair shaggier and greyer. Most of all, the crippled leg had dragged the rest of his frame down around it, making him stoop awkwardly, like a damaged stick insect.

  He frowned at us for a moment, then his mouth split in a wide smile. ‘Anna! Hi! And …’ He clicked his fingers.

  ‘Josh,’ I said.

  ‘Josh, yes, of course, sorry. Great to see you.’ A dank sour smell wafted past him from the depths of the house. ‘Come in, come in.’ I caught a strong gust of whisky on his breath.

  It was dark inside the hall, the space smaller and more cave-like than I remembered it. We came to a living room, whose view out through stone-mullioned windows was obscured by dense foliage. The room was a jumble of ancient leather furniture surrounded and covered by piles of books and other debris. Judging by the stains in the ceiling the damp problem from the flat roof hadn’t been fixed.

  He continued through to a brighter room, with French windows opening onto a small terrace. This room was his den, as untidy as the one before but more lived in, with an empty wine bottle and a tray with the remains of yesterday’s pizza on the floor, and more books. He cleared a couple of chairs and went off to find another bottle, leaving Anna and me eyeing each other doubtfully. There was an old chintz-covered armchair in the corner by the window and I had a sudden vivid memory of another Saturday in this room, music playing, laughter from the garden, and Suzi sitting in that chair, flapping a handkerchief to try to keep the smoke from a joint in Curtis’s hand away from the face of the baby on her knee.