Barry Maitland - Bright Air

‘I asked Marcus what was going on. He wouldn’t say at first, but eventually he told me that they’d had some kind of a quarrel, and Luce had stormed off.’

Anna and I exchanged a glance. This didn’t sound right, not like Luce at all.

‘Apparently Marcus had sent Owen and Curtis after her to calm her down and get her to come back, but they lost her. She was much quicker than they were, and it seemed she didn’t want to come down. Time went by, no progress, and I started to get worried, the afternoon wearing on. They were high up and it was going to take them a while to get back to the boat, and I wasn’t going to risk trying to pick them up in the dark. I told Marcus, and he radioed for them to return. He was mad, and said it would teach Luce a lesson to have to spend the night out on the Pyramid on her own. I didn’t like that idea at all, but what could I do?’

There was something about the way he was telling the story that didn’t quite jell with the impression I’d previously formed of him. He was too passive somehow, playing for sympathy. The sun was warm on our faces, and I asked if I could have a beer. I felt I needed one. He opened up the esky for me and went on with his story.

‘So they returned to the boat, just made it as the light was fading. I was trying to keep an eye on the cliffs, but I didn’t get another sight of Luce. We returned to Lord Howe, nobody saying a word.

‘When we woke up the next morning a gale was blowing. The forecast was bad. We waited from hour to hour for the weather to ease. The flight from the mainland was delayed, and Marcus decided to postpone their return for forty-eight hours. The storm didn’t die down, though-if anything it got worse. In the afternoon I tried to take the boat out, but I couldn’t get beyond the reef, the seas were too big. Maybe we should have called for help then, but we’d already told people that Luce was safe with us, lying down in her room.

‘The next day, Sunday, the weather was better, and we set out first thing for the Pyramid. Of course, we hoped to see Lucy waiting for us at the south end, just like I hoped to see you two down there on Saturday when I came looking for you. But there was no sign of her. We circled the rock several times and couldn’t see a bloody thing. Then the three blokes swam over and started searching on foot. By late afternoon they’d found nothing, and we called them back.

‘We were in a panic now, I can tell you. What should we do? By the time we got back to Lord Howe we’d convinced ourselves that she was a goner, and the main thing now was to cover our backs. I’m not proud of myself, but I have to tell you, if I was put in that situation again, I reckon I’d probably do the same thing. We decided on what we’d do the next day-spend the morning at Balls Pyramid for one last search, then go to plan B. And that’s what we did. At midday we called off the search and I took them to the Mount Gower cliffs where we’d been telling Carmel we were. They knew there was a patch of dangerous loose rock some way up, and the plan was to fake an accident there, where it would be difficult for people to take a close look. That’s when Damien got cold feet. He said he didn’t want anything to do with it, and insisted on being taken back. So I landed Owen and Curtis at the foot of the cliff and took Marcus and Damien back to the jetty. At two Curtis radioed Marcus, and I raised the alarm with Grant Campbell. Of course, it was all far too late by then.’

‘And you sent them off to the wrong place,’ Anna said bitterly. ‘Didn’t you think she could still have been alive on the Pyramid?’

‘I did go back there several times during the search, but there was nothing. So … what did she say, in the note?’

‘What does it fucking matter?’ I said, hearing my voice crack. ‘She died.’ I glared at Bob. His air of penitent regret was irritating me. ‘So what had happened on that Friday, Bob? What was the argument about? Why did she run?’

‘I don’t know, Josh,’ he said, too smoothly. ‘They wouldn’t tell me. They just said something about a professional disagreement, as if I didn’t need to know.’

‘And you didn’t insist? They’d put you in the position of being an accessory to murder , and you didn’t insist on knowing why?’

‘It wasn’t murder, Josh,’ he said in that soft sad voice. ‘The way I saw it, they’d had a row, and she went off to calm down and think things through on her own. But her timing was bad-it was too late in the day, and a storm was on its way. It was just bad luck, for all of us.’

‘Not for all of you,’ I corrected him savagely. ‘Only for her. The rest of you wriggled out of it.’

He turned away and made to get the boat moving, but I called angrily after him, ‘Sit down, Bob! We haven’t finished yet.’

He looked back over his shoulder at me, then shrugged and came and sat down again.

‘Since you can’t offer a reason for their quarrel, Bob, let me suggest one. It goes like this. You and your brother Harry have a racket going here, collecting rare bird eggs from nesting sites all over the island and selling them to smugglers and dealers, like the American who came visiting on that yacht while Luce and the others were here. Highly illegal, of course, but very lucrative. This must be the most perfect spot on earth to run such a business, but I suppose some exposed sites might be a bit hard to access without being seen. Like on Roach Island, say, with all those lovely endangered grey ternlet nests. But Curtis and Owen had the perfect opportunity to go there with impunity, and so you and Harry paid them to do a bit of collecting for you. And with them being such great climbers, you had the bright idea at the end of their stay to get them to do a bit of prospecting on Balls Pyramid too. Kermadec petrel, was it? Its only nesting site? Very desirable, no doubt. The only trouble was that Luce got wind of it, at the party you threw for the yachties, I think it was. Did she overhear something? She got suspicious, anyway, and finally, on that second visit to Balls Pyramid, she caught Curtis and Owen in the act. When she confronted them they panicked. They had to stop her from telling Marcus what they were up to, or they’d be finished-not just kicked out of uni, but up for a jail term, along with you too, of course.

‘Did they talk to you before you set off that day, about their concerns that Luce was on to them? And did you tell them what they had to do if it looked like she’d make trouble? Stage an accident out of sight of Damien and Marcus? But she was too quick for them, wasn’t she? She outran them, but in the end it made no difference. You just left her out here until she was exhausted and had that accident anyway.’

He’d sat there impassively right through the whole of this, listening to my accusations, showing no surprise or outrage. And when I finished he took a deep breath, rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said, ‘Yep, I reckon you could have something there, mate.’

His calm was rather scary, and I wondered how I’d miscalculated. Clearly he was going to have to try to do something pretty drastic about us now, and me holding his knife didn’t seem to bother him.

Then he said, ‘You’ve just got a couple of things back to front. First off, Harry and I don’t deal in eggs. Believe me, in this place you’d be crazy to try anything like that. You’d be found out in no time, and with everybody’s livelihood tied up with wildlife conservation one way or another, you’d be as popular as a dingo in a kindy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Curtis and Owen were involved in something like that, only they weren’t working for me.’

‘Who then?’

‘Marcus.’

‘What? That’s ridiculous.’

‘Couple of years previously, at the end of one of his visits, I went to see him about something. He was packing up to go, and I caught him unprepared. He was placing eggs in a special foam container in his suitcase. He looked crook when he realised I’d seen it, but then bluffed it out, telling me it was all part of the research project, aiming to start a breeding program back in Sydney. He even showed me how the case had a little heater to keep them alive. Later I asked Carmel, in a roundabout way, how wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a breeding program for the rarer birds on the mainland, and she said it might, but there wasn’t one, and anyway it would be very difficult to get permission to remove eggs from the island to get one started. I decided to keep quiet about it. After all, he was the expert, wasn’t he? Mr Wildlife Conservation himself.