Barry Maitland - Bright Air

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.

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.’