Barry Maitland: Bright Air

‘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.’

‘Yes.’ I found I was holding my breath.

‘There was lots of confusing information to sort out in the days after Lucy disappeared,’ he went on. ‘People charging all over the place, rumours of sightings and false alarms. We had to decide what was relevant and what wasn’t. It’s always like that with an investigation of course, but afterwards you wonder. On the day after the accident, the helicopter from HMAS Newcastle flew over Balls Pyramid. They spotted two people who’d landed on the Pyramid from a Zodiac off one of the visiting yachts.’

‘Really? Did you find out who they were?’

‘Mm. One of them had a beard, the other red hair. Sounded like Damien Stokes and Curtis Read to me. Later on I asked them, and they said they’d wanted to check that Lucy hadn’t been washed up on Balls Pyramid. With the direction of the currents that would have been impossible, of course, and I took it for an innocent mistake. But then you wonder …’

‘What do you wonder?’

He just shrugged.

‘Did they find any sign of her?’ I asked.

He said, ‘No. Well, they couldn’t have, could they?’

That evening I met Rory in the hallway of the hotel. He regarded me quizzically over the top of his glasses, the way he no doubt considered all dubious witnesses, then asked sombrely if I’d care to join him in a tot of whisky. I didn’t, but I couldn’t think of a reason to refuse.