Bright Air (22 page)

‘So it’s never been climbed?’ I asked, thinking that would make it even more irresistible to Luce and her friends.

‘It was climbed in the 1960s,’ Bob conceded, ‘and once or twice since, but it’s so dangerous that it’s banned now. It’s a bird reserve.’

We watched vast flocks of gulls floating in the air around its high flanks, and I said, ‘Luce would have loved this place, Bob. Did you ever bring her out here?’

He ducked his head away as a wave hit us, and adjusted his steering. ‘Nah. She saw it all right, though, from South Head. Couldn’t very well miss it, could she?’

I thought he was lying. As I took pictures he pointed out some of the features that the first climbers had christened along the steep ridge that ran up to the summit from the south—the twin spires of Winklestein’s Steeple, the Black Tower and the Cheval Ridge, so named because it was so narrow, with sheer drops on either side, that it had to be traversed as if sitting on a horse, with a leg down each side. I felt sure he’d told Luce the same story.

We could also clearly see the huge breakers crashing against its base.

‘So how did they get ashore?’

‘Their boat stood off while one of them jumped in and swam to the rock with a line, then pulled their gear and the others over. But there are sharks, huge sharks, and the waves and currents are bad around here, mate, real bad. Chances are you’d be swept away or bashed against the rocks before you could get out of the water.’

I could see the difficulties all too clearly, but as we turned back towards Lord Howe I was even more convinced that Luce had stood on that thing. Why was I so sure? There was the map reference in her diary, of course, but it was more than that—I’d felt her presence there. That sounds absurdly fanciful, like Owen seeing her on the mountain before he fell, and Marcus on his terrace, and as we grew further and further away from the Pyramid I tried to convince myself to be rational. But each time I glanced back at it, glowing solitary in the morning sun, the sensation came back, creeping up my spine.

The wind picked up as we approached Lord Howe, the waves got bigger, and Anna was sick again. Then we were
running up the eastern side of the island, Bob pointing out the landmarks among the cliffs and rocky bays. For Anna’s sake, and having spent an extra couple of hours on the detour to the south, we agreed to forgo the fishing, and Bob circled the Admiralty Islands, showing us the wave-cut tunnel through the middle of Roach Island. Seabirds swooped around us, dazzlingly blue, and it was only when they climbed away that we realised they were pure white, coloured by the light reflected off the blue waters. We followed the line of the northern cliffs and circled around North Head to approach a northern passage through the reef. Ahead of us we could see people on the jetty.

We clambered ashore, unsteady, and thanked Bob. I asked how much we owed him, but he wouldn’t take any money. Instead we bought him lunch at the café, and he suggested we borrow a couple of bikes from the house and spend the afternoon exploring.

When he’d gone, Anna, a little colour returning to her cheeks, looked at me and said, ‘So, what’s the mystery?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were up to something. What?’

I felt suddenly reluctant to tell her. I was uneasy about how she might react, and anyway, sitting there at a café table surrounded by people, my imaginings just seemed utterly fanciful.

‘What did you want in the wheelhouse?’ she demanded.

‘He had a GPS set in there,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I just wanted to check something.’

‘Without him knowing. What was it?’

So I told her about that last, erratic reading from the diary, and of the significance of WE as against WF. She knew less about maps than I did, and I had to explain it all twice.

‘But you thought you could put the numbers into Bob’s navigation system and it would tell you where the place was?’

‘That’s right. I thought the WE might have been a mistake, but it wasn’t. When I entered the numbers with WF, I came up with a point in the middle of the ocean.’

‘But with WE?’

‘Yes, I got a landfall, but not on Lord Howe.’

‘Where then?’

‘Near the southern tip of Balls Pyramid.’

‘And that wasn’t the same map reading that Owen entered in Carmel’s log?’

‘I can’t be sure of that. I didn’t have time to copy down his entries. But they told the inquest they’d been working on the Mount Gower cliffs all that week—there was no mention of Balls Pyramid. And if they did go out there Bob must have taken them in his boat, but he denied it, didn’t he? And he claimed no one had set foot on it for years.’

Anna rubbed her forehead, thinking. ‘Maybe they were just
talking
about Balls Pyramid, and Luce looked it up on her equipment and jotted down the coordinates.’

‘Yeah, I might have gone with that if she hadn’t also put down the time and the altitude, just like the other entries. One twenty-five in the afternoon, and one hundred and forty-nine metres up. I think I saw the place as we sailed round. Bob called it Gannet Green, a shelf with a bit of vegetation on it.’ I showed her the pictures on the screen of my camera. They were a bit tipsy with the motion of the boat, but you could see it all right.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Josh. The implications …’

‘Yes. One little number, and if you interpret it that way, it means that everything that Curtis, Owen, Damien, Marcus and Bob said about that final week is in doubt.’

‘Why would they have done it?’

‘Because it’s there. Let’s say they’d finished their officially sanctioned project early, at the end of the previous week, so they decide to go out to have a look at this amazing place. Maybe there are birds out there that you don’t find anywhere else. It’s certainly the most fantastic rock climb I’ve ever heard of. But it’s forbidden to land there and there’s no chance the board will consider a scientific study without a proper submission, and that could take months. So they decide to do it on the quiet, only something goes wrong. Luce has an accident, maybe she’s swept away getting from the boat to the shore. They’ll be in deep shit if they say what happened, Bob especially, so they change the place of the accident to where they should have been, where their daily reports said they were.’

‘How would they have persuaded Bob to take them out there, to let them land?’

‘I don’t know. Money? No. Maybe because he was soft on Luce, and she persuaded him.’

We were silent for a long time. It sounded almost plausible, but there were details that bothered me. I decided to give the great detective time to mull it over.

‘Anyway, if there’s a grain of truth in it, we’ll have to be very careful. I don’t think it’s a story that anybody is going to want to hear. So I propose we do as Bob suggested and go for a cycle, and pretend that everything’s just fine.’

She nodded agreement. ‘You’re right. And really, if it did happen like that, there’s nothing to be gained from opening it all up again.’

‘Right.’ Except that, if it did happen like that, then those five blokes had deliberately conspired to direct the rescue effort twenty kilometres away from where it should have been focused.

We walked back to the cabin and Anna had a shower and I a couple of beers—our respective ways of recalibrating ourselves to the world. Then we went out to the driveway in front of the house, where half a dozen bikes were stacked against the veranda rail, with helmets piled on the edge of the deck. We selected our mounts, I helped adjust the height of Anna’s seat, and then we wobbled off up the driveway to the road. We turned south, back along the way Bob had first brought us from the airstrip, which we came to after ten minutes. The headwind caught us as we turned onto the long stretch of road that ran parallel to the runway, and we laughed as we battled at barely jogging speed, straining against the wind.

At the far end the road curved around the end of the airstrip to head back towards the lagoon shore. Dead ahead there was a sand dune, and parked on it a small white four-wheel drive bearing the crest of the New South Wales Police. We pulled off the road and walked our bikes up to it. There was a track through the dunes here, leading down to the sandy sweep of Blinky Beach, the island’s surfing beach. A lone figure was far out among the breakers, and we sat on the tufted grass watching as he caught a wave and coasted in. He looked as if he got a lot of practice.

He spotted us, and slung his board under his arm and padded up the beach towards us.

‘G’day. Grant Campbell,’ he said as we got to our feet. ‘Looking for me?’

‘Not specially, Grant,’ I said, and introduced us. ‘We’re friends of Lucy Corcoran, remember her? Who had the accident four years ago?’

‘Course I remember.’ He eyed us steadily.

‘Guess you don’t get much crime here.’

‘Nope.’ Grant seemed even more laconic than Bob, and equally aware of our presence on the island.

‘I was talking to Glenn Maddox in Sydney recently. He’s a sergeant now.’

‘Oh yeah? The big guy.’

I assumed he was being ironic. Maddox was shorter than any of us. ‘I told him I was thinking of coming out here. He said to say hello.’

‘Did he manage to convert you?’ He grinned. ‘How come you were talking to him?’

‘Just wanted to check if there’d been any developments.’

‘Developments? Like what?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve been overseas for four years. I just wondered if anything new had come up. Anyway, Sergeant Maddox seemed to think us coming here would be a good idea. Help us come to terms with it.’

‘And has it?’

‘Well, this is only our second day. You were involved with the rescue effort, weren’t you, after she fell?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Were you happy about how it was done?’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Well, did you get all the resources you needed?’

‘We had the navy and the air force. By Monday evening we had twenty boats and aircraft out there.’

‘Were you involved in directing the search?’

‘Me and others.’

‘Would you mind taking us through what happened?’

He sat beside us on the dune, the sand sticking to his black wetsuit, and picked up a piece of driftwood to draw a crescent in the sand. ‘Lord Howe. Bob got a message from them at two that afternoon that Lucy had fallen and was in the water.’ He
poked the stick at the bottom of the crescent. ‘He contacted me, then got in his boat and headed down there. I found as many people as I could with boats and sent them down after him. Towards three they reported that there was no sign of her.

‘They reckoned there was something like a three-knot current down there, running due west, so by then she might have been carried anything up to five kilometres out to sea.’ He drew a line across the foot of the crescent. ‘There were several of us in my office by this stage, and we identified a search area and directed everyone out there except for a couple to keep searching the waters around the cliffs, just in case. By this time some of the yachties from the Sydney to Lord Howe race had heard about it, and they began heading out too. We notified AusSAR, the national search and rescue people in Canberra, and they alerted the navy and air force. The RAAF Maritime Patrol Group is based at Edinburgh in South Australia, so it would take their Orions over four hours to reach us, by which time it’d be dark, but they sent one over anyway with thermal imaging equipment, and then another came towards dawn the next day. HMAS
Newcastle
was exercising in the area and was directed our way, and its helicopter flew over around five. Meanwhile a small fixed-wing set out from Port Macquarie, but didn’t make it before dusk.

‘The boats stayed out till midnight, using lights, though we knew the chances of them spotting anything were slim. They set out again at dawn, by which time the
Newcastle
and the second Orion had arrived.’ He shrugged. ‘What can I say? The experts had taken over by then, plotting the currents, defining the search area. They were using radar altimeter measurements from satellites. It’s like plotting pressures on a weather map—the ocean currents were rotating in a huge
anticlockwise flow around a high spot way to the south. Mate, they were taking her far, far away from land. We knew she was a goner, even if she’d somehow survived that fall. I’m sorry. I don’t reckon there was anything else we could have done.’

‘No, I’m sure there wasn’t, Grant. Thanks.’ I took a deep breath. If my suspicion was right, the whole effort in those critical first hours on the Monday afternoon before sunset had been wasted, displaced twenty kilometres north of where they should have been looking. It made me sick to think about it. No wonder Owen had felt guilty. I wanted to ride back into town and find Bob and choke the truth out of him, but I guessed he’d just deny everything, as Damien would too.

We thanked the cop, and mounted our bikes again and pressed on down the road. There was a steep climb past the golf course, and the physical effort helped work out a little of the frustration I felt. We stopped at a sign to Lovers Bay, and sat on the hillside looking out over the ocean. The sight of that vast sea chilled my heart, and I immediately began pouring out the anger I felt. Anna listened in silence while I ranted on about them searching the wrong sector. Then, when I ran out of steam, she said simply, ‘No, it couldn’t have happened like that.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘If they were on Balls Pyramid when they radioed for help at two that afternoon, how would they have got back to the southern cliffs in time to meet the rescue boats?’

I was stunned. Of course she was right. I wasn’t thinking clearly. ‘How did it work, then?’

‘I’m not sure. It would depend on whether Bob and his boat were there with them when it happened. If he was, they’d have searched for a while themselves, until they were convinced they weren’t going to find her. How long would that take? Hours, surely, if they weren’t prepared to call for help.
Then they’d have returned to the southern cliffs, dropped the climbers, and Bob and Marcus would have headed back to the jetty to wait for the radio call from Curtis. If Bob wasn’t with them, it would have taken even longer—he’d have had to go out to them, then search and so on as before.’