Bright Air (11 page)

‘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.’

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 invisibly 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.

I picked up a book lying among the remnants of Marcus’s meal and checked the title—
Occult Science
by Rudolf Steiner. Anna had opened the doors onto the terrace and I followed her out. Further down the steep slope we could see a kind of amphitheatre formed in a hollow in the hillside, accessible from Marcus’s house by rock steps winding down between the boulders. To one side of the terrace a shade-cloth conservatory had been built beneath the overhang of a sandstone outcrop, with ferns and other plants dimly visible inside.

We turned and saw Marcus limping into the room, and went back inside. He almost stumbled on a book on the floor, and I caught his arm and steadied him, startled by how light he felt. I took the bottle from his free hand and found three empty glasses.

He eased himself with a sigh down into another piece of furniture I remembered, a heavy dark wooden chair he called his throne. ‘So how are you guys?’ he said, examining us in turn. In that more haggard face his gaze seemed brighter, more intense, but his manner was less certain, almost as if he’d become withdrawn, unused to being with people, reclusive, or maybe just drunk.

‘We’re fine,’ Anna said. ‘I work over in Blacktown, and Josh has been in London.’

‘Ah, the merchant banker, yes. London?’

‘Right, I’ve just got back.’

‘Four years,’ he said. ‘Of course, of course.’ As if that was terribly significant.

I smiled. ‘How’s the uni these days?’

He lowered his eyelids, raised his wine cautiously to his mouth and drank. ‘I don’t work there any more, Josh. They decided they could do without me—very wisely no doubt.’ Some wine spilled onto his knee.

Anna said, ‘But you were a great teacher, Marcus. And your research …’

He gave a dry laugh that turned into a cough. ‘After the accident, well, someone had to pay. Inquiries, suspended from teaching, research grants withheld. They made life impossible for me, drove me out.’ He shrugged, wiped his knee absently.

I was shocked, by both his story and how he looked, and said, ‘I’m sorry. Where are you now?’

‘Um? Oh, I’m working on my own private research program.’

‘No more students?’

He gazed at his feet sombrely, then shook his head.

I raised an eyebrow at Anna, who took over.

‘We wondered if you’d heard about Curtis and Owen, Marcus?’

‘Curtis and Owen? No, I haven’t heard from them for a while. What about them?’

I hadn’t noticed a newspaper or a TV in the house.

‘They were killed in a climbing accident in New Zealand last month.’

He cocked his head forward, peering at her. ‘No …’ He looked confused, and I wondered if he might be on medication
as well as booze. ‘A climbing accident?’ He shook his head, not upset but more as if this just couldn’t be right. ‘
Another
climbing accident? Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I went over there as soon as I heard. I was with Owen when he died in hospital.’ Anna was leaning forward, speaking slowly, watching his reactions. ‘Just before he died he told me something very disturbing. He said that Luce didn’t die the way the inquest had heard. He said her death wasn’t accidental.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He said,
We killed her
.’

Marcus looked startled, opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Finally he said, ‘No, that’s … that’s … crazy.’

‘Is it? You weren’t actually there when it happened, were you?’

‘You’re not serious.’ He began tapping a finger on the arm of the chair. ‘There was an inquest, a full investigation.’

‘Which relied on what Curtis and Owen said.’

He hauled himself abruptly upright in his seat, glaring at her. ‘This is crazy, Anna. Tell me again, the whole thing.’

While Anna did so I looked at the books lying around my feet. There was one called
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment
, which I thought might have been about climbing until I saw that the author again was Steiner. There were others by him—
The Being of Man and His Future Evolution
and
Cosmic Memory
—and a thick tome called
A Guide to Anthroposophy
. The books had Dewey classification numbers on their spines from the university library, and I wondered if he still had access, or if he’d stolen them.

‘Thank you for telling me this, Anna. I had no idea.’ Marcus drained his glass and I got up to refill it for him. ‘Have you told anyone else about it?’

‘Not yet.’

Marcus seemed agitated, preoccupied. ‘The fall,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Owen’s mind … He was obviously deranged by his fall.’

‘You don’t think it’s possible he could have been telling the truth?’

‘What? No! Of course not.’

I said, ‘How about Luce’s state of mind, in those last days before the accident?’

‘Luce? State of mind?’ He focused his eyes on me in that intense way he’d had before, as if he wanted to burrow right into your brain and find out what you were hiding in there.

‘Yes, I mean, was she depressed? At the inquest several people said they thought she was. The police investigator even asked you all if she might have killed herself. I just wondered what you really thought.’

‘No, Luce would never do that … Ah, I think I can see where you’re coming from, Josh. She still had a photo of you inside her wallet, and you’re wondering … Am I right?’

I felt the colour rise in my face, but didn’t say anything.

‘No, it wasn’t like that. A bit subdued maybe, towards the end of the trip, but not suicidal, no, no.’

Anna said, ‘One of the witnesses said there was a disagreement between Luce and other members of the team.’

He turned to her, then slowly shook his head. ‘No, Anna—no disagreements.’

I said, ‘What about Curtis and Owen, how were they getting on?’

‘Fine, we were all getting on fine.’ He shook his head, impatient with these questions.

‘Were they lovers?’

He glanced at me, eyebrow raised, as if reassessing me. ‘You know about that, do you? No, that was over long before, as far as I know. And even if they were—what difference would it have made?’

‘Luce felt protective towards Suzi and the baby. I think she felt that Curtis should have left Owen alone.’

‘Was that how it went, Josh? I don’t know. It was none of my business. And Luce never mentioned it. Look …’ he waved a hand at us, pale and bony as a turkey’s claw, ‘this has stirred up old memories, but nothing sinister happened. I promise you that. It was just a terrible accident, terrible, terrible. If there had been any hint of anything else … I miss her too, you know.’ He nodded towards a bookshelf on which we saw a small framed photograph of Luce. ‘Every day I think of her and blame myself.’

He took a deep breath, a glint of moisture in his eyes, and then added with a kind of choked sob, ‘I saw her, you know …’ He waved his hand at the French windows onto the terrace.

‘How do you mean?’

‘About a year ago, out there … Beautiful as ever.’

Anna and I exchanged a glance of alarm.

‘A year ago?’ I said.

He turned his face back from the window to me and said quietly, ‘Have you wondered why you’ve come back now, Josh?’

I looked at him in astonishment. ‘Well, it was just the way things turned out, with my job and so on …’

He shook his head and smiled as if I was being incredibly naive. ‘You were looking at my books,’ he said, pointing to the pile beside my feet. ‘Rudolf Steiner, a great man, a great scientist, who realised the limitations of conventional science and moved on further—much, much further. The man and
woman who designed this house were great followers of his. They studied his books, his philosophy, his discoveries. It took me a long time to realise … The people they designed it for were my grandparents, who left it to me when they died twenty years ago, but it’s only in the last year that I’ve begun to realise that they were all into it, the people who came to live here, including my grandparents. There was art and dance, and everyone joined in; anthroposophical festivals in the open-air amphitheatre down below us here in The Scarp …’ he pointed to the French windows, ‘by the light of flares. Tell me, how many rooms are there in this house, Josh?’