Bright Air (12 page)

His rambling was becoming more and more confused. I shrugged. ‘No idea, Marcus.’

‘Seven, arranged in three overlapping suites. Now, look at the carving of the stone window surrounds, the patterns of glass in the French windows, the design of the fireplace—all repetitions of seven elements in three overlapping groups, at many different scales. You see?’

‘Oh yes, right.’ I looked at Anna again, eyebrows raised.

‘One of the things, the fundamental things, that Steiner discovered was that we have seven parts, seven kinds of self. The house, you see, is the philosophy made flesh, Josh. It is a template, a model, an embodiment of the human spirit itself, as revealed by Steiner. He was the Darwin, the Einstein of the spiritual world, and this was one of his great discoveries. When we die, Josh, only the first member, the physical body, is destroyed. For a few days its companions, the astral and etheric bodies, cling together, after which the astral body separates itself and goes on its way without the etheric, which also dies. Now the person goes through a painful process of purification, retracing his or her life experiences and purging them in what Steiner calls “the consuming fire of the spirit”,
until at last the whole of their earthly life is distilled to an extract, a quintessence, which the Ego carries forward into the spiritual world, the Spirit-land.’

He was becoming more and more excited, eyes wild, and he suddenly reached out to grab my arm. ‘Josh, Steiner tells us that the process of purification takes about one-sixth of the time the person spent on earth. Don’t you see? For Lucy that would be four years. Four years! That’s why you’re disturbed, why you’ve come back to this house now. You were close to her, you sense her being at the time when she must move on into the land of Spirits!

‘That’s why she returned here. It was a dark night. I came into this room, and switched on the light, and there she was, out there on the terrace, a pale figure, but absolutely clear, unmistakable, illuminated by the light from the room. I cried out her name and went towards her. I wanted to speak to her, ask her forgiveness, but she disappeared. She’d come back to this house, Josh, to seek out the blueprint of her future life, to find her way forward into the Spirit-land.’

‘Forgiveness?’ I said sharply. ‘Forgiveness for what?’

‘What?’

‘You said you wanted to ask her forgiveness. What for?’

‘Oh …’ He became a mass of confusion. ‘I felt responsible. She was my student …’ Then he turned on me. His frown might have been puzzlement, or concern, or perhaps no more than a struggle to concentrate. He repeated my name a couple of times, ‘Josh … Josh,’ then his face cleared and he said, ‘I understand—you’re suffering, right? Shit, you feel guilt … despair, right?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘I felt exactly the same, until I discovered the truth.’

‘The truth? You know the truth, about how she died?’

‘Ha!’ Now a beatific smile lit his face. ‘But that’s the point, Josh, that is the point.’

‘What is?’

‘
She isn’t dead
.’

We left soon after, exchanging promises to catch up again another time. As we made for the front door Marcus, returned now to a more prosaic spiritual plane, said to Anna, ‘On morphine, was he?’

‘What?’

‘Owen, when you saw him.’

‘I suppose so, something like that.’

Marcus nodded, as if he knew all about morphine. ‘Messes with your brain, Anna. People believe all kinds of stuff.’

We stepped carefully through the obstacles on the living room floor, and I recognised a Lloyd Rees print on the wall that Luce and I had admired on one of our visits. The memory brought back just how much energy and life there had been in this house then, and how neglected it now seemed. I felt sorry for Marcus. He’d been an intriguing and generous man to know, and he’d made our student lives more interesting, more vivid. Now he seemed utterly lost.

When we reached the front door, Anna led the way up the path between the rocks, but Marcus put a hand on my shoulder and stopped me. He was uncomfortably close, his breath foul on my cheek. ‘Josh,’ he murmured, ‘you don’t want to get into all this. Really. I understand how fond of her you were, but believe me, there’s no
conspiracy
here.’

I nodded, embarrassed to see what looked like a tear in his eye. He was so close I couldn’t avoid noticing the unhealthy colour of his skin, the tufts of bristle he’d missed shaving beneath his chin.

‘Anna’s got it all wrong, you see. You should put her straight. Don’t let her make trouble. Bad for everyone.’

I didn’t mention this to Anna as we drove back to Central,
where she wanted to catch a train. On the way she said, ‘Poor Marcus. I can’t believe how much he’s altered. This thing has really done him in, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, pretty much. He’s a changed man all right. Did you believe what he said, about the accident?’

‘Yes, I did, though he wasn’t there of course, when Luce fell.’

I had believed it too, until that last little exchange at the door. Now I wasn’t so sure.

We agreed we’d have a think about things and talk again soon.

I wanted to think about something else, and Mary helped by giving me a new list of jobs that needed doing around the place. I got stuck into them, and was rewarded later with a lobster dinner and a bottle of wine. After the meal I lay on my bed with a crime novel one of the guests had left with us. She’d recommended it highly, and the reviews quoted on the back cover were all ecstatic, but it annoyed me. It wasn’t that it was unrealistic, at least concerning the technical aspects of murder—DNA profiling, gunshot trauma, the action of bacteria in buried corpses, autopsy procedures and all the rest—in these things it was grossly realistic. But I just couldn’t relate to the characters. They were so incredibly resourceful and resilient; the more they were beaten up and shot and misled, the more determinedly they returned to the fight and the more brilliantly their brains worked. Real people aren’t like that—they’re very easily frightened and confused, their motives are boring and selfish, and when trouble comes they have a tendency to curl up into a little ball until it all goes away. I know, because I’m one. But of course that doesn’t make for a very interesting read.

I had been confused by our visit to Marcus all right, and unsettled in ways I couldn’t quite define. The house had been part of it: claustrophobic, chaotic, a chamber of memories and ghosts. And Marcus himself, diminished and turned in upon himself. I thought about that performance of his, my mind
coloured by the book I’d just been reading. In crime novels, of course, every fact, every event may be significant, carrying the germ of some revelation. Life may not be like that, but the more I considered Marcus’s mystic blustering, the more dubious it seemed, like an elaborate cloak he’d felt obliged to gather around himself. I began to become convinced that the cloak concealed something. A secret. And I wanted to know what it was.

On Monday morning Damien phoned and invited me to have lunch with him. It was a very swish place on East Circular Quay, with a stunning view of the Opera House, and I felt a little out of place among all the corporate suits, but pleasantly so. I really didn’t want to be like that again.

Damien was expansive and friendly, but also, I felt, pointedly assertive as he ordered this and that, as if establishing a certain position of authority. I let him come to the point in his own time, as we were halfway through our fish.

‘I got a call from Marcus Fenn at the weekend,’ he said, dabbing his mouth with his napkin.

‘Oh yes?’

‘He said you and Anna paid him a visit, at Castlecrag.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What did you think?’

‘It was a bit of a shock, frankly, seeing him again. He’s really gone downhill, hasn’t he? The house was a mess, and he didn’t look too fit.’

Damien nodded sadly. ‘You’re right. I’ve watched it happen. The university treated him very badly, you know. Really beat him up. He’d made a lot of enemies over the years, especially within his own faculty—well, you know how sarcastic he
could be. The dean hated his guts and saw the accident on Lord Howe as a way to get rid of him. Rumours circulated—that he hadn’t organised proper back-up for the team, that he was indifferent to safety procedures, that he was spaced out on drugs when it happened—all discounted by the police investigation, but no matter. They made life as difficult for him as they could, and when he accepted a package they refused to give him a reference. Then Luce’s dad went for him.’

‘What? Her father?’

‘Mm, Fred Corcoran, tough old bastard. He saw Marcus’s quitting the uni as an admission of guilt and when the coroner cleared him of any negligence, Corcoran took a private action against him. It dragged through the court for a year. In the end it failed, but it cost Marcus his university payout in lawyers’ fees. The court sympathised with old man Corcoran, even though he was wrong, and didn’t like the look of Marcus, so they didn’t award him costs.’

‘Hell.’ I shook my head.

‘What was so unfair was that Marcus really was devastated by what had happened to Luce, but he just refused to show it, and people didn’t like that. They thought he was arrogant and didn’t care.’

‘So what is he doing now? He said he was involved in some kind of research.’

‘No, no.’ Damien said it with a dismissive flick at some breadcrumbs on the white tablecloth. ‘He’s become a recluse, living on an invalid pension. We tried to help him, Curtis, Owen and I, but he’s difficult. He has these mood swings, and he hates the idea of people feeling sorry for him, or giving him charity.’

Damien put the last piece of barramundi in his mouth, chewed, and then said, ‘When he phoned me, Marcus said
something strange. He said Anna told him that Owen made some kind of confession to her, just before he died.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Apparently Owen said that the accident hadn’t happened the way they told it afterwards.’

He stared at me. ‘Really? You didn’t tell me this before.’

‘No. I was a bit sceptical. I think Owen’s brain must have been scrambled by the fall, but Anna is convinced he was lucid.’

‘And you really didn’t think it was worth mentioning this to me?’

There was an unspoken undercurrent here, concerning our places within the group, that I’d allowed myself to overlook, or forget. He was saying that, of all people, he should have been the first to be told, for it had always been his role to take charge and get us organised, whenever that proved necessary. And equally, I guessed this was the reason why we hadn’t told him straight away, because we knew he’d try to take over.

I shrugged and turned back to my fish, embarrassed in spite of myself. ‘As I say, I don’t know that it can be taken seriously.’

‘Well, it was serious enough to confront Marcus with it.’ His grip on his knife and fork tightened.

‘We just wanted reassurance from him that Luce wasn’t … wouldn’t have jumped.’

But he wasn’t to be deflected. ‘What exactly did Owen say?’

‘What I just told you, plus he said,
We killed her
.’

‘
We killed her
?’ he repeated through his teeth. ‘I was there, Josh. I was part of that team, part of
we
, and you two didn’t think it worth telling me about this?’

‘I’m sorry. We would have. We just wanted to get up to speed first on how things were out there.’

He looked incredulous. ‘You got me to obtain the police report for you, but you didn’t tell me the real reason you wanted it. What was that, some kind of test? You thought I was involved in … what? A murder? A cover-up?’

His field was commercial law, but it occurred to me that Damien would have made a pretty sharp criminal lawyer.

‘No, no, nothing like that.’

There was an awkward silence, during which he stared at me, then he turned away, shaking his head in disgust. ‘Who else have you told about this?’

‘No one. Well, Mary.’

‘Don’t you realise how preposterous it is?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And what motive could
we
have possibly had?’

‘There was one thought that occurred to me.’

‘Oh really? I’d like to hear that.’

‘Do you know that Curtis and Owen had … a relationship?’

‘A sexual relationship you mean? Yes.’ He said it bluntly, as if to emphasise that he would know everything that went on in the group. ‘Why? What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Luce was worried about Suzi. She didn’t like the deceit. I wondered if it was still going on, and she maybe confronted them.’

‘So they pushed her down a cliff? That’s laughable.’

‘Was it still going on?’

He hesitated, looked down at his knuckles. ‘I’m not sure about that. Possibly.’

Another long silence, then I said, ‘Well, it was just a theory.’

Finally he said, very softly, ‘It doesn’t matter, Josh. Not any more. Curtis and Owen are dead. The rest of us just have to live with it—Suzi, old Corcoran, Marcus, me. Christ …’ He put a hand to his face, wiping his eyes. ‘How do you think
I feel, knowing that if I’d been with them that day it might never have happened? I feel guilty as hell.’

‘Yes, I can see that,’ I said, not meaning it unkindly, but thinking that his tone wasn’t quite right somehow, more complaining than contrite. ‘In fact I don’t really understand why they did go without you.’

‘It was a bright sunny day, we’d already been up and down that cliff several times and they were all confident. They just wanted to finish off the job. They didn’t realise how the heavy rain the day before could have loosened the scree. Look, I don’t believe your theory for a moment, but even if it were true, what’s to be done? Uncover the truth? Confront Suzi with it? Destroy her son’s memory of his father?’

I shook my head.

‘No, it’s not really on, is it?’

We finished our meal in an uncomfortable atmosphere, and as we left the restaurant I asked if he had Suzi’s address. He gave me a dark look.

‘It’s okay, I just want to see if I can help.’

He knew it off by heart, and wrote it on the back of one of his cards for me, with a final warning. ‘We’ve got to move on, Josh. She doesn’t need any of this.’