Bright Air (20 page)

I looked at the nametag on her shirt. ‘Carmel? I’m Josh and this is Anna. We were friends of Lucy Corcoran at university.’

‘Oh, really? I’m very pleased to meet you.’ She shook hands vigorously, and there was a warmth to her smile that suggested she’d be fun to have around. But then the smile faded. ‘Were you friends of Curtis and Owen, too? We heard about the accident, of course.’

‘Yes, we were. We all used to go climbing together.’

‘That’s terrible. Three of you …’

‘We’re just here on a short holiday, and we wanted to say hello to the people Luce met. You got to know her quite well during that month she was here, didn’t you?’

‘I did, yes, but … I’d love to have a good long chat to you, but you’ve caught me at the worst time. A friend’s offered to shout me a trip back to the mainland for some leave, and I’m about to dash to catch the plane. In fact I was just about to close the office.’ She checked her watch.

‘Maybe just a couple of minutes, Carmel? We’ve come all this way.’

‘Of course. Sorry, I feel so rude. Do you want to sit down?’

We sat around the office table and accepted the cups of water she offered us.

‘How did you two come to meet?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it was part of the protocol. Dr Fenn had to have approval for his research program from the Island Board, which consulted with us here at National Parks and Wildlife. Part of the agreement was that his team would log each day’s activities with my office. Luce was the person who liaised with
me, so we soon got to know each other. She was brilliant …’ Carmel paused, looking wistfully at her knees. ‘We got on well. We shared the same values.’

‘Maybe you could take us through that month they were here. It would really help us come to terms with Luce’s death to hear it from you.’

‘I met with them here the day they arrived, and we confirmed their program. They were going to start on Roach Island …’ She got up and pointed it out on a big wall map. ‘It’s part of the Admiralty group just off the coast to the north, up here. There’s a grey ternlet colony on the cliffs of Roach Island, and they were planning to spend the first two weeks there, until the fourth climber, Damien, arrived, when they would move down to the much bigger cliffs below Mount Gower, right down at the southern tip. When you leave here you could take the trail up to Malabar Hill, where you can get a good view of the Admiralty Islands. You’d really have to see the Mount Gower cliffs from the ocean side. Maybe Bob Kelso could take you.’

‘Yes, he’s already said he will.’

‘You’ve seen him, have you?’

‘He met us at the airport.’

‘Oh good.’

‘How did Luce seem when they first arrived?’

‘Seem? Well, excited I suppose, about being here and getting started on the project. They all were.’

‘And later, when Damien arrived?’

She frowned, thinking. ‘They’d got into a routine by then, but they seemed pretty happy with things. They’d kept to their program, and finished the first phase as planned.’

‘You got to meet the others, Owen and Curtis?’

‘Oh yes. They were really nice boys, good fun, and Damien too.’

‘How about Dr Fenn?’

‘Yes, we got on all right. He could be a bit intimidating, but I’d got to know him on his previous visits.’

‘So there were no quarrels, fights, that you were aware of?’

‘No. Why do you ask that?’

‘We heard that Luce became withdrawn and depressed towards the end of the trip. Were you aware of it?’

‘She had a bit of a tummy bug,’ she said, pondering. ‘But she didn’t say anything to me about feeling down. Damien would know better.’ She looked at her watch again. ‘I’m afraid I have to get changed.’

I said hurriedly, ‘Could we see Luce’s daily log reports, Carmel? We have so little record of her, it would be good to see some of her work.’

She frowned, her eyes straying to the filing cabinet. ‘Oh, I’m not sure where they’d be now.’ She got up and began searching through the drawers. ‘No, I think they must have gone to Sydney … Oh, hang on.’ She pulled out a file, checked its title and handed it to me. I flicked through the pages. Each day had a new page, on a standard National Parks and Wildlife form, filled in by hand. I turned to the first one, and a familiar string of numbers caught my eye:

1030 57J WF 05935 14723 023

Beneath was a paragraph describing observations of grey ternlets.

‘What’s that?’ I pointed to the numbers.

‘It’s a map reference.’

‘It doesn’t look like one.’

‘It’s a UTM reading—Universal Transverse Mercator?’ I looked blank. ‘It’s different from the old longitude and latitude way of fixing a position. The UTM system divides the surface
of the world into grid rectangles—we’re in grid zone 57J. Then each zone is subdivided into hundred-kilometre squares; we’re in WF, see?’

‘Right.’

‘The next ten numbers are the eastings and northings of the position, and the final three numbers are the height above Australian datum. The numbers at the beginning are the time; so, at ten-thirty on that morning, Luce logged a reading from the GPS equipment she carried. They were on Roach Island, twenty-three metres above sea level, and the reading tells us exactly where they were, to the nearest metre.’

‘Neat. I didn’t get any further than degrees and minutes at school.’

‘The GPS equipment can convert from one system to the other. They happened to use UTM.’

‘And they had to report every move to you?’

‘It was part of the deal. Lord Howe has World Heritage listing, and the surrounding waters are protected as a marine park, so anyone landing on the offshore islands has to get approval from the board, which can take months. Dr Fenn had his research program approved long before they came.’

I turned the pages through September, and came at last to the twenty-eighth, the day after the yachts arrived. The handwriting was different. I noticed that the signature at the bottom was Owen’s and the date next to the signature was the twenty-ninth, the following day, whose page had also been completed by Owen, on that day; the thirtieth had a note that bad weather had prevented work; the first of October was again written by Owen, and the second, the day of the accident, was blank.

‘Luce stopped doing the reports in that last week,’ I pointed out. ‘Why was that?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. As I said, she was feeling a bit unwell. Maybe that’s why he took over. I can’t really remember.’

Anna asked again about Luce’s state of mind and about the party on the Thursday night, and while they talked I went through those final pages again, studying the number strings, the terse reports. Apart from Luce’s electronic diary, they formed the only contemporary record of her last days, and I desperately scanned them for some clue, some hint of that final drama. But there was nothing, not even a single mention of Luce’s name.

‘Now I really must go.’

‘Of course. Have a good trip. Who did you say is treating you to the trip?’

‘Mr Kelso,’ she said. ‘He’s very supportive of our work. It came up at the last minute—he’d booked a flight that he couldn’t use, and he offered it to me. I’ll be away for a couple of weeks.’

‘Then we probably won’t see you again. Thanks anyway for talking to us.’

‘Could we have been the cause of Carmel’s sudden holiday?’ I asked Anna. ‘Or am I being paranoid?’

‘It wasn’t as if she had any answers.’

‘No, but we had no time to work out what the right questions were. Ten minutes later and we’d have missed her altogether, thanks to Mr Kelso.’

We had decided to take Carmel’s advice to walk up to Malabar Hill, and were following the road that led over to Neds Beach on the eastern side of the island. Ahead of us a man was walking, and as he turned off the road we recognised him as Bob. When we reached the place where he had been we saw that he had gone down a path leading to an old timber house with a tin roof. There was no sign of him, and I assumed he must have gone inside. There was a white picket fence around the house, and a child’s tricycle by the gate.

At Neds Beach, a wide arc of pale sand, we found a small crowd standing in the sea in swimsuits, and as we got closer we could see the water boiling around them. After a moment we discovered why—one of them was throwing something into the water from a bucket, feeding a huge shoal of fish. We watched for a while as the people shrieked and pointed, the pitch of their cries rising when someone noticed a small shark’s fin cruising through the turmoil.

From the beach we found the sign for the trail up Malabar Ridge to the point. As we climbed above the trees, wide
panoramas opened up along the coastline and back over the settlement towards the louring humps of the two big mountains to the south. A steady north-easterly breeze whipped our faces as we hiked up to the peak of Malabar Hill and gazed out from the cliff top to the islands lying a kilometre offshore. Hundreds of white gulls wheeled around us, dancing in the up-draught. They had bright scarlet beaks and improbable scarlet streamers in their tail feathers, and they were performing extraordinary aerobatics in front of us, great sweeping backward somersaults and plummeting dives, like hyperactive circus stars. We could make out clouds of seabirds over Roach Island too, the largest of the Admiralty Islands, and for a few moments I imagined that I could see Luce out there, recording her observations in the glow of the late afternoon sun. We watched the red disc drop to touch the ocean, an odd thing for us who live on the east coast, then turned for the hike back. The twilight was deepening when we reached Neds Beach again, where nature put on another performance for us—the return of the muttonbirds from their day out on the ocean, skimming in fast and low like demented Kamikaze, almost clipping the heads of the people gathered to watch, then wheeling and dropping to their burrows around the shore.

It was after six when we reached the cabin, and Bob was already there on the deck, feet up, can in hand. We had picked up a couple of bottles of wine and a six-pack on our way back, and I put these in the fridge along with those he’d brought. I decided I could let my fellow detective keep the clear head. She’d disappeared for a shower when I stepped out onto the veranda, and I sat with Bob and we chatted about the footy. Though I hadn’t really been keeping up, I could remember enough about the Sydney teams to make conversation. But all the time I had the feeling that the real subject was me, what
I was made of, what I knew, what I was doing there. Sprawled out on the chair, behind lowered eyelids and over the rim of his cold tinny, he assessed me. Was I a fisherman? he asked. He’d been out that afternoon and caught a couple of trevally for dinner. Maybe the next day we could drop a line from his boat. Was I a climber? A nature-lover? He suggested I join a group going up to the top of Mount Gower with his brother as guide. I wondered if he’d had a look in our bags and seen the climbing gear. We avoided the one subject we were both really interested in—Luce’s accident. Then again, maybe he really did want to know my opinion of the Rabbitohs’ chances. All I managed to extract from him was that neither he nor his brother was married and they lived in the main house with their parents, with whom we would be dining that night.

Anna joined us, refreshed, and I fetched more drinks. It was a pleasant, cool night, with no mosquitos or flies, the breeze rustling the tops of the palms. Then we heard the sudden piercing cry of a baby. It stopped, then was followed by another, further away, then a third. The sound was so plaintive it made my hair stand on end. Bob saw the look on our faces and grinned. ‘Muttonbirds. You get used to it.’

We later followed him along the path that wound through the groves of palms towards his parents’ sprawling timber-framed house, where Stanley Kelso met us at the front steps. A stockier, more heavily built version of his son, he was blunt and pugnacious, obviously a man used to getting his own way. He must have been fifteen centimetres shorter than me, but he straightened his back and pushed out his barrel chest when he took my hand in a hard grip. He offered us drinks and got straight to the point. ‘Lucy’s death was a tragedy for us all. We got to know her and we liked her, so any friend of hers is welcome in this house.’

We thanked him, and he went on, ‘And those two colleagues of hers, Curtis and Owen, they’ve gone now too in much the same way. It beggars belief. I’m very sorry. You’re not climbers as well are you?’

‘As a matter of fact we are. In fact—’

But he cut me off. ‘A very dangerous pastime, obviously. At least you won’t be doing anything like that when you’re here.’

Bob said, ‘I did suggest that they might like to go with one of Harry’s groups to Mount Gower, if they’ve got the time.’

‘Well, that’s safe enough, as long as you follow his instructions. You’ll no doubt want to see the places where Lucy worked. Bob tells me he’s taking you out on his boat tomorrow if the wind doesn’t get up too much. He’ll be able to show you the bird colonies she was studying, on Roach Island and below Mount Gower, where the accident happened.’

‘Yes, we’re grateful,’ I said. ‘But as a matter of fact we do plan to do a bit of climbing, up to the place where Lucy fell.’

Stanley Kelso’s head rocked back on his shoulders as he glared at me. ‘Out of the question.’

‘We’re both experienced climbers, and we’ve brought our equipment …’

He was shaking his head firmly. ‘No, no, no. Lucy’s was the first fatal accident we’ve had on the island in years. I was very doubtful about what they had planned at the time—there are no mountain rescue services within five hundred kilometres of here. I blame myself now for letting myself be persuaded. There’s no chance that we’re going to allow anyone to repeat the exercise.’

I made to argue, but he raised his hand to silence me. ‘No. We agreed in the end to their proposal because Lucy and the others were doing important scientific conservation work,
but we have no intention of encouraging mountaineering thrill-seekers here.’

‘We just want to pay our last respects at the actual place, Mr Kelso,’ I said. ‘I understand that it was the island’s administrative board that approved their program. Perhaps if we put in a proposal?’