Bright Air (27 page)

Now he was helping Anna over the side, and then pulling the plastic bags with our clothes and gear on board. I decided suddenly that this was the time to act, and I took a couple of paces over to the controls and pulled the key out of the switch. Immediately the motor coughed and cut out.

Bob turned to face me. ‘What’re you doing, mate?’

‘Are you carrying a knife, Bob?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘Take it out of your pocket and place it on the seat over there.’

‘What?’

On the other side of the boat, Anna, gasping and wiping wet hair off her face, stared at me in surprise.

‘Put the knife down and step away, or I’ll throw this key overboard.’

He squinted at me as if wondering what kind of beast he’d fished out of the sea. I must have looked demented—bruised and scraped and swollen all over, the light of madness in my eyes.

‘What’s that, Josh?’

‘Do what I say!’

‘All right.’ He felt in his trouser pocket and brought out a large clasp knife, which he carefully laid down where I’d indicated.

‘Step back.’

He did so, and I darted forward and grabbed the knife.

‘What happened to Carmel’s boat, mate?’

‘The currents smashed it on the rocks,’ I said.

‘Ah, well, reckon the same’s goin’ to happen to us if you don’t let me start that engine.’ He spoke slowly, as if he didn’t want to alarm me, or perhaps because he thought my brain wasn’t quite right.

‘Then you’d better tell us the truth, Bob. We found a note Luce left, on the Pyramid.’

‘A note? What did it say?’

‘Just tell us what happened. Then I’ll give you the key.’

He frowned, then spread his hands. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you, but I reckon I need to start the engine.’

I followed his gaze and saw that we were being drawn into the foaming swell that bordered the rocks. ‘All right.’ I replaced the key in the ignition and joined Anna on the seat as he went to the controls. We pulled on our clothes while Bob got the boat going and steered it out into open water. When we were a safe distance away from the rocks he throttled back and came to sit opposite us.

‘You’ll be getting quite a reception when you get back. They’ve had search parties out looking for you all weekend. They reckoned you must have gone up Mount Gower on your own like you’d said, and got lost or hurt on the slopes, but my hunch was you were out here, specially when I couldn’t find Carmel’s boat.’

‘And you know why, don’t you, Bob? Luce was out here, wasn’t she? You brought her.’

He nodded reluctantly. ‘Yes.’

‘You’d better tell us everything, the whole truth.’

‘Mm. You hungry?’

‘God, yes!’ Anna burst in.

‘I’ve brought some sandwiches and coffee. Here.’

I eyed him warily as he got up and brought a backpack from the wheelhouse. Anna ripped open the top of a plastic container and began stuffing a sandwich into her mouth. Bob poured coffee from a flask into a cup and handed it to me. ‘There’s cold beer and drinks in the esky, but I reckon you need to warm up.’

I took the cup gratefully. The coffee smelled wonderful. I felt as if I’d been shivering for days.

‘They finished their work on the cliffs below Mount Gower,’ Bob began, in that same slow drawl, as if we had all the time in the world, ‘and they still had a bit of time left, and Marcus wanted to have a look at Balls Pyramid. It’s the
only place where the Kermadec petrel breeds, and he said he was thinking of doing a field study there the following year. Of course, being climbers the others were keen to see it too, although I told them it was out of the question to land there. Marcus said, no problem, he only wanted to take a look at the birds from the boat.

‘So I agreed to bring them out here, that was on the Thursday. It was a fine day, and I took them slowly round, stopping to let them look up there with their binoculars. There was a fair bit of whispering going on among them, as if they were discussing something private, but I didn’t take too much notice. Then, when we got to the south end, Marcus asked if I could take them in closer. I did it, and next thing, while I was concentrating on the water ahead, with Marcus standing at my side distracting me, those two blokes, Owen and Curtis, put on wetsuits and dived overboard. They made it over to the Pyramid and climbed up onto the rocks over there. They had a line, and were towing gear. Turned out they had a radio, too, so Marcus could talk to them. They’d planned the whole thing. Marcus apologised and said they just wanted to have a quiet look at the place. They were all very excited about it, Luce especially. She and Damien followed the other two over there.’

‘So Damien was with them that day, the Thursday?’

‘Sure, and the other days too.’

‘You went back again?’

Bob nodded, looking unhappy. ‘They spent most of Thursday over there, but they weren’t satisfied. They wanted to come back on the Friday, the day before they were due to leave. And Curtis and Owen wanted to stay overnight on the Pyramid, to observe the birds. I didn’t like it, but in the end I agreed.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘Marcus made me a good offer for the hire of the boat. They seemed to know what they were doing. I thought it would be okay. Big mistake.’

He hung his head. I thought the bit about Curtis and Owen staying there overnight sounded strange, and wondered if he was lying, but I let him continue.

‘What happened?’

‘We went out the next morning, weather fine as before, but there was something wrong between them. They didn’t seem happy, not talking, Luce especially. I thought they were just hung-over after the party the night before. Anyway, they went ashore, and I anchored and we kept in touch with them by radio. Then around three in the afternoon something happened. They were up on Gannet Green, I’d been watching them with the binoculars. I had a line over the side and I got a bite. I was pulling it in—a nice big yellowfin—when Marcus began shouting into the radio. When I asked him what was wrong he just shook his head, angry. I landed the fish and he began arguing on the radio with someone. I couldn’t really hear because he turned his back to me, so I looked up at the others on the rock. I could see the three men, staring upwards, but I couldn’t make out Luce. Then two of them—Owen and Curtis—began climbing up the ridge above Gannet Green. I watched them through the glasses and then I spotted Luce, high above them and climbing fast.

‘I asked Marcus what was going on. He wouldn’t say at first, but eventually he told me that they’d had some kind of a quarrel, and Luce had stormed off.’

Anna and I exchanged a glance. This didn’t sound right, not like Luce at all.

‘Apparently Marcus had sent Owen and Curtis after her to calm her down and get her to come back, but they lost
her. She was much quicker than they were, and it seemed she didn’t want to come down. Time went by, no progress, and I started to get worried, the afternoon wearing on. They were high up and it was going to take them a while to get back to the boat, and I wasn’t going to risk trying to pick them up in the dark. I told Marcus, and he radioed for them to return. He was mad, and said it would teach Luce a lesson to have to spend the night out on the Pyramid on her own. I didn’t like that idea at all, but what could I do?’

There was something about the way he was telling the story that didn’t quite jell with the impression I’d previously formed of him. He was too passive somehow, playing for sympathy. The sun was warm on our faces, and I asked if I could have a beer. I felt I needed one. He opened up the esky for me and went on with his story.

‘So they returned to the boat, just made it as the light was fading. I was trying to keep an eye on the cliffs, but I didn’t get another sight of Luce. We returned to Lord Howe, nobody saying a word.

‘When we woke up the next morning a gale was blowing. The forecast was bad. We waited from hour to hour for the weather to ease. The flight from the mainland was delayed, and Marcus decided to postpone their return for forty-eight hours. The storm didn’t die down, though—if anything it got worse. In the afternoon I tried to take the boat out, but I couldn’t get beyond the reef, the seas were too big. Maybe we should have called for help then, but we’d already told people that Luce was safe with us, lying down in her room.

‘The next day, Sunday, the weather was better, and we set out first thing for the Pyramid. Of course, we hoped to see Lucy waiting for us at the south end, just like I hoped to see you two down there on Saturday when I came looking for you.
But there was no sign of her. We circled the rock several times and couldn’t see a bloody thing. Then the three blokes swam over and started searching on foot. By late afternoon they’d found nothing, and we called them back.

‘We were in a panic now, I can tell you. What should we do? By the time we got back to Lord Howe we’d convinced ourselves that she was a goner, and the main thing now was to cover our backs. I’m not proud of myself, but I have to tell you, if I was put in that situation again, I reckon I’d probably do the same thing. We decided on what we’d do the next day—spend the morning at Balls Pyramid for one last search, then go to plan B. And that’s what we did. At midday we called off the search and I took them to the Mount Gower cliffs where we’d been telling Carmel we were. They knew there was a patch of dangerous loose rock some way up, and the plan was to fake an accident there, where it would be difficult for people to take a close look. That’s when Damien got cold feet. He said he didn’t want anything to do with it, and insisted on being taken back. So I landed Owen and Curtis at the foot of the cliff and took Marcus and Damien back to the jetty. At two Curtis radioed Marcus, and I raised the alarm with Grant Campbell. Of course, it was all far too late by then.’

‘And you sent them off to the wrong place,’ Anna said bitterly. ‘Didn’t you think she could still have been alive on the Pyramid?’

‘I did go back there several times during the search, but there was nothing. So … what did she say, in the note?’

‘What does it fucking matter?’ I said, hearing my voice crack. ‘She died.’ I glared at Bob. His air of penitent regret was irritating me. ‘So what had happened on that Friday, Bob? What was the argument about? Why did she run?’

‘I don’t know, Josh,’ he said, too smoothly. ‘They wouldn’t
tell me. They just said something about a professional disagreement, as if I didn’t need to know.’

‘And you didn’t insist? They’d put you in the position of being an accessory to
murder
, and you didn’t insist on knowing why?’

‘It wasn’t murder, Josh,’ he said in that soft sad voice. ‘The way I saw it, they’d had a row, and she went off to calm down and think things through on her own. But her timing was bad—it was too late in the day, and a storm was on its way. It was just bad luck, for all of us.’

‘Not for all of you,’ I corrected him savagely. ‘Only for her. The rest of you wriggled out of it.’

He turned away and made to get the boat moving, but I called angrily after him, ‘Sit down, Bob! We haven’t finished yet.’

He looked back over his shoulder at me, then shrugged and came and sat down again.

‘Since you can’t offer a reason for their quarrel, Bob, let me suggest one. It goes like this. You and your brother Harry have a racket going here, collecting rare bird eggs from nesting sites all over the island and selling them to smugglers and dealers, like the American who came visiting on that yacht while Luce and the others were here. Highly illegal, of course, but very lucrative. This must be the most perfect spot on earth to run such a business, but I suppose some exposed sites might be a bit hard to access without being seen. Like on Roach Island, say, with all those lovely endangered grey ternlet nests. But Curtis and Owen had the perfect opportunity to go there with impunity, and so you and Harry paid them to do a bit of collecting for you. And with them being such great climbers, you had the bright idea at the end of their stay to get them to do a bit of prospecting on Balls Pyramid too. Kermadec petrel, was it? Its only nesting site? Very desirable, no doubt.
The only trouble was that Luce got wind of it, at the party you threw for the yachties, I think it was. Did she overhear something? She got suspicious, anyway, and finally, on that second visit to Balls Pyramid, she caught Curtis and Owen in the act. When she confronted them they panicked. They had to stop her from telling Marcus what they were up to, or they’d be finished—not just kicked out of uni, but up for a jail term, along with you too, of course.

‘Did they talk to you before you set off that day, about their concerns that Luce was on to them? And did you tell them what they had to do if it looked like she’d make trouble? Stage an accident out of sight of Damien and Marcus? But she was too quick for them, wasn’t she? She outran them, but in the end it made no difference. You just left her out here until she was exhausted and had that accident anyway.’

He’d sat there impassively right through the whole of this, listening to my accusations, showing no surprise or outrage. And when I finished he took a deep breath, rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said, ‘Yep, I reckon you could have something there, mate.’

His calm was rather scary, and I wondered how I’d miscalculated. Clearly he was going to have to try to do something pretty drastic about us now, and me holding his knife didn’t seem to bother him.

Then he said, ‘You’ve just got a couple of things back to front. First off, Harry and I don’t deal in eggs. Believe me, in this place you’d be crazy to try anything like that. You’d be found out in no time, and with everybody’s livelihood tied up with wildlife conservation one way or another, you’d be as popular as a dingo in a kindy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Curtis and Owen were involved in something like that, only they weren’t working for me.’

‘Who then?’

‘Marcus.’

‘What? That’s ridiculous.’

‘Couple of years previously, at the end of one of his visits, I went to see him about something. He was packing up to go, and I caught him unprepared. He was placing eggs in a special foam container in his suitcase. He looked crook when he realised I’d seen it, but then bluffed it out, telling me it was all part of the research project, aiming to start a breeding program back in Sydney. He even showed me how the case had a little heater to keep them alive. Later I asked Carmel, in a roundabout way, how wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a breeding program for the rarer birds on the mainland, and she said it might, but there wasn’t one, and anyway it would be very difficult to get permission to remove eggs from the island to get one started. I decided to keep quiet about it. After all, he was the expert, wasn’t he? Mr Wildlife Conservation himself.