Bright Air - Barry Maitland [103]
‘Yes, yes,’ I lied. ‘But I want to hear it from you, Marcus. I think Damien spared us some of the philosophy. We want to hear it all.’
‘Well, you’ll have to fill up my glass.’
I got up to do that for him and he continued with a sigh.
‘That first day on the Pyramid we were disappointed, but towards the end they did find insect droppings up among the melaleuca bushes on Gannet Green that seemed promising. The insects were nocturnal, so we decided to leave Curtis and Owen up there overnight to see if they could spot them with torches.
‘The next morning Damien, Luce and I were having an early breakfast together when Curtis came on the radio to tell me that they had been successful—they’d found and photographed half a dozen live specimens. Damien started talking about coming back later with a properly approved project to remove some of them for a breeding program at the university, and reintroduce them to Lord Howe when the rats were eradicated. But I noticed that Luce didn’t say much, watching my reaction carefully. I was sure that Damien had been right about her having suspicions, and I was in quite a bind. As soon as she left to get ready, I spoke to Damien and radioed Curtis to tell them what they had to do. They were very surprised, of course, but I insisted, and they had to agree.
‘Bob took us back out to the Pyramid, and Luce and Damien went ashore and climbed up to Gannet Green with food and hot drinks for the other two. Something about the way they were behaving made Luce suspicious, and she noticed Damien passing Curtis a pack I’d given him. When Curtis said that she and Damien should return to the boat while they cleared up their things, she sensed that something was wrong. She asked them what was going on, and said she wanted to look in the pack. They refused, but she grabbed it. They tried to stop her opening it, but she was too quick for them and pulled out the container inside. Curtis grabbed it and in the confusion it fell to the ground and burst open.’ He shrugged, took a sip of his drink and shuddered.
‘What was in it?’
‘Black rats,’ he said softly. ‘A large breeding pair. Harry Kelso had caught them in the traps he has set, and I persuaded him to let me have them. They jumped out and scuttled off into the rocks.’
We both stared at him, stunned, imagining the scene.
‘But … why?’ Anna finally managed to gasp.
But I thought I knew. ‘Supply and demand,’ I suggested.
He smiled, as at a satisfactory student. ‘The merchant banker is correct. My dealer friend didn’t just want some phasmids, he wanted all of the phasmids, the only ones. That was his demand, the last living phasmids on the planet. He wanted to corner the market. He didn’t want someone coming back later and finding more. He made it plain that life would be very uncomfortable for me if I didn’t oblige him. I really hadn’t seen that side of him before.’
I tried to imagine Luce’s reaction as she watched those rats scuttling off among the rocks, trying to come to terms with the extent of the others’ treachery, Marcus’s most of all.
‘She wasn’t running away from the others,’ Anna said. ‘She was trying to catch the rats.’
‘Exactly. I was worried she’d have an accident, and I told them over the radio to try to reason with her, tell her the truth. But it was too late for that. Far too late.’
I felt sick, still finding it hard to absorb the extent of Marcus’s fall from grace. ‘So there’s a breeding stock of phasmids somewhere in the States, is there?’
‘No, no. I’d already told Curtis and Owen to kill the ones they’d captured. I told my friend that we’d had no success, that it was plain that there were no phasmids left alive. Which was now in fact true.’
Now we just gawped at him. The man was unbelievable. ‘You killed them all? You exterminated a whole species? In God’s name, why?’
‘So you didn’t really know the story. Well, no matter. I’ll tell you, then you can judge.’
The rain was picking up again outside, pattering against the glass of the French windows.
‘The Lord Howe phasmid was a very