Bright Air - Barry Maitland [34]
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.’
8
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