Bright Air - Barry Maitland [39]
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