Bright Air - Barry Maitland [40]
I shrugged and turned back to my fish, embarrassed in spite of myself. ‘As I say, I don’t know that it can be taken seriously.’
‘Well, it was serious enough to confront Marcus with it.’ His grip on his knife and fork tightened.
‘We just wanted reassurance from him that Luce wasn’t … wouldn’t have jumped.’
But he wasn’t to be deflected. ‘What exactly did Owen say?’
‘What I just told you, plus he said, We killed her.’
‘We killed her?’ he repeated through his teeth. ‘I was there, Josh. I was part of that team, part of we, and you two didn’t think it worth telling me about this?’
‘I’m sorry. We would have. We just wanted to get up to speed first on how things were out there.’
He looked incredulous. ‘You got me to obtain the police report for you, but you didn’t tell me the real reason you wanted it. What was that, some kind of test? You thought I was involved in … what? A murder? A cover-up?’
His field was commercial law, but it occurred to me that Damien would have made a pretty sharp criminal lawyer.
‘No, no, nothing like that.’
There was an awkward silence, during which he stared at me, then he turned away, shaking his head in disgust. ‘Who else have you told about this?’
‘No one. Well, Mary.’
‘Don’t you realise how preposterous it is?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And what motive could we have possibly had?’
‘There was one thought that occurred to me.’
‘Oh really? I’d like to hear that.’
‘Do you know that Curtis and Owen had … a relationship?’
‘A sexual relationship you mean? Yes.’ He said it bluntly, as if to emphasise that he would know everything that went on in the group. ‘Why? What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Luce was worried about Suzi. She didn’t like the deceit. I wondered if it was still going on, and she maybe confronted them.’
‘So they pushed her down a cliff? That’s laughable.’
‘Was it still going on?’
He hesitated, looked down at his knuckles. ‘I’m not sure about that. Possibly.’
Another long silence, then I said, ‘Well, it was just a theory.’
Finally he said, very softly, ‘It doesn’t matter, Josh. Not any more. Curtis and Owen are dead. The rest of us just have to live with it—Suzi, old Corcoran, Marcus, me. Christ …’ He put a hand to his face, wiping his eyes. ‘How do you think I feel, knowing that if I’d been with them that day it might never have happened? I feel guilty as hell.’
‘Yes, I can see that,’ I said, not meaning it unkindly, but thinking that his tone wasn’t quite right somehow, more complaining than contrite. ‘In fact I don’t really understand why they did go without you.’
‘It was a bright sunny day, we’d already been up and down that cliff several times and they were all confident. They just wanted to finish off the job. They didn’t realise how the heavy rain the day before could have loosened the scree. Look, I don’t believe your theory for a moment, but even if it were true, what’s to be done? Uncover the truth? Confront Suzi with it? Destroy her son’s memory of his father?’
I shook my head.
‘No, it’s not really on, is it?’
We finished our meal in an uncomfortable atmosphere, and as we left the restaurant I asked if he had Suzi’s address. He gave me a dark look.
‘It’s okay, I just want to see if I can help.’
He knew it off by heart, and wrote it on the back of one of his cards for me, with a final warning. ‘We’ve got to move on, Josh. She doesn’t need any of this.’
He was right, of course. The only trouble was, he wasn’t the only one feeling guilty.
Risk management had been my area in London. After we parted, as I walked around the quay watching the gulls wheeling over an incoming ferry, it occurred to me that Damien would also make an excellent risk manager. He had been forceful, persuasive, working me into a corner from which I had little choice but to agree with him. But Marcus’s voice kept whispering insistently in my ear, ‘There’s no conspiracy here.’ I’d never heard