Bright Air - Barry Maitland [43]
‘No diary,’ Anna said.
I pointed at the electronic notebook. ‘What about that?’
‘Maybe.’ Anna turned it over. It looked old, battered and scratched. There was a loop attached, and I could imagine Luce carrying it clipped to her climbing harness. Anna found the switch and pushed it to ON, but the screen remained stubbornly blank. ‘Looks dead,’ Anna said, and I winced. ‘I wonder …’ she ploughed on, turning to Corcoran. ‘Maybe we could take this to someone who could fix it. See if they can make it work?’
He stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I reckon not. Could be personal stuff in there Lucy would prefer left alone.’
‘It could be exactly what we’re looking for,’ Anna insisted. ‘I can assure you that only Josh and I would see it, and we’d keep any personal things strictly confidential, and return it to you.’
He shook his head, unmoved.
Anna seemed about to argue, then shrugged and put it back in the box. She flicked through the address book and put that back, too, and then the wallet and mobile phone. A blue envelope I hadn’t noticed before remained lying on the desk. Anna picked it up and read the name written on the front. ‘It’s to you,’ she said, and looked at me. She handed it over. I stared at it, then at her father, and put it in my pocket.
When we got back to the car, Anna banged the car door in frustration. ‘Personal stuff. That’s exactly the point. The police probably never got into it. There’s no other reference to it in the report. And I know someone I’m pretty sure could get it open.’
‘Not much we can do, Anna. It’s his prerogative.’
She turned to me and said, ‘Aren’t you going to read her letter?’
‘Later.’ I started the engine and we moved off. As we circled to the car park exit I glanced back at the building and saw Corcoran’s face at the upstairs window, staring down at us.
When we reached the town centre I said, ‘Want a coffee or something before we head back?’
She shrugged, and I pulled into a parking space outside a different café. While we waited for our coffees I reluctantly got Luce’s letter out of my pocket.
It was clearly a draft, undated and with words and phrases crossed out.
Dear Josh,
I can’t tell you how hard it is to write to you this. I feel like the last phasmid. so sad. There are so many things I want to tell to you, and no words to say them with though I’ve tried so many times. But today when I was climbing something made me think of Frenchmans Cap. The wind, I think. It broke my heart. How brave we were then??? You said I was a hedgehog and you a fox, and now I have one big thing to tell you.
That was all.
Anna was looking at me with concern in her eyes. I handed it to her without a word, because my throat was so tight it hurt to swallow.
She read, then looked up and said, ‘There was something she wanted to tell you.’
Yes, I thought: that she didn’t love me any more or that she still did; that I was a bastard or that she wished me well.
‘The fox knows many things,’ Anna said, ‘but the hedgehog knows one big thing. What was it?’
‘Maybe that she was going to kill herself,’ I said. ‘That’s why the police held onto it, don’t you think? Because it sounds like a suicide note.’
Anna reached out her hand and gripped mine. ‘No, Josh, I’ll never believe that.’
‘Well, we’ll never know.’
‘Unless it’s in that bloody diary.’
The waitress brought our coffees and then Anna said, ‘We were brave at Frenchmans Cap, weren’t we? Fearless.’
‘Not exactly. I was terrified.’
‘But we did it. We had the nerve to do it, just us. I sometimes think I haven’t got the nerve to do anything like that any more.’
‘Damn right.’
We sipped our coffees in silence, and then she said, ‘I want that diary, Josh.’
I stared at her.
She said, ‘What’s the roof of Corcoran’s shed compared to Frenchmans Cap?’
So we found a hardware barn on the edge of town, a huge place with a vast car park scattered with utes and four-wheel drives. Though inexperienced in this field, we thought we did a pretty good