Bright Air - Barry Maitland [50]
After a long silence she whispered, ‘Yes.’
Earlier, Bonnie and Clyde had come to mind, but now Laurel and Hardy seemed more like it.
‘Sorry.’ She was pulling on her jeans.
I said nothing. I was wondering what to tell the police who would surely be on my doorstep first thing in the morning. If they didn’t catch us on the highway.
11
But they didn’t catch us on the highway, nor, to my relief and surprise, did they come calling the following day. I got on with my chores and waited, but nothing happened. I did read Luce’s note again and again, trying to extract its meaning, without success. And I looked up the word phasmid in the dictionary. It was an insect of the order Phasmida, apparently, a leaf or stick insect, which immediately brought an image of Marcus into my mind as we’d last seen him, all awkward arms and legs. Was that what she was referring to? Was that how he saw himself, the last phasmid? It didn’t make much sense to me, and I wondered about Luce’s state of mind when she’d written that note.
I continued going back through all the documents I had relating to Luce’s accident, searching for some new angle, and a couple of days later I found it. The first hint of it was in the bottom corner of one of the last newspaper reports of the accident that Anna had photocopied. It was the small heading for another article that was off the page, and it read, LORD HOWE RACE YACHT SKIPPER QUESTIONED. It seemed an odd coincidence to me, and I decided to find out what it was about. I went to the local library and searched through their microfiche copies of the paper until I found it. It was a eureka moment, and I felt that burn of apprehensive excitement you get when you come across something really big. It was almost as if I could sense Luce’s presence at my shoulder.
Australian Customs and Quarantine officials in Sydney yesterday detained the skipper of a boat recently returned from the Sydney to Lord Howe Island yacht race, after a search of the vessel uncovered a quantity of rare native bird eggs on board. A spokesman for the Australian Customs Service revealed that the search had followed a tip-off, but declined to identify the nationality of the suspect. He said that the illegal international trade in wildlife was estimated by Interpol to be worth $10 billion annually, and was surpassed in value only by drugs and weapons.
This surely was what I had been searching for. Birds’ eggs were exactly the reason why Luce and the team were on Lord Howe Island—the grey ternlet’s eggs, to be precise. I did remember that much from what Luce had told me. They were carrying out research into its breeding habits, so you could say that she had died on account of the sex life of a small, rather delicate seabird, listed as a vulnerable species in Schedule 2 of the New South Wales Threatened Species Conservation Act. About the only other thing I could remember about the bird was that the sexes were practically indistinguishable, with no plumage variation during the breeding season, which, as I suggested to Luce, might have been one reason they were a vulnerable species.
And now here was someone recently returned from Lord Howe and accused of smuggling rare birds’ eggs. Had Luce discovered what was going on? Had Curtis and Owen been somehow involved? I scanned the papers for the following days, but could find no further reference to the case. Eventually I gave up and walked back to the hotel, head spinning. The race yachts had arrived at the island on the twenty-seventh of September, I remembered, just five days before Luce’s accident. She had gone to the party that was held for them on the twenty-eighth, and they had helped in the search for her.
I returned to my room and began going through the police report again, working at it far into the night, until I finally stopped at around four and fell into a troubled sleep.
The next morning I phoned Anna. She said she’d given Luce’s diary to the computer whiz who serviced the equipment