Bright Air - Barry Maitland [60]
Anna phoned me the next morning to say that she’d tracked down Pru Passlow, the doctor’s ex-wife. My first reaction was to tell her to forget it, and I described my meeting with Detective Sergeant Maddox, whose thoroughness had begun to make me doubt our ability to discover anything new. But Anna had already arranged to meet Ms Passlow, who was now a lecturer in the Faculty of Nursing at the university, and who had said we could catch her at the university library that morning.
I picked Anna up at Central and drove her to the campus. It felt very strange going back into the library, the first time since that sweet, intense time over four years before when I had been immersed in my master’s, and in Luce. So redolent was that familiar library smell that my pulse began to race and the arteries in my throat began to swell, as if I might catch sight of her at any moment.
We tracked Pru Passlow down by Dewey decimal, at 610.73 among the stacks. She seemed a brisk, capable woman, with bright, sharp eyes. We sat around a table and kept our voices low, in deference to the readers in the adjoining carrels.
‘So what’s your interest?’ she asked. ‘Are you writing a book or something?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ Anna said. ‘We were close friends of Lucy’s, but we weren’t with her at Lord Howe. Josh has been in England all this time, and now he’s back, he wanted to speak to some of the people who were there.’
‘I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind,’ I said.
‘Ah, closure,’ Pru Passlow nodded. ‘Yes, I’m still haunted by it. Never finding her made it seem worse. When was the last time you saw her?’ She directed this at me.
‘Um, August the eleventh, about three weeks before she went to Lord Howe. I left for London, and she saw me off at the airport. Actually, we wanted to ask you the same question.’
‘Why is that?’
Ms Passlow had obviously found the Socratic method a good teaching technique—answer a question with another question. That’s Socrates the philosopher, of course; Socrates the dog also uses the method, but he only ever has one question: ‘Can I have something to eat?’
‘Well, from what people have told us, she seemed to be depressed and unwell in those last weeks. We wondered if that could have contributed to her accident.’
‘You’ve spoken to my ex, have you? What did he tell you?’
‘Not a lot.’
She gave a little smile. ‘And how well did you know Luce, Josh?’
Luce, not Lucy. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and wondered why she kept asking these questions. ‘Pretty well. No, very well. We were close.’
‘I see. I did wonder if there was someone …’
‘So when did you last see her?’
‘It would save you a lot of time if you just asked the coroner’s office for their report on the inquest, don’t you think?’
‘We’ve read it.’
‘Well then.’
She still seemed incapable of giving a straight answer.
‘You said you last saw Luce on the evening of September the twenty-eighth, at the party at the Kelsos’ for the yacht crews.’
‘Yes I did, didn’t I?’
‘That must have been a big party.’
‘Social event of the year.’
‘Did you get much of a chance to speak to Luce then?’
‘Not really. I just noticed she was there.’
Anna suddenly said, ‘What was making her sick?’
The abruptness of the question threw the other woman for a moment. ‘You read my husband’s diagnosis, didn’t you? Gastroenteritis.’
‘Why are you being so evasive, Pru?’ Anna said. It was a belligerent question, but spoken gently. Then she added, ‘She was pregnant, wasn’t she?’
Pru Passlow just stared back at her, unblinking.
I looked from one to the other. ‘Pregnant?’
‘Must have occurred to