Bright Air - Barry Maitland [62]
After ten minutes he appeared, ushering an old man to the desk. He looked impatient as he took the note, ripped it open, read, and then turned very pale. He scanned around the room until he saw us, then gave a brief jerk of his head for us to follow him to his room.
‘What did she tell you?’ The muscles of his mouth bunched around the words as if they were sour.
But I’d had enough of being questioned. ‘Why don’t you just tell us.’
‘I had no reason to suspect pregnancy. She didn’t hint at the possibility to me. The symptoms were compatible with gastroenteritis, which was going around at the time.’
‘Can you estimate how far gone she was?’
‘No, I’ve no idea.’
Anna took over. ‘Why did you tell your wife to hide it?’
‘For Luce’s sake. She’d specifically asked Pru to say nothing.’
‘You were in love with Luce, weren’t you?’
He dipped his head. ‘That’s none of your business.’
‘Did you try to have sex with her?’
He winced, then said, ‘No.’ It didn’t sound convincing, but it was an ambiguous question. Had he had sex, or had he tried?
I said, ‘I’ve been in touch with the detective who drew up the report for the coroner. Maybe we should tell him about this.’
Passlow shook his head hopelessly. ‘Please don’t do that. It has no bearing on anything.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Well, you’re the amateur detectives!’ he shot back suddenly, switching to bluster. ‘Work it out. If anything suspicious happened to Lucy then those two on the cliff with her must have been involved, right? And I don’t believe that for an instant. They … they were good friends. They’d never have hurt her.’
He had picked up something about Curtis and Owen, I thought.
‘Look, if you want reassurance, go to the island. Speak to the ranger, Carmel Bisset, or Bob Kelso. They were her friends too. She may have confided in them.’
Anna was reluctant to let it go at that. ‘So you still maintain that the last time you saw Luce was at the party on the Thursday evening?’
He nodded sadly. ‘I barely saw her there. She was avoiding me, I think. I never saw her again.’
‘What about Damien Stokes? Remember him? He complained of having a tummy bug in that last week, too. Did he come to see you?’
‘Stokes?’
I described him. ‘Black hair, beard, my height, science/law student. He arrived halfway through their month on the island.’
‘Oh yes, I remember. Pru took a fancy to him, as I remember.’
‘That’d be right,’ Anna muttered.
The doctor had got to his feet and was searching through a row of large desk diaries in his bookshelves until he found the year. He turned to late September, scanning the pages. ‘Yes, I saw him on the Tuesday, but not because of a stomach upset. He came to see me that evening to dress a scrape on his knee he’d got while climbing with the rest of them that day. Nothing serious.’
‘May I?’ I asked, and reached for the book in his hand. He released it reluctantly. I checked the pages for that last week. Damien’s was the only name from the university group that was mentioned. ‘Thanks.’
When we got back into the car, Anna said, ‘Passlow’s right. We’re going to have to go to the island.’
I felt queasy. ‘I think we should consider this a bit more, Anna. I’m not sure it’ll do any good going there. In fact it could do a lot of harm.’
‘I need you there, Josh.’
‘Why?’
‘I was never one for solo climbing.’
14
Nor was I. One of Luce’s heroes was an American climber, Lynn Hill, whom she had met once when Lynn visited Australia. Lynn was the first person to free climb, without artificial aids, the Nose route up El Capitan at Yosemite, an almost impossible thousand-metre ascent, in just twenty-three hours, much of it in darkness. Luce had shown me photographs of the epic climb, to me unimaginable. I remembered that as I was poking about in the boxes I’d left with Mary four years before, pulling out my old climbing shoes from one, my helmet and chalk bag from another. They looked worn and tired, someone else’s possessions, not mine. How had Luce ever come to love that other person, that