Bright Air - Barry Maitland [66]
‘Yes, he’s already said he will.’
‘You’ve seen him, have you?’
‘He met us at the airport.’
‘Oh good.’
‘How did Luce seem when they first arrived?’
‘Seem? Well, excited I suppose, about being here and getting started on the project. They all were.’
‘And later, when Damien arrived?’
She frowned, thinking. ‘They’d got into a routine by then, but they seemed pretty happy with things. They’d kept to their program, and finished the first phase as planned.’
‘You got to meet the others, Owen and Curtis?’
‘Oh yes. They were really nice boys, good fun, and Damien too.’
‘How about Dr Fenn?’
‘Yes, we got on all right. He could be a bit intimidating, but I’d got to know him on his previous visits.’
‘So there were no quarrels, fights, that you were aware of?’
‘No. Why do you ask that?’
‘We heard that Luce became withdrawn and depressed towards the end of the trip. Were you aware of it?’
‘She had a bit of a tummy bug,’ she said, pondering. ‘But she didn’t say anything to me about feeling down. Damien would know better.’ She looked at her watch again. ‘I’m afraid I have to get changed.’
I said hurriedly, ‘Could we see Luce’s daily log reports, Carmel? We have so little record of her, it would be good to see some of her work.’
She frowned, her eyes straying to the filing cabinet. ‘Oh, I’m not sure where they’d be now.’ She got up and began searching through the drawers. ‘No, I think they must have gone to Sydney … Oh, hang on.’ She pulled out a file, checked its title and handed it to me. I flicked through the pages. Each day had a new page, on a standard National Parks and Wildlife form, filled in by hand. I turned to the first one, and a familiar string of numbers caught my eye:
1030 57J WF 05935 14723 023
Beneath was a paragraph describing observations of grey ternlets.
‘What’s that?’ I pointed to the numbers.
‘It’s a map reference.’
‘It doesn’t look like one.’
‘It’s a UTM reading—Universal Transverse Mercator?’ I looked blank. ‘It’s different from the old longitude and latitude way of fixing a position. The UTM system divides the surface of the world into grid rectangles—we’re in grid zone 57J. Then each zone is subdivided into hundred-kilometre squares; we’re in WF, see?’
‘Right.’
‘The next ten numbers are the eastings and northings of the position, and the final three numbers are the height above Australian datum. The numbers at the beginning are the time; so, at ten-thirty on that morning, Luce logged a reading from the GPS equipment she carried. They were on Roach Island, twenty-three metres above sea level, and the reading tells us exactly where they were, to the nearest metre.’
‘Neat. I didn’t get any further than degrees and minutes at school.’
‘The GPS equipment can convert from one system to the other. They happened to use UTM.’
‘And they had to report every move to you?’
‘It was part of the deal. Lord Howe has World Heritage listing, and the surrounding waters are protected as a marine park, so anyone landing on the offshore islands has to get approval from the board, which can take months. Dr Fenn had his research program approved long before they came.’
I turned the pages through September, and came at last to the twenty-eighth, the day after the yachts arrived. The handwriting was different. I noticed that the signature at the bottom was Owen’s and the date next to the signature was the twenty-ninth, the following day, whose page had also been completed by Owen, on that day; the thirtieth had a note that bad weather had prevented work; the first of October was again written by Owen, and the second, the day of the accident, was blank.
‘Luce stopped doing the reports in that last week,’ I pointed out. ‘Why was that?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.