Bright Air - Barry Maitland [67]
Anna asked again about Luce’s state of mind and about the party on the Thursday night, and while they talked I went through those final pages again, studying the number strings, the terse reports. Apart from Luce’s electronic diary, they formed the only contemporary record of her last days, and I desperately scanned them for some clue, some hint of that final drama. But there was nothing, not even a single mention of Luce’s name.
‘Now I really must go.’
‘Of course. Have a good trip. Who did you say is treating you to the trip?’
‘Mr Kelso,’ she said. ‘He’s very supportive of our work. It came up at the last minute—he’d booked a flight that he couldn’t use, and he offered it to me. I’ll be away for a couple of weeks.’
‘Then we probably won’t see you again. Thanks anyway for talking to us.’
16
‘Could we have been the cause of Carmel’s sudden holiday?’ I asked Anna. ‘Or am I being paranoid?’
‘It wasn’t as if she had any answers.’
‘No, but we had no time to work out what the right questions were. Ten minutes later and we’d have missed her altogether, thanks to Mr Kelso.’
We had decided to take Carmel’s advice to walk up to Malabar Hill, and were following the road that led over to Neds Beach on the eastern side of the island. Ahead of us a man was walking, and as he turned off the road we recognised him as Bob. When we reached the place where he had been we saw that he had gone down a path leading to an old timber house with a tin roof. There was no sign of him, and I assumed he must have gone inside. There was a white picket fence around the house, and a child’s tricycle by the gate.
At Neds Beach, a wide arc of pale sand, we found a small crowd standing in the sea in swimsuits, and as we got closer we could see the water boiling around them. After a moment we discovered why—one of them was throwing something into the water from a bucket, feeding a huge shoal of fish. We watched for a while as the people shrieked and pointed, the pitch of their cries rising when someone noticed a small shark’s fin cruising through the turmoil.
From the beach we found the sign for the trail up Malabar Ridge to the point. As we climbed above the trees, wide panoramas opened up along the coastline and back over the settlement towards the louring humps of the two big mountains to the south. A steady north-easterly breeze whipped our faces as we hiked up to the peak of Malabar Hill and gazed out from the cliff top to the islands lying a kilometre offshore. Hundreds of white gulls wheeled around us, dancing in the up-draught. They had bright scarlet beaks and improbable scarlet streamers in their tail feathers, and they were performing extraordinary aerobatics in front of us, great sweeping backward somersaults and plummeting dives, like hyperactive circus stars. We could make out clouds of seabirds over Roach Island too, the largest of the Admiralty Islands, and for a few moments I imagined that I could see Luce out there, recording her observations in the glow of the late afternoon sun. We watched the red disc drop to touch the ocean, an odd thing for us who live on the east coast, then turned for the hike back. The twilight was deepening when we reached Neds Beach again, where nature put on another performance for us—the return of the muttonbirds from their day out on the ocean, skimming in fast and low like demented Kamikaze, almost clipping the heads of the people gathered to watch, then wheeling and dropping to their burrows around the shore.
It was after six when we reached the cabin, and Bob was already there on the deck, feet up, can in hand. We had picked up a couple of bottles of wine and a six-pack on our way back, and I put these in the fridge along with those he’d brought. I decided I could let my fellow detective keep the clear head. She’d disappeared for a shower when I stepped out onto the veranda, and I sat with Bob and we chatted about the footy. Though I hadn’t really been keeping up, I could remember enough about