Bright Air - Barry Maitland [69]
Bob had been watching this exchange with a trace of wry amusement in his eyes, as if his father and I had been having the sort of tussle he’d been used to losing for years. He turned his head towards the door as his brother Harry came in. He was fresh out of the shower after a day leading a group through the rainforest in the southern uplands. He had the same brown outdoor complexion as his brother, but he seemed leaner and tougher. His dark hair was cut very short, and I thought he looked as if he might have been in the army.
His father said, ‘We were just explaining to Josh and Anna that there’s no possibility of them climbing up the cliffs where Lucy fell, Harry.’
‘You’re climbers too, are you?’ He looked me over as if assessing me. ‘No, Dad’s right. We’ve had a bit of rain recently and the cliffs are running with water. If you take a boat down there you’ll see a few good waterfalls. The view from the sea is fine anyway, if you’ve got binoculars.’
‘Exactly.’ Stanley shook his head to dismiss the topic.
Harry said, ‘You had any dealings with Marcus lately?’
He said it almost as if they were old mates, and I looked at him in surprise. ‘Yes, we saw him recently.’
‘How’s he doing these days?’
Muriel Kelso bustled in at that point, a very different character from her husband, and the atmosphere in the room immediately brightened. Her welcome was irresistibly warm, her face, haloed by fine silver curls, glowing as she hugged Anna and then, slightly to my embarrassment, myself. ‘My dears, how wonderful to see you both here. Are you comfortable in the cottage?’
It was almost as if she’d personally invited us to stay there, instead of Anna booking it on the internet. Her charm seduced us all, and even Stanley became more mellow. She was sure that our stay would help heal the wound of the loss of our dear friends, and she insisted that her family would move heaven and earth to make it so. She only wished she’d been able to persuade Lucy’s dear father to come and do the same. But I remembered Sophie Kalajzich’s assessment of her, and could see the tough old bird beneath the charm.
‘Who were you talking about when I interrupted?’ she asked.
‘Marcus,’ Harry said. ‘I wondered how his leg was doing. We heard he’d been sick again.’
This was news to me, and I was surprised they were still in touch. ‘He did look a bit frail when we saw him, but he didn’t mention being sick.’
‘Poor man,’ Muriel said. ‘A brilliant mind. I believe the accident affected him deeply.’
‘Did you know him well?’ I asked.
‘Well, yes, he’d been coming here for, what, eight or nine years before the accident. He’d become like one of the family really.’
Stanley grunted, and from the look on his face I guessed he didn’t quite share his wife’s enthusiasm.
I found it hard to get to sleep that night. It wasn’t the food that kept me awake, for Muriel had cooked her son’s trevally as perfectly as she’d managed everything else. Nor was it the wine we’d consumed, which was excellent and plentiful enough to have knocked me out. It might have had something to do with that muttonbird, still giving its baby cries, heart-rending in the night.
There was something I’d intended to do earlier, and had been deflected by Bob’s presence when we’d returned. I’d wanted to look again at the sheets of paper with the codes from Luce’s diary, while the log records I’d studied in Carmel’s office were still fresh in my mind. I got them out of my bag and sat up in bed to study them.
The first thing I noticed was that they all had an extra four numbers at the beginning of each string, which I soon realised was the date. Given that, and Carmel’s lucid explanation, the whole sequence became intelligible. It was the final entries that interested me, and here I did notice something odd, for there was a single entry for Thursday the twenty-eighth of September, the day on which Owen had taken over the reporting. It was the very last line in Luce’s diary, and it ran:
2809 1325 57J WE 23674 85849 149
I stared at it