Bright Air - Barry Maitland [73]
When he’d gone, Anna, a little colour returning to her cheeks, looked at me and said, ‘So, what’s the mystery?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You were up to something. What?’
I felt suddenly reluctant to tell her. I was uneasy about how she might react, and anyway, sitting there at a café table surrounded by people, my imaginings just seemed utterly fanciful.
‘What did you want in the wheelhouse?’ she demanded.
‘He had a GPS set in there,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I just wanted to check something.’
‘Without him knowing. What was it?’
So I told her about that last, erratic reading from the diary, and of the significance of WE as against WF. She knew less about maps than I did, and I had to explain it all twice.
‘But you thought you could put the numbers into Bob’s navigation system and it would tell you where the place was?’
‘That’s right. I thought the WE might have been a mistake, but it wasn’t. When I entered the numbers with WF, I came up with a point in the middle of the ocean.’
‘But with WE?’
‘Yes, I got a landfall, but not on Lord Howe.’
‘Where then?’
‘Near the southern tip of Balls Pyramid.’
‘And that wasn’t the same map reading that Owen entered in Carmel’s log?’
‘I can’t be sure of that. I didn’t have time to copy down his entries. But they told the inquest they’d been working on the Mount Gower cliffs all that week—there was no mention of Balls Pyramid. And if they did go out there Bob must have taken them in his boat, but he denied it, didn’t he? And he claimed no one had set foot on it for years.’
Anna rubbed her forehead, thinking. ‘Maybe they were just talking about Balls Pyramid, and Luce looked it up on her equipment and jotted down the coordinates.’
‘Yeah, I might have gone with that if she hadn’t also put down the time and the altitude, just like the other entries. One twenty-five in the afternoon, and one hundred and forty-nine metres up. I think I saw the place as we sailed round. Bob called it Gannet Green, a shelf with a bit of vegetation on it.’ I showed her the pictures on the screen of my camera. They were a bit tipsy with the motion of the boat, but you could see it all right.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Josh. The implications …’
‘Yes. One little number, and if you interpret it that way, it means that everything that Curtis, Owen, Damien, Marcus and Bob said about that final week is in doubt.’
‘Why would they have done it?’
‘Because it’s there. Let’s say they’d finished their officially sanctioned project early, at the end of the previous week, so they decide to go out to have a look at this amazing place. Maybe there are birds out there that you don’t find anywhere else. It’s certainly the most fantastic rock climb I’ve ever heard of. But it’s forbidden to land there and there’s no chance the board will consider a scientific study without a proper submission, and that could take months. So they decide to do it on the quiet, only something goes wrong. Luce has an accident, maybe she’s swept away getting from the boat to the shore. They’ll be in deep shit if they say what happened, Bob especially, so they change the place of the accident to where they should have been, where their daily reports said they were.’
‘How would they have persuaded Bob to take them out there, to let them land?’
‘I don’t know. Money? No. Maybe because he was soft on Luce, and she persuaded him.’
We were silent for a long time. It sounded almost plausible, but there were details that bothered me. I decided to give the great detective time to mull it over.
‘Anyway, if there’s a grain of truth in it, we’ll have to be very careful. I don’t think it’s a story that anybody is going to want to hear. So I propose we do as Bob suggested and go for a cycle, and pretend that everything’s just fine.’
She nodded agreement. ‘You’re right. And really, if it did happen like that, there’s nothing to be gained from opening it all up again.’
‘Right.’ Except