Bright Air - Barry Maitland [74]
We walked back to the cabin and Anna had a shower and I a couple of beers—our respective ways of recalibrating ourselves to the world. Then we went out to the driveway in front of the house, where half a dozen bikes were stacked against the veranda rail, with helmets piled on the edge of the deck. We selected our mounts, I helped adjust the height of Anna’s seat, and then we wobbled off up the driveway to the road. We turned south, back along the way Bob had first brought us from the airstrip, which we came to after ten minutes. The headwind caught us as we turned onto the long stretch of road that ran parallel to the runway, and we laughed as we battled at barely jogging speed, straining against the wind.
At the far end the road curved around the end of the airstrip to head back towards the lagoon shore. Dead ahead there was a sand dune, and parked on it a small white four-wheel drive bearing the crest of the New South Wales Police. We pulled off the road and walked our bikes up to it. There was a track through the dunes here, leading down to the sandy sweep of Blinky Beach, the island’s surfing beach. A lone figure was far out among the breakers, and we sat on the tufted grass watching as he caught a wave and coasted in. He looked as if he got a lot of practice.
He spotted us, and slung his board under his arm and padded up the beach towards us.
‘G’day. Grant Campbell,’ he said as we got to our feet. ‘Looking for me?’
‘Not specially, Grant,’ I said, and introduced us. ‘We’re friends of Lucy Corcoran, remember her? Who had the accident four years ago?’
‘Course I remember.’ He eyed us steadily.
‘Guess you don’t get much crime here.’
‘Nope.’ Grant seemed even more laconic than Bob, and equally aware of our presence on the island.
‘I was talking to Glenn Maddox in Sydney recently. He’s a sergeant now.’
‘Oh yeah? The big guy.’
I assumed he was being ironic. Maddox was shorter than any of us. ‘I told him I was thinking of coming out here. He said to say hello.’
‘Did he manage to convert you?’ He grinned. ‘How come you were talking to him?’
‘Just wanted to check if there’d been any developments.’
‘Developments? Like what?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve been overseas for four years. I just wondered if anything new had come up. Anyway, Sergeant Maddox seemed to think us coming here would be a good idea. Help us come to terms with it.’
‘And has it?’
‘Well, this is only our second day. You were involved with the rescue effort, weren’t you, after she fell?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Were you happy about how it was done?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, did you get all the resources you needed?’
‘We had the navy and the air force. By Monday evening we had twenty boats and aircraft out there.’
‘Were you involved in directing the search?’
‘Me and others.’
‘Would you mind taking us through what happened?’
He sat beside us on the dune, the sand sticking to his black wetsuit, and picked up a piece of driftwood to draw a crescent in the sand. ‘Lord Howe. Bob got a message from them at two that afternoon that Lucy had fallen and was in the water.’ He poked the stick at the bottom of the crescent. ‘He contacted me, then got in his boat and headed down there. I found as many people as I could with boats and sent them down after him. Towards three they reported that there was no sign of her.
‘They reckoned there was something like a three-knot current down there, running due west, so by then she might have been carried anything up to five kilometres out to sea.’ He drew a line across the foot of the crescent. ‘There were several of us in my office by this stage, and we identified a search area and directed everyone out there except for a couple to keep searching the waters around the cliffs, just in case. By this time some of the yachties from the Sydney to Lord Howe race had heard about it, and they began heading out too. We notified AusSAR, the national search and rescue people