Bright Air - Barry Maitland [92]
‘So they returned to the boat, just made it as the light was fading. I was trying to keep an eye on the cliffs, but I didn’t get another sight of Luce. We returned to Lord Howe, nobody saying a word.
‘When we woke up the next morning a gale was blowing. The forecast was bad. We waited from hour to hour for the weather to ease. The flight from the mainland was delayed, and Marcus decided to postpone their return for forty-eight hours. The storm didn’t die down, though—if anything it got worse. In the afternoon I tried to take the boat out, but I couldn’t get beyond the reef, the seas were too big. Maybe we should have called for help then, but we’d already told people that Luce was safe with us, lying down in her room.
‘The next day, Sunday, the weather was better, and we set out first thing for the Pyramid. Of course, we hoped to see Lucy waiting for us at the south end, just like I hoped to see you two down there on Saturday when I came looking for you. But there was no sign of her. We circled the rock several times and couldn’t see a bloody thing. Then the three blokes swam over and started searching on foot. By late afternoon they’d found nothing, and we called them back.
‘We were in a panic now, I can tell you. What should we do? By the time we got back to Lord Howe we’d convinced ourselves that she was a goner, and the main thing now was to cover our backs. I’m not proud of myself, but I have to tell you, if I was put in that situation again, I reckon I’d probably do the same thing. We decided on what we’d do the next day—spend the morning at Balls Pyramid for one last search, then go to plan B. And that’s what we did. At midday we called off the search and I took them to the Mount Gower cliffs where we’d been telling Carmel we were. They knew there was a patch of dangerous loose rock some way up, and the plan was to fake an accident there, where it would be difficult for people to take a close look. That’s when Damien got cold feet. He said he didn’t want anything to do with it, and insisted on being taken back. So I landed Owen and Curtis at the foot of the cliff and took Marcus and Damien back to the jetty. At two Curtis radioed Marcus, and I raised the alarm with Grant Campbell. Of course, it was all far too late by then.’
‘And you sent them off to the wrong place,’ Anna said bitterly. ‘Didn’t you think she could still have been alive on the Pyramid?’
‘I did go back there several times during the search, but there was nothing. So … what did she say, in the note?’
‘What does it fucking matter?’ I said, hearing my voice crack. ‘She died.’ I glared at Bob. His air of penitent regret was irritating me. ‘So what had happened on that Friday, Bob? What was the argument about? Why did she run?’
‘I don’t know, Josh,’ he said, too smoothly. ‘They wouldn’t tell me. They just said something about a professional disagreement, as if I didn’t need to know.’
‘And you didn’t insist? They’d put you in the position of being an accessory to murder, and you didn’t insist on knowing why?’
‘It wasn’t murder, Josh,’ he said in that soft sad voice. ‘The way I saw it, they’d had a row, and she went off to calm down and think things through on her own. But her timing was bad—it was too late in the day, and a storm was on its way. It was just bad luck, for all of us.’
‘Not for all of you,’ I corrected him savagely. ‘Only for her. The rest of you wriggled out of it.’
He turned away and made to get the boat moving, but I called angrily after him, ‘Sit down, Bob! We haven’t finished yet.’
He looked back over his shoulder at me, then shrugged and came and sat down again.
‘Since you can’t offer a reason for their quarrel, Bob, let me suggest one. It goes like this. You and your brother Harry have a racket going here, collecting rare bird eggs from nesting sites all over the island and selling them to smugglers