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By Root 634 0

and dealers, like the American who came visiting on that yacht while Luce and the others were here. Highly illegal, of course, but very lucrative. This must be the most perfect spot on earth to run such a business, but I suppose some exposed sites might be a bit hard to access without being seen. Like on Roach Island, say, with all those lovely endangered grey ternlet nests. But Curtis and Owen had the perfect opportunity to go there with impunity, and so you and Harry paid them to do a bit of collecting for you. And with them being such great climbers, you had the bright idea at the end of their stay to get them to do a bit of prospecting on Balls Pyramid too. Kermadec petrel, was it? Its only nesting site? Very desirable, no doubt. The only trouble was that Luce got wind of it, at the party you threw for the yachties, I think it was. Did she overhear something? She got suspicious, anyway, and finally, on that second visit to Balls Pyramid, she caught Curtis and Owen in the act. When she confronted them they panicked. They had to stop her from telling Marcus what they were up to, or they’d be finished—not just kicked out of uni, but up for a jail term, along with you too, of course.

‘Did they talk to you before you set off that day, about their concerns that Luce was on to them? And did you tell them what they had to do if it looked like she’d make trouble? Stage an accident out of sight of Damien and Marcus? But she was too quick for them, wasn’t she? She outran them, but in the end it made no difference. You just left her out here until she was exhausted and had that accident anyway.’

He’d sat there impassively right through the whole of this, listening to my accusations, showing no surprise or outrage. And when I finished he took a deep breath, rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said, ‘Yep, I reckon you could have something there, mate.’

His calm was rather scary, and I wondered how I’d miscalculated. Clearly he was going to have to try to do something pretty drastic about us now, and me holding his knife didn’t seem to bother him.

Then he said, ‘You’ve just got a couple of things back to front. First off, Harry and I don’t deal in eggs. Believe me, in this place you’d be crazy to try anything like that. You’d be found out in no time, and with everybody’s livelihood tied up with wildlife conservation one way or another, you’d be as popular as a dingo in a kindy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Curtis and Owen were involved in something like that, only they weren’t working for me.’

‘Who then?’

‘Marcus.’

‘What? That’s ridiculous.’

‘Couple of years previously, at the end of one of his visits, I went to see him about something. He was packing up to go, and I caught him unprepared. He was placing eggs in a special foam container in his suitcase. He looked crook when he realised I’d seen it, but then bluffed it out, telling me it was all part of the research project, aiming to start a breeding program back in Sydney. He even showed me how the case had a little heater to keep them alive. Later I asked Carmel, in a roundabout way, how wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a breeding program for the rarer birds on the mainland, and she said it might, but there wasn’t one, and anyway it would be very difficult to get permission to remove eggs from the island to get one started. I decided to keep quiet about it. After all, he was the expert, wasn’t he? Mr Wildlife Conservation himself.

‘That was back when Marcus had two good legs, and was leading the fieldwork himself and doing most of the climbing. But four years ago he’d have needed someone else to do the collecting for him.’

I was stunned. This all sounded horribly plausible. Curtis and Owen were both intensely loyal to Marcus, and it was hard to imagine them getting mixed up in something like this without his knowledge and approval. I looked at Anna, her mouth open, about as gobsmacked as me.

‘I’ll tell you something else,’ Bob added. ‘That American you mentioned? Marcus knew him from before. He told me he was an old buddy from when he’d been at university in California.