Bright Air - Barry Maitland [94]
‘What about Damien?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying he was in on it too?’
‘What do you think? I’d say so. Not Luce, though. Straight as a die, she was. My guess would be that it was his job to keep her distracted while the others got on with it.’
‘Distracted?’
‘Yeah. He was her climbing partner, wasn’t he? Can we head back now?’
Anna and I sat in silence as the great pinnacle shrank away behind us.
As we approached Lord Howe, Bob turned to us again, and said, ‘So, what do you want to do?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, are you going to ’fess up to stealing Carmel’s boat and landing illegally on Balls Pyramid and forcing dozens of people to spend their weekend searching for you?’
‘What’s the alternative?’
‘The alternative is that we say you set off on foot, along the base of the cliffs, to try to reach the place Luce was supposed to have fallen, and got lost, or trapped by the tide. Maybe one of you fell and twisted an ankle and couldn’t get back, and the other stayed.’
Anna and I looked at each other.
‘Why would you agree to that, Bob?’
‘Because they’ll tear you apart if you tell them the truth, and I don’t fancy the questions you’d have to answer as to why you thought it was so damn important to go out to the Pyramid. As far as I’m concerned, the less said about that place the better.’
‘What about Carmel’s boat?’
‘I can sort something out, get her a new one.’
‘We’d pay for it,’ Anna said quickly. ‘I’d insist on that.’
It was a moral hazard problem, I suppose, a rather neat one. Bob was offering us a way out of an embarrassing predicament by doing something rather similar to what he claimed he had had to do in relation to Luce, forcing us to admit in effect that we’d have done the same thing in his shoes. It didn’t appeal to me one bit, but I still wasn’t sure about his story, nor whether I trusted any of the Kelsos, and it seemed to me that, without solid evidence either way, we were pretty much in their hands.
I exchanged a look with Anna. ‘All right?’
She shrugged. ‘As a matter of fact I do have a swollen ankle.’
‘Good,’ Bob said, and turned the boat towards the opening in the reef.
They made it easy for us to live with our moral turpitude. Everyone was so pleased to see us safely back, falling over each other to look after us, hailing us as heroes and Bob as scarcely less than a saint. And when I thought about it later, lying in a hot bath with a large whisky in my fist, it seemed to me that in a way it was true—our ascent of Balls Pyramid had been fairly heroic, and Bob had saved our lives. But I also couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow he’d been let off the hook. I thought that much of what he’d told us was probably true—Luce going missing on the Friday rather than the following Monday, for instance, would be a risky thing to invent, and seemed to fit with the fact that we hadn’t found anyone else who’d seen her during that period—but was it the whole truth? Once he realised we knew he’d taken Luce to Balls Pyramid this story was about the best he could have come up with to exonerate himself. And I still found his accusation against Marcus hard to come to terms with. I swung between incredulity and sickening doubt. And if it were true, the one I felt most bitter about was not Marcus, wrecked in his Castlecrag cave, but his lieutenant, Damien—Damien the survivor, in his luxury flat, the father-to-be. I thought of how he’d helped us, tried to steer us away from this, of how solicitous he’d been to Suzi and how he’d groomed Mary.
The thought of Mary reminded me how long we’d been away, almost a week. When I got out of the bath I phoned her and she assured me that everything was well. I didn’t tell her about our little misadventure.
That evening Muriel Kelso insisted that we eat with them. We had both been examined by the doctor and Anna’s ankle X-rayed and bandaged, and though he pronounced us reasonably fit, suffering from mild exposure, Muriel still regarded