Bright Air

13

I didn’t do much more climbing with Luce and her friends after Frenchmans Cap. Instead she and I found safer ways to fulfil ourselves, moving into a flat together when we returned to Sydney. We were very happy that summer, she spending the days working in the Conservation Biology Centre, me earning money washing dishes in the restaurant next door while trying to get on with my MBA thesis on risk management.

She liked to tease me about risk management, as if my choice of subject betrayed some aspect of my personality. I don’t mean that she was being critical of me-that summer we each believed the other perfect-so much as hinting that I was in need of some realignment, a process largely achieved on Frenchmans Cap. It was something to do with accepting the intractable nature of things, of experiencing the exhilaration of dangerous reality, of letting go and falling yet still climbing out.

I saw things a little differently. It seemed to me that climbing perfectly illustrated the centrality of risk management in life. It was an extreme metaphor of everyday experience, in which risk was always present to some degree, but capable of being managed-superbly in her case, clumsily in mine.

Risk management became sexy in financial circles after the big scandals of the nineties-Baring Brothers, Metallgesellschaft, Orange County, Sumitomo-demonstrated the degree to which the growth of financial derivatives could expose institutions to enormous losses. The ease with which a single trader could lose over a billion dollars and bring down the oldest private bank in London was very scary, and led a lot of people to become interested in how such risks could be managed. My research area was on the computational side, examining case studies using variants of the Black-Scholes-Merton model and Monte Carlo simulations. I tried to explain all this to Luce, but she found it unreal and, I suspect, rather silly. She was amused, though, when I told her that Nick Leeson might have got away with it, had it not been for the Kobe earthquake, which caused a sudden drop in Japanese equities. She seemed to think there was some sort of natural justice in that. After Frenchmans Cap I had a finer appreciation of sudden drops and natural justice, and could see what she meant.

But by the following June, my master’s almost completed, things weren’t going so well for Luce and me. I blame myself entirely now, although at the time I found all kinds of reasons and rationalisations for my discontent. I was becoming restless, feeling unreasonably restricted and tied down. Perhaps it was a character flaw on my part, something more intractable than even the experience on Frenchmans Cap could cure. One telling symptom of my malaise was a creeping sense of that feeling that Groucho Marx identified when he said that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. It’s more common than we like to admit, that feeling, but made invisible because we don’t seem to have a name for it. We need to borrow one, as we did with schadenfreude, literally harm-joy. Perhaps selbsthassfreude, self-hate-joy. I began to think that there must be something wrong with Luce, something inadequate and unworthy, simply because she loved me.

One weekend Luce went back to see her father in Orange. I didn’t go, and after finishing at the restaurant on the Saturday night I called in at a student party we’d been invited to. There was a girl there, quite a pretty little thing, who took a great fancy to me. I couldn’t shake her off, and didn’t really want to. I slept with her that night.

The next day I tried to tell myself it was a trivial thing and didn’t matter. I chased the girl away and told her I didn’t want to see her again, and tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. But when Luce came back and I watched her unpack her bag, talking about her trip, I felt sick with shame. Of course she wouldn’t see it as trivial, no more than I would have done in her place. I wondered how long it would take for her to find out, and thought I should tell her first, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t brave enough. I had a poisonous secret now, and hated myself for it. Every time she came into the room, every time she looked at me, I scanned her face for the knowledge. It became a void between us, a thousand-foot drop that I couldn’t cross.

Then I got an email from a friend who’d been a year ahead of me at uni. Gary McCall was a New Zealander who, like me, had been steered into quantitative finance by our tutor. Now he was in London, working for the BBK Bank. They were running an innovative new in-house program for their staff, he said, rotating them through a number of the bank’s departments in both London and Frankfurt to get a thorough practical grounding in risk management strategies. He was very enthusiastic; the program was highly regarded and the bank was recruiting. He had been specifically asked by his boss, Lionel Stamp, if he knew of any more like him who might be interested in coming over. Without telling Luce, I said I was definitely interested, and received an application form by return.

So I decided that I had to leave. I had always assumed that I would have a spell working abroad after I’d finished uni, but now this vague ambition became focused into a compulsion. I had to leave Australia, I told Luce; my career demanded it. She had to finish her honours year, culminating in the field trip to Lord Howe Island. And after that she had been accepted for a master’s in Marcus’s Conservation Biology Centre. We discussed alternatives, her following me to London after she’d done the field trip, or me delaying my departure to go with them to Lord Howe, but nothing was resolved, and there was an emptiness between us when it finally came time for me to leave.

Anna phoned me the next morning to say that she’d tracked down Pru Passlow, the doctor’s ex-wife. My first reaction was to tell her to forget it, and I described my meeting with Detective Sergeant Maddox, whose thoroughness had begun to make me doubt our ability to discover anything new. But Anna had already arranged to meet Ms Passlow, who was now a lecturer in the Faculty of Nursing at the university, and who had said we could catch her at the university library that morning.

I picked Anna up at Central and drove her to the campus. It felt very strange going back into the library, the first time since that sweet, intense time over four years before when I had been immersed in my master’s, and in Luce. So redolent was that familiar library smell that my pulse began to race and the arteries in my throat began to swell, as if I might catch sight of her at any moment.

We tracked Pru Passlow down by Dewey decimal, at 610.73 among the stacks. She seemed a brisk, capable woman, with bright, sharp eyes. We sat around a table and kept our voices low, in deference to the readers in the adjoining carrels.

‘So what’s your interest?’ she asked. ‘Are you writing a book or something?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ Anna said. ‘We were close friends of Lucy’s, but we weren’t with her at Lord Howe. Josh has been in England all this time, and now he’s back, he wanted to speak to some of the people who were there.’

‘I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind,’ I said.

‘Ah, closure,’ Pru Passlow nodded. ‘Yes, I’m still haunted by it. Never finding her made it seem worse. When was the last time you saw her?’ She directed this at me.

‘Um, August the eleventh, about three weeks before she went to Lord Howe. I left for London, and she saw me off at the airport. Actually, we wanted to ask you the same question.’

‘Why is that?’

Ms Passlow had obviously found the Socratic method a good teaching technique-answer a question with another question. That’s Socrates the philosopher, of course; Socrates the dog also uses the method, but he only ever has one question: ‘Can I have something to eat?’

‘Well, from what people have told us, she seemed to be depressed and unwell in those last weeks. We wondered if that could have contributed to her accident.’

‘You’ve spoken to my ex, have you? What did he tell you?’

‘Not a lot.’

She gave a little smile. ‘And how well did you know Luce, Josh?’

Luce, not Lucy. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and wondered why she kept asking these questions. ‘Pretty well. No, very well. We were close.’

‘I see. I did wonder if there was someone …’

‘So when did you last see her?’

‘It would save you a lot of time if you just asked the coroner’s office for their report on the inquest, don’t you think?’

‘We’ve read it.’

‘Well then.’

She still seemed incapable of giving a straight answer.

‘You said you last saw Luce on the evening of September the twenty-eighth, at the party at the Kelsos’ for the yacht crews.’

‘Yes I did, didn’t I?’

‘That must have been a big party.’

‘Social event of the year.’

‘Did you get much of a chance to speak to Luce then?’

‘Not really. I just noticed she was there.’

Anna suddenly said, ‘What was making her sick?’

The abruptness of the question threw the other woman for a moment. ‘You read my husband’s diagnosis, didn’t you? Gastroenteritis.’

‘Why are you being so evasive, Pru?’ Anna said. It was a belligerent question, but spoken gently. Then she added, ‘She was pregnant, wasn’t she?’

Pru Passlow just stared back at her, unblinking.

I looked from one to the other. ‘Pregnant?’

‘Must have occurred to you,’ Anna said, though whether to me or Pru, I wasn’t sure.

Finally Pru broke eye contact with Anna and gave a shrug. ‘You said it.’

‘Why didn’t you tell the coroner?’

‘Luce asked me to keep it to myself, although I did tell my husband. He was very embarrassed. Asked me to keep quiet about it.’

My head was buzzing, and I had difficulty concentrating on what they were saying.

Anna said, ‘Embarrassed about what?’

‘His misdiagnosis. And the fact that Luce came to me, not him.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

Pru took a deep breath. ‘Dick was in love with her. Horribly, grovellingly, embarrassingly so. Things were pretty bad between him and me at that stage-we went to Lord Howe originally to patch things up after I’d had a stupid affair. We thought it would bring us back together again, the two of us on an idyllic island, but it turned out to be a very bad idea. By the time Luce came along we couldn’t stand the sight of each other. We hadn’t slept together for six months. And, of course, he couldn’t look at any of the women on the island, not in a place like that-everybody would have known about it within ten minutes. We were just about at breaking point, ready to throw it in and return to the mainland, then this beautiful, intelligent, sympathetic girl stepped off the plane.’

‘Morning sickness?’ I hissed. ‘Are you sure?’ I felt like the man who was mugged in the library and had to whisper for help.

Pru turned and looked carefully at me. I understood her caution now.

‘She came to see me late in the afternoon of that Thursday, before the party, when she knew Dick wouldn’t be at the hospital. She asked me to test her, so I did. It was positive. She didn’t say much more other than to ask me to tell no one.’

‘Didn’t she say how late her period was?’ Anna said.

‘No. And I didn’t ask about the father. She didn’t want to talk.’

‘How soon does morning sickness happen, after conception?’ I whispered.

‘Usually between two and ten weeks.’

‘Did your husband …’ For once Anna seemed to have difficulty finishing a sentence.

‘Have sex with her? I honestly don’t know. He was certainly badly shaken up when I told him about the positive test. That was a couple of days after the accident, when it was becoming clear that she hadn’t survived.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘Yes, but he didn’t say anything. He just burst into tears. I debated what to do, but in the end I decided I should respect Luce’s wishes.’

We sat in silence for a long moment, then Anna said, ‘What really happened to Luce, Pru?’

Pru frowned, as if not sure what to make of that. ‘What the coroner said, presumably. Why? Do you know something different?’

‘We’re not sure. Can you think of any other explanation for Luce’s disappearance?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Was anybody angry with her?’

‘What are you getting at? Are you suggesting somebody pushed her? The two boys with her that day?’

‘Is that possible? Or somebody else?’

Pru shook her head in disbelief. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t the faintest idea. They seemed like nice boys. Have you spoken to them?’

‘They’re both dead, Pru. They were killed in a climbing accident in New Zealand about a month ago. They left a message, you see, that was ambiguous.’

Pru looked shocked. ‘My God, so many accidents … I suppose theirs was an accident?’

‘As far as we know.’ I gave her one of Mary’s cards and wrote my mobile number on the back. ‘Please give us a ring if you think of anything else.’

Anna said not a word as we tramped back to the car. We got in and I said, ‘Leichhardt?’ and she just nodded. I said, ‘Did you suspect it all along, or was it just a sudden brainwave?’

She looked at me as if I was a bit slow, and turned away. I had a powerful urge to kick her out and drive somewhere quiet and just scream or weep or jump into the ocean. But there’d be time for that. I buckled up and started the engine.

We were in luck. Dr Passlow had a Saturday morning surgery, for the older ragazzi and their dads by the look of it. I asked the receptionist for a piece of paper and an envelope, and wrote a short note for the doctor. ‘Would you mind giving him this as soon as you can, please? It is rather urgent.’

After ten minutes he appeared, ushering an old man to the desk. He looked impatient as he took the note, ripped it open, read, and then turned very pale. He scanned around the room until he saw us, then gave a brief jerk of his head for us to follow him to his room.

‘What did she tell you?’ The muscles of his mouth bunched around the words as if they were sour.

But I’d had enough of being questioned. ‘Why don’t you just tell us.’

‘I had no reason to suspect pregnancy. She didn’t hint at the possibility to me. The symptoms were compatible with gastroenteritis, which was going around at the time.’

‘Can you estimate how far gone she was?’

‘No, I’ve no idea.’

Anna took over. ‘Why did you tell your wife to hide it?’

‘For Luce’s sake. She’d specifically asked Pru to say nothing.’

‘You were in love with Luce, weren’t you?’

He dipped his head. ‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Did you try to have sex with her?’

He winced, then said, ‘No.’ It didn’t sound convincing, but it was an ambiguous question. Had he had sex, or had he tried?

I said, ‘I’ve been in touch with the detective who drew up the report for the coroner. Maybe we should tell him about this.’

Passlow shook his head hopelessly. ‘Please don’t do that. It has no bearing on anything.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Well, you’re the amateur detectives!’ he shot back suddenly, switching to bluster. ‘Work it out. If anything suspicious happened to Lucy then those two on the cliff with her must have been involved, right? And I don’t believe that for an instant. They … they were good friends. They’d never have hurt her.’

He had picked up something about Curtis and Owen, I thought.

‘Look, if you want reassurance, go to the island. Speak to the ranger, Carmel Bisset, or Bob Kelso. They were her friends too. She may have confided in them.’

Anna was reluctant to let it go at that. ‘So you still maintain that the last time you saw Luce was at the party on the Thursday evening?’

He nodded sadly. ‘I barely saw her there. She was avoiding me, I think. I never saw her again.’

‘What about Damien Stokes? Remember him? He complained of having a tummy bug in that last week, too. Did he come to see you?’

‘Stokes?’

I described him. ‘Black hair, beard, my height, science/law student. He arrived halfway through their month on the island.’

‘Oh yes, I remember. Pru took a fancy to him, as I remember.’

‘That’d be right,’ Anna muttered.

The doctor had got to his feet and was searching through a row of large desk diaries in his bookshelves until he found the year. He turned to late September, scanning the pages. ‘Yes, I saw him on the Tuesday, but not because of a stomach upset. He came to see me that evening to dress a scrape on his knee he’d got while climbing with the rest of them that day. Nothing serious.’

‘May I?’ I asked, and reached for the book in his hand. He released it reluctantly. I checked the pages for that last week. Damien’s was the only name from the university group that was mentioned. ‘Thanks.’

When we got back into the car, Anna said, ‘Passlow’s right. We’re going to have to go to the island.’

I felt queasy. ‘I think we should consider this a bit more, Anna. I’m not sure it’ll do any good going there. In fact it could do a lot of harm.’

‘I need you there, Josh.’

‘Why?’

‘I was never one for solo climbing.’