When I mentioned this, Anna nodded and said, ‘Something else odd about those last few days …’ She pointed to the names written against each day, referring to witness sightings of Luce. ‘After that party on the Thursday night, the only people who mentioned seeing Luce again were the three other climbers, plus Marcus and Bob Kelso, whereas in the days before Thursday, lots of people saw her around-Sophie Kalajzich, Dr Passlow and his wife, the other Kelsos, the National Parks and Wildlife ranger, the people who ran the grocery store …’
‘What do you make of that?’
‘It’s like Luce withdrew, kept herself to herself, don’t you think? As if she wanted to be alone.’
I thought about it, then I said, ‘I just can’t get over the fact that she should never have been there at all on that Monday. They should all have been back in Sydney by then.’
‘Yes,’ Anna said.
‘And they should never have tackled that cliff without Damien. I mean, it’s just so bloody stupid. It shouldn’t have happened.’
‘So what are we going to do about it?’
‘I wonder if Mary isn’t right, Anna, about how we should be thinking more about the impact on Suzi and the other families if we go on with this. I mean, supposing we did discover something nasty?’
She frowned at me. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Did Luce ever tell you about something that happened that first time I went climbing with you all at the Watagans? Something about Curtis and Owen?’
She looked blank and shook her head, so I told her. A couple of days after that weekend, Owen had come to see me. He was in quite a state, desperate to convince me that what we’d witnessed had been a terrible mistake, a moment of madness on his part. He was utterly devoted to Suzi and the baby, he said, and begged me to keep it to myself. I said, fair enough, it wasn’t my business and I had no intention of mentioning it to anyone else, but what about Luce? He’d already seen her, apparently, and she too had agreed to keep quiet, so we left it at that.
Anna was surprised, but not as much as I’d expected. She’d known that Curtis had had relationships with men, but hadn’t thought about Owen.
‘You’re wondering-what if they didn’t stop, if they were lovers when they went to Lord Howe, and Luce threatened to spoil things?’
‘She was very concerned about Suzi, and she didn’t believe Owen’s story that it was a one-off thing. Look, it needn’t have been a deliberate plan to kill her; maybe just that she got into trouble and they … hesitated to help, because of this problem. A second would do it, a look exchanged between the two of them, a moment holding back, and then it would be too late.’
I felt sick talking like this. It seemed all wrong, not the actions of the people I’d known. Surely Luce wouldn’t have pushed them into a corner, and surely they would never have reacted like that if she had. But could I be sure?
‘And then I started to wonder about the accident in New Zealand. What do we know about what happened there?’
Anna frowned. ‘They were roped together, just the two of them, crossing a steep ice slope. The rest of their party could see them, but they were some distance behind. They said Owen, following Curtis, fell and pulled Curtis down with him.’
I pictured it. ‘Oh, hell,’ I whispered.
We sat in silence for a long while, then I said, ‘I think we should talk to Marcus.’
8
I borrowed Mary’s car, and we drove across the bridge into North Sydney and through the suburbs beyond until we reached the strip of shops at Castlecrag, where I pulled over to consult the map. Outside, people were walking their dogs and sipping lattes at pavement tables, enjoying the sunny Saturday afternoon. But I had a hollow feeling of foreboding in my gut at the thought of meeting Marcus again.
The area we wanted lay to one side of the main road, on the rocky bushland hillside dropping down to the bays of Middle Harbour. It’s a place unlike any other in Sydney, laid out in the 1920s by the two American architects, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, who had previously won the competition to design the new Australian capital city at Canberra. They were inspired by the dramatic site at Castlecrag, and must have seen some poetic metaphor in medieval castles, for they gave its narrow lanes, winding along the contour lines between rocky outcrops, names like The Rampart, The Bastion and The Bulwark. The Griffins designed a number of the houses in their subdivision, too, and if you think of the quintessential Australian house as being lightweight, open to the landscape, with sunny decks and a tin roof, then these were exactly the opposite-solid cubic bunkers embedded into the hillside like refuges for trolls in a strange land. Marcus’s house was one of these, located at the end of a cul-de-sac in The Citadel, its rough stone blocks almost invisibly hunkered down among large boulders and overgrown by gnarled banksias and angophoras. Its walls ended abruptly at a flat roof, like a castle keep, the source of dramatic views down into the ravine leading into Middle Harbour. Seeing it again, rugged and dour, I felt an odd sense of time shifting, as if the front door might open and we’d find the others still inside, laughing and arguing and drinking as before.
We parked and walked down the narrow sloping drive, flanked by rock green with mould, to the heavy front door. I rapped the brass knocker and we waited, and waited, and then there came the scuffle of a bolt being slid, and the door opened.
It was as if all his most distinctive features had become exaggerated, eliminating the rest. His leanness had become skeletal, the lines on his face gaunt cleavages, and the long black hair shaggier and greyer. Most of all, the crippled leg had dragged the rest of his frame down around it, making him stoop awkwardly, like a damaged stick insect.
He frowned at us for a moment, then his mouth split in a wide smile. ‘Anna! Hi! And …’ He clicked his fingers.
‘Josh,’ I said.
‘Josh, yes, of course, sorry. Great to see you.’ A dank sour smell wafted past him from the depths of the house. ‘Come in, come in.’ I caught a strong gust of whisky on his breath.
It was dark inside the hall, the space smaller and more cave-like than I remembered it. We came to a living room, whose view out through stone-mullioned windows was obscured by dense foliage. The room was a jumble of ancient leather furniture surrounded and covered by piles of books and other debris. Judging by the stains in the ceiling the damp problem from the flat roof hadn’t been fixed.
He continued through to a brighter room, with French windows opening onto a small terrace. This room was his den, as untidy as the one before but more lived in, with an empty wine bottle and a tray with the remains of yesterday’s pizza on the floor, and more books. He cleared a couple of chairs and went off to find another bottle, leaving Anna and me eyeing each other doubtfully. There was an old chintz-covered armchair in the corner by the window and I had a sudden vivid memory of another Saturday in this room, music playing, laughter from the garden, and Suzi sitting in that chair, flapping a handkerchief to try to keep the smoke from a joint in Curtis’s hand away from the face of the baby on her knee.
I picked up a book lying among the remnants of Marcus’s meal and checked the title-Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner. Anna had opened the doors onto the terrace and I followed her out. Further down the steep slope we could see a kind of amphitheatre formed in a hollow in the hillside, accessible from Marcus’s house by rock steps winding down between the boulders. To one side of the terrace a shade-cloth conservatory had been built beneath the overhang of a sandstone outcrop, with ferns and other plants dimly visible inside.