When we got back to the car, Anna banged the car door in frustration. ‘Personal stuff. That’s exactly the point. The police probably never got into it. There’s no other reference to it in the report. And I know someone I’m pretty sure could get it open.’
‘Not much we can do, Anna. It’s his prerogative.’
She turned to me and said, ‘Aren’t you going to read her letter?’
‘Later.’ I started the engine and we moved off. As we circled to the car park exit I glanced back at the building and saw Corcoran’s face at the upstairs window, staring down at us.
When we reached the town centre I said, ‘Want a coffee or something before we head back?’
She shrugged, and I pulled into a parking space outside a different cafe. While we waited for our coffees I reluctantly got Luce’s letter out of my pocket.
It was clearly a draft, undated and with words and phrases crossed out.
Dear Josh,
I can’t tell you how hard it is to write
That was all.
Anna was looking at me with concern in her eyes. I handed it to her without a word, because my throat was so tight it hurt to swallow.
She read, then looked up and said, ‘There was something she wanted to tell you.’
Yes, I thought: that she didn’t love me any more or that she still did; that I was a bastard or that she wished me well.
‘The fox knows many things,’ Anna said, ‘but the hedgehog knows one big thing. What was it?’
‘Maybe that she was going to kill herself,’ I said. ‘That’s why the police held onto it, don’t you think? Because it sounds like a suicide note.’
Anna reached out her hand and gripped mine. ‘No, Josh, I’ll never believe that.’
‘Well, we’ll never know.’
‘Unless it’s in that bloody diary.’
The waitress brought our coffees and then Anna said, ‘We were brave at Frenchmans Cap, weren’t we? Fearless.’
‘Not exactly. I was terrified.’
‘But we did it. We had the nerve to do it, just us. I sometimes think I haven’t got the nerve to do anything like that any more.’
‘Damn right.’
We sipped our coffees in silence, and then she said, ‘I want that diary, Josh.’
I stared at her.
She said, ‘What’s the roof of Corcoran’s shed compared to Frenchmans Cap?’
So we found a hardware barn on the edge of town, a huge place with a vast car park scattered with utes and four-wheel drives. Though inexperienced in this field, we thought we did a pretty good job of equipping ourselves, emerging with a pair of sheet-metal shears, a crowbar, a torch, a builder’s leather tool belt, bolt cutters, a big screwdriver, a long length of rope and a box of disposable latex gloves.
As we got back into the car with our loot, Anna said, ‘What is a phasmid, anyway?’
‘I have no idea.’
10
After the Watagans I went on a number of weekend climbing trips with Luce and her friends around the Sydney area. I was still doing the bouldering and gym work, and was gradually becoming more proficient and more confident with heights. Then, towards the end of the year, we decided to take a climbing trip to Tasmania as soon as exams were finished. I think Marcus had something to do with the decision, because he had some business to do there at the University of Tasmania. So we made arrangements to fly to Hobart, and hire a van to drive out to the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park in western Tasmania. Our goal was Frenchmans Cap.
Just getting there was quite an effort-a two-day hike from the Queenstown road, where we had left Marcus and the van to return to his meetings in Hobart. We hauled our thirty-kilogram packs over the Franklin Hills, from which we should have got our first distant view of Frenchmans Cap, but were disappointed to find the whole horizon obscured by low cloud. This was a wet part of the world, where rain falls three hundred days in the year, and we knew that our climbing would depend on getting a spell of decent weather. We descended to the plain of the Loddon River, a notorious bog of button grass, ponds and mud, as Curtis discovered when he stepped off the trail and sank to his waist. A fine drizzle set in as we plodded through the marshland, and we no longer said much. After crossing over the pass on the far side and descending to the hut on Lake Vera, we’d been going for over ten hours and were exhausted. We were the only people at the hut that night, and after a hot meal and change of clothes we fell fast asleep.
The rain was heavier the next morning, uncomfortably so at first, then more alarmingly as the track led along an exposed ridge and the wind picked up, lashing us as we laboured under our heavy packs. At one point Anna lurched against me, blown sideways by the stinging wind, and I had to catch and steady her to stop her falling down the scree slope. Again we should have had a sighting of Frenchmans Cap from there, but could see nothing until we approached the Tahune hut, almost at its base, when the peak suddenly loomed out of the cloud, huge and scary. I had been told that these were the highest cliffs in Australia, four hundred metres of sheer white quartzite, but the immensity of the climb hadn’t hit me until then, and I felt queasy all that evening, guiltily hoping that the rain would keep falling.
But it didn’t. The next morning was cloudy but dry, becoming brighter as the day went on. We decided to limber up on some of the shorter routes on the north-west wall, an array of pinnacles and buttresses on the lower side of the mountain. I was paired with Luce, and after a slightly shaky start I began to get a feel for the hard, crystalline rock surface, and gain a little confidence.
The skies kept clearing until by evening there wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and the others decided that the following day would probably offer the best chance to attack the long routes on the high cliffs on the other side of Frenchmans Cap, which would need a whole day’s climbing. There was a lot of debate over maps and diagrams about which route we should try, and in the end we decided to go for the east face. They selected three parallel routes, just as at the Watagans, except that now the climbs would be three hundred and eighty metres long instead of twenty. Luce and I would take the middle one, rated 20 on the Australian scale, 5.10d on the American, and much tougher and longer than anything I’d attempted before.
We set off early the next morning for the hour’s hike to the base of the east face, then we split up into our pairs. Luce and I climbed to the top of a grassy ramp, where we roped up and Luce set off to lead the first pitch. We had planned to take the climb in seven pitches in all, with Luce to lead most of them, establishing the belay anchors at the end of each pitch. These were long stages for me, forty or fifty metres each in length, and my heart was thumping when I finally heard Luce’s cry, from far above, ‘On belay.’ I set off, focusing on the glittery surface immediately above me, making steady progress until I joined her in the lee of a jutting prow of rock. I was breathing heavily, my arms and legs shaky, but I’d made it, and I grinned and turned to see the view, already a broad panorama across the national park although we’d barely begun. While I rested, Luce described the next stage, pointing out the features I needed to recognise up to the next belay point, fifty metres above our heads.