‘Hell.’
‘What’s wrong?’ I hissed.
‘Bloody jeans. I can’t climb in these. I didn’t come prepared for this.’ So she took off her jeans and handed them to me, and set off again. From the top of the racking she took hold of a square metal rainwater downpipe and began hauling herself up. I got a flash of frivolously polka-dotted panties disappearing over the eaves, then I jogged back to the front fence.
From there I could see Anna’s dark shape move along the roof, and I guided her over the phone until she was directly above the office, with its window at which I’d caught that last glimpse of Corcoran’s face.
‘What now?’ I whispered.
‘There’s a skylight …’ She was panting, her breathing harsh in my ear.
I heard a splintering crack, and watched her outline disappear into the dark shadow of the roof. At the same time a blue light started to flash at the front of the building and an alarm began to shriek.
How long would it take? I supposed it would be a matter of luck-there could be a police car cruising on the highway nearby, or a security guard patrolling the industrial estate two minutes up the road. I bit my lip and clenched my fists as the minutes ticked by. What the hell was she doing?
Then I saw headlights on the road, coming fast towards us. When I tried to warn Anna, the noise of the alarm coming through the phone obliterated my words. I shrank back behind a big plastic water tank as the headlights swept across the yard and came to a stop at the gates. Someone moved into the beam. Whoever it was had a key, because the gates swung open and the vehicle, a white ute, lurched forward to the main doors. When the driver got out again the lights caught him, and I recognised the lanky figure of Luce’s father. He transferred something to his left hand, a stick perhaps … no, a gun. I stopped breathing. He was carrying a rifle or a shotgun.
He unlocked the big front door and rolled it partially open, then stepped inside. The alarm abruptly stopped. Ears ringing still, I spoke softly into the phone. ‘Anna, can you hear me? Corcoran’s arrived. He’s in the building. He’s got a gun.’
I didn’t know if she’d heard because she didn’t answer, but I did see the office window swing open, and the thin grey lines of a rope snake down the wall. Anna followed, giving me palpitations as she struggled through the tight opening, then slid down the rope. She tugged one end of it and it fell to her feet, where she scooped it up and started running towards me at the gap in the fence. A dog I hadn’t noticed before in the back of Corcoran’s ute began barking furiously, and Anna half turned her head towards it, and at the same time her belt with its load of tools slid down her hips and became tangled with her legs, and she crashed to the ground. Behind her I saw Corcoran reappear at the main door, and I raced over to Anna, grabbed her and the belt and hauled them both towards the fence. There was a shout as we tumbled through, and then a loud bang. Shredded leaves and twigs pattered down on us as we reached the car and hurtled off into the night.
‘Wow,’ I finally said, as darkness enveloped us. ‘You all right?’
‘Yes.’ She was panting, vibrating like a plucked string. ‘I couldn’t find it at first. He’d hidden it behind the filing cabinet.’
‘But you got it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What else?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What else did you take?’
‘Nothing, I’m not a thief.’
I took a deep breath. ‘So somebody made a forced entry into his building and ran off with his daughter’s electronic notebook, and nothing else? The same notebook he’d refused to give to two visitors earlier in the day?’ She didn’t say anything. ‘You left the wallet, with its photo of me, I suppose?’
After a long silence she whispered, ‘Yes.’
Earlier, Bonnie and Clyde had come to mind, but now Laurel and Hardy seemed more like it.
‘Sorry.’ She was pulling on her jeans.
I said nothing. I was wondering what to tell the police who would surely be on my doorstep first thing in the morning. If they didn’t catch us on the highway.
11
But they didn’t catch us on the highway, nor, to my relief and surprise, did they come calling the following day. I got on with my chores and waited, but nothing happened. I did read Luce’s note again and again, trying to extract its meaning, without success. And I looked up the word phasmid in the dictionary. It was an insect of the order Phasmida, apparently, a leaf or stick insect, which immediately brought an image of Marcus into my mind as we’d last seen him, all awkward arms and legs. Was that what she was referring to? Was that how he saw himself, the last phasmid? It didn’t make much sense to me, and I wondered about Luce’s state of mind when she’d written that note.
I continued going back through all the documents I had relating to Luce’s accident, searching for some new angle, and a couple of days later I found it. The first hint of it was in the bottom corner of one of the last newspaper reports of the accident that Anna had photocopied. It was the small heading for another article that was off the page, and it read, LORD HOWE RACE YACHT SKIPPER QUESTIONED. It seemed an odd coincidence to me, and I decided to find out what it was about. I went to the local library and searched through their microfiche copies of the paper until I found it. It was a eureka moment, and I felt that burn of apprehensive excitement you get when you come across something really big. It was almost as if I could sense Luce’s presence at my shoulder.
Australian Customs and Quarantine officials in Sydney yesterday detained the skipper of a boat recently returned from the Sydney to Lord Howe Island yacht race, after a search of the vessel uncovered a quantity of rare native bird eggs on board. A spokesman for the Australian Customs Service revealed that the search had followed a tip-off, but declined to identify the nationality of the suspect. He said that the illegal international trade in wildlife was estimated by Interpol to be worth $10 billion annually, and was surpassed in value only by drugs and weapons.
This surely was what I had been searching for. Birds’ eggs were exactly the reason why Luce and the team were on Lord Howe Island-the grey ternlet’s eggs, to be precise. I did remember that much from what Luce had told me. They were carrying out research into its breeding habits, so you could say that she had died on account of the sex life of a small, rather delicate seabird, listed as a vulnerable species in Schedule 2 of the New South Wales Threatened Species Conservation Act. About the only other thing I could remember about the bird was that the sexes were practically indistinguishable, with no plumage variation during the breeding season, which, as I suggested to Luce, might have been one reason they were a vulnerable species.
And now here was someone recently returned from Lord Howe and accused of smuggling rare birds’ eggs. Had Luce discovered what was going on? Had Curtis and Owen been somehow involved? I scanned the papers for the following days, but could find no further reference to the case. Eventually I gave up and walked back to the hotel, head spinning. The race yachts had arrived at the island on the twenty-seventh of September, I remembered, just five days before Luce’s accident. She had gone to the party that was held for them on the twenty-eighth, and they had helped in the search for her.
I returned to my room and began going through the police report again, working at it far into the night, until I finally stopped at around four and fell into a troubled sleep.
The next morning I phoned Anna. She said she’d given Luce’s diary to the computer whiz who serviced the equipment at the nursing home, but hadn’t got a result yet. I told her I had something to discuss with her and we arranged to meet that lunchtime. When I got there she took us to the deserted library room, where she’d arranged a tray of sandwiches.
She saw how agitated I was. ‘What’s wrong, Josh? Have the police been in touch? Mr Corcoran?’