We later followed him along the path that wound through the groves of palms towards his parents’ sprawling timber-framed house, where Stanley Kelso met us at the front steps. A stockier, more heavily built version of his son, he was blunt and pugnacious, obviously a man used to getting his own way. He must have been fifteen centimetres shorter than me, but he straightened his back and pushed out his barrel chest when he took my hand in a hard grip. He offered us drinks and got straight to the point. ‘Lucy’s death was a tragedy for us all. We got to know her and we liked her, so any friend of hers is welcome in this house.’
We thanked him, and he went on, ‘And those two colleagues of hers, Curtis and Owen, they’ve gone now too in much the same way. It beggars belief. I’m very sorry. You’re not climbers as well are you?’
‘As a matter of fact we are. In fact-’
But he cut me off. ‘A very dangerous pastime, obviously. At least you won’t be doing anything like that when you’re here.’
Bob said, ‘I did suggest that they might like to go with one of Harry’s groups to Mount Gower, if they’ve got the time.’
‘Well, that’s safe enough, as long as you follow his instructions. You’ll no doubt want to see the places where Lucy worked. Bob tells me he’s taking you out on his boat tomorrow if the wind doesn’t get up too much. He’ll be able to show you the bird colonies she was studying, on Roach Island and below Mount Gower, where the accident happened.’
‘Yes, we’re grateful,’ I said. ‘But as a matter of fact we do plan to do a bit of climbing, up to the place where Lucy fell.’
Stanley Kelso’s head rocked back on his shoulders as he glared at me. ‘Out of the question.’
‘We’re both experienced climbers, and we’ve brought our equipment …’
He was shaking his head firmly. ‘No, no, no. Lucy’s was the first fatal accident we’ve had on the island in years. I was very doubtful about what they had planned at the time-there are no mountain rescue services within five hundred kilometres of here. I blame myself now for letting myself be persuaded. There’s no chance that we’re going to allow anyone to repeat the exercise.’
I made to argue, but he raised his hand to silence me. ‘No. We agreed in the end to their proposal because Lucy and the others were doing important scientific conservation work, but we have no intention of encouraging mountaineering thrill-seekers here.’
‘We just want to pay our last respects at the actual place, Mr Kelso,’ I said. ‘I understand that it was the island’s administrative board that approved their program. Perhaps if we put in a proposal?’
‘Won’t make any difference. In any case, the board doesn’t meet for another month. I suggest you take some flowers with you tomorrow, and Bob will get you as close to the place where she fell as he can.’
Bob had been watching this exchange with a trace of wry amusement in his eyes, as if his father and I had been having the sort of tussle he’d been used to losing for years. He turned his head towards the door as his brother Harry came in. He was fresh out of the shower after a day leading a group through the rainforest in the southern uplands. He had the same brown outdoor complexion as his brother, but he seemed leaner and tougher. His dark hair was cut very short, and I thought he looked as if he might have been in the army.
His father said, ‘We were just explaining to Josh and Anna that there’s no possibility of them climbing up the cliffs where Lucy fell, Harry.’
‘You’re climbers too, are you?’ He looked me over as if assessing me. ‘No, Dad’s right. We’ve had a bit of rain recently and the cliffs are running with water. If you take a boat down there you’ll see a few good waterfalls. The view from the sea is fine anyway, if you’ve got binoculars.’
‘Exactly.’ Stanley shook his head to dismiss the topic.
Harry said, ‘You had any dealings with Marcus lately?’
He said it almost as if they were old mates, and I looked at him in surprise. ‘Yes, we saw him recently.’
‘How’s he doing these days?’
Muriel Kelso bustled in at that point, a very different character from her husband, and the atmosphere in the room immediately brightened. Her welcome was irresistibly warm, her face, haloed by fine silver curls, glowing as she hugged Anna and then, slightly to my embarrassment, myself. ‘My dears, how wonderful to see you both here. Are you comfortable in the cottage?’
It was almost as if she’d personally invited us to stay there, instead of Anna booking it on the internet. Her charm seduced us all, and even Stanley became more mellow. She was sure that our stay would help heal the wound of the loss of our dear friends, and she insisted that her family would move heaven and earth to make it so. She only wished she’d been able to persuade Lucy’s dear father to come and do the same. But I remembered Sophie Kalajzich’s assessment of her, and could see the tough old bird beneath the charm.
‘Who were you talking about when I interrupted?’ she asked.
‘Marcus,’ Harry said. ‘I wondered how his leg was doing. We heard he’d been sick again.’
This was news to me, and I was surprised they were still in touch. ‘He did look a bit frail when we saw him, but he didn’t mention being sick.’
‘Poor man,’ Muriel said. ‘A brilliant mind. I believe the accident affected him deeply.’
‘Did you know him well?’ I asked.
‘Well, yes, he’d been coming here for, what, eight or nine years before the accident. He’d become like one of the family really.’
Stanley grunted, and from the look on his face I guessed he didn’t quite share his wife’s enthusiasm.
I found it hard to get to sleep that night. It wasn’t the food that kept me awake, for Muriel had cooked her son’s trevally as perfectly as she’d managed everything else. Nor was it the wine we’d consumed, which was excellent and plentiful enough to have knocked me out. It might have had something to do with that muttonbird, still giving its baby cries, heart-rending in the night.
There was something I’d intended to do earlier, and had been deflected by Bob’s presence when we’d returned. I’d wanted to look again at the sheets of paper with the codes from Luce’s diary, while the log records I’d studied in Carmel’s office were still fresh in my mind. I got them out of my bag and sat up in bed to study them.
The first thing I noticed was that they all had an extra four numbers at the beginning of each string, which I soon realised was the date. Given that, and Carmel’s lucid explanation, the whole sequence became intelligible. It was the final entries that interested me, and here I did notice something odd, for there was a single entry for Thursday the twenty-eighth of September, the day on which Owen had taken over the reporting. It was the very last line in Luce’s diary, and it ran:
2809 1325 57J WE 23674 85849 149
I stared at it for a while, struck not only by the date, but also by how different it looked from all the other lines. Here, for example, was the previous reading, taken on the Wednesday:
2709 1508 57J WF 06588 04470 103
That was similar to all of the entries from the previous two weeks, when they’d moved from Roach Island down to the southern cliffs. For a start, the two groups of five digits-the eastings and northings readings-were quite different. Even more significant, I thought, the WF symbol on every other reading on the list had become WE in that final entry. Could that have been a simple typo? I tried to remember what Carmel had said about the WF, and recalled that it identified the hundred-kilometre squares into which the UTM zone 57J was subdivided. If it wasn’t an error, the final entry must have been taken in a completely different grid square from all the rest. Wherever it was, it was big, for the final three digits showed that they were 149 metres above sea level.