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The sea wasn’t too rough, and once he’d resigned himself to taking us out there, Bob became determined to prove just how inaccessible it was. To begin with, there were the tips of lesser peaks around it, barely breaking the surface, that made it dangerous to approach. Then there was the impossibility of making a landing, there being nowhere a boat could safely moor against the vertical sides. And finally, the thing was too exposed, too sheer, its rock too eroded and crumbly, to safely climb.

‘So it’s never been climbed?’ I asked, thinking that would make it even more irresistible to Luce and her friends.

‘It was climbed in the 1960s,’ Bob conceded, ‘and once or twice since, but it’s so dangerous that it’s banned now. It’s a bird reserve.’

We watched vast flocks of gulls floating in the air around its high flanks, and I said, ‘Luce would have loved this place, Bob. Did you ever bring her out here?’

He ducked his head away as a wave hit us, and adjusted his steering. ‘Nah. She saw it all right, though, from South Head. Couldn’t very well miss it, could she?’

I thought he was lying. As I took pictures he pointed out some of the features that the first climbers had christened along the steep ridge that ran up to the summit from the south-the twin spires of Winklestein’s Steeple, the Black Tower and the Cheval Ridge, so named because it was so narrow, with sheer drops on either side, that it had to be traversed as if sitting on a horse, with a leg down each side. I felt sure he’d told Luce the same story.

We could also clearly see the huge breakers crashing against its base.

‘So how did they get ashore?’

‘Their boat stood off while one of them jumped in and swam to the rock with a line, then pulled their gear and the others over. But there are sharks, huge sharks, and the waves and currents are bad around here, mate, real bad. Chances are you’d be swept away or bashed against the rocks before you could get out of the water.’

I could see the difficulties all too clearly, but as we turned back towards Lord Howe I was even more convinced that Luce had stood on that thing. Why was I so sure? There was the map reference in her diary, of course, but it was more than that-I’d felt her presence there. That sounds absurdly fanciful, like Owen seeing her on the mountain before he fell, and Marcus on his terrace, and as we grew further and further away from the Pyramid I tried to convince myself to be rational. But each time I glanced back at it, glowing solitary in the morning sun, the sensation came back, creeping up my spine.

The wind picked up as we approached Lord Howe, the waves got bigger, and Anna was sick again. Then we were running up the eastern side of the island, Bob pointing out the landmarks among the cliffs and rocky bays. For Anna’s sake, and having spent an extra couple of hours on the detour to the south, we agreed to forgo the fishing, and Bob circled the Admiralty Islands, showing us the wave-cut tunnel through the middle of Roach Island. Seabirds swooped around us, dazzlingly blue, and it was only when they climbed away that we realised they were pure white, coloured by the light reflected off the blue waters. We followed the line of the northern cliffs and circled around North Head to approach a northern passage through the reef. Ahead of us we could see people on the jetty.

We clambered ashore, unsteady, and thanked Bob. I asked how much we owed him, but he wouldn’t take any money. Instead we bought him lunch at the cafe, and he suggested we borrow a couple of bikes from the house and spend the afternoon exploring.

When he’d gone, Anna, a little colour returning to her cheeks, looked at me and said, ‘So, what’s the mystery?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were up to something. What?’

I felt suddenly reluctant to tell her. I was uneasy about how she might react, and anyway, sitting there at a cafe table surrounded by people, my imaginings just seemed utterly fanciful.

‘What did you want in the wheelhouse?’ she demanded.

‘He had a GPS set in there,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I just wanted to check something.’

‘Without him knowing. What was it?’

So I told her about that last, erratic reading from the diary, and of the significance of WE as against WF. She knew less about maps than I did, and I had to explain it all twice.

‘But you thought you could put the numbers into Bob’s navigation system and it would tell you where the place was?’

‘That’s right. I thought the WE might have been a mistake, but it wasn’t. When I entered the numbers with WF, I came up with a point in the middle of the ocean.’

‘But with WE?’

‘Yes, I got a landfall, but not on Lord Howe.’

‘Where then?’

‘Near the southern tip of Balls Pyramid.’

‘And that wasn’t the same map reading that Owen entered in Carmel’s log?’

‘I can’t be sure of that. I didn’t have time to copy down his entries. But they told the inquest they’d been working on the Mount Gower cliffs all that week-there was no mention of Balls Pyramid. And if they did go out there Bob must have taken them in his boat, but he denied it, didn’t he? And he claimed no one had set foot on it for years.’

Anna rubbed her forehead, thinking. ‘Maybe they were just talking about Balls Pyramid, and Luce looked it up on her equipment and jotted down the coordinates.’

‘Yeah, I might have gone with that if she hadn’t also put down the time and the altitude, just like the other entries. One twenty-five in the afternoon, and one hundred and forty-nine metres up. I think I saw the place as we sailed round. Bob called it Gannet Green, a shelf with a bit of vegetation on it.’ I showed her the pictures on the screen of my camera. They were a bit tipsy with the motion of the boat, but you could see it all right.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Josh. The implications …’

‘Yes. One little number, and if you interpret it that way, it means that everything that Curtis, Owen, Damien, Marcus and Bob said about that final week is in doubt.’

‘Why would they have done it?’

‘Because it’s there. Let’s say they’d finished their officially sanctioned project early, at the end of the previous week, so they decide to go out to have a look at this amazing place. Maybe there are birds out there that you don’t find anywhere else. It’s certainly the most fantastic rock climb I’ve ever heard of. But it’s forbidden to land there and there’s no chance the board will consider a scientific study without a proper submission, and that could take months. So they decide to do it on the quiet, only something goes wrong. Luce has an accident, maybe she’s swept away getting from the boat to the shore. They’ll be in deep shit if they say what happened, Bob especially, so they change the place of the accident to where they should have been, where their daily reports said they were.’

‘How would they have persuaded Bob to take them out there, to let them land?’

‘I don’t know. Money? No. Maybe because he was soft on Luce, and she persuaded him.’

We were silent for a long time. It sounded almost plausible, but there were details that bothered me. I decided to give the great detective time to mull it over.

‘Anyway, if there’s a grain of truth in it, we’ll have to be very careful. I don’t think it’s a story that anybody is going to want to hear. So I propose we do as Bob suggested and go for a cycle, and pretend that everything’s just fine.’

She nodded agreement. ‘You’re right. And really, if it did happen like that, there’s nothing to be gained from opening it all up again.’

‘Right.’ Except that, if it did happen like that, then those five blokes had deliberately conspired to direct the rescue effort twenty kilometres away from where it should have been focused.

We walked back to the cabin and Anna had a shower and I a couple of beers-our respective ways of recalibrating ourselves to the world. Then we went out to the driveway in front of the house, where half a dozen bikes were stacked against the veranda rail, with helmets piled on the edge of the deck. We selected our mounts, I helped adjust the height of Anna’s seat, and then we wobbled off up the driveway to the road. We turned south, back along the way Bob had first brought us from the airstrip, which we came to after ten minutes. The headwind caught us as we turned onto the long stretch of road that ran parallel to the runway, and we laughed as we battled at barely jogging speed, straining against the wind.