At the far end the road curved around the end of the airstrip to head back towards the lagoon shore. Dead ahead there was a sand dune, and parked on it a small white four-wheel drive bearing the crest of the New South Wales Police. We pulled off the road and walked our bikes up to it. There was a track through the dunes here, leading down to the sandy sweep of Blinky Beach, the island’s surfing beach. A lone figure was far out among the breakers, and we sat on the tufted grass watching as he caught a wave and coasted in. He looked as if he got a lot of practice.
He spotted us, and slung his board under his arm and padded up the beach towards us.
‘G’day. Grant Campbell,’ he said as we got to our feet. ‘Looking for me?’
‘Not specially, Grant,’ I said, and introduced us. ‘We’re friends of Lucy Corcoran, remember her? Who had the accident four years ago?’
‘Course I remember.’ He eyed us steadily.
‘Guess you don’t get much crime here.’
‘Nope.’ Grant seemed even more laconic than Bob, and equally aware of our presence on the island.
‘I was talking to Glenn Maddox in Sydney recently. He’s a sergeant now.’
‘Oh yeah? The big guy.’
I assumed he was being ironic. Maddox was shorter than any of us. ‘I told him I was thinking of coming out here. He said to say hello.’
‘Did he manage to convert you?’ He grinned. ‘How come you were talking to him?’
‘Just wanted to check if there’d been any developments.’
‘Developments? Like what?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve been overseas for four years. I just wondered if anything new had come up. Anyway, Sergeant Maddox seemed to think us coming here would be a good idea. Help us come to terms with it.’
‘And has it?’
‘Well, this is only our second day. You were involved with the rescue effort, weren’t you, after she fell?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Were you happy about how it was done?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, did you get all the resources you needed?’
‘We had the navy and the air force. By Monday evening we had twenty boats and aircraft out there.’
‘Were you involved in directing the search?’
‘Me and others.’
‘Would you mind taking us through what happened?’
He sat beside us on the dune, the sand sticking to his black wetsuit, and picked up a piece of driftwood to draw a crescent in the sand. ‘Lord Howe. Bob got a message from them at two that afternoon that Lucy had fallen and was in the water.’ He poked the stick at the bottom of the crescent. ‘He contacted me, then got in his boat and headed down there. I found as many people as I could with boats and sent them down after him. Towards three they reported that there was no sign of her.
‘They reckoned there was something like a three-knot current down there, running due west, so by then she might have been carried anything up to five kilometres out to sea.’ He drew a line across the foot of the crescent. ‘There were several of us in my office by this stage, and we identified a search area and directed everyone out there except for a couple to keep searching the waters around the cliffs, just in case. By this time some of the yachties from the Sydney to Lord Howe race had heard about it, and they began heading out too. We notified AusSAR, the national search and rescue people in Canberra, and they alerted the navy and air force. The RAAF Maritime Patrol Group is based at Edinburgh in South Australia, so it would take their Orions over four hours to reach us, by which time it’d be dark, but they sent one over anyway with thermal imaging equipment, and then another came towards dawn the next day. HMAS Newcastle was exercising in the area and was directed our way, and its helicopter flew over around five. Meanwhile a small fixed-wing set out from Port Macquarie, but didn’t make it before dusk.
‘The boats stayed out till midnight, using lights, though we knew the chances of them spotting anything were slim. They set out again at dawn, by which time the Newcastle and the second Orion had arrived.’ He shrugged. ‘What can I say? The experts had taken over by then, plotting the currents, defining the search area. They were using radar altimeter measurements from satellites. It’s like plotting pressures on a weather map-the ocean currents were rotating in a huge anticlockwise flow around a high spot way to the south. Mate, they were taking her far, far away from land. We knew she was a goner, even if she’d somehow survived that fall. I’m sorry. I don’t reckon there was anything else we could have done.’
‘No, I’m sure there wasn’t, Grant. Thanks.’ I took a deep breath. If my suspicion was right, the whole effort in those critical first hours on the Monday afternoon before sunset had been wasted, displaced twenty kilometres north of where they should have been looking. It made me sick to think about it. No wonder Owen had felt guilty. I wanted to ride back into town and find Bob and choke the truth out of him, but I guessed he’d just deny everything, as Damien would too.
We thanked the cop, and mounted our bikes again and pressed on down the road. There was a steep climb past the golf course, and the physical effort helped work out a little of the frustration I felt. We stopped at a sign to Lovers Bay, and sat on the hillside looking out over the ocean. The sight of that vast sea chilled my heart, and I immediately began pouring out the anger I felt. Anna listened in silence while I ranted on about them searching the wrong sector. Then, when I ran out of steam, she said simply, ‘No, it couldn’t have happened like that.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘If they were on Balls Pyramid when they radioed for help at two that afternoon, how would they have got back to the southern cliffs in time to meet the rescue boats?’
I was stunned. Of course she was right. I wasn’t thinking clearly. ‘How did it work, then?’
‘I’m not sure. It would depend on whether Bob and his boat were there with them when it happened. If he was, they’d have searched for a while themselves, until they were convinced they weren’t going to find her. How long would that take? Hours, surely, if they weren’t prepared to call for help. Then they’d have returned to the southern cliffs, dropped the climbers, and Bob and Marcus would have headed back to the jetty to wait for the radio call from Curtis. If Bob wasn’t with them, it would have taken even longer-he’d have had to go out to them, then search and so on as before.’
‘You’re right! And then there’s Damien. Was he really sick in bed, or was he with them, refusing to have anything to do with it and demanding to be taken back? However you look at it, she must have gone in hours before they gave the warning-maybe first thing that morning.’
‘Why that morning, Josh? I told you right at the beginning, didn’t I? We only have their word for any of this. We haven’t found anyone else who saw Luce after Thursday night. Why did Owen take over filling in Carmel’s log?’
The timing-that’s what had been bothering me all along. Why did they delay their return to Sydney?
I said, ‘There’s something else I thought of, to support the idea that they weren’t on the southern cliffs when she fell.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If they were there, and they were doing their research project, why wasn’t her electronic diary lost with her? Why didn’t she have it on her, the way she had all the previous month, recording their positions? It was found in her room, and now we know that her last entry was for the Thursday.’
If there’s a psychic equivalent of vertigo, I felt it then, the giddy sense of having nothing solid beneath you. ‘Would they have really done that-just not told anyone about the accident for days?’