Girl in an Empty Cage Read online

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  It was three days before the weather was good enough to fly again. Buck, along with more than a dozen other aircraft, used the next four days of good weather to do a widespread search across the northern VRD and west Kimberley. But in the end, with absolutely nothing found, it too was abandoned.

  In due course there would be an official investigation. For now the case was closed. Vic had vanished, presumed dead in a crash somewhere far out in that empty place. To Buck it felt like another pointless waste of promising life.

  He must now take carriage of the will which Mark had entrusted to him. He would go and see the police and Susan, he was unsure whether anything was to be done for her, and she had bigger problems than an inheritance, where a will may or may not exist.

  But still he needed to advise both the authorities and her of his piece of knowledge in this matter. Not that he expected her to know about the will as Mark had said he was not going to tell her. But still it was a little piece of the sad and unintelligible jigsaw he had inherited.

  A month later a fishing trawler, working off the coast west of Darwin, sighted some wreckage floating in the water. It was hauled aboard and taken back to Darwin. Here the experts determined it was a fuel tank from a Bell 47 helicopter, badly damaged, as if from a crash impact.

  So the official finding was that it was most likely to be a part of the helicopter flown by Vikram Campbell on the morning of December 30th and he had most likely crashed somewhere in the lower reaches of the Victoria River, with the helicopter wreck then washed out to sea.

  Another two days were spent searching this area around the mouth of the Victoria River but still nothing was found. So the search was officially ended and the files were passed on to the coroner’s office for its consideration.

  Buck and a few friends held a wake in the Timber Creek hotel, one steamy afternoon in early February. A thunderstorm was turning the sky purple, with flashing and rumbling far out to the north, out near where the Victoria River met the sea. It seemed that the Gods had joined in the ceremony too.

  “Vikram Campbell, helicopter pilot extraordinaire, RIP”, they said, as they downed their drinks in his memory.