Murder by Sunshine

by Garrett Russell

  His original plan when he married Fiona had been divorce and an easy settlement for half her inheritance, but the financial crisis had changed that drastically. She was worth so much less these days. Yet the standards he had become accustomed to were so damnably expensive. How could a man who’s driven Porsches for seven years be expected to settle for something Korean? And he shuddered at the thought of squeezing into anything smaller than this old Chelmer mansion with its wide verandahs and gardens that rambled right down to the river.

  It was not that he was greedy, Malcolm reassured himself. Nor a spendthrift. In fact, he was the one who brought some self-discipline to the marriage. If it had not been for his steadying hand on the purse strings, Fiona’s passion for shopping could have reduced the family fortune to a frightening shadow by now.

  That’s why killing her was really the kindest way out. It would be unthinkably cruel to force Fiona into a lifestyle supported by only half her wealth.

  Malcolm had reached this decision about six months ago. He was casting about for some way to carry it out when Fiona herself presented him with the perfect idea.

  ‘Skydiving?’ he said when she thrust the brochure under his nose.

  ‘The girls at aerobics say it’s the biggest buzz. There’s this new thing called tandem jumping that’s so easy. We could go together.’ Her face glowed with excitement.

  ‘I’d love to,’ he said, and there was no need to manufacture enthusiasm this time, the way he had become accustomed to with Fiona’s crazy whims. This one would be a buzz all right. His mind was already buzzing with the possibilities.

  ‘Oh, Malcolm,’ she hugged him for the first time in two years. ‘I’d just love to hit the silk with you.’

  He didn’t tell her that parachutes are made of Dacron, not silk, these days. He didn’t tell her he’d made a hundred jumps in the army, either. He just smiled and let her kiss him.

  Fiona went ahead and booked a tandem jump for both of them. Malcolm tried to look as nervous as she did when they were each strapped to the front of an instructor and the four of them clambered into the little plane like clumsy copulating insects. He was genuinely nervous as they floated down to earth, because he needed Fiona to react as he expected in order for his plan to work.

  She did, and it did.

  Fiona had inherited a sense of adventure as well as a large chunk of Australia from her bush-bashing father. She loved the thrill of the free fall, and in the euphoria after that first jump, she was easy prey for the instructor. All Malcolm had to do was tag along and sign up with her for a full skydiving course.

  They both joined the parachute club. Fiona had his-and-hers jumpsuits made in ridiculously expensive Italian silk. His was red with green legs and sleeves, hers was green with red. They bought parachutes to match and learned to pack them, following the strict club code that each jumper should be solely responsible for his or her own chute.

  The brisk drive from Laurel Avenue to Ipswich Road and then out of the city and up the Brisbane Valley to the club’s airfield became a standard part of their weekend routine.

  The week before they were scheduled to take their first solo jump, Fiona came home from her usual midweek shopping marathon with two tiny teddy bears. One was dressed in a silk jumpsuit matching hers, the other was dressed to match Malcolm.

  ‘So, we’ll always jump together, so to speak,’ she explained as she stuck the little bears on to each of their parachute harnesses with Velcro patches. ‘The Fiona bear goes with you, the little Malcolm bear comes with me.’

  Malcolm smiled with genuine delight. He was so pleased he didn’t bother to start his usual argument about Fiona’s spending. She had just solved a major problem for him.

  Malcolm’s dilemma was one of logistics. He needed time to tamper with Fiona’s parachute, but whenever she went out, so did the chute. She had an annoying habit of taking all her jump gear in the boot of her BMW to show off to her shopping friends. Fiona was like that, a rabid enthusiast for as long as the novelty lasted. And Malcolm knew from experience that this novelty would wear off quickly. He had to get to Fiona’s parachute before she suddenly flitted off to some other interest and gave up on skydiving altogether.

  The first solo jump could be his only chance and the bears were the perfect solution.

  The next day, when Fiona went out shopping, Malcolm pulled his own parachute out of its pack and spread it out in the seclusion of the back verandah. He carefully repacked it with a mis-fold here, a twisted line there, then pulled his reserve chute out and did the same to it. When he was satisfied that he had reduced both parachutes to lethally ineffective tangles of cloth, he checked the little bear on the harness. It came away from its Velcro fastening without a trace.

  And so to this morning. The big day. It was a lovely day for their first solo sky dive, with the sunlight reflecting a brilliant blue from the depths of the pool and hardly a breeze to ripple the waters of the river beyond.

  The morning was so calm, Malcolm could hear the gentle lapping of the tide against the hull of his sleekly phallic Signature cruiser, tied up against his private river pontoon. The boat tugged at its mooring lines like a spirited thoroughbred, eager for a run, and he silently apologised to it for its scandalous lack of use. Fiona hated the water, and Malcolm had been rather preoccupied with their aerial activity lately.

  ‘From tomorrow, things will be different,’ he said to himself as much as to the boat. ‘In fact, we’ll celebrate by going out together. I’ll take you down to the city reaches. Lunch at Michael’s, how does that sound?’

  He smiled at the brilliance of the idea. What could be more natural than the inconsolable husband, taking his grief out on the river, being suddenly seized by the desire for a lonely lunch at his wife’s favourite restaurant? He’d go straight to the usual table, and he’d insist they keep it set for two. That’s an image sad enough to sear itself in the minds of Fiona’s social circles. Then he laughed out loud as he realised he had to suffer just one more meal with the damned woman. Fiona would be home from the shops at lunchtime.

  She arrived with the predictable clutch of boutique bags and some things from the deli.

  ‘Rosie is so green with envy over my skydiving,’ she enthused as they ate on the verandah. ‘You should have seen her face when she saw my jumpsuit this morning.’

  That was good. A witness to prove Fiona had her gear with her. Malcolm was becoming impatient to get out to the airfield.

  ‘Will we take your car or mine?’ he said.

  ‘Let’s take yours, darling. I love it when you drive fast.’

  ‘I’ll load the gear while you get changed.’

  When Malcolm had finished squeezing the two parachute packs behind the seats of his Porsche, he checked his handiwork with satisfaction. The matching packs looked normal. Fiona would never notice that her little red and green bear was now on the parachute Malcolm had packed.

  He drove fast with the top down. They didn’t speak. Fiona turned the stereo up to a level that tingled all his senses and he pushed the car hard through the bends and curves where the road hugged the twisting upper reaches of the river.

  His whole body was buzzing with anticipation by the time they reached the sleepy airfield, surrounded by crops and grazing cattle.

  He waited impatiently for their turn to fly, chatting absently with some of the other jumpers while Fiona listened to more deafening CDs in the car. She seemed remote. Lost in her own nerves, Malcolm thought, at the prospect of her first jump without the instructor. That was good. The less he had to do with her this afternoon, the better.

  Finally, the time came.

  He helped her into the harness and patted the tiny bear.

  ‘Let’s hit the silk together,’ she whispered huskily, clasping her hand over his and the bear.

  They dived out of the Cessna hand in hand. Abstract patterns of paddocks and fields and tortured twists of river spun wildly below them as they tumbled through the sky. The wind whipped their hair a
way from their faces. It seemed to etch a strangely ecstatic smile on Fiona’s face. She looked beautiful, thought Malcolm, and he was shocked at the thought. She had been more sexy since the skydiving. Almost back to their first heady year together. For a moment, he felt a sharp pang of guilt. But now it was too late.

  He angled his body, manoeuvred his face close to Fiona’s and kissed her on the lips. The last kiss goodbye. His skin prickled with some kind of primitive excitement as she kissed him back. Incredibly, their seven years together flashed vividly through his mind. Like a near-death experience, he thought, and it made some kind of weird sense. He was near death, wasn’t he?

  He let go of her hand. He’d rather remember her like this than see the horror on her face, so it would be better for him to slow from freefall into parachute descent first. That way she would be well below him when it happened. He angled his body sharply, drifted away in the buffeting wind, waved a final goodbye and pulled his ripcord.

  He waited for the jolt that would come when the canopy blossomed above him, tautening and filling with air to cushion the force of his falling body.

  But it didn’t happen. Instead, the parachute streamed behind him like a wild red and green comet tail. He looked up at the fluttering mess of useless fabric and swore out loud. The one contingency he hadn’t counted on was that Fiona could be incompetent enough to foul her own parachute. Still, there was no need to panic. He let his old army training come into play as he steadied himself in the whistling wind and pulled the ripcord for the emergency chute.

  ‘Got you, bastard!’ Fiona yelled to herself when she saw Malcolm’s second parachute fail as spectacularly as the first. She punched the air like a victorious athlete. Now she knew for certain that he had not seen her swap the teddy bears back at the airfield.

  She congratulated herself on her own ingenuity. The hardest part of the whole plan had been working out how to make sure both parachutes could never open. She had spent days of experimental folding and re-folding in her Teneriffe loft to get it right. And Malcolm actually believed she took a parachute out shopping to show her friends!

  She patted the little bear on her harness. The fool had fallen for that, too, as easily as he had fallen for the whole skydiving idea. At last she was rid of him for good. No more fights about her own money. No more secret real estate deals. She might even move into the loft permanently – but not before she gave herself the pleasure of sinking that selfish prick of a boat. What a pity Malcolm wouldn’t be around to see it.

  She blew him a cheeky kiss. She could clearly see his face, pale with terror behind his goggles, as he clawed through the air towards her. She waited until he was one stroke away from grasping her harness before she waved goodbye and tugged on her ripcord.

  Malcolm realised what was happening before Fiona. She heard his burst of savage laughter over the deadly flapping of the unopened parachute streaming behind her.

  The echo of that laugh followed both of them all the way into the ground.

  Of Pearls and Swine

  The lugger crested a wave as she passed through the eye of the wind. Her bow fell into the trough, then found the face of the following wave. Green water buried the foredeck as the sheets snatched the booms to a stop, the sails snapped taut and she lurched onto the new tack. Every timber in the ship shuddered and a shriek of pain rose from the depths of her hull.

  ‘Shut that companionway hatch tight!’ Pierce bellowed to the deckhand who slid aft from cleating the foresail sheets and disappeared into the protection of the cabin.

  ‘If they can’t shut the bastard up, I can at least shut the blasted noise in,’ he said to himself. There was no one else on deck to listen to him. Even if there was, he would have been hard to hear over the creak of the rigging and the buffetting of the wind.

  He strained his eyes into the spray that whipped off every part of the topsides as he settled the lugger on her new course. His gun grey beard whipped and fluttered past his ears. It was the only hint of softness about the man, who stood at the helm as solidly as if he was morticed into the timbers of the deck. A lump of hardwood, sculpted by the weather, stained deep brown by the sun. And the hardest parts of him were those eyes. Steely blue, defying the sting of salt and salvation with equal ferocity.

  The lugger shuddered into another wave, and again a shriek of agony rose from within her hull.

  ‘Damn your slitty eyes, you little yellow bastard!’ Pierce cursed the man writhing on a bunk below.

  He cursed the other divers and the deckhands for bringing the man off the sea floor alive. He cursed his rotten luck in being forced to leave the richest grounds he’d found in seven years of pearling. He cursed the headwind that had him beating back to Thursday Island. He cursed the time he’d waste disembarking the invalid then scouring the grog shops and flop houses for the crew he knew would bolt as soon as they were alongside in Port Kennedy. So, for good measure, he cursed the sick man again for not yielding him the relatively minor inconvenience of a burial at sea.

  As far as Pierce was concerned, Yoshi was the diver he could most afford to lose. The only reason the little yellow devil was still aboard was the shortage of divers of any kind anywhere in the straits. The cyclone of 1899 had done Pierce and the other surviving skippers the favour of sinking over half their rival vessels last year, but it had also claimed more than 300 able bodied men. Good hands were hard to find in Torres Strait this season, so any hands would have to do. Even if they were as slow and dreamy as Yoshi’s.

  The other Japanese said he was a poet. Pierce didn’t know about that. The scrawls his diver produced in that heathen noodle writing may as well have been written in Martian, for all the skipper could see or care. All the writing in the world wouldn’t make him work any better, below the waterline or above it.

  Yoshi was a lazy bastard, no doubt about it. Many’s the time Pierce’s hand ached for a whip and less liberal times, but he had to settle for watching the dark haired demon like a hawk. Below water, he was below reach. On deck, at least, cleaning the pearlshell, he was prey to Pierce’s eye.

  Not that Yoshi was greatly different from the others in this regard. Pearlshell was the bread and butter, pearls the jam of Pierce’s enterprise, and he guarded the sweet prize jealously. Trust no one, not even the mate, was his motto. He made his crew work naked with their cleaning knives, then still checked their pockets and duffels at the end of each voyage.

  ‘Lee ho!’ Pierce bellowed against the wind. The companionway hatch cracked open, the deckhand scrambled forward to the jib sheets, and Pierce swung the helm hard to weather.

  The lugger crested a wave as she passed through the eye of the wind. Her bow plunged into the face of the following wave as she slammed onto the new tack. Every timber in the ship shuddered, even the frame of the bunk Yoshi was curled into. He shuddered with it, screaming his agony through the hank of rope clamped between his teeth.

  The sweat of the heat and the tears of his pain ran together in salty rivers down his cheeks. He could feel rough hands wiping his face and the sting of a cool water cloth on his forehead. He could hear the murmured worry of his crewmates in a tumbling flow of Japanese, Pidgin and English. Odd words came at him like whitecaps on the surface of a stormy sea.

  ‘So sudden ...’

  ‘The bends?’

  ‘Appendicitis?’

  Yoshi ached to add his own words, but they would not come. His tongue, the tongue his friends boasted could bring forth pearls to shame the moon, was now swollen and dry and prickled to bleeding by the coarse hemp fibres. It felt like the images of the Christian god he’d seen on the walls of the island church, with thorns stabbing his forehead and his gaunt body nailed to a cross.

  ‘Is this my cross?’ thought Yoshi. ‘Am I to die for my sin?’

  He ached to tell his crewmates of his secret. If he had failed to cheat his way from under Pierce’s hated hand, at least they could profit from his pain. If only he could tell them.

  But he knew he couldn’t f
orce the words, with the same certainty he knew he was dying. He silently bid goodbye to his dreams of returning to Kyushu as a wealthy and respected writer of haiku.

  His karma was deserting him this time around the circle, and he accepted it.

  The lugger jolted onto a new tack, and a heading that would fetch the entrance to Port Kennedy. Pierce braced his ears for another infermal wail from the belly of the boat. He heard nothing more than the howl of the wind in the rigging.

  The hatch slid open and the mate stepped solemnly onto the deck.

  ‘Damn his yellow hide!’ bellowed Pierce.

  The Reverend Doctor Alfred Davis gently arranged Yoshi’s body on the table. He said a small prayer of salvation despite the dead man’s heathen status.

  The Reverend Doctor should have been in the small graveyard beyond his mission chapel, discreetly witnessing the Japanese funeral rites he had become accustomed to observe since he arrived on Thursday Island. Instead, he found himself pressed into service to perform an autopsy. That faithless old pirate Pierce insisted on it, and for the most unsavoury of motives. His persistence in claiming the right to have his employee’s body examined for valuables misappropriated by ingestion had been so rabid as to dissuade both the Commissioner and the Reverend Doctor from their natural inclination towards swift burial in this torrid climate.

  The Reverend Doctor held a deep breath, braced himself for the putrid gush he knew would afflict him, and made the incision.

  He confirmed the cause of death, his own bile rising at the stench of poisonous pus that oozed through the dead man’s vitals. His immediate impulse was to violate the body no further, to deny Pierce’s venal suspicion the dignity of his complicity, just as he had earlier denied the rogue the privilege of being present at the poor crewman’s post mortem. Curiosity, however, drove the Reverend Doctor on. He rationalised it as scientific interest in the asiatic anatomy, but as his gloved fingers probed the small intestine and closed on something large and hard, he could not deny the sudden racing in his heart. Was this something of the fever that seized gamblers at the toss of the pennies?