Heiress On Fire

by Kellie McCourt

  Ah, feck it.

  ‘I hope they have plenty of icy sauvignon blanc, chilled Champagne and old Scotch at the funeral home,’ I said truthfully into the microphone. ‘Maybe even a couple of those cocktail slushy machines. Because it’s open bar and you’re all invited.’

  CHAPTER 29

  TONIGHT’S SPECIAL

  Now a couple of things happened after this. Firstly, and most importantly I think, I received a raging applause, and a standing ovation from about 2300 people. I think they were the 2300 spectators who did not know Richard, but were now very excited by the idea of downing a free $500 bottle of Champagne or a vodka slushy. Or both.

  Secondly, I was very magnanimous in gesticulating my ‘you’re all invited’ gesture. What that means is that I threw my arms out when I said ‘you’re all invited’ and hit the candle on the altar with one hand and the candle on the giant wooden candlestick at the edge of the sanctuary with the other hand.

  The altar candle hit both the chalice (cup of wine) and the censer (incense burner). Now normally wine is not all that flammable. But this wine was. Is holy wine more flammable than regular wine? Did the bishop like a little whisky in his holy wine? Did the bishop like whisky instead of wine? I would not like to speculate. But the whole altar went up very quickly. The blessed carpet was extremely flammable. Unsurprisingly it turns out that incense, the second cousin to scented candles and oil diffusers, is also extremely flammable.

  Thirdly, Richard’s mother may have passed out. It might have been the vast amount of alcohol I was pretty sure she had consumed prior to the funeral. It might have been the fire. It might have been the speech. Who is to say? James picked her up and carried her out through the screaming masses. People really panic when there is a fire in a confined space. Even if it is a very large confined space like a cathedral.

  A couple of burly bodyguards appeared from nowhere and ushered Grandmother and Mother out a side door.

  Searing and Burns went into bodyguard mode shepherding the prime minister and the state premier out, then coming back for the VIPs and the general public.

  A few minutes later one of Grandmother’s bodyguards came back for me. By that time I had already made my way through the smoke to the side exit and the rescue was somewhat redundant.

  I found myself shuffled by said bodyguard into an armoured black stretch SUV Range Rover. Mother and Grandmother were already inside, sitting opposite each other, waiting. The tension inside the SUV was fiercer than the heat inside St Mary’s.

  I thought I had just come from my worst nightmare. Twice. I was wrong. Being in a confined space with these two women simultaneously, that was my worst nightmare. Then the door pulled open and Esmerelda climbed in next to me. I was wrong, this was my worst nightmare.

  The SUV had four seats which were quite similar to first-class seats on a plane, except here the seats sat in two rows of two and faced each other (instead of front to back) and there was a shared foot space of about 2 metres by 1 metre in between.

  ‘That was friggin’ awesome!’ Esmerelda exclaimed, wide-eyed. ‘Best funeral ever.’

  ‘Do you have a drinking problem?’ Grandmother wanted to know.

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Mother, leaning across the space to pat me on the knee. ‘Do you need a Happy Meal honey?’

  I nodded. I needed ten Happy Meals.

  ‘Don’t use food to soothe her, Catherine,’ said Grandmother, turning to face Mother.

  ‘You just said not to give her a drink!’ Mother countered.

  To be fair, without wine or burgers what else were you supposed to use to dull the pain? I suppose there were always shoes.

  A fire engine raced past, sirens and lights blazing, on the way to douse the fire at the cathedral no doubt.

  Mother looked discreetly back out her window at the fire engine.

  Grandmother rolled her eyes and fixed herself a Scotch from the centre console. No ice. No water.

  I was about to have Esmerelda order a Happy Meal on Uber Eats when I realised she was possibly the most normal person in the car. It gave me pause. Not a long pause, but a pause. And I said possibly.

  I knocked on the screen that separated us from the driver. The glass panel powered down. Grandmother’s driver Mr David was at the wheel.

  ‘Take me home,’ I said.

  Oh wait, I did not have a home.

  ‘Take me to her home,’ I said pointing at Mother.

  I was going to pick up my packed bag and head straight to the airport.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Grandmother, refilling her glass. ‘Go home. Have a shower. Put on a new dress.’

  I looked down at my dress. It was burnt. The hem of the coat was about 20 centimetres higher than before. I touched the edges and black fabric came off in my hands. The side seams of the dress were singed. My black stockings looked like they belonged to a punk rocker.

  Esmerelda’s phone pinged with a text message. She looked at it with a neutral face.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘It’s Burns,’ she said with mild disdain. ‘She says, “Motive”.’

  ‘Motive?’ I said. ‘What motive?’

  ‘Your motive,’ said Grandmother with her usual tact. ‘She’s saying that Sandra Banks woman’s affair with your husband is motive for you killing him.’

  ‘That is ridiculous!’ said Mother. ‘No one is actually saying Richard had an affair!’

  Esmerelda nodded in agreement.

  ‘I think it was fairly heavily implied Catherine!’ said Grandmother.

  Esmerelda nodded in agreement to this too.

  I was not sure. Not completely sure.

  ‘Either way! I. Did. Not. Kill. Him!’ I cried. ‘We all know Crystal did it.’

  There was a long, silent intermission. Knowing and proving were two different things.

  ‘You need Bob the Builder,’ said Esmerelda.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Grandmother.

  Esmerelda told her the story. Crystal’s sister Debbie had botched surgery. Debbie died. Crystal blamed Richard. Debbie’s boyfriend was the Mr Fix-It man biker AKA Bob the Builder. Crystal went to Bob for help. Bob probably gave Crystal the explosives. The AFP had Bob in federal protection. He was inaccessible. I was doomed. Esmerelda followed Searing and thinks she knows where Bob the Builder is. I was still doomed.

  ‘Where is he?’ Grandmother asked Esmerelda.

  ‘He’s hiding out at the Crown Street Diner,’ said Esmerelda.

  ‘The restaurant you drove past on the way home last night?’ I said. ‘There?’

  I vaguely recalled the darkened windows of an Italian restaurant shopfront in Surry Hills. On reflection I was certain I had eaten there. Great truffle and dill risotto.

  ‘I thought he was in some highly secure witness protection location? Now he is living on Crown Street, next door to a gelato shop?’

  ‘There’s also an excellent Bikram yoga studio across the road,’ said Mother.

  Grandmother rolled her eyes, again.

  ‘How is that even possible?’ I wanted to know. ‘How do you hide out in a functioning restaurant?’

  ‘I think it’s closed on Mondays and Tuesdays,’ Esmerelda said, as if that helped.

  ‘And I think they only do dinners,’ Mother added. ‘Excellent pear and rocket salad. Hard to get a table on the weekends.’

  Grandmother and I eye-rolled together.

  ‘And?’ I wanted to know from Esmerelda. ‘Where does he go Wednesday to Sunday?’

  ‘And at night, when they’re open?’ added Grandmother to Mother.

  Mother looked hopefully at Esmerelda.

  Esmerelda shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Perhaps he just pops himself away into the linen closet?’ said Grandmother, draining the rest of her Scotch.

  The SUV limousine came to a stop and idled.

  Esmerelda powered down her heavily tinted window and stuck her head out, looking left, right, up and down.

  ‘Like, I guess,’ she said, ‘you could hid
e up there.’

  We all turned to look out of her open window. We were in front of the Crown Street Diner. It was closed. It must have been Monday. Or Tuesday. Or early in the day.

  The restaurant had a large glass window at the front that ran from about four feet off the floor to about two feet from the ceiling. There was an enormous black blind that was drawn all the way down. It blocked out 95 per cent of the window. There were small slits on either side of the blind where you could conceivably peek in, but if memory served, the floor was a matte black wood and the chairs and tables were also black. When the restaurant was in service the tables were covered with white tablecloths and set with white flatware. But it was closed and it looked very, well, black.

  To the right of the window was a set of extra-wide double doors that reached almost to the ceiling. Each door had a brass handle positioned at the centre and what looked like a peephole several feet above the handle. The doors were also painted black, but this time they were a high gloss black. It looked like the doors a swanky giant might have at the entry way to its castle.

  Tucked discreetly to the right of the main street facade was a rather rustic-looking gate that probably led to a back alley and service entry.

  The brickwork around the window and front door was black. The roof face and overhang were also black. I had not noticed when I ate there but it had a long gabled roof. It was like a big squat triangle sitting on top of the building. There was no window, and it was, like everything else, painted black. It could conceivably hide a small, low-ceilinged flat above the restaurant proper.

  Grandmother eyed Esmerelda. ‘I’m going to overlook the fact that you redirected my driver.’

  ‘Like, you’re totally welcome,’ said Esmerelda.

  ‘It doesn’t matter where he is,’ I said ignoring them and eyeing the very locked and closed-looking restaurant. ‘What am I going to do? Knock on the door and ask for a confession?’

  ‘Yes, exactly!’ said Grandmother in bafflement. ‘Why not? I’ll go in there with you right now.’

  ‘To confront a biker?’ I said astonished.

  Pearls and Chanel versus steel-cap boots and a leather vest. How would that go?

  ‘Indigo, I have done battle in boardrooms with Rupert Murdoch, Gina Rine1hart, Silvio Berlusconi and Christy Walton in the same day. Do you really imagine I’ll have a problem with a man who’s named after a children’s cartoon?’

  ‘She doesn’t have to go anywhere with you!’ Mother interjected, placing a protective arm across the seat to me. ‘Indigo can rise above it. Ignore all that horrible gossip about her killing Richard. Who cares what other people think?’

  Well, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are based on that very concept. So billions of people care what everyone else thinks.

  ‘And the police?’ Grandmother wanted to know.

  ‘Well,’ said Mother, faltering slightly, ‘you apologise to the PM over that oyster incident and I’m sure they’ll forget all about Indigo. It’s not really bribery or corruption or anything, because Indie’s actually innocent.’

  Grandmother’s face grew dark with rage. ‘Over my dead body!’ she thundered. ‘The man’s a rabid imbecile.’

  Grandmother went on a diatribe about the prime minister, but I was falling into my own rabbit hole. Did billions of people really think I blew up my husband? Were the police really going to arrest me? Did Richard really have an affair with Sandra Banks?

  ‘… And I’m sure, in time, a few years maybe,’ Mother was saying, ‘the community will come around and you’ll be invited back to Fashion Week in Paris. And London. And New York. And of course Cannes will take even less time. You could be at the Met Gala in two years! LA in three months. In the meantime, you can live with me. We’ll face it together.’

  She might have had some problems in the past but she was such a wonderful mother. So loyal. She was a living spiritual example. But there was no way in hell I was going to face society as Heiress on Fire: the woman who blew up her husband. Heiress on Fire was bad enough.

  ‘No way,’ was all I could manage.

  ‘Or …’ she said thinking, ‘we could go to the Phi Phi Islands! Or the Maldives. Somewhere warm. With blue water. White sand. We could hire a private chef. And a masseuse,’ she said.

  See, we were related after all.

  ‘Oh! Or, or!’ She clapped excitedly. ‘You could come to a retreat in the mountains with me! We could fast. Meditate all day. No speaking. Just silence. We could go for a month, or six months even. Isn’t that a fantastic idea?’

  And there it was.

  She was glowing. She was truly excited by the prospect of sitting like a cross-legged mute on a hessian sack for twelve hours a day, eating nothing but four brazil nuts and a couple of butterfly wings. I, on the other hand, would rather shoot myself. Better yet I would rather be trapped in an Italian restaurant with a biker killer (I bet he was a killer) and let him shoot me. Being shot would be better than enduring a transcendental meditation retreat. If there were federal police in there, well, then, I was going to get arrested eventually anyway.

  I put on my sunglasses, wrapped a black Bvlgari scarf over the top of my head, tied it under my chin and cracked the car door open an inch. ‘I’m going in.’

  ‘Good girl!’ said Grandmother and she began fossicking in her handbag. Was she going to give me lunch money for the trip?

  ‘Is that what you need to do?’ my Zen mother wanted to know.

  I looked at Esmerelda. She was playing Angry Birds on her phone.

  ‘Hey!’ I said to her. ‘A little support and concern please.’

  She looked up from the phone. ‘Dude. I’m totally concerned.’

  Grandmother finally found what she had been searching for in her purse. It was a gun. Well, it was a fashion statement, and quite possibly a museum piece, but also a gun. It was smaller than Esmerelda’s jacked-up iPhone, but somewhat fatter. It was solid silver with a smooth pearl handle. The silver on the barrel was engraved with roses. It was so tiny and pretty I had a hard time figuring out where the bullets went in.

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Mother.

  ‘It belonged to my grandmother Rose,’ she said foisting it at me. ‘I’ve almost never used it. But it has come in handy a couple of times. I want you to have it.’

  ‘That’s so sweet,’ said Esmerelda, eyeing the gun. It was the most emotion I had ever seen out of her. She put her phone in her back pocket.

  ‘Thank you Grandmother,’ I said putting the pearl-handled weapon back in her hands. ‘But I’m not sure that killing someone is the best way to prove I didn’t kill someone.’

  ‘Don’t be so dramatic Indigo,’ Grandmother said dismissively. ‘You don’t have to kill him. Use it as leverage. If you absolutely have to, a bullet to the leg should suffice.’

  She was serious.

  ‘Don’t hit the artery in the thigh. That’s a messy business. A foot is best.’

  Who knew.

  ‘Thank you. I really do appreciate it. But not today.’

  ‘I’ll come in with you. I can negotiate,’ she said.

  How old do you have to be before dementia sets in? She looked very young but Grandmother had to be circling her seventies. Maybe even her eighties. There was no way I was letting her out of the car. Not that I thought anything was going to happen. I did not think I would be able to get past the back fence. And even if I did, there was no way a controlling biker thug was living in police protection by hiding like a rat in the walls or ceiling cavity of a hip Italian restaurant, right?

  ‘How about you and Mother keep an eye out for me?’ I said.

  I think Mother would have rather shared a car with a couple of hungry great white sharks but she nodded. I gave her two minutes before she bailed out or took the gun and shot Grandmother with it.

  Grandmother looked at me with a mix of pride for what she incorrectly assumed was bravery (it was vanity and ego) and disappointment. I think she was looking forward to using that gun.

&n
bsp; I opened the door of the armoured Range Rover and stepped out into the world.

  Then I went back for Esmerelda.

  When I said ‘I’, I meant Esmerelda and I.

  CHAPTER 30

  GUN GIRL GORILLA VANILLA COKE

  There was no way Bob the Builder was in that building. I mean, what were the chances? Searing could have been going to get takeout pizza or spaghetti and garlic bread when Esmerelda followed him here.

  ‘How did Searing get in?’ I asked Esmerelda after examining the giant door.

  ‘Back alley,’ she said pointing to the rickety gate at the side.

  Well of course. I took a few steps to my right to the failing side gate, reached my hand over the top and undid the latch. I pushed the gate door open and waited for something to happen. Nothing. Crickets. It was an empty alley decorated with a few empty milk crates, a gurgling drain and exactly nothing else. The alley ran along the side wall of the restaurant and ended in an entry door that jutted out from the main building: the restaurant’s back door service entrance. The right-hand side of the service entry door butted up against a wall shared with the neighbouring building, the gelato shop. This building must have been a semidetached, a semi.

  Many of the buildings in the inner city suburbs were semidetached. In the 1850s when most of the building was going on around Sydney, bricks were somewhat of a luxury and one did not waste them building a wall to one home or building, only to build another wall a metre away. The buildings had common walls. They were semidetached from one and other. Semis.

  From the front the restaurant appeared to be a freestanding building, but the side gate hid the back part of the building which shared the common wall. I had not looked closely at the building next door, the gelato shop, but I thought there was even less chance of Bob the Builder hiding out in a gelato shop than there was of him hiding in a restaurant.

  The other wall on the left-hand side of the building was freestanding: it was a street corner with a set of traffic lights.

  We walked down the alley. Well I walked and Esmerelda stalked. She had gone into Doberman mode again. I rattled the door at the end of the alley. Locked.