The First Cut

by Sisters in Crime Australia

  I lay in wait for him for days, choosing my encounter with great care. Trugby walked daily through a park between his place and his local shop. I met him half way. I thought the man would die of fright. He turned deathly pale, and could barely answer my greeting. I told him the police investigation had found no trace of Matti and I was convinced, as I had been from the start, that she had drowned. I said her boat had been found drifting and she couldn't swim. I said I was devastated by the tragedy and was going to move from the house.

  I told him I intended packing up and selling everything, including the house. I said I remembered how much he and Mr McVay had liked the paintings, but that I had no idea whether they were worth anything. They were just old and not very interesting as far as I was concerned, and that I'd probably give most of them to a church fete or something, unless he knew if there were any valuable ones which I should keep.

  His greed consumed his fear. He became quite ravenous, almost incoherent with it. He said that possibly some of them had value to collectors, as interesting examples of Victorian art, even if they had no great monetary worth. I said I didn't know anyone who collected that sort of stuff and I didn't feel up to chasing potential buyers.

  As I hoped, he leapt quickly into the opportunity I'd left open for him, offering to look over the collection again for me and, if I wanted, to handle any items I chose to sell. I said I wanted to get rid of the lot of them, there was very little in the house I intended keeping and that it would be a great service to me if he would do that. I even told him I would insist on him taking a commission.

  We arranged that he should come over by boat the next afternoon. I told him the road was closed and that I was busy until five. For the chance of getting for a few hundred dollars a collection probably worth close to a million, he would have walked across the water.

  I knew I had the bastard.

  The next morning I gathered the fungi. The faintly bad smell disappeared as I gently poached them, added cooked steak and flavoured the mix with aromatic spices. The whole mixture I made into a beautifully baked, individual meat pie, in a red dish. Then I made a second, without fungus, which I baked in a green dish.

  Trugby turned up on the dot of five. By wasting a lot of time, hinting about other stored works and changing my mind a dozen times, I kept him on tenterhooks until seven. I suggested we talk more over dinner, saying it wouldn't take me a minute to thaw out a couple of pies. There was no way Trugby was going anywhere until I had made up my mind. I left him itching over the collection of five by eights that I said weren't worth much, because they'd been painted on wood, not proper canvas or paper, and went to prepare the meal.

  At half-past seven Trugby ate his last meal and congratulated me on my cooking.

  By eight o'clock he was obviously in distress. I said it must have been the rich pastry; I would get him some antacid.

  I had laid the meal in the study, a small windowless room, with a thick door that locked and bolted. I left him locked in and went down to the beach where I sat for a long time staring at the still water, listening to the faint sounds of struggle coming from the house as he tried to break down the door. I knew he couldn't. The doors were made to last and, the effects of the poison so debilitating and rapid, that I knew he had no chance.

  About midnight, I went to check on him. I could hear groaning from the other side of the door and rasping breathing.

  I knew my toxicology well enough to be certain that without intervention and given the volume he had eaten, he would be dead by morning. Close to dawn I went for a walk along the edge of the lake and watched the sun rise until it was very high.

  At about noon I opened the study. Trugby was dead.

  That night I dragged him in a fishing net into the runabout. I took him to the end of our long inlet and buried him in the black sludge of the morass under a pile of drift wood.

  There are no other properties on this end of the lake. No one ever comes to the morass. Even the summer people avoid this inlet. Dead water. You can always tell it.

  For the rest of that night I slept for the first time since I lost Matti. But the following morning the sounds of the birds feeding on his carcass woke me.

  Knapper found McVay hiding out in a fisherman's hut farther down the lake. I knew it had to be him. He thought he had a priceless opportunity for blackmail but I wanted him even more. He would come after me. The blackmail of a wealthy woman, as they had proved many times before, would be the perfect enticement.

  He couldn't make up his mind when to act. I think he was unsure if it were I who had found and removed the body from our beach, because the second time I had made certain no one saw me. The night after Trugby's reappearance, I crated his body in a packing case and stored him in the cellar at the Aunt's house.

  Through binoculars, I watched McVay cruising up and down past my house, waiting. I decided to give him some inducement.

  For several days I carried empty boxes from the house into the runabout and transported them over to the Aunt's house. McVay watched me from the hut; as far as he knew I was moving house. I only had to wait three days after shifting before he made his move.

  He came to the Aunt's House one morning after breakfast demanding that I talk to him 'by myself, if I knew what was good for me', already making overt threats, telling me he knew what I'd done and that I'd 'better agree to his business deal or maybe I'd disappear like someone else'. He was pathetic. Trugby must have driven the operation and without his mentor, he was all brashness with nothing to back it up. He was even shaking. If I'd shouted at him, I think he would have run.

  I smiled at him; my most deadly smile, and said I was sure we could come to some agreement, particularly after what I'd found in the cellar. He was shocked at that, stuttering as he grasped the implications. I think he thought the strong room door would never open again, but suddenly with the material in the cellar exposed, he stood in very clear danger, particularly from the diary. The idea of dozens of people giving evidence suddenly frightened the hell out of him.

  I wanted him to react impulsively. I told him to wait where he was while I went to tell the non-existent staff not to disturb us. I ran straight down under the house and hid back in the darkness inside a chimney base from where I could see the entrance to the strong room, open and waiting for him. It went just as I had planned.

  McVay grasped his chance and didn't lose a minute. He came scrambling down the stairs almost before I was in position. The open door was more than he could believe, he gave a little cry of astonishment and ran straight into the rat trap. I slipped out behind him.

  The last I ever saw of McVay was his back bent over the brief case, throwing out papers looking for the diary.

  The last he ever heard from me was the locks turning on the strong room door and the wall panel sealing into place.

  For the last two years I have employed Knapper to trace and personally speak to every surviving person whose name appears in the infamous diary. At least I have some pleasure in knowing that there are some who can now sleep again.

  Last year I filled in the cellar passage. There is now no trace of the old room or any sign that it ever existed.

  LUISA

  Christina Lee

  I lost touch with Louise after we left school. Yes, I know I should call her Luisa, but I still think of her as Louise. No, I never asked about the new name. It didn't seem polite, like bringing up some awfully embarrassing thing that someone did when they were 12. Anyway, she did Arts at Sydney Uni and I was going out to Lidcombe every day for the physio course, and we just never saw each other. When I met her again she was Luisa.

  It was at Jacquie and Belinda's party. I'd actually met Jacquie as a patient. Lateral ligament, left ankle, quite a nasty sprain. It's a classic netball injury but in her case it was line dancing. I'd never even heard of line dancing then, can you believe it? Well, I'd led a pretty sheltered life. The physio course was pretty demanding, and then when you graduated it was all shift work and long hours
and you tended only to socialise with other physios. That's how I met Mark, of course. Physios are very nice people but I suppose Jacquie would say we're a bit straight. Certainly, we seemed to live in a different world from her and Belinda.

  I don't usually socialise with patients, but Jacquie was lovely and it turned out that she and her friend Belinda lived just around the corner. And the ankle had healed up beautifully, so she wasn't an ongoing case or anything. Besides, most of a physio's patients are about ninety. People tend to think we spend our days treating football players for groin injuries and massaging Olympic swimmers, and so on, but in fact it's mostly strokes, rheumatoid arthritis, and post surgical. So Jacquie made a nice change. She used to giggle if it hurt and tell me funny stories about her job and her flatmate, and so on. Which certainly made a change.

  So I said yes, we'd love to come, although I was a bit doubtful about how Mark would take it, going to a party with a bunch of people we didn't know. But in the end he had a marvellous time; even though, well, I know I should have twigged after all the stories Jacquie had told me about Belinda this and Belinda that and the things they did together, trekking in Nepal and backpacking in Europe, and all the rest of it.

  But as I said, I do lead a fairly conventional life and it really wasn't until we got to the party and they were standing there arm in arm that I realised.

  I mean, it's not like I'd never met a gay person or anything. Now I come to think of it, I'm sure a couple of the girls in my year were lesbians. But you didn't talk about that sort of thing, so I suppose it never occurred to me. I don't really see why it should be such a big thing; I mean, you're there to do a job and what you do in your own time is your own business, isn't it?

  Anyway, Mark took it all in his stride. He kissed them both on the hand and turned on the smile and in about two seconds they were running around finding him a glass of champagne and taking his new distressed leather jacket off to the coat heap in the bedroom and introducing him to people left, right and centre.

  I turned around, and there was Louise. Of course, she'd changed a lot. When we were at school she had long bunches of fat white ringlets and lots of pimples. Now she was very tanned and athletic-looking, and she had a sophisticated cropped haircut and one of those short slim little dresses that just yelled at you that here was a girl who grew up on the North Shore and whose daddy gave her a monthly clothing allowance.

  'Jane,' she said to me. 'What a surprise. Have you got a drink?'

  So she got me a drink and we caught up on what had happened to us. For me, of course, it was pretty simple; physio, six months working in London, back here to marry Mark and a job at the Prince of Wales. For her, as you might have expected, there was rather more to tell, and I must confess that I never really did get the whole story straight. The arts degree, yes, but all the sailing in the Med with Jean Paul and skiing at Val d'Isere with Claudio and the study exchange in Padua and the part-time job in Seville; it all got a bit complicated.

  Anyway, she said she was a freelance writer, which confirmed my suspicion that her daddy was paying her an allowance, and she lived in the flat next door and knew Jacquie and Belinda from a publishing party. Most of the people at this party were in publishing or writing, because Jacquie is an editor at a big publishing house and Belinda tutors in creative writing, so of course most of their friends are writers and such.

  Well, after we'd got all that sorted out, she looked over my shoulder and asked me to introduce her to Mark because she was really looking forward to talking to someone who wasn't a friend of Dorothy's for a change. I didn't know Dorothy, either, and I was going to say so. But Louise was the sort of woman who, when she said 'someone', you knew that other women didn't count.

  So I took her over to Mark and she held out her hand and said, 'Hi, I'm Luisa.' That was the first I heard of this Luisa business, and I was going to ask, but just then Jacquie came bouncing up and dragged me off to look at the knee of a friend who'd fallen off his high heels. And the friend's knee turned out to be perfectly all right, he just wanted a photo of himself in drag having his leg massaged. So we had a lot of champagne, and he and his friend kept taking photos of people doing outrageous things, which made them do even more outrageous things, and the next time I looked at my watch it was half past one and we had to go.

  Mark was still talking to Louise, and he kept saying how wonderful it was that she and I had met up again after so long and we would have to keep in touch, and the friend with the knee took a photo of me hugging Louise and another of Mark and Jacquie drinking champagne out of each other's glasses. It wasn't at all the sort of party we usually go to.

  Well, I dropped over to Jacqui and Belinda's a couple of days later with some flowers to say thank you, and Louise was there, sitting at the kitchen table drinking peppermint tea, and I wound up staying talking for hours. After that it just became a habit. I had an early shift most Wednesdays and Mark was hardly ever at home; he had a private sports physio business as well as the hospital job, so there was nothing much to hurry home for.

  I would buy a few Hungarian cakes and then go to Jacquie and Belinda's. We'd have tea and cakes, and then they'd sit at the kitchen table writing or talking and I'd cook and then we'd all eat. Luisa wasn't there all that often after the first time, and usually she didn't stay long if she was. She said she was very busy on a writing project, but Jacquie said that she had been saying that ever since she moved in next door and as far as she knew Luisa had never published anything.

  They talked a lot about books. Belinda wrote short stories and reviews and magazine articles, and she always had stacks of creative writing exercises to mark and, of course, both of them read all the time. It was very different from our place; we had a lot of books, too, but they were mostly anatomy textbooks and things like that.

  One week, Belinda asked me if I'd read a story she had just had published in a short-story magazine. She'd never shown me anything she'd written before and I was quite flattered to be asked. So I sat there and tried to concentrate while she pottered around the kitchen making curry.

  It was about a physiotherapist called Madeleine who fell in love with a patient, who's a woman, but the woman's got this great boyfriend and isn't interested. At the end, the boyfriend turns out to be the physio's ex-husband. So this woman she's become so keen on is the same person as the bitch who stole her husband.

  It sounds rather ordinary like that, but it was a lovely story. The physio realises that she's been feeling sorry for herself, and she's been blaming the new girlfriend for her own misery, without even knowing her. And she realises it's time she got on with her own life.

  The disturbing thing, though, was that it was about me. Well, not about me; I mean nothing like that has ever happened to me, but it was me, all the same.

  When I'd finished, Belinda turned around from the stove and said, 'What do you think?'

  I must have looked a bit shocked, because she said, 'Oh, no, I've upset you, haven't I?'

  I said, 'It's me, isn't it?'

  She said, 'Umm... in a way.'

  And I said, 'But I'm not like that. I haven't got a thing about an old boyfriend and...' and I stopped, because I was going to say I wouldn't fall in love with a woman, but I couldn't think of a way to say that to Belinda without sounding rude.

  She poured me a drink and said, 'But that's what writing's all about. You start with something real and you think, what if this happened, or that happened, and it turns into something else. You were telling me once about touching people who were very unattractive and how you coped with it. So I started thinking about how a physio would cope with having to touch someone she found very attractive, and it grew from there.'

  I was a bit puzzled. I understood what she meant, all right, but I wasn't too sure about it. I suppose I'd never thought about where writers got their ideas from. But, of course, what else could they possibly do; they take incidents from other people's lives and turn them into something else. But when you read something, you don't
think about the friend or whoever started the whole thing, and how maybe how they felt about it.

  It did feel a bit uncomfortable, but I couldn't really see what she had done wrong. Anyway, just then Jacquie came in and we wound up having a really interesting talk about writers and how they steal events out of their friends' lives or things they read in the paper or conversations they overhear on the train.

  'That's what creative writing is all about,' said Jacquie, pouring us all another drink. 'Taking things that you hear about and turning them into something different, something that expresses a new truth.' She talked like that sometimes.

  I still wasn't too sure about it all, but when I told Mark later that night, he couldn't see what the problem was.

  'She wrote a story about a physio. You're not the only physio in the world. What's the big deal?' he said. 'She met you, it made her think about physios, she wrote a story. She's a writer.' And he turned over and went to sleep.

  Put like that, it sounded pretty reasonable. But it wasn't just a story about physios, it was a story about me. Once I got over the initial shock, though, I decided it was quite flattering. I mean, how many other people have had stories written about them? So the next week I took her a bunch of orchids. To say thank you, or sorry, or something.

  And so life went on. Mark was working long hours, and I found myself looking forward more and more to seeing Jacquie and Belinda each Wednesday. Sometimes we'd go out together on a Saturday, too, to big raucous pubs or little jazz clubs. Luisa came along every now and then, but not all that often. I had a feeling that she saw us as a fall-back option, for nights when she didn't have a date with some man.

  Anyway, it was all very settled. Like family, really. So when I came in to the flat one afternoon with my bag of sticky cakes and found the two of them just sitting there, in this awful, oppressive silence, with no books on the table and no drinks or snacks or newspapers or any of the usual clutter, I got this heart-in-my-mouth feeling and stopped in the doorway. At first I thought that somebody must have died, except that they were both looking angry rather than sad, so then I wondered if they had had a fight.