Scarlet Stiletto - the First Cut

by Lindy Cameron

  My stomach threw a fist at me. I hadn’t eaten all day! I would think better with some food in me. I turned on the mobile first, seeing as I was back in range. Four messages from Ray to ring immediately. He didn’t sound happy.

  “Jesus, Annabel, I’ve been shitting myself.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Are you okay? What’s happened?”

  “To me, not a bloody thing.”

  Ray’s vocal tone became querulous. “Did you ring Heinrich and ask him to come down there to meet you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “You heard. Did you?”

  I thought about the LandCruiser. Could the driver have been Heinrich in a hat and sunglasses?

  “Not in a million years. Wasn’t he at work with you all day?”

  “Yeah, for the morning. I came back from after lunch to find a message on my desk, which was Heinrich saying you’d rung, it was urgent, and he’d gone. Like I said, I’ve been shitting myself ever since.”

  Ray didn’t have a decent proposition for why Heinrich would risk such a blatant lie. I told Ray about my notion that I’d been followed. Not Heinrich, though, given he’d been in the office for hours after I left town.

  “Annabel, I reckon you ought t’get out o’there.” He paused for a minute. “It’s too dangerous to drive in the Territory after dark. Leave the car, and your stuff. Put a hat on and some different clothes and go check into one of the other hotels. Sails in the Desert, it’s the swankiest. Department’ll foot the bill. I’m on my way.”

  “I’m a big girl, I can handle this. It’s just as bloody dangerous for you to drive. There are cattle and camels and roos running amok. Maybe one will get Heinrich. Maybe he’s innocent. Go home to Marcia.”

  “I really mean it. I’m less than 100 K from you; I left forty minutes after Heinrich.”

  Bloody mobiles, you can be ringing from anywhere. I did a quick calculation based on Ray’s timing. Heinrich had to be very damn close. “Okay. I’m going to hang up and change. Meet me in an hour.”

  “Okay. See you at Sails.”

  “No. I’ll call with a location.”

  I rang off. Sure, I trusted Ray, but you can never be certain who was listening in. It was a police phone, after all.

  Red. A dingo’s bone. A mad copper. Is copper red? Yes. Was Heinrich the killer? Not my gut feeling, but it was unlikely his alibis had been checked. I wished I didn’t feel that wearing a skirt was my best disguise. It made me feel vulnerable.

  The sound of yet another bus passing outside. Then a car, a big car, slowing, stopping. This hotel was an odd design, with the bathrooms on the outside wall, no windows from the bed-sit area. I slunk into the bathroom. Yep, I couldn’t see the plates but I’d bet my mother’s wedding ring it was the LandCruiser.

  The lined curtain was partly pulled. I crammed myself against it. The man in the Cruiser was lit by a street light. He was surveying the rooms, his movements suggesting calm, loads of self-control. The sort of control you’d need if you were going to follow a fellow human being up a climb nearly as steep as Everest, then thrust a knife in their neck and shove them over the edge without being noticed.

  “The killer’s outside my window,” I said when Ray answered my call. “I’m still not sure it isn’t Heinrich ... Same kind of body. Tall, looks lithe.”

  Expletives hissed down the phone. And advice. I was just about hyperventilating but I was going to get through this. There were people everywhere. If I got outside and at the same time kept out of the bastard’s way, I’d survive, but I wouldn’t say unscathed. He was still sitting, watching.

  “Listen,” I whispered. “The link is the Chamberlain case. Do you have a list of the people camped near Azaria’s tent that night?”

  Ray knew me better than to argue about distractions. “There’s some sort of list. Incomplete match. A couple of families close by had a bit to say.” He couldn’t help himself. “What the fuck are you asking me this for now?”

  “My hunch is, if you match that list with the single males who’ve been working in the area for the past six or so years— or maybe driving trucks through—you’ll find a name. Someone—maybe even a kid—who was there on 17 August 1980, and who’s come back. Either riddled with guilt, or anger. He believes the dingo story—that’s why the bones. Something to do with Azaria not being saved.”

  Red dust blew across the Cruiser outside. The man picked up a mobile. I shuddered. If he had back up, I was in serious trouble. As he put it down and began to get out of the car, I started to move. I needed to be in public view, attracting attention. And fast.

  As I hit the street I heard feet pounding the pavement. Heinrich appeared, just about frothing at the mouth.

  Twenty seconds later it was like a bushfire had jumped the road. Screeching sirens, the thud of fists and bodies falling, staff and tourists slapping into each other, kids taking no notice and being screamed at by their parents, and shouts of ‘Police! Police!’, just like in the movies. I shoved myself through the crowd.

  Heinrich was holding his look-alike on the ground and spitting orders to the security guards who’d joined him. When he finally saw me, he grinned. “Cheers,” he said. “You led me to him.”

  It turned out Heinrich was indeed overly ambitious. And an arsehole. He’d seen the connection with Azaria; he’d also been right about the killer being more or less local. So, he leaned on Ray to invite me up and spread the story of my past success and my imminent arrival as widely as he could. In the Territory word of mouth is highly effective. He’d been kind enough to try to keep me in Alice in the hope of catching the killer there. Great.

  I was right, too. Jason Trevalley had been a kid in the camp-ing ground the night Azaria disappeared. Probably would have had no effect on him except that he found out several of the campers did see the dingo but never told the police. Including himself and his father. The campers dispersed but he kept hold of the names and addresses, tracked those who moved house. Over the past six years he’d driven trucks through the Territory, arranging to meet them one at a time; a kind of purging reunion, he’d said, for our crime of silence. At a safer time of year. Wear red, he told them, that way we’ll know each other, and blend with the Rock. The Rock of life. The apparently accidental deaths received little coverage interstate. When I came along he had only one victim to go. Jason Trevalley was to meet his father at the Rock this solstice.

  The worst of it was that the Trevalley name wasn’t on the police files. So, without me as bait, he might never have been caught.

  Ann Penhallurick

  Best Police Procedural, 2004

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  ~ * ~

  Brought to Book

  When Simmo told us she’d been burgled and that her precious collection of girls’ school stories had been stolen, my heart sank. Not entirely out of sympathy, I must confess. Of course I understood her grief—what fellow collector wouldn’t?—but my first reaction was to think: “Oh, no! Now I can’t tell them about my books.”

  The books I’d been so looking forward to showing off were in my bag, placed carefully beside me on Gin’s battered red armchair. One was a hardback copy of The Chalet School in Exile by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. It would have cost more than $50 to purchase via Abebooks.com or eBay, but I’d found it for $2 at a local garage sale two weeks ago. The second was a paperback by Harriet Martyn called Jenny and the New Headmistress, which I’d successfully bid for on eBay. The cost had been ludicrous for a 1985 paperback, but since I’d spent nearly twenty years searching for a copy, I figured it was worth it.

  Up till recently, I’d believed I was the only thirty-something woman in the world who, in times of trouble, turned to the well-thumbed pages of the Chalet School or Malory Towers the way most people flew to the bottle or the fridge. Only last winter, when I’d been made redundant from my job as a university librarian, I’d spent many a cold, dreary day curled up on the sofa in front of the wood heater, absorbed in an endless round of dif
ficult new girls, practical jokes, lacrosse matches and midnight feasts. And it was during that—thankfully brief—period of unemployment that I’d made two surprising discoveries, courtesy of the Internet.

  One was that many of the books I’d been collecting since childhood were actually quite rare and valuable. I told my husband and my parents about the prices they were commanding, and suddenly they started regarding my school story collection as an acceptable investment rather than a disturbing sign of arrested development.

  The second was that Internet forums devoted to girls’ school story authors and their books were both abundant and active. For the first time, I found other fans to discuss my childhood favourites with. And it was through these online forums that I’d encountered a group of local women who met up in real life to discuss school stories and book collecting—AFOGS (standing for Adult Fans of Girls’ Stories and pronounced ‘Afogs’). AFOGS comprised ten women aged from twenty-five to sixty, who lived in and around Melbourne, and who met at one another’s houses on Friday evenings on a bi-monthly basis. I’d been a member for just under a year.

  Tonight we were meeting at Gin’s chaotic flat in Prahran. Gin was thirty-five, just three years younger than I; small and slight, with short blonde hair. Up till a couple of years ago, she had been a small-part actor; these days she translated Spanish plays into English and produced them on the Melbourne stage. As well as a talent for acting and languages, Gin had an incredible knack for finding the rarest and most valuable of children’s books for next to nothing. She’d once found a pristine first edition of Elsie J. Oxenham’s Girls ojthe Hamlet Club—worth more than $1200 on eBay orAbebooks.com—for 50 cents in an op-shop while on holiday in Queensland. Rarely a meeting went by without Gin turning up with a showbag of amazing finds. Whereas, until I found Exile, I’d netted precisely nothing at my weekly garage sale and trash and treasure hunts. Which was why I’d so much looked forward to showing it—and Jenny—off.

  But now I couldn’t. It simply wasn’t appropriate with Simmo close to tears over the loss of her collection.

  “You mean they took every single book?” Gin said. She sounded half-disbelieving, and I couldn’t blame her. Who ever heard of burglars breaking into your house and nicking books?

  “Every single one,” Simmo sighed. She was an accountant, in her mid-fifties, tall and large with short, red-dyed, spiky hair and huge, red-rimmed glasses. All the AFOGS members had impressive collections of girls’ school stories, but Simmo’s had been far and away the best. You name the author, and she’d owned all their books, all first editions, all with immaculate dust jackets. She’d completed her collection of New Zealand writer Clare Mallory’s school stories only a week or so before the previous meeting, having forked out $150 for Merry Marches On on eBay.

  “Was anything else taken?” I asked.

  “Of course. The DVD player, the computer, the camera, jewellery ... the usual things. Those things didn’t bother me, other than the inconvenience. Everything’s insured. But, the books are impossible to replace, some of them literally impossible ...”

  This was true, I thought, recalling how Jenny and the New Headmistress had appeared on eBay only once in the past twelve months and never onAbebooks.com in the same period of time. Simmo would struggle to replace some of the books she’d had. Then there were the memories associated with them; she’d read her first Abbey book coming out on the boat from England with her ten-pound-passage parents, a farewell gift from the grandmother she’d never seen again. How could insurance replace that? We spent the rest of the meeting disconsolately slugging dry white wine and nibbling peanuts and cheese and crackers, murmuring appropriate comments while Simmo told us that the police had barely been able to conceal their smirks when she’d informed them that her collection of school stories was among the stolen goods.

  “I suppose they’ll turn up at a trash and treasure somewhere, earning somebody a quick buck,” Jude said. She was in her late forties, with greying hair, and was almost as short and slight as Gin. We all envied Jude for being able to legitimately claim that her avid reading of school stories was ‘research’ because she was a university lecturer in children’s literature and its history, and regularly penned feminist perspectives of the girls’ boarding school story for academic journals.

  “That’s what the police said,” replied Simmo. “If that’s what’s happened, they’ll be a lucky haul for some collector at the market.”

  “I’ll look out for them at the trash and treasures I go to,” promised Gin.

  We broke up shortly after that, after arranging that in two months’ time we’d meet at my place. I’d show them Exile and Jenny then, I thought, grabbing my bag and saying goodbye. By then, Simmo would be over the shock and would probably have gone some way towards replacing her collection.

  I hurried to the corner of Gin’s ill-lit street, and stomped up and down like a stood-up teenager while I waited for my husband Peter to pick me up on his way from the football.

  He finally arrived, fifteen minutes after our prearranged time. “How was the game?” I asked, as I jumped into the passenger seat and pulled on my seatbelt.

  “Terrible. We were terrible,” he said. By ‘we’ he meant Hawthorn, his team, which, judging by his dejected expression, had lost yet again. “How was the meeting?” he asked me as he drove off.

  “Terrible,” I echoed. “Simona has been burgled, and all her books have been taken.”

  “Oh, well,” Peter replied, carelessly. “That’s what you get for living in Footscray.”

  We stopped at the supermarket on the way home, and it was well after eleven when we finally arrived back at our own house miles away from the city in the Dandenong Ranges. Peter grabbed a couple of shopping bags and bounded off into the house, while I trailed slowly after him, juggling shopping and books. When I reached the top of the short flight of wooden steps that led up to our deck, Peter was standing on the doorstep, looking shocked.

  “Lucy,” he said, “we’ve been burgled.”

  The widescreen TV, DVD player and stereo had gone. So too had Peter’s digital camera and some of my jewellery. And, every single one of our books.

  Now I knew how Simmo felt, I realised, as I wandered miserably around the house, staring at the empty bookshelves in disbelief. The big bookcase in the study that housed all my children’s books now held nothing. The two large wine-rack-cum-book-shelves in the living room were now devoid of my ‘grown-up’ fiction and Peter’s collection of sports books as well as the wine. Even our recipe books had been taken from the kitchen. The only books I now possessed were the two I’d taken to Gin’s.

  The police came, looked around, took statements, examined the side window that the burglars had smashed to break in, then went off to ask our neighbours if they’d seen anything, which was unlikely given our house was shrouded by trees. We promised to compile a list of what had been stolen and take it down to the station within twenty-four hours. I told them about Simmo’s burglary, hoping that they’d recognise the similarities between the break-ins even though Simmo lived on the other side of the city.

  Over the next few days we made out a list for the police, filled in the insurance forms, talked incessantly to friends and relatives about what had happened. At work, my mind constantly wandered. I wanted to do something, anything, to get my books back. Whoever broke in to our house had taken the books for a reason, I surmised, presumably because they were valuable, or at least some of them were.

  Maybe they’d taken them to a second-hand bookshop rather than a trash and treasure, hoping to get a good price? At lunchtime, I grabbed the Yellow Pages and started ringing antiquarian bookshops on my mobile, asking if anyone had come in over the weekend with boxes of books, including a hundred or so school stories ... After five futile calls, I gave up. There were too many booksellers in the Yellow Pages alone. And, I knew from Internet surfing that there were plenty more whose businesses were solely online and not listed in the telephone directory. It would take
forever to contact every bookshop in Melbourne, and I didn’t have the patience.

  After a couple of weeks, our insurance money came through, and we started to replace the goods we’d lost. Somehow, though, I couldn’t bring myself to begin replacing my book collection. They’d taken so many years to amass, and many of them were so hard to find. I had just come offline one night, half-heartedly searching for Chalets on Abebooks.com, when the phone rang. Peter came into the study to say it was for me.

  It was Gin. To tell me she’d been burgled. And that all her books had gone.

  It was Saturday evening and Simmo, Gin and I were sitting in our living room, relishing the warmth from the wood heater, and guzzling Pringles and a ten-year-old bottle of red.

  “It must be someone who knows us, Lucy,” declared Gin. “Someone who knows our movements, knows that Simmo and you and Peter go to work every day from Monday to Friday, knows that I go out to the theatre for three hours every afternoon.”