Scarlet Stiletto - the First Cut

by Lindy Cameron

  It was Peter. He sounded panicky.

  “Lucy!” he said. “I’m at mum and dad’s place, waiting for the police. I was driving past for work, and thought I’d go round to the house to check it was okay. The side window’s been broken. It looks like they’ve been burgled!”

  Liz Filleul

  First Prize Trophy, 2004

  <>

  ~ * ~

  The Super Murder

  Warm sunlight flickered between the large leaves of the giant Moreton Bay fig trees.

  Sydney on a glorious Autumn day is hard to beat, I thought, luxuriating in a well-earned day off. The Olympic colours on the light-rail carriages flashed through the garden shrubbery and soon afterwards the transporter pulled into the front portico of Sydney’s Central Railway Station. I moved quickly through the smooth-opening doors. Sleek and silent, the machine glided back out through the park heading for the bustle of George Street.

  It was a day I’d long anticipated. I was on my way to the travel agents to book a month’s cruise on the Sea Legend. When winter’s cold nights felled the leaves from the fig trees and its biting winds scattered them throughout the park, I’d be frolicking in the tropics.

  Once I’ve made the reservation, I thought, I’ll wander up to Abbey’s Bookshop then take in the first chapter of the latest Sue Grafton over a coffee in one of the Queen Victoria Building cafes.

  But then my vision of flexi-day heaven was suddenly jarred out of focus.

  “But what should I do?” The question came from the white-haired man sitting opposite and was directed to his faded companion. “The children are in favour of me taking the money ... Our Cheryl, in particular, is very keen. The fund managers say that the lump sum goes into our estate.”

  “How do we know there’ll be anything left of that money to go to our children? We could use it all up. We might be in our nineties before we die,” his companion agitated, plucking at the catch of her cheap handbag. The man grumped and turned away and I empathised. Fancy spoiling a beautiful day with talk of dying!

  “I know we’ll get advice about how to invest the money,” the wife continued, “but these advisors are paid on commission, so they’re bound to recommend their own company’s products, aren’t they? What happens if we put everything with them and it goes sour? You know how the stock market goes up and down.”

  I turned aside. There was still enough heat in the sunshine coming through the carriage window to give my dreams of a holiday in the tropics credibility. I shut out the pair opposite. I envisaged myself lying by the pool on the deck of the giant cruise ship, glass of chardonnay in one hand, a slab of King Island brie on the side table, and a good crime novel ready to open. And at night ...

  I’ll have to spend some time today looking for an evening gown, I decided. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been out on a bender all night. Working shifts did nothing for my social life but the savings meant I could now afford the best. Dressed in my finery, I’d take to the dance floor ...

  “We’ve never handled large amounts,” the plaintive whine intruded. “When you worked, we had your wages and then the superannuation pension. We knew exactly how much money we had and we didn’t need to worry about things like changing interest rates.” She sniffed into a tissue. “Now they’ve upset everything! I won’t know what to spend on the housekeeping every week.”

  I held on grimly. I imagined myself, a vision in red, watching the dawn break over the Pacific, standing at the bow rail with a handsome working-class hero—or maybe an aristocratic intellectual; it didn’t matter—so long as they could discuss the latest novels by Minnette Waters and Sara Paretsky.

  “I know it’d be nice to take a fancy holiday and I’m not denying you deserve it. You’ve always worked hard ... but I’ve been a good housekeeper and I defy anyone to make money go further than I do. The different meals I can make with a half-kilo of mince ...”

  My dream world was shattered. It just couldn’t hold up against the assault from that voice.

  If that damn woman didn’t shut up, I’d do for her myself and then she’d have nothing to worry about, I thought, irritably. Fortunately the tram had arrived in George Street.

  The tropical ocean reflected the full range of blues. I’d seen sapphire and turquoise and navy by day, and pale silver and pewter and blue-black by night. At sunset the water, together with the sky, were glorified in full palette. Brilliant pinks, reds and golds slowly melted into subtle tones of orange, purple and grey. Some of my fellow sailors claimed the dawn was even more spectacular and I promised myself that one morning I’d set the alarm and be up on deck to see it. For the moment I was raging too far into the night to get up early. Perhaps if I stayed up all night, I could take in the dawn as an extra!

  My body was standing up surprisingly well to the high life. It was so relaxing not to have to keep to a disciplined program. I was spoilt for choices of food and drink, activities and leisure. There was choice in everything ... except men. Free-spirited intellectuals were hard to find and most-working class heroes were obviously still on the mainland, hard at work. After a few days I decided that I needed to cast my net a bit wider. I hadn’t been to the pool on the upper deck, so I put on my bikini, grabbed my tube of sunscreen and climbed the stairs.

  I settled myself in the deck chair. Carefully I smoothed on the full-strength cream while from under my lids I took in the available talent. Regrettably, nothing sparked my interest, so I lay back and began to drift off. Visions of my mates doggedly travelling to work in the cool Sydney I’d left behind floated across my eyelids. I turned over and sank into the lilo again, but something was wrong ... I saw leaves on the Moreton Bay figs and the streets were clean. A voice intruded.

  “And I said to him, ‘We can’t afford a holiday like this. You never know when times will change.’ And I was right! Look at the exchange rate for our currency! Every time you go down to the purser’s office to check it, the Aussie dollar’s further into the mire.”

  My brain struggled with my body. You left Sydney to escape conversations like this, my mind urged. You should get up and jump into the pool. But I left Sydney so I could lie here in the sun and do nothing, my body protested in reply.

  “Well, it was like destiny really,” the voice continued. “The day he came home from booking the tickets, he died.”

  His destiny maybe, I thought crossly, but it was black fate that he’d booked them on the same cruise as me! Then I felt guilty. Poor old codger! Booked for the trip of his life and then ... POW! Nothing. I opened one eye cautiously.

  “He never told me what he’d done,” the woman in an oversized floral outfit was telling the woman on her left. “I only found the tickets when I was sorting out his things afterwards. I asked what I should do about them and they said that my ticket couldn’t be cancelled.” She turned away and gazed over to her right where I was lying. Instinctively, I closed my eye. “But there was a refund if you suddenly took very ill ... and you can’t get more ill than dying, can you?”

  It was too much! I jumped up from the chair and dived straight into the water.

  I saw her a few times after that and changed direction to avoid her. She was invariably chewing the ear of some poor sod.

  Why do people think that their life story’s of any interest to total strangers, I wondered. Before long other people were taking my option and disappearing as soon as she appeared. Those at her table at mealtime weren’t so lucky.

  “There was this clause that you couldn’t cancel. I tried to, as soon as I found out what he’d done. But he’d been really sneaky about it. He didn’t buy the tickets until two weeks before the ship was due to sail,” she told the man trapped on her right. “That was when the option to cancel ran out. I suppose they have to know that far ahead for catering and allocating the cabins.”

  “You’re not saying ...” one matron at the table began and then thought better of it.

  “No, go ahead and say it. I’ve got nothing to hide. It mi
ght look odd if you didn’t know my husband. He could be very stubborn. He was determined to have this one big holiday. Well, he wanted it for us both, of course, but I didn’t want to spend the money. It was only that they changed some law about the superannuation and he could convert it into a lump sum ...”

  Twice now I’d had my holiday enjoyment spoiled by this whining woman! It had to be the same one. The voice vibrated through my body and struck the exact same nerve as when I’d been sitting opposite her on the light rail three months before. I begged the gods not to let her disturb me any further and I gave them a helping hand by trying even harder not to be where she was. And I wasn’t alone. She could clear a room faster than a shout of ’Fire!’. But the ship wasn’t big enough. Two days later I was in the queue in the bistro and she was regaling the woman trapped next to her.

  “He brought home the tickets and showed them to me with such a self-satisfied smirk on his face ...” She twisted to her right to inform the man pushing his tray along behind her. “ ‘You’ll have to go now, Mother’, he said ... He always called me Mother ... ‘There’s no refund once there’s only two weeks to go’.”

  I scooped some chop suey into my plate and grabbed a bread roll. I’d planned to have lamb korma, but it didn’t matter. I’d spotted a table with only one chair free and plonked myself into it but I hadn’t anticipated well enough. The chair directly behind me was empty. She headed straight for it.

  “You know about the refund rule, don’t you?” I heard her ask the next table.

  Why the dickens does she imagine that people in the middle of their holidays would be the least bit interested in the refund rule, I wondered.

  “If you just decide to change your mind, you lose your money ... did you know that?”There was no response. “But if you die ... like Father did ... you get it all back. The nice man at the travel agency explained it all to me when I took the tickets back as soon as I found out what he’d done.”

  It wasn’t until I was on the point of sleep that night that the discrepancy struck me. I had a fairly retentive mind. You need one, if you’re going to follow a P.D. James and remember where the suspects’ stories don’t match.

  When had Mrs Goodness found out about the tickets and when had she taken them back, I asked myself. At the pool she said she hadn’t known about the tickets until she was sorting her husband’s things out later, probably a few days after his death. It had to be, because he’d bought them after the two-week non-cancellation period was already in force and there had to be time for the funeral, time for her to make the enquiries, pack, and be on board with the rest of us. Today in the bistro she said she took the tickets back as soon as she found out what he’d done—most likely very soon after he told her his news with the smirk on his face.

  Relentlessly my mind processed everything she’d said. The contradictory versions of when she’d found out about the tickets weren’t the only things that didn’t ring true. That a travel agency would be so callous that they’d refuse to give refunds for both the dead man’s ticket and that of his widow of only one week, surprised me. I remembered the helpful man in the agency. He was very busy but always thoughtful of his clients. If the refund policy was enforced to the letter, it wouldn’t have been his doing. Still, these sorts of decisions were probably down to some heartless senior executive.

  Try as I might, the story of Mrs Goodness and her cruise tickets wouldn’t let go. I hated it when this happened! My thought processes got wound up in the intersecting data of a set of circumstances and they probed and teased the details, trying to sort them out. It usually occurred three-quarters of the way through a good mystery. I’d put my finger in the book to mark the page, close my eyes and recall all the characters. I’d set them at the murder scene. I’d check their movements and motives. Often I had to leaf back through the pages to pinpoint a particular word or phrase that might, or might not, be a clue. Then I’d take a stab at guessing who had done it and why. While all this was happening, sleep was impossible. It was the same thing now, only I didn’t have any printed text to use for reference, and my memory was becoming untrustworthy.

  I decided to clear my mind and tire my body with a brisk walk around the deck.

  “The time span under consideration was two weeks,” I mumbled as I strode along. “First, Hubby went and bought two non-refundable tickets for the cruise. That was a constant.” Then I recalled her voice penetrating my dreams as I lay beside the upper-deck pool, saying, “The day he brought the tickets home, he died. I never knew anything about it until later.”

  But that wasn’t what she said in the queue at the canteen, I reminded myself. She said, “He showed me the tickets. He had such a self-satisfied smirk on his face ... and then he died, that same day ...” So there was another constant. Hubby died the same day as he bought home the tickets. There was something more ...

  You’re missing something, I nagged at my brain. What is it?

  My mind was log-jammed. I struggled to put it away, to forget it. I picked up my pace. It should be no concern of mine whenever it was that one of my fellow passengers found out her husband had booked their holiday. Playing the sleuth was a mind game against a challenging author, an interaction with a clever writer. It was not to be confused with a real-life experience! After all, plenty of men died of heart attacks when they were retired.

  Half of them probably popped off straight after having a fight with their partner, I reckoned. And there certainly would have been a fight, at least a verbal one. What he’d done was in direct opposition to her wishes. That thought brought me up with a start. He must’ve decided to take the lump sum settlement, to have the money to splash on the tickets. Two acts of defiance in the same short period! No wonder he’d overstressed and gone to meet his maker.

  On the other hand, or rather, in the other corner, she’d have been fraught, too.

  Her whole narrow world was suddenly turned upside down. No more Darby and Joan lives, with him going to bowls and her eking out their super pension with her well-honed eye for a bargain. As she saw it, her fears that Father’s access to big money would go to his head were realised. Most women I knew would jump at the chance to live it up on an ocean cruise for once in their lives. They’d accept it as a one- off fling, with the bonus of packets of holiday snapshots to upstage their mates with when life returned to normal. But this wasn’t the relaxed point of view from which Mrs Goodness operated.

  Hang about, I thought. She is living it up. The holiday he’d wanted so badly was denied to him, but not to her. And there’s no doubt that she’s making the most of it. She’s into everything that’s going. She must be wondering why she’d been so against it in the first place. My thoughts continued to fly around, probing and testing. Every time they came back to the refund policy, I struck a sour note.

  How could they be so heartless? Maybe she just didn’t understand properly. I couldn’t wake up the ship’s administrative staff in the middle of the night to check it out, so I talked severely to myself, took a sharp turn around a corner of the deck and crashed into one of the ship’s crew. He held me firmly to stop me falling down. We laughed as we disentangled ourselves and then I introduced myself and invited him to walk along with me for a full turn of the deck.

  We met often after that. I was happy to settle for the company of an ordinary worker who could keep up his end of a conversation. He refused to do the Titanic thing on the bow, but it didn’t matter; he made up for it in other ways. I was living on Cloud Nine. At last the cruise had become the holiday of my dreams.

  Late one night as we lay on adjoining lilos on a secluded portion of the deck, I reached over and twirled a tuft of his chest hairs between my fingers. Suddenly he asked me how I was enjoying the cruise.

  “I’m surprised you ask!” I replied, tugging his chest hair gently.

  “I didn’t ask how you were enjoying ... us. I mean has anything in the arrangements ... or anyone of the crew or passengers upset you ... made you feel uncomfortable?”
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  “No, of course not ... well, not recently, anyway.”

  “I apologise for talking shop but I really would be interested to know.” He propped on one elbow and looked at me. “The captain’s had complaints about a real bore among the passengers. Apparently this widow keeps talking about refunds and the price of everything and how she never would’ve come on the cruise if she’d realised that the optional activities cost extra. We always have a few complaints from people who sign up for things without reading the form properly, but this woman is driving the Morale Officer crazy.”

  Back the memories came, slamming into my mind like the Melbourne into the Voyager. I wanted to pour it all out but I pulled myself up short. No way was I going to make a fool of myself by putting my crazy suspicions out on display.

  “Can I ask you a hypothetical?” I began cautiously. He nodded and listened carefully to my query about the situation of a new widow and the refund policy.

  “No, that’s incorrect. Either the widow is lying, and didn’t check her situation at all, or she did ask but didn’t listen to the reply properly. In the circumstances you’ve described, the company would be most sympathetic.” He sensed my reaction. “Cynic! Okay, we’re not altogether altruistic. Think what the media would make of it. Can’t you see the headlines? ‘Giant travel firm takes money from new widow. Dream holiday turns to nightmare.’ It’d be our nightmare, more like! Besides we have people on standby; these unexpected things always turn up. We understand that a new widow wouldn’t want to go almost straight from the funeral to the ship!”