Scarlet Stiletto - the First Cut

by Lindy Cameron

  Who’d worked around for many nights.

  “Just the gasps and heavy breathing someone finds in new delights.”

  Softly spoken, sexy Susan

  Stood aside from all the rest.

  Gazed at our Inspector Dulcie

  Trying hard to do her best.

  Raised her heavy painted eyelids,

  Blew an expert cloud of smoke:

  “Guess I ought to speak up quickly.

  Think I know this nasty bloke.

  It’s quite some time now

  Since I’ve seen him.

  I don’t want to cast the blame,

  But I caught a glimpse this morning,

  Yes, I think this chap’s the same.”

  Dulcie gently steered the answers,

  Sat the girl down on a stool.

  “How then do you think you know him?”

  “His son went to a boarding school.”

  Detective Froome and Dulcie together

  Cast a glance at sexy Sue.

  How would she be mixed with learning?

  Surely not a thing she’d do?

  Suzy caught their stares and meaning.

  Recognised their disbelief.

  Thought she’d tell another story,

  Causing Dulcie and Froome relief.

  “Well,” she said, “this job I’m doing

  Isn’t one I’ve always had.

  And, I know some think it’s naughty,

  Even think it’s very bad.

  But hours are good and Madam’s easy;

  The pay is great in many ways.

  It’s higher than the average income,

  Even better than DJs.”

  “A boarding school? I can’t believe it.”

  Something tweaked in Dulcie’s brain.

  She had heard those words this morning;

  Had she heard them once again?

  “Tell me, Susie, please,” said Dulcie.

  “Tell me how this had begun—”

  “I’ve seen the son,” said sexy Susie,

  “ ... when I was a MERCY NUN!”

  Silence reigned in Madam’s boudoir:

  A first time for the golden rule.

  Buxom Betty dropped her fag-end,

  Froome slipped off the plastic stool.

  Lucy Lara fluttered eyelids.

  Should she question? Should she cheer?

  Thought she’d celebrate for Susie,

  And got herself a Toohey’s beer.

  Inspector Dulcie gazed at Susie,

  Exercising civil rights.

  Standing there in sparkling spangles

  Poured into her orange tights.

  Dulcie shook her head in wonder,

  Lots of things she’d like to ask.

  But, questions first and answers later

  Was the most important task.

  “Get to Price’s house,” snapped Dulcie.

  “Take the fellow by surprise,

  Check his job and time of starting,

  Disregard his bloody lies.

  Then we’ll have to get our Susie

  To identify this crook.

  Looks like gaol for our Russell:

  Think they’ll throw at him ... the book.”

  Russell’s hours of work were queried.

  Management was shocked to find

  That instead of Russell’s sickie,

  He’d been of another mind.

  Sexy Susie went with Alex,

  Answered questions—they were rife.

  Was this the man she’d seen this morning?

  If so, Russ had killed his wife.

  Russell sat, red-eyed, unshaven,

  Shrouded in a cloak of gloom,

  Making frank and true confessions

  In the police procedural room.

  “Yes,” said Russell. “God, I killed her,

  Sudden anger made it so

  Because I heard from trusty workmates

  That she’d turned into a PRO.”

  Detective Froome received promotion.

  Sexy Susie proves her worth.

  Tries her best to keep receiving

  That bit of heaven here on Earth.

  Inspector Dulcie’s left the Police Force;

  Said at last she saw ‘the light’.

  You’ll find her now at Madam’s,

  Booking clients in—at night.

  Phyl O’Regan

  Funniest Crime/Best Crime in Verse, 2002

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  ~ * ~

  Dead Water

  I don’t like the nights when I don’t sleep. When there is no finish to the night, no drift and fall, the nights when nothing can stop the panic and the pain from flowing and ebbing. When a pale dawn shows in the sand-blasted window frames, the poor light creeping over the lake, the ti-tree straggling along the edge slowly etching the profile of a face gaping at the sky. The face I wanted to forget, the one I never wanted to see again. Sand eddying in and out of the mouth and the slack skin puffing and falling under the ripples.

  I loathe the dawn now. Daybreak means hearing the sea birds feeding at the edge of the lake and waking is thinking of them feasting on that fleshy mess. Fighting over it. Scrabbling on the face with their scaly red legs, squabbling over the swollen tongue.

  He never should have come up from where I sank him, deeply, into the mud at the back of the lake under the driftwood pile. He didn’t just wash up on our beach. It wasn’t by chance. McVay must have been watching. The net was cut off.

  I know this lake; it has mothered and fathered me. For fifty years I have played on its sandy beaches, swum and sailed and fished in its water. I know how its currents run and how its winds blow. I know its morasses, inlets, mud flats, channels and islands; where the Tatungalung lived before my great-grandparents destroyed their land and massacred the survivors. I understand its shores; the great, ancient dune lines that keep the sea at bay. And I know its temper: enchanting in summer by moonlight, the water flickering with phosphorescence; but murderous in winter with explosive south-westerlies blasting in from the southern ocean.

  We called him the birdwatcher. That’s what we thought he was doing the first time we saw him hiding in the reeds on Matti’s side of the lake.

  One of Matti’s properties spreads along that edge of the lake until it joins mine at the back morass. Matti’s family owned all the land in this area that my family didn’t; her family was in stock, produce supply and property, while mine was in shipping and property. Between us, the families used to say, we could buy up Gippsland. Which was exactly what they had been doing for a hundred years. Then as we grew older, what a pity, they said, we didn’t each have a brother, that we were just two girls, otherwise we could marry and divide the country between us. Which is exactly what we did.

  When the lakes were being used by my great-grandfather’s coastal shipping line, this house was built so he could keep an eye on his goods and chattels as they steamed in and out beneath his balcony. There was no access here by road then, the closest transport was the railhead on Matti’s side of the lake that her great-grandfather built to meet our ships.

  We saw him through grandfather’s telescope and thought he was watching the sea eagles’ eerie near our inlet. He was there for days, then one morning he arrived on our doorstep by boat. He said he was a historian researching pioneer families of Gippsland, but nothing about watching us. He was an odd fish. He actually thought he could ask anything he liked and we would fall over ourselves to accommodate him.

  He made a great fuss over Matti. She was beautiful; not young any more, but still with the fine facial bones that last longer than a pretty skin over them. He asked about old diaries and family documents, which both of us did have by the room full, but I didn’t like him enough to give him access to our family history. He wanted to have a good snoop around, but we both were fed up with him, his peculiar way of looking at us and his obsequious comments with their snide afterbite.

  Two weeks later we were repairing
the ancient stone fish trap at the mouth of a narrow inlet, which still acts as our local fish shop, when a motor boat came nosing up the lake and moored at out jetty.

  The young man said he was Gawler McVay, a research assistant to Dr Trugby. He said he wanted to check some details, but Mr McVay seemed more interested in the family’s paintings than in what we had to say. He finally admitted being distracted and asked permission to inspect them.

  It is a significant collection. Grandmother was an influential patron of the arts with a remarkable ability to back the right horse. The place is full of early work by the Heidelberg School greats, life drawings, five by eights, sketchbooks, oils, watercolours and autographed first editions, given to grandmother by the artists before they became famous or fashionable. Later, when her trust was justified, she bought or was given their mature works. Perhaps she threw out her mistakes, but the collection is unique in its consistent quality and that much of it is unknown, our family never being one to encourage attention.

  Mr McVay said he wanted to catalogue and publish the collection, which I expressly forbad. He was not pleased, and wasted an hour trying to change my mind.

  Matti next saw Dr Trugby when he wanted to rent a small place of hers across the lake. He was persuasive and annoying and finally she agreed against her better judgement. He took a lease on the Aunt’s House for a year, saying he’d fallen in love with the lake, the old house and its isolation.

  From then on we saw him regularly. He called in with fish he’d caught, wanting to know if he should prune the roses, fix the gate or some such excuse. Always he was hard to dislodge. He was flagrant in his ponderous flirtation with Matti. She annoyed him by deliberately misunderstanding him. I teased her about her elephantine lover, but she just laughed and said if she’d wanted another relationship with a man, she’d had plenty of years to do it and it certainly wouldn’t be with ‘the Tugboat’. Always he asked us to come to dinner, and always we refused. It didn’t seem to matter, for he never took no for an answer.

  The way Matti and I both handled the millions we inherited was to set up several charitable trusts. We did it in such a way that, apart from approving recipients and occasionally appearing at functions for our respective foundations, we had very little to do with our families’ fortunes. As most of the money had been made in Gippsland, it was being spent in Gippsland, so the day Matti disappeared, left my life without a shadow, I was opening a new detox wing of an alcohol and drug service for Eastern Gippsland.

  I’d spent the night in Orbost and got home mid afternoon expecting to see Matti sprawled out on the verandah still reading, where she swore she intended to stay all weekend. The book was still upturned, half a glass of white on the table beside it, the house was wide open, and the row boat was gone. I thought she was fishing, but she never returned, my glorious Matti, my soul mate, my partner of twenty years. Left, as if she had simply walked down to the beach and out into the water.

  Finally after hours of ringing, scouring the lake in the runabout, even calling in at the Aunt’s House to talk to the vile Trugby, I called the police.

  I put it off as long as I could because the response I anticipated from them was exactly the result I got. I knew she was dead. I tried to deny it, invented any reason for her disappearance, but it didn’t work. I knew she wouldn’t come back and I knew what the cops would think.

  I pulled rank. I rang the Assistant Chief Commissioner and reminded him that not only did he know both our late fathers very well, but that I had funded the Gippsland Community Rehabilitation Programme for young offenders most generously. Not to mention the domestic violence refuge, and the consideration I was giving to his request for a sophisticated communication system for his community policing squad.

  Communication from the top down worked reasonably well. It certainly brought prompt response. Within hours the place was crawling with police. Swiftly followed by reporters and even a subeditor or two who could taste the dream headlines.

  The fervour of investigation didn’t last two days. You could see their eyes change as they started understanding our relationship. It is but a tiny step for mankind to make giant steps in preconception. Their questions became statements, often wrong but never in doubt.

  I knew I would be suspect, was then, and still am, but there was nothing even they could build a shred of a case on ... although God only knows that was what they wanted. It wasn’t too hard to work out their motive as they struggled with formulating ideas that would prove their assumptions of the jealousy certain to have been an intrinsic part of my relationship with Matti. In my hysterical state, I would have been totally out of control.

  I suspect that idea was quashed by the Assistant Commissioner, because one day their attitude changed from voyeurism to sullen resentment. After weeks of futile investigation, I was told blatantly that Matti had taken off with a man. Her secret lover. Why should I expect to know about him when my reaction would, of course, be outraged jealousy and—its corollary never actually spoken—murderous violence.

  Yes. Of course.

  In the end I was notified grudgingly, as if it were none of my business, that Matti was listed as a missing person and that I would be kept informed. That was only because I’d spent a bucket of my money searching the lake and questioning people the police hadn’t. They were frightened that, with my peculiar access to people, either I, or the newspapers who were going crazy over this salacious headliner, would come up with something they’d missed. Which is what I did.

  It was weeks before they all left. Every day some aspirant would appear at the door, with a new theory or a new story line. Not until we became dead news could I start doing what I wanted.

  Maybe I was obsessed by the idea, but I was certain that bastard Trugby had something to do with Matti’s disappearance. The police, on my insistence, had interviewed and reinterviewed him, until one day he rang to say he couldn’t stand the distress any longer, that it was affecting his work and he was giving up the lease. The cops had found nothing on him or on McVay.

  As children, Matti and I spent summer holidays together in the Aunt’s House, where Matti and her parents were living at the time. We loved it. Great Aunt Nell was the young Parisienne of the old brown photographs that hung in her bedroom. Painter, writer, Rodin’s lover; she who was once the sculptor’s beautiful young model. We called her the Purple Aunt, and trailed her diaphanous purple silk dresses and feathered hats through the dusty summers of our childhood.

  Aunty Nell was just compos enough to be left nominally in charge of us, but had absolutely no idea of what we did all day. It was child heaven. Consequently, one summer when we were ten we tunnelled out a secret passage under the house. With increasing age, strength and years the tunnel became almost a room. It retained its secrecy until the day the lightning struck and a bushfire roared through the property, close enough to the house for us to have to drag Aunty Nell down into our secret room. Fortunately for us, the fire didn’t burn down the house over our heads.

  When our distraught parents arrived expecting to find us all dead, we escaped the punishment one would normally expect from tunnelling under the house foundations by emerging as heroes. The secret room was enlarged to a useful size, reinforced and fitted with a door. It acted as a strong room for the considerable amounts of money Matti’s parents paid out in wages each week. The door was hidden much to our joy behind a sliding wall panel. When Matti and her parents moved to the main house, after grandfather died, the strong room was never used again.

  I had this unsubstantial fear that if I found anything in the Aunt’s House I would find it in the strong room. I dreaded that it would be her body, but even if I found that which I feared most, I could at last stop this relentless searching. I would, to my ultimate cost, know.

  What I found was far, far worse.

  The strong room door actually had two locks. One that was obvious and commonly the only one used. The second, the original lock, was concealed under the door’s bottom lip and tempe
ramental; if it caught it had to be hand-released.

  It was clear that someone had found the room. The sliding wall panel was not secured and the old lock had been tripped. The usual lock, however, was open, as if someone had been trying to get in, but failed. I opened the door and crossed the threshold into my own singular and murderous madness.

  Trugby or someone had used the strong room to store their photographic equipment. Cameras, videos, projectors, film processing equipment and arc light nearly filled the small room. Then I found the pictures of Matti.

  Naked, bound and gagged. Tied in hideous poses. With Trugby raping her. Then McVay. The videos were worse. The first terribly, horrendously, violent. The second with her moving in a drugged nightmare, violently pornographic.

  I sat on the lawn for a long, long time. Hoping for the impossible, that the pain could kill. But pain does not kill. It chokes and sears and paralyses and tortures and, finally, after a long time, turns into a cold rage of retribution.

  After hours I forced myself back into that place. Matti had not been the only one. There were boxes of photographs of other men, women, and child victims. In a crate I found probably a hundred more videos and, in a briefcase, with pathetic pleading letters, a diary of names, addresses, personal details and, against some, the amounts that had been extracted in blackmail. Many of their targets were from other countries, but the last six were Australian. Matti was the last entry.