At some time after Matti’s death, they must have tried to get into the room, probably when the police started asking questions, but the old lock caught and they couldn’t open the door. They left the house, hoping the evidence would never be found, or perhaps intending to come back later and try again.
I took the diary, photographs of Trugby and McVay, and left everything else. I knew what I intended to do. There would be no more police, no trial or smart defence lawyers, short gaol sentences and parole for good behaviour after a few years.
As soon as I got back to my house I moved an armed guard into the Aunt’s House. Then I started calling private detective services. The fourth one I interviewed I liked. Her name was Knapper, and she was as tough as old boots. Her brief was simply to find Trugby and McVay and tell me where they were.
After she left I went out into the old garden, and started to plan how I would kill them. Sitting under the oak trees, I found my answer.
For three weeks I waited. The Trugby name was bogus. There was not a university, college, institution or library in the country who knew of any historian or writer by that name. He had no papers or books published, had never been born, married, died, paid taxes, had a bank account or voted. McVay was similarly anonymous.
The more I worked with Knapper, the more I trusted her. She knew I was withholding information from her, information that I couldn’t talk about to anyone, not even to her. But, one night when I was feeling particularly miserable and had drunk too much scotch, I told her the whole story. I didn’t think I could shock the old buzzard, but I did. She didn’t say much, but she went white with anger and four days later she had found Trugby. She wouldn’t tell me how, except that it was through the pornography trade and an ex-prisoner.
He wasn’t very far away. He was living on the other side of the lakes, keeping very much to himself. His neighbours knew him as Arnold Hall, a retired accountant. Knapper told me where he shopped and what his movement patterns were. They included driving to a point on his side of the lake from which he could see the Aunt’s House. He was still keeping a regular watch on it.
I also got an unexpected lecture from Knapper on the danger of people like him and how amateurs, like me, get into trouble trying to take the law into their own hands. She could see she was getting nowhere and went off angry.
There was one thing, though, about which my knowledge was more than amateur. I’ve always been a good biologist. Much of the time when I lived here in the past, I’d lived off the land. Shoots and leaves, fungus in autumn, fish, prawns, mussels, supplemented with fruit from the derelict orchard and nuts from the trees at the old stockman’s hut. But, ever since I was a kid, I’d been fascinated by fungus. And now as an adult I knew my discipline well enough to publish, with a biologist friend, a field guide on Victorian fungi.
I know perfectly well which fungi are edible, which are poisonous and which are deadly. While we have a number of fungi that can cause great pain, or make you very ill if eaten, we have only one in Victoria that is deadly; the rare Amanita Phalloides, commonly called the Death Cap or the Angel of Death. It is not a native Australian and grows under exotic trees, most commonly under oaks. Thanks to the desire of my great-grandmother to recreate Shropshire in Gippsland, I had a fine crop of this Amanita on the oak lawn. The dangerous thing about this species is that, unlike some of the more flamboyant fungi that burn the mouth or taste unpleasant, or that take a large volume to kill a person, the Angel of Death looks unremarkable and has a mild flavour. It also takes only a very small amount to kill a healthy adult.
I planned my strategies carefully. I had to get Trugby to the house and keep him long enough to eat a meal with me.
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 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, with the effects of the poison so debilitating and rapid, I knew he had no chance.
About twelve, 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 twelve 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 further 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.
Now he couldn’t make up his mind when to act. I think he was unsure if it was 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.
Bronwyn Blake
Best Lesbian Protagonist, 1995
<
~ * ~
Ripe Red Tomatoes
It was so hot out, a real scorcher. What a relief it was to get home, to come back to the coolness and comfort of the house, away from the heat that had seemed even more stifling in the city.
She’d had to go out that afternoon; her appointment had been made a month ago and she couldn’t put it off. The heat hadn’t been too bad when she went out, but she should have got a taxi home, she decided, too late. Even if the taxi wasn’t air-conditioned, it would have saved her the walk from the tram stop. But she’d gone in by tram and had automatically headed for one when she was ready to come home.
There was a hot northerly wind blowing, and the thunderstorm and rain forecast for later in the day were still a long way off. Her head was aching and her feet felt as though they were on fire. Wearily she made her way towards her house. She opened the front door and kicked off her shoes before she switched on the air-conditioning, wishing she’d left it on when she went out. She looked down at her feet. They were bright red and swollen, puffy round the ankles, and there was a red mark where they had bulged over the sides of her sensible court shoes.
She wanted to pull off her clothes and get under a cool shower; but first a cold drink—that’s what she needed— straight from the fridge and with plenty of ice. A gust of cold air wafted out when she opened the fridge door, and for a moment she stood in front of it, revelling in the coolness against her hot and sweaty skin. She leaned down, her face thrust forward, feeling the chill against her cheeks and eyelids. She unbuttoned her dress to the waist and let the icy air wash over her scrawny breasts. Then, as she straightened up and stretched out a hand to pick up the bottle of mineral water, her eyes focused on the contents of the fridge. As she knew they would be, the shelves were laden with bright-red, ripe tomatoes.
“Mmm, that’s what I’ll have for tea,” she said aloud. “Tomato sandwiches.”
Eunice didn’t feel self-conscious talking to herself. Who was there to hear? There was no one else in the house, there had seldom been anyone but herself in it since Jack died. Come to think of it, there hadn’t been anyone much but the two of them, even when Jack was alive. Dear Jack. Sometimes she missed him, but they’d been married only for eight years, and it was now more than five years since he’d died. She was the only child of elderly parents, who were both dead when, just before her thirty-ninth birthday, she married Jack Mitchell. She and Jack hadn’t had any children, so she was used to being on her own.
“At least I don’t have to worry about proper meals all the time, as I did when Jack was here,” she said as she shut the fridge door. “Tomato sandwiches’ll do me any day.”
She felt better after she’d showered, but her head still felt heavy. If only the storm would come and clear the air. She put on a clean, loose-fitting dress, and went barefoot into the kitchen to get her meal. The fine-bladed, sharp knife cut easily through the firm red flesh as she sliced the tomatoes for her sandwiches. Fresh grainy bread, butter, and just the merest sprinkle of salt and white pepper to bring out the flavour of the tomatoes. She carried the plate of sandwiches and another ice-cold drink into the family room, setting them down on the coffee table beside a comfortable armchair.
“There really is nothing like home-grown tomatoes,” she said aloud, as she sat back and bit into a sandwich.
It wasn’t a very original or earth-shattering thought, she reflected, but what did it matter? It didn’t matter any more than it mattered that she also thought there was nothing quite like picking the ripe fruit still warm from the day’s sun. She loved her garden. She loved digging in the soil with her hands to plant the young seedlings, almost as much as she loved picking the ripe crop.
How Jack had laughed when she told him she wanted to dig up the dahlias that were there when they bought the house, and turn the flower garden into a vegetable patch. “Come off it, Eunice!” he’d said. “I’ve got better things to do with my spare time than dig vegetable gardens.”
“Not you. Me! I’ll do it. I want to.”
“You, a gardener? What about those hands you’re always so careful about? And, growing vegetables? All you know about vegetables is picking them off the shelves at Safeways.”
But she’d gone ahead and done it. When she came home from work, and at the weekends, she’d dug up the dahlias, turned the soil over and fertilised it, and planted vegetables. She didn’t know why (she’d never done any gardening before), but she loved the work, although she didn’t think of it as work. She put in a variety of crops: potatoes, climbing beans, Brussels sprouts, tomatoes. That first year she’d put in only a few plants, but when she found how much more flavour there was in her home-grown vegetables than any she’d ever bought before, she gradually put in more and more plants and varieties. She borrowed books from the library and avidly watched all the gardening programmes on television. She learned how important it was to rotate the crops in different parts of the garden each year. She discovered the benefits of mulch, and
understood why it was best to water at night or in the early morning. She knew that certain plants needed particular types of fertiliser, but that you couldn’t go wrong with blood and bone. She realised the advantages of growing early and late varieties and that her supply became much more manageable if she staggered their planting over three or four weeks.
When Jack became seriously ill she had resigned her bookkeeping job and stayed home to look after him. Apart from at the very end, when he’d needed almost constant attention, she was able to spend even more time in her garden. She kept the front garden always looking neat and colourful, mowing the lawn and pruning the roses, but her heart wasn’t into that the way it was for her vegetable garden.
She bought an expensive stainless-steel spade and fork, and dug new beds in parts of the back garden where once there was lawn. In the far corner she hammered in some stakes and put wire netting round them and threw in all her kitchen scraps and lawn cuttings and weeds from the garden to make a compost heap. She spread lime and fertiliser, and sprayed to eradicate pests. She turned over the soil and exulted in its warmth, its dark richness on her hands as she put in the young plants. She watered them, fed them, nurtured them, and watched with loving pride as they grew and ripened. She delighted in all of them; but her favourites, the ones she cherished most, were her tomatoes.
Scarlet Stiletto - the First Cut Page 26