by Zane Lovitt
Crime Scenes
stories
Crime Scenes
stories
Edited by
Zane Lovitt
spineless wonders
www.shortaustralianstories.com.au
Contents
Introduction
The Turn
Amanda O’Callaghan
Three-Pan Creek Gift
Peter Corris
The Mango Tree
PM Newton
Thirteen Miles
Michael Caleb Tasker
Postcard From Cambodia
Andrew Nette
Swimming Pool Girls
Melanie Napthine
Death Star
Tony Birch
The Teardrop Tattoos
Angela Savage
The Good Butler
Carmel Bird
The Drover
Leigh Redhead
Saying Goodbye
David Whish-Wilson
I Hate Crime Fiction
Eddy Burger
Contributors
Editor
Introduction
Long ago I heard it said that crime fiction is the king of genres. Even to a writer of crime fiction, it seemed a lofty claim. My instinct was to straddle my high horse and pontificate on the subjective nature of art, to declare that one person’s Picasso is another’s arse-pick-o, to deem the truth unknowable in the Hegelian, objective sense.
That response is technically correct and painfully boring.
Long ago I heard it said that the only rule of writing fiction is, Don’t Be Boring.
So allow me to offer three reasons why crime fiction is the metaphorical king of the literary jungle.
First, it sells. People read it. Nuff said.
Second, nothing gets you turning the page like suspense. It’s the reason we experience stories – to be made to want to know what happens next. Laughing, crying, learning; these can be a lovely bonus, an end in themselves, but our addiction to stories is our addiction to that sense of fever and urgency when we forget where we are, forget who we are. When we flip off the pilates class planned for six tomorrow morning because we can’t put the cursed book down and turn off the light – otherwise known as suspense.
Yes, you find it across all genres. Science fiction can make you hanker to find out how the robot stole the virus from the spaceship. Romance novels ask you to wait, chapter upon chapter, before telling you if the squash champion and the neurosurgeon live happily ever after. And you almost skip forward, desperate, guilty, just to ease that glorious ball of tension in your stomach.
But here’s the thing: the crime section of the bookshop is the one place where you know the writer set out to do that. For all other writing, it’s what happens when the author knows their craft. For crime fiction, it’s the atomic purpose. It’s why the work exists: to make the reader turn the page with fumbling, sweaty fingers.
Third, crime fiction is the closest we have to a genre that directly reflects our ordinary lives. The challenges faced by characters in crime fiction are the same that you and I encounter every day, but for these characters the stakes are so much higher: a suitcase full of money, a prison sentence, a grievous assault, or (most often) life itself. But beneath this contrivance, the characters’ dilemmas are our dilemmas.
I may argue with my brother and we may take our turns feeling humiliated, or offended, or neglected, but what’s at stake for us is fairy floss compared to what’s at stake for Michael and Fredo Corleone in The Godfather. And because the stakes are high, that conflict has to be resolved.
Crime fiction is a Trojan horse, sneaking in relevant, even important information for our lives under the guise of escapism. Yes, this too is a feature of all genre-writing, but crime fiction is where the characters are the most ordinary, the most recognisable, the most us.
This hot little book you hold in your hands is filled with more examples. ‘Saying Goodbye’ is, on the surface, the final thoughts of a crooked cop and his ignominious end. Underneath, it depicts the lasting shame so many adult children feel for their fathers. In ‘Death Star’, a revenge plot blossoms in rural Australia, pulling back the curtain on the lack of meaning and opportunity for small-town youth.
You’re sceptical, I know. Perhaps you loathe crime fiction, consider its conventions clichés and its conflict dull. Perhaps you only picked up this book because you know someone who reads crime, their birthday is approaching and you want to be sure this font meets with your exacting standards. Well, don’t buy it for someone else. Buy it for you. There’s a special treat for your kind at the end.
More likely, you’re loving how prejudiced you think I am. You’re superior like a marriage counsellor: cri-fi isn’t better or worse, just different. You are a student of the world, a diner at the banquet of literature where no course is served nonpareil.
And I get that. We are not so different, you and I.
But I invite you to dismount that horse, to unclench and find within these pages that heady pulse you felt as a child walking the library aisles, when books smelled of musty excitement and the musty librarian needn’t have bothered to shush anyone because the book you’d drawn from the shelf was authentic, faithful to the first principles of storytelling:
Make the reader turn the page.
Make them forget where they are.
Who they are.
Don’t be boring.
Fuck pilates.
Nuff said.
Zane Lovitt, 2016
The Turn
It’s the turn that tells you. There you are, idly taking in a man carrying a black bin bag, making his way down a lane. You know the bag’s heavy – you see that – and you’ve got nothing better to do than just sit in the car and think that maybe he works in one of those restaurants, so the bag’s full of slops, pulpy and unstable, a horror show if it splits open. You think maybe he’s just been cleaning out rubbish, sorting out his spare room or his study. He might live in those apartments stacked above the shops. But you decide that he doesn’t look like the studying kind. Funny how you know these things based on nothing, from just a glance. He’s got his back to you, so you can’t see his face; no idea about hair or skin colour. He’s wearing dark clothes and some sort of beanie on his head, but that’s all you could say. Has he got an unusual walk? Maybe you’re imagining it. He’s not moving very fast with the weight of the bag, so he might be middle-aged, or older. You know he’s not well, the way he carries his shoulders a fraction too high. Emphysema. Might be lung cancer. A sick, old man taking out his rubbish. All these things go through your mind in a matter of seconds.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Jackie used to ask me all the time.
‘Nothing,’ I’d tell her. But truth is, you’re always thinking of something, always noticing.
The guy’s almost at the back of the lane now. The traffic’s heavy enough. Not much business around. He’s about to disappear, and you’ve lost interest. But then he turns. Still holding the bag clear of the ground, he stops, swivels his body round towards you. You see a flash of white-skinned neck. He looks straight at you, like he can see you, only he can’t because you’re sitting in the dark, waiting for the lights to change. But it’s the turn that makes you look more closely. It’s not like he’d heard something scrabbling near the bins, or footsteps behind him. This is slow, deliberate. He turns because he’s checking no-one’s watching.
But you are.
*
‘You’re a gloomy sod, Robbie Quinn’, Jackie used to say.
She always called me by my full
name. Coming from her, it never felt strange. Same with the way she called me a sod. There was no malice in it. She said it about a lot of people. ‘A poor old sod was brought in this morning and you should have seen his leg…’ Jackie’s sod was harmless, affectionate even, unless she told you to sod off. Then you’d know she was annoyed. She sounded most English when she said that – the little snap of her accent coming through. It used to make me smile.
And, no, I wasn’t gloomy. Not back then. Jackie always thought that having a quiet moment meant you were getting depressed. She didn’t like to think about things too deeply. Some days all I wanted to do was just sit at the table, sip my coffee and stare out into the street for half an hour. But it bothered Jackie. She’d start shuffling papers, pushing in chairs. ‘When’s your shift start?’ she’d say. ‘Aren’t you going to your mother’s first? That coffee’ll be cold as charity by now.’ She’d annoy me out of my thoughts and I’d get going again, saving my quiet time for when she was at the hospital. I sit at the window a lot now. Everything stays where I leave it. The coffee goes as cold as charity, whatever that means. When I turn to look into the street, I notice everything.
*
A crowd is a terrible thing. I know it’s foolish to say so because mostly a crowd has a purpose: commuters, shoppers, hospital visitors – the posse of media in my front yard. In a crowd, pretty well everyone has a place to be. But for me, even after all this time, it’s different, unnerving. I look at every face, assessing every shape and size. I get entangled in the impossible knot of all those lives: the way they walk, hold their heads, their voices as they pass. Once, near the old bus station, I could hear a frantic call, ‘Robbie, Robbie’, and the accent was English and I said to myself, Don’t turn around. She always said your full name. It’s not her. It can’t be her. But at the last minute, I did turn, and I saw a woman with her arms outstretched, and a black dog racing away trailing a glittery red lead. And when someone caught the leash as the dog shot past, bringing him up tight like a cartoon character, front paws pedalling the air, I burst into a crazy cackle. Too loud, too high. And everyone turned – some with frozen smiles from watching the dog – and they all stared because I was a man laughing alone in a crowd. A man with no place to go.
*
They thought it was me in the beginning. Some of the papers, all of the cops. Can’t say I blame them. Routine procedure, I heard that a lot. Mostly, it was two cops. One almost small enough to be a jockey, except he had huge hands. The other about my size, normal enough, but with something of the cowboy about him. He had a Clint Eastwood squint in one eye when he spoke, like he was looking into a mirage down a long highway. If he’d been an accountant or a bus driver you wouldn’t even notice it. But a detective – it was almost comical. Once, after he’d been questioning me for a long time, I could see the squint forming, and I felt myself starting to smile.
‘Something funny, Mr Quinn?’ he said, and that eye would shrink even more. The jockey never said much, just watched, hunched over the table, those hands all knotted up in front of him. Once, late, when Clint had his face up close and I was feeling light-headed, I just burst out laughing. The sound bounced all over the room. An older guy in uniform looked in at the door for a few seconds, went away without a word.
‘Your wife is missing, Mr Quinn,’ Clint said, ‘and you’re laughing. Can you explain that?’
And he looked over at the jockey, who just shook his head and re-knotted his hands.
*
If Jackie had been there she could have told them that I always laugh when things are really bad. That I laughed at my own sister’s funeral. Poor Lisa. ‘You’re a stupid sod, Robbie Quinn,’ Jackie had whispered under her breath, passing me a huge folded handkerchief. And I’d sobbed and tittered into the green tartan and everyone except Jackie moved a little bit away, so that when my poor sister was safely out of sight I found myself almost alone, as if I’d been at someone else’s graveside, a different funeral. The smell of the fresh-turned earth that day was oddly pleasant. When the vicar turned back and said, ‘Can I help you, Mr Quinn?’ I let Jackie answer for me.
‘I’m taking him home now,’ she said, and she slipped her hand under my arm and turned me towards the road. Tender. Sometimes things could be really tender between us. We actually walked home that day, though it was miles. Halfway there, where the road bends away from the edge of town like it’s trying to escape all the dullness, I threw the handkerchief into the Torrens. For once, Jackie didn’t say a word, just did up her top button where a sharpish breeze was pushing in. When I turned back to the water, the handkerchief was floating away like a small, checked raft.
*
Four miles. That’s the distance between here and the hospital. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be kilometres but Jackie never broke the habit of talking in miles, so I kept it too. I never walked to my shift, not once, but Jackie liked walking. ‘I hate those smelly buses,’ she’d say. We didn’t use the car for work. ‘Rotten sods, ripping us off with the parking.’
I wouldn’t let her walk at night, and she’d moan about that sometimes, tell me about the freaks on the bus. But she’d humour me. ‘Take a taxi if you miss the last bus,’ I’d tell her. ‘Yeah, yeah, moneybags,’ she’d say. There’s only two street cameras between the hospital and our house. One points at the footpath, one at the road. You learn this stuff. Jackie was picked up on both of them, walking quickly. On the second one, she stops and unbuttons her jacket because she’s got too warm. She was hurrying because she was late leaving the hospital and it’s dark, except for the light from Roy’s Discount Meats spilling into the road.
They showed me the camera footage of Jackie a couple of times. I could hear Clint breathing beside me as I watched, feel his eyes on the side of my face. As Jackie walks out of view – the last sight of her – her coat, which is slung over one shoulder, lifts in the wind like a purple cape. She looks back, as if someone has called her. Then she turns towards home, stepping into a great pool of darkness.
*
Truth is, I was thinking about leaving her. There was never any big fight, no major issue. Most of the time, to use Jackie’s words, we mucked along pretty well. I just wanted to find a bit of peace on my own. I like my own company, always have. The night shifts used to kill some of the others, but not me. I liked the hush that came over everything up in the ward late at night. It’s always had a magical quality; anything felt possible. But maybe, on the quiet nights, there was too much time to think. And sometimes, I admit it, I thought about a life without Jackie. My feeble half-notions about leaving her make me cringe now. It all seems so petty, after everything that followed.
*
‘I thought you were starting early today,’ I said to Jackie as she sat down at the breakfast table on our last day together.
‘Phoned in sick,’ she said. Her voice was tight. She hadn’t brushed her hair, which was unusual. She was hugging her coffee cup with two hands, holding it so hard that I thought it might crack open and slosh over us both. I ate my toast and watched her, the crunching loud in my ears. Jackie knew about Ida Costello in Bed 6. I could see that. She was never off that damn phone of hers.
‘You know I can’t stay,’ she said, staring. ‘You know I can’t get up every day and look at you, knowing what went on.’
I was surprised at how angry she was. ‘Christ, Jackie, she was nearly ninety. The woman had one lung. She was in a lot of—’
‘Don’t say it!’ Jackie actually shrieked those words. Later, our neighbour would tell Clint he heard it, clear as a bell. We weren’t shouters, generally. Jackie was up on her feet then. She walked over to the window and stood there for a long time, her back to me. Then she turned and said, very quietly, ‘You don’t get to choose these things, Robbie Quinn. Nobody gets to choose. You decided about Lisa, didn’t you?’
She could see by my face it was true.
‘Your own sister, for g
od’s sake.’ Jackie looked very small, standing there in her dressing-gown, her balled fists like little apples in the pale pink pockets. ‘And poor old Ida.’
I started to move towards her but Jackie looked like she might jump through the window if I came any closer. ‘It was you at Welgrove General, wasn’t it?’ Jackie said. I was close enough to see her eyes fill with tears. ‘That big woman with the sarcoma, she was the first, wasn’t she? And then poor old Mrs Lacey.’
‘Jackie,’ I said, but more words wouldn’t come. She was looking at me with repulsion. ‘You covered it up well,’ she said, her voice suddenly nurse-calm. Evelyn Lacey’s face loomed at me out of the past. Relieved. That’s how she’d looked. There was a bit of talk after she died – that nosy new registrar – but nothing came of it and we both left Welgrove soon afterwards.
Now, looking at Jackie’s disgusted face, I didn’t know whether to feel angry or sad. I thought she’d realised about Lisa. ‘It’s for the best,’ Jackie said at the time, when my sister was finally gone. The best. But now I could see the truth: Jackie’s words weren’t some coded message of approval. For the best was just another cliché. Hospitals are full of them. Doctors, nurses, counsellors – even the tea lady never shuts up. It’s what we say when we can’t make things better. Jackie had never mentioned the deaths at Welgrove until Ida Costello died. Not in any specific sense. Any blaming sense. But something must have clicked for her with Ida’s death. Everything seemed obvious after that.
‘How could you?’ she’d said, suddenly breaking down, fleeing towards the bedroom. I knew then she’d leave. In the doorway, only half turning as if she could no longer bear to look at me, she said, ‘It’s murder, you stupid fucking sod.’
*
I wasn’t sorry about Ida Costello. ‘Say a prayer for me, won’t you?’ Ida used to say, most days. I told her I wasn’t religious, every time, but she’d just say, ‘Well, maybe today.’ She wasn’t hoping to get better; she knew enough to know that wouldn’t happen. She was hoping she’d die. That’s what all these hypocrites can’t accept, what Jackie could never accept: these people had had enough. My poor cancer-raddled sister wanted to die. ‘Help me, Robbie,’ she said, and I knew exactly what she meant. But helping Lisa didn’t come easily. It’s much more straightforward when they’re just patients.
