by Phyllis King
Scarlet Stiletto
The Second Cut
Award-winning stories from Sisters in Crime Australia
Edited by Phyllis King
No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks
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Contents
Intro
Kill-Dead-Garten Aoiffe Clifford
Amanda Lois Murphy
Sally’s Seachange Kristin McEvoy
Cold Comfort Sarah Evans
Monitoring the Neighbours Kirstin Watson
Poppies Kylie Fox
Persia Bloom Amanda Wrangles
Kitchens Can Be Dangerous Ronda Bird
The Key Suspect Jane Blechyden
Smoke Aoife Clifford
The Write Place Liz Filleul
Playing Chicken Corinna Hente
Side Window Vikki Petraitis
Bucket Time Kerry James
Undeceive Eveylyn Tsitas
Fence Hanger Linda Tubnor
Plain Jane Louise Bolland
Xenos Evelvn Tsitas
Check-Out Time Rowena Helston
A Man of Fashion Lesley Truffle
Death World Eleanor Marney
Tallow Eleanor Marney
About The Authors
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Introduction
If writing a book can be likened to giving birth - and as my most recent novel is called The Half-Child, I reckon I can get away with the metaphor - then the Sisters in Crime are the midwives of my writing career. I guess that makes the Scarlet Stiletto Awards my literary equivalent of antenatal classes.
Back in 1998, I was an aspiring writer with a recently-abandoned manuscript burning a hole in my filing cabinet. When a friend told me about the Scarlet Stiletto Awards, a crime writing competition exclusively for women, it sounded too good to be true. I’d never written a crime story before but I was inspired by the criteria: ‘must contain an active woman protagonist and a crime-mystery theme’.
My entry, ‘The Mole on the Temple’, featured an Australian expatriate detective called Jayne exposing a card scam in Bangkok. It didn’t win the coveted first prize Stiletto Trophy; but it did win third prize and that gave me the confidence to persevere.
Jayne Keeney became the hero of my first novel, Behind the Night Bazaar, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award as an unpublished manuscript in 2004. It was published in 2006 and shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Award for Best First Book in 2007. The second in the Jayne Keeney PI series, The Half-Child, was shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction in 2011.
But, if it hadn’t been for the Scarlet Stiletto Awards, Jayne Keeney might never have been born.
I’m only one of many authors who’ve kick-started their writing careers with a prize at the Scarlet Stilettos. Cate Kennedy was an unknown when she won the first two Scarlett Stiletto Awards in 1994 and 1995. Today she is published across most genres - fiction, poetry, non-fiction - and has won a dazzling array of literary awards, including the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards People’s Choice Award 2010 for her novel The World Beneath, and Victorian Premiers’ Literary Award for Poetry 2011 for The Taste of River Water. Since 2007, Cate has sponsored a prize in the Scarlet Stiletto Awards.
Tara Moss won the Young Writers Award in 1998 and went on to pen the bestselling Mak Vanderwall crime series (11 languages in 17 countries); and also writes the paranormal Pandora English series.
Another ‘shoe winner’ as they’re called (the trophy is made from a ‘real’ red stiletto shoe) was Liz Filleul, whose first novel, To All Appearance, Dead, was inspired by her 2004 First Prize win. Liz has another category-winner in this book.
Other Scarlet Stiletto trophy and category winners with published novels include Josephine Pennicott, Cheryl Jorgensen, Jo McGahey, Bronwen Blake, Sarah Evans Inga Simpson, Patricia Bernard, Margaret Bevege and Alex Palmer.
Their stories and others from the first 13 years of the awards appear in Scarlet Stiletto: The First Cut (2007); reissued in 2011.
The publication of this book, Scarlet Stiletto: The Second Cut, marks the 20th anniversary of Sisters in Crime Australia and 18 years of the Scarlet Stiletto Awards.
None of the authors whose First Prize stories are featured in The Second Cut were published before winning the Scarlet Stiletto Award. However, Amanda Wrangles, author of ‘Persia Bloom’, has since published her first book; and her co-author on that debut novel, Kylie Fox, has a category-winning story featured in this collection.
Are you starting to see a pattern here?
The Scarlet Stiletto Awards have grown to 11 prizes, with categories for malice domestic, innovation, funniest crime, best investigation, and great film idea; as well as prizes for best new talent, young writers, late starters (writers over 60). This makes these awards uniquely inviting, even enticing.
A look at the Second Cut’s four First Prize stories shows how this plays out: two stories, ‘Wrangles’ ‘Persia Bloom’ and ‘Kill-Dead-Garden’ by Aoiffe Clifford are darkly comic; ‘Tallow’ by Eleanor Marney is violent and nasty; ‘Undeceive’, a crime in verse by Eveylyn Tsitas is as poignant as it is poetic.
As a place to get started as a crime writer, I can’t recommend the Scarlet Stiletto Awards highly enough. Kudos to Sisters in Crime Australia for the work they continue to do to nurture and support women’s crime writing in Australia. And congratulations to all authors whose work appears in Stiletto: The Second Cut.
Angela Savage
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Kill-Dead-Garten
Aoiffe Clifford
Lindy didn’t discover the body until we’d been at the Kinder for at least ten minutes. I say body but I guess I should say Zarko because that’s whose body it was; Zarko the Cleaner. That makes him sound like a professional wrestler or hitman but really he was the cleaner.
I was turning off the alarm and Rosa was making us all cups of tea in the kitchen for when we would sit down to discuss the children’s curriculum needs for the term. This would turn into the usual whingeing about how little respect we preschool teachers get. It was a time-honoured tradition and we never failed to deliver. Or, to be correct, Rosa and I never failed to deliver.
Lindy, being a twenty-something Marxist socialist still living at home in Mum and Dad’s McMansion, was more focused on ranting about the fascist male capitalist conspiracy which was oppressing the masses. She usually did this while flicking through high-end fashion magazines. She hadn’t quite decided whether her destiny was to look after the sprogs of the proletariat or to design clothes for the bourgeoisie. Either way we figured she was destined to be sponging off her parents for a good while yet.
‘I think you’d better come in here,’ Lindy called out to us. ‘On second thoughts, call an ambulance.’ She hesitated slightly and then said, ‘Perhaps just the police.’
This sounded more interesting than, ‘someone’s poured blue paint in the red paint bottle’ which was the usual start to the day so both Rosa and I walked down the hall. We passed the walls covered in stick figure paintings in primary colours, and posters advertising events masquerading as fun social nights out but which were actually designed to fleece the parents in a bid to keep the Kinder open. The hall opened into the playroom with its worn-out lino and lingering playdough smell. We walked to where Lindy was standing.
There in the home corner was Zarko. He hadn’t been a good-looking man alive and fair to say he looked even worse dead, but then a large compass through the head was never a good look, sartorially speaking. It was a bit too cutting edge even for Lindy.
The three of us looked at each other and then back at Zarko.
‘Gosh,’ I stammered.
‘Oh my,’ murmered Rosa.
‘
Holy Fuck!’ exclaimed Lindy.
Lindy had only been in the industry for six months and she often forgot the cardinal coffee rule. You might be looking as dark as a double espresso, you might be thinking thoughts murkier than the bottom of a Turkish coffee but you are not allowed to say anything stronger than babycino in the vicinity of the Kinder.
The only thing more sacred than the coffee rule was the no nuts policy. Sadly this was not designed to deny access to the occasional mad parent but was focused on what food could be brought into the centre. Even Lindy obeyed this one as she suffered from nut allergies herself.
After some silence and glaring at Lindy - we’re not the types to let our standards drop even with a dead body in the room - Rosa asked, ‘What’s that poking out of the top of his head?’
‘A giant compass,’ I answered. ‘I bought it to draw large chalk circles outside on the pavement for the four year olds. It’s mostly wood and completely safe - except, I guess, for the rather large metal needle part that appears to have pierced his brain.’
‘You don’t think DHS will launch an investigation into this do you?’ asked Lindy. She hadn’t been here long but she had learned that a Department of Human Services investigation was something to be avoided at all costs; too much paperwork. We like to pass on our many years of experience to little grasshoppers like Lindy.
‘No,’ said Rosa. ‘It isn’t a kid. It’s only likely to be the police.’
We all cheered up at that realisation.
‘Is he definitely dead?’ Rosa queried. ‘Well he feels cold,’ said Lindy, crouching down next to the body and fumbling around his neck area. As Zarko was a man who sweated large blotches through his clothes even in the dead of winter with the air conditioning on this sounded like a clincher.
After some hesitation Lindy got up. ‘I’ll go and get Princess Anne - she’s a nurse - she’ll know about dead bodies,’ she called as she walked back up the corridor.
Princess Anne was the nickname for Anne McKay, the Maternal Health Nurse who shared the building with us. She was middle-aged and jaded like the rest of us (except Lindy who was young and jaded) but did it with a nice manicure and blond highlighted hair. Somehow she managed to stretch the pay cheque to look like she belonged to the ladies who lunched or had affairs with tennis coaches in between buying modern art and doing charity work. Mutton dressed as lamb I always thought but then, what’s so attractive about dressing as mutton?
Lindy regularly recognised the designer clothes Anne wore and enjoyed shocking Rosa and me by informing us that the skirt or the shirt or the bag or, if it was a bad week, the haircut was worth more than our weekly wage combined. Lindy was torn between thinking this was evidence of the ills of the capitalist money grubbing society we were forcing the children of tomorrow to conform to and wanting them for herself.
‘I’ll phone the police,’ said Rosa ‘and then the Union.’
‘The Union?’ I questioned.
‘If this doesn’t get us danger money I don’t know what will.’ Rosa had been waging a one-woman war against our hourly rate. While no sane person would argue that the leafy green comfortable suburb we worked in was dangerous, similarly no sane person would work for the hourly rate we do, so I didn’t stop her.
That left me alone with Zarko and to be honest he wasn’t the greatest company. Zarko was a big man, at least six foot four. I hadn’t talked to him much even though he cleaned the Centre six mornings a week - it’s supposed to be six nights a week but often he was just finishing as we started work. We were on a good morning grunting arrangement - I’d say good morning and he would grunt in reply. So I can’t say I was as upset at the death as I was at losing a perfectly good wooden compass.
Lindy came back looking pensive but without Princess Anne who, it seems, was sick today. Fifteen minutes later Rosa came back with the police. As Zarko hadn’t moved in the meantime it was safe to say that we didn’t need the ambulance.
Sergeant Michael Bakula looked like a tired middle-aged man because that was what he was. We all knew him well as he had three boys who’d all attended the preschool. George still attended, a regular expert at teaching the other four-year-olds about interrogation methods and kneecapping recalcitrant offenders.
Lindy looked at Mick in disgust and walked away muttering about the tools of a vicious authoritarian state. Clearly the Marxist was winning over the fashionista today. Rosa and I smiled at him. Mick took down the few details we knew about Zarko.
‘Any idea who did this?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Nope’ I said.
‘Anyone who disliked him?’
‘Well outside the fact that he had virtually no education, learnt English from Sesame Street and still managed to get paid more than us with our four-year tertiary degrees which I greatly resented, I can’t think of anyone off hand,’ retorted Rosa. She snorted to herself and walked away.
That left Mick and me looking at the body.
‘Shit,’ said Mick. I glared; the coffee rule applied to everyone. ‘I’d better get this place cordoned off
‘For how long? It’s a curriculum day today but tomorrow we’ve got the four-year-olds for a full day.’
‘I think classes will be cancelled for a few days at least,’ said Mick and then as an afterthought swore again. ‘George was supposed to be here tomorrow. I guess I’m going to have to chuck a sickie.’
In the end the Kinder was closed for a week. But when we returned it all seemed surprisingly normal for a Kindergarten which had been emblazoned on the front cover of the Herald Sun under the banner headline of KILL-DEAD-GARTEN. A pedant might ask what other kinds of killing there are, but if such a pedant worked in a Kinder where the cleaner had been murdered maybe they should just be grateful that the headline wasn’t DUMB TEACHER BUYS KILLER COMPASS.
Once the police ruled out any underworld links to the murder, the media interest waned, though I guessed it would all be rekindled if it turned out to be the work of a psychopathic preschooler. I had finished a long session with the four-year-olds which had included George Bakula explaining to the children about police procedure and not touching any toys for fear of disturbing the crime scene, when I walked into the kitchen where Rosa and Sue, the President of the Preschool Committee, were deep in conversation.
Sue was one of those people who didn’t say much but got a lot of things done. The type of person who ran basketball comps, looked after elderly parents, sat on Parents’ and Friends’ Committees at schools and baked cakes for cake stalls - all without any whingeing. In my book that made her a modern day saint or a complete lunatic. She didn’t have much of a sense of humour but then not many saints were known for their humour - not so sure about lunatics. At the moment neither she nor Rosa looked too happy.
‘Have you heard Mirabelle’s latest idea?’ Rosa asked me a little aggressively.
Now most parents are alright, even those who are deluded enough to think that their little angel might be ‘gifted’, which accounts for at least one third of the parents in any given year. However, there is always one who could try the patience of even a lunatic/modern day saint. This year it was Mirabelle, mother of Shalini.
Mirabelle believed in the purity of children, not setting boundaries around their wisdom and allowing them to open our eyes to society’s limitations. She had thought that Shalini should be home schooled but had decided that Shalini was a gift that should be shared with the community. Shalini made all of us believe in home schooling as well.
‘Mirabelle thinks we should have a cleansing ceremony to banish the bad feng shui from Zarko’s death. She is particularly concerned about how her delicate flower Shalini will cope with the negative vibrations of his restless spirit,’ Sue said.
Rosa grimaced at the kettle and if I didn’t know her better I would have thought that she was muttering some distinctly caffeinated comments under her breath.
‘Shalini didn’t seem too bothered today by the negative vibrations,’ I said. ‘I had to rescue little Sa
m Mikakos before she brained him with a piece of wood in order to recreate the crime scene.’
‘If we don’t have a ceremony, any chance Shalini might not be able to return to such a dangerous spiritual environment?’ Rosa asked hopefully.
‘No,’ said Sue. ‘And Mirabelle has been trying to gain support for the idea from other parents. We should just go along with it.’
‘Fine,’ answered Rosa in a tone that implied it was anything but, ‘as long as I do not have to participate in any way.’
In the end we all went. Even Princess Anne attended (dressed in Prada, Lindy muttered) but looking like death warmed up. Must still have been getting over her ‘flu. Rosa pretended to be there under protest but actually she wouldn’t have wanted to miss the debacle it was likely to be. Debacle it was. Mirabelle hadn’t managed to convince many parents to attend, only the handful who were too polite or too stupid to avoid her completely. Sue had dragooned the usual suspects, that is everyone else on the Kinder Committee, and it was fair to say they looked pretty mutinous having to give up another Saturday for the Kinder.
