Double Fatality

DOUBLE FATALITY

It was three o'clock in the morning and I was watching "Fatal Attraction" with a glass of Jack Daniels and slice of cold capricciosa I brought back from town, for company. I was half asleep. It gets mighty lonely here on the east coast of Tassie when I'm not out in the boats with the rest of the crew, setting pots for crays or else pulling them in.

There was a howling wind outside and I was trying to remember the name of the woman who plays the part of the one that gets shot and stabbed and drowned in the bath and my mind was going round in circles. The doorbell rang.

I was not expecting company.

I switched on the outside light and through the glass in the door I could see the outline of a woman. As I got up to the door I could have sworn it was the face and long curly hair of the bathtub bird from "Fatal Atrraction".

"Help! Open up! Max! It's me, Celia!" She was hammering on the door now.

My neighbour's wife Celia stood on the doorstep, her long blonde hair in damp curls, whipped by the wind, and her blue eyes wide and frantic. She almost leapt into the room, the belt of her white towelling robe trailing behind her. She was wearing only a silky looking black nightgown. Her feet were bare. Very white, very clean, very pretty.

There have been times when I have cast a hopeful eye on Celia - and she actually does look a bit like that woman - better looking in fact. Her fella is Rod. He works with me on the boats. Big bloke. Nasty temper. To tell the truth, I keep my distance from Celia. But this night she was obviously the damsel in distress.

"Quick. You've got to help. It's Rod. He's - he's gone.

" I asked her to come in and calm down and explain. Gone? How gone?

"He came home late and there was a man in the truck with him. I don't know who he was. They didn't even come into the house. They argued; I could hear them from the bedroom, and then there was a terrific fight out there in the yard, and next thing I knew they took the truck and roared off. And that was an hour ago. And I'm scared. You must have heard them.

" I handed her the Jack Daniels and she drained the glass.

"Wonder I didn't hear something," I said, half under my breath. She smiled a half smile and held up the glass. I laughed. Then I was serious again.
"What'd he look like, the bloke?"
"I don't know. I didn't see. I just heard them yelling and fighting."
"Yeah, OK," I said. "So I was watching the video and knocking off the Jack Daniels. I was oblivious.
" She smiled again. Her half smile.
"Can we, you and me, can we go out and look for them? "
"Where would we look?"
"Around. "
"Call the police?"
"Not yet. But bring the rifle."
"Wait a minute, Celia. I don't plan to shoot anybody."
"Just scare him. Scare him off."

It sounded crazy, even then. But it was real late at night, and there was this terrible wind, and - well - Celia has a way with her. I put on my jacket and fetched the rifle.

"You put this on." I gave her a windbreaker. "And your feet. Where's your shoes?"

Suddenly she looked confused. She stared at her feet as if she was trying to remember something, or trying to think of what to say. Then all the wild tension seemed to go out of her and she asked me to go home with her while she got dressed.

It had started to rain.

"You say they had a fight out here in the yard?"
"Yes, I could hear them. Look, the bucket's been knocked over."

In five minutes she was dressed and we set off in my van, heading out towards the cliff. She was no longer agitated, but she sat peering through the windscreen at the road ahead as the headlights cut the darkness, and the wipers whined. Suddenly she said,
"Stop! Stop! What was that? Back up. Back there by that fencepost."
She jumped out and I followed with the torch. Sure enough there was a snakeskin belt, Rod's belt, its buckle glinting in the torchlight as it lay in the stones by the side of the road.

I swung the torch round across the scrub and into the trees, up the road and down again. We searched for other evidence. There was nothing. And the rain had washed away any tyre marks that might have been there. I threw the belt in the van and we went on towards the sea.

"Go slow, Max," Celia said. "There might be other things." She looked methodically to left and right, and I could catch, every now and then, the clean smell of her shampoo.

We wound round the final bend before the road led up to the headland, and stark in the light of my headlamps was Rod's old Toyota, up on the highest point, outlined dark against the sky. Celia gasped and I felt her jolt in her seat. Her hands flew to her mouth and I thought she was going to fall forward.

"Steady!" I said, and put my foot down. We careered towards the truck, my back wheels beginning to slip on the gravel.

Before I had even stopped the van, Celia was out on the headland. I could see that both doors of the truck were wide open, and the cabin was empty. I shone the torch on the seat and sure enough it was covered with blood. I remember a sort of calm, a sort of feeling of unreality, came over me and I said nothing. But together we walked the short distance to the top of the cliff and looked over.

Below, on the rocks, we could see the dark shape of a body.

We looked down at the rocks, out at the water, in silent disbelief. Then I said we had to go for the police, and we turned our back on the scene and got into the van. We drove slowly, in silence for a while and then Celia said softly, her eyes straight ahead on the road,
"It was him, wasn't it?"
I looked at her, knowing there was no hope, and I said, trying to comfort her, trying to make things easier,
"I reckon so, Celia. I reckon somehow, he, Rod, isn't coming back. I'm sorry. I'm real sorry."
And I was, I was sorry. He was OK, Rod. Like I said before, he had an ugly temper, but he was a good worker on the boats, a good enough neighbour. I reckon. I saw a man drown once, out in the rip, but I've never seen someone lying on the rocks like that, so dark and still and kind of peaceful, with the waves breaking just out of reach.

We woke up the town policeman who came to the door in an old red and black dressing gown pretty much the same as my own. His was shabbier. He took our report and rang for reinforcements from Hobart. Then he sent us home.

"We'll ring you, Max,' he said. "Ring you when there's news. You take Celia home and look after her and we'll ring you. When there's news." He spends most of his life hiding in the bushes catching drunk drivers and speed maniacs. This was different; he wanted to gather his wits.

I lit the fire at my place and made us some coffee and poured us another another whiskey. I don't remember what we talked about while we were waiting, and in fact it didn't seem long before the phone rang.

It was a young detective from Hobart.
"We don't have positive ID yet, but going on the licence found on the body it seems he was probably Jake Nelson. A mainlander.
" "Say that again?"
"Jake Nelson. Probably."
"But what about Rod?"
"Who?"
"Rod Green. The owner of the truck up on the headland."
"Dunno, mate. I'll ring you when I hear anything."

"What? What?" Celia said when I told her. She was white as a ghost, and breathless.
"It's not him, Celia. Some bloke called Jake Nelson."
"But it must be him. How can it not be him? There's been a mistake. I have to go to the police station. I can identify him. It's him. I know it's him."

But it wasn't Rod. No, they found Rod out in the water, a little way round the point. And when they put two and two together, it turned out Rod and this bloke got into a barney in the pub and threatened to kill each other. They had succeeded. Jake had a broken neck and Rod had been stabbed twice - once through the heart, with a hunting knife.

The sequence of events they figured out went as follows: Jake stabbed Rod once and then Rod knocked Jake out and thought he had killed him. Then he drove to the top of the cliff to dump the body, but Jake came to and stabbed him again, and they fought it out on the cliff and both ended up on the rocks. Wild stuff.

What was the argument in the pub all about? Money or a woman? Some people said one and some said the other. We'll probably never know. They never found the knife.

I mean to say we'll never know for sure exactly what the argument was over. But I can tell you for certain that even if Rod killed Jake. Jake did not kill Rod.

Women are sentimental, and Celia is no different from the rest. Rod's snakeskin belt, the one we found on the roadside, hangs on a hook behind the door, a sad remembrance. We got mighty friendly after the fatality, and I spent plenty of time around at her place. I found the valentine from Jake to Celia in the drawer of her dressing-table. Dated two weeks before the deaths. Celia knew Jake all right; she knew Jake real well.

I put the valentine, all red hearts and white teddy bears, down on the table and I said to Celia,
"So I reckon you knew that Jake Nelson pretty well, eh?"
Not being a complete fool, she said she did. Met him at the Casino in Melbourne when she was on holiday. Planned to run off with him, but Rod got wind of it and had it out with Jake first of all in the bar and then in the yard behind the pub. She looked up at me slowly, and she said,
"He killed him in the yard and dumped his body over the cliff before he came home."

The hunting knife was in the kitchen drawer; she showed it to me.
"He forced me into the truck. Said he was going to push me over the cliff too. I took the knife from the drawer and I stabbed him while he was driving and grabbed the wheel. Then I threw his belt out the window for somebody to find, and I drove to the top of the cliff and rolled him over into the sea. "

I remembered her clean white feet and her fresh, damp hair. So she ran home, had a shower, and then came to me for help.

She told me all this and I looked into her eyes, cold and icy blue they were, and empty, I thought now, of all feeling.

I rang the police and reported that I hadn't seen Celia for a week, and she wouldn't answer the door or the phone. They found her hanging in the shower from her husband's snakeskin belt.

She had suffered terribly, I said, from depression, since the time of the double fatality.