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 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 want 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; waking is thinking of them feasting on the 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 50 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 face 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 acts as our local fish shop, when a motor boat came up the lake and moored at our 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 re-interviewed 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 parent's 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 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 temperamental; 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.
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 and McVay names were 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, but 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. 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 only have 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 which 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, the effects of the poison so debilitating and rapid, that I knew he had no chance.
About midnight, 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 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 farther 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.
He couldn't make up his mind when to act. I think he was unsure if it were 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.