Warm sunlight flickered between the large leaves of giant Botany Bay fig trees.
'Sydney on a glorious Autumn day is hard to beat,' I thought, luxuriating in a well-earned day off. The Olympic colours on the light rail carriages flashed through the garden shrubbery and soon afterwards the transporter pulled into the front portico of Sydney's Central railway station. I moved quickly through the smooth opening doors. Sleek and silent, the machine glided back out through the park heading for the bustle of George Street.
It was a day I'd long anticipated. I was on my way to the travel agents to book a month's cruise on the Sea Legend. When winter's cold nights felled the leaves from the fig trees and its biting winds scattered them throughout the park, I'd be frolicking in the tropics.
'Once I've made the reservation,' I thought, 'I'll wander up to Abbey's Bookshop then take in the first chapter of the latest Sue Grafton over a coffee in one of the Queen Victoria Building cafes.' My vision of flexi-day heaven was suddenly jarred out of focus.
'But what should I do?' The question came from the white-haired man sitting opposite and was directed to his faded companion. 'The children are in favour of me taking the money… our Cheryl, in particular, is very keen. The fund managers say that the lump sum goes into our estate.'
'How do we know there'll be anything left of that money to go to our children? We could use it all up. We might be in our nineties before we die,' his companion agitated, plucking at the catch of her cheap handbag. The man grumped and turned away and I emphathised. Fancy spoiling a beautiful day with talk of dying!
'I know we'll get advice about how to invest the money,' the wife continued, 'but these advisors are paid on commission, so they're bound to recommend their own company's products, aren't they? What happens if we put everything with them and it goes sour? You know how the stock market goes up and down.'
I turned aside. There was still enough heat in the sunshine coming through the carriage window to give my dreams of a holiday in the tropics credibility. I shut out the pair opposite. I envisaged myself lying by the pool on the deck of the giant cruise ship, glass of chardonnay in one hand, a slab of King Island brie on the side table and a good crime novel ready to open. And at night…
'I'll have to spend some time today looking for an evening gown,' I decided. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been out on a bender all night. Working shift did nothing for my social life but the savings meant I could now afford the best. Dressed in my finery I'd take to the dance floor…
'We've never handled large amounts,' the plaintive whine intruded. 'When you worked we had your wages and then the superannuation pension. We knew exactly how much money we had and we didn't need to worry about things like changing interest rates.' She sniffed into a tissue. 'Now they've upset everything! I won't know what to spend on the housekeeping every week.'
I held on grimly. I imagined myself, a vision in red, watching the dawn break over the Pacific, standing at the bow rail with a handsome working class hero - or maybe an aristocratic intellectual - it didn't matter, so long as they could discuss the latest novels by Minnette Walters and Sara Paretsky.
'I know it'd be nice to take a fancy holiday and I'm not denying you deserve it. You've always worked hard… but I've been a good housekeeper and I defy anyone to make money go further than I do. The different meals I can make with a half kilo of mince…'
My dream world was shattered. It just couldn't hold up against the assault from that voice.
'If that damn woman didn't shut up I'd do for her myself and then she'd have nothing to worry about!' I thought irritably. Fortunately the tram had arrived in George Street.
The tropical ocean reflected the full range of blues. I'd seen sapphire and turquoise and navy by day and pale silver and pewter and blue-black by night. At sunset the water, together with the sky gloried in the full palette. Brilliant pinks, reds and gold slowly melted into subtle tones of orange and purple and grey. Some of my fellow sailors claimed the dawn was even more spectacular and I promised myself that one morning I'd set the alarm and be up on deck to see it. For the moment I was raging too far into the night to get up early. Perhaps if I stayed up all night, I could take in the dawn as an extra.
My body was standing up surprisingly well to the high life. It was so relaxing not to have to keep to a disciplined program. I was spoilt for choices in food and drink, activities and leisure. There was choice in everything… except men. Free spirited intellectuals were hard to find and most working class heroes were obviously still on the mainland, hard at work. After a few days I decided that I needed to cast my net a bit wider. I hadn't been to the pool on the upper deck, so I put on my bikini, grabbed my tube of sun-screen and climbed the stairs.
I settled myself in the deck chair. Carefully I smoothed on the full strength cream while from under my lids I took in the available talent. Regrettably nothing sparked my interest, so I lay back and began to drift off. Visions of my mates doggedly traveling to work in the cool Sydney I'd left behind floated across my eyelids. I turned over and sank into the li-lo again but something was wrong… I saw leaves on the Botany Bay figs and the streets were clean...
A voice intruded.
'And I said to him 'We can't afford a holiday like this. You never know when times will change.' And I was right! Look at the exchange rate for our currency! Every time you go down to the purser's office to check it, the Aussie dollar's further into the mire.'
My brain struggled with my body. 'You left Sydney to escape conversations like this,' my mind urged. 'You should get up and jump into the pool.'
'I left Sydney so I could lie here in the sun and do nothing,' my body protested.
'Well it was like destiny really,' the voice continued. 'The day he came home from booking the tickets he died.'
'His destiny maybe,' I thought crossly, 'but it was black fate that he'd booked them on the same cruise as me!' Then I felt guilty. Poor old codger! Booked for the trip of his life and then… POW! Nothing. I opened one eye cautiously.
'He never told me what he'd done,' the woman in an over-sized floral outfit was telling the woman on her left. 'I only found the tickets when I was sorting out his things afterwards. I asked what I should do about them and they said that my ticket couldn't be cancelled.' She turned away and gazed over to her right where I was lying. Instinctively I closed my eye. 'But there was a refund if you suddenly took very ill… and you can't get more ill than dying, can you?'
It was too much! I jumped up from the chair and dived straight into the water.
I saw her a few times after that and changed direction to avoid her. She was invariably chewing the ear of some poor sod.
'Why do people think that their life story's of any interest to total strangers?' I wondered. Before long other people were taking my option and disappearing as soon as she appeared. Those at her table at mealtime weren't so lucky.
'There was this clause that you couldn't cancel. I tried to, as soon as I found out what he'd done. But he'd been real sneaky about it. He didn't buy the tickets until two weeks before the ship was due to sail,' she told the man trapped on her right. 'That was when the option to cancel ran out. I suppose they have to know that far ahead for catering and allocating the cabins.'
'You're not saying…' one matron at the table began and then thought better of it.
'No, go ahead and say it. I've got nothing to hide. It might look odd if you didn't know my husband. He could be very stubborn. He was determined to have this one big holiday. Well, he wanted it for us both of course, but I didn't want to spend the money. It was only that they changed some law about the superannuation and he could convert it into a lump sum…'
Twice now I'd had my holiday enjoyment spoiled by this whining woman! It had to be the same one. The voice vibrated through my body and struck the exact same nerve as when I'd been sitting opposite her on the light rail three months before. I begged the gods not to let her disturb me any further and I gave them a helping hand by trying even harder not to be where she was. And I wasn't alone. She could clear a room faster than a shout of 'Fire!' But the ship wasn't big enough. Two days later I was in the queue in the bistro and she was regaling the woman trapped next to her.
'He brought home the tickets and showed them to me with such a self-satisfied smirk on his face…' She twisted to her right to inform the man pushing his tray along behind her. ''You'll have to go now Mother'… He always called me Mother… 'There's no refund once there's only two weeks to go.'
I scooped some Chop Suey into my plate and grabbed a bread roll. I'd planned to have Lamb Korma but it didn't matter. I'd spotted a table with only one chair free and plonked myself into it but I hadn't anticipated well enough. The chair directly behind me was empty. She headed straight for it.
'You know about the refund rule, don't you?' I heard her ask the next table.
'Why the dickens does she imagine that people in the middle of their holidays would be the least bit interested in the refund rule?' I wondered.
'If you just decide to change your mind, you lose your money… did you know that?' There was no response. 'But if you die… like Father did… you get it all back. The nice man at the travel agency explained it all to me when I took the tickets back as soon as I found out what he'd done.'
It wasn't until I was on the point of sleep that night that the discrepancy struck me. I had a fairly retentive mind. You need one, if you're going to follow a P.D. James and remember where the suspects' stories don't match.
'When had Mrs Goodness found out about the tickets and when had she taken them back?' I asked myself. At the pool she said she hadn't known about the tickets until she was sorting her husband's things out later, probably a few days after his death. It had to be, because he'd bought them after the two week non-cancellation period was already in force and there had to be time for the funeral, time for her to make the enquiries, pack, and be on board with the rest of us. Today in the bistro she said she took the tickets back as soon as she found out what he'd done - most likely very soon after he told her his news with the smirk on his face.
Relentlessly my mind processed everything she'd said. The contradictory versions of when she'd found out about the tickets weren't the only things that didn't ring true. That a travel agency would be so callous that they'd refuse to give refunds for both the dead man's ticket and that of his widow of only one week, surprised me. I remembered the helpful man in the agency. He was very busy but always thoughtful of his clients. If the refund policy were enforced to the letter, it wouldn't have been his doing; still, these sorts of decisions were probably down to some heartless senior executive.
Try as I did, the story of Mrs Goodness and her cruise tickets wouldn't let go. I hated it when this happened! My thought processes got wound up in the intersecting data of a set of circumstances and they probed and teased the details, trying to sort them out. It usually occurred three-quarters of the way through a good mystery. I'd put my finger in the book to mark the page, close my eyes and recall all the characters. I'd set them at the murder scene. I'd check their movements and motives. Often I had to leaf back through the pages to pin-point a particular word or phrase that might, or might not, be a clue. Then I'd take a stab at guessing who had done it and why. While all this was happening, sleep was impossible. It was the same thing now, only I didn't have any printed text to use for reference, and my memory was becoming untrustworthy.
I decided to clear my mind and tire my body with a brisk walk around the deck.
'The time span under consideration was two weeks,' I mumbled as I strode along. 'First, Hubby went and bought two non-refundable tickets for the cruise. That was a constant.' Then I recalled her voice penetrating my dreams as I lay beside the upper deck pool, saying 'The day he brought the tickets home, he died. I never knew anything about it until later.'
'But that wasn't what she said in the queue at the canteen,' I reminded myself. 'She said, 'He showed me the tickets. He had such a self-satisfied smirk on his face… and then he died, that same day… ' So there was another constant. Hubby died the same day as he bought the tickets. There was something more…
'You're missing something,' I nagged at my brain. 'What is it?'
My mind was log-jammed. I struggled to put it away, to forget it. I picked up my pace. It should be no concern of mine when it was that one of my fellow passengers found out that her husband had booked their holiday. Playing the sleuth was a mind game against a challenging author, an interaction with a clever writer. It was not to be confused with a real life experience! After all, plenty of men died of heart attacks when they were retired.
'Half of them probably popped off straight after having a fight with their partner,' I reckoned. 'And there certainly would have been a fight, at least a verbal one. What he'd done was in direct opposition to her wishes.' That thought brought me up with a start. He must've decided to take the lump sum settlement, to have the money to splash on the tickets. Two acts of defiance in the same short period! No wonder he'd over-stressed and gone to meet his Maker.
On the other hand, or rather, in the other corner, she'd have been fraught too.
Her whole narrow world was suddenly turned upside down. No more Darby and Joan lives, with him going to bowls and her eking out their super pension with her well-honed eye for a bargain. As she saw it, her fears that Father's access to big money would go to his head were realised. Most women I knew would jump at the chance to live it up on an ocean cruise for once in their lives. They'd accept it as a one-off fling, with the bonus of packets of holiday snapshots to upstage their mates when life returned to normal. But this wasn't the relaxed point of view from which Mrs Goodness operated.
'Hang about… ' I thought. 'She's living it up. The holiday he'd wanted so badly was denied him, but not her. And there's no doubt that she's making the most of it. She's into everything that's going. She must be wondering why she'd been so against it in the first place.' My thoughts continued to fly around, probing and testing. Every time they came back to the refund policy, I struck a sour note.
'How could they be so heartless? Maybe she just didn't understand properly.' I couldn't wake up the ship's administrative staff in the middle of the night to check it out, so I talked severely to myself, took a sharp turn around a corner of the deck and crashed into one of the ship's crew. He held me firmly to stop me falling down. We laughed as we disentangled ourselves and then I introduced myself and invited him to walk along with me for a full turn of the deck.
We met often after that. I was happy to settle for the company of an ordinary worker who could keep up his end of a conversation. He refused to do the Titanic thing on the bow but it didn't matter, he made up for it in other ways. I was living on cloud nine. At last the cruise had become the holiday of my dreams.
Late one night as we lay on adjoining li-lo's on a secluded portion of the deck, I reached over and twirled a tuft of his chest hairs between my fingers. Suddenly he asked me how I was enjoying the cruise.
'I'm surprised you ask!' I replied, tugging his chest hair gently.
'I didn't ask how you were enjoying… us. I mean has anything in the arrangements… or anyone of the crew or passengers upset you… made you feel uncomfortable?'
'No, of course not… well, not recently anyway.'
'I apologise for talking shop but I really would be interested to know.' He propped on one elbow and looked at me. 'The captain's had complaints about a real bore among the passengers. Apparently this widow keeps talking about refunds and the price of everything and how she never would've come on the cruise if she'd realised that the optional activities cost extra. We always have a few complaints from people who sign up for things without reading the form properly, but this woman is driving the Morale Officer crazy.'
Back the memories came, slamming into my mind like the Melbourne into the Voyager. I wanted to pour it all out but I pulled myself up short. No way was I going to make a fool of myself by putting my crazy suspicions out on display.
'Can I ask you a hypothetical?' I began cautiously. He nodded and listened carefully to my query about the situation of a new widow and the refund policy.
'No, that's incorrect. Either the widow is lying, and didn't check her situation at all, or she did ask but didn't listen to the reply properly. In the circumstances you've described, the company would be most sympathetic.' He sensed my reaction. 'Cynic! Okay, we're not altogether altruistic. Think what the media would make of it. Can't you see the headlines? 'Giant travel firm takes money from new widow. Dream holiday turns to Nightmare.' It'd be our nightmare, more like! Besides we have people on stand-by; these unexpected things always turn up. We understand that a new widow wouldn't want to go almost straight from the funeral to the ship!'
One new widow had.
I told him everything I'd overheard, including the conversation on the light rail back in Sydney. I said that I had a theory that something didn't add up but I kept qualifying what I said. Perhaps it wasn't surprising that a recently bereaved person got herself confused and thought she'd been told that she had to travel or she'd loose the value of her ticket.
My companion protested again that this wasn't the case.
'Anyway,' I rushed on, 'most widows would forego the cruise either way. Perhaps I read too many crime yarns, but I've got this suspicion that there's something sinister in the timing of the husband's death. The wife has at least two versions of when she found out about the tickets… but maybe she's just confused with everything happening so quickly. After all,' I put it to my interested friend,' if there was any hint of foul play, someone in their own circle would have noticed something. There'd be family, neighbours, friends… a family doctor. Even if my theory is right and in a rage she'd slipped a cocktail of medicines into his afternoon tea causing his heart to go into shock, someone on the spot would've thought the same thing and investigated.'
'I'm with you,' he said thoughtfully, 'up until you translate her rage into action. I've observed hundreds of couples on their retirement cruise. They fight in almost as many different ways as there are couples. Yelling matches are the most embarrassing for onlookers but I've heard some quietly spoken put downs that were as venomous as a Taipan bite. Body language is the most common form of control…'
He went on with his observations but I wasn't listening. My mind was locked in on an image. I saw the arthritic hands plucking at the latch of her bag. Her fingers were pick, pick, picking. I saw her companion's body slump and turn away. Thus she had controlled him… up until he went to town, cashed in his superannuation and bought the tickets. My sailor friend's comments had sent my mind racing off in new directions about the old couple. There were clues a good detective shouldn't miss. I remembered the vindictive tone of her voice when she said that he'd had such a smirk on his face when he showed her the ticket. Perhaps to the husband it had left him as the loving smile that went with offering a wonderful surprise! Even if it had been the smirk of the man with the power to dictate how their money and their futures were to be spent, there had been more than the usual degree of self-satisfaction in the wife's tone as she described the scene. To her it was a smirk that she wouldn't have to see again!
Then I had another flash! She'd been looking to the right when she said it. It was a genuine recollection. I remembered an episode in the TV series CSI - Crime Scene Investigation, when that aspect of body language was used to spot a killer. People look to the right when they recall, to the left when they create. I'd been lying at the pool edge when she'd been looking to her left and created the lie, saying, 'I didn't know anything about it until days later.'
I came out of my theorizing somewhat embarrassed. My handsome friend was shaking his head.
'You haven't been listening to me but I can tell that you haven't been idle. What've you come up with now?' My speculation got a mixed response.
'I take your point about the tone of voice but the looking right and left thing? I don't think that means much. I do know that most murders are committed by someone known to the victim,' he acknowledged, 'but men are more likely to be the perpetrators than women.'
I nodded. 'Hard to believe the nagging old woman lost it so completely as to enact her fury.' It was time for a reality check. 'It's almost as hard to believe as me being a genuine crime solver. If I did a fraction of the physical activity the PI's I read about undertake, I'd be the one having the heart attack.'
He put his finger gently on the tip of my nose and wriggled it.
'I'm not familiar with the detective books you read. Surely the key is the observation and the deductions that flow from them. I take you for a modern day Agatha Christie!'
'Then Agatha needs to take some time out.' I leaned across and pulled him close.
The next morning I was soaking up the sun when a shadow blocked out the light.
'Excuse me, madam,' my friend was always formal in public. 'Aren't you the lady who asked me the 'hypothetical' about a widow and the refund policy?' I looked up and he smoothly lowered himself down onto his haunches, crouching down beside me. 'I've just come from a meeting in the officers' ward-room,' he said quietly. 'The captain's been contacted on the ship to shore phone. There've been enquiries about one of our passengers and I remembered our conversation. I wonder if you'd come with me?'
When we docked no one was allowed to disembark. Rumours flew from one group of passengers to another at the speed of light. Two days before I'd told my story of overheard conversations and observations to the captain and the security officer. Soon afterwards I saw the same officer, now dressed in casual clothes, engaging in a chat with the new widow. The subject was the refund policy.
'It isn't fair! I'll end up loosing money. All these extras! The money from Father's refund should've lasted me the whole cruise. I had my ticket and I deserved a holiday with all the worry I'd had lately. The refund should've covered the extras….'
I watched as the detectives came up the gangway as soon as it was in place. They collected Mrs Goodness from the ship's brig. Television cameramen packed the bottom of the gangplank to take shots of the black widow, then when the rest of the passengers were allowed off, reporters hounded the departing passengers asking then what it was it like to share a cruise with a murderer. No one had a useable quote, or even an intelligent answer. There'd been no weapon, no rivers of gore, no blood curdling screams - not one ingredient of a good story. So the reporters had to look elsewhere. Next morning I read their report to my sleepy sailor mate.
'Ms Cheryl Goodness said she'd been outraged that her mother had gone cruising and was living it up, when her father was still warm in his grave. She'd insisted her brother go with her to the police and demand an autopsy. The body was exhumed and an analysis of the stomach contents confirmed her suspicions.'
'So Dad was overdosed,' he grimaced. 'You were right. Be pointless trying to hide anything from you, wouldn't it?'
'Yes, if you keep playing with the truth and can't stop giving out clues. I think hiding things is a mistake anyway. I reckon that's what killed him. If he'd been up front and said what he was going to do before he did it, then she'd have been angry, but she wouldn't have been outraged. They knew they were different people yet they didn't make allowances for those differences. She was a skinflint, into detail and counting the pennies. He'd known that for fifty years yet he unilaterally makes the decision that shatters her predictable world.'
'She knew he wanted to do this one extravagant thing. She should have given him some leeway.' I saw his struggle in his narrowed eyes and heard it in his tentative voice. 'I spend a lot of time at sea… away… '
'You know the expression - don't ask, don't tell? Can you live with that? I mean, as applied to both of us?'
The silence lengthened. Slowly he shook his head.
'I'd better go.'
'Right,' I said regretfully. 'No argument.'
'And no poison chalice,' he managed a grin.