Murder Piping Hot

By Ann Morven

Mad bomber at large, bumbling amateur in pursuit! Folksinger Sheil B. Wright is sole survivor when a Scottish ritual is fatally disrupted in Australia's green Southwest. Sheil challenges pedantic police inspector Sheryl Holmes, descendant of the great Sherlock, finding clues in a lovesong and smutty verse by Robert Burns. Passions are unleashed. The killer decides Sheil must die.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darling Newspaper Press
• Release date: May 14, 2009
• ISBN: 9781452309668

Book preview

Murder Piping Hot

A thrilling whodunit

by Ann Morven

Mad bomber at large, bumbling amateur in pursuit! Folksinger Sheil B. Wright is sole survivor when a Scottish ritual is fatally disrupted in Australia's green Southwest. Sheil challenges pedantic police inspector Sheryl Holmes, descendant of the great Sherlock, finding clues in an old Scottish lovesong and smutty verse by Robert Burns.

Dangerous passions are unleashed, from history's Glencoe Massacre and from the modern trauma of Australia’s indigenous people. Then comes the horrendous truth as the killer decides Sheil must die.

©Darling Newspaper Press

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THE WANDJINA: sacred Aboriginal rock art.

The man, in life wherever placed

Hath happiness in store

Who walks not in the wicked's way

Nor learns their guilty lore.

-- Robert Burns

MY gut twisted when the knife-wielder declared he was digging a trench of gushing entrails. The grisly words accompanied the scooping dance of a ten-inch blade.

Onlookers, in evening dress, were grouped within Macarthur’s Great Hall. They growled in obscene anticipation. Gushing entrails, yum!

Again the threatening thrust above the victim, a pudding on a silver platter, and more visceral verse . . . Trenching your gushing entrails bright, like any ditch. And then, oh what a glorious sight! Warm, reeking, rich.

Standing in my overtight skirt of Woolworths tartan, near the doomed haggis, my face ballooned, my fingers wiggled, and my bagpipes waited to caterwaul. The guests saluted with their whiskies and chanted the litany:

Fair fall your honest, sonsie face,

Great Chieftain of the pudding race.

Big belly girthed in a kilt, Lord Macarthur glared and grinned, smoothed his fair and thinning locks, and boasted in a brogue adopted for the occasion: My famous ancestorr stole Spain's merino and introduced it to Austrrraalia. Ladies and gents, what have I personally given? Mineral riches is what. Ironore, nickel, gold. And most of all I have given myself.

With this the tartan tycoon made a final stab to conclude the slicing ceremony, and vanished in a blast that was no part of it, his fragmented flesh mixing noisily with the minced sheep's liver, barley and oatmeal. His remains, they said later, could not be separated from any piece of that dinner.

News headlines immortalised the exploding haggis. More to the point, they included a secondary snippet of informaton which, to me, was actually the most important: SOLE SURVIVOR FAT SHEIL

I think that's what one newspaper said, but I've never been able to find it in any of the archives. Maybe tormented memory plays tricks when a gal's nudging forty, or it could be that an accurate memory recalls only crazy thoughts that came amid the chaos.

Sheil mate, gerrup for cripes sake.

A human voice, a living voice. Blimey mate, you's heavier than a king boomer.

The banners of oblivion dissolve. The person likening me to a bull kangaroo heaves me to a sitting position, the mist becomes the black-moon face of Billy Boomerang, the gardener.

Glad yer alive, he grunts, but you blurry landed on me best bottlebrush.

A grumpy gorilla, this Billy, his potato nose and corrugated brow chiding me while I ache all over. Your plant saved me, Billy. Ouch! I had been trying to get up and this movement brought a terminal sigh from broken twigs beneath me in the soft flowerbed. I knew how they were feeling.

Mate, the gorilla complained, that bugger was just about to bud. Now you broke him.

I couldn't help it, okay?

Yet he continued his tirade of lament. I brung them seeds ten-thou blurry miles from Arabia. Grow-n-graft him beaut. Now your big butt squash him dead.

Wheest Billy! Lady Fiona's command came from a halo of silver hair in the shadows. Your banksia is the least of it. There are 18 people confirmed dead so far, including Macarthur. Go to the ambulance men at once and offer your strength in the rubble. There is a corpse they cannot reach.

Her words sent the slope-shouldered hulk scurrying away, and she turned her attention to me. You must forgive Billy. He’s a bit . . . let us say unworldly.

Since I'd slumped flat on my back again, and since she was at full vertical stretch, this command seemed to come from a long way up. He accuses the Almighty of racial bias in failing to create a black flower. And he is bent on redressing the balance. A government blunder, you see, granted him a study trip to the Middle East. Something involving desert flora. Now he dedicates the black banksia to his dear dead mother. Eight months gone but he only just found out. He'll name his precious sub-species in her memory.

She stooped to brush a bud from my eyebrow, coming nearer my level.

Unfortunately for Billy, but miraculously for you, your bulk crushed his best spinulose, the pride of his very first crop.

Black banksias? Unheard of colour, perhaps handy at funerals. I regarded the floral shambles, easing my knuckles away from a jagged leaf and noticing that someone had bandaged my right wrist rather professionally and, with less precision, had tossed a tartan rug over me.

The doctor said best to leave you. You were comfortable in the dirt and where else could we have put you? So many others. She sighed, a keening sound that made me shiver despite the rug. Dead or disfigured all.

She was taut as a celtic harp, her dinner gown a splendid white column but its front horribly smeared with blood and worse. Yet, at the edge of hysteria, she was somehow achieving control. In the murk and smoke she was a stoic statue of dignity. Her sash of dark-green plaid was secured by a huge circular brooch, an amber gem that flared with reflected lights, as did her eyes. These, I noted, were hard, green and fierce.

You flew, she marvelled. Through the french windows. Lucky they were wide open.

How long was I blotto?

More than an hour, but now, my precious bard, if you feel up to it the police wish to question you.

Her bony mitt gripped my arm and with surprising strength helped me from the horizontal. Once upright, I realised that the background hubbub tormenting my ears was the orchestra of emergency: first-aid crews, firemen, rescue diggers.

Come along, there's a brave bard. That word.Bard. I remembered she had given me this clan identity upon booking my pipes for the supper. She saw me more as an accessory, a social device, than as a person.

She steered her dented bard past gutted windows, the formal dining room. In this area of the Macarthur residence the roof had gone and beyond the skeleton of the glass doors – my miracle escape – was a smoking expanse of splintered masonry and timber in which teams were still probing.

Someone invisible, perhaps Billy, was hauling away a monstrous sideboard, the sort of furniture most of the world had abandoned circa Middle Ages. A burdened stretcher group, plasma bottle held high, trod the wreckage balancing a broken victim and betraying by their expressions an absence of hope.

To survive that, I grunted, my lucky star must be beaming and so must yours, Lady Fiona. I saw you leave the hall just before the cutting of the haggis.

This drew a bitter twist to her lips. The waiters were tardy. Aussie oafs the lot of them. And she an Aussie-born Scot. Just before the Immortal Toast, I counted four empty glasses. Unforgivable. I had gone to redress the oversight. But bards are magically blessed. A breed in touch with the stars, as you have said. You are alive, my bonnie, beyond all the odds. God be thanked for that.

It's thanks to your Aboriginal gardener, I told her, who holds our whitefella god to be imperfect.

My muse within, still suffering from shock, was crooning stupidly to a tune that would need more work:

Bill, Bill, may your black flowers fill

funeral parlours of the wooorld!

We were beyond the ruin of the great hall and near the mansion's front entry when Lady Fiona's voice interrupted my silent chanting: Inspector, here is the bard. Delivery accomplished, she let go my arm and hurried away.

THE INSPECTOR, from the rear, was camouflaged by neat shoulders and elegant buttocks but when she turned I saw a fashion frump. Her police-blue skirt drooped on one side where a holster held her mobile nokia. Near this dangled handcuffs.

As she took my hand I noticed frayed wool on the sleeve of her cardigan. This was pink, her only visible concession to womanhood. Its colour clashed with her uniform blouse of pale blue yet showed the same stains. Coffee, soup and toothpaste, I guessed, a haphazard tartan. Her tangled hair was not unlike the mess of thorns that had cushioned my recent landing.

Holmes, said her narrow lips.

Only the eyes smiled, mocking and superior, in a plain face without makeup. Sheryl Holmes, murder squad. The razor nose on that elfin face was from a comic book, and so were her next words: Wham, karrump, shebang!

Huh?

Violent noises, the tune of how you must ache all over. Nevertheless, I need immediate answers from you. She flashed another sneer, then covered her pixie mug with officialdom. You have kept me waiting.

I was out cold.

"So Doc said. But you're the only person who saw it – the only living person, that is. Tell me all while your memory is still fresh."

Couldn't forget. Every detail is etched for life. Look, I'll tell you everything later. Right now I want to go home.

You can't. This is mass murder and I want facts. First tell me about her.

The birdlike neck bent towards the departed Lady Fiona Macarthur, and the pricklebush above the inspector's scalp bobbed to confiding closeness. Her hubby blown to bits, yet she's calm as a fence crow.

Gotta sit down. As I slumped into a highback that was carved with thistles, she pointed to my left arm, elfin eyes aglow. Renowned as Scotland's own.

My elbow isn't that famous.

A Persian invention from the eighth century Before Christ, introduced to Scotland by the Romans. I refer to your bagpipes.

Amazing. I was still clutching the bag. As I leaned on it, a loyal death groan squeezed out.

I had it puffed up for some mighty skirls, I told her. It was tight against my chest. Maybe it met the force of the blast.

Like a car's airbag, yes, it is possible. A cushion of air.

I went through the window, landed in a bush. I'd been hired for the Burns Night.

As a folk musician, wild ethnic airs are not my first preference, and the pipes were hired, but being chronically overdrawn at the bank I grab whatever bookings my agent can find.

This job had me watching grown adults talk to a pudding. And me, Sheil B. Wright, respected Oz balladeer, playing tunes in the pudding's honour! Well, that is not so ridiculous when you're the piper they happen to be paying.

Ah yes, Burns Night, said Inspector Sheryl Holmes, into another mini lecture. "A Scottish festival, second only to their Hogmanay or New Year. It is, of course, a tribute to Rabbie Burns, their national poet. Ploughboy rhymer, late seventeen hundreds. A man's a man for all that."

When she paused for breath, I told her: "Lord Macarthur was reciting the immortal toast. A weird Scottish custom. They call it Ode To The Haggis."

January 25th. She confirmed the date from a wire-shielded commando watch that burdened her petite wrist. It is the poet's birthday. Sacred to Scots everywhere, even here in Australia. Are you Scottish? You've got the big hips to hang a kilt on.

My granny came from Glasgow, Inspector, but I'm true-blue Oz.

She glowered at the collapsed tartan bag beneath my elbow. What caused the explosion?

He stabbed the haggis.

Stabbed haggis. She raised a grubby notebook while her biro somehow added a splotch to her stain-friendly cardigan. I was reliving jumbled images:

Lord Macarthur's devilish face:

the smooth fatness of the haggis;

the squashed banksia bush;

Billy's accusing glare;

and, as I shuddered at the memory, Lady Fiona's icy smile. But was that before or after?

Lord Macarthur ripped into the pudding just before the explosion. I'm told they boil it in a disgusting bag of entrails.

Sheep's gut, muttered Holmes over her busy biro. Or sometimes the stomach of a cow. Go on, go on.

I saw steam where the knife went in, and there was a little red circle . . . they'd painted a target for him.

Target? Elfin ears twitched, eyebrows arched and her topknot jiggled. Who? Where?

Top of the haggis. Like with a thick felt-tip marker. Black circle with a red dab within, inviting the stab.

Her pert nose scoffed and I caught her ridicule.

It was a fun occasion, I stuttered. Lord Macarthur went along with the joke.

He went all right. A detonator inside the haggis?

But it was boiled. You can't make a stew of dynamite.

Oh?