Oh Matilda: Who Bloody Killed Her? Chapter 15

What would James Bond do? We’re about to find out as journalist Charles Wooley takes up our novel’s gripping summer story.

 

This is ‘summer reading’ like nothing you’ve read before: a diverse field of writers collaborating on a novel that will captivate you through summer.

Each author had just three days to write their chapter, with complete freedom over story and style; it’s fast, fun and very funny.

To start from the beginning, go to Chapter 1 or ohmatilda.com.au

Today, journalist and writer Charles Wooley continues the story with Chapter 15.

By Charles Wooley

He surfaced abruptly.

According to his watch it was not quite four o’clock in the morning yet McCredden was wide awake though not yet sober after a lost day of drinking.

The window was shuttered but shafts of moonbeams pierced the darkness through gaps in the wooden louvres.

Lights danced and sparkled on the polished mahogany blades of the large fan rotating soundlessly overhead.

Slowly he took things in.

Moonlight must mean a clear sky.

Then he heard the silence.

After days of incessant raging winds, horizontal rain, and the endless clattering and banging of the storm …. now there was nothing.

Either he was deaf, or the storm was over.

The sudden silence must have woken him.

Listening harder there was one sound: the muffled, distant and oddly reassuring drone of the generator. It was a steady heartbeat in this world of violent death into which he had stumbled.

He remembered why he had got so drunk. Engelbrecht, the island’s manager, had been murdered.

He had been McCredden’s prime suspect with his bogus “I know nothing” air of confusion and bewilderment.

Besides, the name Engelbrecht had the theatrical ring of classic villainy.

The question was, with Engelbrecht eliminated, who was now the killer and who the next victim?

And God knows what else had happened while McCredden had been hiding in the bottom of a bottle.

He groaned his first words before the dawning of the new day. “Bloody hell.”

Going back to sleep was not an option. He was too hungover and on edge.

While the change of weather suggested the chance of rescue it did nothing to allay his growing tension.

Lying there he felt a tightening of his scrotum and some worrying contraction in that general area. He was starting to hyperventilate and to sweat between the buttocks, always signs of rising anxiety levels, usually reserved for opening nights of live theatre or meetings with his taxation accountant.

Or divorce lawyers.

Marooned on a remote island with a bunch of self-centred egomaniacs and a crazed killer who was knocking them off, one after the other, who wouldn’t have a panic attack?

He reconsidered his earlier notion that he was caught up in a reprise of Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’?

But all of Christie’s victims had been scumbags. They deserved their punishment.

“Why the hell am I here?” he protested from his sweaty bed. “Apart from some notably bad behaviour in restaurants, some minor infidelities and most of the seven deadly sins, why me?”

He took a long slug from his bedside bottle of world-beating Tasmanian Lark Whisky. The tasting notes promised vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce and cherries and ‘a tinge of mossy, medicinal vegetation’.

He needed medicine.

Soon he was up, anxiously pacing the room and desperately reviewing the script so far. It was full of holes.

Resorting to his craft, forensically he prepared his case, just like the courtroom lawyers he had played so many times.

His Atticus Finch had been a triumph in Melbourne thirty years ago.

Or was it Shepparton?

Another long draft of the Lark and he was back: centre stage and spotlit only by moonbeams.

He enjoyed the theatre of the courtroom where barristers and actors have so much in common.

“If it pleases the court, my client admits Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust and Gluttony but not Sloth.

“In mitigation he is up and out of bed even before the sparrow has farted.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is hardly the behaviour of a sloth.”

The old actor, like so many of his kind, was given to therapeutic soliloquies, especially in extremis. And his current situation certainly was literally ‘at the point of death’.

And yet?

He recharged his glass of Lark and switched roles to the sceptical Lieutenant Columbo.

He had once studied old videos of Peter Falk when auditioning for a detective role. Unsuccessfully as it turned out.

“Just one more thing …

“…. what do you think the movie director Bradley Champion meant after Matilda’s body had been found when he said, ‘We have a murderer among us, which, while scary, also presents opportunities.’

“His leading lady is dead, and he thinks there could be opportunities?

Certainly not some crumb-bum-two-a-penny ‘true crime podcast’ recorded on his iPhone?

It’s gotta be more than that don’t ya think?”

Yes, Columbo was right. Bradley Champion, that fading impresario, had to be up to something.

Was Bradley, like Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest (a role McCreddin had played twice) toying with his castaway victims in some malevolent and magical way?

But given Champion’s apparent mental disintegration, had it all spun dangerously out of control?

Whatever. McCredden reminded himself that a television crew had landed on the island and he was now up for yet another starring performance.

Even if it proved to be his last.

To settle his rising excitement, he brewed a soothing cup of English breakfast. He liked his tea hot strong and black and this morning with another big shot of Lark Cask Strength 58% Whisky.

He continued his single malt soliloquy: “What exactly is rotten in this state of Denmark?”

He let the question echo for a moment.

“Well, the whole damned thing is too convenient. A bunch of ghastly but admittedly entertaining characters thrown together in a life and death situation.

That’s all well and good in fiction, but in real life it never happens.”

“Wait a minute,” interrupted the quiet voice of a rarely heard, diffident McCredden. “What about that South American football team whose plane crashed in the frozen wastes of the high Andes. They ate one another.”

“But they were hardly entertaining,” insisted the familiar voice of arrogant McCredden.

“Off the field they were just a bunch of hungry boofheads with little to say for themselves.”

“That’s a bit hard,” cautioned the judicious McCredden.

“Even Bradley Champion could hardly make MasterChef with a Ragout of goalie and a Feijoada of fullback.”

“Whereas?”

And there, in the synchronicity that sometimes comes with overindulging in expensive whisky, the two McCreddens chorused.

“Whereas, what’s happening here I might find quite entertaining were I not about to be murdered.”

He felt so much better now the single malt soliloquy was again working its wonders.

A favourite McCreddenism was that talking to himself was often the most enlightening conversation he would have all day.

But this time he was wrong.

Today a revelation was in store, way beyond his wildest whisky soaked imaginings.

Parting the wooden louvres he peered out at the world.

A pale dawn was gathering over the island and a rising tide was pushing piles of storm flotsam high up the beach.

It was time.

Steeled with a parting shot of Lark, he determined to move the story along.

Or die in the attempt.

Across the wide airy colonial veranda and over the debris strewn lawn he strode, only a little wobbly, in the direction of the sound of the generator.

That seemed a reasonable place to start inquiries. Down in the engine room.

In the freshness of dawn after a storm, the world had been created anew. On the tip of every leaf, tiny water droplets sparkled like baubles in the slanting early morning light.

McCredden felt recharged and resolute, at least until the Lark would wear off.

A new day, a new man and a new role.

For the first time he was playing secret agent 007 …. and he could even hear the theme tune.

As Bond scanned the generator deep in its concrete bunker, he discerned two underground conduits leaving the site. One headed back to the resort. The other, much newer, headed in the opposite direction deep into verdant bush.

007 flared his nostrils. He would follow that one.

Moving swiftly through the jungle, like a panther in implacable pursuit of the scent of quarry, Bond soon reached a high security fence of thick steel mesh topped with strands of unbreachable shiny razor wire.

The place was unwelcoming. Large signs warned in red letters, DANGER, HIGH VOLTAGE. NO ENTRY.

Bond was now missing the reassuring shoulder-holstered heft of his 7.6mm Walther PPK as he surveyed the formidable fortifications behind the wire.

The recently built, large, squat, solid raw concrete blockhouse was topped with an array of communications antennae and a satellite dish.

To 007’s experienced eye the equipment was undamaged by the storm. But it did strike him as suspicious that despite the appearances of a strongly fortified top-secret military listening post, the security gate was invitingly wide open.

As was the massive steel door to the building itself.

Bond narrowed his eyes.

Was it a trap?

In a lifetime of playing many parts, McCredden was still annoyingly haunted by the long public memory of one silly role he preferred to forget.

Very early in his career, he had narrowly beaten a young rival, Bryan Brown, to the starring role in a television commercial for a most versatile carving knife.

Embarrassingly, he had shouted: “But there is more!”

And now, indeed there really was.

Standing in the threshold of the fortress, apparently back from the dead, fresh and beautiful as the morning, was a smiling Matilda Meadows.

“Hello John McCredden. We have been expecting you. What took you so long?”

Oh Matilda is continuing through to mid-February with acclaimed authors Nikki Gemmell, Siobhan McKenna and Meg and Tom Keneally, among others, to contribute chapters. Join the fun with Chapter 1 or at ohmatilda.com.au

Charles Wooley is a celebrated journalist and writer best-known for his work on the ABC and Channel 9’s 60 Minutes.