Life's Not Fair

Friday:

Scott let the silver dragon knocker fall against its polished strike plate for the third time. He shivered in the rain until the grand, black door of number 36 Oak Street swung open.

“Come in, come in, you moron! Why didn’t you use your key? You’re soaking!”

“I wasn’t sure if you were home. Didn’t want to just barge in.”

“Let me take that coat. Go through to the study. I’m set up in there with Jack and coke. I’ve been writing again.”

Ella hung up Scott’s dripping jacket and strode off down the hall towards the kitchen. Scott pulled off his wet Chelsea boots, ruffled the worst of the rain from his short, dark hair, and stepped onto the deep, chocolate coloured carpet of the study. He scrunched his socked toes into the luxurious fibres and looked around at the leather sofa, mahogany desk, and framed Monet prints. Scott could never afford anything this lavish, but then he had never been to university. He had never studied law. He had never earned as much as his sister.

Scott picked up Ella’s current Paperblanks notebook from the glass-topped coffee table, snapped the magnetic clasp open, and silently read the last half page of scribbled writing:

***

It wasn’t the first time Greta had considered poison. There were almost too many options, though. At least a knife was a knife. A swift fall down the spiral stairs could easily have been an accident. With poison there were slow acting options, fast acting options, tasteless ones, some that required disguising, some that lingered in the blood, some that were undetectable an hour after death. So many options. But whatever she decided, Keith had it coming. Greta lifted her fingers to her swelling left eye. What pathetic excuse would he make this time?

***

Poison. She’d be researching poison for this story. It was perfect.

Ella returned from the kitchen with a stainless steel ice bucket, just as Scott replaced her notes next to her Montblanc fountain pen. Who spent that much on a pen? And he knew she had more than one.

”Jack and coke?” Ella asked.

“I wouldn’t say no.”

Ella turned the antique-style globe in the corner of the room until England faced her. She clicked the clasp at the top and slid the world open to reveal a shelf inside, level with the equator. Removing a bottle of Jack Daniels from the hidden cabinet, Ella poured a generous measure into a crystal whisky glass. Finally she topped it up with coke and added a few ice cubes. 

“Still writing everything longhand?” Scott took his drink and sat back on the sofa.

“Yeah, I spend all day on a work laptop, and it makes my eyes hurt, just use my personal one for story research. Besides, it feels more natural to write creatively this way. My legal papers and court documents are always electronic. I don’t want my fiction to be so clinical.”

Ella sat down next to her brother and ran her manicured nails through her long black hair.

“What are you writing now?” Scott asked.

“Oh, I'm trying my first murder. Woman who kills her violent husband. But I can't get the twist right in my head and I’m umming and arring about the weapon she’ll use.”

“Revenge killing eh?" Scott rubbed his stubbled chin. "Interesting motive, revenge. Some people sit on their resentment for years, decades even, before they finally get satisfaction. Have you read The Count of Monte Cristo?”

“Of course! Brilliant book. But I think this woman is going to take fairly swift action.”

“Are all those notebooks full of stories?” Scott pointed to the sturdy shelf above the desk. There were fifteen or twenty Paperblanks books with different, shiny cover designs, lined up between a pair of heavy silver A-Z bookends.

“Most of them. A few are empty, not started yet, and the couple on the left-hand side, well . . .” she trailed off.

“Yeah, what are the ones on the left?”

“Well, I thought I’d try writing some memoirs. You know, about the family and stuff.”

“Why would you write about our family?” Scott slammed his drink down on a slate coaster and drew his fingers across his eyes to meet at the bridge of his nose. “It’s just lie after lie and a bunch of unjustified decisions.”

“I know.” Ella sighed. “I’m thinking of calling it: Life’s Not Fair. It’s a bit of a cliché, but it's still Mum’s catchphrase, and it fits the stories so perfectly.”

“Well, I don’t want my kids reading it. Ever. If you publish it, do it under a fake name.”

“I don’t plan on publishing anything. This stuff is just a creative release. You know, like your music?”

“Ok, but I’ll hold you to that. Anything happens to you, I’m burning all your notebooks.” Scott cut his sister a sly grin.

“I’ll leave them to you in my will,” she said. “You can do whatever you want with them.”

“Speaking of wills.” Scott turned towards his sister, looking directly into her pale face. “I spoke to Mum last night. She says she’s rewriting hers. Splitting everything fifty-fifty between us. Including whatever’s left of what she got when Dad died.”

Ella's eyes narrowed. “I know. I got the same call. I was going to talk to you about it, since, you know, Dad had wanted you to have everything. Mum’s naming me as the executor. She thinks that because of my legal background it will be less stress for me. Maybe she's right.”

“More like she thinks her useless son can’t handle it.”

“I know you feel like you've missed out on a lot, but they didn’t do it on purpose, not the way they saw it.” Ella sat back and sipped her whiskey.

“I was there you know, with her, in her room, when she called you yesterday. I heard what she said. That’s how much she cares, she talks about me as if I’m not even there. I may be a porter at Queen Mary’s hospital, but there’s no need for my own mother to treat me like staff.”

Ella placed her drink down on a coaster and put her head in her hands. “You heard everything she said?”

“I can quote it: You deserve half, Ella. If we’d ever planned to have a second child, then Scott might be in a different position now. But we didn’t, and we had to make a choice. We simply couldn’t afford to send you both away to study at the time, and he lost out. It may not be fair, but life’s not fair.”

“Well, she’s made up her mind. But-”

“-I need to go. The kids will be going to bed soon, and I try to be there to tuck them both in, not just the oldest one.”

Saturday:

If his mum was rewriting her will, there wasn’t much time to lose. Scott had to do something drastic, and fast or he'd miss out on half of his rightful inheritance. His late shift at Queen Mary’s didn’t start til 3pm. He had plenty of time to do his own research before work, while Ella was shopping in the city.

Letting himself into number 36 Oak Street, he took off his boots in the hallway and padded into his sister’s study. There it was, as always, her personal laptop, open and logged in on her mahogany desk. How many times had he told her about online security? Good job she never listened.

Scott pulled on some surgical gloves and spun a couple of times in Ella’s expensive leather chair. Then he checked her cookies and browser history and had a good look through her recent Google searches. He picked up her current notebook and skipped to the last page she’d written. They all had one thing in common. Strychnine. A nasty poison that caused a quick and painful death if given in high enough quantities.

Ella had done all the work for him. She’d even identified where to obtain such a poison. It was mostly used as a pesticide against unwanted birds and there was a farming supplies place two hours away that sold it in liquid form. 

Now, where was the final prize? Ella, having come to rely on a cleaner to do most of the housework, had, as usual, left the two empty glasses of Jack and coke from the night before on the coffee table.

Scott double checked his memory of the previous evening and concluded that Ella’s drink was the one on the right. He stood up, crossed the room, and bent down level with the glass. There they were; perfect fingerprints. A few seconds later, Scott had lifted one with Sellotape and stashed it carefully into an old cassette case, which he secreted away into his coat.

He headed into work, leaving Ella’s home office exactly as he had found it.

Once inside the hospital, he headed for the geriatric unit and, turning his key in the storeroom door, he looked both ways up and down the bleach-scented corridor. Then he stole himself inside, and flipped on the light. The small room had an array of medical equipment on offer, arranged on neat metal shelves. Scott knew exactly what he needed. He slipped a couple of twenty millilitre plastic syringes with hypodermic needles attached, into his pocket. He’d watched the nurses administer intravenous drugs into his mother's cannula a hundred times. How hard could it be?

Sunday:

Late shift again. Before it started, Scott pulled a black baseball cap down over his brow, stuck on a fake but convincing moustache, and drove out to Watermarsh Farm Supplies. He briefly wandered around the huge warehouse-style store, between the tools, feeds and hay nets before he purchased what he actually needed, for cash. “No receipt, thanks.”

Monday:

Scott’s rest day rolled around. Once the kids had gone to school and his wife had gone to work, Scott got busy trimming the golden privet hedge at the back of their terraced house. Today was the day.

Ella would go to the hospital to visit their Mum on her lunch break. She would arrive around 1.30pm and stay for 45 minutes. Scott knew the hospital routines off by heart. At 12pm the health care assistants would appear with food; Mum would refuse to eat much of it and complain that she was tired. The nurses would give her a light sedative around 12.15 and she would be asleep by 12.30, only waking when Ella arrived an hour later.

Strychnine took about fifteen minutes to have any noticeable effect, and about thirty minutes to kill. He had to time this carefully.

At 12.55 Scott parked his blue Polo in the visitor carpark of the Queen Mary. He was wrapped in a long, beige trench coat he hadn’t worn in years. He'd removed his staff pass from the dashboard and stuck it in the glove compartment. His mother’s private room was at the end of a corridor near an unalarmed fire escape, and that was the route he took to get to it.

He arrived at her door at 1.10pm exactly. The nurse’s station was at the other end of the landing, the four nurses there seemed busy with paperwork as he glanced down towards them. Even if they had looked up, he could have claimed to be visiting and abandoned his plan for another day. But that didn’t happen.

At 1.11 Scott entered the dimly lit room, gently closing the door behind him. His mother was sound asleep and breathing evenly. He took a seat next to her bed, pulled on another pair of surgical gloves, and removed a syringe and a small bottle of poison from a gift box he had hidden in his coat pocket.

A momentary doubt crept through his mind. Was this really a good idea? His mother stirred and he froze for a split second, before cramming his implements back into his pocket as an icy dread swept over his back and down both arms. She didn’t wake.

Scott checked the clock. 1.15. He had ten minutes to do it or back out. Hesitation would cost him sorely. His mother murmured in her sleep, what was she saying?

“Life’s not fair.”

“No, Mum, it isn’t,” he whispered back.

A moment later, Scott had removed the syringe from its packaging, filled it with poison, and inserted the needle into his mother’s cannula. He took a few heavy breaths and pushed the strychnine into her veins. He only had seconds to finish the job and get out. The drug would start to take effect within fifteen minutes and, Scott assumed, surely wake her up as her muscles began to spasm. But hopefully not before Ella arrived to take the blame for the whole thing.

The old cassette tape box had been the perfect place to hold the Sellotape. Scott removed the incriminating fingerprint with little trouble and pressed the sticky side of the tape down hard against the plunger of the syringe. When he pulled it away, he was satisfied that most of the print had transferred onto the plastic, and he carefully planted the tiny weapon under the mattress of his mother’s bed.

It was time to make a hasty exit. Within moments of checking the way was clear, Scott headed off down the fire escape stairs and walked back to his car. He waited until 1.35pm to drive away, to be sure that Ella wouldn't see him leaving as she arrived. He took a moment to imagine the panic and chaos that would be occurring about now in his mother's room. She'd be writhing in agony and struggling to breathe. How long would it take them to find the needle?

Leaving the hospital, strangely elated, Scott drove straight over to Oak Street and let himself back into Ella’s house. He would soon be rid of his evil mother and his selfish sister into the bargain.

Back in her study, in stocking feet, Scott removed the notebook with the tale about the strychnine poisoning from the coffee table – now she could no longer claim her internet history was research for a story. Also, as he couldn’t resist, he took the two notebooks from the far left of the shelf above her desk. “Life’s not fair,” he laughed to himself as he stuck his sister’s luxury-bound memoirs into his bag.

A quick stop off at the Cancer Research charity shop and he had rid himself of the trench coat. He headed home and put that morning’s hedge cuttings into a neat pile, topped off with a cassette box containing a piece of used Sellotape, a black baseball cap, a fake moustache, two pairs of surgical gloves, an unused syringe, and his sister’s latest work of fiction. A couple of matches were all it took to start the destruction.

As the flames licked up around the final bits of evidence, Scott opened his bag and removed Ella’s memoirs from it.

“So, Ella, what have you got to say about all this?”

He skipped to the end of the second book, ready to relish in the joy that Ella would be expecting even more money to add to her swelling bank account. She didn't know that she would miss out on the inheritance completely now that she had been well and truly framed for her own mother’s murder before the will was even updated.

Scott began to read:

***

Mum's right. Life’s not fair. It certainly hasn’t been fair to Scott. But perhaps I can do something about that. As her executor maybe I can influence how her estate gets divided up. I don’t know much about probate law, but I can look it up easily enough. Surely I can gift him my share. Maybe there’s a way to do it without him getting taxed twice. God knows I don’t need it. It’s just such a shame she’s already finalised the new will. She hasn’t got long left – but maybe tomorrow when I see her, I can persuade her to change her mind back to how Dad wanted things.