William was born in the United Kingdom in 1938 but has lived in Queensland since 1968. Married to a retired schoolteacher and with one married daughter who is a psychologist, William lives in Brisbane, Australia.

A schoolteacher himself for twenty-five years, specialising in Foreign Languages and Classics, William decided in 1984 that someone else could do the next quarter of a century. He changed careers and worked for eighteen years as a probation and parole officer, although, as it turned out, there was little difference between being a schoolteacher and being a probation officer. Still the same challenge of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, only this time without textbooks and a syllabus.

In the mid 1990s William decided to turn seriously to writing. He attended a creative writer's course under the inspiring tutelage of Paulette Gee where he received an excellent grounding in the elements of the craft.

Several of his short stories have appeared in collections published in recent years by Paulette Gee's own Debut Publishing Company.

Nowadays William is a member of CrimeWriters Queensland and of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Qld). His particular interest lies in painting psychological portraits of the characters he creates.

Chapter 1

Gasthaus zum Goldenen Löwen, (The Golden Lion Inn), Obermühl, Switzerland, 1998.

Christ knows why the old railway builders felt they had to perch the station on a narrow ledge bloody miles above the town like that. The only way to reach the bottom was by riding in a cable car. Not that I’m afraid of heights, you understand, but it was a hell of a long way down from there and the cables supporting the car looked like thread from a cotton reel. It all looked pretty bloody flimsy to me. Like something a kid would throw together out of Lego or Meccano. The posters at the top station claimed the system had been working for over eighty years without an accident. That’s what they say, I thought. There’s always a first time.

The car swayed a couple of centimeters away from the platform’s edge when we stepped on board, before ever it moved out over the sheer drop into the valley. Only a gap of a centimeter or two, but enough to see empty space below you. Not very reassuring. I glanced anxiously at my brother, but he had his eyes tight shut.

‘You okay, Col?’ I asked.

‘Just don’t talk to me at the moment, d’you mind?’ he snapped. He was definitely not at his best.

As the car started its spidery descent down the cable, the dense forests of fir-trees far below us looked like toothbrushes with their bristles sticking upwards. Their pointy ends were waiting to spear us like chicken kebabs on a backyard barbecue if we fell. I was glad there was only going to be one more trip. That would be at the end of the week when we had go back up to catch the train to Milan.

‘It’s a hell of a long way down,’ said my brother, managing to squint out of one eye. Evidently he shared my opinion. ‘Who was the smart-arse who came up with a plan like that?’

‘You mean the plan to come to Switzerland or the plan we carried out back home in Australia?’

‘The plan to come here. We said we weren’t going to mention the other one.’

‘Okay. Sorry. Forgot,’ I replied. ‘Hey, you’re not going to throw up, are you? You’ve gone a funny colour.’

‘I shouldn’t have looked down,’ he said through gritted teeth. He swallowed hard. Several times, in fact.

I weathered the six-minute trip from station to town better than my brother did. For as long as I can remember Colin had been afraid of heights. In fact, he was afraid of a lot of things. He had been a pretty timid child at the best of times. But then, he never stood a chance. His confidence had been sapped very early in his life. My father hadn’t been able to intimidate me anywhere near to the same extent, especially after I finally got the better of him. But he had made Colin afraid of his own shadow.

Right from the moment the cable car swung out over the void, Colin didn’t look at all comfortable. His face looked more and more bilious the further we descended. He tried hard to look as unconcerned as the locals. It was the two nasty lurches over the support pylons that finally did it, though. At the second lurch, only a couple of minutes away from the end of the ride, my brother turned that awful green colour you sometimes see on the floor of a stagnant pond. His right hand gripped my knee so hard it hurt. I could see that he was continuing to swallow desperately to stop himself from vomiting, but he was fighting a losing battle.

When the cable car finally came to rest at the bottom station in the town square, he was the first one out of the door. I half-expected him to fall to his knees and kiss the ground like the Pope. But there wasn’t time. He made a dash for an ornamental shrubbery and emerged a little while later, still a nasty colour, but relieved of a burden and starting to revive.

We’re staying at the hotel that the airline booked for us. It’s a nice old inn just off the main street and it’s called the Gasthaus zum Goldenen Löwen: the Golden Lion. I say ‘nice’ because I mean it. It’s nice in the sense of decent, welcoming and unsullied. The exact opposite of the Duke of Connaught, back in Queensland, where we lived for all those years. That fucking hateful building - I wonder if they’ve pulled it down yet? The City Council has been saying for years they were going to widen the intersection. Let me get at it with a wrecking-ball or a bloody great bulldozer. I’ll do it for them. I’ll go through it slowly and methodically from end to bloody end, room by bloody room. Put all those ghosts to rest.

Same with the love-nest behind the Gold Coast. Same wrecking-ball. Same bulldozer. Flatten the lot. Harry and his black-spot. Amanda and her little golden dolphin on a safety-chain. Wherever Harry and Amanda are now, I am sure the temperature is pretty hot, stoking all those furnaces. I guess Colin and I’ll be stoking those same furnaces when our time comes, after what we did. Who knows? Who knows anything for sure in this strange world that God certainly screwed up when he made it. I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere near God when I am dead. He’s too dangerous. And once I’m dead, I’m dead, so it won’t matter one way or the other. My life will have come to a final full stop. The Afterlife, you say? Load of crap. Religious rubbish! The Soul, you say? A cheap invention for a shoddy purpose. No such thing. If you ask me, the soul and the conscience are a convenient way to divide our actions into what is called Good and Bad. And Good and Bad don’t exist, either, because the world is really only divided into what is socially acceptable and what isn’t. Or between what you can get away with and what you can’t. Which is why Harry and Amanda are dead and Colin and I are alive, well off and in a cozy Swiss hotel at this moment. And I’m in a mood to reminisce...



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