BLURB

      Ronnie Collins is happily married with a gorgeous son.

      She loves her job in fashion.

      She's also naked, hungover and in a strange bed - and her problems have only just begun...

      Set in Melbourne and Sydney, Half Past Dead is Jane Clifton's debut thriller - comic, criminal and a little wicked.

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      Born in Gibraltar, actor and singer Jane Clifton has worked in show business for more than thirty years. She lives in Melbourne with her partner and two children. This is her first novel.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Special thanks to Georgia Chapman of Vixen for her help in researching the textile design aspect of this story. She let me wander around her workshop and answered all my inane questions with infinite patience. Thanks also to Dur-é Dara, Melbourne restaurateur and icon, for all things Malaysian, via 'the Ipoh connection'; Christos Vafeas for all things Greek; John Spooner for trying to crack the Age archives for me; Colin Talbot for all his elder statesmanlike advice and Barney McAll for Juilliard. I am grateful to my lifelong friend Jenny Keath for helping me tidy up the Sydney end of things and for just being there. And the Moonee Ponds Library for providing a peaceful workspace, away from the laundry!

      DEDICATION

      For Hank, my joy, Molly-Rose, my flower and Paul, my rock.

      And Mickey Camilleri, crush-buddy and true friend.

      CHAPTER ONE

      IT wasn't for the sex. She told herself that all along. She had a good sex life. A perfectly satisfying, regular and often thrilling sex life, even after many years of monogamy.

      A sex life that was, she admitted, largely confined to the bedroom, rather than the lounge-room floor or the shower or the kitchen table or just inside the front door and, these days, pyjamas were involved. A sex life with no urgency, not a lot of selflessness and far less creativity than those all-night marathons of the first couple of years.

      The back of her neck and her thighs were no longer the preferred targets for kisses - what kisses there were - and her toes were positively neglected. In fact, she would have to say that if her body were a football field, the midfield would be brown, dry and sandy with overuse while the wings, back and forward areas would be waist-high, lush and green.

      But for all that... she couldn't complain. Sex for her was open all hours, safe and savagely efficient. God knows, some of her female friends hadn't had so much as a cuddle with a man in over a year or, worse still, had almost given up hope.

      Intelligent and financially independent, even the good-looking ones made other arrangements, went out with women or the occasional gay 'handbag', took pottery courses, did intensive, bone-draining yoga classes and joked about their vibrators.

      And there she was, knocking it back some nights because she was too tired!

      So, it wasn't for the sex, Ronnie reminded herself as she looked down at the corpse of Lawrence Konitz sprawled across the lino, right where the mail would have dropped through the slot.

      He was dressed in the same cream silk pants and pale blue shirt he'd been wearing the night before, but he was barefoot, lying face down, his right leg bent at an odd angle with the foot caught under the left thigh. His left arm extended past his head, his right arm tucked under his body.

      Ronnie couldn't see his face, but a dark red stream was seeping out from under his right armpit and forming a little pool in which a lone fly was showing a great deal of interest and buzzing out a general announcement to its extended family.

      His body lay still, but she was not about to run over and check his pulse or hold to his mouth the small mirror one always carries for such emergencies. And she wasn't going to scream. They only did that in films and usually out of shot.

      No, she was going to stand exactly where she was, paralysed with fear. She felt she could handle that.

      A violent spasm had woken her earlier; one of those moments of semi-consciousness when, in your dreams, you trip and fall and your body jumps as if riddled with bullets as your jaw snaps your teeth together on your tongue.

      Groping for the bedside clock, Ronnie succeeded only in sending it clattering to the floor, spewing batteries in all directions. Somewhere, far below her, a door slammed, followed by the sound of a car firing up outside and taking off at high speed.

      Retrieving the fallen clock with an outstretched arm, she saw the time of 8.37 a.m., and by then it was too late. If only she had woken at seven or, even better, if she had never fallen asleep.

      If only: the story of her life.

      A quick glance at the headless pillow beside her assured Ronnie that she was alone, but it took several minutes for her to work out where she was and in what state, both emotional and geographic. It took longer to remember how she had got into that state.

      Firstly, she was naked. Secondly, and most unfortunately, she was not between the sheets at number 37 Wakelin Street, Yarraville: the address which had appeared on her tax return for the last seven years and at which she resided with Boyd, her husband of eleven years, and her nine-year-old-son Matt.

      It was entirely probable that she was in the bedroom of Lawrence Konitz, a man who, up until about five hours ago, she could have sworn she knew quite well, but now, after taking in her surroundings, she was far from sure.

      Ronnie gazed with one bleary eye at the piles of books and magazines stacked haphazardly on makeshift shelves of plank and brick, at the clothes that spilled from every drawer, cascading over clusters of empty beer cans and an old take-away container still in its plastic carry-bag stained with reddish-orange oil. She tried to square this with the altar to anal retention that was Lawrence's desk, situated a paper-plane flight away from her own workspace at Arthouse Studios.

      Lawrence was based in sales and marketing and had little to do with the artistic side of Arthouse Studios textile design business. Even so, Ronnie would never have imagined his home to have been so devoid of style. The early morning sun, piercing the chipped, too-small bamboo blind, threw irregular bars of light across dusty, picture-free, apricot walls huddled around irregular, unpolished floorboards. This was a room for a short tenancy; the waiting room of a country railway station; a kidnapper's lair.

      It smelled stale, unventilated, with a faint trace of dog.

      And the shoes. Imeldas of shoes. Blacks and browns, brogues, tan, grey, spats and trainers, elastic-sided, purple suede, thonged and buckled, tyre-soled, winklepickers, Birkenstock, Niblick, Blundstone and Docs, swoosh and three-striped canvas, lace-up knee-highs with beaded fringes, red and white cowboy boots jewelled with aquamarine, spike-soled and loafers, patent-leather pumps, clogs, massage sandals and dozens of black cotton happy shoes.

      A field of shoes. A shoedrift. All worn, creased and down at heel, and covered with a fine patina of dust and the promise of a strong smell. Unpaired. Like lost souls in a singles bar looking for Mr Right (or Miss Left as the case may be). Your partner for life just a few feet away, but you'd never know in this crowd. Lonely shoes, pointing in all directions, unable to make a decision.

      Who would have thought he'd have so many shoes? She hadn't noticed that he wore a lot of different pairs, and shoes were something she noticed. You can tell a lot about a person from their choice of footwear.

      'Never trust a man in white shoes,' her mother had cautioned. 'Pimps!'

      In her formative years Ronnie had heeded this