Dead Man's Chest (5 page)

‘So where do you live then?’

‘In a tent, Guv’nor, in the backyard. It’s all right in summer,’ Tinker told Phryne. ‘I could bring a blanket and stay here, Guv’nor, if you want to have a man in the house. I could stay in the Johnsons’ old room. Not to mess up your nice house, like.’

‘I think we could do better than that,’ said Phryne. ‘Move one of the iron beds from upstairs, get Dot to organise you some linen and so on, purchase a pair of pyjamas, which you will wear, and unfortunately that includes a bath every Saturday night and one immediately before you put your new shirt on. Is that fair?’

‘Yes, Guv’nor! But I got no money, Guv’nor!’ he told her, shamefaced.

‘No matter, I have. Dot will take you down to the shops and buy some clothes. But hang onto your present garments. They will make a very good disguise. Where do you line up in the seven children, Tinker?’

‘I’m the eldest, Guv’nor,’ he said. ‘Then there’s sisters all the way down to little Albie and Tommy and . . .’

‘I see. Can your mother spare you?’

‘If I’m bringing in some cash, Guv’nor, she’ll be jake. She was real cut when she thought I was going to get the sack. We got to stash the rent money, see, to last us through the winter. There ain’t no trippers in the winter. And Mum can’t work like she used to, since the last baby.’

‘All right. Do you want to work for me, Tinker?’

‘Yes, Guv’nor!’ His eyes burned hot with adoration.

‘You have to keep anything you find secret, you understand? No boasting to the other boys, no little hints about how much you know, no gossip about my household.’

Tinker stood to attention.

‘Lips are sealed, Guv’nor!’

‘All right then, it’s a deal,’ said Phryne, extending her hand to be shaken. ‘Now we have to make a plan. Sit down—it’s all right, the chair covers are washable. Ah, tea. Hello, Dot, did you finally get some rest?’

‘Yes, Miss, until that cop turned up.’ Dot sank down into one of the easy chairs. ‘What did he want?’

‘To tell us that the Johnsons had ordered a carrier to take their furniture away and that no further action was to be taken.’

‘What, even though they left their little doggie they were so fond of?’ demanded Dot, outraged.

‘Even so. I ushered the lad out before I clipped his ears, as clipping the ears of the constabulary seldom profits an investi- gator. I have taken Tinker into my household. This is Miss Dot, and you will do as she says,’ Phryne introduced them.

‘H’lo,’ said Tinker, looking down.

‘I’m sure you’ll be a good boy and help Miss Phryne,’ said Dot, despite inner misgivings. The boy was clearly a guttersnipe. On the other hand, Miss Phryne was very perceptive about people. He might have hidden depths. Well hidden. But Dot’s not to reason why. Poor boy could do with some feeding up, that was plain.

‘Oh, yes, Miss,’ said Tinker.

Ruth brought in tea. They ate her banana bread. They drank. Tinker managed without spilling anything or dropping crumbs on the carpet.

‘Right,’ said Phryne, producing a sea-green notebook and unscrewing the top from her fountain pen. ‘Here is what we know.’

In an hour, they had laid out a comprehensive document. Phryne read it over then put the lid back on her pen.

1. The Johnsons were quiet people with no known vices.

2. They seemed happy with their employer, Mr Thomas, who as far as he knew lent me a house with devoted and stable staff.

3. They apparently ordered a van from Ellis and Co, Point Lonsdale, and put all of their worldly goods, and a lot of food, on board.

4. They left not a rack behind except a scatter of oddments and their beloved little dog, Gaston.

5. No one saw them leave? Check this, Tinker.

6. What was the destination of the van? Check this, Phryne.

7. They left the back door open.

8. They put the Boucher and the Chelsea figures in the wine cellar—for safekeeping, perhaps? And they didn’t touch the wine when they were looting the house.

9. They gave no notice, as far as we know, to Mr Thomas, who is out in the backblocks and cannot be contacted. And not due back for several months. Talk to his university colleagues? Phryne.

10. The house was not ransacked. There are a lot of nice things here, and no sign that the upper floor has even been entered.

11. Police have decided that no further action need be taken. Idiots.

‘As nice a little puzzle as Dr Thorndyke ever solved,’ said Phryne with satisfaction.

‘And no murders,’ replied Dot, fervently hoping that this was so.

‘So far,’ said Ruth. Intercepting a stern glance from Phryne, she added hastily, ‘My dinner’s all ready to go in the oven, and now I’ve got to take Jane swimming,’ and she collected her sister, despite her perennial protest that she’d come when she finished her chapter.

‘It’ll be here when we get back,’ soothed Ruth as she led her towards the stairs to change into bathing suits.

‘The sea would still be there when I finished my chapter . . .’

‘What do you think’s happened to the Johnsons?’ asked Dot, really wanting an emollient answer. She did not get one.

‘I can’t imagine,’ replied Phryne. ‘Now, if you would, Dot, go down to those shops again and buy some respectable clothes for this ragamuffin. Shirts, you know, and underwear and so on. I’ve got an account at the draper’s. Or I could go myself,’ she suggested. ‘If your feet are still sore.’

‘No, no, my feet are fine, that nice lie-down was just the thing,’ said Dot quickly. The Lord alone knew what Miss Phryne might buy if set loose in a draper’s shop.

‘Good, then I will possess myself of the telephone and see what I can find out amongst the intelligentsia.’

She was aware that Tinker was at her side, quivering slightly.

‘Tinker?’

‘Guv’nor, if you want me to go about finding out things, it would be good to have a bike.’

‘Yes?’ asked Phryne, wondering how far the young man would push his luck.

‘Only Jack said he had an old one he could let me have for five shillings. Needs new tyres but it’ll be bonzer once I scrape off the rust and give it a good polish. I could get about a lot quicker with a bike, Guv’nor.’

‘So you could.’ Phryne reached for her purse and counted out ten shillings into the grimy hand. ‘Buy new tyres and a tin of polish, too. That’s an advance, Tinker. You’ll have to pay me back sixpence a week.’

‘Right you are, Guv’nor!’ Tinker went to the door with Dot, walking on air. A bike meant the difference between employment as any kind of messenger and penury and a monotonous diet of porridge, bread and tea in the winter. ‘You beaut!’ said Tinker, and Dot smiled at him. With a comprehensive bath and some new clothes, he might be quite personable. And with him sleeping in the Johnsons’ rooms, there would be a guard on the back door. Besides, Dot loved shopping, and had now decided on the purchase of the ivory dress with the appliqué. This task took her back to the very shop, hopefully before someone else had had time to buy it.

In the distance they saw Jane, accompanied by Ruth, running down the hill towards the baths. No green-sickness for Miss Fisher’s girls. Dot led the way into the draper’s, feeling pleased with the world.

CHAPTER FIVE

Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?

Job 41:1 The Holy Bible

Phryne pushed back her chair and lit a gasper.

‘That,’ she told Ruth, ‘was a wonderful dinner. The soup was delicate, the roast lamb superb, the vegetables succulent and the apricot cream positively adorable. Well done, Ruth dear. Applause, please,’ she requested, and the company, including a very clean Tinker in a blinding shirt, applauded. ‘Now, we need to settle what we want to do,’ Phryne continued. ‘You are not going to cook every night, Ruth, unless you want to. What do you want?’

‘I love cooking,’ said Ruth. ‘But I need a kitchen maid. It’s not fair to drag Jane away from her books and Tinker is going to be working for you.’

‘True. But if we find a kitchen maid, would you like to continue?’

‘Yes, Miss Phryne, except maybe I could cook dinner for say five nights and then have two off? There are lots of good restaurants in Queenscliff, they say.’

‘Every one of the big hotels boasts of their chef,’ Phryne responded. ‘That sounds fair. Make it four and three, eh? And if at any time you want to throw your copy of
The Gentle Art of Cookery
at the wall, we can go and buy fish and chips down at the harbour. Deal?’

‘Deal,’ said Ruth promptly.

‘Now as to the Johnsons. I have been talking at wearisome and probably very expensive length to the grave and reverend signors of the university and it appears that no one knows where Mr Thomas is. He has a favourite tribe, it seems, who tell him secret anthropological things, and he doesn’t want to share them with anyone else. This sort of thing is common in universities, apparently. “Like a dog with a bone,” one gentleman informed me. However, I have got a couple of telegraphic addresses, and I shall try sending messages tomorrow.’

‘What about the locked room?’ asked Jane eagerly. She was forbidden to read at dinner and had actually been listening.

‘Ah, yes, the locked room. Not yet,’ said Phryne affectionately. ‘First we need to survey his own literary works, which means going through all these books, which means you and me, Jane. Ruth and Dot will be helping Tinker to set up his room. By the way, Tinker, you have sole charge of poor Gaston. He knows you. Keep him with you. If he gets out and comes back bemired, you know who is going to be washing him.’

‘Yes, Guv’nor, it’ll be me,’ said Tinker, unfazed. He had washed Gaston once and he could do it again. Besides, the little dog would be company. Tinker had never slept solo in all of his sixteen years. Although he had hated the stuffy family tent packed with humanity, he didn’t know about being alone. Still, he was now the proud possessor of a job, a lot of clothes, a very short haircut, and a bike which would be sparkling once he had scraped and sanded all the rust off it. Tomorrow he’d give Mum his first week’s wages, which Phryne had advanced for that purpose. He could not, offhand, imagine that he could be any happier.

Phryne and Jane began at one corner of the library and scanned shelves.

‘Here’s biology,’ remarked Phryne. ‘Tulloch, MacKay. All the texts. Darwin—looks like a complete collection. Even
The Voyage of the Beagle
.’

‘I’ve got chemistry here,’ said Jane in reply. ‘Your favourite Glaister,
The Power of Poison
. University textbooks. Botany.
Indigenous Dicotyledons of the Otways
. A rather good old
Herbal
. Gerard. And here are Culpeper’s
Complete Herbal
and
English Physician
. Hmm. He says that mint is a refrigerant. We’ve just been eating refrigerant herbs. I don’t feel any cooler, though.’

‘But think how hot you might feel if you hadn’t been eating mint,’ Phryne told her. ‘Stop reading and keep scanning, Jane, if you please. I’ve moved on to mathematics and chess. All Greek to me. Iris on auction bridge.
A Book of Games
. Music—opera plots, various analysts, life of Diagalev,
Ballet for Beginners
. Cultured sort of chap, our Mr Thomas. What have you got?’

‘Astronomy. Advanced, bound papers. How interesting!’

‘Later,’ said Phryne, cutting off a stream of information at its source. ‘Here are classics—Roman plays, Juvenal, Lucan. And the Greeks—Aristotle, Socrates, Plato. Politics. We have Thomas Paine. We have
Das Kapital
. In German. We have Engels’
Condition of the Working Class in England
. Much more readable, by the way, than the master Marx. What have you got, fellow librarian?’

‘Children’s books,’ said Jane. ‘Fairy tales.
Mother Goose
.
The Wind in the Willows
. I like this one.
The House at Pooh Corner
, just published. I’ll set that aside to read later. Lots of these are new.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Phryne.

‘They smell new,’ said Jane. ‘Never been opened, I’d think. He must have laid them in for someone’s children.’

‘He does lend the house,’ agreed Phryne. ‘Up here I’ve got three-volume novels—
The Rosary
by Florence Barclay,
The Daisy Chain
by Charlotte M Yonge. I read them when I was your age, Jane. Reliable read and they did go on for ages.’

‘Like those all-day suckers,’ said Jane wisely. ‘They don’t taste all that good but they do last all day.’

‘Precisely,’ said Phryne.

There was a crash, a thud, and a lot of creaking from the luggage hoist.

‘That will be the iron bed for Tinker,’ said Jane, not taking her eyes off the shelves.

Molly began to bark hysterically.

‘And that will be the escape of Gaston from the servants’ quarters,’ said Phryne, weighing
The Descent of Man
in one hand.

Something scuttled into the library and hid under the couch.

‘Gaston,’ said Jane, walking over to the door and shutting it. ‘Poor little creature. I wonder how the Johnsons came to leave him behind?’

‘He might have leapt out of the truck,’ said Phryne. ‘Here’s anthropology, Jane, come and see. Dogs do tend to lose their heads when anything strange happens, you know.’

‘I know,’ said Jane. ‘Ooh! Here’s one by our own Mr Thomas himself.
Journeys in Arnhem Land
. And here’s another,
Fetish and Mystery in Arnhem Land
.’

‘Fetish? Isn’t that African? I seem to remember Mary Kingsley talking about fetish religions. Can you see a copy of
The Golden Bough
?’

‘Here, all three volumes of it.’ Jane hefted down the third, which had the index.

Phryne scanned rapidly. ‘Fetish Kings in West Africa,’ she read. ‘Nothing about Australia. Never mind. No doubt Mr Thomas will enlighten us. Gosh, listen to this from the much-respected Mr Frazer: “Amongst the aborigines of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are magicians, and not one is a priest: everyone fancies he can influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but no one dreams of propitiating the gods by prayer or sacrifice.” Well, Mr Frazer, that seems a little harsh.’

‘Why?’ asked Jane, reaching for the second volume.

‘Assuming that if you don’t sacrifice to the gods then you are a rude savage.’

‘I’m a rude savage,’ said Jane unhesitatingly.

‘Me too. Though I would not advise rubbing ochre onto the person. I once got coated in red mud while caving, and it might have been easier just to apply another coat than get that muck out of my hair. It took hours. Almost caused Dot to swear.’

‘No!’ objected Jane.

‘Well, she blessed me a lot of times in the name of various saints and was distinctly heard to say “drat” more than once. That’s strong language for Dot. There’s a whole shelf of works on the Phoenicians in England here. It’s something of a fad at the moment, I believe.’

‘Phoenicians? Like in Ancient Greece?’ Jane climbed up onto a chair to reach the higher shelves.

‘Yes, those Phoenicians. They would travel anywhere to sell something or buy something. The Afghans of the ancient world. They traded around Africa for gold and ivory. They might have got as far as Cuba. They certainly bought their tin from Cornwall. Tin being essential to the manufacture of . . .’

‘Bronze,’ said Jane quickly.

‘Good! And since it was the Bronze Age, they’d feel silly without any bronze. They’d have to call it the Copper Age, and I don’t believe copper is at all useful for weapons.’

‘Too soft,’ said Jane. ‘Mind you, bronze is mostly copper with about ten percent tin thrown in to harden it.’

‘And it is beautiful,’ said Phryne, lifting down her armload of books and offering a hand to her daughter.

‘Oh,’ said Jane, who had never understood the term. ‘I suppose so, Miss Phryne.’

The sofa and the table were piled with anthropological texts.

‘Well, there’s our research work,’ said Phryne.

‘What are we looking for, Miss Phryne?’ asked Jane, taking up a weighty tome and wondering where she had left her notebook and pencil.

‘Any clue as to the present or prospective whereabouts of Mr Thomas, or his destination, or even his closest allies,’ Phryne told her.

‘Ah,’ said Jane, who had found both notebook and pencil keeping her place in
The Mystery of the Gilded Bones
. Detect- ive stories could wait. This was a real-life mystery. Jane sat down to read through Mr Thomas’s first book. Phryne took the second. Jane was supplied, by Ruth, with a night-time cup of cocoa, and Miss Fisher took another gin and lemonade.

Dot, Ruth, Tinker, Molly and Gaston (retrieved from under the couch and comforted with a biscuit) retired to the cosy confines of the kitchen and left them to it. Gaston was not happy. The kitchen was his kitchen, but the familiar furniture had gone and the human smells were different. He yearned for his people. He shivered, though the night was warm.

Then the boy called him. The boy had not been a close friend but he belonged to the part of Gaston’s life which had contained affection and biscuits. He trotted into the bedroom, where the boy lay in a bed made up suitably with pillows, sheets and blankets. They, too, had the proper scent of the household.

Tinker was uncomfortable. The house was making creaking noises and something appeared to be breathing near the window. He had never slept alone in his life. The bed was clean and he was clean and this, too, was strange. He kept getting tangled in his sheets, never having lain in sheets before. His new pyjamas, which he was wearing as a condition of his employment, were scratchy starched cotton and they pulled at various points where he had been used to wearing only a shirt, when his shirt was clean enough to wear. Every time he closed his eyes he expected that whatever had happened to the Johnsons was about to happen to him, for Tinker was sure that they were dead, probably murdered. A snake? A deadly krait, the ‘hundred steps’ snake which was all the victim would ever walk before he died horribly? Some sort of spider? There had been a huntsman on the ceiling and it was gone now. What would Sexton Blake do?

Find an ally, of course.

‘Come on, Gaston,’ called Tinker, and heard the clatter of the little dog’s claws on the hard stone floor.

Gaston leapt up into Tinker’s arms, turned around three times to give himself room, gave the boy’s face a passing lick, and settled down to sleep. Tinker closed his eyes and undid the top button of the pyjama jacket, letting in some welcome air and the smell of dog, to combat all this cleanliness.

Both of them sighed deeply.

Even though the huntsman descended the wall to find out if he was edible at all, and retired disappointed to catch moths, Tinker and Gaston did not wake again until daybreak.

Morning was announced by the merry cries of the baker’s boy, the butcher’s boy (hoping to see his beloved Lily and retiring broken-hearted), the milkman, the grocery man and, oddly enough, the ham-and-beef’s adorable fourteen-year-old daughter, whose little brother had been caught playing with the fisherboys and had been confined to barracks for spanking, scolding and disinfection. Warned by the previous day’s experience, Phryne slept through this visitation. Jane also showed no signs of rising.

Dot, who had agreed to cook breakfast for the duration, fried tomatoes, mushrooms, bacon and eggs. Ruth sliced bread and laid the kitchen table for their breakfast. Molly ate rinds, as did Gaston. Tinker had fought his way into his new clothes and appeared, having voluntarily washed his own face and hands. This was easy, he explained, when you just had to turn on a tap and water came out. Hot water.

‘A bloke doesn’t even have to boil a billy,’ he said, sitting down where indicated and picking up his eating implements.

‘It is wonderful,’ agreed Dot. ‘I remember getting up in the freezing dawn to light the copper.’

‘Me too,’ said Ruth, shuddering slightly. ‘Fingers so cold they wouldn’t work. Dropping the matches. Praying that the little flame would catch.’

‘Here, hang on,’ objected Tinker. ‘How do you know all that stuff? You’re ladies.’

‘Certainly we are ladies,’ Dot told him. ‘Where does it say that a woman who works for a living can’t be a lady? Isn’t your mother a lady?’

Tinker was astounded. His entire political and social world view had been knocked off its axis. Dot loaded his plate with provender, filled his cup with well-sugared tea, and bade him eat up and think about it later. Tinker could understand that, at least. And he had been told to do as Miss Dot ordered. Besides, he had never eaten tucker like this in his underfed life. Thinking, Tinker felt, could always wait.

Ruth, between bites, wrote out her tasks for the day. It was rather a daunting list. The only trouble with Miss Leyel’s wonderful recipes was that they took a lot of peeling and chopping and mincing. Dot observed the fraught way in which she was chewing the end of her pencil and said, ‘Never mind, we will get a kitchen maid for you,’ and Ruth smiled and took the implement from between her teeth. Then she frowned afresh.

‘Not if it’s Lily again. What’s wrong with her, anyway?’