Death at Victoria Dock (7 page)

Dot came up, with both girls, eager to find out how the night had gone.

‘Well, Miss, did you find out anything?’

‘Yes. Lots of things. Some to the purpose. I have to go into the city, Dot, and meet an anarchist woman. How do I look?’

‘Awful,’ said Jane, candidly. Ruth nodded.

‘Good. Full of political consciousness and no time for fashion. Now, I’ll be back as soon as I can. Be good, ladies, and don’t forget to go and collect the diary from Mary Tachell. And if you can help it, don’t affront the poor little thing. She’s not very attractive and not very clever and without one of those her future is likely to be dire. All right?’

They nodded solemnly. Phryne ran down the stairs, hoping that she was not corrupting her two adoptive daughters too badly, and reflecting that she really must remember her audience when minded to coin aphorisms.

‘She’s lovely,’ said Jane, affectionately. ‘But she’s terribly cynical.’

Ruth agreed. ‘I suppose that all grown-ups are like that.’

‘You can go and clean up your room,’ snapped Dot. ‘And mind your language about Miss Phryne. If it hadn’t been for her you two would still be slaveys in a boarding house.’

Subdued, they raced down the stairs to make beds, and play games with Ember, who regarded all housework as a challenge to his ingenuity.

***

The policeman sounded wary on the telephone, but not hostile.

‘Yes, Miss Fisher, I have heard of you. Detective-Inspector Robinson speaks very highly of you. I’ll help you if I can. I do understand, as an old digger, how you feel about being shot at.’

‘Good. I’m told a young woman is coming to identify my dead young man this morning.’

‘That is correct. She gave her name as Mary Evans.’

‘And you believe that?’

‘She didn’t sound like any Evans I ever heard,’ he admitted. ‘Balt, I reckon.’

‘I would like to come along to the morgue with you.’

‘If you like, Miss Fisher. As long as it isn’t in any official capacity, you understand.’

‘Not at all. I am anxious to be wholly unofficial. When is she expected?’

‘Ten-thirty.’

‘Oh, Lord, can you delay her until I come?’

‘If you can come soon.’

‘I’ll drive like the wind,’ Phryne promised, and hung up on the remonstrance about speed limits which he felt that he had to make.

Mr. Butler took to The Esplanade with a roar, and whisked Phryne into the city in twenty minutes. He dropped her outside the police station and drove carefully down Russell Street to a pub where he could repair his nerve. He had not driven that fast in his life before.

Phryne, drab as a sparrow, enquired for Detective-Sergeant Carroll and was directed into the bowels of the building, where she promptly got lost and had to be rescued by a passing cadet.

She knocked, and a gruff voice ordered her to enter.

In the small cupboard allotted to this guardian of the law a very large police officer was wedged, in company with a thin pale girl bowed under the weight of a sheaf of brown hair which had, recently, been dyed black. She looked up at Phryne’s entry and revealed a face of such naked sorrow that Phryne flinched.

‘Ah, there you are, where have you been? Got lost? Come on, Miss Evans. Now we got someone to support you. Off we go.’ He twitched the thin girl up from her chair and thrust her out into the corridor. ‘Collins!’ he roared, ‘take these ladies to the morgue and get an identification for your dead ’un, then come back here. There’s been a baby discovered in the river.’

Constable Collins took the girl’s arm, recognized Phryne, opened his mouth to make an unwise declaration, then shut it again under the impetus of Phryne’s forty-watt glare. The girl sagged on Collins’ arm and he bore her up with some anxiety.

‘Come along, my dear,’ said Phryne, taking the other arm. ‘This is very brave of you. You know that he would have wanted you to be brave.’

The wounded eyes, drowned in dark shadows, stared into her face. Phryne was almost painfully reminded of the blazing eyes of her lover of the night before, and melted at the knees. She dug her fingernails into her palm and returned the gaze.

‘Who are you?’ asked a thready voice. Phryne had not prepared an alias, and grasped at her French Apache name.

‘I am
La Chatte Noire
, and Peter sent me to support you.’

‘Peter…’

‘Peter Smith.’ She touched her collarbone, and the young woman appeared satisfied. Mary Evans leaned her weight on Collins as he led them out into the courtyard and handed them into a police car, climbing into the front.

The morgue was a depressing brick building which could not really be anything else. The sun however shone brightly, and Phryne wished that her part did not require her to wear black. Collins escorted them into the cold chamber, stinking of disinfectant, and an attendant wheeled out the body, draped in a sheet and naked as the day he was born.

Phryne looked as Mary stared; she could not avoid it. He seemed serene, now, cleansed of mud; the hair had dried flossy, like silk.

‘Glad you’ve come,’ remarked the attendant, a fat young man with greasy hair and a serious complexion problem. ‘We can’t keep all the corpses we find, you know. Pretty soon Coroner would refuse to sit on him.’

Collins, who had not got used to death, turned on him in a fury.

‘You shut that mouth, you ratbag,’ he snapped, and the attendant blanched so that his pimples stood out like lanterns.

‘All right, boss, no need to get shirty,’ he stammered.

‘Is this man known to you, Miss?’ asked Collins formally.

Mary Evans nodded tremulously.

‘What is his name?’

‘Yourka. His name is Yourka Rosen.’

‘All right, Miss. Sign the form. Full name and address, please.’

Mary reached out a thin hand reddened with housework and touched the cheek. The coldness of the dead struck such a chill through her that Phryne felt it through her embrace, and bore Mary up as she collapsed.

‘Take him away,’ she ordered, and the attendant rolled the trolley out, Phryne hoping vengefully that acne was a terminal condition. Mary sat up on the floor, and signed Collins’ form. She gave her address as the Great Southern Private Hotel and began to sign her name with an A before she remembered that her name was Evans. She spoke in French, to Phryne.

‘Will he be buried in the Church? I have no money to bury him!’ She wailed and rocked in unappeasable grief, and Phryne stood up and addressed the constable.

‘Nothing you can do here, Collins, go back to Russell Street. And give that pimply necrophile the news that I will pay for a proper Catholic funeral and he’d better make sure that the body is suitably dealt with. All right?’

‘Yes, Miss,’ stammered Collins, and left to over-awe the front office, profoundly glad to be out of this chill room smelling of death.

Mary was weeping distractedly, and Phryne let her cry for ten minutes before she drew her to her feet and walked her out of the room.

‘We must get out of here,’ said Phryne, escorting the woman into Batman Avenue. The river glinted through the trees and Phryne saw the Melbourne Boat House, scene of many wild parties. The balcony, against all likelihood, was still defying gravity.

Mary moved like a sleepwalker, weeping distractedly, as they staggered past the swimming pool with its dolphins and sun-bathers waving from the roof.

‘Down this track,’ Phryne decided, crossing Prince’s Bridge and descending to the bare track which ran along the river. ‘Do calm yourself, Mary!’

Crying so convulsively that her body shook in Phryne’s embrace, Mary negotiated the steps and they continued along the river, which was full and looked sullen and very cold. Small boats passed on their way to Queen’s wharf. Ahead, past the railway bridge, was the clutter of brick warehouses under the line, where Phryne hoped to obtain some tea in relative obscurity.

Under the Sandridge line and near to the wharf they stopped. There was a pie cart. Phryne dragged Mary up the sloping bank and onto the shore, sat her down on a brick wall and rummaged for some money.

‘Two teas, please,’ she said, to the unshaven personage presiding over the urn, which leaked and hissed steam. ‘No, on second thought, one tea.’

‘What’s wrong, lady, don’t you fancy my tea?’ asked the pie-cart proprietor, grinning with all of his remaining teeth.

‘No,’ agreed Phryne. ‘I don’t. Now we’ve just come from the morgue and I don’t feel like trading comic cross-talk with you. Tea, and look slippy.’

‘Oh, been to the morgue, eh? I’ll put a slug in it, then. The poor sheila. Husband?’

‘Cousin. Thank you. What is it?’

He held up the bottle. ‘Navy Rum.’

‘That will do nicely.’ Phryne paid him a shilling for the tea, loaded it with sugar and took it back to Mary. She waved it away, then accepted it as Phryne shoved the cup into her hand. The pie-cart owner had been generous with his rum. Phryne could smell the raw alcoholic vapour from two feet away.

Mary sipped, sniffed, then sipped again, seeming surprised at the taste.

She had stopped crying.

‘He is dead,’ she whispered. ‘All along I had hoped that it was not Yourka that they had killed. But it was Yourka,’ she added. ‘He is dead and he is my last cousin. The Revolution has killed them all.’ She took a gulp of the scalding tea. ‘Have some,’ she offered, and Phryne decided to give the pie-cart owner his chance. She obtained another cup and was astonished to find that it was good, though strong. A dray lumbered past on what seemed to be elliptical wheels, the horses straining at the collar. She waved away the dung-laden dust and sat down on the wall next to Mary again.

‘There is nothing that I can do for Yourka now. Being dead. But I am still alive and I can revenge him.’

‘Can you?’

‘Of course. I know all their plans. They killed him because he was young and stupid. Do you know how old Yourka was?’

‘No.’

‘Seventeen. And now he will never be eighteen. The dead are forever young, forever beautiful.
Chatte Noire
, did you not think him beautiful? As a comrade, I sleep with all of them, but Yourka was my cousin and my lover. So gentle, so young. His flesh was my delight. When I touched him just then death had turned him to stone. Cold as moss. I will revenge him,’ she added, simply.

Phryne patted her hand, at a loss for a comment. Her use of English was as stark as scripture. Cold as moss. So he had been, poor Yourka.

‘I shall bury him in the church,’ she said at length. ‘Who was your priest?’

‘Father Reilly, at Our Lady Star of the Sea, bless you!’

Mary launched herself into Phryne’s arms and kissed her moistly.

‘The comrades must not know.’

‘Not know what?’

‘That he will be buried in the church. They do not believe in God. They do not allow anyone else to believe in God, either, though that did not stop Yourka from believing. He used to pray his little child’s prayer every night, because he knew no other. I shall miss him for the rest of my life, which will not be long if they catch me talking to you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Peter sent you. I like Peter, I have known him all my life, but the others do not respect him, even though he has grown old in the struggle. He is against their
illégalisme
. He says that it will make Australia into a police state, which is true. They will not accept this. I do not know who you are,
ma Chatte
, but you are a friend of Peter’s or he would not have sent you, he must trust you, therefore they will not.’

‘That makes sense.’

‘But I like you and I owe you a debt for burying Yourka in God, which is all I can do for him now. I should have warned him. I did not, because I thought they would not kill him. But they killed him,’ she said, sadly. ‘Shall we have more tea?’

Phryne ordered more tea, bemused.

‘However, first I must consult the spirits.’

‘The spirits?’

‘Indeed. We go to Madame Stella, who is Jean Vassileva, she holds seances at the Socialist Bookshop in Spencer Street every Tuesday night. They, and I, have always been given good advice by the spirits. They always take her advice. They get in touch with the old dead anarchists through her, and Lenin.’

‘Lenin?’

‘Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the Russian leader, you must have heard of him.’

‘Of course, but I have never spoken to him,’ said Phryne. ‘May I come too?’

‘Of course. The spirits are there for all. Now I must go. They do not know that I have identified Yourka, and they must not know. I will see you at the seance,
ma Chatte
. Eight o’clock, in an upstairs room at the Bookshop. God bless you,’ and she was gone, moving slowly as though she was carrying a heavy weight on her shoulders, the long black hair spraying dull across her black-clad back.

Phryne went to the Socialist Bookshop and Tearoom—the house of all the red-raggers in Melbourne—and asked for Jean Vassileva. The plump lady behind the counter paused to sell a pamphlet on Spain and chirped.

‘She’s sitting over there, dear! If you want tomorrow’s seance it’s one pound a ticket. You can buy them from me.’

‘One ticket, please.’

Phryne handed across her one quid and then walked over to a well-dressed middle-aged woman who was eating bread and butter and looked just like a Fitzroy housewife.

‘Hello! I hear that you are in contact with the spirits.’

‘All is known in the other world, dearie,’ said Jean in a broad Australian accent. ‘Got your ticket? I can’t do with a big crowd, you see, because the Guide don’t like it.’

‘The Guide?’

‘Bright Feather, me spirit guide. He’s in charge. What are you looking for, eh? Lost someone?’

She was eyeing the black dress avidly. This woman could not be a real medium, Phryne decided, and was exactly the person she was looking for.

‘You have some strange customers,’ she commented. ‘Anarchists
and foreigners and all.’

Jean gave her a frightened glance and muttered, ‘They scare me to death, dearie, I don’t mind bloody telling you. Even though me old man is Latvian. I had to learn the lingo to tell me mum-in-law what I thought of her. But they pay well, the red-raggers.’