Death Before Wicket: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries 10 (3 page)

P
hryne had eaten her Neapolitan ice-cream under the disinfectant shade of the cypresses, walked slowly around the small resort of Manly, and was about to suggest that they board the
Dee Why
for home when the sky broke open and all the water which had been idling about as droplets in the overheated air said the equivalent of ‘the hell with it’ and let gravity win.

‘This isn’t rain,’ she called through a curtain of water, ‘this is a deluge.’

‘Clarry, did you put in that order for gopher wood?’ yelled Joss.

‘They were out of stock; we’ll just have to swim home,’ replied Clarence.

‘We’ll get soaked,’ commented Joss. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘The pub,’ said Phryne.

‘It’s shut,’ said Joss.

‘Is it?’ asked Phryne. She walked—running would only make the drops collide at greater velocity with her already drenched frame—across the street and banged on the door of the Steyne Hotel.

‘Bona Fide Traveller,’ said Phryne to the huge red-faced man who allowed the door to grind open an inch. ‘Find the book and I’ll sign it, and bring me three towels, a gin and tonic and two beers for my escorts.’

She shoved the door heartily, it opened, and she was inside out of the rain, which was increasing to a torrent, drumming hard on the pavement and splashing back knee-high. The landlord, who had to stoop to see Phryne’s face, yielded to superior force and led the way to a small plush parlour designed for the accommodation of ladies. She dried her hair, arms and hands and signed the Traveller’s Ledger as Phryne Fisher—London. Which was, if only historically, true. The gin and tonic was well made and the air was beginning to lose its stifling quality.

‘Well, that’s an improvement,’ she said, looking out of the heavily curtained window at the streams flowing down the street outside. Joss and Clarence accepted their beers and drank them in dazed silence. Eventually Joss said to Clarence, ‘I never,
never
managed to get into a pub which had closed its doors before. I think we made the right choice of detective, eh, Clarence?’

Clarence nodded, appearing to be much cast down by the rain, which had ruined his carefully arranged coiffure. He slicked down his hair with the palm of his hand and studied himself dolefully in the fly-flecked pub mirror. The sight of the dapper young man appearing between two Staffordshire dogs distracted Phryne for a moment. It was quite odd, almost surrealist.

‘I like your cheek,’ said Phryne without heat. ‘I haven’t agreed to help you yet.’

‘What more will it take to convince you?’ asked Clarence, unenthusiastically. ‘I bet this fabric will spot. I don’t like rain!’

Phryne smiled and offered him her comb. He accepted it with a graceful bend.

‘Hmm. Not sure. What have you got so far?’

‘Well, there’s the introduction from the anarchist, he was hard to find.’ Joss had rubbed his head dry and his hair was beginning to curl. ‘Fortunately we’ve got a friend in the Australian Workers’ Union, he goes out to the cane-fields and he knew Red Peter, he said that this Smith man got a letter from you, so we asked our friend to tell him all about it and he agreed to introduce us. You have to give us marks for effort.’

‘I do,’ said Phryne.

‘And I suppose that everyone in Melbourne knows that you’re an anarchist?’ asked Clarence, insinuatingly, handing back the comb with another bow.

‘I don’t care a straw if they do,’ replied Phryne, looking the young man in the eye and daring him to continue with anything which even remotely resembled blackmail. He subsided into gloomy meditations on the subject of rain and linen suits.

‘What if we just beg?’ asked Joss, dropping to his knees at Miss Fisher’s wet bare feet. ‘Come on, Clarence. Stop sitting there arguing.’ He dragged his friend down to kneel beside him and put up his hands, palm to palm, like a good child.

Phryne had defences against almost any argument, but not against two pretty young men at her feet. Very decorative they were and she might have uses for them. They both looked up into her face with an identical expression of lamb-like faith. They do believe that I can solve this, thought Phryne. And although I did promise Dot no murders, this is just a theft.

‘Please?’ asked Clarence, and Jocelyn echoed, ‘Pretty please?’

‘All right,’ agreed Phryne, and called for another drink.

The landlord considered that they had all, self-evidently, had enough.

Phryne returned to the Hotel Australia in time to change for dinner to find her clothes laid out neatly on her bed and a note from Dot: ‘Gone to see Joan back soon’ propped on the dressing table. Joan, Phryne knew, was married to an ironmonger who had a shop somewhere in Woolloomooloo, a name clearly made up by a printer with a lot of surplus letter ‘o’s. She sat down in an easy chair to read the paper. The
Sydney Morning Herald
was extending itself in the matter of cricket.

The team is definitely ageing, Phryne thought as she ran a pearly fingernail down the list of English players. Hobbs was over forty, and so were Tyldesly, Hendren and Phillip Mead. Of the bowlers, Geary’s nose had been broken at Perth but he would play in Sydney. White was a slow left-hander who bored batsmen out, Staples and Tate medium pace stock bowlers who were very hard to score from, and there was also the young man Larwood, of whom great things were expected. Wally Hammond could bowl as well, but he was such a magnificent bat that no sensible captain would risk him injuring himself while bowling. Of the Australians, the old guard predominated also. Woodfull, Richardson, Ponsford and Hendry as batsmen, Grimmett, Ironmonger and Blackie (a newcomer at forty-six) bowling slowly. It didn’t look good for the Australians, especially in view of the Brisbane Test. The Australian fielding had been sloppy, the bowling inaccurate, the batting disgruntled, and the Test lost by the dreadful, unprecedented margin of 675 runs.

It didn’t look like interesting cricket, thought Phryne, but even the most tedious match was worth watching for awhile; one never knew what would happen, a fact which differentiated cricket from all other forms of sport. Phryne had never been interested in football, except as a tribal ritual, nor in tennis, motor racing, horse racing or athletics. But as a small girl, she had started playing cricket amongst brothers, across a cobbled back lane with a fence for one wicket and a kero tin for the other, and the feeling of excitement had never left her. Phryne still felt the fierce pleasure of thwacking the cloth and cork ball solidly with the paling bat, even though such a shot was inevitably over the fence, six and out. In summer the sole outing for the Fisher children had been a train trip to Altona Beach, where they had played cricket on the greyish sands and her brothers had repeatedly struck the ball into the sea, whence it had been retrieved by a large mongrel dog called Rags.

Phryne’s newspaper slipped from her lap and she closed her eyes. Those had not been good days, as the family had been very poor. Phryne had salvaged bruised fruit and veg from the pig bins outside the Victoria market, had been frequently hungry and infrequently beaten by her drunken ne’er-do-well father, had watched one of her sisters die of diphtheria, had never been really warm or really full. Her mother had worked all the hours there were cleaning houses—but it had been fun, playing cricket on Altona Beach with Rags, drawing lots for who got to be Victor Trumper…

She woke with a start as a gentle tone sounded. The Australia provided a dressing gong to inform its guests that it was time to prepare for dinner. Phryne duly dressed and dined lightly on salmon mayonnaise and salad, drank a few glasses of champagne and went back to her room expecting Dot to have returned. Dot was not there, no message had been left by a deferential switchboard, and Phryne was beginning to worry. There were a lot of perils in a foreign city for a good looking young woman, especially if she was foolish enough to appear at all lost or vulnerable. Especially if she did not know the rules, which streets should not be walked down during certain hours, which pubs sold sly grog, which Push ruled which area.

It had been the same in the beginning, when the colony had been established on raw alcohol and flogging, when the Rum Corps—a regiment so corrupt that it disintegrated in a high wind—had ruled the roost and expelled the governor. A city in the old days of mud and disease and reeking poverty; where blood and flesh from the triangle had blown back into the faces of the witnesses.

Phryne shuddered. She was glad that she had not been there when gentlemen hunted kangaroos across the Domain. Life then had been far too solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. What would it have been like, to come up from the stinking hold of a ship and see—what? The harbour, the barren shore, the endless wastes of scrubby grass and—to their eyes—colourless forest. No familiar plants, strange animals, birds with no song, but the same old lash, the same old lice and rats and starvation, the specially imported filth and injustice. They must have felt utterly lost, abandoned on the edge of the world, and angry—yes, very angry. So they had behaved like a conquering army, but never one who meant to stay. Cut down the trees, ugly untidy things, tear down the forests, destroy the wildlife, murder the hapless original inhabitants who had lived here for thousands of years without harm. Wipe out a language? Why not? All heathens, anyway. Didn’t even make good slaves…

Some of the buildings were still standing: the barracks, the hospital. There was a flavour in the city of its convict past, its brutal origins, which underlay the high Victorian buildings and the air of gentility. Like the tank stream, it ran underground. Little Chicago, Jack Robinson called it. It had been the same in the 1890s. Sydney seemed to have more gangs of vicious criminals, more violence, more murders, than quiet peaceful Melbourne where the last criminal excitement had been Snowy Cutmore shooting Pretty Dulcie and Squizzy Taylor. Probably Melbourne was just as crime-ridden, but there crime had no element of display; there was something about Sydney that made its crooks advertise their talents. It had been the same in Henry Lawson’s day. He had produced a very clean version of the gutter-ballad Phryne had heard in Melbourne:

‘Would you knock him down and rob him?’ said the Leader of the Push.

‘Why, I’d knock him down and fuck him,’ said the Bastard from the Bush.

It was said that Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo were impassable after dark. Tensions between Catholic and Protestant were high, there was the admixture of degraded, detribalised and terribly treated Aborigines in Redfern, returned soldiers in the much-rumoured White Army, communists of all stamps and dyes, artists and whores and poets and thieves and the downtrodden desperate poor, out of work and out of place.

A nasty brew, thought Phryne. A very dangerous cauldron bubbling next to the peaceful harbour.

Phryne had not asked Dot for her sister’s address. She had in all probability been asked to stay for tea and was presently playing with the children in a respectable ironmongery somewhere while Joan’s husband got on with his iron-mongering and Joan made tea for her sister. It would be premature to call out the guard.

Phryne opened her travelling book—Mary Kingsley’s
Travels in West Africa
—and sat down to sip cognac and read. A light breeze blew through the open shutters and brought her the distant noise of traffic and a whiff of salt air. She was just laughing at Miss Kingsley’s statement that it was only after falling into a leopard trap and emerging unscathed from a pit lined with spikes that one realised the usefulness of a good thick serge skirt when she heard the door click and Dot came in.

‘Hello, Dot,’ said Phryne, looking up from the book. ‘Did you have a good…’ her voice trailed off. Dot’s face was drawn, her hair coming unplaited; she slumped wearily in her chair and she smelt strongly of beer, cheap scent and tobacco smoke. Phryne knew that Dot rarely drank, certainly did not smoke and never used any perfume other than Potter and Moore’s Lavender Water.

Phryne picked up the telephone and ordered tea to be brought immediately if not sooner. Then she filled a glass and took it to her maid.

‘Drink some water, Dot dear, and tell me what’s wrong. I’ve sent for tea, it should be here directly.’

‘Oh, Miss, it’s awful,’ Dot whispered. She took the glass and drank.

‘Your sister, Dot, has something happened to your sister?’

Dot gave Phryne such a sorrowful look that she drew an instant conclusion.

‘Oh, Dot dear, don’t say that she’s dead?’

‘Better if she was,’ said Dot with unexpected vehemence, and burst into tears.

Phryne rallied around with handkerchiefs and cool water and after ten minutes Dot was sitting at the table, red-eyed but with dry cheeks, sipping very strong, heavily sugared tea to which a judicious quantity of Phryne’s good cognac had been added. Phryne did not ply her with questions, but after awhile Dot began to talk.

‘I telephoned this afternoon, Miss, and Joan’s husband answered, and he said she wasn’t there. He’s a bit of a rude bloke, Jim is, anyway, and I didn’t take no notice and said I’d come and visit at six, and he didn’t say I couldn’t, so I took some cakes and went to the place, it’s a shop in William Street, I think he’s not doing too good. The shop was open and I walked in and there was little Dottie tied by the leg to a desk at the front, tied up like a dog! And little Mary sitting in the gutter, splashing in the gutter, in the filthy water. So I heaved up one little one and released the other—and there was a raw red ring around her poor little ankle!—and I promised them cakes if I could wash them, and we went into the smithy and there was Jim sitting yarning with some mates of his, and I asked him where my sister was and he stood up and yelled at me, “She’s run off!” and I couldn’t imagine Joan doing that, not leaving her kids, and I said so, and he said, “You’re another, all sluts, all the Williams girls are sluts and so is their mother,” and I just took the children, who didn’t ought to hear things like that, into the house behind the shop. It was filthy. Joan would never leave it like that. I didn’t know what to do, Miss.’