Murder in Montparnasse (3 page)

‘This is an expensive studio,’ said Phryne, looking at the back of the picture. ‘Mostly they can coax and flatter a subject into compliance. And they couldn’t even get Miss Elizabeth Chambers to smile. That argues a strong will.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Dot. ‘I reckon she’s a redhead, Miss. Look at how pale her skin is.’

‘You’re right. My notes say that she has blue eyes and beautiful auburn hair, feuilles mortes, dead leaves. Her only beauty, apparently.’

‘Except for a clear conscience,’ said Dot sententiously. She disapproved of this modern cult of the body. It smacked too much of the world, the flesh and the devil. ‘And maybe a sense of duty.’

‘Yet she has vanished,’ said Phryne. ‘Just when her father was concluding arrangements for her to marry an excellent French cook of good character and perhaps fifty summers.’

‘How old is this girl?’ asked Dot.

‘Eighteen, almost nineteen,’ said Phryne evenly.

‘Then she had a reason to run away,’ said Dot. ‘What sort of man is her father?’

‘A company director and prominent racing identity,’ said Phryne.

‘A crook,’ decided Dot.

‘Yes, probably. I still don’t precisely understand why Monsieur Anatole wished to marry her, or why her father agreed. Something odd there, Dot dear. There are, I should imagine, plenty of women of the right age who would appreciate Monsieur Anatole’s heavenly cooking and overlook his age and his moustache.’

‘A moustache!’ Dot shuddered.

‘Yes. One of those droopy ones. This needs looking into, Dot. Nasty things can happen to young women astray in the world without guidance.’

Dot thought of her own distressing career as a housemaid, working her fingers to the bone while fighting off the young men of the household, and sighed in agreement.

While Phryne frequently caused her anxiety, she was no threat to Dot’s virtue, only her nerves.

‘But you were all right,’ said Dot. ‘You said you joined an all-women ambulance brigade in France during the Great War when you were only seventeen.’

‘So I did, but I was lucky. I grew up in Collingwood. One learns a certain savoir-faire and a lot of ways of surviving with that kind of background. But this young woman went straight from home to boarding school and straight from boarding school to finishing school and then back home and what she knows of the world you could put on a stamp with a lot of room left over. She’s always been looked after and she’s always been supervised. There has always been someone to tell her what to do and there have always been rewards for obeying the rules. She has, in point of fact, always done what someone told her, and that, in the everyday world, gives her the survival quotient of a snowflake in hell.’

Dot thought about it. She nodded.

‘We have to find her,’ she said.

‘Once we have done that, we don’t have to send her back to her father,’ Phryne commented. ‘We can probably extort a living allowance for her from Daddy.’

‘How? He wants her to marry this old Frenchman.’

‘Prominent racing identities always have a few secrets, Dot dear,’ said Phryne. ‘And I bet Elizabeth knows them. On the darker side of this disappearance, Dot, there is the possibility that her father has disposed of her for that very reason. He hasn’t made any effort to find her. It is Monsieur Anatole who is concerned about her. I gather that her mother is dead, so there may be no one to wonder where the poor girl is if Daddy has buried her under the stables.’

‘Don’t say things like that, Miss,’ Dot complained, hugging her cardigan closer.

‘All right,’ said Phryne kindly. ‘We’ll treat it as a disappearance. Monsieur Anatole is no oil painting, I admit. Now, get out the society papers, Dot dear, and let’s see what we can find out about Hector Chambers. If he’s that rich and famous, he ought to be in
Society Spice
or
Table Talk
. You can take
Table Talk
.’

Dot hauled a bundle of the well-produced, respectable
Table Talk
out from its box, and Phryne began to flick through the grubby, low-class, frequently closed-down
Society Spice
, in which she herself occasionally figured as ‘High Class Girl Dick’, to her great delight. The only thing which mitigated against pure enjoyment of
Society Spice
was the bad quality of the paper, which flaked and tore and refused to separate into pages. Perhaps due to its peripatetic existence, the typefaces were rarely the same two issues running, and if it had ever employed a proofreader, he had retired in tears after the first day and could never bring himself to go back. Divorces and maids’ evidence flitted under Phryne’s regard: thefts and nameless assaults and—aha! Horse racing news.

‘I’ve got something, Dot. From Old Jock, their racing correspondent. “Jaunty Lad, owned by well-known identity Hector C, disqualified from the Ballarat Cup for boring. Jockey states that he was instructed to ride unsafely by the owner . . .” Hmm. This seems to insinuate that other horses in the race were doped. Clearly a wide field for criminal activities. And, yes, here we are, I knew I’d seen something. Here is an accusation of substitution. Jaunty Lad was absent from his stables when Jolly Tom won the sixth . . . Interesting. Not one of our most honest citizens, this Chambers. What have you got in
Table Talk
?’

‘Here’s a photo,’ said Dot, marking another place with a hairpin. Phryne looked over her shoulder.

A smallish man with the lined face of someone who spent a lot of time in the open air; perhaps small enough to be an ex-jockey. He was elaborately dressed in full evening costume, complete with top hat, which almost doubled his height. He was standing in the midst of a group of society persons at a garden party. ‘Mr Hector Chambers shares a glass of wine with Mr and Mrs Thomas Chivers and their daughter Julia at the Garden Party in Aid of Distressed Jockeys.’

‘How does he strike you, Dot?’

‘Mean as a rat,’ said Dot unhesitatingly.

‘I have never really trusted appearances, you know, but you are good at faces, Dot dear. Do we know anything about Miss Chambers’ mother?’

‘Died last year,’ said Dot promptly. ‘I remember the funeral. Very posh. The young woman wasn’t here at the time.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘Don’t know. She wasn’t that old.’

‘Wheels within wheels. Let’s put these back and I’ll call Jack Robinson. Where’s Mr Butler?’

‘Taken the car for a service, Miss, you remember. You said it was running a bit rough.’

‘Of course. Well, I am going to occupy myself unexceptionably for the rest of the day. I really shouldn’t drink wine at lunch. Break out the aspirin, Dot dear, and sling me the rest of our
Society Spice
collection. I suppose you could call it research.’

Dot did as she was requested and went off to struggle with the telephone. Dot appreciated the usefulness of the instrument, but could never really convince herself that flames and lightning bolts were not going to shoot out of the receiver one day.

The return of Mr Butler coincided with the post, which he brought in on a silver salver. Mr Butler was pleased by subtle nuances and Miss Fisher had bought the salver especially for him. She took the paper knife and cut envelopes.

‘Bills, bills, more bills, aha! Invitation to the Lord Mayor’s Ball, how nice. And to supper afterwards. I’ll think about it. How’s the car running now?’

‘Purrs like a tiger,’ said Mr Butler. He doted on Miss Fisher’s Hispano-Suiza and had hung over it as anxiously as a mother while the mechanic had tuned the engine.

‘Good. Detective Inspector Robinson will probably join us for dinner, Mr B. Now I’m going to have a little nap. It’s been a fatiguing afternoon.’

Mr Butler nodded, mended the fire, and took the mail away. Phryne shut her eyes. Paris, 1918. How had Phryne entered Paris at the end of the Great War?

On the back of an army truck with a lot of convalescent poilus, she recalled. At the end of a dark, tiring, bitterly cold winter’s day in early December. Her ambulance unit had been paid off, the girls had gone to other units, and Phryne was going back to Paris, eighteen years old and so tired she could hardly remember her name.

She had left her school in June, hitched a ride on a freighter to Boulogne and joined an all-women ambulance unit attached to the French Army. She had thought herself cool, efficient and proof against shock. She had found out, as the first shell burst, that she was not cool. At the end of the first fifteen-hour day tending the wounded, she had dropped a retractor and been unable to convince her fingers to pick it up—not efficient. And bathed in blood, collecting amputated limbs for burial, she discovered that she was not proof against shock.

But she had persisted. Gradually her frozen horror thawed. She had learned to drive and steered her clumsy, jerky, heavy ambulance over rutted roads and around shell-holes under fire, and thrilled to the danger. Once, dragging the moaning wounded out from half-burial in mud, she had been clipped by a stray shell fragment. Streaming blood from the head wound, she had completed the rescue before she gave gently at the knees.

A week’s leave and she was back again, a decorated French heroine. Mademoiselle the Honourable Phryne Fisher, Médaille d’Honneur. The scar did not show under her close-cut black hair. She was as thin as a knife blade, and as sharp, after months of heavy, demanding, dangerous work, stronger than she had ever been, but almost exhausted by the time she took her last load of recovering southern boys into the city and was set down, at her request, outside the Hôtel Magnifique.

She clambered up the steps, shucked her knapsack at the counter and leaned on it, momentarily dizzy.

‘Bonjour, m’sieur,’ said the clerk, disapproval in every syllable. The Magnifique did not approve of grimy, bone-thin tramps soiling its marble and gold foyer.

The figure raised its head. Cold green eyes, red-rimmed, stared into his. He jumped.

‘Madame,’ he corrected. The face was female. Now he looked properly, so was the hair, cut in a cap. And the clerk, who had been a stranger to every human emotion through four long years of war, found that he had one left. Fear.

‘Mademoiselle Phryne Fisher,’ said the woman. She handed over an identity card and passport. ‘My father has an account. I want a suite, private bath, some toiletries—let Madame la Concierge attend me. At once.’

The tone of voice suggested that there was no possibility he might demur, and he didn’t. He knew the name of mademoiselle’s father. Milord was a frequent visitor in times of peace, and the Magnifique wanted him to return, dripping with new crisp pound notes. This must be the eldest daughter . . . by her passport, just eighteen. She looked forty.

‘At once,’ stammered the clerk. ‘We have a nice suite, Mademoiselle Fisher. Has mademoiselle any baggage?’

‘Not yet,’ said Phryne.

Then it was easy. Phryne fell into the calm pool which was the Magnifique and was carried along. First the lift to the suite on the second floor, the plush carpet and the private bathroom. The attendance of Madame la Concierge, the order for Guerlain soap, perfume, powder and suitable cosmetics.

Madame was concluding her list when she caught sight of the medal pinned to Phryne’s ambulance tunic, tossed among her other garments on the floor. ‘Mademoiselle was with an ambulance unit?’ she asked.

Phryne, sitting on a chair by the window drinking hot chocolate as though it was nectar, nodded.

‘La Toupie?’ asked Madame la Concierge, naming the eccentric head of her unit. Phryne nodded again. Madame swept the guest into a close embrace. Phryne was beyond surprise. Madame smelt sweetly of orange blossom water and starch.

‘You rescued my grandson,’ she explained. ‘What do you need other than these? I would be of service to you.’

‘Some clothes,’ said Phryne. ‘What was your grandson’s name?’

‘Pierre Valcluse.’

‘I remember him,’ said Phryne. ‘He was on the truck today. Very soon you should see him.’

And I hope you can cope with it, she thought. He’s only got one arm now. Still, he’s alive, which is more than one could say for the others in that trench.

‘Bon. I will send my friend to you and she will make you some clothes. For tonight I will lend you some. This order will be here as soon as possible.’

‘Good,’ said Phryne. ‘I have been thinking about this bath for six months.’

‘It will be memorable,’ promised Madame la Concierge, and left.

Phryne stared at the view. Paris looked the same. Dirtier, perhaps, grimy with smoke, noisy with soldiers. But the roofs were the same, all those little lives carried on underneath them, washing still drying on precarious lines between windows. Paris was Paris. She felt comforted.

Madame la Concierge returned with a basket of toiletries and ran Phryne’s bath. It
was
memorable. It took considerable scrubbing to remove the patina of grime, gunsmoke, trench miasma and ingrained disinfectant from Miss Fisher’s person. Even after the bath had been emptied and refilled, her feet were still giving Madame la Concierge pause and her fingernails were beyond repair. She was also far too thin. The clerk had shown Madame the passport photo and
that
Phryne Fisher must have weighed a good seven kilos more than this one. Well, the war was over. The young woman could rest, drink chocolate, and regain some female curves. The young were very resilient. This one had mistreated her body and seen far too many horrors. Her eyes were haunted.

On her own responsibility, Madame ordered a strengthening dinner and a whole bottle of good Côte du Rhône. A robust southern wine, full of sunshine.

Phryne had found herself dried, slicked with a variety of unguents, inserted into a voluminous nightdress and tucked into bed. It felt so good to be warm, tended and clean that she burst into tears once Madame had left the room, promising dinner in due course and a dressmaker in the morning.