Murder in the Dark (29 page)

‘It was always very close in the old days,’ murmured Phryne.

The wine servers went around again and the next game was called. About half the company, she noticed, were either actually asleep or half asleep, their heads pillowed on their arms. Several had just curled up on the tent floor and gone bye-byes with the complete innocence of children. The wine cup wasn’t that strong, Phryne thought. It could only have been about eight o’clock, quite dark. This sleepiness must have been the product of alcohol and exercise. Phryne herself had never been more wide awake in her life.

‘Blind Man’s Bluff!’ announced Sylvanus. ‘Hoodman’s Blind! Who found the bean in their bowl?’

‘I did,’ said the druid.

Gerald was led forward, his eyes swathed in a white cloth.

The candles were put out and darkness flowed into the tent. Phryne had the same thought as Nicholas and a fraction of a second sooner. Fool, she told herself as she ran, idiot, it isn’t during karez that he is perfect, it’s when he is blinded and in the midst of his acolytes, perfectly trusting, perfectly vulnerable.

She shoved Sabine aside and dived towards the lone figure turning his mistletoe crowned head from side to side, trying to understand the flurry. And again in one of those instantaneous flashes, Phryne thought of the sacrificial human under the white robes, waiting meekly for his holy death that would bring back the sun for his tribe.

Phryne was behind Gerald as he stood blindfolded in the middle of the floor. Nicholas was in front, which was why the thin knife aimed at Gerald’s heart went instead through Nicholas’s shoulder. There it stuck. The assailant wrenched at it unavailingly for a moment and then took to his heels and ran, and Phryne ran after him. Nicholas sank slowly to the floor.

The Joker was examining Miss Fisher very carefully. In the riddle
game going on, in connection with the missing boy, she appeared
to be winning. She was beginning to look dangerous. And she
would be so very beautiful, dead.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Here life has death for neighbour,
and far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
And no such things grow here.

AC Swinburne
‘The Garden of Proserpine’

The killer was dressed in a page’s costume. He was fast. So was Phryne. She was almost near enough to tackle and grab when he threw a bench down—she had to jump over it—and then he was racing for the back of the house.

Behind her Phryne heard screams. People and light spilled out of the Templar tent. That ought to act as a signal, she thought, but all her elaborate preparations had been predicated on the attack happening in the dark, at the love-feast. This half-light was confusing but would not hide some of the means she had hoped to use to catch the Joker.

Phryne excluded from her mind her concern for the stabbed Nicholas and her burning desire to find out who the Joker actually was. He was rounding the house, now; she heard his soft shoes scuff on gravel. Her own made an identical noise.

No one seemed to have noticed the two runners. Out of the corner of her eye Phryne saw Gabriel and some footmen issue forth from the front door, armed with various weapons. If she so much as paused to scream at them she would lose the Joker. Where was he heading? The area behind the house was a maze of washhouses, drying yards, back kitchens, sculleries and sheds for tools, coal, and miscellaneous gardening requisites. There he would hope to lose Phryne, and she did not mean to be lost.

Her breath was shortening. Her heart was pounding. Joker and avenger slid a little as they came into the cobbled space behind the laundries, where a hundred years’ continual leakage of water had given rise to a fine fresh green growth of moss. The red page’s jerkin vanished round a corner and Phryne hared off in pursuit. She had a gun in her pouch, she realised, and a fat lot of use it was. She couldn’t free the thongs while she was running. At least, she thought, the murderer had left his knife in Nicholas. Must have stuck between bone and bone.

The red jerkin darted into a space between two huts and Phryne dived after it. He had not spoken a word, and she had made no challenge. Now she didn’t have the breath to do so. If he can’t lose me in this collection, she thought, he’ll have to—

She stumbled and fell full length across someone’s foot. All the remaining breath was knocked out of her.

‘Ambush me,’ she concluded the thought. There was a thin knife poised over her breast. The Joker had pulled his hood down so low that she could not see his face.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Wrong question,’ the Joker informed her. His voice was light and strangely characterless, with almost no accent.

‘So it is,’ said Phryne, allowing her breathing to become slow and deep, a technique taught to her by Lin Chung. ‘The only answer is, why not? I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me who hired you?’

‘I might,’ he returned. ‘I do need something from you, as it happens, which is why I let you chase me all this way.’

‘And what can I do for the Joker?’ asked Phryne, matching tone for tone. ‘Are you comfortable in English, or would you prefer to speak French?’

‘English is my native tongue,’ he protested.

‘Is it, indeed? Tell me, do you like killing people?’

‘It is one of the only realities,’ he said. The knife had not deviated by a sixteenth of an inch from its place over her heart. But he wanted something and while he was talking he was not stabbing Phryne to death. This would not be a salubrious place to die, bleeding her life away on the slimy cobbles between two ruined buildings. Phryne resolved not to die there. Somehow.

‘There are other realities. Birth, perhaps? Love?’

‘I never loved anyone,’ he said, as though it was a matter of no importance. ‘I don’t know how. It got left out of me, I suppose. My mother always said I was an unnatural child, and my father favoured his other sons. I killed them all, one night, in a fire. As the house burned, I felt pleasure. I never had before. I was fifteen.’

‘How very interesting,’ said Phryne. ‘Did you take part in the Templar love-feasts?’

‘I did,’ he said. ‘They were very boring. I had to lie still while people kissed me. I did not find it pleasurable. But death—now death is never without interest.’

‘Tell me,’ requested Phryne. Her muscles were beginning to tremble from staying so still for so long.

‘If I was to push this knife into your breast, just there, it would slide in like butter,’ he said eagerly. ‘The blade is very sharp. It would meet no resistance. Then, as long as I withdrew it carefully, there would be no visible bleeding. It is unlikely you would feel much pain. You would become sleepy and then collapse, and the people who found you would never notice the little puncture. So while they were bringing the smelling salts you would exsanguinate and die. Just pass away, under their hands.’

‘I see,’ said Phryne. ‘But Gerald . . .’

‘That Nicholas interfered,’ protested the light voice. ‘Not fair. He leapt in the way, spoiled my stroke, and then my favourite blade Eleanora got jammed in his shoulder.’

‘Eleanora?’

‘I name my knives. Eleanora was my mother’s name.’

Phryne bit back a comment about filial loyalty and tried a small flinch.

‘It’s cold on the ground,’ she suggested. ‘And you want me to do something for you, before you kill me?’

‘Oh. Oh, yes,’ said the Joker, slightly disconcerted. ‘Perhaps you should get up, then. I will walk behind you,’ he said, allowing Phryne to feel the prick of the blade in the middle of her back. ‘And if I stab you here, you will be paralysed for quite twenty minutes before you die.’

Phryne believed him. She got to her feet carefully, shook herself, and dusted down her costume. Her hands went to the strings of her pouch.

‘May I smoke?’ she asked coolly. ‘Even the executed are allowed a last cigarette.’

‘No,’ he said waspishly. ‘I don’t approve of ladies smoking. Shall we go?’

‘Where?’

‘Something I need to make sure of,’ he said. ‘Just walk, Miss Fisher.’

Phryne’s fingers worked at the thongs of the pouch as she strolled, slowly, into the main drying yard. It was strung with lines made of all substances from string to galvanised wire. The Joker, however, divined that Phryne might try to trap him and forced her away from the middle of the yard and into the black shadows at the edge.

Damn, she thought. And these strings have chosen a hellish time to make themselves into a knot. He is going to kill me. Without a thought. Without a qualm. He is a true monster. And I really will miss Lin Chung. And Dot. And coffee.

‘Left or right?’ she asked at a corner.

‘Left, please. I say, Miss Fisher, you are taking this well. I hope you aren’t expecting to be rescued. I doped the Templars’ followers. That will be attracting a lot of attention.’

‘Did you poison them?’ asked Phryne.

‘No, just chloral hydrate in the marzipan. You seem very alert, though.’

‘I don’t like marzipan,’ Phryne responded.

‘That would explain it,’ he agreed.

His muscular control was remarkable, Phryne thought. That knife had not moved, even though both of them were walking. It was about an eighth of an inch into her back, and one movement would sever her spine. She dragged at the knotted thongs. They did not budge.

‘Now, where is the place?’ he muttered. ‘These old houses are so confusing. Not built, you know, but just “growed”, like Topsy. Where is the kitchen from here?’

‘If I gesture, will you impale me?’ she asked, and he laughed, a light boy’s laugh full of good humour.

‘That’s for me to know,’ he chuckled, ‘and you to find out.’

‘The kitchen, I believe, is to your right and somewhat behind you,’ she said, deciding not to risk the gesture.

‘Then we will go that way,’ he said.

Somewhere in a suppressed part of Phryne’s mind terror ran round like a mouse in a wheel. She let it run.

‘I believe I know what you are looking for,’ she said.

‘Indeed?’

‘The child,’ she said. ‘The little girl.’

‘Saw me sharpening my knives,’ he said. ‘I put her out of the way until this was all over. Now I will have to remove her as well, and you, of course, Miss Fisher.’

‘Of course,’ Phryne replied. Hope leapt in her heart. The old scullery where Marigold had been imprisoned was on the direct path to the kitchen door, and some preparations must have been made there by now. ‘Satisfy my curiosity. How do you mean to get away? The place will be swarming with policemen any moment now.’

‘No, there are only two of them at Werribee. They will have to telephone Melbourne, which is half an hour’s journey even if they set out right away and use one of the new high speed cars. By the time they arrive I shall have clothed myself in my own riding garments, borrowed a pony and got to my car, which is hidden some miles from here.’

‘And if you can’t steal a pony? Those horse lines have valets and stablemen camped beside them and they can’t all be drunk.’

‘Then I shall take Templar’s horse,’ he said promptly. ‘Acorn is a nice steady beast, unlike that demon Miss Isabella rides.’

‘I see. Did you have an agreement about both of them, or was it just Gerald?’

‘Just Templar,’ he said. ‘Not that I mind killing women. They are only disappointing in that they are so easy to kill.’

This one won’t be, vowed Phryne grimly. One knot slipped under her frantic tugging. What she really needed, of course, was a knife. How foolish of her not to carry one at all times.

But of course, she did have a knife. All medieval persons had eating knives. Hers was in a decorative sheath hanging down from her belt. With great care she began to draw it up. It might not be sharp, but it was a weapon. Phryne’s teeth ached from keeping her jaw and thus her voice steady. And they were approaching the back scullery where Marigold had been imprisoned. Marigold was gone, which might give Phryne a moment of inattention in which to avoid being skewered.

‘I believe this is the place,’ she told the Joker, grabbing for the sheath and extracting the blade. She jagged it across the thongs. It did not cut. She tried again. It was as blunt as a bottle and not even half as much use.

The Joker’s attention was diverted for just a moment as he considered the prison, which was littered with broken planks. Phryne flung herself to one side and screamed ‘Help!’ His casually brutal slash cut a streamer from her long sleeve.

The kitchen door crashed open. Sam shouldered out. Ted and Rob sprang into the half-lit yard, armed with an axe and a shovel.

‘Ah,’ said the Joker. ‘You surprise me, Miss Fisher.’

‘Oh, I do hope so,’ said Phryne. ‘Sam, Ted, we need to disarm him. Be careful—he’s really good with that knife.’

‘Years and years,’ said the Joker in a singsong voice, the knife making patterns in front of their eyes. ‘I trained for years for my profession. If you think I am going to end it here, in this godforsaken country at the end of the world, you are wrong.’