Murder in the Dark (31 page)

Phryne laughed. ‘I’d love to hear a jazz crumhorn,’ she said. ‘Help me up and give me my gown, please. I’ll go and get dressed. Has Dot arrived yet? Send her to me, will you? All this adventure is very hard on the wardrobe.’

Not even trying to avert his eyes, Nicholas helped Phryne onto the bathmat and wrapped her in her terrycloth bathgown. Then he conducted her, step by step, to the Iris Room, where an anxious Dot was already waiting with fresh clothes and a scolding.

‘Miss, you said this wasn’t dangerous,’ she complained as she whisked Phryne inside and sat her on her bed. ‘Let me just replace those plasters, they’re peeling. I’ve brought you some clean clothes. Will you wear the rose or the cornflower shift?’

‘The cornflower,’ said Phryne. ‘It wasn’t really dangerous, Dot. The ones who got wounded weren’t me. Those little pinpricks didn’t even need a stitch.’

‘That’s not what that Sam has been telling Mr Robinson,’ Dot said severely, dropping to her knees to make sure that Phryne’s feet were properly dry before fitting on her sandals. ‘He says that you ran the killer ragged and then trapped him and never turned a hair.’

‘Actually I think I must have turned handfuls of hair. Just look and see how many grey ones there are, will you? And if you wouldn’t mind, Dot, my hair really needs attention.’

Dot sat Phryne in a straight chair and began a punitive brushing, muttering to herself.

‘Where is Mr Butler?’ asked Phryne.

‘In the kitchen talking to his old friend. This hair’s in a shocking state. Dry as a broom. You’re going to need a proper egg shampoo when you get home, Miss.’

‘I know, I was just thinking that,’ responded Phryne. The brushing was very soothing. This is how a stroked cat must feel, she thought. I might even purr.

Finally Dot was satisfied with Phryne’s appearance and allowed her to stand.

‘You’ll do,’ she said, flicking off some dust. ‘What can I do now?’

‘Come with me,’ said Phryne. ‘We’ll collect our policemen on the way.’

Mr Butler set down his tea cup. Mrs Truebody made very good tea.

‘Nearly over now, Tom,’ he said to his disconsolate friend. ‘Just the one more night and it’ll all be done.’

‘No,’ said a voice from the door. ‘It’s not over yet.’

‘Miss Fisher!’ Mr Butler rose respectfully to his feet. So did Mr Ventura.

‘It’s no good,’ said Phryne gently to the quivering man. ‘Gilbert told me all about it before he died. Adventures Limited? Who else could it be? Why did you want to kill Gerald Templar, Mr Ventura?’

Tom Ventura cast a panicky glance around the kitchen. Mrs Truebody was standing by her small stove, frypan in hand. Gabriel was sitting by the back door, sharpening a kitchen chopper with a whetstone. In front of him were three policemen. Nowhere to run. He let out a huge breath and sank down into his chair.

‘It was Tom?’ asked Mr Butler, staring. ‘Tom, did you do this?’

‘Yes, yes I did,’ snarled Tom Ventura. ‘I’m proud of it. He was wasting the money, wasting it, and he was never pleased. He called me a small man who didn’t understand magnificence. When I found out about the Joker and realised that he was an artist in his way, I told him to take away everything from the pompous bounder Templar and then kill him at the perfect moment. I was there to witness it. I saw the knife. Then you got in the way,’ he snarled at Nicholas, who was standing with one hand on a concealed pistol. ‘And you bitch,’ he sneered at Phryne, ‘you caught him and that mammoth Sam killed him. And there went my sweet revenge, all wasted. And I paid him two hundred pounds, and passage money and expenses!’

Tom Ventura began to cry. Mr Butler reached out an uncertain hand and patted his shoulder. For a while nothing was heard in the kitchen but the gritty sliding noise of the whetstone and the sobbing of Tom Ventura.

Then he made a fast grab for his inside pocket and Phryne pounced. She twisted his arm and a paper of tablets fell onto the floor.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. It might be the neatest way, but we need to know some things. Where is Tarquin?’

‘Get off me!’ screamed Mr Ventura, struggling wildly. Phryne could not hold him. Mrs Truebody surveyed the situation, came to a conclusion, and brought her frying pan down hard on his head. He collapsed without a murmur.

‘Might be more reasonable when he wakes up,’ she commented, and put the pan back onto the stove.

‘If I wasn’t already married . . .’ said Mr Butler in sincere admiration.

Mrs Truebody settled her apron with a pleased hand. ‘I take that as a compliment, Mr Butler.’

‘So you may, Mrs Truebody.’

Sergeant Collins gathered up the body during this exchange of old-world courtesies.

‘What shall we do with him, sir?’

‘Take him along to my room and sit with him,’ ordered Robinson. ‘I’ll send the doctor along. He’s still attending to one of those idiots who fell into the campfire. He’s just scorched but he’s creating a treat. Search him first,’ he added, as the policeman carried Mr Ventura out of the room. ‘Don’t want him leaving us too soon.’

‘I’ll go as well,’ said Nicholas. ‘In case he feels chatty when he wakes up.’

‘Now we have got to go and find out about Gerald’s affairs,’ said Phryne. ‘We’ll need all the papers from Mr Ventura’s room. I don’t think we have good financial news for him and Isabella.’

‘Lucky if he’s got a penny left,’ agreed Jack Robinson. ‘What with Ventura spending all that gelt on assassins and fares and expenses and probably trousering a reasonable amount for himself as a commission.’

‘I expect so,’ said Phryne. ‘How are you at balance sheets?’

‘I’m a shark,’ said Jack Robinson. ‘I was in the fraud squad before I got sent to homicide.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Phryne. She looked with affection at this unremarkable policeman. ‘Let’s go, then.’

‘So he even spent my money on trying to kill me?’ said Gerald, wrinkling his perfect brow. ‘But why?’

‘He hated you,’ said Phryne.

‘But why?’

‘Because you told him the truth,’ she said gently. ‘You said he was a small man who lacked magnificence. And he was. He probably would have been all right,’ she added, ‘if he had never met you. He had the making of, say, a small town accountant. He would have married a small town princess and been very happy as a big fish in a little pond. But he could never match you, Gerald, and he knew it, and it rankled, and then it festered. He heard about the Joker from some of Paris’s more dangerous underworlders, and from then on the whole thing has an air of Greek tragedy.’

‘He was a small man, but I need not have told him so,’ mourned Gerald. ‘I lacked kindness and have been punished for it.’

‘I reckon you have,’ said Jack Robinson. He had spent an illuminating morning with the ledgers and invoices, fuelled by moral outrage and tea. Robinson liked accounts. Although they might lie, they never hid around corners and fired guns at the investigator. Mr Ventura had kept two very clear sets of books.

‘You might be able to get some of your gelt back from Adventures Limited, though you’d need a court order,’ he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. ‘And perhaps a good accountant might find some of the money he’s squirrelled away in various bank accounts. But as it stands at the moment, Mr Templar, your remaining capital is—’ he scribbled a few calculations—‘three hundred and seven pounds five shillings elevenpence ha’penny.’

Gerald looked crushed for a moment. ‘That isn’t a lot,’ he said, ‘to keep all these followers. Yet I can’t turn them away. They have been faithful. Some will manage by themselves, I am sure, but some won’t. Isabella has no money of her own. What am I to do?’ he asked rhetorically.

The parlour was silent. Phryne had nothing to suggest, though selling some of the younger acolytes did occur to her. Jack Robinson was sorry for Gerald. The description of the bloke did not convey what a nice man he was.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Something may turn up. I mean, you’re still alive,’ he told the disconsolate victim. ‘The smart money would have been on the Joker, you know. You would have been skewered if it weren’t for our Miss Fisher here.’

‘That is true, and very wise,’ Gerald replied. ‘If only I could find Tarquin I would not be so easily discouraged. Cautious optimism, then. We still have tonight’s New Year’s Eve party, and all of the rest of the time is paid for and arranged. One thing to be said for him, Tom Ventura is very efficient.’

‘He was,’ agreed Robinson, using the past tense deliberately. The blanket-wrapped, foam-flecked and screaming lunatic who had been carried out of the house into the waiting police car had not been even marginally recognisable.

And the slight body of the Joker, carefully photographed for the first time in his career, had been taken off to the Coroner’s Court for an autopsy. The coroner thought that evil people had organic brain damage or some other physical disease. Phryne did not think so, and neither did Robinson. Some coots were just naturally evil, was his view. And Sam’s action had just saved the state the expense of a trial and hanging. Not to mention that the Joker had a talent for escaping. No, a good result all round.

Robinson closed the ledgers and shuffled the papers into order, with his neat handwritten summary on top. Someone would have to take over to pay the remaining staff. Phryne said she would send him the replacement accountant.

When Sylvanus Leigh appeared, pale as cheese with his hunting hangover, Robinson lent him his indelible pencil to make his own notes. Sylvanus came to the same conclusion. The Templars were, effectively, broke.

Phryne Fisher had used that same pencil to inscribe doggerel verse on her gummed pink paper, and Nicholas accompanied her as she went around the camp site and house, licking and gluing them at eye-height to trees, tents and walls.

‘Tarquin alive not Tarquin dead/Or Phryne Fisher breaks your head,’ read Nicholas. Under that was ‘Hornbeam, noon’. He shrugged. ‘You are trying to flush the kidnapper out?’ he asked.

‘Evidently,’ she replied. The next one read: ‘Tarquin lost or come to harm/Phryne Fisher breaks your arm/Hornbeam, noon’. This was to be attached to the bar tent.

‘Hornbeam at noon and I’ll find means/So we don’t have to spill the beans’, warned another. ‘Tarquin hurt or in disgrace/Phryne Fisher breaks your face,’ she added, securing it on a monkey puzzle tree. ‘Return the boy to me I beg/Or Phryne Fisher breaks your leg.’ She gummed that threat to a tree near the horse lines.

‘Yes, but if you know who it is, Phryne, why all these threats? Nice scansion, though,’ added Nicholas.

Phryne looked at him. He was not as well as he was pretending. His face was flushed, his golden curls crisp with sweat. That knife had almost gone right through his shoulder and stuck in his scapular. He must have been in agony now that the excitement had worn off.

‘You,’ she said, in a voice which totally refused to believe that things could be otherwise, ‘are going to Dr McPherson for a change of dressing and a morphine injection, and then you are going to lie down in my bed again. You want to be in good form for the party, don’t you? Well, then . . .’ She stifled his muted protest with a kiss. ‘Here’s the key. Are you going by yourself or do I have to get a nurse for you?’

‘I’ll go. Provided you promise not to do anything dangerous.’

‘I promise,’ she said blithely.

He was deeply suspicious, but he went. Phryne watched him until he was safely in the house and proceeded to gum her last label: ‘At noon under the hornbeam tree/Who loves to lie with me?’.

It was almost eleven. Phryne had her book. She sat down under the hornbeam tree to await events. She had just got to the part where Hercule Poirot lines up all the suspects and harangues them in fractured English as to their degrees of guilt when the kidnapper came in under the low boughs and sat down at her feet. She closed the book, put it in the Pierrot bag, and laid her hand on her little gun, which would never again be placed in any purse where the catch might tangle or jam.

‘Well, here we are,’ she said.

‘
Viciste
, Galileae!’ he quoted in an exhausted tone. ‘You have conquered. I saw your riddles. Not as good as mine. Glad to find some way out of it.’

‘This way we can do it quietly,’ she told him. ‘You tell me what happened.’

‘I really can’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t know a lot of it.’

‘Well, let’s start with Marigold. Gilbert grabbed her and shut her in the old laundry, meaning to come back and finish her off later. She had seen him with his knives—you know, those knives all had names? That’s why Marigold vanished. But Tarquin was snatched on orders to remove from Gerald everything that he loved. I found the place where he dropped the tray he was carrying and all the glasses broke. Also I found his shoe. But that wasn’t you, was it?’

‘No,’ said the sad voice by her knee.

‘No, you found the boy where Gilbert had hidden him. Is he alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Gilbert did rather enjoy a drawn-out gloat. So you freed Tarquin from wherever he was . . .’ she stopped invitingly.

‘The coal cellar. I heard him screaming. I let him out and sent him into a bathroom for a wash. Poor boy was filthy with coal dust. I got him some clean clothes and washed out the gold suit. But when I went back I couldn’t find the other shoe. So you had it! While he was washing I . . .’

‘Thought of a scheme to extract money from Gerald.’

‘Well, yes, but not for me. For the others. Ventura said that Gerald was spending his fortune hand over fist and there would be nothing left.’

‘He certainly tried to make it so,’ Phryne conceded.

‘So I talked to Tarquin, and we agreed that he should hide until the banks open on Wednesday, and then he could come forth, and I would have the money to get everyone home.’

‘So you’re Triceratops?’

‘My brother. I have two brothers in Melbourne and a sister in Brisbane. But then this Gilbert thing happened and it doesn’t seem fair on the boy . . . but I don’t know how to get him back.’

‘There once was a lady of Niger/Who smiled as she rode on a tiger,’ said Phryne.

‘Exactly. “At the end of the ride the lady was inside and the smile on the face of the tiger”. I really do love Gerald. I wouldn’t hurt the dear fellow for the world. And if he finds out that I betrayed him, he will be shaken. Can you get us out of this, Phryne?’