The Castlemaine Murders (3 page)

In the thirteenth year of the reign of the glorious Emperor Lord of
the Dragon Throne Kwong Sui of the Ching Dynasty, seventh day
of the seventh month, festival of the Bridge of Birds.

Esteemed Uncle

The unworthy nephew Sung Ma reports that he has joined the
Lin Family from the Four Provinces who are going to the Second
Gold Mountain to seek gold. They have employed me because I am
literate and have some knowledge of medicine and divination.

I am leaving on the ship
Kate Hooper
in the morning.

I know that your justifiable wrath will be measureless at this
rebellion, honoured Uncle, but once I failed the second literary
examinations and you informed me that I could no longer stay idle
in your house, I must have money, and where to find it? I must
become a merchant, to do that I must have capital, and they say
that in this place there is gold in the streets.

My little capital should be sufficient to maintain my mother
and sisters until I return. I know that to descend from scholar to
gold grubber is a disgrace. But I have failed as a scholar. Perhaps
I will succeed as a ku’li. My strength is certainly bitter enough.
Please convey my respectful love to my aunt and cousins. I enclose
a letter for my mother which, if you would be so kind, you might
allow your steward to read to her.

The disgraced younger nephew Sung Ma kowtows three times
and begs forgiveness.

CHAPTER TWO

Then consider the police: the friends of the honest
woman and the enemy and hunter of thieves,
tramps, swindlers, rioters, confidence tricksters,
drunkards and prostitutes.

George Bernard Shaw
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide
to Socialism and Capitalism

After that there was no hurry to get home. While waiting for the police to arrive, Dot, Phryne and Lin Chung ate ice cream, Ruth and Jane ate Turkey lolly, and Miss Eliza did her best to have hysterics.

‘Give it up,’ said Phryne dispassionately as her sister choked, gasped and sobbed. ‘You didn’t do that when we found that old man who had crept in under the bushes in the park and died there. I know you didn’t. You were fascinated when you were ten. This is what you have trained yourself to think a lady does under the circumstances, isn’t it? You were misinformed. Have some ice cream. It’s very good.’

The one requirement for a really satisfying fit of hysterics is a sympathetic audience and as Miss Eliza’s troubled gaze wandered over her immediate family, she couldn’t find any sympathy. Jane was interested because she wanted to specialise in morbid psychology after she completed her medical training. Lin Chung had averted his eyes from this distressing spectacle. Dot was looking prim. Ruth was eagerly asking the ice-cream man if he had some cold water she could throw over a lady who was having the vapours.

The cold water decided it. Miss Eliza sat up and announced that she was going to bear up. It did not do to give way. Letting down the Empire and so on. Phryne bought her an ice cream as a reward.

It really was surprisingly good on her stiff upper lip, rich and creamy, with bits of genuine strawberry in it. She ate it all.

‘You don’t need to wait, girls,’ said Phryne. ‘Go and use up those tickets.’

Miss Eliza felt so much better that when Jane and Ruth wanted to go to Neptune’s Kingdom and consult the mermaid fortune-teller, she offered to escort them and was warmed to hear their acceptance. Perhaps they weren’t such bad children.

Phryne eyed her daughters and said, ‘I’m sure you’ll be good,’ in a tone which warned them that they had better be good, and they nodded a little sadly. It seemed like a waste of nice water not to allow Miss Eliza to slip into the waxwork mermaid’s deepish little pond. The edge was always slippery.

But good it was and they walked across the hot dusty park to the brightly painted pavilion of Neptune. There was the old gentleman, looking cheerful, trident in hand, surrounded by some rather buxom mermaids. There on her rock was the mechanical mermaid who told fortunes. She was life-size, made of wax, or perhaps porcelain. She had sapphire blue eyes and a glittering silvery blue tail, and her ample bosom was decorously concealed behind a curtain of blonde hair. There was the deepish small pool, with real goldfish flickering among the weed. The mermaid had a series of little scrolls in a box before her. When Jane put in her penny, the delicate hand moved, the mermaid’s seaweed-crowned head bowed, and she picked up a scroll and dropped it into a chute.

‘It will be “You will go on a journey and meet a mysterious dark-haired man”,’ she said. ‘Same as always.’ She unrolled the little scroll. ‘No, it says “Beware. Death in the dark”. How curious! What about you, Ruth?’

Ruth inserted her penny and the mechanical hand hovered and pounced.

‘Men are fools that wish to die,’ she read. ‘Is’t not fine to dance and sing, while the bells of death do ring?’

‘That’s unusual,’ commented Jane. ‘I think it’s from a poem. I’ll look it up when we get home. Do you want to try, Miss Eliza?’

Eliza put in her penny and unrolled her scroll.

‘There is no friend like a sister,’ she read. ‘That’s part of a poem too, isn’t it, girls?’

‘ “There is no friend like a sister, in calm or stormy weather”. “Goblin Market”. Christina Rossetti,’ said Jane promptly. ‘Someone has been changing the scrolls. They used to be about meeting dark-haired men or secret lovers. This is much more interesting. Got another penny, Ruthie?’

‘I’m going to go on the merry-go-round again,’ murmured Ruth, handing over the penny. ‘I don’t like this mermaid any more.’

‘Just let me get another fortune,’ insisted Jane, and put it in her pocket without reading it. Ruth was more sensitive to the uncanny than herself, Jane knew, always threw salt over her shoulder if she spilled it. Jane could read her fortune later.

Jane looked back at the mermaid as they left and wondered what it would be like, trapped in porcelain, with no one to hear if you screamed, and shivered. This was turning out to be a fascinating day. She hoped that she might be able to see more of the mummified body. How long did it take to reduce a human body to that strange state of leather and bone? Was this deliberate embalming or the action of hot sun and desert winds?

With any luck she might be able to see a real autopsy. She followed Ruth out into the hot sunlight, agog with scientific curiosity.

Phryne was not enjoying her interrogation at the hands of a particularly sceptical policeman.

‘Probably rabbit bones,’ he said. ‘Just to give you a bit of a scare, like.’

‘I know rabbit bones, I’ve eaten enough of them,’ returned Phryne crossly. ‘And I spent all day in a ditch in Exmoor once, putting an Iron-Age skeleton together. The toe bones were the hardest to find. This is a metatarsal if ever I saw one! Have a look!’

‘Lamb bones, maybe,’ he said.

Constable Benson was a large, stolid constable with the beefy self confidence which arises from being able to instantly crush any opponent, if necessary by sitting on them. Phryne felt like a small, yappy terrier, trying to get the attention of an unusually obtuse Aberdeen Angus bull. Time to pull rank.

‘Constable Benson, if that mummified body is not taken down and covered and conveyed rapidly to a medical officer for an autopsy, I am going to report to Jack Robinson that one of his constables needs spectacles,’ she said firmly.

Constable Benson blinked, like an Aberdeen Angus bull who has been peacefully contemplating the landscape and is unexpectedly bitten in the fetlock by an exasperated bee.

‘Do you know Detective Inspector Robinson, Miss?’ he asked.

‘Certainly. Get going! Find out where the cowboy came from. The Luna Park management must know. I haven’t got all day,’ said Phryne.

‘Oh. Well. I’ll have to make a report,’ said Benson, fumbling out his notebook, searching for and locating his much-chewed pencil, licking the end and beginning to write. Phryne took a deep breath. This was going to take some time.

The Luna Park management appeared in the form of Mr Bennet, a portly, jovial man with a great display of waistcoat and watch chain. He shook Phryne’s hand, obligingly ordered the dummy to be unhooked and laid on the ground, laughed heartily when told that it was a real corpse and stopped laughing heartily when the papier-mâché mask slipped and revealed a whitewashed, dreadful, hollow-eyed skull.

‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed in what Phryne chose to believe was an ejaculatory prayer. Several nearby nuns crossed themselves before they hurried the ice-cream dripping orphans out of view onto the River Caves ride.

Several people were examining the dummy with great interest. A pink-faced man the size of a wrestler bent over it, looking at the desiccated wrist, then snorted, stood up, collected his dark-haired friend and strode away. Several girls threatened to faint. Several bold boys approached close enough to touch and were shooed away.

The sight affected Constable Benson too. He wrote more quickly, pencil stabbing into the hapless page. ‘Where did you get the . . . deceased . . . from?’ asked Benson.

‘Bought a whole lot of stuff from a carnival that went broke,’ stammered Mr Bennet. ‘From Bendigo way. Mr Dalby handled the sale. My partner. I’ll check the sale note. I’m sure we got some dummies, the werewolf and the vampire from them. A travelling show, it was. You know the kind. Bloke who owned it died and his widow sold his effects. Come along with me and I’ll find the note. And—Bill! Fetch a tarp and cover it up, for God’s sake.’

Bill did as he was told. Phryne, Jane and Constable Benson followed Mr Bennet to the office, where he rummaged in a filing cabinet and muttered. After five minutes of dropping sheaves of paper, he found the sale note.

‘Here we are,’ he told them in triumph.

The sale note, Phryne saw over Constable Benson’s meaty shoulder, was grimy but readable. The list of properties from Carter’s Travelling Miracles and Marvels Show was given as 1. Ghost with wrappings 2. Vampire (cloak needs mending) 3. Cowboy (needs a lot of work) 4. Werewolf (bald spots on skin) 5. Misc. canvas backings and theatrical sets. Phryne noticed that the cowboy mannequin had been discounted to half price because it was so unconvincing. Mrs Carter had cleared three quid on the deal and probably thought she had done well.

‘I’ll use your telephone, Mr Bennet,’ announced Constable Benson. ‘We need to get the morgue van to collect the deceased. Then we shall see. You can go home, Miss Fisher. We know where you live and someone will come and talk to you.’

‘Very well,’ said Phryne. ‘Who will do the autopsy?’

‘Dr Treasure, I expect,’ said Benson. ‘He gets all the strange ones.’

‘Ah,’ said Phryne, and left before she could be warned not to make any enquiries on her own. The charming blond (and, regrettably, happily married) Dr Treasure was sure to welcome her interest in a fascinating cadaver.

‘Miss Phryne, I wanted to see that autopsy!’ objected Jane as they went down the wooden stairs to the main courtyard.

‘And so you shall,’ said Phryne. ‘I know Dr Treasure of old. Come along, my dears, it’s time to go home. We’ve got a new mystery,’ she added with relish. ‘And we may well have to solve this one all by ourselves.’

‘Oh, goody!’ exclaimed Ruth, a born investigator.

‘Phryne,’ objected Miss Eliza mildly, ‘this is very unladylike.’

The sting appeared to have gone out of Eliza. Phryne wondered if it was the spectacle of an old murder or all that ice cream which had mollified her sister.

‘So it is,’ agreed Phryne happily. ‘But I think that body is about fifty years old. No one is going to care about him. And he was murdered.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Jane.

‘When the papier-mâché mask slipped, I saw his face,’ said Phryne. ‘And I saw the bullet hole in the centre of his forehead.’

‘Oh,’ said Eliza, and was silent all the way home. This was a great improvement. Phryne considered that she might not have to poison Eliza after all.

Eliza remained quiet during an excellent dinner of cold lamb and salads and lemon meringue pie, and silent even after, when Lin Chung had gone home, Dot had brought out her drawn-thread work and Phryne was writing down everything she could remember about the body.

‘He had cowboy clothes on,’ she said. ‘A checked shirt, a pair of moleskins and those leather things.’

‘Chaps,’ said Jane, a fervent reader of Westerns. ‘And leather boots. With studs. Which weren’t his,’ she added.

‘Because?’ asked Ruth.

‘They came off too easily. And he had a cowboy hat, one of those curly brimmed ones.’ She wrinkled her forehead, trying to remember.

‘Now how did a real corpse come to be found in the Ghost Train?’ asked Phryne.

‘They bought the cowboy from the carnival. Carter’s Travelling Miracles and Marvels. Maybe someone decided to kill someone and hid the body by putting him amongst the dummies,’ suggested Ruth.

‘Yes, but this body was mummified,’ objected Jane. ‘That means someone who knew what they were doing eviscerated him, packed the body with sawdust, dried it in some way and that takes months. Seventy days, according to the Egyptians.’

Dot stopped listening and concentrated on her embroidery.

‘Someone might have found a natural mummy,’ said Phryne. ‘Drag out the encyclopaedia, Jane, and see what it says about natural mummies. They are found in deserts, I believe.’

Jane hauled out the requisite volume of the
Britannica
and leafed through it. ‘Mummification is a natural process where the body is desiccated by the application of heat and salt . . .’ she read. Her thin finger travelled confidently down the page. ‘Aha. “It is believed that the Ancient Egyptians discovered mummification by observing the bodies of humans and animals which had been buried in hot, dry, salty sand. The conditions of Egypt are peculiarly suited to this process because the sand contains a high degree of natron, which Herodotus says is used to preserve the bodies of pharaohs.” Gosh. So maybe he just dies in the desert . . .’