The Castlemaine Murders (5 page)

‘Barbarism. He said that we have left behind the barbarism of the past. And I was thinking, Miss Crich said that the Great War killed more men than any other war—not Alexander, not the Romans or Assyrians, no one killed more people than . . . well, us. Our governments. Aren’t we barbaric still?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Phryne with great feeling. ‘The only difference is that we are trying not to be. We at least know what barbarism is, and we reject it. That has to count for something. But not,’ she added, breaking into the fast scamper of one wearing a tight-fitting skirt, ‘to any great degree of success.’

Eliza, she noticed, was running beside her. And prudent Eliza, wishing to protect her milk and roses, carried a sunshade. It was frilled and delicate as befitted a lady’s accessory for a warm summer’s day, but it had a steel shaft and handle.

‘And how do you expect the horse to get up if you keep beating it?’ Phryne asked a carter, who was flailing at a fallen horse’s eyes with a buggy whip.

The carter sighted Phryne’s small figure and growled an obscenity. He continued to beat the horse, which was so pinned under the remains of the cart that it could not move.

Jane was interested, warm-hearted Ruth was aghast. Both of them took a step backwards to allow Phryne room to move. Eliza did not.

‘See here, my man,’ she began. Her aristocratic tone attracted the carter’s full wrath and he came up from his stooping position roaring. Eliza was caught by the arm and uttered a ladylike shriek.

Phryne dodged around him, removed his whip with a quick twist, and called to an enthralled crowd, ‘Come and heave this cart off that poor horse while I reason with this gentleman. There will be shillings if this is done very quickly,’ she added as the carter dragged Eliza towards him.

Then something astonishing happened. The aristocrat, daughter of at least a hundred distinguished earls, lost her manner, her accent, and her temper. The carter found himself being dragged off balance by a fury who snarled through bared teeth, ‘Shut your filthy mouth! If you call me that again, you bludger, I’ll knock out your eye with this sunshade! Now take your hands off me! Who asked you to manhandle a lady, you bastard?’

Phryne, energised and warmed by the return of a small sister who had flanked her indomitably by the pig bins of the Victoria market, poked the whip into the middle of the driver’s unsavoury back. He was a big, red-faced, broken-toothed bully, greasy with breakfast sausages and stinking of beer. Phryne knew the type.

‘Let my sister go,’ said Phryne clearly. ‘She means it, you know. And that sunshade is London made. Steel. Which eye don’t you need?’ The carter released Beth, who shook herself like a cat ruffled by unauthorised handling. Phryne did not allow the carter to turn around. Her gentle voice continued from behind his back, which was disconcerting. ‘Now we are going to get your horse up, and you are going to behave, and the Inspectors of Cruelty will be round in the morning to make sure that you don’t beat the poor beast to death because we have embarrassed you. Assuming it can still trudge, of course. How are the men going, Beth?’

‘They’ve heaved the cart off,’ said Beth. ‘They’ve got it onto four hoofs again. It’s favouring the off-fore, but nothing’s broken as far as I can see.’

‘Name and address?’ asked Phryne, and wrote down the grudgingly given details in a small notebook. ‘You may turn around now,’ she told him.

When the carter realised that he had been bailed up and reproved by a woman barely over five feet tall in a cloche hat, he swelled with outrage, remembered the sunshade, and released his beery breath.

‘Good, lead it carefully, now. Thank you, gentlemen,’ said Phryne, distributing shillings with a liberal hand to her stalwart helpers. ‘Now, Beth, I think we could do with a nice cup of tea.’

‘Bugger that,’ said Beth, fanning herself with her straw hat. ‘We need a drink.’

Phryne and her sister walked arm in arm along Acland Street. The sun shone. The breeze blew the scent of ozone and Turkey lolly and the vinegar scent of best black silks brought out for Sunday. Phryne was suddenly very happy.

‘Good afternoon, Dr Treasure. Such a bore to bother you on a Sunday afternoon,’ apologised Phryne. The room looked just as it always had. Crowded. Shelves bore books, anatomical specimens far too vividly displayed in gin-clear alcohol, a pair of crossed oars with a kangaroo skin behind them and a rather out of place teddy bear. He was a battered, humorous and much loved bear with an air of slightly cynical world weariness and someone was going to miss him fairly soon. And in all probability, they would then scream. Dr Treasure’s family occupied the parts of his house without, Phryne hoped, interesting viscera in jars, and he had two small children much given to vociferation.

‘You know, Miss Fisher, I’ve never been bored in your presence,’ replied Dr Treasure, offering her a chair next to a table bearing an ominous, shrouded burden. He took her hand and kissed it.

Dr Treasure was an expert in many sciences, frequently consulted in the deepest secrecy by important persons, and very firmly married. Phryne found this refreshing. She could flirt with Dr Treasure without the risk of being invited to any impromptu game of swap-the-spouse. He was tall, with the curly blond hair, guileless blue eyes and rosy cheeks of the country boy he had been, and Phryne liked him very much.

‘Well, we’ve laid him out—definitely a him, he’s very well preserved,’ observed the doctor, throwing back the covering. Phryne couldn’t help noticing that it was a fine linen sheet and hoped that Mrs Treasure was not going to be told where her trousseau linen had gone. Although by now she could probably guess.

The corpse was, as the doctor had said, very well preserved. Horribly so. Even the fingernails were still on the clawed fingers. The face was still disfigured with the half-rotten papier-mâché mask. The drum-tight leathery skin stretched over the great bones of the torso, ribs and pelvis, and even the shrunken remains of male organs were evident. Phryne did not blench, because she never did, but she did not find the sight agreeable. Jane stepped forward with every appearance of delight.

‘Who is this?’ asked Dr Treasure, a line appearing between his brows. What he was thinking, Phryne knew, was that naked men, however long dead, are no sight for young maidens. What he said, to his eternal credit, was, ‘Miss Jane, is it? Pleasure to meet you. Have you been to an autopsy before?’

‘No,’ replied Jane. ‘But I’ve read several reports. You begin with a Y incision, do you not? Throat to sternum then around the navel to the pubis?’

Dr Treasure blinked.

‘Ah, well, yes, though the very first action is to view the body all over, to see what can be seen. That is what the word means. “Op”, to see; “auto”, for oneself.’ The line between Dr Treasure’s brows vanished. He smiled down on Jane’s enthusiastic face. ‘Do I detect a future colleague in the bud, as it were?’

‘I want to study morbid psychology,’ said Jane. ‘But first I want to be a doctor.’

‘And so you shall,’ agreed Dr Treasure, equipping Jane with a large apron and blousing it at the waist so that it would not drag on the floor.

Phryne had wondered how Dr Treasure would react to Jane. She looked so small, so thin, and so schoolgirlish in her good blue churchgoing suit and her round felt hat. But the admirable Dr Treasure had recognised something akin to himself in the composed young woman which had removed all his objections.

A door closed and someone came in through the house entrance.

‘Ah, Ayers, there you are,’ said the doctor. ‘May I introduce my most learned colleague Professor Ayers, the Egyptologist?’

Phryne smiled. Ayers was from Sydney University, expert in both the pharaonic debris and the beautiful boys that littered the desert. He was a slim, elegant man about the heft and height of Lawrence of Arabia. The last Phryne had seen of him he had been headed for the sandier bits of the world with a papyrus clue to the tomb of Khufu, builder of the great pyramid. Either he was back or he had never left.

‘You’ve caught me making final arrangements,’ he told her. ‘Next month I’m off.’

‘I wish you every success,’ said Phryne warmly. ‘Allow me to introduce my daughter Jane.’

Ayers bowed slightly in Jane’s general direction. Professor Ayers evidently did not like children. Phryne noticed that Jane divined this instantly and changed position around the dead man, so that she was standing close to Dr Treasure. Phryne was impressed with Jane’s sensitivity and also that she did not seem to return Professor Ayers’ dislike.

‘Well, here’s our chap,’ breezed Dr Treasure, aware of an atmosphere. ‘Weighs in at fifteen pounds and is fifty-nine inches in extremis—and his extremis is more extreme than usual. Beautiful condition,’ he continued, knocking on the corpse’s chest with his knuckles. There was a hollow clonk.

‘Would that be his height in life?’ asked Jane.

‘No, they shrink a bit,’ replied Ayers. ‘The corpse is desiccated, which reduces the overall weight and the space between the joints. Give him another four or five inches for a living height. My word,’ he said, drawing closer to Jane’s unwelcome proximity. ‘He is magnificent, Treasure. What a find, Miss Fisher!’

Phryne found the mummy more grotesque than magnificent. Dr Treasure had removed the clothes and had been engaged in cleaning the leather face with linseed oil. He offered Phryne a swab. She politely declined. The way that the dark skin had torn like paper over one cheekbone was unsettling her. ‘Where be your quips, your quiddities . . .’ she asked herself. ‘Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay might stop a hole to keep the wind away . . .’

She had been unaware that she had spoken aloud until Dr Treasure completed the quote: ‘“Oh that that flesh that held the world in awe, could patch a wall t’ expel the winter’s flaw . . . Go to my Lady, bid her paint an inch thick, to this end she must come. Make her laugh at that!” Dear me. Shakespeare always has a word for it, hasn’t he?’

‘Yes, it’s so accommodating of him,’ said Phryne rather tartly, and turned her back on the table.

Here were the chaps and the cowboy hat of his disguise. They felt new, or rather, not old enough to be original. They were filthy with dust and old spiders’ webs.

‘I think it’s whitewash,’ said Professor Ayers behind her.

‘Whitewash indeed, and papier-mâché. Curiouser and curiouser. Ayers, my dear fellow, who whitewashes a mummy?’

‘And why?’ murmured Jane. ‘It’s a bit like gilding fine gold or painting the lily, you know.’

‘So you read Shakespeare as well, my young colleague. Very suitable. Can you get hold of this bit from your end? I think it will peel. So. Very nice.’

‘I do hope you are going to tell us, Miss Fisher,’ commented Professor Ayers. ‘When you have an explanation, of course. I know it is going to be fascinating. Someone makes a mummy—you know, Treasure, some consideration ought to be given to the method of mummification. I am almost prepared to swear that this body was treated in an Egyptian fashion. Give me a probe and I’ll be sure.’

There was an interval in which Phryne tried not to hear sinister scraping noises, and Ayers exclaimed, ‘Exactly! No nasal sinus!’

‘Ah,’ said Jane.

‘Ah,’ said Dr Treasure.

‘What does that signify?’ asked Phryne after a pause in which the scientific drew their own conclusions and the unscientific wondered why they had come.

Dr Treasure hurried to explain. ‘Well, you see, there are various ways of preserving a body—by freezing in permafrost, by smoking, by curing, by embalming and by desiccation. I don’t think he’s been smoke-cured, do you, fellows?’

‘No singed bits,’ said Jane, who had obviously been promoted to an honorary fellow.

‘No soot,’ agreed Professor Ayers.

‘And if he had been properly embalmed he’d have more flesh on him,’ Dr Treasure continued, ‘to put it crudely. Embalming works by injecting arsenic . . . well, I suppose that is not relevant.’ He had observed that he was not holding his audience. ‘Of course, there are also the bodies of saints and so on who have been preserved incorrupt by some means, but they are supposed to be perfect and this chap only weighs fifteen pounds. So it’s probable that he was preserved by desiccation, that is, he was dried out. We don’t know yet if it was natural, which he could have done himself by dying considerately in a nice hot desert, or whether someone did it on purpose with a couple of bags of butcher’s salt. Professor Ayers reminded me that in Egypt the brain was extracted through the nose . . .’

‘With a thing like a button hook,’ added Jane helpfully.

‘And has just ascertained that the nasal sinus is broken, which means . . .’

‘Thank you,’ said Phryne. ‘I understand. Pray continue, gentlemen.’

Phryne turned back to the clothes. Jane was in her element. Phryne was not. The corpse disturbed her. She felt that this examination was somehow indecent.

The cloth of the shirt tore even under her very careful handling. There were traces of whitewash on the wide band of a cheap collarless blue and white checked flannel shirt, circa perhaps 1910. The trousers were older—moleskins, if she were any judge—and as fragile as old washleather. Phryne took up Dr Treasure’s magnifying glass. Something was written or perhaps, yes, stitched into the waistband. It was so blurred and broken that she could only guess at it. Was that a T? Followed, perhaps, by a B? A washing mark, maybe. Otherwise the moleskins were cobwebby, worn, dirty and fragmentary. There was scarcely enough trouser to keep even a mummy decent.

There were no rags of undergarments, though they might have fallen entirely to dust, and no socks in the dusty boots. Poor TB, if he was TB, had not even been given a slave’s loincloth before he had been dressed in these foul rags and displayed like a guy.

The boots were interesting. They looked too good to be wasted on a carnival figure, for all the walking he might do. Jane had suggested that they were not his boots because they had fallen off, but surely the total loss of flesh would explain that? If he had been about 64 inches tall he might have had a size . . . seven, perhaps, boot. Phryne borrowed some linseed swabs and cleaned one side of the left boot, noting that the soles had plenty of wear in them. Layers of dust came off and under it a splash of white and then a streak of red. Blood? No. Blood dried black. This was red clay. Under close examination she could see that both boot soles bore traces of red clay. Tenacious stuff, red clay. Phryne had once been smeared with clay during an injudicious foray into the sport called caving, and after trying to remove it from her hair had decided that it might be easier just to plaster the rest of herself with red clay and start a new fashion. Where was the nearest red earth? Not on the black soil plain. Towards Ballarat, perhaps, or Bendigo.