Unnatural Habits: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (Phryne Fisher Mysteries) (15 page)

‘I’m so sorry, Miss Fisher,’ he faltered.

‘It’s nothing,’ she told him. ‘Now, be comforted. Miss Kettle was seen at another place after your club. She vanished from Footscray. No one will investigate you. Not even as to where you find ortolans in Australia. Where no ortolans fly.’

‘Are you sure of this?’ asked Mr. Featherstonehaugh.

‘Certain. I am pursuing several lines of enquiry, but none of them concern you or your excellent establishment.’

He relaxed at last into the amorous embrace of the plush chair.

‘Oh, I have been so worried,’ he said.

The waiter patted his shoulder and offered him more brandy, which he sipped.

‘But you can do something for me,’ Phryen continued. ‘Your members are used to keeping secrets, and they are everywhere. If anyone hears anything about Polly Kettle, I would be much obliged if they would tell me.’

‘Of course, Miss Fisher,’ said Mr. Featherstonehaugh.

‘Is any member of your club involved in any way with the press?’

‘I trust you, Miss Fisher, but I cannot disclose any of the member’s names.’

‘Yes, quite. I meant, if any of them are, perhaps I could meet them? My word is my bond and I swear not to even write down their names.’

Mr. Featherstonehaugh thought about this. He drank more brandy. He looked up at the waiter and said flirtatiously, ‘The best cognac, my dear?’

‘Only the best for you, Boss,’ said the waiter in a broad Australian accent. ‘I thought you were going to keel over.’

‘Well, well, I applaud your generous spirit. Spirits. Hah! Very well, Miss Fisher. We shall invite you to lunch.’

‘Gentlemen only,’ Phryne pointed out.

‘You shall be an honorary gentleman,’ he said slyly.

‘I have always tried to behave like one,’ she responded.

‘And if you solve this case without involving us, I shall tell you the secret of ortolans en brochette. In Australia.’

‘Deal,’ said Phryne, and held out her hand.

She returned home with the name of the book from which the delectable cider cup had derived, still wondering about the ortolans. Surely a man of Mr. Featherstonehaugh’s refinement wasn’t cooking budgies?

Lunch was cold chicken and ham sandwiches and ice cream for dessert. Very satisfactory, Phryne thought, considering the Blue Cats’ two cooks. One for rice pudding and roly poly and steak and kidney pudding, and one for Mont-Blanc aux marrons
and quiche lorraine and boeuf en daube. Cunning.

After lunch she laid out her butcher’s paper and displayed it for her minions.

‘Ooh,’ said Tinker, looking at the rude words.

‘Interesting,’ said Jane, looking at the diagrams. ‘They’ve got the labia entirely wrong, you know.’

Phryne smiled. Thus the scientific mind.

‘Yes, but that need not concern us here. This is the wall from Mrs. Ryan’s prison cell. I want you to sort out the entries. I want the ones which don’t say the equivalent of “die you bloody bastards.” I know who wrote that one.’

‘Are you looking for a clue, Miss Phryne?’ asked Jane. ‘Should I get Ruth?’

‘Where is she?’

‘In the kitchen, Mrs. Butler’s making an ice-cream concoction. Something to do with egg whites. They weren’t whipping properly when I just thought I might take my book into the parlour to get out of the way.’

‘Bombe Alaska,’ diagnosed Phryne. ‘Delicate work in this heat. No need to disturb her. Can you and Tinker make notes for me? I have to call a bishop.’

‘Yes, Miss Phryne,’ replied Jane. ‘I’ll take this side, you have that side, and we’ll meet in the middle?’ she said to Tinker. He nodded.

Phryne left them sorting out the invective from the anatomically incorrect and went to the telephone. The weather had turned humid and she found thinking difficult. Walking to her own hall was like wading through warm treacle. The limbs seemed to be weighted and the intellect fogged. How anyone ever gets anything done in the tropics I can’t imagine, she thought. And there’s going to be the mother and grandmother of a storm fairly soon. The black cat Ember’s taken refuge in my wardrobe and Molly’s as flat as a dogskin rug on the bathroom tiles. Nothing moving but her poor little panting tongue. And if this goes on I might join her.

She got through to the bishop’s secretary fairly easily, but the bishop was not available. Phryne hadn’t expected him to be. She made an appointment to see him the next day. She also mentioned that a certain Father Kennedy should be questioned under obedience about the pregnancy of a girl called Annie Jordan. And that if this was not done Miss Fisher would be reluctantly compelled to mention the matter to friends of hers at the Hawklet. This snippet caused the secretary to make comprehensive notes about the matter for the bishop’s urgent atttention. That being as much as she could do from the Catholic angle for the day, Phryne called Jack Robinson and told his sergeant all about Mrs. Ryan’s disappearance, emphasising that finding Patrick Ryan had become urgent, as it was possible that Polly Kettle was in his hands, and they were not reliable hands. She also asked for and got the address of Polly Kettle’s parents in Camberwell.

By that time she had had enough of the telephone and went back to the parlour. Jane and Tinker were discussing what they had found, quite amicably. My, isolation had done that boy a power of good. He even looked more comfortable, sprawling over the paper and breathing heavily through his mouth as he untangled the prisoners’ scribblings and wrote the important ones down in his notebook. He was wearing his new shorts and had even abandoned his boots and put on the sandals, which he had previously scorned as girlish footwear. Of course, melting feet might have something to do with that.

Phryne still felt slow and stupid. She sat down, rang for Mr. Butler and ordered iced lemonade, and read through her own notes. Then she selected the Encyclopaedia
Britannica
and read the entry on ortolans. It was so cruel and disgusting she was very glad that she had missed this gastronomic treat.

The birds,
Emberiza hortulana
, were identified with the Roman delicacy fig-peckers. Being foolish enough to migrate to France, they were captured alive, kept in a dark box and fed on millet, figs and grapes, then drowned in armagnac. They were then roasted quickly and eaten whole by a diner with a linen cloth draped over his head. The taste was amazing, apparently, from the ambrosial fat to the bitter guts. Revolting. One writer opined that the linen cloth was to allow the diner to hide from God. Sounded reasonable. From the picture, they looked a bit like finches. Phryne could not imagine Mr. Featherstonehaugh allowing such brutality to occur at the Blue Cat. She looked forward to his secret.

Thunder rumbled overhead. Phryne drank lemonade and meditated on cruelty. There was such a lot of it about. She was sunk in gloom by the time Jane and Tinker called her over to the big table to receive the gleanings of their study.

‘Mostly they’re just things like “die you bloody bastards” and “fuck Mrs. Ryan.” Someone else wrote “only with yours,”’ giggled Tinker.

‘But there is this,’ said Jane. ‘It doesn’t seem to relate to anything else.’

Phryne read the legend SS 5.10 BM Kollontai.

‘Interesting,’ she said.

‘What is Kollontai?’ asked Jane.

‘Alexandra Kollontai, a revolutionary Russian woman. Good work, minions. This is definitely significant,’ Phryne told them. They beamed.

‘Yes, but what does it mean?’ demanded Tinker.

‘Ah, there you have me,’ said Phryne. ‘I don’t know yet. But we’ve seen it before. In relation to Julie Reilly. In the letterbox. I have it here somewhere. Ah, yes.’ She exhibited the note.
‘
Julie, remember the revolution. SS 5.10, BM
,’
she read.

‘Whatever that means,’ said Jane.

‘That we shall ascertain. I wonder if it’s a phone number? Might be scrambled, of course.’

‘There are four hundred and fifty-six million, nine hundred and seventy-six thousand permutations of those seven letters and numbers,’ said Jane after a brief calculation.

‘Then you had better get started,’ said Phryne serenely. ‘Is Dot back yet?’

‘Yes, Miss Phryne, she’s in the garden,’ said Jane, slightly dismayed. But it might not be as bad as she thought at first, she told Tinker as they went into the hall. ‘The letters have to stay together, two letters for the exchange. So there’s only six hundred and seventy-six thousand perms of that.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Tinker, who had always been good at numbers. Especially when they related to how many fish he had to sell to constitute enough potatoes for seven people’s dinner. ‘Tell me about permutations. Sounds hard.’

‘Not really,’ said Jane, delighted to have an intelligent auditor. Ruth was only interested in numbers when it came to measuring ingredients. ‘You just take the original number of variables… There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, so you just multiply twenty-six by itself, which makes six hundred and seventy-six, for the total number of ways of arranging any two letters. There are three numbers, so you multiply ten by itself twice to make a thousand, and multiply the two together. But now I come to think about it, it won’t be that bad, because if the number is a coded version of five hundred and ten then there might be only ten possibilities.’

‘How does that work?’ Tinker asked, feeling that Jane might not have been as tedious a companion as he had thought. This was mind-stretching stuff. He found that he liked the feeling. Jane expounded.

‘Let’s say it’s a code where you add a number to the original one. Say you add four to every number. Then the original telephone number would have been 176. So the ten possibilities would be 510, 621, 732, 843 and so on.’

‘So how would the letters work then?’ enquired Tinker, suddenly drowning in a sea of numbers.

‘You might add a fixed number of letters. If it’s four again, then instead of SS it would be WW. So there’d only be twenty-six permutations for the letters. So twenty-six times ten is two hundred and sixty.’

‘Unless the numbers and letters you add changes every time?’ suggested Tinker.

Jane frowned, while appreciating that this innumerate fisher boy had made a valid comment. Tinker might have his merits after all.

‘I really hope they don’t, or we’ll be in a spot of bother,’ Jane answered.

***

Phryne took her shady hat from its peg by the back door, passing through a cloud of culinary gloom. The egg whites, apparently, had completely declined to be whipped. Mrs. Butler was of the opinion that there must have been a speck of grease in the mixing bowl. She was making an apricot cake instead, as Mrs. Butler hated waste. Phryne nodded in passing and kept going. Even the most even-tempered of cooks became unstable when the ingredients rebelled.

Dot was sitting under the arbour, her sewing in her lap, a glass of her most sinful drink, a sherry cobbler, before her. She was always aware that she had signed the pledge when she was eight. A sherry cobbler was as far as her dissipation ever went.