Urn Burial (9 page)

But who knowes the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his afhes, or whether they are to be fcattered? The relicks of many lie like the ruines of Pompeys in all partes of the earth; and when they arrive at your handes, these may seem to have wandered 81

farre, who in a direct and median travel, have but few miles of known earth between yourfelf and the pole.

‘Bottled apricots and cream,’ decided Mrs Reynolds.

Phryne took Sir Thomas into the parlour.

When, at three-thirty, she went to the maid’s door and knocked, there was no reply. The door was open. Phryne looked in and what she saw caused her to drop a valuable early copy of Urne Buriall to the floor with a thud which might have broken the spine.

Lina was not going to be able to tell her who had attacked her in the fog. A swollen countenance, blue with suffocation, confronted Phryne’s horrified gaze. Black bruises showed on the throat.

Lina was dead.

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CHAPTER SIX

The certainty of death is attended with uncertainties, in time, manner and places.

Urn Burial, Sir Thomas Browne, Chapter III.

PHRYNE PICKED up the book, stepped back and closed the door. Then she walked quickly to the drawing room, passing Mrs Croft on her way back to the kitchen.

It took some time to locate the Mistress of the House. Phryne finally ran her down in the kitchen garden, consulting with a grubby gardener’s boy about, it seemed, carrots.

‘Evelyn, I have something to show you,’ said Phryne. ‘Could you come with me, please?’

‘Now, Phryne?’ Mrs Reynolds looked up from surveying a collection of muddy objects which might, or might not, be vegetables.

‘Yes, now, Evelyn,’ she replied. Something in her voice made Mrs Reynolds abandon her discussion and follow Phryne obediently to Lina’s room.

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Phryne opened the door.

The bed was made up with clean sheets, drawn close and flat. The blue blanket and eiderdown lay innocent of one wrinkle. The window was open, the curtain flapped.

Of the dead woman there was not a trace.

‘Where’s Lina?’ asked Mrs Reynolds.

‘Where indeed?’ asked Phryne, profoundly shocked. ‘Is this the right room?’

‘Why, yes, her name’s on the door,’ said Mrs Reynolds, pointing out the luggage label with a handwritten ‘Lina’ on it. ‘Where can they have put her? Perhaps Mrs Hinchcliff has moved her to their suite, it’s further along. Let’s see, next door is the housemaid, then the scullery maid . . .’ She opened each door as she passed and Phryne looked in. Each room had the same bed and chair, the same box, and various rather dim or messy oils on the wall facing the window. Servants’ rooms tended to be the destination of pictures and furniture that no one had the heart to throw out but didn’t want to exhibit in any public rooms.

Dot’s powdering closet had a large gilt-framed painting of a few vague figures walking through a field which Phryne’s companion had instantly disliked. Phryne had swapped her for Hope, which Dot thought well drawn.

The Hinchcliffs’ suite was larger and well furnished in the standard Cave House melange of styles. It contained a tester-bed, a Turkish carpet, some mock-Sheridan chairs and a Gothic-revival table, a painting of three horses and a multitude 84

of photographs in silver frames. In several of them, a younger Mr and Mrs Hinchcliff stared out, clutching a baby notable for its utterly blank expression. What it did not contain was Lina.

‘I’d better talk to Mrs Hinchcliff,’ worried Mrs Reynolds. ‘She must have ordered Lina moved.

Thank you for telling me, Phryne. I can’t have my household shifted about like this.’

‘Not at all,’ said Phryne through lips which were as numb as novocaine.

In another three minutes she had found Lin Chung.

He was sitting in a leather armchair in the small parlour, reading her copy of Bleak House. She paused at the door and looked at him. The weak sunlight gilded his bent head and the long fingers turning the pages. He seemed as self-contained and decorative as a cat.

He felt her presence, lifted his head to speak and saw her expression. Her face was blanched and she looked like an ivory carving of some Buddhist deity. His urbane comment on Dickens’ style died on his lips. He did not exclaim, but she saw hunting alertness sweep through him, so that even sitting in exactly the same pose, he was no longer relaxed but nerved for action. She walked deliberately forward and held out her hand.

‘Come,’ she said, and Lin Chung followed unquestioningly out of the house and across the lawn until she stopped under the beech tree. She led him around the trunk and then scanned the branches narrowly. In all that time she had not 85

spoken and the hand in his was shaking. Then she slid both arms around his waist and held him tight as she began to speak. His arms closed around her.

‘The body was gone?’ he asked, five minutes later. ‘I see. It is perfectly insane, but this is a good setting for the surrealist. Phryne, how dreadful.

You are having a difficult day.’

This deliberate understatement produced a laugh, which pleased him. He sat down on the dry grass under the tree and gathered Phryne into his embrace. She tucked her head under his chin. He admired her immensely. She was still trembling with shock but she was reasoning like a sage.

‘She was dead,’ she said firmly. ‘Strangled. How hard is it to strangle someone, Lin?’

‘Easy,’ he said. ‘With sufficient strength of heart.’

‘Show me,’ she requested.

Reluctantly, Lin Chung laid both hands to her slim throat, thumbs at the front. He pressed lightly. ‘You see, here is the pressure point. And here is the great blood vessel that supplies the brain. All I need to do is grip hard enough to cut off that blood supply, and you would be unconscious in – well, maybe a minute – and . . .’

He stopped.

‘Dead in five minutes? Would it take a great deal of strength?’

‘No, just as I said, a strong heart. Firmness of purpose, you say in English.’

Phryne got out her small mirror and examined the faint red fingermarks on her delicate skin, 86

already fading. ‘That’s where the black bruises were. Exactly like that. She’s dead, Lin, someone killed her, and then someone took the body. I don’t understand. But I will. Now, there have been other developments, too. Someone came into my room while I was asleep – a man, that’s all I can say.’

‘There might be many reasons to come to your room, Silver Lady,’ his voice was amused.

‘Yes, and that’s what my previous visitor Gerald had in mind, but the second one – I don’t know, Lin, I didn’t want him to find me. I can’t explain, but I was sure I did not want to be discovered and that he did not intend amorous dalliance. This place is giving me the grues, as Dot would say.’

‘I have also had an occurrence, Phryne,’ said Lin Chung evenly. ‘When my valet came to lay out my evening clothes, he found something on my dressing-table which had not been there when we went to lunch.’

‘Oh? What?’ Phryne declined to guess. In Cave House, it could be anything from a golden bee from the Empress Josephine’s dress to a fresh plate of soupe printanière made with real springs.

‘An urn,’ said Lin Chung. ‘I believe there are a lot of them in the house – you’d think the English would understand the Chinese better, we both have ancestor-worship – and some maid may have brought it there by mistake.’

‘That sounds very unlikely. Where is it now?’

‘Li Pen replaced it. It was a rather handsome one, marble with a gilded lid. It stood on a plinth 87

in the hall, and now it is back there.’

‘Did anyone see Li Pen replace it?’

‘I doubt it. Li Pen has made something of a profession of not being noticed.’

‘Don’t let me go, and to Hell with my reputation, I’m cold,’ said Phryne, snuggling closer. There was something infinitely reliable about Lin Chung, and moreover he was very warm. The heat of his skin was palpable.

‘What do you make of the urn?’ she asked.

‘A joke, I fancy,’ said Lin slowly, allowing one hand to cup Phryne’s chilled face. ‘Not a very funny one. Is there more?’

‘Certainly,’ she said, and told him all that she could recall about the assignation in the library, mentioning the presence of the poet and Miss Medenham. She added the whole tale of Tom Reynolds and Jack Lucas’s father and the argument about the inheritance.

‘Most interesting.’

‘You’re being inscrutable again,’ accused Phryne.

‘So solly, Missee,’ he apologised and Phryne reached up to clip his ears. He caught her wrist and she twisted her hand free, not amused.

‘Enough of the stage Chinaman. It disconcerts me, stop it. Now, what are we to do? Do we tell anyone?’

‘How can we? I believe you, Silver Lady, but it is unlikely that anyone else will, because you are telling them something they do not want to hear.’

‘True,’ agreed Phryne. ‘But I need to know what 88

happened. We have sufficient resources to solve the riddle between us, Lin dear. Let us consider. I saw the Doctor come out of that room just after lunch. He said that Lina would be awake at tea.

That’s now and we are missing it. Can you manage without tea?’

‘I would walk many miles to sit under a tree with you, Silver Lady – and to miss English tea, which is not tea as I know it.’

‘Good. I saw the Doctor about one-thirty. By three-thirty the girl is dead. And by three-forty, at the most, the body is gone and the room tidied.’

‘Yes. The timing is rather strict. What is the next question?’

‘Who wanted her dead? She seems to have been a harmless, if addled, girl.’

‘Too many novels,’ agreed Lin Chung. ‘Li Pen tells me that in the kitchen they say that she was curious about everything, too fond of sweets, especially chocolate, and prone to spin fancies about the guests. Mrs Croft says that she doted on the poet, but I don’t know how far the affair progressed, if there was one. There was only minor resentment about her being the housekeeper’s niece, so she must have been an adroit girl.’

‘And now she’s dead,’ said Phryne. She stared across the lawn at the grey, roiling river, and thought angrily of Lina who had eaten her last chocolate, ripped out of life by someone’s strong hands around her throat. Had she woken and seen the face of her attacker, died hard and in terror, or slipped out of life without a sigh, unconscious 89

in one minute and suffocated in five? Either way, it was intolerable.

‘We must find out where everyone was between one-thirty and three-thirty. Where were you?’

‘I concluded my game of tennis with Miss Fletcher at about two-fifteen and went to my room to change. Then I looked for you and could not find you, so I sat down in the small parlour to read Bleak House. I stayed there until you came in looking like a spirit.’

‘Did anyone else pass through?’

‘Yes, several people. Miss Mead was in the room for a while, just after I got there, talking to Mrs Fletcher about crochet. Mr Reynolds and the Major, I believe, went fishing. Mrs Reynolds was in the adjoining parlour talking to the cook about menus – I could hear her.’

‘Yes, I saw her there. I didn’t look into the little parlour, Lin. Is that where you were? I saw the poet and Miss Cynthia in the library – that place was designed for assignations. Ask Li Pen to find out about the menservants, and Dot can locate the ladies. I mean to see this solved, Lin.’

‘Why?’ he asked. It was not an idle question.

Phryne thought about it.

‘Because it is disgusting. I didn’t take to poor Lina, but someone killed her and they are not getting away with it. Also, taking into account the man in my room and the shot in the mist, it might be us, next. This house feels dangerous. Will you help me?’

‘Yes,’ said Lin Chung. ‘I’ll help you.’

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Phryne and Lin Chung came back into the house as afternoon tea was being cleared away. The company was all gathered in the parlour. Phryne retraced her steps to Lina’s room, up the grand staircase and then the hidden one.

‘Look,’ she exclaimed. ‘Can you see footprints?’

Lin Chung leaned down and outlined a muddy mark on the stair carpet. ‘A boot – a man’s boot,’

he commented.

‘Yes, and they go all the way to Lina’s room, two tracks – coming and going.’

Lin walked down to the nearest guestroom, which happened to be Phryne’s, and pressed a buzzer. When a panting maid appeared, he said,

‘Send my manservant to me, please.’

‘Wait,’ Phryne interposed. ‘You’re the chambermaid, aren’t you, responsible for the rooms?’

The girl nodded. She was a solid young person with short blond hair and round blue eyes like a doll’s. ‘Did you change Lina’s bed just now?’

‘Why, yes, Miss. I was doing the rooms and saw that she wasn’t there, so I made her bed and cleaned the room. Why, is anything wrong, Miss?’

‘No, of course, what could be wrong?’ replied Phryne. ‘Was the window open?’

‘No, Miss, I opened it. Let in some fresh air, like.

Missus’ orders.’

‘Good. That’s all,’ said Phryne, and the girl sped down the back staircase for the kitchen, where presumably Li Pen was taking tea with the rest of the domestics.

‘Why do we want Li Pen?’

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‘He can tell me about the footprints. Silver Lady, Li Pen is a great hunter. They call him ‘‘Tiger-slayer’’ in his village because he once followed and killed a man-eater. Hunters track things.’

Lin Chung removed himself punctiliously from Phryne’s room and she leaned in the doorway.

‘Confucian principles holding out?’ she asked, sweetly.

‘Just,’ he admitted, taking in the invitation in her stance.

‘Drat,’ said Phryne, not noticeably annoyed.

Li Pen and Dot answered the summons. Lin spoke briefly in Cantonese to his valet, and Li Pen’s smooth face seemed to sharpen, though his features remained unmoved. He dropped to the floor at the foot of the small staircase, his nose almost touching the carpet, then inched his way up.

‘Break a snake’s back to follow him,’ said Dot.

‘What’s this all about, Miss?’

‘I’ll tell you later, Dot dear. Just now we’ve found some footprints. Who wears hobnailed boots?’