Dead Man's Chest (12 page)

‘Is she all right?’ he faltered.

‘Bugger off,’ growled Ruth.

Kiwi buggered off. Ruth carried Jane to the shallows and sat by her as she vomited seawater and shook with outrage.

‘He tried to kill me!’ she exclaimed.

‘I don’t reckon we want to play with boys anymore,’ said Ruth. ‘Come on, can you walk? Lean on me. We’re leaving.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

To be weak is miserable Doing or suffering

John Milton
Paradise Lost

Jane and Ruth plodded home up the hill, salty and disgusted. Mrs Mason had offered to drive them home if they stayed for the picnic to which the boys were so looking forward, but they had fairly politely declined.

They were met by Phryne, who sent them upstairs for a bath in her own bathroom, with the special soap. Before they sank into the hot, foaming water, Jane borrowed Dot’s embroidery shears and snipped off the long plait of her hair at the nape.

‘No one,’ she said to Ruth, ‘is going to do that to me again.’

Ruth did not say a word. Jane had been badly treated as a child. When she was hurt, her face looked like it had back in the boarding house. Pale and set, as if carved out of wax. Ruth would do anything to take that look off. Therefore, instead of going downstairs to investigate who was cooking bacon and cabbage in her very own kitchen, she slid into the bath and started massaging Miss Phryne’s coconut shampoo into her sister’s outraged scalp.

They emerged clean and scented. They drained the bath and cleared the sand out of the bottom of the tub. They dressed in clean clothes and went down to the kitchen without a word.

Phryne was listening to Máire talk about the phantom snipper.

‘He’s a ghost,’ she declared, crossing the bib of her white apron. ‘I’ve worn my scarf ever since he cut the hair off Mary Nicholls, and she cried for days. And Alice Chestnut. She’s got a bob now. But he’s never seen. The girls say they just felt a tug, as though someone had pulled their hair, and felt around and it was gone. Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph protect us, he’s got another, so he has!’

‘I cut it off myself,’ declared Jane.

‘And very fetching it will look,’ said Phryne. ‘When trimmed a little. Are you hungry, girls?’

‘Starved,’ declared Ruth. ‘We never got a bite of that picnic.’

‘Boys played rough?’ asked Phryne gently. Ruth nodded. ‘I see.’

‘I’ll cook you up some more bacon and cabbage, will I now?’ asked Máire.

‘Do so,’ invited Phryne. ‘Then Michael can show Ruth how to fillet garfish.’

‘I’ve just been thinking about garfish,’ said Ruth.

‘We need a rolling pin,’ he said. ‘Or a bottle.’

‘I’m not fishifying my pastry pin,’ said Ruth. ‘After lunch, we can use an empty wine bottle. We’ve got plenty of them.’

Máire sliced more bacon. For the first time in her life she had actually eaten enough of that smoked treat. She felt positively virtuous.

After a record-breaking bicycle ride, Tinker fell through the back door with Gaston drooping in his wake.

‘You found it?’ asked Phryne.

‘Yes, Guv’nor,’ he replied. ‘All tied up and marked for sale. Gaston smelt the stuff out and howled and howled and we had to quit before we got sacked.’

‘Well done!’ she congratulated him and he beamed, teeth white in his grubby face. ‘Now you get into the bath, use pumice on those hands, and you’d better take poor Gaston with you. When you come back there will be bacon and cabbage.’

‘Bacon and eggs,’ Máire told her. ‘It’s that I have no more cabbage.’

‘That will suit just as well,’ Phryne replied.

‘Yair, bonzer,’ agreed Tinker, who was terribly, terribly hungry.

However, he took Gaston into the servants’ bathroom, ran himself a hot bath with carbolic, and washed himself and the little dog with care. He was elated. He had been sent out on an undercover mission, and he had succeeded. Him and Gaston. The guv’nor was pleased with him. He deserved his bacon and eggs. And he had earned threepence, and threepence was threepence.The water swirled black and he refilled it and soaked himself again. How had he got so dirty in only one day?

Gaston, who was used to baths, resigned himself to the absence of his people. These substitutes were at least affable and free with their scraps and biscuits. And he was beginning to be fond of Tinker. He sat on the bath mat and dripped, wrinkling his sensitive nose at the stink of the disinfectant.

When he saw Jane’s hair, Tinker blinked but did not comment. His attention was drawn to a large plate containing not only bacon and eggs but mushrooms and onions and tomatoes. Gaston, at his feet, was treated to leftover chicken and dog biscuits in gravy. Both dined lavishly.

Then everyone decided that they could do with a little rest, it being one o’clock. Phryne declared a siesta and they scattered to their own lodgings. Michael and Máire took their leave, carrying the leftover bacon. The O’Malley family was going to dine well tonight. On something other than fish. And Ruth had learned the enchanting skill of bending a slit garfish around a bottle, whereupon the skeleton obligingly popped free and the fish was boned. They reposed in the sink in a little salty water, waiting for the triumphs of dinner.

Phryne had dosed Jane with a cup of valerian tea. She knew that sort of helpless, violated rage very well. Jane was white and shocked. And she urgently needed to see a hairdresser. Her hair, abruptly released from the weight of her plait, fluffed around her head like a dandelion. But Jane was greatly cheered by a short conversation she had had on the stairs.

‘Do you want them punished, Jane?’ asked Phryne lightly, hand on the banister.

‘Only Fraser. The others didn’t join in,’ said Jane. ‘And Kiwi came back to ask if I was all right.’

‘Then Fraser shall be sorry,’ said Phryne.

Jane looked at the cold light that glinted in her adoptive mother’s green eyes. Then she fetched a short, deep, satisfied sigh.

‘All right,’ she said, and they climbed upwards towards rest.

Dot arrived home with Hugh and the startling news that old Mrs McNaster had died suddenly. Her son-in-law could not properly certify her death, and had called in another practitioner from Geelong. Local excitement was muted. There was a certain air, Dot said, of restrained celebration. Constable Dawson had visited the scene and found nothing awry.

‘That bloke wouldn’t notice if a tram was . . .’ began Hugh, a large, charming policeman, looking even larger in shirtsleeves and flannels. He staunched his metaphor before it offended Dot. ‘Not a zealous officer,’ he explained. ‘Wouldn’t want to offend the nobs, if there was anything wrong with the death.’

‘No reason to expect that there would be,’ said Dot briskly. ‘She was an old lady in frail health. You’re not being a policeman here, Hugh.’ Dot blushed as she called her affianced by his first name.

‘And so she passed on, regretted by few,’ said Phryne piously. ‘A poisonous old party, now facing a searching examination by the recording angel. But, dammit, there goes my witness.’

‘Witness?’ asked Hugh, pricking up his ears.

‘We’ll explain over a drink,’ said Phryne. She took his arm and led him inside. If Hugh arrived, could Lin Chung be far behind? All this exercise and good food had restored Phryne’s weakened frame and she could just do, she thought, with a little, or perhaps a lot, of amorous exercise.

Drinks were served by Dot in the parlour. The junior members of the household were asleep, exhausted by emotion and daring.

Molly gave Hugh an affectionate lick and sat down on his feet. She liked him; he was a reliable supplier of titbits and was a deft hand with ear scratching.

‘This is nice,’ said Hugh, after a deep draught of the beer which his devoted fiancée had laid in for him. ‘I went round to your house, Miss Fisher. You wouldn’t want to be there at the moment. Only quiet place was the kitchen. There were workmen all over putting up your new crimson wallpaper, tiling the floor and, while I was there, they were hauling your malachite bath up the stairs.’

‘Oh, dear, and I meant Mr and Mrs B to have a rest!’ said Phryne.

Hugh grinned, rumpling his short fair hair.

‘They’re all right. Nice little dinners in their part of the house and of course it’s all quiet at night. They reckon another two weeks and it will be right-ho. Mrs B wanted me to tell you that Ember is well. He had another two goldfish out of the pond.’

‘Ah, well, I have been eating a lot of fish myself,’ said Phryne. She had resisted the designer Camellia’s suggestion that she buy expensive Japanese carp for this very reason. If Ember was going to eat them—and he was—then he could snack on Woolworth’s goldfish at sixpence each, not the Emperor’s koi.

‘And the fraud case is finished?’ asked Dot, refilling the beer glass. She was drinking a daring sherry and Phryne had her usual gin and orange.

‘All tied up with packing tape and consigned to the public prosecutor,’ said Hugh easily. Since being concussed in an early investigation, he reckoned that finishing a case without being belted over the head meant that he was winning, at least on points. ‘And they gave me my stripes,’ he added.

‘So, you’re Detective Sergeant Collins now?’ asked Dot. ‘You deserve it!’

‘Thanks. You’ve been having trouble, Miss Fisher?’ asked Hugh, a little uncomfortable about being praised.

‘It’s been an interesting few days,’ agreed Phryne. ‘Dot will tell you all about them when she awakes. I’m taking Jane to the hairdresser, if you’ll excuse me.’

Jane did not like the hairdresser, and neither did Phryne. The shop was crowded with miscellaneous lotions, potions and liquids designed to produce a fine glossy chevalure from anything short of old hemp rope. The prevailing scent was chypre, overlaid with a strong suggestion of burnt horsehair. This was not a good combination. Jane sneezed.

‘Oh, no, another victim of that madman!’ exclaimed Miss Leonard, a woman with iron discipline, to judge by the perfect galvanised-iron waves of her coiffure. ‘And such a lovely, lovely colour! A tragedy!’

Jane was about to inform her that it was merely hair, and she had done execution on it herself, but Phryne pressed a hand on her shoulder and she subsided into the chair. Miss Leonard did seem to know what she was doing, at least. Jane’s world was suddenly full of shampoo.

‘Just a bobby cut, Mrs . . . er . . .?’ asked the hairdresser, sluicing off the suds and rubbing the hair dry.

‘Fisher,’ said Phryne. ‘A bobby cut. Like mine.’

‘I can’t understand it,’ said the hairdresser, applying some sort of unguent to Jane’s scalp and rubbing industriously. ‘How someone could want to hurt young girls like this.’

‘People,’ agreed Phryne, ‘are strange. Are you all right, Jane?’

‘Yes,’ said Jane, after some consideration. ‘Is this going to take long?’

‘Never hurry an artist,’ advised Phryne. ‘I’ll just take a tour of the shelves.’

‘Everything to preserve, nourish and condition your hair,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘Now, Miss, if you would sit up, we’ll just tidy up a few ends . . .’

Jane watched in some amazement as her face appeared again between two wings of hair. This was going to be easier to manage than that long plait. She should have disposed of it long ago. Less time on the care of hair was more time for reading books, she thought. No wonder scholars don’t mind going bald. More face to wash, less hair to comb. Her face looked different, too. Thinner. More grown-up.

‘There,’ exclaimed Miss Leonard, fllicking hair off the back of Jane’s neck. ‘What do you think?’

‘Very nice,’ said Jane.

‘Indeed.’ Phryne dragged her gaze away from fascinated contemplation of an array of wigs which looked as though their original owners had been scalped. They belonged in an ethnographical museum. There were, however, no shrunken heads that she could see. ‘A very neat haircut. Thank you, Miss Leonard.’

Phryne parted with a small sum and followed Jane out of the shop, evading the hairdresser’s cry of ‘Anything for yourself, some Indian root tonic, perhaps? Some hair nourisher, some follicle food . . . ?’

‘I just have to order some more beer,’ said Phryne. ‘Now that we have Hugh with us. How are you feeling?’

‘Good,’ decided Jane, patting her new coiffure. ‘Lighter.’

‘I thought the same when I had mine cut. But it wouldn’t do for Ruth, or for Dot.’

‘No,’ said Jane.

Beer ordered—and another bottle of gin in case Mrs Mason dropped in—and they walked up the hill to the house, where, to the strains of the gramophone playing ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More, No More’, Dot was dancing with Hugh and Tinker was dancing with Ruth and Molly was giving her opinion of this frivolity by running between the dancers’ legs whenever she could spy an opening.

She had just upset Dot, who was swept off her feet and into Hugh’s arms, when Phryne and Jane came home.

Dot blushed and tried to release herself. Hugh hung onto her. She was a lovely armful, his affianced bride, and they weren’t doing anything wrong. Phryne chuckled and swung Jane into the dance. Soon they had forgotten why they were dancing, and just danced.

The gramophone hissed to a halt. Phryne laughed.

‘That was fun,’ she said. ‘What do we think of Jane’s new style?’

‘Fetching,’ said Hugh.

‘Nice,’ said Ruth.

‘Very pretty,’ said Dot.

Jane smiled. She had never worried about being pretty. But it might be useful.

‘Now,’ said Phryne, ‘a council of war, if you please. More drinks?’

‘I’ll get ’em,’ volunteered Tinker.

He returned with a tray. Dot sipped decorously at another sherry. Hugh opened another bottle of beer. Tinker, very carefully, mixed another iced gin and orange for Miss Fisher, and the younger members of the household had lemonade. They all sat down in the parlour on the shabby chairs and looked attentive.

‘Well, Detective Sergeant Collins, what do you think?’ asked Phryne.

Tinker’s eyes lit up.

‘You’re really a homicide cop?’ he asked.

‘I really am,’ responded Hugh solemnly.

‘Gosh,’ said Tinker.

Phryne sipped cautiously. Tinker had been very generous with the gin. And although it was fitting and proper that he should find another hero, she felt a momentary pang.

‘I don’t know a thing about the phantom snipper,’ said Hugh. ‘I never heard of such a thing. Bloke must be a few sandwiches short of the full picnic, I reckon. He won’t be caught until he makes a mistake and some sheila belts him with her handbag.’

‘One thing,’ offered Jane. ‘How does he cut the hair? I had to make seven chops to cut mine, and that was with Miss Dot’s sharp embroidery shears. Ordinary scissors wouldn’t do it that fast.’