Death by Water (10 page)

‘None at all,’ said Phryne. The four ages of womanhood laughed back at her. ‘This is a wonderful picture,’ she told Mr Forrester. ‘Can I buy a print? And have you any more for me to see?’

‘Certainly,’ said Mr Forrester, abandoning seduction for the moment and hauling a suitcase from under his bed. He spread the pictures out. Phryne was surrounded by naked women, smiling, sombre, coy, bold, sleeping, dancing, wreathed in vines, draped in shawls. She pounced on another.

A peasant woman suckling a child. Her head was bent so that a wing of hair fell forward over the side of her face and shaded
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the plump, kicking baby. Her work-worn hands cradled the delicate child reverently.

‘You are selecting my favourites with amazing accuracy,’

smiled the photographer. ‘That’s Tante Marie with little Angelique.’

‘How many studies did you take to get that picture?’ asked Phryne.

‘Ten. Luckily the baby was hungry.’

What was clear from the collection was the pure, uncon-taminated passion of Mr Albert Forrester for women of any type, class or age. Phryne felt flattered on behalf of her gender.

It was nice to think that someone liked women so much, when there was such a lot of misogyny in the world.

‘Perhaps you might pose for me?’ he asked a little tentatively.

‘Perhaps I might,’ said Phryne. ‘Were you never tempted to photograph La Paloma? She had an abundance of flesh.’

‘A Rubens rather than a Renoir,’ agreed Mr Forrester. ‘But a most unpleasant woman. Do you know, she had a child when she was twenty, during a brief marriage, and she just left it with her mother in some benighted Neapolitan slum and swanned off, not even paying properly for its maintenance?

The character of the sitter does tend to emerge in photographs, you know. I wouldn’t have cared to have her in my collection.’

‘Or Mrs West?’ asked Phryne idly, picking up a photo of a sleeping odalisque, lying on her side, the fall of her hip and shoulder perfectly outlined against a hidden light.

‘No, because to take photographs I need both my hands attached to my wrists and my head in its right place on my neck,’ he said, grinning. ‘West, as you will have observed, is a jealous brute.’

‘I noticed,’ said Phryne. ‘Why on earth does he bring her on these cruises, she being what she is and he being what he is?’

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‘There you have me,’ confessed Mr Forrester. ‘I have wondered the same thing myself. I suppose the lady insists. She may look like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but as they said in the eighteenth century, I’ll warrant that she wouldn’t choke on cheese.’

‘Well,’ said Phryne, getting up. ‘Thank you so much for showing me your pictures. They are superb. Shall I see you at dinner?’

‘Certainly,’ said Mr Forrester, and Phryne took her leave, considering his offer. It was certainly more comfortable on the
Hinemoa
than it had been in the freezing studio where she had last been an artist’s model. She might well decide that a nude of Phryne Fisher would be in good company amongst Mr Forrester’s ladies.

She was so engrossed that she walked right into a steward, almost invisible behind a pile of towels. They spilled and Phryne helped him gather them up.

‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t look where I was going,’ she said, stuffing towels into his arms.

‘And I couldn’t see where I was going,’ he answered, dragging a cart forward and refolding rapidly. ‘Like my mum always said, make two trips. Not your fault, Miss. You’re Caroline’s Miss Fisher, aren’t you?’

He was another of those stocky middle aged men with which the ship seemed largely staffed. This one had thinning brown hair and blue eyes.

‘That’s right,’ said Phryne, wreathed in towels.

‘She’s been telling us about you. Allans remembered seeing an article about you in the
Age
. You’re a private detective, aren’t you, Miss?’

‘Yes, but I’d rather it didn’t get about,’ she said, hushing him with a gesture.

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He nodded ponderously. ‘Won’t get about from us, Miss.

You’re trying to find out about the jewels?’

Phryne hustled him into her stateroom, towels and all.

‘And if I am?’

‘Well, we’ll help,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t us,’ he said, in identical tones to the attendant Rose in the beauty salon. ‘But the company can’t help wondering if it was. Makes for trouble. This is a happy ship, Miss. Lots of us turned down higher wages and so on to stay with the
Hinemoa
. We want to know who did it.

By the way, Johnson’s my name.’

Phryne shook his hand.

‘Nice to meet you. I do want to find out what happened to those gems,’ said Phryne, giving up. It was no more use trying to keep secrets on a ship than in one of those small villages beloved by Agatha Christie. ‘But since I have my suspicions already and they don’t involve the crew, I need you to stay schtum, understand?’

He nodded. ‘Anything you want, Miss. Just you ask.’

‘Caroline looked after all the victims, didn’t she?’ He bridled and she patted his arm. ‘I don’t suspect Caroline of anything. But if she wants to help, she can help. Ask her to rack her memory about any visitors to the victims before they were bereft of their gewgaws. Who came to see La Paloma and Berengaria Reynolds? Who comes to see Mrs West when her husband isn’t there? Get Caroline to talk to my companion Dot and we shall see what we shall see,’ she said, with emphasis.

‘All right, Miss,’ he assented, folding the last towel and placing it on the ziggurat. He put a heavy hand on top of the pile to prevent it from toppling.

‘And anything else you find out, tell me or Dot, and take care that we aren’t overheard,’ she said.

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‘You want to look at them musicians,’ he whispered, leaning so close that Phryne could smell the mint on his breath. ‘They’re no better than they ought to be, them Melody Makers.’

‘I shall,’ she promised, and let him and the towels out into the corridor.

Since her hair was now dry, Phryne reassumed her bathing dress, took up her impedimenta and went back to the pool.

Before she left, she carefully reset her mousetrap. And this time, Jack Mason was safely on the sun deck, playing tennis, and she got her swim in peace.

When she returned to her suite, Dot was there too, calmly sitting on the floor and scratching a disreputable cat behind his nibbled ears.

‘Hello, Scragger, I didn’t see you come in,’ said Phryne, tossing her hat onto her bed. ‘You must have been under the laundry cart, you clever old puss. Or in it, perhaps. Nothing like a soft bed of fresh towels after a hard morning’s ratting.

What have you been doing, Dot?’

‘I’ve been walking around the sun deck with Maggie and Mr Thomas, that’s Mrs West’s maid and Mr Mason’s man,’

responded Dot, getting to her feet.

‘And gathering gossip like the flowers in May?’ asked Phryne. Dot pinkened.

‘They told me you went to Mr Forrester’s cabin,’ said Dot accusingly.

‘Did they? So I did. Only, as it happened, to look at his photographs, and they are very good, Dot dear, nothing in them that would bring a blush to a bishop’s countenance,’ said Phryne, a little severely. ‘And if I decided to engage in a ship-board romance, it would be none of your business, Dorothy.

I sent you to listen to gossip about other people, not about me.

You must know all about me by now,’ she added, stripping off
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the cotton dress. ‘I must wash all this salt off. Find me a robe, will you, old thing?’

Dot found her a robe without another comment. Scragger, alerted perhaps by the sub-sonic noises of rodents elsewhere in the superstructure, mewed at the door and she let him out into the corridor. He wound appreciatively around her ankles a couple of times and stalked out.

Phryne emerged from the shower dripping, rubbed herself dry and donned the robe.

‘Well, what news on the Rialto?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got some to swap.’

Dot gave up. Phryne’s morals, as always, were her own.

‘They told me a lot about the other passengers, though they wouldn’t talk about their employers much,’ she informed Phryne. ‘Except Mr Mason’s man says that he’s worried about him. He used to do all these sports, you know, football and mountain climbing and cricket, but since his father made him promise not to be a footballer, he’s just been a fribble—that’s what Thomas calls him. You know, a young man who wastes his time on dancing and ladies and drinking.’

‘Perhaps it’s a tantrum,’ suggested Phryne. ‘An “Oh, very well, Pater, I won’t be a footballer, but I’m dashed well not going to be anything else you want me to be”. Young men are tiresomely prone to demonstrations like that. Is his father likely to be impressed?’

‘Thomas doesn’t think so. He says that old Mr Mason is a formidable character, one of those iron-jawed men, and he’s content to wait his son out.’

‘And meanwhile youth is wasting away.’

‘Something like that,’ agreed Dot.

‘Has the young man any idea of a profession? With all that robust energy and muscle, why isn’t he exploring unknown
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reaches of the Amazon and having his picture taken with a lot of grinning headhunters for
National Geographic
?’

‘Nice,’ said Dot. ‘I’ll suggest it to Mr Thomas. Though I don’t think he’d like the Amazon. He knows all about wine and was telling us that this ship has the best seagoing cellar since the
Titanic
. Anyway, they think the attraction is Mrs West.’

‘Aha,’ said Phryne, lying back on her bed and blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. ‘Cherchez la femme, and she is a troublemaking young woman if ever I saw one. Mr Forrester was hinting that she had the power in that partnership.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Dot primly. ‘When he really dotes on her and she just puts up with him, then anything she says goes because he’s so afraid of losing her.’

‘That can backfire,’ commented Phryne, blowing another smoke ring. ‘For a start, being the focus of a strong-minded man’s obsession isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Dot. If the object is a nice, compassionate person, she will endure and endure until she finally breaks and runs away with the milkman or retreats into a convent. I have known cases, don’t laugh.’

‘And if the object isn’t a nice, compassionate woman?

Because I have to say, Mrs West gives her maid a very hard life,’

said Dot.

‘Then the object becomes desperately bored, driven to affairs, and may well provoke the obsessor to extreme action.’

‘Suicide?’ gasped Dot, crossing herself.

‘Or homicide. Or both. If Mrs West is playing with her husband’s affections, she may well get those pretty pink fingers burned. Just because he adores her doesn’t mean he isn’t the ruthless businessman he’s been all along.’

‘There’s a nasty story . . .’ Dot began.

‘Do tell,’ encouraged Phryne.

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‘Mr West found out that Mrs West was close to a young salesman in Mr West’s office, before they started all this travelling.’

‘And he ruined him?’ asked Phryne.

‘Yes. The company was told to look at him and they went through his accounts and found that they were wrong and a great deal of money had been paid into his bank account. He said he knew nothing about it, but he went to jail for six months anyway and when he came out he couldn’t get a job and the grog got him. Or so Thomas says.’

‘Nasty,’ said Phryne with a slight wince. ‘That doctor and Jack Mason had better look out.’

‘I suppose the doctor’s safe because he’s a crewman, and Mr Mason’s safe because he’s already in disgrace,’ commented Dot, picking up her embroidery again.

‘Nothing to stop Mr West hiring a couple of brawny stokers to beat the soul case out of him when we get to a port,’ said Phryne. This time Dot winced. ‘But he might even have tried that. Mason is a strong young man who probably studied boxing, and might never have made the connection between a sudden assault and Mrs West. Hmm. I shall see if I can find out.’

‘The crew don’t like the musicians,’ said Dot, threading a needle with dark brown thread.

‘So I am told.’ Phryne recounted her conversation with Johnson amongst the towels. ‘I need to talk to them, Dot dear, but they always seem to be on stage. Is there any time off for the whole gang of them?’

‘Sunday,’ said Dot. ‘On Sunday there are amateur singers in the Smoke Room and just a gentleman playing a piano in the Palm Court. They’ll all have Sunday off. Do you want to, I don’t know, meet them by chance, or do you want to do this openly?’

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‘By chance to begin with,’ said Phryne.

‘They have a room to themselves, for rehearsing,’ said Dot.

‘The crew say they all gather in there to drink and play cards.

They think that’s not nice. But, of course, it’s the only time they all get off together and no one else likes them. That niece of Mr Cec’s, she might get you in.’

‘Lizbet Yates. Yes indeed. I shall angle for an invitation.

Now, what else? La Paloma isn’t in favour with the female-fancying Mr Forrester because she is a bad mother. She had a child when she was very young, abandoned it with her mother in dire poverty in Naples, and went off to become a diva, leaving Grandma and Baby in straits. And let me tell you, Dot dear, Neapolitan dire poverty is pretty close to extinction.’

‘What an awful thing!’

‘There might have been reasons,’ said Phryne. ‘She might have hated the father and by extension hated the baby. She might have hated her mother, too. She might even have had reasons for such hatred. Life is perilous for a pretty, talented girl from a background like that. Mothers have sold their daughters for a small fee if the alternative is starvation.’