Death by Water (11 page)

‘Even so,’ said Dot mulishly, biting off a thread with a snap of her white teeth. ‘It’s not right to leave the baby. Mothers shouldn’t do that.’

Phryne shrugged. ‘I haven’t found out anything else,’ she said. ‘Nothing about the Cahills or the Singers. But Rose in the salon told me that Professor Applegate is a special person for the Maoris.’

Dot nodded. ‘That’s what they say. A grandmother. A wise woman.’

‘She’s even got a tattoo on her forearm and she says it was agony,’ Phryne said.

‘A tattoo? That nice respectable old lady?’ Dot’s needle
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unthreaded with the involuntary jerk of her hand. ‘Drat,’ she added.

‘A Maori tattoo. It probably has something to do with rank.

She’s still a nice respectable lady, Dot. And the mousetrap was sprung,’ said Phryne with satisfaction. ‘Either old Mr Aubrey, Professor Applegate or someone they knew rummaged in my bag while I was being jumped on by that muscle-bound idiot Jack Mason.’

‘Did anyone have a bruised hand?’ asked Dot, re-threading the needle.

‘I couldn’t tell. I didn’t see the actual incident, just heard the snap. Mr Aubrey had his hands under his rug and the professor has such blotchy hands that I couldn’t decide. But we are attracting attention, Dorothy, the right kind of attention.

Now I am going to have a nap until it’s time to dress for dinner.

All this detecting is tiring work. And why, Dot, is there a teddy bear on my bed?’

It was a newish bear, sitting jauntily alongside one of the
Hinemoa
’s plump brocade lounging pillows. He looked more than a little out of place.

‘There’s a child in Third Class that forgot her favourite toy,’ said Dot, ‘And they tried giving her a new bear but he was too new and she just cried some more. So I said that we’d squeeze the newness out of him. I’ve already loosened his right ear and re-stitched his eye. He just needs to be hugged,’

explained Dot. ‘I’ll take him tonight.’

‘Oh,’ said Phryne, touched. ‘How very nice of you, Dot.

Come along, Teddy.’

She lay down comfortably, clutching the teddy bear to her curves, and shut her eyes. She was asleep in moments.

Dot stitched steadily. If she kept on at this rate, she would finish her tea cloth before the enforced rest of the Sabbath.

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Richard Van Geer

Diamond cutter

Amsterdam

This is to advise you that our representative, Mynheer H Brugge,
will be sailing to America soon to convey greetings and confiden-tial reports to our home company in New York. He will be pleased
to carry any of your merchandise or letters which cannot be
entrusted to the ordinary post.

Brugge and Associates

Haarlem

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CHAPTER SIX

Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day.

With night we banish sorrow:

T Heywood

‘Pack, clouds, away’

Phryne woke and found that she had buried her face in the teddy’s soft fur. She sneezed. Dot was still stitching. An hour had gone by. An explanation for the jewel thefts which was so totally preposterous she could really only have thought of it while her usual critical faculties were disabled, bloomed in her mind and she laughed aloud. Dot looked up.

‘Call for a small pre-prandial nip,’ Phryne said, still laughing.

‘Gin for me and sherry for you. Full dinner dress this evening.

I shall wear the charcoal with the sable stole. No, it’s too warm for sable. The silk shawl with all those gold beads. I’ve just had the oddest notion, Dot. So odd that I’m really not going to tell even you, in case you call Caroline to bring a nice straitjacket with the drinks tray. But what an idea, eh, Teddy?’ She punched the teddy in his rotund tummy and was rewarded with a growly noise.

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Dot called Caroline, who bustled in with her tray. ‘Had a nice day, ladies?’ she asked. ‘Roberts says you swim really good, Miss Fisher. They’re having a race on Monday, you want to be in it—the prize is a bottle of the best bubbly, corker stuff, they say, though I prefer beer myself.’

Phryne took the glass containing the perfectly mixed gin and tonic. Should she mention Mr Forrester? Johnson had seen her come out of his cabin. Should she start explaining herself to a censorious crew? No, no, a thousand times no. They could put up with it and like it or not depending on personal preference. But it appeared that Caroline had something else on her mind.

‘They told me what you do, Miss,’ she said to Phryne. ‘You let me know and I’ll tell you anything you like.’

‘Good,’ said Phryne.

‘It wasn’t us,’ said Caroline, echoing Rose and Johnson.

‘I know,’ said Phryne.

‘Well, I’ll come back later,’ said Caroline, and trundled out with her tray, leaving Phryne with the half-bottle of gin and Dot with a fresh glass of sherry.

‘I didn’t tell them,’ said Dot.

‘I know,’ said Phryne again. ‘You can’t keep secrets in a village. Someone called Allans saw my picture in the
Age
. We just don’t tell the passengers and all will be well. Now for the dress,’ said Phryne. ‘And can you disinter the bijou?’

‘Right away,’ said Dot, getting out the embroidery scissors.

Dressed in the subtle, not-quite-black silk, unique because it was part of Lin Chung’s haul from a silk buying trip. The colour was produced by an error in the dyeing. Phryne caught the eye. So did the sapphire, depending from its carefully securable collar.

‘Two ladies lost their gems while dancing,’ Phryne told
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Dot. ‘Is there any other way you can fasten the thing, apart from that little chain and pin?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Dot, drawing small stitches through the high neckline of the dress. ‘It’s now sewn on,’ she said, breaking off the thread. ‘You can’t see the stitches but they won’t get that jewel off without taking off your dress,’ Dot told Phryne, and blushed.

‘And I shall wait until you do that, later in the evening,’

Phryne responded. ‘Have a nice dinner, Dot dear. I’m going to sit out here and watch the sea,’ she said, and sat down on the wicker chaise longue, a slippery, glittering, night-black vision out of a shipwrecked sailor’s dream.

She watched the sea for an hour then shook herself, put on the decorated shawl, and went to dinner.

Table three had the usual faces around it. Mrs Cahill was complaining that the beef curry was too hot, Mr Aubrey was explaining that you wouldn’t get beef curry in India, because cattle were sacred, and Mrs Singer was asking for a plain omelette for Mr Singer, who, she explained proudly, was a martyr to dyspepsia.

‘Always comes on late in the afternoon,’ she told the table at large. ‘Doesn’t it, dear?’

‘Don’t fuss, Lily,’ grunted Mr Singer, massaging his upper belly.

‘Now, I can eat anything,’ said Mr Mason heartlessly. ‘Even tried some of Mr Aubrey’s volcanic curry once. A triple vindaloo called a
pali
. Mind you, steam came out of my ears and I drank the water jug dry in one hit.’

‘And I told you it wouldn’t work,’ said Mr Aubrey. ‘You need milk to kill the spice. Young idiot,’ he said, half affectionately. ‘Young men! Always wanting things they haven’t earned! Twenty years in India I had to spend before I could really relish a proper vindaloo.’

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‘And I never will,’ Phryne told him. ‘How can you taste anything else? Like, for example, this excellent lobster thermi-dor that I am eating?’

‘Can’t,’ confessed Mr Aubrey. ‘I am afraid that once the tongue gets used to the really strong curry, everything else seems tame.’

‘Curry!’ shuddered Mr Singer. ‘Where’s that damn omelette?’ he asked the steward abruptly.

‘On its way, sir,’ said the steward. He edged around the table to refill Mr Singer’s glass, possibly with the idea that getting a bit more beer into the grumpy gentleman might ameliorate his temper, if not his indigestion.

‘I never got used to vindaloo,’ said Miss Lemmon. ‘I always thought that eating it was some sort of mortification of the flesh. But they make lovely curries in Madras with coconut milk and butter. Such an array of spices! I remember going into the spice market and being almost knocked over by the scent.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Aubrey reminiscently. ‘Cumin, corian-der, cinnamon, cloves, chili . . .’

‘And that’s only the Cs,’ said Phryne, taking up a forkful of cream sauce and lobster.

Mr Aubrey chuckled. ‘There’s also cayenne in C,’ he told the table at large. ‘And ginger and garlic in G.’

‘And fenugreek and fennel in F,’ added Miss Lemmon, delighted with the word game.

‘And mustard, turmeric and saffron in the other letters.

Not to mention O for onion,’ capped Mr Aubrey.

‘And I for inedible foreign dago muck,’ growled Mr Singer.

Phryne felt that she was not going to like Mr Singer any time soon.

‘No, that would be under M for muck,’ she told him coldly.

‘And under I for impolite. Here comes your omelette, Mr
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Singer.’ She did not add ‘and I hope it chokes you’, but the wish could have been inferred by the alert listener.

Most of the listeners at the table were alert. They smiled upon her. There was the faint clank of ranks closing.

Professor Applegate said, specifically to Mr Singer, ‘You couldn’t have afforded a digestion like that in Maori society, you know.’

‘Why?’ asked Jack Mason innocently.

‘Well, it was a healthy enough diet, lots of fish and vegetables. They made bread out of the fern root and ate a lot of the local berries and fruits,’ said Professor Applegate. ‘But after the moa were killed off, and before the white man brought pigs to New Zealand, the only mammal apart from dogs, large enough for a really good hangi was . . .’

‘Men?’ asked Mrs Cahill, catching her breath in excitement.

‘What’s a hangi?’ asked Phryne.

‘An earth oven. You get your slaves to dig a nice deep pit and build a fire at the bottom, and when it’s burned down into coals, you lay clean stones and then parcels of meat, fish and vegetables on it, wrapped in flax. Then the servants pile all the earth back and it cooks very gently all night so that when the pit is opened, the aroma is superb.’

Mr Singer was greening quite satisfactorily, Phryne thought, and threw in another question.

‘So if we had a Maori Mrs Beeton, the recipe would start, take one freshly killed enemy . . .?’

‘Yes. In New Guinea they called men ‘‘long pig’’. Several of the old hands I met told me the taste was superior but very similar to pork—’

‘Please,’ said Mr Singer, showing his first sign of human-ity. Professor Applegate, evidently, was not going to let him get away with the dago comment too easily.

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‘And in Northern Queensland the cannibals preferred to eat the Chinese, because they ate rice and their flesh wasn’t so salty,’ said Mr Cahill unexpectedly. ‘Lots of Chinese up there on the River of Gold. What’s the matter, Singer? Omelette not up to scratch?’

‘What sort of people are you?’ demanded Mrs Singer indignantly.

She was about to become shrill and Navigation Officer Theodore Green, who had joined them for dinner, interjected with a desperate non sequitur. ‘You were asking me about mysteries of the sea, Miss Fisher.’

‘I was,’ said Phryne, who was quick on the uptake. ‘And you were saying that there was a ship once which got caught in the ice. The
Mignonette
, was it?’

‘No, Miss Fisher, that was quite another matter. I was referring to the
Jenny
, which was encountered by the whaling schooner
Hope
just south of Drake Passage in Antarctica. The whaler’s lookout had signalled an iceberg and
Hope
clewed in to look at it when the iceberg split down the middle—calving, they call it—and out came the
Jenny
, battered, sails in tatters, but still more or less intact.’

‘I’ve seen those photographs from the Shackleton expedition,’ scoffed Mr Cahill. ‘The
Endurance
was just plain crushed by the ice.’

‘But the
Jenny
was not,’ insisted Theodore Green politely.

‘Ice is a mystery and no one has quite worked out how it does things. Ice can creep up as gently as a mist or—as in the case of the
Endurance
—pierce and claw the ship to pieces.
Jenny
was a topsail schooner and of course made all of wood, which flexes and moves, not like rigid steel. Perhaps that made a difference.’

‘Never mind the science, what happened?’ demanded Jack Mason.

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‘The cold had preserved the ship perfectly, and the bodies of the crew. They had just frozen to death where they sat or lay.’

‘I’ve seen soldiers who have fallen and died of exposure like that,’ commented Phryne. ‘Seemed a gentle death. They looked like they were asleep.’

‘The
Hope
brought back the log of the
Jenny
,’ said Theodore Green, giving Phryne a very puzzled look. ‘The last entry said ‘‘no food for 71 days’’. And from the date it seemed that the
Jenny
had been caught in the ice for . . .’ he paused for effect. ‘For thirty-seven years.’

‘I wonder if that’s how the legend of the
Flying Dutchman
got started?’ asked Mr Aubrey. ‘I’ve always wondered about that.’

‘Ghost ships,’ said Theodore Green. ‘Plenty of room on a big ocean for ghosts. No need to scoff,’ the navigation officer told Mr Singer. ‘The present king and his brother saw a ghost ship when they were naval cadets. Entered into the log.’