Murder in the Dark (10 page)

Phryne engaged Jonathan in a discussion of the more obscure of the romantic poets. A tray of drinks was brought in by a servitor from the purple tent. No Sylvanus. No Tarquin. Phryne was already halfway through her gin and tonic when the Oscar Wilde figure returned.

‘I’m sorry, Gerald,’ he said, ‘but I can’t find the little beast anywhere. He’s probably flounced off in a tantrum.’

‘Well, I’ll just have this drink,’ said Phryne, ‘and then I’m going to the jazz singers. I’ll call by afterwards and make sure that Tarquin has come back.’

She was glad to collect the Sapphic girls and leave. Soon the kissing and caressing would begin, and she had not thought to have someone make her a new set of karez drawers, which prevented unintended consequences to the Templar Feast of Love.

Phryne and the girls went to the jazz tent, where Nerine and the three T’s would soon be playing. The jazz tent was not so much a tent as a pavilion. There was a sky-shade in case of rain and a curtain behind the stage, otherwise it was open to the elements—and, regrettably, the mosquitoes and the heat. In deference to the total lack of what any musician would have recognised as acoustics, the singer had a microphone. Nerine always did well with a microphone. Because she was so shortsighted she held it close to her mouth and the visions conjured up by the sight of Nerine singing into the microphone at close range were enough to quite overcome some gentlemen, who felt the need to go and take a midnight swim in rather a hurry. In some cases, in their clothes.

Tabitha caught sight of Phryne as she came in and nudged the singer. Nerine finished ‘St Louis Blues’ and said, ‘This song is for my ol’ fren’ Lady Phryne. You lissen up good now,’ she told the audience, and they listened up good as Nerine began the aching lament: ‘I went down to St James Infirmary, and I saw my baby there.’

‘The singer—you know her?’ asked Pam, blushing.

‘Certainly. She is an old friend. Shall I introduce you, girls?’

The girls nodded. Even if Nerine was not of their subspecies, she was gorgeous beyond belief—just looking at her was almost enough.

‘Let him go, let him go, God bless him,’ sang Nerine, undulating so close to the edge of the dais that Phryne’s heart was in her mouth. ‘He never did love me!’

Phryne did not leave the jazz pavilion until Nerine and the three T’s had taken a well-earned break and the Jubilee Jazz Band was on, playing quicksteps and bunny hugs for such patrons as could still both find their feet and stand on them. She bade the girls goodnight after introducing them to Nerine and went back to the Templar tent, wondering if that bad boy Tarquin had reappeared. The karez hour was over and most of the disciples had departed to their virtuous beds. Only Gerald and Sylvanus sat together, drinking another G and T and trying to play chess. They both looked up hopefully as she came in. By the way their faces fell, Phryne had her answer.

‘So he hasn’t come back,’ she said, glad for an excuse to leave the leftover hash smoke, which was making her giddy. ‘I’ll just go along and have a little look at the scene.’

‘Would you, Phryne? I’d be so grateful,’ said Gerald. Sylvanus patted his shoulder. Phryne went out again into the hot night.

It was not hard to trace the gold-clad child’s progress as far as the drinks tent. The barman reported that he had made up a tray, jug and glasses, and had personally seen Tarquin safely to the door with them, as the hearties had thought his gold tunic risible and might have tripped him. ‘In fun, of course, Miss Fisher.’

From the drinks tent Tarquin’s path back to Gerald would have been straightforward enough. Phryne stepped carefully in and out of the light of tall electric standards, which lit the ground under them and left a pool of ebony darkness between. In one such she felt glass crunch beneath her sandalled feet and stopped abruptly. The ground was wet underfoot and a scent of gin rose all about her, as unmistakable as eau-de-cologne.

‘Still, it might just be a broken bottle,’ she mused, scraping the ground with careful fingertips to estimate the amount of glass. Far too much for one bottle and, anyway, the glass was thinner and curved: wine glass shapes had been broken on this spot.

She saw a white flicker of paper on the nearest standard and carefully peeled it away from the iron. The lamplight was too dim to read by and she didn’t want to attract attention. She placed the paper in her bosom for future reference and cast around for further clues. She found nothing but one of the winged shoes, caught in a box thorn hedge. The full search would have to wait for daylight. Beyond the lights the night was as dark as nights ever got in summer in these parts. Which was very dark indeed.

Carrying the shoe, she went sadly back to the Templar tent to report to Gerald that someone seemed to have ravished his fairy child away as cleanly as Ganymede was kidnapped by Hermes. It was only then that she remembered the piece of paper and extracted it from her bosom. It was a common luggage label, stiff white paper with blue borders, gummed on the back to be attached to a trunk. Someone had given it an inadequate lick when gluing it to the lamp post.

‘It’s a riddle,’ she said, displeased. In the middle of the label, in neat clerkly script, was written: ‘It flies, it wastes, it drags, it goes,/And like the River Thames it flows.’

‘A riddle? Could it have something to do with Tarquin?’ demanded Gerald.

‘No idea,’ said Phryne. ‘But it was on the post near where he dropped the tray. We can easily find it by daylight, the ground is covered with broken glass. You like parlour games, Gerald. Can you guess the riddle?’

‘No,’ said Gerald forlornly. ‘I’m no good at riddles.’

‘Well, there’s one person who wanted Tarquin,’ said Sylvanus with great daring, echoing Phryne’s thought.

‘Who?’

‘Why,’ said Sylvanus, ‘your sister, Isabella. Hadn’t you better ask her if she knows where the imp is before you raise the camp by night?’

‘How dare you!’ Gerald leapt to his feet.

Phryne found the subsequent scene exhausting. Finally she dragged herself away and headed for the great house, wanting nothing more than a wash and a bed of some kind. In pursuit of this modest ambition, she skirted a band of howling boys, who apparently thought they were wolves, and just avoided tripping over a pair of lovers who had miscalculated how far the shadow of their tent extended. Nerine’s voice echoed in Phryne’s mind: ‘So cold, so blue, so bare . . .’

Where was that pestilential small boy? Had he really run away in a pet? It was possible. But Phryne had a bad feeling about the event. She didn’t think that Tarquin would sacrifice one of his winged shoes, however cross he was with Gerald and however jealous of Phryne.

She undressed, washed briefly, and sat down at her impromptu dressing table to remove her make-up. The room seemed untouched. The locked hatbox which presumably contained Gerald’s threatening letters was on her bed. Gerald had put the key into her hand earlier in the evening.

She reached for the cold cream and swiped a gob of it across a scratch on her wrist, which instantly began to bleed. ‘Ouch,’ said Phryne, fascinated. The cold cream had felt like sandpaper. She staunched her wrist with a handkerchief and smeared a sample of the cold cream across a piece of paper. She held it up to the light and saw minute glittering specks in it.

‘What a nasty trick,’ she said to herself. ‘Ground glass in the cold cream. I could have gouged my face with it if I had just plonked it on and given it a good rub as I usually do. That was the idea, of course. I wonder what else he has prepared for me? Scorpions in my slippers? Snakes in my bed?’

Never one to ignore a sensible precaution if she had time to comply with it, Phryne carefully banged both slippers upside down on the floor before putting them on. No scorpions or spiders. She threw back the covers on her bed and revealed nothing but a small bag with ribbons which smelt of lavender. She put it on the windowsill, just in case. She searched the room for other lethal traps and found nothing. Not an attempt to kill, just to mutilate.

‘Oh, what fun,’ said Phryne, now thoroughly awake. She had a sudden idea and scrabbled for the key to the hatbox in which reposed Gerald’s threatening letters. But when she opened it, it was entirely empty.

‘Damn,’ said Phryne, and donned her negligee. She put her cigarettes and lighter in her petticoat pocket and secured her little gun in her long medieval sleeve. The camp had settled down to sleep, except for the hardy souls still dancing to the Jubilee Jazz Band. But there was a light on in the back of the house, and thence Phryne went, keeping to the shadows, making no noise that an unusually alert leopard would have heard. She needed some answers. And some coffee.

‘John the Evangelist,’ announced Dot, opening the book. ‘He was the son of Zebedee, one of the apostles. He wrote a book of the Bible.’

The girls’ attention wandered. John hadn’t done much, they considered. He was a writer. He was there when Lazarus was raised, but so were all the others. He hadn’t cut off any ears, or denied Christ, or even got himself martyred in an interesting way . . .

‘He was thrown into a huge pot of boiling oil,’ said Dot.

They stopped playing with Molly.

‘Ooh!’ said Ruth.

‘How big?’ asked Jane.

‘Huge,’ said Dot. ‘And he came out of it without a blister. So they let him go.’

Jane’s mind raced. How much oil, and what sort of oil, would she need to boil a saint? And what temperature would really hot oil attain?

Dot was pleased with their attention, and handed out a good conduct chocolate each.

CHAPTER SIX

With cat-like tread upon our prey we steal,
In silence dread our cautious way we feel.
No sound at all, we never speak a word.
A fly’s footfall would be distinctly heard.

WS Gilbert
The Pirates of Penzance

Creeping through a dark house was, Phryne would be the first to admit, not easy, especially if it wasn’t your house. Fortunately, though probably in favour of nocturnal visitors, the stern Fathers had removed almost every whatnot, plant stand, vase, stool, decorative fire screen and set of Benares images which had made Victorian decor such a nightmare to dust. Phryne drifted through the darkness, feeling her way, not hurrying.

She found the green baize door by touch and opened it without a creak. Then she stood blinking in bright light. She had always heard that things were different below stairs. Upstairs and in the tents outside, the guests were falling asleep. Here all the preparations for a huge breakfast for two hundred were being made. A butcher was slicing rashers from a whole side of bacon. A young woman was bringing in baskets of eggs packed in straw. An elderly lady was slicing a harvest of loaves, brown and white. Porridge cauldrons were being scoured in the back kitchen beyond and potatoes and white fish were being cooked and eggs hard-boiled for kedgeree. A huge array of sauces were being strained, checked and decanted into serving jugs.

As Phryne stood amazed a girl, pleating her apron, asked the elderly lady, ‘Can’t Tommy go out into the scullery?’ and she snapped, ‘Oh, Elsie, surely you haven’t been listening to those stories about a ghost!’ when the butcher saw Phryne and the whole active kitchen ground slowly to a halt.

If Phryne had not anticipated the kitchen staff, the kitchen staff were astonished to see Phryne, clearly a lady, and in her nightclothes, in their kitchen. They were a tableau from Ford Madox Ford for a moment, until the elderly lady settled her apron and cap and bustled forward.

‘Yes, Miss? How may we serve you? I’m Mrs Truebody, the housekeeper. You others get on, get on! We’ve got two hundred breakfasts to prepare and it’s already past midnight. Come this way, Miss. You must be the Hon. Miss Fisher,’ said Mrs True-body, leading Phryne aside into a small room furnished with an easy chair, a very professional roll-top desk and the usual accoutrements of an office. Phryne sat down composedly in the visitor’s chair, which was straight backed but well padded. Something in the housekeeper’s tone had been familiar. Deferential but not overawed.

‘And I’m not the first titled person you have had in your kitchen, am I?’ she asked affably.

‘God bless you no, Miss Phryne!’ The housekeeper allowed herself a small, strictly controlled smile. Getting her title correct, Phryne noticed. Phryne was an Hon., as her father occasionally pointed out, and therefore not entitled to be called ‘Lady’. Especially when she behaved as Phryne behaved, he usually added.

‘The governor used to dine here, regular as regular. Princes, too, we’ve entertained. Royal princes,’ she explained, as if Phryne might mistake for real British royalty that raffish Russian and Polish strain about whom Mrs Truebody had doubts. ‘But what can I do for you, Miss Phryne?’

‘I need a cup of coffee and some answers,’ said Phryne frankly.

‘A cup of coffee you shall have,’ said Mrs Truebody, making a gesture at Minnie, a young woman in a linen apron so white that by the carbon light she seemed wrapped in acetylene flame. ‘Answers, if I have them, certainly.’

‘How long have you worked here?’ asked Phryne.

‘Forty years,’ said Mrs Truebody, sinking down into her padded chair. ‘Last of the family died and the others sold the house to the Church, and they—well, they didn’t need a housekeeper. I retired. I had a good salary while I worked and a good pension, and I saved a lot. I have my own little house in Werribee near my two young brothers’ families. But not in them, if you see what I mean.’

‘I do,’ said Phryne. ‘Young children can be so exhausting.’

‘Quite. But when the Templars made me such a generous offer, saying that only I understood how the old house worked, I agreed to come back just for this party. Actually I dealt with their man Mr Ventura. Such a fuss budget! I never knew a man to be—forgive me, Miss—such an old woman. I gave him a room in the servants’ quarters because he would not leave my people to get on with their work, but would keep meddling. If he wants to behave like a servant he can stay with the servants, I said.’

‘And you were right,’ said Phryne. Mrs Truebody settled her considerable bosom. She was a plump lady with white hair in a bun, spectacles on a long black tape and a comfortable figure under stern control. Her corsetry creaked a little if she made a sudden movement. Her eyes were blue and her colour high without the aid of rouge. Her dress was dove grey and her apron white and she was as wholesome a creature as Phryne had seen in a long day. When the coffee came, clear, strong and hot in its own copper pot with a jug of hot milk and some ginger snaps beside it, Phryne was happy to drink and nibble and listen to the history of the mansion.