Murder in the Dark (18 page)

‘She’s been—oh, four days without food? There’s a tap in the sink or she would have been dead. Someone in that menage out there tried to kill her. I need to hide her in a safe place until I catch the assassin and she recovers. At least enough to tell me what happened to her.’

‘Poor little mite!’ Mrs Truebody was affected. ‘She can be . . . my sister’s youngest child, here to recover from a . . .’

‘Bout of pneumonia,’ suggested Phryne. ‘That’s not infectious.’

‘And needs feeding up,’ agreed Mrs Truebody. ‘She can have the little room next to mine. We’ll get her cleaned up and into bed before you can say Jack Robinson, with a nice bowl of my chicken broth inside her.’

‘Do you understand?’ Phryne asked the wild, ragged figure in the remains of a pink dress. ‘These nice people will look after you until I can give you back. Will you stay with them?’

The child nodded. Then she whispered something. Phryne leaned close to hear.

‘I want him to stay,’ she said, touching a thin hand to Big Sam’s chest.

‘You’ll feel safe if he’s with you?’ Phryne guessed. The child nodded again.

Mrs Truebody blew her nose. Sam was affected, too. His eyes moistened and the end of his broken nose wiggled eloquently. Of course, this rescued scrap might have been the first child who hadn’t taken one look at him and run screaming for its mother.

‘He can stay,’ said the housekeeper. ‘Now, my girl, it’s into the bath with you, and then we’ll see about some food. You’ll talk to me tomorrow, Miss Phryne?’

‘Tomorrow,’ yawned Phryne. She was exhausted.

As she walked away, Mrs Truebody called, ‘What’s her name?’

‘Marigold,’ said Phryne.

She stumbled through the green baize door into the main house, found her own room, and neglected even to put a chair-back under the door handle as she tumbled into bed and was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

Saturday, 29th December
Usually Phryne woke all of a piece, knowing who she was and where she was (though not, on some occasions, the actual name of the person reposing beside her). Many of her bedfellows had informed her that this was one of her most irritating qualities. She had lost the devotion of a French poet, for instance, who had departed yelling, ‘Can’t you at least find some existential angst?’ and she had been laughing too much to properly bid him farewell. Phryne knew who she was and what she was and she liked all of her.

This morning, however, found her lightly dazed, possibly from lack of sleep, and terribly, terribly hungry. Though she knew where to search for the next annoying little luggage label, she threw on some clothes, conducted a scandalously sketchy toilette and headed straight for the breakfast which was laid out, in all its splendour, under its awning.

With entirely undisguised greed, she grabbed the largest available plate and piled it high with eggs, bacon, kedgeree, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, and something she couldn’t quite identify but which might have been Swedish hash. It had corned beef in it, anyway. She carried the plate back to a table and demolished it so quickly that her silverware made a small tattoo all of its own. Then she went back for kippers, devilled kidneys, bubble-and-squeak and cold ham. This took her slightly longer, as the kidneys had been devilled with the kind of English mustard which comes in a powder and can only be eaten unaffected by old India hands who took their vindaloo at volcanic heat. Phryne fanned herself, dabbed her eyes and drank some water.

She was still hungry, however, and accompanied her pot of coffee with a lot of buttered toast thickly spread with Scotch marmalade. A white peach and, on mature consideration, another white peach, completed her meal and she sat back and sighed with repletion.

‘Only three goes at the buffet?’ asked a voice. Nicholas sat down beside her. His cornflower blue eyes were just as azure in the morning. ‘I ate my way through five, and the waitress was dead lucky I was occupied when she came asking about tea or I might have devoured her as well.’

‘I know. That’s what breathing hash smoke does for you,’ said Phryne, lighting her first cigarette of the day with pleasure. ‘As my father used to say, “I could eat a cow; milkmaid, stool, bucket and all.” And apart from starving, how do you find yourself this morning, Nicholas?’

‘I just looked under the blankets and there I was,’ he said, grinning. ‘I feel fine. Not that yesterday wasn’t strenuous. And lovely,’ he added quickly, in case Phryne thought he had forgotten her most welcome erotic attentions, which he hadn’t. And never would. He had a feeling that Phryne was branded on his mind. The day that had contained Phryne and wasabi had to be unforgettable.

‘Well, there have been developments,’ she said, and told him all about Marigold and what Phryne had done with the child.

‘Why hide her?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Use your loaf,’ said Phryne. ‘Someone kidnapped her once, no reason to think they wouldn’t do it again. She’s staying with the admirable Big Sam between her and harm until I’ve worked out what is going on. Any kidnapper trying his luck with Big Sam is going to be seeking all around the grounds for his strewn limbs. Now, have you eaten enough? I have to go and follow another clue.’

‘I’m with you,’ declared Nicholas, taking an apple from the bowl on the table. Phryne decided that she really couldn’t eat another peach, which seemed a shame. They were perfect peaches.

‘What are we doing in the billiard room?’ asked Nicholas, a little later. He was looking around for somewhere to discard his apple core. ‘Feel like a game?’

Phryne gave him a look—the one that worked on traffic wardens—and he recoiled a little.

‘The riddle said “I am the kindest, deepest, first”. Now there is only one thing which could apply to all of those things, and that is “cut”. The first cut is the deepest. The unkindest cut of all. Agreed?’

‘I would point out that it says kindest, not unkindest, but all right,’ said Nicholas, still holding the apple core.

‘Throw that core out the window,’ said Phryne crossly, ‘and pay attention.’ Nicholas opened the window, threw out his apple core, said, ‘Oh, sorry,’ and shut it again. Phryne continued: ‘The next line says, “Sinless and wicked and needed and cursed”. That sounds like a knife. A surgeon uses a knife for good, a bandit for evil. Both wicked and sinless, see? And when we add “needed and cursed” I think we have a military blade of some sort.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Partly because it would be hard to make a label stick to a knife in the very clean Mrs Truebody’s kitchen, where every knife is scoured. And partly because I can see the blue and white corner of a label on that sabre there, on the wall.’

‘Simple,’ said Nicholas.

‘Even Sherlock Holmes said it was a mistake to explain,’ said Phryne, rolling her eyes. ‘Can you get it down for me, please?’

Nicholas reached and lifted and laid the sabre on the billiard table. He found an envelope glued lightly to the wall behind the weapon and brought that down too.

‘Another riddle on the blade,’ said Phryne. ‘What’s in the envelope?’

‘A ransom demand,’ said Nicholas slowly. ‘But a strange one.’

‘Well, of course it is strange,’ Phryne told him. ‘Everything related to the Templars is strange. Something normal would be the strange thing in this milieu. What does it say?’

‘It says, “Buy ten thousand shares in Triceratops Holdings Pty Ltd before tomorrow closing. Otherwise Tarquin dies”. No signature. That’s all.’

Phryne examined the note. ‘Plain paper, blue scholar’s script. Same as the labels. Buy shares? That’s an odd demand.’

‘What about the riddle?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Luggage label as before: “Quarried, carried, carved and holed/Doomed to perpetual wet and cold”. Nasty. His scansion is getting worse, have you noticed?’

‘What are we going to do with the note?’ demanded Nicholas, not offering any opinion on the poetic merits of the riddle.

‘To whom is it addressed?’

‘To Gerald Templar,’ Nicholas replied.

‘Then to Gerald Templar it must go. Why don’t you take it to him, and I’ll go and talk to Marigold.’

‘Shouldn’t we call the police?’

‘No,’ said Phryne, and he watched her departing back, straight and determined, and sighed. Then he went in search of Gerald Templar. Phryne went in search of a telephone. She needed information and Dot would get it for her.

Mrs Truebody was resting after the exhaustions of breakfast and gathering her strength for an attack on lunch, which was again to be packed into hampers, after which preparations for dinner would begin. Who’d be a cook, thought Phryne. She remembered a shearers’ joke about their cook: the boss demanded, ‘Who called the cook a bastard?’ to which the chorus replied, ‘Who called the bastard a cook?’ And the shearers’ nickname for any cook was ‘the poisoner’.

Phryne sat down next to the dozing Mrs Truebody and closed her eyes. The kitchen noises were very soothing. She was neatly asleep in a moment and the maids smiled to see the two of them, the slim fashionable lady and the stout housekeeper, slumbering peacefully side by side.

After half an hour Mrs Truebody awoke and her snort of consciousness woke Phryne, too. She blinked and yawned like a cat.

‘We were both up late,’ said the cook, signalling to Minnie for coffee.

‘We certainly were. How is the child?’

‘Well, Miss, I reckon a few days’ feeding and she’ll be all set to rights. In body. In mind, I don’t know. She hasn’t hardly let Big Sam out of her sight since you found her and if she tries to sleep she screams something awful. And the ends of her poor little fingers are all torn from trying to dig a way out through the stones. Should we get a doctor to her, do you think?’

‘No, he would want to give her sedatives and that does not help in this sort of thing. Unless she’s been injured—interfered with?’

‘Not that I could see,’ said the housekeeper, without turning a hair. Ruling a large establishment for forty years didn’t leave a lot of human sinfulness unaddressed. ‘I bathed her and put arnica on her bruises and iodine on her scratches and Elsie lent her a nightgown. She’s been sleeping in snatches. Do you want to speak to her, Miss Phryne?’

‘If I could,’ said Phryne.

‘Minnie will escort you,’ said Mrs Truebody. She raised her voice a little. ‘Everyone else will return to their duties or all those guests will go hungry at lunch, and we will be shamed.’

This produced a flurry of activity. Gabriel, who had been sharpening knives, began to use them on paring legs of lamb and ham and a roast of beef into thin slices. Elsewhere, bread was being cut, tomatoes, cheese and onion portioned and lettuce shredded. An array of the most delicious cakes were today’s desserts. Mrs Truebody passed a large plate of chocolate cake to Phryne.

‘This might persuade the child that you mean well,’ she said, and smiled a very weary smile.

This brouhaha had been hard on poor Mrs Truebody, thought Phryne as she allowed Minnie to conduct her to the servants’ quarters. Another crime to add to the riddler’s list of criminal charges.

‘How are you feeling today, Minnie?’ she asked. Minnie blushed.

‘I woke up real hungry,’ she said. ‘But it’s all my own fault, I did eat just a corner of the fudge, where it had caught and scorched. After they told us not to eat it. I won’t do that again,’ said Minnie. ‘Here we are, Miss. Do you want me to wait?’

‘No, I can find my own way back. You go and make up hampers—I don’t want to miss out on another excellent lunch.’

Minnie bobbed an almost curtsy and vanished. Phryne knocked gently on the plain deal door. Big Sam opened it with the care needed from someone who could just as easily have wrenched it off its hinges. He grinned when he saw her.

‘Come in, Miss,’ he said.

‘Hello, Sam,’ said Phryne. ‘How is your charge?’

‘Hungry,’ said Sam. ‘Appetite like a wharfie. Marigold,’ he addressed a figure sitting up in the maid’s iron bed. ‘Here’s a lady with cake.’

Marigold, cleaned and combed and dressed in a flannel nightgown, was a different creature to the haunted wreck that Sam had carried out of the old scullery. Only her eyes were restless, never staying focused on one thing. Phryne handed over the cake, napkin and fork, and watched the child eat. Big Sam took his chair and put a bookmark in a small volume.

‘What are you reading?’

‘
The Wind in the Willows
,’ he said, a little abashed.

‘Marigold reads real good. It’s about Mole and Rat,’ he said.

‘And Riverbank,’ said Marigold. Her voice was uncertain. After all, she had done nothing for the last four days but scream. ‘And picnics. Who are you?’

‘This is the lady who found you,’ said Sam, a little severely. ‘She told me, break the door, and I broke it, and there you were.’

‘That was you?’ asked Marigold. She had dark hair and eyes. She reached out bandaged hands to Phryne. ‘Thank you. I never thought I’d get out. I thought I’d die in there. In the dark. In the orphanage they used to lock us in the cellar when we’d been naughty. I always used to scream.’

Phryne took the injured hands in both of her own and sat down on the bed.

‘I heard you,’ she said. ‘And I felt you. A terrible despair. The maids thought you were the ghost of a girl who killed herself.’

‘Oh, her,’ said Marigold. ‘She was sad. She didn’t mean me any harm. She was someone to talk to. In the dark. I think she’s gone now. I think I felt her go when Sam broke the door.’

Phryne let this astonishing statement whizz through to the keeper.

‘You’re safe now,’ she told the girl. ‘Sam will make sure that nothing happens to you.’

‘Yair,’ said Sam, flexing a few muscles. Marigold gazed at him with adoration.

‘He once picked up a bull,’ she told Phryne. Phryne could credit it. Sam looked down modestly.

‘Did you see the person who put you into that prison?’ asked Phryne. ‘I need to find them.’

‘Yair,’ said Sam again. ‘Me too.’

He extended both hands. They were as big as hams. Then he clenched both fists. Tendons sprang up on his massive forearms. Muscles moved out of the way of other muscles. Marigold giggled.

‘I didn’t really see,’ she said to Phryne. ‘I was looking at the milking cows. I like animals.’