Murder in the Dark (8 page)

Sylvanus Leigh was witty, acerbic, considerably older than the company’s average age of twenty-five, and one of the kindest men Phryne had ever met—provided that he was not detected in his good deeds. When asked once why he was carrying two miserable Parisian kittens, rescued from a dog’s jaws, in his pocket, he had taken them out, examined them carefully, and said, ‘Mittens,’ before returning them to their sanctuary. Phryne happened to know that they now ruled his tiny Montparnasse flat as royalty, but no one else ever suspected it. She smiled at him with real affection as he bowed elaborately over her hand.

‘Sweet and adorable Miss Fisher, you walk in beauty like the night, though not this vile hot one,’ he told her. ‘I fly for some more nectar before the hearties wreck the tent.’

He ambled away.

Gerald sighed. ‘It’s like this,’ he started the story again.

‘Phryne!’ squealed four female voices, and Phryne went down under an avalanche of Sapphic kisses. Sabine, Marie-Louise, Minou and Sad Alison. They were just as Phryne remembered, though Alison seemed to have got sadder. In that bright company she stood out like a blown bulb in a string of fairy lights. The girls from the Tea Shop of Sybaris, Rue de la Chat Qui Peche, Quartier Latin, Paris, stroked and hugged and pecked while peppering Phryne with questions—wasn’t this a strange country, what on earth was she wearing under that silk shirt, was it always this hot, wasn’t Gerald looking divine, had she seen that there were two girl riders in the polo team, how deliciously decadent!?

‘Not now,’ said Gerald, shedding an atom of his carefully cultivated serenity. ‘I want Phryne to myself for a moment.’

‘Oh,’ lips pouted and quivered. ‘As long as you give her back later. Still, it is your party, isn’t it, darling?’

‘It is,’ said Gerald, and the girls, arms around each other, dawdled back to the company of the Lady’s Own, reclaimed their feathers and resumed fanning. Phryne put Gerald back on his throne and perched herself comfortably on the wide, padded arm.

‘Now, look straight ahead, try not to move your lips and talk fast,’ she instructed. ‘We can ride out the next interruption as it comes. What is biting you, Gerald Templar?’

‘Someone is threatening to kill me,’ he said, obeying her to the syllable. In men, this always had an ameliorating effect on Phryne. She allowed her chin to rest on his magnificent chest for a moment.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know that either. Started in Paris. Got letters.’

‘Kept letters?’

‘All of them,’ he said, confounding Phryne’s detective-story narrative reflexes. In such novels the victim had always burned the letters, adding a degree of difficulty to the detective’s task, in case the author thought that he or she was having too easy a life.

‘Good. Go on,’ she instructed him.

‘Tried to poison me,’ said Gerald. ‘Arsenic in the sugar on Turkish delight. I didn’t eat the stuff. But Tillie Mayer did and was taken to hospital. Tried again, a toadstool in the
potage
automne
. Three people in the ambulance that time. Tried to ruin me. Wrote to “Faits Divers” in
Paris Jour
and said that we held black masses and orgies like in that
À rebours
book.’

‘But, Gerald—’ said Phryne. He held up his hand and she subsided. Time was, indeed, of the essence. She could see a boy with a tray being chivvied by Sylvanus Leigh into crossing the tent and not stepping on any important parts of the recumbent bodies.

‘Police investigation,’ he said. ‘Cleared us. Paper printed a retraction. Mud sticks, though.’

‘So it does,’ said Phryne.

‘Then he began stealing from us,’ said Gerald. ‘Money went missing. Suppliers’ cheques vanished. Jewellery, too. Thought I’d left him behind in France. Now he’s here. I invited you to my party, Phryne, and now I want you to save my life.’

‘You’re exaggerating,’ she told him. ‘No one is dead yet. How do you know he’s here?’

‘Got note,’ said Gerald. Phryne saw with admiration that he really had the hang of prisoners’ lingo, which was spoken without moving the lips and was hell on plosives. But Gerald always had been the clever twin.

‘Here’s Sylvanus,’ she said. ‘Have someone put the notes in my room disguised as a hat in a locked hatbox. You should not be seen giving them to me. But I have to tell you, my dear, that someone has already made two determined attempts to keep me away from your little gathering, so I am disposed to believe you.’

Gerald sagged a little. ‘I thought it would take much more to convince you,’ he admitted. ‘Very well. Sylvanus, you are a lifesaver,’ he said in his usual baritone as the older man came puffing to the dais. ‘What have you brought us?’

‘No point in messing about in this climate,’ said Sylvanus, nodding to the boy to put the jug down into its ice bucket and allowing him to hand out glasses. ‘You have a superlative barman, Gerald, and a very tasty one as well. Arms like a wrestler. Just the gentlest beading of honest sweat upon his manly bosom. Said bosom, half bared, was at lickable height and I almost swooned while waiting. He concocted them for me. Singapore slings just like Raffles used to make. Bottoms up,’ he encouraged, and drank down his glass.

Phryne sipped. Cherry brandy, gin, lemon juice? Tonic water certainly. A sure preventative against the malaria which she might catch from a citronella loving mosquito. Should an anopheles stray her way south from tropic climes where malaria lived . . .

Her mind was definitely wandering under the influence of all that hash smoke. She shook herself briskly. That had been adroit of Sylvanus, bringing not individual glasses but a big jug of the drink—and drinking it first to prove it harmless. Assuming he knew about the poisoning of the soup and the Turkish delight. She eyed Sylvanus narrowly and he smiled at her with his neglected teeth.

‘Oh for a beaker full of the warm South . . .’ he began. ‘The true, the blushful Hippocrene . . .’

‘I am happy about the beaded bubbles winking at the brim,’ Phryne said, ‘but I worry about the purple-stainéd mouth. Generally I find wine which stains the mouth also destroys the digestive system.’

‘Oh Lord, yes,’ agreed Sylvanus, slumping ungracefully down to sit on the dais, contriving thus to be at both Gerald and Phryne’s feet. ‘I can recall a 1915 chianti which tasted just like red ink flavoured with engraving acid. I only had the one glass, though. My concierge pinched the rest for cleaning sinks. Still, nothing was going to do poor Keats any more harm, so he might as well have drunk bad wine.’

‘True,’ agreed Phryne. ‘Talk to me, Sylvanus. How was your voyage?’

‘Oh, pleasant, very pleasant,’ he said. ‘Never travelled so far before—not ever, really. Your Australia is about as far away as you can get from anywhere at all, isn’t it?’

‘Almost far enough from my father,’ said Phryne, sipping. She would have to watch how many of these she drank. They were sweetish and sourish and very, very moreish.

‘Ah, yes, I saw your unesteemed progenitor in Paris on the way through,’ said Sylvanus, chuckling. ‘He was yelling at a porter, who was not carrying his baggage in a respectful enough manner. You know what those railway porters are like, Phryne. Tough as old railway sleepers and able to carry just about anything—including a medium-sized bistro—on that strap arrangement across their forehead.’

‘So, what happened with Papa?’ asked Phryne.

‘He yelled louder, because it is well known to English people that foreigners only pretend to speak those nasty foreign tongues but really understand English if it is shouted loudly enough. Then the porter unlatched the strap, dumped all the baggage on the platform and began, very deliberately, to throw it, piece by piece, into the path of the oncoming Train Bleu.’

‘No!’ exclaimed Phryne, delighted. ‘What did the old buffalo do?’

‘Stormed off to get a gendarme. Meanwhile, your mother produced money and apologies and really much better French than she thinks she speaks and by the time the policeman arrived the baggage had all been carried to a taxi and no one knew what the trouble was about . . . I do like your Papa, you know,’ he mused. ‘He is perfect, in his way.’

‘As a viper is a perfect viper or a tarantula a perfect tarantula,’ Phryne riposted. ‘You want Papa, Sylvanus dear, he is all yours.’

‘He would look good stuffed, in some decent museum.’

‘On that we can certainly agree,’ Phryne laughed. ‘You still tell a very funny story, my dear old thing.’

‘Well, to get into the best society nowadays you have to either feed people or amuse people or shock people,’ he replied seriously. ‘She feeds them, he shocks them and I amuse them. It’s a fair bargain.’

‘Sylvanus?’ said Gerald.

‘Yes, my dear?’

‘Can you go and find Tarquin? He ought to have been back by now.’

‘I don’t know what you see in that horrible child,’ said Sylvanus, brushing aside his thinning forelock. The gesture belonged to a time when he had more hair, and now just looked clumsy.

‘Myself when young,’ said Gerald.

‘Surely not,’ protested Phryne.

‘I only sent him to the kitchen and he always skimps kitchen visits—can’t see the point of aspiring to culinary perfection. Mind you, the poor little scrap only got bread and dripping on birthdays and Christmas so he hasn’t actually got any standards.’

‘You sent him away half an hour ago,’ Phryne reminded Gerald. ‘And you told him to stay until the housekeeper personally swore that your menu would go onto the table unchanged. He might not appreciate haute cuisine but he adores you and if you told him to stay until he had the old lady’s word, then I believe he would stay.’

‘Yes, probably. The thing I told you is making me more concerned than I usually am about people and their sad fates.’

‘Sad fates,’ mused Sylvanus. ‘What I could tell you about sad fates. There are so many more of them than happy fates.’

‘Only because a happy fate doesn’t make a good story,’ objected Phryne. ‘For every student who runs away with her teacher and lives happily ever after outside Montpellier with their five children and pet rabbit called Max, there is one dreadful tragedy involving nunneries and sharp knives.’

Sylvanus evidently disliked her reasoning. ‘Oh come, Phryne, that’s like saying for every young man who kills a stranger at a crossroads and then goes on to merrily marry an older woman as his queen and rules happily ever after there is one tragedy involving torn-out eyes and a noose made of a girdle. Some things are just bad, bad from the very beginning.’

‘Indeed,’ said Gerald. He was looking across the tent at his sister, utterly relaxed on her hammock, turning her delicate face into the cool air from the fountain, a movement very like a baby seeking its mother’s breast.

‘All right, given that you can have things bad
ab initio
,’ argued Phryne. ‘Oedipus, for instance, initiated his terrible fate by losing his temper at the place where three roads met and killing an older man. That, I agree, is not a good beginning. Bad deeds breed other bad deeds. Murder requires recompense, blood, as they say in Greece, calls out for blood. But if the deed which sparks off the terrible fate is as simple and benign a one as falling in love, then there have to be other possibilities.’

‘Do you really think that falling in love is a benign action?’ asked Sylvanus wearily. Suddenly he looked old. His cheeks sagged. ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action.’

‘Thank you, Mr Shakespeare,’ said Phryne tartly.

‘Jonathan, Sylvanus and Phryne shall be our reciters tonight,’ said Gerald. ‘Subject: evil. That ought to settle the point, and it will also delay the nine thousandth repetition of Chesterton’s “Lepanto” by our dear friend Nicholas. Just lately I’ve come over all unnecessary at the line “dim drums throbbing”.’

‘It just shows your innate good taste is reasserting itself,’ said Sylvanus indulgently, ‘after all that time contemplating the sort of second rate modern French drivel to which I would not give library room.’

‘Such as?’ bristled Phryne, who was fond of modern French poetry.

‘“Flowers of Evil”,’ sneered Sylvanus. ‘Pretentious windy rubbish.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Phryne. ‘I fear we are going to differ very markedly in our recital, Syl.’

‘I would have been astounded if we did not,’ he replied courteously.

Phryne put her hand over her glass as he offered to refill it. Poetry recitals—yes, a feature of the Templar court was recitals. No one was allowed to merely read a poem, they had to know it by heart. Phryne, having a memory as sticky as flypaper, sorted through her repertoire. What would amuse this gathering?

Elbowing her imp of the perverse firmly aside and turning down flat her suggestion—‘Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow wow’—Phryne took her leave to perform her ablutions, don her own evening clothes and see how much poetry she could, in fact, remember well enough to perform. A sonnet, perhaps? A piece of the
Inferno
? Verlaine or Rimbaud to annoy Sylvanus? Or what about her old friend Villon?

The heat outside the tent took her by surprise. That fountain really had been effective in cooling the air. Outside there was nothing to cool it. Groups of young men lay about on the parched sward, drinking far too much beer because they were thirsty. There would be some suicidal hangovers tomorrow whatever the weather. The north wind was picking up. By tomorrow it might be the full dragon’s breath which withered trees and started bushfires and always gave Phryne a headache. She slipped past the lazy groups, heading towards the house.

There was a flash of gold and Tarquin sped past her, his mission completed. So that was all right. Phryne wondered what was in those notes that Gerald had carefully preserved. She quickened her pace. The country house rule about bathing—he who bathes first, bathes fast—was a good one but she did not mean to comply with it.

Phryne was gritty, sweaty and a little intoxicated and what she wanted was a lush, full, hot, foamy bath in which she could recline.

She ran lightly up the stairs and gathered all her bathing things, locked herself into the bathroom as the taps roared, and sank into a strong scent of lemon blossom, which went well with citronella. The house might have been vandalised and its spirit broken, but its hot water system worked just as superbly as it ever had, when Governor La Trobe was expected to dinner and all of the guests wanted a bath at once.