Queen of Flowers (13 page)

‘I was,’ said Phryne. ‘And it was after five. Even the most roisterous are usually tucked up in someone’s bed by then.’

‘But about midnight—the joint might have been jumping.

We’ll have to ask the carnies,’ said Bert. ‘And there’s the Ace of Clubs, she comes in about then.’

‘The Ace of Clubs?’ asked Phryne. ‘How odd. Someone sent me an ace of clubs.’ She collected it from the mantelpiece.

Bert chuckled. ‘Someone doesn’t know you very well,’ he commented.

‘Why?’ asked Phryne.

‘You don’t gamble. It’s a boat, a gambling boat. Comes in
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every night. Here to Williamstown. See, there are the times, written down at the bottom here. Assuming you’re a rich capitalist with far too much money and time on your hands, you arrive at Willi or at the pier, you go on board, you waste the money which you’ve ground out of the labour of the starving poor, and then they take you back, you pick up the Rolls, and home you go, drunker and poorer but probably not sadder or wiser. Been going on for years, ever since baccarat arrived in town. Run by Mr Walker. Not a man to even think about crossing. Supposed to have good wine, but,’

Bert added.

‘Nice boat. Steam yacht. Mate of mine says that there isn’t an inch of brass unpolished,’ said Cec. ‘Treats his crew well.

Good wages and not a hard job. They lie up during the day, do a bit of painting or repairs, take on stores. Only three journeys a night. Mind you, it’s a bit hard to leave Mr Walker if you know any of his secrets. Good idea to go somewhere else if you want to retire peaceful.’

‘Like Africa,’ said Bert. ‘Or New Zealand. Nah, New Zealand’s probably too close. South America, maybe.’

‘When you say peaceful, Cec, do you mean without any bullet holes in important parts of the anatomy?’ asked Phryne.

Cec nodded.

‘Oh,’ said Phryne. ‘Well, this Ace of Clubs token must be fairly well known in gambling circles. My wine merchant recognised the card and leapt to the wrong conclusion. That is comforting. I should not like to trust the opinion of a young man who made that sort of mistake.’

‘Oh yair, everyone knows about it.’

‘Including the cops?’

‘Of course. But baccarat, see, it’s a simple game. Raid the boat and what do you get? A lot of people innocently playing
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bridge. No roulette wheel, no little horses. Vice know all about Mr Walker. And he don’t like trouble. He only accepts cash, no markers, no jewellery. If you win big you get taken home in his car with his boys so no one relieves you of that heavy wallet in the street or on the beach. Been a couple of blokes tried to muscle in on such a sweet racket. And who knows what happened to them? They might’a seen the error of their sinful ways and entered a monastery. But I don’t think so,’ said Bert with heavy emphasis.

‘I see,’ said Phryne. ‘Well, Cec, can you ask your mate if they saw a stray girl on the beach this morning? That isn’t a loaded question.’

‘With Mr Walker you never know,’ said Cec. ‘But no harm in asking.’

‘As the bishop said to the actress,’ agreed Bert, ‘that ain’t all, is it?’

‘No. Several things. You saw Madame Anatole at the market one morning and warned her about some men. Who were they?’

‘Who’s Madame Anatole when she’s at home?’ asked Bert, puzzled.

‘Sorry. Lizzie Chambers as was, the disguised mute boy that the girls tracked across the city one night—you remember?

Finally ended up in Kew?’

Bert grinned and took another sip of beer. ‘Oh yair. Lizzie.

Nice girl. Married that Frog cook who burns a grouse steak, but. She always gives me a g’day when she sees me. And she works hard. We often sees her at the fish market, real early, picking up the best of the catch. Yair. I remember. Though that was at the Queen Vic one morning, have to be a coupl’a weeks ago. She says to me, do you know those men, Mr Bert—that’s what she calls me—they are often at our bistro? And I
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looks and it was that mug lair Simonds, and his bloody awful mate Mongrel. Real bad men, Miss. You want to stay away from them.’

‘They are the men with whom our missing girl has been dining,’ said Phryne. Bert whistled. Cec pursed his lips.

‘Then I reckon she’s in a bit of trouble.’

‘What’s their main business?’ asked Phryne.

‘Bank jobs,’ said Cec. ‘And payrolls. They carry guns. And I heard a rumour that Mr Walker wasn’t pleased with them for saying that he ran an illegal game.’

‘Not nice company for a young lady,’ said Cec.

‘No,’ said Phryne. ‘Ask around about them. Discreetly, we don’t want to attract any unpleasant attention. Also, I need to know who runs the nearest brothel. One which might see an unprotected girl and decide to snatch her.’

Bert choked on his beer. He had never got used to Miss Fisher’s plain speaking.

‘They’d be mad,’ he opined after Cec had pounded his back. ‘Stray girls are always trouble. No well-run house’d risk her getting away and calling the jacks. Anyway, St Kilda’s pretty busy these days. Most of the girls are out on the street. What do you think, Cec?’

‘There’s the University,’ said Cec, obscurely.

‘They’d never steal a stray girl,’ objected Bert.

‘No, but they might take one in,’ said Cec. ‘If she turned up on their doorstep.’

‘We’ll have a look around,’ said Bert dubiously. ‘If you like.’

Phryne let this pass. Bert and Cec often spoke in riddles.

‘Right,’ she said, rising. ‘You do that, and I’m off to talk to her family. Not that I expect they’ll tell me anything resembling the truth,’ she added, allowing Bert to help her to her feet.

‘Why not?’ asked Cec.

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‘Because in all my experience,’ said Phryne, ‘such families never have.’

Families with missing daughters need a jolt to get them to spill.

Phryne decided on an appearance
en grande tenue
at a really inconvenient time. She dressed in a very expensive suit and hat, called up Mr Butler for chauffeur duty again and descended, unannounced, on the bereaved household at five in the afternoon.

It was a very large house in Brighton. Phryne wondered what Camellia, so happily discussing orchids with Jack Robinson, would think of the garden. It was largely composed of box hedges. Gravel covered most expanses. Such grass as grew was clipped close. There were no flowers, no decoration, not even a little playful topiary. Just the looming hedges and the dense dark leaves. Cold. Neat. Unpleasantly like a graveyard.

In fact, it was a graveyard. Phryne saw small tombstones—

surely too small for a human?—in a neatly railed enclosure near the fence. She sat up straighter. This looked like being an interesting visit.

Mr Butler parked the car at the steps and escorted Miss Fisher to the door. The iron-coloured stone of the house boasted what had been a fine set of French windows. These had been covered with solid iron bars. Phryne had seen more cheerful prisons.

‘I don’t know about this place,’ muttered Mr Butler, who had a sincere devotion to his excitable Miss Fisher.

‘Onward and upward, Mr Butler dear,’ said Phryne bracingly.

Mr Butler seized the large iron gargoyle knocker on the front door and slammed it three times. It made a hollow boom.

Nothing happened.

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Then Phryne heard a scattering of feet and the very big door creaked open to reveal a very small, very dirty girl in a smock. She paused to wipe her nose with the back of her hand.

She bobbed a curtsey and said, ‘Yes?’

‘The Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher to see Mrs Weston,’

announced Mr Butler.

At the sight of him in his blue uniform glittering with buttons, the child gave a squeak of alarm and fled down the hall, screaming, ‘Missus! There’s a jack!’

‘Probably not a child of the household, then,’ commented Mr Butler drily.

‘Did you hear what she called you?’ asked Phryne, intrigued.

‘A jack, Miss Fisher? I don’t know the term.’

‘It means a policeman, Mr Butler. And it isn’t the sort of slang one expects to hear in Brighton. Hello?’ she called into the house. ‘I’ll give them another couple of minutes and then I’ll write a note.’

‘Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it is a lady, like Mary said,’

exclaimed the second child of the day. This one was taller and more articulate, though Irish, but she bobbed the same little bob. She looked about fourteen and she was pinned into an overlarge white nurse’s wrapper down which some child had spilled cocoa quite recently.

‘Please come in, m’lady, and I’ll tell Mrs Weston you are here. And your man.’

Phryne followed the white uniform down a long dark corridor. It was swept clean, bare of carpet or picture, and lit only by meagre electric bulbs at long intervals. The small servant retained Mr Butler as Phryne was conducted into a parlour notable for the dimness of its light and the overstuffed nature of its furniture. It smelt musty, as though no window
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had been opened in a long time. On inspection, this proved to be because not only was the window nailed shut, it also had iron bars fastened very sternly across it.

This room, Phryne decided, listening to the sounds of domestic mayhem, had belonged to an old lady, and she and the room had got older and shabbier together. There were her flower pictures, her tapestry fire screen in Berlin wool (depicting Dido and Aeneas) in front of a fireplace which contained a fancily folded paper fan, her wedding bouquet under a glass dome, her footstool drawn close to the fire. Nothing had been changed or cleared away. Phryne opened a mother of pearl box and found a store of stale cachous, the same violet ones with which her own grandmother had always rewarded Phryne for sitting still in church and reciting the Collect correctly on her return. Phryne had loved her grandmother and liked violet cachous so she had mostly qualified for one.

Phryne sat down in the visitor’s chair and listened. She heard a small child shrieking at the top of his voice: ‘No! Want Biddy!’ She heard a dish smash on a hard floor. She heard Mr Butler’s voice, saying something soothing. The child stopped crying. Then an old man’s voice rose above the background noise. ‘If we do not have instant silence you are all going to be sleeping under a bridge tonight!’

Waspish, thought Phryne. The aged gentleman is not subtle in his control over his family. That bridge might be looking like a more and more attractive form of accommodation if this was the usual standard of household management.

One does not expect a bridge to be comfortable, so one is not disappointed.

Phryne was getting restless. The spirit of the old lady was so strong in her room that Phryne fancied she could almost see her, sitting in her chair, which over the years had conformed
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itself to her contours. Folding her hands in her lap. Allowing her head to nod. Taking a little nap before dinner which had turned into the longest sleep of all.

Phryne glanced at her watch. Ten more minutes and she would leave.

Five minutes later the door slammed open and into the room came the small Irish girl, carrying an unpolished tray on which reposed unmatching glasses and a decanter of some dark, sinister fluid, a small, fat, choleric dog hauled along by a small, fat, choleric boy, and Mrs Weston, who looked like a tragedy queen who had been told very bad news while being dragged through four hedges backwards.

‘Miss Fisher!’ she gasped, sinking down into the old lady’s chair. Phryne could almost see the ghost bridling. ‘Do have a drink. Bridget, pour the wine.’

‘Yes, Miss,’ said Bridget, and did so very neatly. Especially considering that the small boy was dragging on her arm and demanding in a high, irritating whine that she come and play with him. Phryne’s fingers itched for his ears.

‘Go on, then, Bridget,’ said Mrs Weston, and the door closed behind boy, maid and dog. The silence came back with a rush.

‘It’s so hard to get good servants these days,’ sighed Mrs Weston. ‘That girl will be off as soon as her little sister can go to school. She only works here because she can keep little Mary with her.’

‘Very likely,’ said Phryne coolly. Any young woman with a morsel of pride would hear the siren call of the pickle factory from what was doubtless a cold, hard, grudged bed, accompanied by bad food, sixteen hours’ work a day, no privacy and a household ruled by a nasty old man. In the pickle factory you got wages in your pocket, a fixed eight hours’ work a day and
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they supplied pattens against the brine. It would be heaven compared to the Weston household.

‘Do have a drink,’ urged Mrs Weston, gulping. Phryne tasted it gingerly. It had once, perhaps, been a fine wine, but it had been hoarded long past its prime, and now in its senility there was only the ghost of what it once had been. But it wasn’t actively poisonous and Phryne sipped. The glass in her hand was Waterford crystal. Mrs Weston was drinking from carnival ware. This place was a puzzle.

‘I have been engaged to find your daughter Rose,’ she told Mrs Weston. ‘I know she has run away before. Do you know where she has gone on previous occasions?’

‘No, she never . . .’ Phryne stared Mrs Weston down.

‘Yes, all right, she has been naughty before. But it was just a girlish prank. Girls have these fancies, you know, Miss Fisher.’

‘I know,’ said Phryne gently.

‘She always came back after one day,’ sobbed Mrs Weston.

‘I never knew where she went. Her grandfather said he’d beat it out of her but she refused to speak and I stopped him after a while.’