Queen of Flowers (24 page)

I didn’t hardly like to say it with Robinson here, everyone
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knows he’s straight as a die, he’s not a bad bloke for a cop, but there’s some cops making a good living looking the other way in St Kilda. Not naming no names, mind.’

‘So, Mr Walker is mine. I’ll visit his game tonight. You’ll have to teach me to play baccarat, though,’ she said.

‘Take all of a minute,’ grunted Bert. ‘Baccarat ain’t a difficult game. If it wasn’t for the side bets you could die of boredom watching it. He don’t allow unescorted ladies, though.

Who you gonna take with you?’

‘Lin,’ said Phryne. ‘He looks gorgeous in evening dress.’

‘Yair, good. Everyone knows the Chinese are mad gamblers.

Sorry,’ he said.

‘As long as it is what everyone knows,’ said Phryne. ‘No offence taken. Could Rose have gone overboard from his boat, do you think?’

‘Could have,’ said Bert. ‘And if she did he’d know all about it.’

‘All right. Who else?’

‘I reckon that’s enough for one night,’ said Bert. ‘Me and Cec are going to make a bit of a noise in a few pubs, drop a word into a few ears. Stir the pot a bit.’

‘You’ll need some drinking money,’ said Phryne and handed over a note. ‘Don’t argue, Bert dear, I’ve saved fifty pounds’ ransom today. Hugh, I want you to find out all you can about Mr Johnson. There’s those secret police files, aren’t there, on all the prominent citizens of Melbourne? The ones no one is supposed to know about?’

‘No one’s supposed to know about them,’ said Hugh, astonished.

‘Take notes. After that I want you to go to the office of a fetid little rag called the “Hawklet”,’ said Phryne. ‘They’ll be somewhere in Little Lon. Suggest to them that you will give
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them first refusal on a really impressive scandal. They love scandals. The reason I can’t tell you their present address is that they got another libel writ and closed. Again. They always reopen a couple of doors down. Pretty soon they will be running out of Little Lon and will have to start again at the top.’

‘How do you know about the “Hawklet”?’ asked Bert, a little shocked.

‘I make it my afternoon reading every time I can get a copy,’ said Phryne promptly. ‘What they don’t know about the seamy side of the city you could put in a wineglass. They must know something about Johnson, and they may know something about Grandpapa Weston. Squeeze them, Hugh dear. If you don’t get anything from them try the “Age” and the “Argus” archives.’

‘All right,’ said Hugh.

‘What can we do?’ asked Dot.

‘I’m afraid that you’ve got the job of trawling the circus for Ruth. Call out for her quietly and look into every tent and building that you can. It has to be a really unobtrusive search, you understand? James, you might like to take your fiddle. She loves your playing. You might be able to coax her out if she’s hiding, or alert her if she’s captive. Dress like it’s a holiday and carry a basket. Eat toffee apples. Drift.’

‘Yes,’ said Dot, ‘we can do that. What do we do if we find that she’s captive? Tied up, say, in a caravan?’

‘If it looks too hard for you to handle alone, then go get Dulcie and ask her to bring an elephant. That ought to suppress any resistance.’

‘Very well,’ agreed James. ‘I’ll get my fiddle.’

‘And I’ll bring a basket,’ said Dot. ‘Jane, you need the old straw hat, not the new one. Back before dark,’ said Dot.

They all left. Bert and Cec to selected pubs. Dot, Jane and
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James to the circus. Hugh to the archives and then the

‘Hawklet’. Phryne went to see how Rose Weston was.

‘No change,’ reported Lily Jackmann. ‘She’s been talking and I’ve been writing it down but it’s all nonsense.’

Phryne read ‘no no don’t want to don’t want to please don’t hurt me’ and felt that whatever happened to Mr Johnson and Mr Weston, it could not be bad enough.

‘But it’s doing her good,’ said Mrs Jackmann. ‘Talking.

I reckon she’s never said all this stuff before. It’s just bubbling up. Better out than in,’ said Mrs Jackmann briskly. ‘Her temp’s going down and her blood pressure’s better and there’s not as many noises in her lungs.’

Sigmund Freud would have agreed with her, Phryne thought. Much better out than in.

She phoned Lin and secured his escort for the evening.

Her part in this campaign would come much later. The gambling boat didn’t leave until eleven-thirty. That meant a strenuous night in prospect, and she needed to prepare. She took herself up to her boudoir and sat down at the window to clean and load her gun. Better safe, to use another aphorism, than sorry. The mechanism slid and closed under her handling, a perfect, shiny, deadly little toy for a lady.

Then, like the cat Ember, Phryne decided that a nap was just what she needed. She shed her clothes, put on a silk nightgown in a soothing milky shade and slid down into her bed. Ember grumbled a little and moved aside to allow her feet past. It was amazing how one small, relatively slim cat could occupy a whole bed, Phryne thought drowsily.

Then she plucked all her worries off, visualising them as pocket-sized Notre Dame gargoyles, and hurled them beyond the imagined perimeter she had set up around her bed. She fancied that she could hear their howls of baffled rage as
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they clawed to get back in to annoy her and could not get past the border.

It was a technique taught to her by a very toothsome cere-monial magician in London, and it never failed. Phryne could not afford guilt or remorse. She was going to need all of her skills to rescue Ruth and find out what had happened to Rose Weston, and bring her attackers to a nasty legal end. Or illegal would be just as good. Phryne was not worried about that. She was concerned with justice, not law.

She fell asleep as neatly and completely as Ember.

Mr James Murray to Mr Aaron Murray

2 April 1913

Dear father, my longing for home increases as I contemplate this
strong sunlight and mop my brow in the heat. My friend Rory’s
matrimonial plans have been interrupted. The good Mrs Ross
refused his perfectly honourable proposal—why, I can’t imagine,
unless she objects to him on account of his being a sailor and
poor—and now he meets his bonny birdie at the street corner
in the dead of night. He’s caught a cold doing it, he coughs all
night, and I am very sorry for him. He truly loves this girl and
she truly loves him. And she is a good, sensible, well-skilled girl
whom any Island mother would be pleased to see her son
bringing home. In the words of the song, she can certainly make
a griddle cake, and Irish stew, and singing hinnies too.

We’ve had to move to another boarding house. The food is
not good and the presence of poor Rory moping about like a sick
spaniel does not increase its cheer. I can’t really leave him, Father,
but we’ve a couple of months yet before I take my berth on the
P and O. Neil has a job sewing sails in the port and we have
been making gramophone records of the old songs. They all want
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me to be Scotch, not understanding that Orkney was settled by
Vikings, so I call myself Hamish, a small joke at the expense of
those who do not understand the Gaelic. Cruel, I know, but
I am tired of being myself and here, so why not be Hamish
McGregor? He might be a happier man.

With many good wishes,

Your loving son, James

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Postern of Fate, the Desert Gate, Disaster’s Cavern,
Fort of Fear

The Portal of Baghdad am I, the Doorway of
Diarbekir.

James Elroy Flecker

‘Gates of Damascus’

‘How’s tricks?’ asked Bert. ‘Still got the old SP down the lane?’

‘Yair,’ said the barman at the Esplanade, after a brief pause for identification of the questioner. ‘Bert, yair, I remember you.

And Cec. G’day. Ain’t seen you for a donkey’s age. What’s the news on the wharf strike?’

‘Goin’ from bad to worse.’ Bert leaned confidingly on the bar which, at the Espy, was longer than some skittle alleys. ‘Me and Cec’ve got a cab.’

‘Might be a good idea,’ said the barman, wiping the mahog-any surface. He loved the Espy’s bar and hated the way careless drinkers kept spilling beer on it, which took off the polish.

‘But right now I’m looking for Simonds and Mongrel,’

said Bert.

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‘What’s a decent man like you want with scum like them?’

asked the barman, caressing the surface briefly.

Bert shrugged. ‘Got a message for ’em,’ he said.

‘They’re banned,’ said the barman. ‘Boss got shut of ’em last week. I hope it’s a strong message,’ he added with a grin which exposed his four remaining teeth, two top, two bottom.

Although as he had proved in a recent altercation, the Espy barman could still bite.

‘Strong enough,’ said Bert. ‘Any idea where they’d have gone?’

‘Try the Flora,’ advised the barman. ‘Get deloused after,’

he added.

‘Oh, jeez,’ said Bert, ‘the bloody Flora.’

‘Too right,’ said Cec.

Bert finished his beer moodily. When he found them two, he vowed silently, he’d make them pay for forcing him to go into the Flora.

Jane hadn’t known that one could actually eat too much Turkey lolly, or too many ice creams, toffee apples, sherbert bombs or suspicious green sweets from a penny lucky dip. She was beginning to feel that she needed to find a convenient bush to be sick under, and they hadn’t covered half the ground yet.

Dot bustled along, poking into every corner with an expression of half-witted good will which was very convincing. She had almost been clawed by a surprised lion, who was taking an afternoon nap, and a camel had spat at her and missed, neither of which events had damped her enthusiasm or curbed her activity. James sat in the middle of the riggers’ camp, playing the fiddle so sweetly that Jane could not imagine it not drawing Ruth if she was there. Somewhere she had heard that the McCrimmons of Skye could pipe seals out of the sea. James
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Murray could fiddle whales out of the ocean and Jane expected them at any moment. She could easily envisage the huge grey heads turning to triangulate on the sound, and the vast bodies sliding through the deep blue.

Imagination was keeping Jane’s mind off her stomach, which was a good thing.

Hugh Collins located the office of the ‘Hawklet’ only because of a scrawled piece of paper in the window. Underneath in the cellar he could hear the thud of the press. They must have to take it apart and move it and reassemble it every time they get into trouble, he thought. That’s a lot of work.

The police files which didn’t exist and no one knew about had yielded a fair amount of very guarded information.

Mr Johnson was a prominent exporter, mainly of fruit. In summary, he sent bananas to New Zealand and received cheese and wool in return. New Zealand, of course, made very good cheese, and Queensland grew very good bananas, passionfruit, guavas, alligator pears, mangoes, custard apples and pineapples.

All of which Mr Johnson supplied through a network of growers and packers. He had a lot of interests in transport, which made sense. He was unmarried, which for a man of his age—forty-five—was unusual. There had been two separate complaints about him from underage girls, but the com-plainant had always refused to testify and the matters had not been proceeded with.

Mr Weston was described as retired and miserly. He had committed an assault with an umbrella on a woman collecting for the Home for Unmarried Mothers. He had been bound over to keep the peace. He owned shares in several of Mr Johnson’s companies and—Hugh had found this odd—had divested himself of his house and most of his assets, putting
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them in his daughter’s name several years earlier. Almost as if he expected some unpleasant and expensive discovery. Johnson’s companies were, as far as the files knew, unblemished, though the same could not be said of their bananas. Hugh wondered what the ‘Hawklet’ was going to be able to tell him.

The door opened to his knocking. A shrewish face looked out, said, ‘You’re a cop!’ and tried to slam the door. Hugh had had the forethought to insert a size eleven foot in a size twelve police issue boot into the gap and the door bounced off the metal toecap.

‘Oh, all right,’ said the shrewish man. ‘No wonder they call you flatfoots! Give me the writ and go away.’

‘No writ,’ said Hugh easily. ‘Got a bit of information for you, if you care to have it.’

‘Police corruption?’ breathed the shrewish man. He was about five feet tall, with longish dark hair that straggled into his collar, crooked teeth, and bright, feverish eyes. Hugh winced.

‘Horrible deeds in high life,’ he replied. ‘I reckoned it was right up your street.’ Hugh surveyed Little Lon, a sink of iniquity even at two in the afternoon.

‘Come in. My name’s Prayse, that’s p-r-a-y-s-e, and I’ve heard all the jokes so don’t bother. Horrible deeds, eh?’

‘Extremely horrible,’ said Hugh.

He looked for somewhere to sit down. The small room was crowded with furniture, books, long strips of paper and a very elderly and smelly bulldog in a basket. Every surface was smudged with ink and covered with a light veil of cigarette ash.