Death by Water (13 page)

‘It’s the wrong one,’ she told him crossly. ‘Go back and get the right one.’

‘It will do,’ he said, with an appearance of mastery. He wrapped her in the soft grey folds and led her away, protest-ing. Phryne suppressed a grin and caught the professor with an identical expression and her hand at her mouth.

‘And this is Karina, the keel of the ship Argo,’ said Theodore Green.

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Mr Michael Johnson

New York

Hi Mike, this is to tell you that Julia and the girls will be sailing
tomorrow on the new ship. Isn’t it amazing how fast progress goes?

I remember when it took all of two months to get across the
Atlantic. I must be getting old though Julia tells me I’m not,
because she’s the same age as me, I guess, though don’t tell her I
said that. I’m staying in London for a few more weeks to deal
with that Michigan steel export problem. These Brits drive a
real hard bargain but they’re no match for Yankee ingenuity in
the end.

Best

Joe

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Yet for disport we fawn and flatter both
To pass the time when nothing else can please.

E De Vere, Earl of Oxford

‘A Renunciation’

When they came back to the Palm Court the Melody Makers had limbered up and were playing ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ rather well, with a jazz edge to the traditional tone.

Phryne walked into Mr Mason’s embrace and they danced away.

‘What are you doing, wasting your life, Jack?’ she asked, hoping to shock him into a reply. ‘Is it the charms of dear Jonquil? That won’t answer, it won’t answer at all.’

He was duly jolted, missed his step and almost ran Phryne into a palm tree.

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard,’ said Phryne grimly, signalling a steward and ordering two gin slings. She pinned Jack Mason against the palm so that he could not easily move until the drinks came and she allowed him to sit down in a wicker chair.

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‘You see, I came on this holiday for a rest,’ she told him,

‘and I am finding the whole West, Mrs West and Mason imbroglio enervating. So before I change my table and find some sane people to sit with—though they will be sadly boring—I’m giving you a chance to explain. What is going on? Are you madly in love with Jonquil?’

‘Don’t say her name in that soupy way,’ he protested.

‘It’s hard to say the name Jonquil any other way,’ she pointed out, reasonably.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. Like many a young man in torment, Jack Mason stretched, flung out his arms (narrowly missing a passing steward, who saved his tray of drinks with an adroit zig to the left) and stuck out both legs in front of him (narrowly missing a dancing officer, who saved his partner’s stockings with an adroit zag to the right).

‘You’re a hazard to navigation,’ said Phryne amusedly. Jack Mason drew in his limbs, drank his drink, and began to explain, though he was hanged, he told himself later, if Miss Fisher was due any explanation or had any right to ask for one.

Much less demand one.

‘I’ll tell, but this is a dead secret, all right?’

Phryne nodded.

‘My father—well, I’m a disappointment to my father.

Which is fair enough, because he’s a disappointment to me. He wants me to go to the varsity and be a lawyer like him. Well, I tried it to please him, and I was so bored by the end of six months that I had to throw it up or die. I’ve always been a big hearty chap, good at games, and I wanted to be a professional athlete, but he wouldn’t hear of it. So we can’t agree on anything. He said he’d cut off my funds unless I gave up sport, so I gave it up. He’s on the board of P&O so I can travel as much as I want. He thinks I’m going to give in, but I’m not.’

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‘With you so far,’ Phryne assured him.

‘I was at a loose end, you see, so me and a few of the football chaps at the shop—the university, you know—went to a dance place in Richmond one night. Professional dancers, you know, shilling a dance?’

‘I know the sort of place,’ said Phryne, who did. Weary, overly made-up girls in much mended frocks circling the floor in the arms of people who held them too close, panted over their charms, and stood on their feet. Matched, of course, by tight-waisted young men in threadbare evening dress, bright eyes and dirty necks, ready to whisper sweet nothings into any female ear, be she never so ugly. Phryne avoided dance halls.

They were sad and sordid.

‘So there I met—’

‘She was a professional dancer?’

‘Yes, and she was different from all the others. I picked her out at once. Same war-paint, same old dress, but eager eyes, not cynical like all the other old boilers. I bought her whole evening and went back the next night.’

‘And the next,’ prompted Phryne.

‘Then—well, you know my situation. I haven’t enough to marry on and anyway . . .’

‘She isn’t the kind of girl you take home to your stern papa,’

said Phryne.

‘Er, no, she isn’t,’ confessed Jack Mason. ‘Then some bounder attempted to warn me off,’ he said indignantly. ‘Told me to stay away from her as though he was one of those American gangsters. The idea!’

‘We have produced some very nasty home-grown brutes,’

said Phryne, speaking from personal experience. ‘What happened then?’

‘I kept going to Richmond and then one night a sneering
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bastard called me over and told me that unless I left ‘‘their girl’

alone, my father would be hearing about it.’

‘And you told him to publish and be damned,’ said Phryne, trying to move the story along a little. Behind her, the piano struck up and a woman began to sing a blues song. Not a voice with a great range, or great steadiness, but huge expressiveness and a strangely coincidental choice of song. It was, Phryne ascertained, Magda, the first violin, accompanied by her sister Katrina. Magda was clad in a long, bright red dress of immod-est cut, made by the same hands that had fashioned the bright blue one which her sister was wearing. Both dresses glittered with sequins. The sisters were very decorative.

‘Ten cents a dance, that’s all they pay me,’ mourned the deep voice, with no trace of accent. ‘Gosh, how it weighs me down. Ten cents a dance, sailors and tough guys, rough guys who tear my gown . . .’

‘Well, no, that is, I didn’t quite,’ squirmed Jack Mason.

‘Jonquil herself told me to go away, that I was getting her into trouble with her boss, and if I couldn’t marry her she’d have to find someone else who could. So, well, I went away.’

‘I see,’ said Phryne.

‘I suppose you think I’m a cad,’ he said miserably.

‘No, I don’t,’ Phryne told him. ‘You didn’t love her, so why stand in someone else’s way? You behaved sensibly, probably for a change.’

‘Though I’ve a chorus of elderly beaus,’ sang Magda, ‘stock-ings are porous with holes at the toes . . .’

‘Anyway, I don’t know what she wants,’ said Jack Mason.

‘I don’t know if she wants me or not. She complains about her husband all the time but Blind Freddy can see that he’s crazy about her. And I’m still sorry for her, poor little rich girl, flirting with the officers like that Doctor Shilletoe, she has him
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hung, drawn and quartered, poor chap, and driving West mad with jealousy.’

‘That is such a good rhyme,’ commented Phryne, momen-tarily distracted. ‘Porous and chorus. Sorry. Did you, in fact, have an affair with Mrs West when she was a dancer?’

‘No,’ said Jack Mason flatly. Here he was, pouring out his soul, and his interlocutor was listening to a singer. ‘Women!’

about summed up his attitude to the sex.

‘I really can’t advise you as to what Mrs West may be intending,’ said Phryne, leaning forward to allow him to light her cigarette. ‘She might be thinking of an adulterous affair, but she might also be aware that her husband would probably kill her if she did. That’s an obsessive man. She’s playing with fire. I think that you should find a career, Jack. Why aren’t you climbing unclimbed mountains? Exploring the far reaches of unknown rivers? You’d be very good at that.’

‘You think so?’ A spark lit itself in the young man’s lack-lustre eyes.

‘I do,’ said Phryne. ‘You could accompany an archaeolog-ical expedition to Mayan ruins and stop the scientists from being eaten by tigers. Or possibly jaguars, in South America, come to think of it. You’re wasting your life. And if you are wondering whether Mrs West will run away with you, I’d say that is improbable. She likes you, but she likes her luxury and new dresses and jewels and three meals a day more. Which is to be expected, working as hard as she worked and being as scared and cold and miserable and bullied as she must have been.’

‘I suppose,’ he said reluctantly.

‘And you’re not in love with her, so why keep on with this half-hearted charade?’

‘I do, I do . . . love . . . her,’ faltered Jack Mason.

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‘Not enough,’ said Phryne. ‘She’s an excuse so that you don’t have to go on with your life, make any decisions—and also to punish your father,’ she dissected ruthlessly. ‘None of those are the ingredients of love.’

‘You’re not the first person to tell me this,’ he said ruefully.

‘Professor Applegate, Mr Aubrey and probably Mrs Cahill,’

Phryne guessed.

‘Bang on, all three,’ he said. ‘And Thomas, my man. And my father. But I might take notice of you,’ he said insinuat-ingly. ‘You’re young, like me.’

‘No, I’m not, my boy,’ said Phryne firmly. ‘I don’t think I was ever young like you. Come along. We’re wasting valuable dancing time.’

‘I’m here till closing time,’ proclaimed Magda. ‘Dance and be merry, it’s only a dime!’

The dance floor was full. Phryne found herself too com-pressed to do more than the standard ‘nightclub shuffle’, which consisted of moving gently in whatever direction there was room. They circled slowly. Possibly because of all that dance hall practice, Jack Mason was a good dancer.

Phryne had carefully not brought any dresses with trains.

They were just pure provocation to a certain kind of lead-footed man.

She was being turned near the bandstand when she felt a sharp tug at her collar. It was instantly released. Phryne looked around at once and could see nothing unusual. The Melody Makers were tooting, thumping, plucking or sawing as to preference. Her nearest neighbour was Mr Cahill and, on the other side, the Wests. She put a hand to the jewel. Dot’s stitches had held. It was still there.

But where had that pull come from? Left, right, behind, before or—intriguingly—above? Phryne looked up. Nothing
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above her now but chandeliers and strings of the famous Tiffany coloured lights, festooned in garlands, red and blue and claret and yellow, figured with vine leaves and grapes and flowers.

Thoughtful, Phryne finished the dance and excused herself.

She needed another drink and time to think. She sat down against the wall, ordered a double cognac, and watched the dancers.

How had it been done? Just a sharp tug from—as it might be—behind, and there went the lolly? Phryne shook her head so firmly that the drinks steward, Pierre, came hurrying over to inquire if the cognac was to the lady’s liking. Not many women, in his experience, drank cognac, and the ones who did knew what they were drinking. He was terrified that harm had come to his champagne fines cognac, and was reassured by the lady in such fluent and appreciative French that he brought out his special bottle of Grandes Armagnac des Ducs and poured her a glass.

She savoured it in the proper fashion and favoured Pierre with more appreciative comments. He made a mental note that table three should have the good burgundy with their boeuf en croute tomorrow. He could pass off the inferior bottles on tables seven and four. Table seven knew nothing of wine, sending back a bottle of riesling as “corked” because it had bits of cork in it, the imbeciles. Table four had gulped down a very special old pale brandy as though it was common wood alcohol, which was probably what they had been drinking because they had said that his brandy lacked bite. They deserved inferior burgundy.

The bottles that had been stored too close to the stove might have enough bite by now for table four. A wine waiter’s revenge may be long in coming, but it arrives in the end.

Pierre left the charming lady, plotting quietly to himself and wondering why she had kept that Parisienne accent when she
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had clearly mastered French and could have abolished it in favour of an attractive accent, like as it might be, his own, Normandy tones.

Cognac always had a good effect on Phryne’s thought processes. The superlative Armagnac rather unhinged them.

Unhinged might be a good place to be, Phryne thought. Rational deduction wasn’t doing her any good. Information received told her that neither of the ladies who had lost their gems while dancing mentioned any touch. They would have noticed a sharp tug. Right. Therefore the jerk was produced because Dot had stitched the sapphire necklace to Phryne’s dress. Someone had tried to steal the sapphire and had been foiled. Twice, so far, if the person with mousetrap fingers had been looking for the sapphire in Phryne’s Pierrot bag, instead of where it actually was, sewn into the knotted scarf on Phryne’s hat.

Perhaps the mousetrap had made him or her clumsy. That was a nice thought. The dancers blurred past Phryne’s eyes. It was time to go to bed. Mr Forrester danced along with Miss Lemmon. Everyone seemed to be having a good time.