Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher (33 page)

‘Yes. You were bending the facts to fit your theory. This is almost always fatal. Now I did not have a theory so I approached the matter with an open mind. Where did the rock come from? Bert?’

‘It’s the same as the ones in Paris Street, Miss. They are taking up the old kerb-stones and replacing them with cement. They’ve been there a while, and there’s clover growing over them.’

‘Good. What did you find on the murder weapon, Benton?’

‘A clover burr, hemp, chewy and some grass,’ said Benton.

‘Good. Now it struck me that whoever imported the stone might have been playing a game. What game have all the children been playing since Luxor was found?’

She pointed at Jim. He faltered. ‘Pyramids, Miss.’

‘Cec will now take us to where he found the rope.’

Cec led the way, and revealed the pile of bluestone pitchers. They had been tumbled over the fence, and under them was revealed the cache of Pharoah’s treasures, food for the afterlife in the form of a licorice block, and pictures of his royal relatives, transport and even slaves with white kilts. Amelia stared at them, paling to the whiteness of chalk. Paolo took her arm, worried.

‘What were these children doing when you saw them yesterday, Bert?’

‘Trying to wrap up an old girl’s cat as a mummy,’ chuckled Bert. ‘They had all the bandages but the cat wouldn’t play.’

‘Jim, tell us what you were playing here when Mr McNaughton caught you.’

‘Pyramids,’ whispered Jim. ‘We took the tyre down and Mickey was up the tree. We was hauling the stones up like the pictures said. It worked bonzer, too. We had four stones for each side of the square, and we almost finished it when . . .’

‘Exactly. Why was the deceased wearing street shoes? He saw from his drive a gaggle of street children desecrating his sacred turf. And after he had strictly forbidden his daughter to allow them on the property. What did he do? He strode across here and bellowed in his most terrifying voice that they should clear off. Mickey was up in the tree, holding the rope to which the top stone was attached. The deceased halted directly under him and Mickey was so terrified that he let the stone go. Then he fell off the tree and ran for his life. Is that right?’

Jim nodded. Mickey began to howl. Bert, who had been expecting this, thrust a huge toffee apple into the gaping maw.

‘The kids all ran away as fast as they could go. Eh, Jimmy?’

Jimmy grinned, remembering that flight over the fence and down the valley, into the safety of their favourite box-thorn.

‘So, you see, the blow was delivered by a more powerful force than man. It was gravity that murdered McNaughton. That pitcher weighs about twenty pounds and it fell some three feet. Enough to cave in any skull. So McNaughton dies as he had lived; a mean old cuss.’

‘How did the tyre get back, then?’

‘Ah. In the house, Miss Amelia is told that her brother has been pacing about uttering threats against her father before stamping off down the valley. She goes to look for him. There is her father, lying in the grass, perfectly dead. She does not understand the significance of the stones. She leaps to the conclusion that her brother has killed her father. She takes the bluestones and dumps them over the wall, with the tomb treasures. She unties the rope and throws it away. She is wearing soft house shoes so she leaves no footmark. Then she takes a new piece of rope and re-hangs the tyre. The children’s pulley has fallen naturally into the groove carved in the bark by the swing, so there is no other sign of their presence. She intends to discover the body the next day, but Daniel the spaniel is not going to be denied. Danny knows a dead body when he sees one. So the death is revealed sooner than she expected. Is that what happened, Amelia?’

Paolo gave her an affectionate shake. ‘Why did you not tell me, foolish one? I would have helped you. You must not carry stones—you will spoil your fingers.’

Bill, congested with emotion, said, ‘Amelia! Is this true?’

‘Yes, Bill.’

‘Sporting of you, old girl,’ he mumbled. Amelia smiled. Mrs McNaughton, who was a little slow, finally reached her conclusion.

‘Then it was an accident.’

‘Yes, Mother.’

‘Bill didn’t kill him.’

‘No, Mother.’

‘In fact, no one killed him!’

‘That is right, Mrs McNaughton,’ agreed Detective-inspector Benton. ‘Much as I hate to admit it.’

‘Good. I also have a witness to Bill’s walk. It can be confirmed by consulting the daybook in Kew Police Station. You should have checked. This is she—Miss Wilson.’

Margaret Wilson was a sturdy, tanned, straightforward young woman, who had clearly never lied in her life.

‘I passed Bill on that path at four,’ she stated. ‘He has met me before, but I must have made no impression on him, which is a pity.’

Bill protested incoherently. ‘No, Margaret, don’t think that. I had a lot on my mind. I was in a mood. Don’t think that I . . .’ He trailed off and blushed.

Miss Wilson took his arm.

‘Well. Is this the end of the game?’ asked Paolo.

‘Ask the detective-inspector,’ said Phryne.

‘Is it?’ Paolo hugged his fiancée close. ‘Are you going to arrest the girl for loyalty to her brother? Surely that would not be a good deed. And he died by his own act. Had he not ambushed these children he would be alive today, which would not be a good idea.’

‘No charges will be laid against Miss McNaughton or the kids,’ said the detective-inspector glumly.

‘Then I would like to announce that Miss McNaughton has agreed to be my wife and I trust that we shall see you all at the wedding, including you,
scugnizzi.
If you wash your faces first. Since my wife will not have any money from the estate of her father no aspersions can be cast at us.’

‘That’s what you think,’ commented Jillian. ‘That clause is invalid. Void for being contrary to public policy. She will get the money without the condition, as will Mrs McNaughton. I know the solicitor who drew up that will. Poor thing. He told the old man all about what would happen if it was challenged, but all he would say was, “They’d never dare”. Unpleasant person. So if I feel like casting the odd aspersion at you, Paolo, I shall cast it.’

‘Under the circumstances you are welcome, Signorina Avvocata. Shall we also invite this so-tedious policeman to our wedding,
cara
?’

‘Yes,’ said Amelia. ‘I want to paint him.’

They all went to lunch, well and truly satisfied.

‘Have another cocktail,’ suggested Phryne to the detective- inspector. ‘Theories are like that. At least I didn’t expose you through my old friend who works for
The Hawklet
, did I?’

The policeman paled, and gulped the cocktail.

The street children were seated at the buffet, with all their favourite foods within reach. Lucy had uncorked Mickey from his apple and was feeding him cream cake while she ate a fat chocolate bar in neat, mouselike nibbles. Jim and Elsie were up to their eyes in rainbow jelly. Janey was applying raspberry vinegar to her face and the front of her frock. The violent death of McNaughton did not seem to be haunting them.

Bert lifted his beer in a toast to Cec, who could not move because Amelia was sketching him and asking if he had a Scandinavian grandparent. Phryne had snared a lamington out of sheer nostalgia and was wondering if Margaret Wilson really wanted Bill McNaughton, in view of his lousy heredity.

Someone seized her arm in an iron grip.

‘Damn you, Phryne,’ hissed Jillian Henderson. ‘You’ve gone and lost me my murder!’

CHAPTER ONE

There was a beetle sitting next to the goat: (it was a very queer carriage full of passengers altogether)

Lewis Carroll
Alice Through the Looking Glass

Fortunately, the Hon. Phryne Fisher was a light sleeper. She had dozed for most of the journey, but when the naus- eating odour of chloroform impinged on her senses, she had sufficient presence of mind to realise that something was happening while she still had wits enough to react.

Reaching over the slumbering form of her maid and companion, Dot, she groped for and found her handbag. She dragged it open, moving as though she were five fathoms under water. The clasp of the handbag seemed impossibly complex, and finally, swearing under her breath and gasping for air, she tore it open with her teeth, extracted her Beretta .32 with which she always travelled, and waveringly took aim. She squeezed off a shot that broke the window.

It shattered into a thousand shards, spattering Phryne and Dot with glass, and admitting a great gush of cold air.

Phryne choked, coughed, and staggered to her feet. She hung out of the window until she was quite certain of her sobriety, then hauled the other window open. The train was still moving. Smoke blew back into her face. What was happening? Phryne reached into the picnic basket, found the bottle of cold tea, and took a refreshing swig. Dot was out to the world, slumped over her travelling bag, her long hair coming loose from its plait. Phryne listened carefully at her maid’s mouth, with a cold fear in her heart. But Dot was breathing regularly and seemed only to be deeply asleep.

Phryne wet her handkerchief with the remains of the cold tea and opened the door of the compartment. A wave of chloroform struck her, and she had to duck back into her compartment, take a deep breath and hold it, before running into the corridor, tearing open a window and leaning through it. There was not a sound on the train; not a noise of human occupancy. She sucked in a breath and rushed to the next window, repeating the procedure until all the windows were as wide open as the railways allowed.

There were four compartments in this first-class carriage. She had noticed the occupants as she had sauntered along before supper: an elderly lady and her companion in the first, a harassed woman and three diabolical children in the second, and a young couple in the third. Phryne and Dot had occupied the fourth, and that probably explained their relative immunity, as the smell got thicker and harder to bear as Phryne neared the front of the train.

The engine halted; she heard the whistle, and an odd bumping noise at the front of the first-class carriage. There was a rush of steam, and the train began to move again, almost precipitating Phryne onto her knees, as she was still rather shaky. Still coughing and retching, she opened the window of the young couple, then the mother and the children. Finally she approached the first compartment, and the smell was strong enough to sting her eyes. She applied the wet handkerchief again, staining her face with tea, dived in and stood staring.

The companion lay flat on the floor with a spilt cup by her hand, but the window was already open and the old lady was gone.

Phryne then did something that she had always wanted to do. She pulled the communication cord as hard as she could.

The train screeched to a satisfying halt, and a porter came running, slapping open the door to the dining-car and immediately beginning to cough.

‘Did you pull that cord, Miss?’ he asked. ‘For the love of Mike, what’s been happening here?’

‘Chloroform,’ said Phryne. ‘Help me get them out into the fresh air.’

The porter shouted, and several more liveried men crowded into the carriage, before they began to choke and tried to run out again.

‘Idiots!’ gasped Phryne. ‘Put a wet hanky over your silly faces and come and help me.’

‘I’ll handle it, Miss,’ said one rather tall and charming conductor. ‘You’d better come out too, until it clears a little. Give me your hand, Miss, and down we go.’ Phryne, who was feeling very unwell, allowed herself to be carried down the step and off the siding. She sat down unsteadily in cold wet grass and was delighted with the sensation. It seemed more real than the hot, thick darkness of the train.

The tall conductor laid Dot down beside Phryne, and the old woman’s companion beside her. Dot turned over in deep sleep, her face against Phryne’s neck, sniffed, croaked ‘Nuit D’Amour’, sneezed, and woke up.

‘Lie still, Dot dear, we’ve had a strange experience. We are quite all right, and will be even better in a minute. Ah. Someone with sense.’

Phryne accepted a cup of hot, sugared tea from an intelligent steward and held it to Dot’s lips. ‘Here you are, old dear, take a few sips and you’ll be as right as rain.’

‘Oh, Miss, I feel that sick! Did I faint?’ Dot supped some more tea, and recovered enough to sit up and take the cup.

‘In a way, Dot, we all did. Someone, for some unknown reason, has chloroformed us. We were in the end carriage and thus we inhaled the slightest dose, though it was quite enough, as I’m sure you will agree. And when I get hold of the person who has done this,’ continued Phryne, gulping her tea and getting to her feet, ‘they will be sorry that they were ever born. All right now, Dot? I mean, all right to be left? I want to scout around a bit.’

‘All right, Miss,’ agreed Dot, and lay down in the dank grass, wishing that her head would stop swimming.

The train had come to a halt in utter darkness somewhere on the way to Ballarat. All around the pastures were flat, cold and wet; it was the middle of winter. She regained the train as the guards were carrying out the last of the children, a limp and pitiful bundle.

‘Well, this wasn’t on the timetable!’ she exclaimed to the nearest conductor. ‘What happened? And who caused it to happen?’

‘I thought that you might have seen something, Miss, since you were the only one awake. Though you seem to have caught a fair lungful of the stuff,’ he added. ‘You sure that you feel quite the thing, Miss?’

Phryne caught at the proffered arm thankfully. ‘I’m quite all right, just a little wobbly in the underpinnings. What are we going to do?’

‘Well, Miss, the train-conductor thinks that we’d better put everyone on board as soon as they have recovered a bit and take the train on to the next town. There’s a policeman there and they can send for a doctor. Some of them kids are in a bad way.’

‘Yes, I expect that will be the best plan. I’ll go and see if I can help. Give me an arm, will you? Do you know any artificial respiration?’

‘Yes, Miss,’ said the middle-aged man, glancing admiringly at the white face under the cloche hat. ‘I learned it for lifesaving.’

‘Come on, then, we’ve got lives to save. The children and the pregnant woman are the main risks.’

Phryne found, on examination, that the youngest child, a particularly devilish three year old on whom she had been wishing death all day, was the worst affected. His face was flushed, and there seemed to be no breath in the little body. She caught the child up in her arms and squeezed him gently.

‘Breathe, little monster,’ she admonished him, ‘and you shall dance on all my hats, and push Dot’s shoes out the window. Breathe, pest, or I shall never forgive myself. Come on, child, breathe!’

In, out, the chest rose and fell. The child gulped air, choked, fell silent again, as Phryne jogged his chest and he dragged in another breath, with nerve-racking intervals in which she heard the other passengers groaning awake. The pregnant woman was retching violently, and abjuring her comatose husband to awake. A small hand clutched Phryne painfully by the nose and the child’s strong legs flexed and kicked. The whole child seemed to gather himself for some final effort. Phryne held her breath. Was this a death tremor? Johnnie took his first independent breath.

‘Waaaahr!’ he screamed, and Phryne began to laugh.

‘Here, you take him,’ she said to the nearest guard. ‘But be careful, he’ll be sick in a moment.’

The guard was a family man, and took the resultant mess philosophically. They were all awake now; the woman and the children, the pregnant lady and her husband, and Dot. All except the companion to the elderly lady, and she was burned about the nose and mouth, and very deeply drugged, though her heart pounded strongly under Phryne’s hand.

‘All back on the train,’ ordered the conductor. ‘This way, ladies and gentlemen, and we’ll soon have you comfortable. This is some sort of silly joke, and the Railways will be responsible for any damages. Might I offer you a hand, Miss er . . .’

‘Fisher. The Hon. Phryne Fisher,’ said Phryne, allowing herself to lean on the arm. ‘I really am not feeling at all well. How long to Ballan?’

‘About ten minutes, Miss, if you’ll excuse the guard’s van, there being no room in the rest of the train.’

Phryne and Dot sat side by side on the floor, next to a chained dog and a cage full of sleepy chickens. The lady-companion was laid beside them, and the rest of the first-class passengers sat around the walls, surveying each other with discomfort.

‘I say, old girl, you look as if you’ve been pulled through the hedge backwards,’ opined the young husband in a feeble attempt at humour, and his pregnant lady rocketed into hysteria.

It took Phryne the ten minutes to Ballan to induce in the lady a reasonable frame of mind, and at the end of it Phryne was a rag.

‘If you have anything else to say that you think is funny, I’ll thank you to keep it to yourself,’ she snarled at the husband, catching him a nasty accidental-on-purpose crack on the shins. ‘I’ve got other things to do than calm the heeby-jeebies. Now we are at Ballan, Dot, I hope that we can get to the overnight things, for we really must have a hot bath and a change of clothes, or we shall catch our death.’

‘There’s a hotel in Ballan,’ said the mother, catching little Johnnie as, much recovered, he poked his fingers in among the chickens. ‘Come away, Johnnie, do!’

‘The Railways can pay for it, then,’ suggested the young man, with a wary eye on Phryne. ‘I haven’t got the cash for an overnight stay.’

‘I can advance you enough,’ said Phryne. ‘Not to worry. Here comes our nice conductor to release us from durance fairly vile.’

The conductor had clearly done wonders in a very short time.

‘If the ladies and gentlemen would care to break their journey for awhile, they may like to bathe and change at the hotel,’ he suggested. ‘The guards will bring your baggage. The hotel is about a hundred yards down the street, and we will carry the sick lady.’

Phryne took one child, Dot another, and they trailed wearily down the road to the Ballan Hotel, a guesthouse of some pretension. They were met at the door by a plump and distressed landlady who exclaimed over their condition and took charge of the children.

‘Room two, ladies, there’s a bath all ready for you. I’ll send the man with the baggage when he arrives. I shall have tea ready directly, and I’ve sent for the doctor. He should be here soon.’

Dot and Phryne gained their room, and Phryne began to strip off her wet garments. Dot located the bath, and gestured to it.

‘You first—you were worse affected,’ insisted Phryne, and Dot recognised inflexibility when she saw it. She took off her clothes in the bathroom and sank into the tub, feeling the aching cold ease out of her bones. She heard the door open and close as she lay back and shut her eyes, and presently there was Phryne’s voice.

‘Come on, old dear, you don’t want to fall asleep again! I’ve got the clothes and I’ve got some tea.’

‘In a minute,’ promised Dot, and exchanged places with her mistress.

They were dressed in clean clothes and thoroughly warmed when the conductor returned to advise them that the chloroform vapour was all gone and they could resume their journey, if they liked. Phryne was ready to go, and was called in to rouse the companion of the elderly lady.

The woman was much scorched or scalded about the nose and mouth, and the doctor seemed worried about her. She had not begun to rouse until the injection of camphor had been made. Then she opened her eyes all of a sudden and, hearing Phryne’s voice, asked, ‘Where’s Mother?’

And Mother was gone.

After that, there was no further chance of getting to Ballarat, and Phryne turned to the landlady.

‘There was another lady on the train, and she has definitely gone. We must call the police—perhaps she fell out the window. Is there a police station in Ballan?’

‘Yes, Miss, I’ll send the boy around now. What a terrible thing! We’ll have to rouse out some of the men to go searching.’

‘Dot, are you better?’ asked Phryne of her maid.

Dot replied, ‘I’m still a bit woozy, Miss. What do you want me to do?’

‘Go and make some tea.’

‘I can manage that,’ agreed Dot, and went out. The doctor was applying a soothing cream to the stricken woman’s face.

‘What burned her? Chloroform?’ asked Phryne, as she took the jar out of the doctor’s insecure hold and held it out for him to dip into. ‘Does it burn like that?’

‘Certainly. She has had a chloroform-soaked cloth laid over her face, and if you hadn’t woken them all up and got her out of the train, she would now be dead, and even so there may be permanent damage to her liver.’

‘What about the rest of us? Would we have all been affected just by the chloroform in the first compartment?’

‘No. The gas is heavy, much heavier than air, and very volatile. Someone must have poured it into the ventilation system. Someone wanted you all asleep, Miss Fisher, but I have no idea why. There now, you may stopper the jar. Poor woman, a nasty awakening, but she’s slumped back into sleep again. Can you watch her for an hour? I should go and see how those children are getting along.’

‘By all means,’ agreed Phryne, her conscience still tender in the matter of little Johnnie. ‘I’ll stay here. If she wakes, can I give her tea?’

‘If she wakes, Miss Fisher, you can give her anything you like,’ said the doctor, and hefted his black bag in the direction of the children’s room.

An hour later, at three in the morning, the woman awoke. Phryne saw her stir and mutter, and lifted her to moisten her lips with water.