Murder in Montparnasse (23 page)

He waved an expansive hand. There, indeed, was the Bentley. Gratifying, but Phryne had other fish to fry. That prominent racing identity Hector Chambers would be pleased to get this expensive collection of metal back, but he also wanted his daughter. Where was Elizabeth Chambers?

‘Have you searched the house?’ she asked.

‘I was about to invite you inside,’ said Robinson, offering her his arm with a courtly gesture which made the rest of his men stare.

Phryne laid a hand on his elbow. ‘Let’s go then, shall we?’ she asked.

The path through the back yard was strewn with things which crunched and rolled underfoot. On examination, they proved to be nuts, bolts, spark plugs and unidentifiable bits of ex-motor vehicle. Phryne reflected that she was walking on a geological stratum of car parts, and wondered what a competent geologist would think of this—and what he would call it. The vehicular belt?

‘We reckon there’s the remains of at least ten cars here, maybe more,’ said Robinson, as excited as Phryne had ever heard him. ‘We’ve been looking for these blokes for a couple of years. Steal the cars, repaint them, change the engine numbers and drive ’em to Sydney. Never a clue as to who was doing it. Well,’ said Robinson, pushing aside the broken remains of a back door, ‘here’s the house.’

‘What a hovel,’ commented Phryne. It stank of poverty, oil, paint and dirt. The only furniture appeared to be four broken armchairs and a case of beer. ‘Is there an upstairs?’

‘This way.’ Robinson indicated a staircase littered with cigarette ends and other debris into which Phryne was not minded to enquire. The upper floor windows, festooned with cobwebs, looked over Acland Street. There were three rooms. They were all empty.

Empty, that is, of a kidnapped heiress. Actually they were rather full. They were filthy and crammed with bits of engines and pots of paint and tools. No one was hidden there. There was nowhere to hide anyone. Phryne tapped walls, looked for a way into the roof, moved various larger bits of pressed metal, but not only was there no sign of the young woman, there was no sign that she had ever been there.

‘A cellar?’

‘Not in this house,’ said Jack. ‘And when I was having a little chat with Blue—Pollack, that is—he told me that they found the Bentley with the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked in Barkers Road, Kew.’

‘How very curious,’ Phryne commented. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she added. ‘You will search this place in daylight, won’t you? Thoroughly?’

‘I’ll take it to pieces myself,’ said Robinson, chuckling.

‘Then if you will excuse me . . . and congratulations on your coup.’

Phryne walked home, thinking hard. This had been an operation whose stated objective was to steal cars, not girls. Someone had taken the Bentley to Barkers Road, Kew and left it there, practically with a ‘Please Steal This Car At Your Earliest Convenience’ label on the windscreen. Who had taken it there? And where, oh where, was Elizabeth Chambers?

‘Miss Fisher!’ Jack Robinson leaned out of the window of a police car which had crept up beside her. ‘You walk fast! Coupla bits of news. We found Billy the Match. Working as a furnace tender at Hume’s Pipes. Never leaves the fire and never been happier, he reckons.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Phryne. ‘I was rather sorry for Billy the Match.’

‘And I forgot to say, your Miss Williams’ young man will be late back. He broke a stolen goods case in Mildura but he’ll be home tomorrow. And he found your René Dubois had been there, staying at the same hotel, talking to the dead man just before he got to be dead. And Collins found out that this Dubois bought a whole bottle of some heathen spirit from the pub keeper. Called vodka.’

‘Oh,’ said Phryne. ‘That would explain how Thomas MacKenzie got so drunk. Vodka has almost no taste.’

‘Yair, so my Russian sergeant told me. This Dubois was s’posed to be there on a frozen orange juice lark. He fills the glass with this vodka and the orange juice, tells the poor bloke to bottoms-up and he’s half-pi full of ink already. Wouldn’t be hard to lay him down in a ditch with all that inside him.’

‘How very . . . ruthless. What about the other murder?’

‘I’ll come and tell you about it tomorrow, but it’s much the same. They should’a found the knock-out drops in the body but it’s too late for that now. Luckily they found the bottle they was in, once the lazy hounds searched that yard properly. He was laid out under the car and then it was dropped on him.’

‘Efficient,’ murmured Phryne.

‘Yair. I reckon it’s someone who isn’t real strong. Both the victims’ve been knocked out before they was killed.’

‘Not so much not real strong,’ observed Phryne, ‘as not real brave.’

Jack Robinson gave her a shrewd look.

‘I reckon this ain’t such a surprise to you,’ he said. ‘I reckon you’re going to tell me all about it tomorrow.’

‘Do you?’ said Phryne. ‘Goodnight, Jack dear.’

She walked on and the police car, after a pause, roared away. Jack had his car thieves, and Phryne had—what?

Not a lot, and that was plain.

Phryne had always enjoyed walking at night and after she was free of René she had reclaimed the streets of the Quartier Latin for her own. Phryne was not going to allow the fear that she might set eyes on her faithless, brutal lover again debar her from the streets of Paris, which are the most interesting streets in the world . . .

To begin with, it had been fear. People had beaten Phryne before. It was not the pain. It was the humiliation. The messy, dirty, squalid fact that she had been slapped around like a whore disciplined by her pimp. That someone—that her lover—could think of Phryne like that made her shudder with disgust.

But the fear faded. Sarcelle and his atelier were delighted to see her and had given Madame la Concierge strict orders to never, never, allow René in, regardless of any bribe which he might offer. The Quartier Latin women were quite capable of carrying out their collective threat, which was to deprive René of his masculine attributes and make him eat them. If ever they laid their hands on him he might suffer the fate of Pentheus, and even Natalie Barney had said that she would join in the Bacchic rout if René was the object. She added that her Temple of Friendship could be dedicated anew if necessary.

Toupie declared that if she saw the louse René she would run him over, and Joe Carstairs said the same. Both had fast cars and a cavalier attitude to driving which would have made it easy to explain to the French police that they just looked away for a moment and he dived under the wheels, and would the gallant officer of the law accept a little present for his kindness? Sapphic Paris was of the view that they would get away with it and it was just what the repulsive Auvergne peasant deserved for betraying and humiliating one of Toupie’s girls. Who, moreover, was a succès fou as an artists’ model.

Phryne found, to her amazement, that these generous, eccentric, surprisingly interesting people liked her and were willing to go to considerable lengths to comfort, amuse and defend her. She had never been liked in her life. She had been tolerated at home, much oppressed (and frequently expelled) at school, and patronised by her own family when they became wealthy and disliked by all. Until she had come to France. There, in the middle of a war, she had found kindness and appreciation and love and, in her new-found freedom, Paris unfolded before and around her like a blossoming flower.

She walked down the boulevards when the chestnuts were in bloom. Sweet petals dropped all around her, decorating her hair, paving the ground so that she trod on flowers. It was like walking in a scented dream. She sorted through prints and books on the promenade by the Seine, bargaining for posters by Steinlein or Toulouse-Lautrec. She sat on an iron seat in the Jardin Luxembourg while three artists sketched her with the elegant flower-arrangement beds shouting with cannas and lilies as a background and climbing geranium crawling down from the marble urns.

She paced—a little unsteadily—down the edges of cobbled lanes, the sound of dancing in the little square receding behind her, alight with movement and cognac, arm in arm with Dolly or Joe or Kitty or that clever American girl—what was her name?—ah, yes. Sylvia, who wanted to open a bookshop.

And when she was tired, she would sit down at any one of a legion of cafés and order coffee and always find someone interesting to talk to, while the poets argued about Modernism and the patron roared for more Pernod and a white-aproned waiter made grenadine syrup for the children.

Paris was a moveable feast, like Easter. It was full of marvels.

Phryne came to her own front door in an elevated frame of mind.

The house was quiet. In the parlour, two good girls were doing their homework. Phryne sat down in her own chair, eased off her shoes, and Mr Butler brought her a cocktail. Jane and Ruth looked up eagerly.

‘Did you find her?’

‘No, and there’s no sign that she was actually there. Girls, do you remember being poor?’

Both abandoned their geography abruptly. Ruth pushed aside a map of Africa, printed with colonies in red and blue and yellow. It slid to the floor, rainbow-coloured.

‘We remember,’ she said quietly. Phryne observed that they were both tense. Damn. Ruth had been rescued from domestic slavery and Jane from a much darker fate and they were not entirely secure in their safety. Not yet, at any rate. Possibly they never would be. Phryne cursed her tactlessness.

‘It’s all right, you don’t have to be poor ever again. You already know how to be poor. I have a job in mind, and I’m wondering if you might be just the people to do it.’

‘Part of your investigation?’ asked Jane eagerly. ‘Oh, do let us help.’

‘It might be . . . well, I don’t think it will be dangerous, but it might be embarrassing and it might come to nothing.’

‘We don’t embarrass easily,’ said Ruth. ‘We’d love to help. What are you thinking, Miss Phryne?’

‘Of the curious reaction of Sam, the deaf-mute dishwasher in the Café Anatole,’ said Phryne, and explained. They listened carefully.

‘So he isn’t this Billy the Match,’ said Ruth, who had a logical mind.

‘No, Jack Robinson was sure that he had never seen him before in his life,’ Phryne told her. ‘And he’s found the real Billy, working as a furnace tender. A natural for the job if ever there was one.’

‘Yet Sam ran away when he saw Detective Inspector Robinson,’ confirmed Jane.

‘Yes. Or me, of course, but I’d seen him before and he didn’t run away then.’

‘And you’d like to know more about him,’ said Jane.

‘Yes. If anyone else tried to follow him home, he would twig at once. He’s small and fast on his feet and he always goes out through the lane, so he’d notice anyone following him.’

‘Except a couple of shabby girls playing, as it might be, skippy,’ said Jane, who had leapt to the conclusion. ‘Or hopscotch,’ she added, not wanting to be seen to be exclusive of any useful theory. Phryne reflected that Jane would make a very valuable medical practitioner when her time came. She agreed.

‘Or, as you say, hopscotch. He always goes out through this lane. We don’t know where he goes after that. I’m curious. He’s the only new person in Café Anatole since the kidnapping and since the attacks on the café by arsonists. I thought I had him all worked out but I haven’t. I’m curious about him. You might have to take trains or trams and you might lose him, and if you do, I won’t be angry, I won’t be disappointed at all, girls, do I make myself clear? Following people is very difficult and even full-grown and experienced detectives lose people sometimes.’

‘We won’t lose him,’ promised Ruth. ‘We’ll follow him like hounds.’

‘No one notices anyone under five feet high,’ agreed Jane. ‘Not if we look poor. But what if we have to follow him to somewhere—well, somewhere rich?’

‘Good point. Old clothes will do for the lanes of Fitzroy Street but not for Toorak—if he should go that way. What about this; Jane shall have a basket.’

‘Me,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m stronger. I used to haul home all the things from the corner shop which that old bi . . . which my previous employer used to forget to order. Always used to be lots of tins, and how she’d thump me if I wasn’t fast enough! I used to get two rounds of the kitchen and a belting with a broom.’

Jane’s hand stole out and took Ruth’s.

‘That will never happen again,’ she said solemnly.

‘I’ll say it won’t,’ said Phryne very firmly. ‘If this is going to awaken too many bad memories, girls, then we’ll find another way.’

‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘I don’t have nightmares about it any more. I’m safe now. It’d be fun to do something for you, Miss Phryne.’

‘Do you still have nightmares, Jane?’ asked Phryne.

‘No,’ said Jane. ‘I’ve forgotten about it, mostly. It seems like I’ve lived here with you for such a long time. That other time is like a dream. We can do this, Miss Phryne. What would be in the basket?’

‘Good clothes,’ said Phryne. ‘Just a coat and hat each. You can wear your old-fashioned boots and stockings, they’ll pass in the dark. If you have to, you can split up. That might be best. If, for instance, he takes a tram, you can get on it, one girl near and the other at the other end, and then he might not notice. But you need to be careful. If he meets up with anyone who looks at all chancy, abandon the chase, come home right away or ask a policeman for help. I don’t want you running any risks, Jane, Ruth, do you hear? As I said, if there is any trouble, you’re to come straight home.’

‘Yes, Miss Phryne,’ they said, lowering their eyes like good girls.

Phryne did not believe them for a moment.

‘And if you find, as you probably will, that this sourd-muet is the sole support of a poor old widowed mother, you are to come away without attracting attention and we’ll look for some other way of solving the puzzle,’ instructed Phryne, holding out her glass for a refill. Mr Butler materialised in his usual spectral way and obliged.

‘Yes, Miss Phryne,’ chorused her adopted daughters, projecting ‘good girl’ so effectively that she could practically see their haloes.

‘We’ll try it tomorrow night. You must go to bed after dinner and get some rest. Then we’ll go down to the lane behind Fitzroy Street at eleven, when the café closes, and see what we shall see. Now, any messages while I was gone?’