Murder in Montparnasse (27 page)

She stood perfectly still, regulating her breathing, and listened.

There was no light, but the faint vibration of speech trembled on the air. The house smelt of mould, dust, disuse, with an overscent of—was that cooking?

Yes, somewhere someone was consuming onions. And they probably weren’t doing that in the dark.

Phryne risked a brief light from her electric torch. She was in a hall. It was filthy, hung with years of cobwebs, but the floor was swept clean. Fallen plaster was piled neatly in one corner. Beside her a staircase went up into blackness, and—she moved and sniffed—down that staircase the smell of onions was wafting. Phryne’s stomach growled. She had been too excited to eat much supper.

She shut off the torch as soon as she had her foot on the first step. She laid a hand on the rail and walked up very slowly, keeping to the balustrade side of the treads. It was well known that stairs creaked, if they creaked, in the middle.

Up twenty stairs, the scent of onions was strong, and there was a bar of light bright enough to hurt her sensitive eyes under one door.

Phryne opened the door and said, ‘Good evening.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Since nothing is impossible, nothing is inevitable.

Natalie Barney,
Critical Sallies

Three faces looked up in the most absolute horror that Phryne had seen in a life rather replete with people looking horrified when they saw her.

‘May I come in?’ she asked. ‘I’ve brought a bottle.’

‘Miss Fisher?’ asked Julia Chivers through numb lips.

‘Miss Fisher?’ quavered the white rabbit, Mr Jenkins, still holding a slice of onion tart in one trembling hand.

‘Miss Fisher?’ asked a girl with short curly auburn hair and a red mark across her face, dressed in a silk robe covered with dragons.

‘The very same and a long dance you’ve led me, I must say.’ Phryne, keeping away from any grabbing hand, though the company appeared to be too appalled to think of attacking her, unslung her canvas bag and extracted a bottle of champagne.

‘It shouldn’t be too shaken up,’ she commented. ‘Miss Chambers, will you do the honours? And I’d love a slice of that tarte à l’oignon, s’il vous plaît
,
’ she added.

‘Avec plaisir,’ replied Julia Chivers with automatic courtesy, handing over a plate. Phryne took a bite. It was very good. Miss Chambers dealt with the cork and suppressed the ebullience of the escaping Veuve Clicquot with an adroit thumb. Phryne accepted a tea cup and sat down to look at her company.

So this was the missing girl. Elizabeth had cut her hair as short as a boy’s. It curled rather attractively. Without her trademark scowl, she was a charming figure in her gorgeous dressing gown. Radiantly blonde Julia in her sky blue silk looked like she was made of spun sugar and ice. Mr Jenkins looked terrified. They sipped for a moment in silence.

‘You know, I have been looking all over for you,’ said Phryne without heat. The champagne was too good to quarrel over. ‘I worried about you. One always worries about young women who vanish unexpectedly. Now, since the intelligence of my adoptive daughters has saved me from having to trawl for you through all the brothels in St Kilda, don’t you think you ought to tell me what this conspiracy is about? I’m not your father’s employee, by the way,’ she added.

‘N-n-no,’ stammered Mr Jenkins. ‘She isn’t. The boss was going crook all day about her refusing to take his money. He likes people to take his money. Then he can control them.’

‘Precisely why I didn’t take it,’ said Phryne. ‘Well?’

‘I noticed two little girls playing skippy in the alley behind the café tonight,’ said Miss Chambers slowly. Her voice was perhaps rusty from disuse. ‘Then there was a girl in a grey hat on the train. I thought I’d shaken her by crossing the line. Then there was a girl—Lord! Were they both your daughters?— one on the tram, in a pink headscarf. One with a basket and glasses. And they followed me all the way here?’

‘All the way,’ confirmed Phryne. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I’ve had a man in a car following you for days, and he always lost you when you took off the wig. Where did you learn to elude pursuit like that? You’re very good.’

‘John Buchan, the
Thirty-Nine Steps
,’ said Elizabeth Chambers, with spirit. ‘Who taught you to burgle houses?’

‘A burglar,’ said Phryne, as though surprised at the question, ‘of course. Now, you were saying . . . ?’

‘Jig’s up?’ said Elizabeth, appealing to her co-conspirators. They nodded.

‘All right. I want you to understand this first, Miss Fisher. I only ever wanted to be a cook. That’s all I want. All I did at that finishing school was learn everything I could about cooking. The teacher thought I showed promise. I need to get an apprenticeship with a good chef. M’sieur Anatole is probably the best chef in Melbourne, so when Father told me I ought to marry him I didn’t mind, though he is old, but I wanted to find out what he was like. I’m not going to trust my career to a cruel man.’

‘Or your body,’ said Phryne. Elizabeth nodded.

‘That, too. So I asked Father if I could go and work in the kitchen at Café Anatole for a few weeks to find out what the chef was like. A kitchen is a very high pressure job. The character of the chef always comes out with twenty dinners to cook and the boy late with the salad vegetables and the fish going off and the ice-chest melting . . . you can imagine.’

‘Seems like a reasonable request,’ murmured Phryne encouragingly.

‘Not to Father. He puffed and roared and yelled that no daughter of his was going to work for a living and I was bringing disgrace on him and that’s what came of sending girls overseas to get foreign ideas. He went on and on,’ said Elizabeth, wincing at the memory.

‘Yes,’ said Phryne. ‘I can imagine.’

‘Then he forbade me to go to the café again, shut me in my room and told me to play with my new clothes. He told me that I was marrying M’sieur Anatole at the end of the month and then he was marrying my school friend, Julia. He told me it had been agreed with her parents and it was all settled and he was only waiting to get rid of me before he married her. I was a bit upset.’

‘If you hadn’t been upset I’d be worried about your mental health,’ said Phryne. ‘What happened then?’

‘I’d just picked up an armload of those rotten French clothes and thrown them on the floor when Bunny came tapping.’

‘That’s me,’ said Mr Jenkins, smiling a very sweet smile which completely changed the tension in his face. ‘She’s called me that since she was a child. She said I looked like the White Rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
.’

‘More than anyone I’ve ever met,’ agreed Phryne. ‘What had you to suggest?’

‘Well, you see, I’ve worked for Mr Chambers since I was a boy and I know about him. He’s not the husband for a young woman. Or any woman, perhaps. And I knew that with a bit of capital, both young ladies might set up on their own and escape from him completely. I’ll never escape,’ said Mr Jenkins in a resigned tone. ‘But they could. I’d heard Miss Julia talking to Miss Lizzie about that marriage. I knew she was being forced into it.’

‘I was in despair,’ confessed Julia. ‘I’m not strong minded like Lizzie. My mother and father think this marriage settlement is their due for raising me and their last chance to get back to where they were before the war. They would nag and nag and nag and eventually I would do what they wanted just to get some peace. I couldn’t see any way out of it until Bunny came up with his scheme. It was a corker.’

Lizzie went on. ‘So I told Father that I wanted to go to a party at Julia’s cousin Raoul’s, and he was pleased because he thought me properly cowed and obedient—he really doesn’t know me at all well. Julia called and took away with her some of my clothes and my money and passport and things.’

‘You forgot something, though,’ said Phryne. ‘Was it a book?’

‘
Ma Cuisine
, by Escoffier,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Can’t try and be a chef without
Ma Cuisine
, it’s like trying to be a priest without a bible. Bunny pinched it back for me. It was so brave of him.’ She leaned over and hugged an embarrassed Mr Jenkins. ‘And he faked a burglary in case anyone noticed. As you did, Miss Fisher.’

‘So you went to the dance,’ prompted Phryne.

‘I went to the dance, waited until Albie went off for a drink, which he always does if he has to wait, then I pinned the ransom demand on the lamppost, pinched the car and drove it to Kew. Father doesn’t know I can drive. We all learned at the school on a cranky old Deux Chevaux. The Bentley’s a beautiful car. I nearly ran a red light until I worked out how fast it went. I changed my clothes in the back and bundled up my things in a suitcase. I left the car unlocked in Barkers Road with the keys in, hoping someone would steal it. And they did. I walked here, got in by the side door into this disused bit of the house and went to ground. Then it was up to Julia.’

‘And you know what I did.’ Julia blushed a little, looking like a fairy princess who has been caught out fibbing to her fairy godmother. ‘It went off like clockwork.’

‘And you came here, adopted the guise of the deaf-mute, and worked in the kitchen. What were you going to do if Mr Chambers called in the police?’

‘Reappear, say that I couldn’t remember a thing, and start plotting again,’ said Elizabeth quickly. ‘But we were rather banking on him being too fly to bring in the police. He wouldn’t want any of his dealings being examined too closely by the law. And we would have had warning of it from Bunny here.’ She smiled on the white rabbit Mr Jenkins.

‘How did you hit upon your disguise?’ asked Phryne. ‘It was very good. People never look too closely at a scarred face.’

‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Man with the Twisted Lip
,’ said Elizabeth. ‘The scar is cobbler’s glue. Only problem with it is that you have to take it off with turps and it’s burned my skin a bit.’

‘Yes, and that’s what put me onto you,’ said Phryne. ‘I knew of another person who made his scar with glue. In another case, a long time ago. And it wasn’t Jack Robinson you were scared of, was it? It was me. Why?’

Elizabeth chuckled.

‘I don’t know deaf-and-dumb language. I couldn’t return the signs. I was afraid that you’d come over all charitable and send a real deaf-mute person around to teach me. I thought the man with you was him.’

‘Shrewd,’ commented Phryne. ‘I
was
thinking of doing something about the deaf and dumb boy.’

Julia sighed, and Elizabeth sighed with her.

‘All we had to do was keep our nerve and we’d be five hundred pounds richer. Except that you worked it out, Miss Fisher. Now we’ll have to think of another plan.’

‘Not so fast,’ said Phryne. ‘As I said, I am not your father’s employee and I can’t see that any crime has been committed. How do you feel about M’sieur Anatole now?’

‘He’s a darling,’ said Elizabeth enthusiastically. ‘He almost never throws things, he’s patient and he’s kind. Look at how nice they all were to the deformed sourd-muet. He was even teaching me how to make sauces, and I was the most unattractive creature alive. His family is very close but I reckon I’ll fit in like Mary and Janey, the other girls that have married in. He wants his wife to work in the kitchen and that’s what I want too, more than anything. And I will be a very good cook,’ said Elizabeth, elevating the firm chin.

‘Mr Jenkins, how did you dare to carry this out? Weren’t you afraid of being caught?’ asked Phryne.

Mr Jenkins raised his white face. His nose twitched.

‘Oh yes, Miss Fisher, but I’m always afraid, it’s my natural state. He wasn’t going to notice anything different in my manner. I’m always stammering and terrified. Some of us have courage,’ he said sadly, ‘and some of us haven’t.’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Julia. ‘I think you’re very brave, Bunny dear.’

Phryne needed more information before she made her decision.

‘And what were you going to do, Julia? Surely you weren’t going to try to buy off your parents?’

‘But that’s just what I was going to do,’ said Julia. ‘I’d give them the money and they’d leave me alone. I’d get a flat or a little house, and have enough to live on until I decide if I want to marry anyone. I’m not sure that I do. And I’d never have to go to one of those terrible saddling-paddock gatherings again, where all the mothers bridle about all the other mothers’ daughters and no one says anything but vicious gossip and silliness.’

‘It won’t work,’ Phryne told her brutally. Julia gasped and put her hand to her mouth, a fairy princess who has just sat on her favourite gnome. ‘How are you going to account for where you got the money?’

‘An inheritance,’ said Julia. ‘Do you really think that they won’t leave me alone even if I give it to them?’

‘What do you think?’ asked Phryne gently. ‘This is about power and rights, not just about money.’

‘What should we do, then?’ asked Elizabeth. ‘Are you going to turn us in?’

‘No,’ said Phryne. ‘I am not. And my advice, if you would care to have it, Miss Chivers, is to develop religion. Go to church every day. Refuse to wear bright clothes. Decline all frivolous gatherings, go to no parties, don’t wear jewellery, give something your parents value to the poor. You have a real talent for acting, so use it. Pray a lot. Punctuate your evenings with long readings from the more tedious parts of the bible. Try the Epistles, that’s my advice, or all those begats in the Old Testament. Go and work in a soup kitchen. Be seen in the street in your worst dress, praying with passers-by. Get some church leaflets and hand them out to the neighbours. Suggest that you are thinking of entering an Anglican Sisterhood if they make you marry anyone at all. If they are still resistant, fast on bread and water. That’s an old female blackmail method.’

‘How long for?’ asked Julia uncertainly. ‘I can do it. But I don’t want to actually starve to death.’

‘Until Miss Chambers marries M’sieur Anatole at the end of the month. But they’ll crack before that,’ said Phryne confidently. ‘You can’t beat them if you are obeying their rules. Embarrass them and they’ll fall to pieces. Then I suggest that you stay with your friend Elizabeth for a few weeks while you find yourself a nice little house. Collect the ransom, of course. Well invested in the sort of trusts which Mr Bunny will tell you about and you’ll have an income for life. Then you can look about and consider what you want to do.’