Murder on a Midsummer Night (9 page)

Implacably mournful, flanked by two equally elderly ladies and followed by Eliza and Lady Alice, Mrs Manifold, scorning assistance, stumped along behind the coffin of her only son. Somewhere Phryne had seen depictions of three old women like these. As she came in sight of a statue of Michael the Archangel with his flaming sword, she remembered where. In a book about Icelandic legends. The three sisters who controlled the fate of men, living in a cave with only one eye and one tooth between them. Edmund Dulac’s depiction of the Norns.

Sobered, Phryne reached the end of the journey, especially for Augustine Manifold. The coffin was lowered, extra prayers said and Phryne cast some of her flowers into the grave. This custom did not seem to have travelled across the seas and she attracted some puzzled glances from the friends. Mr Palisi, however, approved.

‘A pretty notion,’ he said to her as the priest and the mourners left and a couple of muscular men began to fill in the grave.

‘I thought so,’ she replied. ‘A very good funeral, Mr Palisi, conducted just so.’

‘Thank you, Miss Fisher.’ He accepted the praise as his due. Then he removed his tall hat, wiped his bald head with an irreproachable black-bordered handkerchief, bowed and took his leave.

Phryne headed for the McIlwraith Street exit, bestowing flowers as she went. No sense in wasting them.

In affectionate remembrance of Robert Bettargh who departed this life at 28 years of age. He was an affectionate husband and a kind father
—the rest of the stone was weathered illegible. Just above the moss, Phryne could read
See all things else decay
.

She gave him some flowers.

Just as she was leaving the Catholic section, she noticed an unassuming stone on which the name was almost rained away. She knelt on one knee to read it and recoiled as if the stone had harboured a hidden tiger snake.

Patrick O’Rourke
, the stone declared.
A fellow full of the most excellent jest. Born 15th June 1846 Co Limerick died 25th May 1914 Melbourne
.

If this was
the
Patrick O’Rourke—the birth date was right and the inscription could only be for an actor—he had lived a long time with his guilt at abandoning poor Kathleen. If he had any guilt, of course. He might have just been an ordinary young man, pollinating his way through the flowerbed of maidens like any drone with no regard for consequences. Twenty-fifth of May? It rang a bell. And might be significant, Phryne thought . . . Yes, she had recalled it. He had died on Kathleen’s birthday.

Phryne sat back on her heels and contemplated the stone. Then she scraped away the moss at the root and read:
This stone erected by the Actors’ Benevolent Society and a few sorrowing friends
. Was the Actors’ Benevolent Society still extant? Would they know anything about this Patrick O’Rourke? In any case, since it seemed that he had abandoned the girl and the child, would that help at all? He had never married and had a family, it seemed plain, if the Benevolent Society had to bury him. Had he mourned for his lost love all his life, never finding another, as she had mourned for him and the baby?

Patrick will come for me
, the girl had written in her small, clear handwriting, perfectly sure. Perfectly betrayed. Perfectly abandoned. Patrick had never come to rescue her.

Phryne did not give Patrick any flowers.

Just as she reached the gate, however, she turned back and threw the rest of the spicy stems in front of the worn stone.

‘It might not have been your fault,’ she told him. ‘And you were very young.’

She found Mr Butler waiting for her as she came out into tree-lined McIlwraith Street and blinked at the sudden green.

‘Home?’ he asked, replete with tea and sandwiches.

‘Mrs Manifold’s house, if you please,’ Phryne replied. ‘I’ll just finish up the coffee, but not the cognac. Though I’ve had a bit of a shock in connection with my other case, so maybe just a sip or two. From the look of that gaggle of Augustine’s intimates, I’m going to need my wits about me.’

‘You’ll get to the heart of it, Miss Phryne,’ he assured her. ‘You always do.’

Phryne found this factitious but comforting.

‘So far,’ she said, pouring out the last of the coffee and adding a few fluid ounces of brandy. ‘So far, Mr Butler, I have been lucky.’

‘Lucky’s as good as right, my grandpa used to say,’ he returned equably.

Phryne did not wish to debate this, and cast her mind back to the coroner’s scanty inquest and the shamefully small amount of evidence requested from Augustine’s friends as to his last night on earth.

They had all been at dinner together, they had said, Augustine and all seven of them; both Bartons, White, Adler, Turner, Reynolds and Collins. At Gerald Atkinson’s house. Augustine had seemed more cheerful than usual. He was talking about a deal he had made which would make him rich. He had repeated what Gerald had told Phryne; he was going to buy his mother a house and give her an annuity and live by himself. He wouldn’t tell any of them what this deal was, or even whether it involved a painting or an artifact. None of them had any idea what it was. They said that he was customarily secretive and loved to surprise them with some new thing.

Their evidence, Phryne remembered, had been as close fitting as a jigsaw puzzle. No one had joined the party, no one had left. They had farewelled Augustine together and watched him walk away to his death. And they had stayed together for the rest of the evening, only parting at four in the morning when cars and taxis had been summoned. Neat. But perhaps a little gaudy.

She leaned back and closed her eyes.

When she opened them again she felt better. Cemeteries were lowering to the spirits. Her spirits had now recovered. The big car had stopped outside Mrs Manifold’s house, where it was going to be a squeeze stuffing all those people into the parlour. Phryne gave her hair a last flick and got out and Mr Butler settled down with his pipe and the
Hawklet
to wait. Miss Fisher, to add to all her other virtues as an employer, did not object to the smell of pipe smoke.

Rather sensibly, Mrs Manifold had not tried to hold Augustine’s wake in her house, which looked small. She had spread a buffet in the shop itself. There was a funeral wreath on the door and the knocker had been tied up in a black glove; all the proprieties were, it appeared, to be observed. Phryne went in and was immediately collared by the woman in the red sari. Stephanie, Phryne remembered from her briefing, Stephanie Reynolds. One hand was clutching her arm and the other hand was forcing a glass of port into her grasp. Phryne grasped it, as spilled port would not improve her grey suit. Phryne only drank very good port and her first sniff of this one told her that it did not fall into that category, being the noxious grape-derived fluid supplied to the drunks of St Kilda at threepence a pint and otherwise known as ‘dog’s nose’, for some reason lost in the mists of lexicology. However, there was probably a pot plant around tough enough to survive a libation or two.

‘Miss Reynolds,’ she said politely to her assailant. Pale eyes met hers and straggling brown hair was shaken away from an undistinguished face.

‘Oh, you’re Phryne Fisher, aren’t you, the Hon. Miss Fisher, I ought to say. I met you at the opening of that play, now what was it called? I can’t remember,’ said the woman in the sari blankly, scratching at her caste mark. This meant that she released Phryne, which was a relief. ‘But it was very clever and you were there with a beautiful Chinese man in the most gorgeous suit and James said . . . I don’t recall what James said but it was very funny.’

‘It doesn’t matter in the slightest,’ Phryne assured her truthfully. She didn’t care what anyone said about the association of Phryne and Lin Chung, especially James, who was leaning against the white-painted wall, looking exquisite and drinking his third glass of the revolting port. That appeared to be the sum total of his social skills but Phryne supposed that he might have hidden depths.

Gerald Atkinson was sitting by himself in the inner room, weeping discreetly into a pale blue handkerchief. It was probably pure coincidence that it was Dulac blue.

‘Priscilla and Blanche are so upset,’ Stephanie informed Phryne, looking rather wildly around the room. ‘They liked Augustine. And Gerald, of course. I’ve told them and told them that he has just been translated unto another and higher sphere and we should be able to get him by planchette in a few weeks but they didn’t take it at all well. The master says . . .’

At this juncture Phryne, while preserving the perfect appearance of a lady who is listening closely to the wisdom of the master, tuned out like a Marconi apparatus and considered the room. She had heard a large number of the more theosophical of her acquaintance talk about their masters and she didn’t need to hear it again. For one thing, they all sounded the same and they all demanded the same: total subservience. Phryne thought that she must have missed the vital subservience enzyme or vitamin or whatever it was that made people rush forward to surrender their will to someone else. Miss Reynolds was a natural slave and presumably relished her slavery.

Mrs Manifold and her two sisters were drinking a colourless fluid which might be water or might be straight gin, as they had every right to do, and looking at a huge album of photographs, probably of Augustine as a baby on a sheepskin rug. Priscilla Barton and Blanche White were a picture in contrasts, one looking like a female tramp and the other like the veiled woman in Sapper, who at any moment might start diffusing exotic perfumes and stealing the Naval Treaty. But they were both weeping, Priscilla noisily and Miss White quietly. Rachel Phillips was sitting with Sophie and Cedric Yates, trying not to sip the disgusting port and talking, by the gestures, about furniture. The plump girl, Veronica Collins, was patting Priscilla on the shoulder, and Luke Adler and Valentine Turner, brunette boy and blond boy, were propping up either end of a display case like bookends. From their mutual expression, which was almost identical, they were embarrassed and nervous and had decided that immobility would best preserve them from social errors. Rabbits in headlights laboured under the same misapprehension.

Phryne thought that the person she most wanted to meet was the rubicund, white-haired professor, and she detached herself gently from Stephanie Reynolds and drifted in his direction. He was looking in a glass case. His lips were moving. Translating, perhaps. Phryne joined him and leaned over the case at his side. He was reading a scroll.

‘I don’t know the language,’ she observed. ‘What is it?’

‘Aramaic,’ he said. ‘Hello! I saw you at the funeral. Don’t drink that ghastly stuff,’ he warned her. ‘It would bleach a black dog.’

‘I’m just looking for a pot plant,’ she assured him.

‘Try that vase of lilies, they couldn’t be more dead. I’ve a notion that if we wander over to the bereaved mother we might get a snifter of something better.’

‘With a double dose of bitter aloes,’ said Phryne, tipping her glass as instructed. The deceased lilies rustled sadly. Professor Rowlands looked regretful.

‘True. Poor Augustine, it does seem unfair. You’re Miss Fisher, aren’t you? You know that he was on the verge of a wonderful discovery?’

‘Yes, but no one knows what it was.’

‘You’re looking into his death, aren’t you? Well, I can tell you what Augustine was expecting to find.’

‘Yes, but will you?’ asked Phryne.

He smiled down at her, looking like a younger, slimmer version of Father Christmas. ‘I will,’ he told her. ‘It was treasure.’

‘So how’d you manage on your little holiday in the prison camp?’ asked Curly.

Vern grinned. ‘Did a bit of a perish for terbacca until Bill came up with a lurk.’

‘How? You can’t get anything into the camp, it’s guarded and them guards ain’t got no sense of humour.’

‘Nah, well, you know how Bill’s always looking at insects and worms and snakes and vermin? He found out that scarab beetles always like cooler sand and they can follow a path. So he lay down all casual-like at the fence, drew a line in the sand under the wire, and set his little beetle mates trundling under it, each one with a cig attached by a thread. All I had to do was take off the cig and send the beetle back. When one went on strike he’d get another one.’

‘He’s a clever bloke,’ commented Jim.

CHAPTER NINE

I hate ingratitude more in a man
Than lying, vainness, babbling drunkenness,
Or any taint of vice whose strong corruption
Inhabits our frail blood.

William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night

Phryne had no time to ask any more questions. She gave the professor her card and asked him to call on her at his earliest convenience and stood respectfully to listen to Mrs Manifold speaking her valediction of her lost child.

‘He was a good baby,’ she said, her rough voice creaking as though she had torn her throat with screaming. ‘He was a clever boy, always loving. He worked hard and when his father died he worked harder. He made me happy every day that he lived.’

‘He was a good fellow,’ said Gerald. ‘We all loved him. We’ll all miss him.’

Priscilla and Blanche wept afresh.

Miss Collins said in an unexpectedly beautiful, opera-singer’s voice, ‘He was such a nice man.’

‘He was a shrewd and honourable trader,’ added Rachel Phillips.

‘He was a good boss,’ said Cedric Yates firmly, and Sophie burst into tears. ‘And a good bloke,’ he added.

He raised his glass.

‘To Augustine,’ said Cedric, and they all drank.

Then it was time to condole with the bereaved and go home. Phryne distributed her cards to Rachel and the others and took her leave of the old woman. Even as she watched, Mrs Manifold filled with renewed power. She had buried her son fitly and mourned him as she would for the rest of her life. But she had something still to do. It was revenge. She straightened a little, put back her hair, and took Phryne’s warm hand in her two cold claws. She had a grip like an eagle, and it is never wise, Phryne thought, to rob eagles of their chicks.

‘Do you know anything more?’ she grated.

‘I will come and see you soon,’ Phryne said. ‘When I know more.’

The talons relaxed their grip. Phryne bent to kiss the icy cheek and went out into the sunshine, where Rachel Phillips was drawing a deep breath of smoky St Kilda air as though it was straight from bracing Skegness.

‘Phew!’ she said.

Phryne had to agree. ‘Can I give you a ride?’ she asked.

Rachel shook her curls. ‘I’m going to walk,’ she said. ‘By the sea. And muse on mortality and other things. I’ll call you,’ she promised.

Phryne was about to enter her car when the bright young things came out in a group and lit cigarettes to soothe their feelings. Phryne did the same and accepted a light from Valentine.

‘We’re going back to Gerald’s house,’ said Stephanie. ‘Would you like to come too, Miss Fisher? Augustine deserves a real wake.’

Phryne did not relish their company, but accepted in the interests of detection. Professor Rowlands emerged from the house of woe, bowed, replaced his hat, and strode away. She hoped that he would call her as soon as he could. Treasure, eh? What kind of treasure?

Cedric Yates and Sophie came and shut the door and locked it with a curiously final click. Manifold’s was closed, possibly forever.

‘Very well, but I need to go home first,’ Phryne said to Stephanie. ‘I shall join you later. At Gerald’s house, is it? Then I shall see you there.’

She smiled on the others, got into the car and said to her chauffeur, ‘Get me out of here, Mr B, and with all convenient speed.’

The big car drew away from the pavement.

Phryne arrived home to find that she had a visitor. She didn’t want one but it was the point-device Mr Adami and she could not refuse him an interview. He was as beautifully dressed as ever and looked concerned. A solicitor who looks concerned is always a bad omen. Dot accompanied her into the room, trying to field her coat and hat, which Phryne had flung to the winds. Dot succeeded, due to wicket-keeping for her little brothers as a girl, and stood clutching the garments to her demure bosom. Her employer was, evidently, in a mood.

‘Hello, Mr Adami, do sit down,’ Phryne said crossly, flinging herself into a chair in the small parlour. ‘Dot dear, can you get me a cup of tea? And perhaps ask Mrs B if there is any leftover lunch? Tea, Mr Adami?’

‘No, Miss Fisher, very kind of you but no, I am in haste,’ he said in his precise English. ‘I came here to deliver an invitation from the head of the Bonnetti family—that is, the eldest son, Joseph. He has called a family council about the will of his mother and he would very much appreciate your presence, Miss Fisher.’

‘Oh, very well,’ said Phryne ungraciously. She was in possession of a magnificent fit of temper which she would have to dissipate soon or self-combust. She wondered where it had come from. ‘When?’

‘On Friday afternoon, Miss Fisher. Here is the address. At three, if you please,’ said Mr Adami, and made his escape, feeling, not for the first time, that his profession was a lot more dangerous than the general public would credit. As the front door shut safely behind him Phryne swore loudly.

‘I am quite out of sorts, Dot, and I am going for a swim. When I come back I would like some strong tea to take the taste of funeral liquor out of my mouth and perhaps a toasted sandwich or an omelette. I am going to have to keep up with what I judge is a hard-drinking crowd and my stomach will need lining. Back soon,’ she said, ran upstairs for her bathing costume, ran downstairs and out of the house all in a moment, slamming the door on the way out.

‘Funerals,’ said Dot to Mr Butler. ‘Do funny things to people.’

‘She’s had a tiring day,’ said the butler solemnly. ‘And borne it pretty well up to now.’

‘She’ll be better after a swim,’ said Dot, smoothing the coat as though its feelings might have been ruffled.

Phryne ran across the prickly grass and the hot sand, tore off her loose shift and walked into the water and out as far as she could wade, then dived and swam for the horizon. In her present incandescent state, she thought, it was amazing that the tide was not seething around her. She duck dived over and under the waves as though she was swimming for her life from some sort of shipwreck.

After half an hour she was beginning to recover. Her hair was soaked, as she had been unable to find her bathing cap and had not the patience to search for it. It clung to her sleek head like a seal’s fur, deliciously cold. Her arms and shoulders were agreeably tired and her temper tantrum appeared to have been washed away in the cool salty water. Moreover, she was getting weary and the sun was killingly hot.

She walked home and climbed the stairs to a cool shower and a change of garments, washing away the salt with the fury and soothing her skin with milk of roses lotion (as used by royalty). By the time she had donned a silky violet afternoon dress and sandals she was ready to descend and be affable to her staff, who drew surreptitious breaths of relief and tended her cautiously, as though she might bite.

Phryne ate her omelette, drank a glass of milk and toyed with a meditative banana, sliced, with ice cream, chocolate syrup and nuts. It sweetened her afternoon in a very satisfactory manner. She looked at her companions and saw their wary expressions. Oh, dear. She must have been really uncivil. Again. Time to start mollifying everyone’s feelings.

‘I’m so sorry, Dot, I really loathe funerals. I beg your pardon for being so rude. Poor Mr Adami went out of here like a rocket.’

‘He’ll be all right,’ said Dot. ‘He’s a lawyer. They got thick skins, my mum always said. You sure you want to go to this bunfight, Miss?’

‘I don’t,’ said Phryne, stretching as she stood up. ‘But I’m going. Don’t delay dinner for me, God knows how long I’ll be away with the fairies. If a gentleman called Professor Rowlands calls, ask him to lunch tomorrow. If I’m not home in the morning, call Jack Robinson. He was at the Manifold funeral, so he must think there’s something wrong with that death. How do I look?’

‘Chic,’ said Dot. ‘That violet is a lovely colour with your skin, Miss Phryne. Aren’t you going to wear stockings?’

‘Not with sandals. I need a hat, though—come and help me choose one? And why not ask Mrs B to slice up that roast beef for salad tonight? You know how you like cold roast beef.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dot, who recognised an apology when she heard one. ‘That would be nice.’

Later, wearing a perfectly darling black straw hat with a pale heliotrope ribbon, Phryne was driven to Gerald Atkinson’s house, whence there was a sound of revelry by day. As Valentine opened the door, she was regaled with a little song, a little song entitled ‘No Matter How Young a Prune May Be, It’s Always Full of Wrinkles’.

It seemed scarcely decent, but she walked inside anyway.

The party was in the parlour, a large room in plush and gilt, filled presently with dancers. Valentine said over the roar of the gramophone, ‘Do help yourself to a drink, Miss Fisher, I’ve got to mind the door.’

Phryne stood still. The room was half lit by hundreds of candles. The air was thick with a sweetish heavy smoke. Incense, but not Church incense, unless it was another kind of church altogether. Under the cloud of sandalwood she could smell a sour reek she associated with Morocco—what was it? That scent of burning rotten leaves was familiar. Of course. Kif. Phryne sneezed discreetly and moved through whirling figures until she reached the far wall, where the door into the next room stood half open and a comprehensive bar had been established.

Phryne looked at the profusion of glittering bottles. Lavish and very expensive. Everything that any drinker had ever wanted to imbibe: chartreuse in both colours, strange Greek and Slavic brandies, schnapps, cognac, whisky and whiskey, bourbon and rye, vermouth and Pernod, even including absinthe. She resisted
la Fée Verte
firmly and poured herself a very modest gin and tonic, with just enough gin to flavour her breath. This was no company for teetotallers and she wanted this group to confide in her.

If they ever stopped dancing. Valentine was minding the door, Luke was playing the gramophone. Rachel Phillips must have been and gone, also the professor. Gerald was dancing with Veronica, Priscilla was dancing with Blanche, James was dancing with Stephanie in a whirl of red sari. At least they were tired, which would limit this shameless exhibition. Phryne saw that two of the three couples were now performing the Nightclub Glide, where the female of the pair wreathes her arms around the male partner’s neck and the two lean inwards, providing mutual support to the terminally intoxicated. Fairly soon, they would have to sit down, or fall down.

The gramophone began to play a charleston and that sprightly dance proved to be an impossible task. Gerald sank down onto the sofa and Luke allowed the music machine to wind down. ‘The Varsity Rag’ wailed into silence, which spread and pooled like milk. The dancers were too breathless to speak and Phryne was not going to start. She was hoping that she would not become too affected by the kif if she sat in a draught of fresh air. She had smoked it overseas and it always made her very sleepy and indiscreet, though the indiscretion (which took the form of stroking the nearest available male flesh) might have been inherent, rather than drug-induced.

‘Divine Phryne!’ exclaimed Gerald Atkinson, stretching out a languid hand. ‘So good of you to come and help us mourn poor, poor Augustine!’

‘Poor Augustine,’ repeated Phryne insinuatingly.

‘He was such a nice man,’ sobbed Priscilla. She had collapsed into an armchair and was ransacking her bag, looking for a handkerchief.

‘A good fellow,’ sobbed Blanche, wiping her kohled eyes with a wisp of silk which showed not a trace of black when she let it fall.

‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Veronica Collins, leaning both plump elbows on the table and supporting her dimpled chin in her hands. She spoke with the authority of the very drunk, a state which had degraded her private girls’ school accent a class or two. ‘He wasn’t a nice man at all.’

‘Ronnie, please,’ said Gerald.

‘In what way?’ Phryne’s voice, just audible, floated on the smoky air.

‘He wouldn’t tell,’ pouted Veronica.

‘I said we could get him on the planchette when he’s had a chance to settle down in the afterlife,’ objected Stephanie. ‘He’ll tell us then, just have patience.’

‘Steph, you really are such a fool,’ said James Barton, who had clearly reached the limit of his patience with female sensibilities.

‘How dare you?’ shrilled Miss Reynolds, shocked. ‘You’ve seen what the Hidden Masters can do! You . . . you . . . unbeliever!’ She threw this epithet at him like a curse.

James grinned. It was rather too close to a baring of teeth for comfort.

‘I am an unbeliever,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t believe in any of your spiritualist nonsense. I don’t believe that Augustine knew where it was, and I don’t believe he was going to tell us anything, and I don’t believe that he’ll be any more amenable because he’s dead. He cheated Gerald. He cheated us. He was a twister.’

‘Oh, James, how unkind,’ wept Priscilla. ‘You always were unkind. Mother always said—’

‘Don’t talk to me about Mother!’ James snarled. ‘You always throw Mother at me when I show signs of sickening of all this . . . mawkishness, all this join-hands-and-sing-a-hymn, “Is-there-anybody-there?” foolery. I’m sick of it. I’ll have no more of it, Pris, do you hear? No more!’

‘I will not desert my masters,’ said Priscilla with unexpected firmness.

‘Then you can play with your ouija board without me!’ James flung around and was at the door when Valentine laid a hand on his shoulder.

‘I say, old man . . .’ he began.

James shrugged off the hand and Valentine was joined by Luke, who applied another hand to the other shoulder.

‘You’re upset,’ soothed Luke. ‘Come and have another drink.’

James pushed Luke aside and shoved his way into the hall. Valentine stood in front of him and Luke flanked him. Both of them were sounding very sober, all of a sudden.

‘No, really, old chap, we can’t let you drive a car in this state,’ said Luke.

Phryne found their cooperation slightly menacing. They were like two hunting dogs, reacting to each other without having to look. However, James really should not be allowed out in this state, in the interests of the national death rate. It was a kind action to restrain him.