Urn Burial (10 page)

‘Gardener and his boy, Miss, and that Mr Willis who used to be a jockey. The mechanic might, but in any case they wouldn’t wear ’em in the house, Miss. Mrs Croft won’t allow boots in her kitchen, they’ve all got slippers by the door.’

‘Have they, indeed. Dot, you are invaluable.’

‘Miss, you think something’s happened to Lina, don’t you?’

Phryne looked into Dot’s worried eyes. ‘Yes, 92

Dot, I do think that something happened to her.

What’s the consensus in the kitchen?’

‘No one knows what to think, Miss. The Hinchcliffs haven’t seen her since this morning.

Mrs H thinks she might have wandered off, being troubled in her mind. Mr H isn’t saying anything.

They say Mr Reynolds is going to organise a search party for Lina but they’re afraid that . . .

with the river so high . . .’

‘Yes.’ They had followed Lin Chung’s straight back and Li Pen’s snaking feet up the stair. Now they stood outside Lina’s door. Li Pen had his hand on his master’s arm and was speaking vehemently in short hissing sentences.

‘Li Pen says,’ translated Lin, ‘that the booted feet came up fast and unladen, and went down more slowly, carrying something heavy. He says that he can follow them down, too.’

‘Then you do that while Dot and I examine this room. Now, Dot dear, I’m relying on you. The room’s been cleaned, but there still might be some clues. Have a look around.’

‘You think that she’s dead, don’t you, Miss Phryne?’ she said quietly. Phryne nodded. Dot drew a deep breath. ‘Well, Miss, the blanket’s new, the bed’s been made by an expert; probably Doreen, she’s the chambermaid. Look, mitred corners.’ Dot pulled the whole bedstead aside and poked at the corner of the rug. ‘This is where she’d hide anything she had to keep secret, Miss. See, there’s a tack missing out of the carpet. The corner comes up easily.’ She lifted it and groped 93

underneath. ‘There, Miss.’ She gave Phryne a small box which had once held Empire Toffee.

‘Good, anything else?’

‘Nothing in the wardrobe, Miss, just a heavy coat and the usual clothes. Nothing much in her box, either, except a towel that’s marked ‘‘Cave House’’ and her washing things.’

Phryne sorted swiftly through a pile of paperback novels by the reading lamp. Sinister yellow faces leered from the cover of Dope and Limehouse Nights. Phryne took up each book by the spine and shook it, yielding a forest of chocolate wrappers (Lina favoured soft centres), scrap paper and bus tickets. Poor Lina, who had loved sweets and sensational literature. No wonder she had panicked when she saw Li Pen.

Phryne gathered all the bookmarks. Dot held out her hands to receive the debris and forced it into her cardigan pocket.

‘Come on, let’s see how our sleuth-hound is doing,’ Phryne said, and they left the small cold room, empty now of the merest signs of occupation.

They encountered Tom at the back door, watching Li Pen and his master walking in single file through a wilderness of cabbages.

‘They say the girl was carried out of my house,’

said Tom. ‘Nonsense. I don’t believe in all this Red Indian ‘‘white man speaks with forked tongue’’

gobbledy-gook.’

‘I might point out, Tom dear, that the tracker is 94

actually Chinese and so far hasn’t shown any signs of speaking pidgin English. Lina is gone, Tom.

How do you explain that?’

‘Girl’s off her head. She’s run away,’ said Tom stoutly.

‘Oh yes, in bare feet and nightdress? Excuse me, I’d better go and join Chief Lin and his Indian scout. Come on, Dot.’

‘Miss . . .’ Dot whispered in Phryne’s ear, ‘I might be more use in the servants’ hall.’

‘So you might. Go and have a cuppa and a nice sit down, Dot,’ said Phryne.

Leaving Tom on the threshold, a picture of landed gentry in exquisite discomfort, she followed the path through the kitchen garden and caught up with Lin and Li Pen as they traced the heavy nailed boots to the stables.

‘Lost him,’ said Lin, as Li Pen stared down at a flat expanse of mud, churned up by hoofs. ‘We’ll cast around the edge.’

‘Go on,’ said Phryne. ‘I’ll have a word with the stablemen.’

The stables were well built, well littered and sound. They smelt agreeably of horses, straw and leather-dressing with a faint whiff of Stockholm Tar, a compound of lard and black sulphur.

Phryne patted Cuba’s nose, noticing that his knees were bandaged with skill.

Mr Willis approached crab-wise and commented,

‘’E’s sparky, is Cuba. I reckon ’e’ll be bonzer in a couple of weeks. What can I do for you, Miss?’

‘Lina’s missing,’ said Phryne, looking straight at 95

the stableman even though both hands were occupied in gentling the noble head. ‘Boot prints lead from the house to the stables. What do you know about it, eh?’

‘Nothin’ – I don’t know nothin’.’ He avoided her eyes. ‘Missin’, is she? Must’a gone off ’er nut.’

‘Possibly. However just to be careful, you are going to search the stables and make sure that she didn’t run away and hide here. It’s cold and she only has a nightgown on.’

‘Boss know you’re ’ere?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Boss knows,’ said Tom Reynolds heavily, appearing behind her. ‘Get on with it, Terry.’

Phryne and Tom followed as the jockey began at one corner of the building and, pitchfork in hand, probed every wisp of straw in the place. His attendant boy moved the horses from their stalls and held them in the cold corridor as Phryne watched the fork stab down, hitting asphalt with a grating screech each time. It was a trying noise and by the time the stable, the stableman’s quarters and the baled hay had been searched, she had an ache in her jaw from gritting her teeth and stable dust liberally coating her person.

‘Right, Terry, thanks. We’ve got to cover everywhere. If you see the poor wench, hang on to her and call the house right away,’ said Tom.

They left the stable. Lin Chung was out of sight, down the bank towards the river. Phryne heard him yell, ‘This way!’ and Tom Reynolds groaned,

‘Oh, no, not the river . . .’

They mounted the bank and went down to 96

where the two Chinese stood on the brink of a grey torrent. There was no sign of the bundle of nightdress which Phryne had feared to see.

‘The tracks give out here,’ said Lin Chung. ‘Li Pen says that either the booted man walked into the river or he doubled back. The grass is green and springy, very hard to read.’

‘He can’t have walked into that,’ said Phryne, watching as a packing case whisked past at a good twenty knots and vanished around the bend. ‘No one could swim in that water.’

‘No. But a body, thrown in at this point, would not beach until it reached the main river – perhaps not even then,’ said Lin.

Tom Reynolds, who had been enpurpling for some minutes, exploded.

‘Ridiculous! The girl isn’t dead! She’s gone off her head and run away. I’m organising a search party; we’ll comb the grounds. We’ll find her.

Now I’ve got to go and muster the men.’

He stomped off. Li Pen looked at Lin Chung and said something which caused Lin to laugh shortly.

‘He says that only the guilty are so angry.’

‘Not necessarily. Tom thought you’d found her and was so relieved that you hadn’t that he lost his temper,’ commented Phryne. ‘Could you thank Li Pen properly for me? He must have been a great hunter.’

To her surprise, Li bowed and said in his hesitant English, ‘It is my pleasure to serve you, Lady.’

Phryne smiled. Lin Chung took her hand.

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‘Li, go back to the house and watch and listen,’

he ordered. ‘Phryne, will you walk with me?’ Li Pen bowed and departed.

‘Aren’t you joining Tom’s search party?’ asked Phryne, conscious of the warm hand enclosing her own.

‘Yes, but they must come this way. And we know that they are not going to find anything.’ He drew her away from the swollen river and along the bank which hid it from the house.

‘We have searched Lina’s room,’ said Phryne.

‘She took no clothes and all her shoes are there.

And I know she is dead.’

‘Could you have been mistaken? Did you touch her? Was she cold?’

‘No, I didn’t go into the room. But she was blue, Lin – swollen and blue. No living creature looks like that.’

‘Hmm.’ He thought about it.

‘We have no more facts to exchange,’ she said.

‘I’m cold. Let’s go back to the house.’

‘In a moment, Silver Lady.’ He stopped and turned to her. ‘In the presence of death we cling closer to life, to the flesh and the spirit, fearing dissolution.’

‘True,’ she agreed, leaning into his warmth as a skilled hand slid down to caress her breast, sensitive to touch even through her parrot-patterned jumper.

‘I have said that I will not lie with you under our host’s roof.’ His mouth was almost touching her ear, his breath warm on her neck.

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‘Yes, I heard you,’ Phryne noticed that her voice was quavering and dragged herself under control.

Almost without volition, her hands slipped under the silk shirt and caressed a back as smooth as sun-warmed marble.

‘But there are other places,’ he said, almost inaudibly, and Phryne felt a jolt shoot through her spine.

‘So there are,’ she said, forcing her voice to become light. ‘We shall reconnoitre. Too late for tonight, Lin dear. It’s already getting dark. I think it’s going to storm again.’

She was only taken marginally by surprise when he bent his head and kissed her passionately, soft mouth and silken lips, and the back muscles trembled reflexively under her fingers.

He drew away from her only as they heard the trampling feet of the search party approaching.

She had a lot to think about as she went back to the house. As she entered under the stone portal, it began to rain.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Oblivion is not to be hired.

Urn Burial, Sir Thomas Browne, Chapter V.

PHRYNE WAS dressing for dinner. The search party, defeated by the weather and the approach of night, had returned wet and grumbling. They had found no trace of Lina. It was pouring outside the bow windows, a steady drumming against the glass. Phryne yawned. Rain made her sleepy. She had bathed and was wearing her padded silk robe, a present from Lin Chung. Splashes of bright gold chrysanthemums across a background of dark-green leaves cheered her, and the silk wadding was as warm as fur. The smooth fabric caressed her skin like a hand.

She was sitting in her Sheridan chair, feet towards the fire, staring at the vague oil painting which had been in Dot’s room. It was an improvement on Hope. Ladies with parasols were walking down a flower-strewn slope towards the artist.

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There was a breeze; their hair was blown back and one parasol had turned inside out. Although filthy from long exposure to soot – it must have hung over a mantelpiece – it had a certain internal light which Phryne felt she had seen before, somewhere.

She idled with the idea but could not pin it down.

Europe, somewhere. A French voice came back to her, talking about clarity.

Dot came in briskly, turned on the light, and the impression vanished.

‘Dinner, Miss,’ she said. ‘What would you like to wear?’

‘The jade dress, I think. It’s cold.’ Phryne dismissed her train of thought and watched as Dot laid out the gown of the season.

Being a dinner dress, it was only ankle length.

The fishtail train on Phryne’s ball dress, which seemed, sadly, to be unlikely to see society, at least at this party – was designed for dancing and to overawe the servants. It also provided a convenient test for a clumsy young man to demonstrate just how awkward he was, thus saving Phryne’s feet from many a trampling. If he stood on the train she didn’t dance with him. Dot smoothed the velvet and fluffed up the squirrel-fur collar and cuffs, then found gunmetal-coloured stockings and the silver shoes.

Phryne donned black silk underwear and allowed Dot to drop the dress over her head. She made up her face with a few precise licks of a powder compact, sketched in her eyebrows, painted her mouth, shook her fluid hair into place 101

and surveyed herself narrowly in the wardrobe mirror.

The jade-green velvet, cut by a master, flowed from the furry collar down to her neat ankles and well-shod feet. Phryne turned and walked, watching the movement of the fabric. Beautiful. The dress depended from her shapely shoulders. It was decorously cut, more from considerations of pneu-monia than morality, with a high neck and no unseemly display of vertebrae. Poitou had sent it from Paris with his personal compliments to la belle Anglaise, and Phryne thought that he would have been pleased with it. The gown draped over her body, emphasising just what she wanted emphasised, and was remarkably decent while having a wholly indecent effect.

Dot set a fillet onto the black hair. It had a small panache of seagull’s feathers caught in an ornate silver clip. Phryne slid onto her left middle finger the big silver ring she had bought in Shanghai, the dragon and the phoenix, symbolising the mating of yin and yang, male and female, sun and moon, darkness and light.

‘Perfect,’ she said, and smiled at her reflection.

It smiled back. ‘What’s the news from the kitchen, Dot?’

‘Mrs Croft thinks Lina’s run away and so do most of the others. Mr Hinchcliff is worried, though – so’s his wife. We only see them at dinner, Miss. Mr Reynolds ordered that all the outside staff have dinner at six. He says they work hard and need their food. We’ll eat after you do, Miss.

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Looks like a good dinner, too. Mr H hardly ate anything and Mrs H has been crying. Doreen says there was nothing strange about the room, except that the bottom sheet and the blanket were missing, so she put new ones on the bed. She’s upset because she reckons she must have missed Lina by a minute and might have been able to help her.’

‘She couldn’t have helped her, Dot,’ said Phryne soberly.

‘You think she’s dead, Miss. Why?’

‘I saw her dead. All Doreen has done is spare herself a dreadful sight.’

Dot was silent. ‘I don’t s’pose we can just go away, Miss?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Not a chance,’ said Phryne. The reflection’s red mouth hardened into a straight line and the green eyes narrowed. Dot sighed.