Blood and Circuses (3 page)

He peeled back a blood-soaked blanket and revealed the chest of the corpse. Under gentlemen’s pyjamas were small but perfectly formed breasts.

CHAPTER TWO

There is a tide in the affairs of women
That, taken at the flood, leads—God knows
where.

George Gordon, Lord Byron
Don Juan,
Canto 6

Phryne Fisher was lazily contemplating Sunday from a horizontal position. She thought about rising from her green sheets and doing something energetic, like swimming or a brisk walk along the foreshore at St Kilda. She thought about it again and snuggled back into her pillow.

She was bored. Her favourite, Lindsay, was doing law exams which he really should pass this year and was locked in his own rooms with a torts textbook, subsisting on black coffee and panic. Her adopted daughters were still at school. Her communist friends Bert and Cec were involved in the strike on the waterfront. Bunji Ross the aeroplane pilot was away with a flying circus and there was no pretty young man in the offing. There seemed to be no reason to get up and go through the process of being dressed when there was no one she wanted to see and nothing she wanted to do.

It was five o’clock and she had done nothing whatsoever all day; however, she was hungry. She sat up, smoothed her perfectly black, perfectly straight hair and went to take a cold shower.

‘Dot!’ she called. ‘Drat!’ she added, remembering that Dot would be in church.

Thoroughly put out, Phryne showered, dressed in a light cotton dress and sandals and went downstairs to find out if there was any chance of a late lunch or an early dinner. Awaiting her was a table laid with a cold collation and a note pinned to the muslin netting which protected the food from flies.

Dear Miss Fisher,

Mr B and I have gone to my niece’s wedding, as we arranged last week. We’ll be home before midnight.

Mrs Butler

Phryne whisked off the cloth and a wineglass, caught by the edge, toppled and crashed to the floor. It was one of a set which she had brought from Venice, with a delicate green twisted stem. Irreplaceable.

Phryne swore, which made her feel better. She went to the broom cupboard, found a pan and brush and flung the fragments into the rubbish bin. She fetched a kitchen glass.

‘I shall sit down and have some salad and then I shall go for a walk,’ she said aloud. ‘I am completely out of sorts today and not fit for human company, even if there was some. Which there isn’t.’

A touch on her knee made her jump. On inspection it proved to be the black cat, Ember, politely intimating that he would like some ham too.

Phryne was glad to see him and offered him ham in strips, so that he had to take it from her hand. He did, with a delicacy which enchanted Phryne, allowing her to stroke his smooth black back and to lift his chin to look into his leaf-green eyes. After tolerating her handling for a while, he turned away to begin washing. Phryne watched him as she ate the rest of the ham and some cheese. He polished each paw with precise licks, then rubbed them alternately over the opposite ear.

Phryne had poured herself a glass of dry white wine and was engrossed in watching Ember’s ablutions when he stood up, pricked his ears and gave the hallway a sharp glance. Then he rose and walked to the kitchen door. The audience was over.

The doorbell rang.

Phryne waited for a moment before she remembered that there was no one else in the house. She put down her glass and went into the hall. It was evidently going to be a trying day.

When she swung the door back, she was confronted with a mountain of clothed flesh. Peering around it was a woman with red hair and a snake about her neck; behind her was a dark and beautiful male face. Phryne sighted upwards and said joyfully, ‘Samson! Come in, but look out for that lintel, it’s a bit low. And Doreen and Alan Lee. My dears, how very lovely to see you.’

Samson came into Phryne’s hall, which had never seemed tiny before. Alan Lee and the woman with the snake followed. They stood in a huddle, overawed by luxury, until Phryne drove them into the parlour like a farm-wife mustering chickens and sat them down. Only the sofa was big enough for Samson and it creaked as he settled himself.

‘This is a lovely house,’ sighed Doreen, unwinding her snake and allowing him to drop to the carpet. ‘Look at all them soft curtains and the paintings and all that blue and green. Feels like it’s under the sea.’ She stared at a painting, a full-length nude called
La Source,
and then glanced at Phryne. There was no doubt about the model.

‘What would you like to drink?’ asked Phryne. ‘I’ve got beer and wine.’

‘I’ll make a cuppa,’ said Doreen. ‘What about you fellers?’

‘Wine,’ said Alan Lee. ‘If you please.’

‘I’ll have a drop of beer,’ said the strong man.

Doreen went off to the kitchen, where Phryne heard the kettle clang onto the stove and the pop of the gas. She supplied Samson with a bottle of beer and gave Alan Lee her own glass of wine. She had once spent the night with him, in a caravan when the carnival had camped on Williamstown Road, and she had pleasant memories of the encounter. She had also solved a small problem in detection for him, foiling an attempt to frame his sister for theft. She smiled at him and Samson impartially, pleased to see some people. Phryne did not like to be alone.

‘Well,’ she said, when Doreen had returned with her tea. ‘What brings you here, friends?’

‘We been following Farrell’s,’ said Alan Lee in his husky voice. ‘I’ve still got the carousel and Anna has the shooting gallery. Anna’d be here but she’s sick. Everyone else gets morning sickness. Anna gets sick in the afternoons.’

‘Oh?’ Phryne did not want to comment. Anna Lee had been unmarried when they had last met.

‘She’s my wife,’ said Samson proudly. ‘And she’s expecting.’

‘Congratulations, Samson dear.’

‘Anyway. We’ve been trailing Farrell’s for six months. Good show, usually. You might have seen the ads in the paper—it’s Farrell’s Circus and Wild Beast Show. Old man Farrell runs it, he got it from his dad and his dad’s dad before him. Farrells have always been circus people. And the carnival, it goes along with the circus, sets up outside, with the booths and the sideshows. We don’t take any custom away from the big top, we just share the audience. We need the circus and the circus needs us.’

Alan Lee drained his glass and set it down and Phryne refilled it. The dark face was shadowed, the mobile mouth tight. He’s worried, Phryne thought.

‘But something’s wrong,’ he said, confirming her guess. ‘Things are going very wrong for Farrell’s.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Lots of ’em. Bad luck happens, you know, and you can have a run of it. But Farrell’s is like it’s under a curse.’

Alan Lee passed one long hand over his brow. Half-gypsy as he was, a belief in curses was just under the rational surface of his mind. Phryne took his hand. It was calloused and hard and the fingers gripped with surprising strength.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘They had a real bonzer trick pony, Socks was his name. Could do everything but talk. I never seen a neddie like him. He could dance and leap and Miss Younger could do anything with him. Well, two months ago Socks is found dead in his spot in the horse lines. No one seen near him. All the others chipper. But Socks dead; poisoned, they say, with eating some weed. Maybe yew, that’s enough to kill a grown beast.’

‘Unlucky,’ said Phryne. The hand squeezed hers hard enough to hurt.

‘No. That’s just the beginning. We been following Farrell’s all the time. They came into town last week and it’s been bad luck all along. Socks dying was just the first thing. Then the tightrope broke. Luckily it was under a newie and they had him on a governor.’

‘What’s a governor?’

‘A kind of harness with a line rigged up to the flies so that he can’t fall. To the ground, I mean. They say that the line was old and it frayed against a block. But I know that Sam Farrell had all them lines renewed before we started travelling in August. It’s been like that all along the coast. It was Geelong, wasn’t it, Doreen, that we had the fire?’

Doreen shook her head, flicking back her startling red hair. Her snake reposed in comfortable loops around her, with its flat scaly head on her feet. ‘No, the first one was at Little River. That was in the men’s tent; they said it was someone’s fag end. Geelong was the second, started in some cotton waste near the carousel.’

‘And if I hadn’t been on the lookout, I would’ve lost my living,’ said Alan. ‘It was only a small fire but it made a lot of smoke. Scared off a lot of punters. I didn’t see who started it but it was done on purpose. I don’t leave fuel anywhere near the merry-go-round. It’s stored under my caravan. And I could smell it. Petrol.’

‘What then?’ Phryne got up and handed Samson another bottle of beer. The first had vanished without touching the sides.

‘Then there was me,’ said Samson. ‘I’m strong, I am.’ He rippled a few muscles in his massive forearms complacently. ‘So I don’t have much trouble from the boys in them small towns. They sorta stay away from me. But five of ’em set on me in the street, after dark. And they had knives. Hayseeds don’t carry shivs. I never seen such a thing. If Al hadn’t seen ’em and come running, they woulda killed me.’ He opened his shirt to reveal a long, healed gash which sliced up from his chest to his upper arm. It had been aimed at his heart. ‘And they cut Al up, too. They weren’t no hayseeds out to pick me. They was,’ he pronounced the word carefully, ‘assassins.’

Alan Lee turned over the hand which was holding Phryne’s and she traced the slash on the back. It had left a white scar three inches long, having been done with a very sharp knife.

‘A souvenir of Colac,’ he said with a mirthless smile. ‘That same night a gang attacked Farrell’s head rigger and sank the boot into him. He had eight broken ribs and he’s still in hospital. And riggers are the most important men in a circus. Everyone depends on ’em.’

‘It’s been niggle, niggle, all the way,’ observed Doreen. ‘Sit still, Joe, you silly snake. Little things—like bookings cancelled and animals taking sick and audiences falling off. One of them things, or two, you could expect. But not all of them. So Farrell’s is in trouble. Old man Farrell is worried. It’s not a big show, like Wirth’s, that can work over the winter in the Olympia. Farrell has to clear enough in the season to pay for the winter camp, and there’s the vet’s bills and the food for the stock and all that. We thought that we’d get back to Melbourne and then hook up to another show—a lot of carnies have done that already, they say it’s jinxed. But I like Farrell’s. So I went to Mama Rosa.’

Alan Lee stared at Doreen. ‘You went to the gypsies?’ he asked incredulously. ‘But you don’t believe all that fortune-telling stuff, Doreen? It’s all made up.’ He turned Phryne’s hand over and intoned in a falsetto, ‘You will take a long journey over water and meet a dark-haired man and you will marry and have ten children and be very happy. It’s all rubbish, Doreen! It’s superstition.’

Phryne recovered her hand, while Doreen blushed with rage.

‘Well, I just thought I would. She’s been right for me before. She told me that Mum was going to marry and leave me the snakes and the Princess of the Amazon lark. She told me I’d be a princess. You just put a sock in it, Alan. You ain’t never

forgiven your mum for being a gypsy. And if I want to go to the fortune-teller, what’s it to you?’

Joe, the massive python whom she had named after Stalin, lifted his head off Doreen’s feet and raised his body three feet into the air, flicking his tongue. Alan Lee did not pursue the matter. Phryne reflected that it was never wise to quarrel with a woman with that shade of hair and ten feet of well-trained constricting snake at her disposal.

Doreen stroked the snake and continued, ‘She did a reading of the cards for me—the real cards, not the patter about the King of Spades being a tall dark man. I know the difference! She was worried, too, or she’d never have let me see ’em. They’re real old, with pictures on ’em. She drew the Eight of Wands, reversed . . .’

‘So?’ Alan Lee poured a third glass of wine and Phryne noticed that his hands were trembling. He evidently knew what that card meant.

‘So she said it wasn’t a curse or fate or anything, but a secret and malicious enemy. She said that the gypsies were worried about Farrell’s as well and were thinking of leaving but there wasn’t another show to trail. She told me that this enemy was a man, tall and with white hair, and that I’d see him within three days. She also said that there would be more blood within two weeks but not at the circus. So, two days later, I meet the new partner of Sam Farrell’s show. His name is Mr Jones and he’s tall and has white hair. And just now we went to see Mr Christopher and he’s dead. Stabbed to death in his boarding house in Brunswick Street. So we come to you.’

‘But why me?’ asked Phryne, confused. Samson snorted.

‘Women always get things hind-end before. That old woman, Miss, she said that the problems would all be solved if we went to see a woman with black hair and green eyes whose name began with an F. You’re the only lady we know who matches.’ He sat back and beamed at her with perfect faith.

‘I think,’ said Phryne, at a loss, ‘I think that we had better all have something to eat.’

Detective Inspector Robinson surveyed the corpse. The woman was lying on her back with her head on a rolled pillow, staring straight up. He saw that the eyes were blue and he closed them. They sprang wide again.

‘Rigor is not present,’ said the surgeon, feeling the neck and well-turned jaw, which were as soft as putty. ‘Cause of death is exsanguination from a massive stab-wound.’ He probed gently. ‘Yes, right through the heart, I would say, and it might have cut the rib. Corpse must have been pulled about a bit while dying, or just after death, probably to get the knife out. That’s why there’s so much blood. Arteries spurt, you know.’ Robinson gulped. ‘You are looking for a big, heavy knife, Robinson, at least seven inches long, double edged and about an inch wide. I’ll be able to tell you more later.’

‘Time of death?’

‘Can’t tell, it’s warm in here. Maybe two hours. Could be longer, perhaps as long as ten. Considering the weather, you know. This morning, after dawn, I’d guess. It’s six o’clock now.’