Dead Man's Chest (21 page)

‘Well, where is your Jim, Missus?’ demanded Hugh.

But Jim Ellis and his attendant, Bluey, were nowhere to be found.

CHAPTER TWENTY

When this yokel comes maundering Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him.

Wallace Stevens ‘The Plot Against the Giant’

It had been a lovely night and a strenuous day and Phryne was sleepy. But she was also restless. She had been without male caresses for a week, and that was too long. Her usual remedy had produced a climax, but it was just not the same. She had mosquito bites which she was trying not to scratch and a Dr Thorndyke book with a few stories left unread, so she sat up and put on her light. On her small table there was a tray bearing a half-bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, a biscuit box containing Waterbury’s cream crackers, another containing Ruth’s Anzacs, and her ashtray, lighter and a packet of the Balkan cigarettes she favoured.

‘Alas, poor deprived Phryne, can’t sleep,’ she said to herself, as she wrapped her gown around her and sat down to some nibbling and drinking. She was just wondering how Dr Thorndyke had managed, for such a long career, to avoid assassination for Advanced Smugness when she heard, through the silent house, an odd little click.

Now who would be awake at midnight? She could hear Jane muttering equations in her sleep, as she often did, and Ruth and Dot breathing. Tinker might be slipping out for some night-fishing, of course. But she thought not. That footstep she had just heard was far too heavy to be the lightfooted Tinker.

Then Gaston began to yelp wildly, Phryne heard Tinker yell, ‘You let go of me!’, and then barking and expostulation were muffled by the slamming of a heavy door. Tinker had been defeated. Housebreakers would, at any moment, be coming up the stairs.

Phryne flitted from room to room, waking the sleepers. Ruth sprang awake, already terrified. Jane came vaguely to consciousness. Dot was awake already, having heard Gaston’s protests. Molly was about to add to the general noise when Phryne hushed her.

‘Take Molly and go into the secret room and bar the door,’ said Phryne to the girls. They collared Molly and obeyed, though Jane had to shove Ruth into the room when she saw what it contained.

‘Dot, take my soft soap and go and soap the bottom three stairs,’ Phryne ordered, and Dot scuttled down the front stairs and did so, listening to heavy footsteps approaching and cold to her marrow. Then she hurried up again.

‘Take the heaviest tray you can find from the housemaid’s cupboard,’ instructed Phryne, ‘and bean anyone who comes up the servants’ stair. Don’t ask who they are. Just hit them. As hard as you can.’

‘Yes, Miss Phryne. Who do you think they are?’ asked Dot.

‘I suspect something has gone wrong with Hugh’s plan. Something unexpected. Could any of us have told any outsider that the Johnsons are alive?’

‘Not us, Miss Phryne, we haven’t been out of the house since we found out.’

‘True. Never mind. We have the girls to defend. And no one,’ said Phryne, checking the ammunition of her Beretta, ‘is going to get past us.’

Dot traced a cross on her bosom, and went for the tray. On reflection, she decided on a coal scuttle. It was nice and heavy, being made of iron, but not too heavy for her to lift and swing. Dot, in her hair crimpers and candlewick dressing gown, took up her station at the head of the narrow stair, prepared to do or die.

Phryne took her champagne glass and her cigarette and sat down on the top step. There were thumps and crunching noises in the back of the house. Pretty soon the assailant would decide that the Johnsons were not in the servants’ quarters. Tinker’s voice sounded, yelling, ‘Guv! Wake up! We’ve got company!’, accompanied by continuous barking from Gaston, who must have remembered the people who had kicked him and threw him into the sea.

‘Sister Ann, Sister Ann, do you see anyone coming?’ asked Jane, hoping to snap Ruth out of her terrified stupor. Ruth was staring out the window at darkened Queenscliff, as the attractive alternative to looking at a row of skulls—actual skulls which had come out of dead people!—on top of the bookcase.

‘Only the sun on the road, Sister,’ replied Ruth through numb lips. ‘And the dust beneath. Though it’d be the moon, if there was a moon. Which there isn’t.’

‘No, Molly, put that down.’ Jane grabbed a long-dried bone from Molly’s jaws. Molly was puzzled. It was a bone. Dogs ate bones. She was a dog. What price human logic? Ruth sat down on the floor to hug the dog. If she sat down she could keep her eyes shut. But that was no good. Her imagination was working overtime to scare her to death. She stood up and opened the window so that she could see even better. But the road was quiet. There was nothing to see.

Jim Ellis was puzzled. He clipped Bluey over the ear, which did nothing to soothe his mind. That sneaking bastard kid had said the Johnsons were alive. Well, they weren’t here in their place, only their yappy cur and some noisy boy. He thought he’d killed that dog. But here it was. Still yapping. He would attend to Gaston later.

‘What about the rest of the house, Boss?’ asked Bluey, unfazed. He was used to the Ellis’ agonic dialect, which consisted of curses and blows.

‘The dog’s ’ere. Maybe they took a bedroom ’cos we pinched their furniture. Someone’s livin’ ’ere. We better find out who.’

‘Right you are,’ said Bluey, and ducked the next cuff.

‘You go up the back, I’ll do the front,’ said Jim Ellis.

Bluey assented and slipped away. Apart from Gaston’s barking, the house was silent. Except for a delicate clinking noise.

Jim Ellis had always been the biggest dog in any fight. He knew he was strong and had been a dominant, dirty tent boxer who won every bout he had undertaken, in the days before his brother Tom had taken him into the family business. Yair, and every fight since. He came to the foot of the stairs and saw, in the bright light coming from the upper floor, a slim female draped in the sort of gown that Theda Bara used to wear in the pictures. She was pouring the last of the champagne into a tall glass, which explained the tinkling noise.

‘I’m not going to offer you a drink,’ she told him pleasantly.

Jim stood and gaped. ‘Who’re you?’ he croaked through a suddenly dry throat.

‘Oh, I have many names, many names,’ said Phryne. ‘Nemesis, daughter of Nox, perhaps. The Romans might have called me Adrasta. I could be one of Tisiphone, Megaera or Alecto. But you can call me Phryne Fisher. What are you doing in my house, you vile abomination?’

‘I come lookin’ fer the Johnsons,’ he told her. That smile was beginning to unnerve him. She looked just like a Dutch doll, pink lips, bright eyes, white skin, black shiny hair. But she didn’t sound like any doll. Phryne Fisher gave Jim Ellis the willies.

‘They’re not here,’ she told him.

‘I’ll see for meself,’ he said, one foot on the bottom step.

‘You won’t,’ said Phryne. She produced from her silken lap the little gun and pointed it straight at his face. ‘Don’t come a step nearer.’

‘Now look, lady,’ Jim Ellis decided to temporise while his offsider, Bluey, crept up the other stairs and could come on this insolent female from behind, ‘ya can’t shoot me!’

‘Oh, I can,’ purred Phryne. She was listening for a flurry behind her, as Dot dealt with the intruder.

‘Sister Ann, Sister Ann, do you see the horsemen coming?’ asked Jane.

‘Only a dark road, Sister, and not a speck of movement. What’s happening out there?’ asked Ruth in an agony of suspense.

‘I can hear Miss Phryne talking,’ said Jane, with her ear to the door. ‘I can’t hear what she’s saying. And a man answering. Take that humerus away from Molly, Ruth! Mr Thomas needs these bones.’

‘What on earth for?’

Ruth was a little reconciled to the room of horror, but could not see why anyone would want to construct one.

Dot heard the burglar coming up the servants’ stairs. Bluey had a surprisingly domestic glimpse of a young woman in a beige housegown with curlers in her hair as the scuttle came down and he dropped out of consciousness, sliding bonelessly down the stairs on his front.

Phryne heard the solid clunk of scuttle meeting skull and smiled again on the giant at the foot of the stairs.

‘Go away,’ she suggested.

‘You bitch,’ said Jim Ellis, ‘I’ll have you first, then the others. You’ll be real sorry,’ and rushed the stairs.

He managed the first soaped step, but the second slid out from under his boots and he stumbled. On the third he fell sprawling, tumbling to the bottom of the stairs and roaring with pain and insult. He was huge, magenta-faced, his mouth gaping, showing rotten teeth, his monstrous hands flexing to grip, tear and rend. He was a creature out of a nightmare, of measureless brutality and animal strength and fury. He gathered himself and rushed again.

Phryne shot him quite clinically in the knee, and Jim Ellis went down for the count. His head impacted the floor. He was beaten.

‘Sister Ann, Sister Ann, do you . . .’

‘Aha,’ said Ruth, opening the door a crack. ‘We don’t need any horsemen to rescue us, Sister. We’ve got Miss Phryne.’

After which the rescuing mob of policemen who stormed in to confront the evil-doers and deliver the innocent came as a bit of an anticlimax.

Hugh, who had driven like a maniac from Point Lonsdale to Queenscliff, bell clanging all the way, took in the scene which confronted him and his fellows as they pushed inside the brightly lit house on Mercer Street.

His beloved was sitting in a parlour chair. She was wearing a house dress and had curlers in her hair. She was gulping sherry. The two girls were feeding Molly and Gaston with dog biscuits. Gaston, particularly, had the satisfied air of a dog who has given his assailants a really good solid barking. Tinker was slopping water over the first three steps of the main staircase, mopping with a floorcloth and chuckling. Miss Fisher was smoking a gasper, with her unshod feet propped up on a flattened Jim Ellis, who had a tea towel tied tightly around his knee and his hands and feet bound with washing line. Beside him reposed the senseless form of his associate, Bluey, who was being examined by Dr Green.

‘He might have concussion,’ the doctor was saying as he thumbed back an eyelid. ‘He’s had a heavy blow to the head.’

‘Yes,’ said Dot grimly. ‘And he deserved it.’

‘Doubtless,’ said the doctor smoothly, getting to his feet. ‘And as for the other one, Miss Fisher, he’ll need to go to hospital to have that bullet extracted. I’ll say one thing,’ he added. ‘This is the sweetest-smelling crime scene I have ever been called to.’

‘Floris’s Stephanotis soft soap for that perfect complexion,’ Phryne told him. ‘I order it specially from England. And that was my last bottle, drat all burglars and housebreakers!’

‘Are you all right, love?’ Hugh asked Dot, taking her hand.

‘Miss Phryne had it all under control,’ she told him. ‘But it wasn’t nice for a while there.’

‘Well, we’ve got the rest of them,’ Hugh said. ‘It was only later that I worked out that someone must have seen the Johnsons and reported them alive, and I rushed back here like fury to find . . . that Miss Fisher, indeed, had everything under control.’

‘As usual,’ sighed Dot. Her head ached. She longed to make herself a cuppa, take a Bex and go back to bed. She turned Hugh’s wrist to see his watch.

‘It’s two o’clock in the morning!’ she exclaimed.

‘Time for you to get some beauty sleep,’ said Hugh dotingly. ‘Not as if you need it.’

If he could say that, and her in her ratty gown and crimps in her hair, Dot thought, he must really love me. She smiled.

It took considerable time and trouble to get Jim Ellis onto one stretcher and Bluey onto another and cart them off to Geelong hospital, where they would be cared for under guard. Then Hugh took his leave, the Fisher ménage made themselves tea or cocoa or neat cognac as per preference, the dogs were placated with a brief run, and then, at last, the Mercer Street house was silent as everyone went back to sleep.

Constable Basil Worthington had gently carried all the comatose dogs into their fenced yard and laid out plates of cheap dog biscuits mixed with all the meat in the icebox and bowls of water for their awakening, which might be cranky. He jemmied the lock on the cage and attended to the two others and the bitch and her three squeaking offspring, who were as fat and healthy as their mother was rib-exhibitingly starved to the bone. He made up a mash of bread, cooked chicken and milk for her, using the Ellis brothers’ stores lavishly. They weren’t going to need them where they were going. The mother dog was beginning to stir, and he leaned down to pat her head, when another head was lifted and a boy’s voice whispered, ‘Water?’

Basil had never been afraid of an animal in his life, though this one’s advent had given him a bit of a start. This ragged blood-smeared creature needed help, and he should have it. He gently assisted Fraser to his uncertain feet and guided him into the house. There he provided water and then a strong cup of the Ellis brothers’ coffee, spiked with uncustomed rum. The boy drank water, vomited, then drank more water and then the coffee. Basil wondered how long he had been caged with the hounds. He stank of dog muck and blood and fear, but he did not seem to be wounded.

‘Come along, son,’ said the constable in his soothing voice. ‘We’ve no need to stay here. The dogs will be all right now. Come back with me, and tell you what, you can wash yourself off in the sea on the way.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Fraser.

A great change had come over him. He now knew what crime was like: brutal, unfair, cruel, disgusting. He had no more taste for felony. But he felt much stronger in himself. He had been tortured, mistreated, starved, flung among wolves. He had survived. Nothing his father could do to him would be worse than the Ellis brothers’ dog kennel. He had nothing to be afraid of any more.

He washed ferociously in the cold surf, scrubbing off the blood from the offal he had eaten and the filth from the floor of the kennel. Thus soaking wet, but not actively noxious, he was delivered to an unimpressed Mrs Mason at dawn for her routine of a scalding bath, medicines, treatment for his various scrapes and bruises, and forcible soup, breakfast and cocoa with valerian. He complied so humbly and gratefully with this regime that his hostess thought that she might have been wrong about him. He had not even winced when she had practically poured iodine into all those cuts and scratches. Maybe he was a good boy, after all.