Murder in Montparnasse (19 page)

‘Things to do today: find René,’ Phryne said aloud, hoisting herself to her feet and walking to her bathroom where Dot had drawn her bath, scented with chestnut blossoms. Interesting choice, Phryne thought. She used this exquisite scent to make herself feel better if she was unhappy. Dot must think that she needed it. She probably did.

Phryne sank gently into the bath and closed her eyes, breathing deeply.

Hugh Collins groaned. His head hurt. He tried to move and found that his hands were bound and so were his feet. The world appeared to be wobbling, or rather, surging. Nausea roiled over him in a blood-warm wave.

All he could do for his immediate ease was roll on one side to be sick. He retched helplessly, even after his stomach was empty, and wished he had a drink of water and the key to the handcuffs. This never happened to Sexton Blake.

Handcuffs? The ache in his head was lessening a little. He moved his wrists experimentally. Yes, definitely handcuffs, though it was so dark in his little world that he could not really see them. A momentary fear that he might have gone blind was dismissed as he sighted little stripes of light coming through the boards that constituted his roof. Not blind, then, and not dead. But captive. In a boat.

Who had a reason for hitting Hugh Collins over the head and kidnapping him? The local cop, what was his name? Smith? Yes, Smith. He might have overheard Hugh’s conversation with Robinson, not by any telephonic means but by standing outside the door. And he might have decided that Hugh was surplus to requirements and biffed him with a handy brick. But handcuffing a fellow officer . . . it seemed extreme.

By a complicated manoeuvre during which he wished that he was a stone lighter and had studied acrobatics with some serviceable circus, Hugh managed to get his hands in front of him and reached up to examine his mistreated head. Yes, patch of blood matting the hair, tender to the touch, and a goose-egg swelling. Nothing worse than he had got in many a difference of opinion on Fitzroy Street or Little Lon. Now to get the handcuffs off.

He began to grope around on the floor. Sexton Blake would have found a bent nail or even a complete set of skeleton keys on his prison floor. This floor, however, apart from certain unpleasant detritus, was bare, slimy, and entirely devoid of the means to pick a handcuff lock. But wait a moment. Had he been searched?

Trying to reach his own pockets with handcuffed hands was the sort of physical challenge which only Houdini could have truly relished, he decided, after bending his body into a number of painful contortions. He finally got his fingers into his pockets and found that all of his possessions were there, which included his penknife. This was the sort of careless oversight which one could only approve of in a kidnapper. Hugh prised the awl free with his teeth and bent to his task.

Phryne ate her excellent breakfast and sat down in her parlour with all the information she had gleaned from the police department. Dot had taken the girls out to the pictures. Mr Butler was consulting with the wine merchant in the kitchen and Mrs Butler was remonstrating with the cleaning woman about dust left in corners. Ember was curled on Phryne’s desk and Molly had collapsed asleep on her feet. Molly favoured this place of repose because it made the sittee stay peaceably in one place and not force Molly to follow them all over the house until they settled again.

Phryne was staring over Ember’s head at a small oil, one of the pictures which had come from Paris in 1918 and which she had claimed as commission. It was a Sarcelle nude: Phryne herself, not recumbent and iconic but a swift, rough sketch of her. She was leaning on a windowsill, talking to someone in the yard outside. Her body was pearly, her buttocks as square as a boy’s, her hair swinging forward to hide her face. Her small breasts rested on her crossed arms. Light gushed through the window and flooded the figure. It was considered unacceptably non-cubist and Sarcelle had asked only twenty francs for it. Phryne remembered the day it was painted. November the twenty-third, 1918, one of those sunny clear days which Paris turns on to deceive the populace about the freezing winds and lowering skies to come. The lightly sketched trees outside the window were bare. Yes, nearly Christmas. Papa was paying for paintings, she no longer needed to model, and she wasn’t hungry. And she had been talking to . . . René. So, he had come to the Atelier Sarcelle. Her memory had been at fault.

She gently slid the first paper out from under Ember, who moved his paws obligingly. A list of French people who had come into Australia in the last six months. The last time she had looked at this, she had baulked at René’s name. Now she could scan it carefully.

One thing stood out immediately. René Dubois had been accompanied by Madame Dubois. Not that this should have come as a surprise. René had always been on the qui vive for a rich wife. For a while, until that terrible night, he had thought that Phryne would suit him admirably. Rich Papa, title, beauty. Everything he wanted in a spouse, including a doting, unconditional passion. René had always required a life in which he could play his music until three a.m., sleep until one p.m., and drink, smoke, gossip and flirt for the rest of the time. René, to the horror of his respectable peasant parents, was a ne’er-do-well.

And it wasn’t that everyone hadn’t told her. ‘Oh, my dear,’ La Petite Madeleine had said, fanning herself, ‘if you had to find a lover, chérie, and I acknowledge that one does need a lover once in a while, did you have to embrace René? Everyone knows he is a bad hat.’

‘Phryne, my darling,’ Dolly had whispered in her exciting, breathy voice, ‘my princess, my damsel in a tower, did you have to come down into such unworthy arms? René is no knight in shining armour. René would have been following the Crusade, tooting on a crumhorn and plucking plackets. He would have been thrown out of Sherwood for cheating Robin Hood. They would not have allowed him within a clothyard shaft of any real money or he would have been off to the High Sheriff of Nottingham with the gold and claimed the reward for turning them in . . . really, René is not a good idea.’

Phryne had protested, and Dolly had turned her exquisite wrist to make a Wildean gesture.

‘When will you learn, my dear girl,’ she said coolly, ‘that inadvisable is not the same as undesirable?’

Toupie had called him ‘that bastard’. Toupie did not habitually mince words and was not susceptible to roguish charm (male). Natalie Barney, the only person willing to tolerate René, had viewed him with such penetration that he had avoided her. The artists considered musicians nothing more than background noise which interrupted important discussions on Modernism. Only in the Rue des Trois Colonnes had René been welcome. In the dark and smoky atmosphere the shrill and gleam of the accordion had dominated the night, seeming to contain not only music but the sibilant mutter of Auvergne voices, the scent of cheap tobacco and the eau de mille fleurs which the prostitutes wore to cover the odours of their trade.

And when Sarcelle had paid her fee into her hand, he had told her not to spend it all on René, as he objected to paying souteneurs. And he was a pimp, that was true. He was living on Phryne’s earnings and had every intention of going on doing so until she ran out of money, when—the Sapphics said—he would find another fool to pay for his pleasures.

Phryne’s mind shied away from René again and she forced it sternly back. She had had enough of this. She had suppressed the memory of that night for ten years and now she was going to remember it: remember it, and get over it.

It had been a sullen, icy day, and Phryne was cross. She had a cold coming on. Sarcelle was working on a big nude for which he had a commission from Sardou, and he wanted to finish it. Because the stove had smoked unendurably, he had opened a window, and his model had lain in the draught for hours. When she stood up, instead of offering her the usual cup of chocolate, Madame Véronique had given her a lecture on why handing her money to René was not good. Phryne had flounced out into the street without her fee. She was in the mood for a good dinner and some sympathy.

Instead, she had found René half drunk and half asleep, lounging in her bed and drinking the last of her private bottle of cognac. La Petite Madeleine was not there. René had reached for her but she was not in the mood and had pushed him away.

Then he had erupted into astonishing violence. Phryne found herself on her knees, her hair twisted in his fist, while he snarled, ‘You will do as I say, woman!’

‘Let me go!’ Shocked, Phryne began to cry.

‘You will do as I say,’ he insisted. ‘Where is the money?’

‘I haven’t got any,’ she said through a bitten lip.

He hauled her up and slapped her hard across the face. The bitten lip split.

‘Go out and walk the street,’ he snarled. ‘I want another bottle and then some dinner. What use are you if you haven’t any money?’

Phryne, recovering her wits, wrenched herself free. She was still astounded.

‘René, what’s come over you?’

‘Time you learned your place.’ He spat at her feet.

‘I know my place,’ said Phryne. Sidling, she crossed the room, reached into a drawer and produced her service pistol. Panting, bleeding, weeping, she levelled it in hands which hardly shook at all.

‘Get out,’ she said. René laughed. He had never been closer to death than he was at that moment. Phryne fired into the wall beside him. Plaster fell like rain. Voices protested. Windows slammed open. René scrambled away towards the door.

‘What about your papa?’ he yelled, as the pistol came around again. ‘You will pay well so that I do not tell Milord Papa what you have been doing!’

‘You’re giving me more reasons to kill you,’ said Phryne. ‘You may tell my father anything you like. Not one sou more do you get out of me! Goodbye, René!’

‘I’ll be back!’ he shouted.

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Phryne. She closed the door behind him, locked and barred it, then sank down on the floor and wept as though her heart was broken, because it was.

When Madeleine returned and coaxed her into opening the door, she did not say a word about the bloodstained face which was turned up to her. Instead, she applied a cold wet washcloth and made hot chocolate with cognac. When Phryne had recovered enough to walk, La Petite smuggled her downstairs and through a maze of lanes into the Quartier Latin, where she could go to ground amongst the women.

Phryne stayed indoors at Toupie’s, playing solitaire (and occasionally poker with the mannish Standard Oil heiress Joe Carstairs) until her face healed. She won eleven hundred francs and got warm at last. Toupie had a large house, an American view of central heating, and no objection to guests, as long as they had no objection to her habits. No man ever entered the portals and that was all right with Phryne. She never wanted to see a man again.

Fortunately, she had contracted a cold, so she could stay in bed, sneezing voluptuously, drinking Mariette’s chicken soup and feeling thoroughly sorry for herself in comfort. No one said ‘I told you so’. Dolly Wilde called (when Phryne was presentable again) and brought hideously expensive grapes, which Dolly ate, tucked up cosily beside the invalid, comforting her with her silly, clever, enchanting fantasies.

La Petite Madeleine called, bringing all Phryne’s possessions, as René had been seen lurking. Madeleine told Phryne that René had also called on Sarcelle and collected her fee for the nude, and that last piece of gratuitous meanness had cured Phryne of loving René.

It hadn’t stopped her wanting to kill him, though. This must have leaked through the gossip network which connected the bohemians, because she never saw him again. He fell out of her life and she had only a small scar on the inside of her lip to remind herself of him. That was, of course, enough.

Soothed in the company of women, Phryne returned to modelling. Sarcelle made no comment but ‘My Muse has returned to me!’, and Madame Véronique had resumed supplying her with chocolate. The weather turned snowy but the stove had been fixed. Soon it would be Christmas. The ’flu was dying down and more food was getting through from the provinces. Cheese appeared in the shops again, and unsalted meat, and even marzipan. She had dined that day, she recalled, with Toupie and the girls, on the first post-war tournedos made of real beef and Normandy pommes de terre, and drunk red wine of the Languedoc with farmer’s cheeses wrapped in vine leaves and bread made of wheat, not pease flour.

Phryne lit a cigarette and smiled. She had done it. René was reduced from a towering monster to an ordinary bastard of about five foot six. René was no longer a dreadful image to haunt her sleep, and Paris was her own again. Ember allowed her to remove the next sheet of paper. Mr Butler entered with her morning coffee, made to her own specifications. Sunlight flooded in through the parlour window, lighting up the small, swift, terribly charming sketch, and the Indian ink Picasso cat beside it. Phryne had stood and watched Pablo draw that cat in one effortless sweep of the brush. She had been very fortunate to be in Paris, very fortunate indeed. A thought struck her.

What were Sarcelle’s paintings worth these days? She must call on a picture dealer on the way to take Jack Robinson to lunch.