Murder on a Midsummer Night (13 page)

He saw her coming down the street. She ran forward into his arms.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers too.

William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night

Miss Fisher was still toying with the remains of her mixed fruit and nuts and musing on her recently departed luncheon guest when Dot came back from the city, flushed with triumph, bearing spoils of war, and more than a trifle dishevelled.

‘It’s blowing a gale out there!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ll just run upstairs and take off my hat, Miss Phryne. How did you manage with the professor?’

‘I fear that I have been managed rather expertly,’ Phryne replied, eating another muscat. ‘Don’t run, Dot. Walk slowly. How about lunch?’

‘Oh, I forgot,’ said Dot. ‘I’ll ask Mrs B for a sandwich or something. I’ve had such a morning. Back soon.’

She deposited the folder and the little box on the table. Phryne did not touch them. They were Dot’s revelation. Instead she walked into the smaller parlour, found her encyclopaedia and looked up Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard. Why that mark of significance? she wondered. Black beards must have been fairly common at the time. Which was circa 1680. Born in Bristol. His ship was called
Queen Anne’s Revenge
and he ruined lives and stole fortunes around the Caribbean. Privateer during the War of the Spanish Succession, which Phryne had never understood. He didn’t seem to have actually killed anyone, Phryne noticed as she read on. Just held up their ships and looted them down to the smallest coin, earring and gold tooth. Blackbeard because he filled his beard with pistol wadding and lit it when aroused. He lived on Nassau, where the Governor was in his pay. When offended, he had once blockaded Charleston. Finally he retired full of bad works to Ocracoke Inlet to put his sea boots up and there he was attacked by men of the Royal Navy under Lieutenant Maynard, who sneaked in and ambushed him. ‘
He drank damnation to me and my men, calling them cowardly puppies, saying he would neither give nor take quarter
.’ He was thereafter shot four times, stabbed more than twenty times and died in a sword fight with Lieutenant Maynard, who eventually managed to cut off his head. End of career of notorious pirate. Supposed, on not very good evidence, to have left buried hoards all over the Caribbean.

There was a sentence from a book which she could not quite find, itching at her memory. She relaxed and allowed her mind to drift. Then she had it. ‘
Don’t know Captain Flint? You’ve heard of Blackbeard? Blackbeard was a child to Flint.
’
Treasure Island
, of course. Robert Louis Stevenson.

Phryne didn’t like pirates. She had never considered them romantic. One of them had removed Lin Chung’s ear, and had come damn close to killing him. And Phryne, of course. Were ancient pirates more romantic than modern ones? Probably not. Parading Teach’s head—complete with beard—around to prove that he was dead was just a touch barbaric, though it was instantly convincing.

Could anyone really believe in pirate treasure in this year of grace 1929? Of course, with enough kif and absinthe, one could believe anything; fairies, pelmanism, politicians. Now what had those wasters and bounders said about their spirit guides? ‘Zacarias’, yes, well, one of Blackbeard’s crew was called Israel Hands. And ‘look to the West’, which didn’t mean anything. From the right point of view, everything was to the west. And what did one make of the otherwise honest Augustine Manifold carrying out such a thumping great hoax? As soon as it was exploded there would go his commercial reputation, even if the police didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with fraud.

Phryne shook her head. She could, regrettably, easily see Gerald Atkinson fitting out a boat of some kind—probably a lugger—and heading off to the Caribbean to search for pirate treasure. Probably dragging his protesting clique with him. As long as someone else did the sailing, the provisioning, the navigating and the cooking. What she couldn’t see was Gerald Atkinson actually finding any treasure.

She shelved the problem as Dot came back, freshly rinsed and wearing a loose beige cotton shift and sandals. Outside, the north wind clawed at the shutters.

‘I had such a lovely talk with Mr Wright and Mr Lawrence,’ said Dot, accepting a glass of iced orange crush. ‘Ooh, how nice! It’s so hot outside. I spent a pound out of special expenses on gin and tonic for them,’ she told Phryne.

‘A pound well spent,’ Phryne replied. Mrs Butler refilled her own glass of orange drink, made by juicing a lot of oranges and diluting the juice with sugar syrup and soda water. The lemon version was also very good. ‘Make sure I top it up. One must always have an emergency fund. Pass me my purse and I will do so now, before I forget and you are too polite to remind me. Well, what did they say, these superannuated actors?’

‘Lots of things, but these are the important points. Patrick O’Rourke was never very successful, though he played Hamlet when young.’

‘As did our Patrick,’ said Phryne.

‘He died in poverty and misery and no one could quite understand how he gassed himself,’ said Dot, still skirting the suicide taboo. ‘But he was buried properly and there were three strangers at his funeral. Here are their names,’ she said, producing the document with all the pride of Ember producing a dead rat. ‘The gentlemen sorted through all the names and these are the only three that they did not know. The others were all actors.’

‘Good, Dot, good!’

‘I can’t read them very well but you might do better in a good light. Looks like T. Johnson, S. Barton and Geston or Gaston. Two men, they had the impression that they might have been together, and a woman in a shabby black cloth coat—on a freezing cold day.’

‘I’ll examine it with the magnifying glass later. And what is in this box?’

‘Patrick O’Rourke’s possessions, Miss. They didn’t have anyone to give them to, so they kept them. They’re very honest, in a way. Very innocent, too, in their way,’ observed Dot.

Phryne gave her an approving smile. ‘You are very wise, Miss Williams. Shall we open the box?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Dot, and fetched the scissors.

The box had been sealed with a couple of sealing-wax wafers and a piece of sticking plaster. As she opened it Dot could smell alcohol and scent; eau de cologne and greasepaint, of which Mr Wright had been redolent. In it was a wodge of papers, a small package, and a gold watch. Phryne examined the watch, pulling over a light.

‘Cheap, gold foil, not working,’ she said, giving it a delicate wind and hearing the works ratchet and fall silent. ‘Could possibly be fixed, I suppose. Give me that butter knife, Dot, and I’ll open the back.’

Dot, who had been unfolding very delicate old paper, obliged and Phryne gave the secret cleft in the pocket watch a light twist. The back popped open.

‘Ah,’ said Phryne. ‘What do you have there, Dot?’

‘Letters,’ said Dot. ‘From a girl called Kathleen who is expecting a baby. From Ballarat.’

‘I see,’ said Phryne. ‘And here I have a miniature of the very same Kathleen.’

‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ asked Dot, looking at the colours, still fresh after all this time, protected by the closed watch case.

‘It’s her,’ said Phryne. She levered the picture out and on the back was written
Mo Cridhe
.

‘My heart,’ said Dot. ‘It means “my heart” in Scotch, which I suppose is also Irish.’

‘We’ve got the right Patrick O’Rourke, then. What’s the playbill?’

‘He was playing Hamlet in Ballarat. At the Theatre Royal. Lord, what were the dates?’

Phryne fetched her notebook.

‘He was playing Hamlet on the dates that she was writing to him from that place,’ said Dot. ‘And he never came for her.’

‘There might have been a lot of reasons for that,’ said Phryne. ‘He might have felt that she was better off with her family than following an impoverished actor around the traps, hungry, unsettled, sleeping in lodgings.’

‘He might have been wrong,’ said Dot fiercely. ‘He broke her heart.’

‘So he did,’ said Phryne. ‘And his own as well. Why else should he kill himself on the anniversary of her birth? No use being cross with the dead, Dot. What’s in the other little packet?’

Dot opened it with difficulty. It had been sealed and sealed again, as though it was very precious.

‘It’s a guinea,’ she said, holding it up to the light. ‘A golden guinea. And he was so poor, and never spent it!’

‘There’s writing on the paper,’ Phryne pointed out.

‘Can’t read it,’ said Dot. ‘It’s in Irish, as well. “
Tá sí milse ná seo rud eile
.” Whatever that means.’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Phryne, ‘you shall go and find me an Irish priest who can read it for us.’

‘All right,’ said Dot. ‘Father Kelly at St Mary’s will know. And I’ll light a candle for his betrayed girl when I’m there.’ She thought a moment. ‘And for him, as well,’ she added reluctantly.

‘Stout fellow,’ approved Phryne.

Mr Butler shimmered into sight, advising Miss Dot that her lunch was laid out in the breakfast room and that Detective Inspector Robinson had called and asked for an interview with Miss Fisher.

‘Good,’ said Phryne. ‘Have some lunch and then some rest, Dot dear, this weather would fell an elephant. You’ve done very well,’ she added, as Dot went out to nibble her chicken sandwiches with banana ice cream to follow and Phryne welcomed her old friend into the parlour, where he fell into a chair with a groan. His unremarkable face was flushed red and he appeared to be steaming.

‘Mr Butler will help you off with your jacket,’ she said sympathetically. ‘Shirt sleeves are good enough for me, Jack dear. Then you will drink a pint of cool soda water and then a large amount of beer. You have to replace the water first or you get drunk intolerably fast, and now that I am here in summer I have begun to understand this Australian insistence on cold beer. Only ice cold beer could enable anyone to survive in this intolerable climate.’

Mr Butler had discorporated in his inimitable way and now reappeared to supply the soda water, which Jack Robinson engulfed without blinking, then a cold beer from a bottle reposing in a large metal ice bucket on which clouds of condensation were forming. Jack Robinson drank the beer in one long, satisfying draught, excused himself to the downstairs washroom, and came back much paler and wetter, having apparently put his head under the tap.

‘She’s a killer outside,’ he said, taking his second glass more slowly.

‘So Dot says.’ Phryne was on her third glass of orange crush. The heat was leaching fluid out of her body, she felt, as though hungry for her fleshly moisture to alleviate the extreme dryness of the air.

‘That really hit the spot,’ said Jack Robinson. ‘Didn’t know about drinking soda water first, though. That’s a bonzer notion. Seen plenty of blokes down a couple of cold beers when they were hot and suddenly they’re roaring. They say it’ll be cooler tomorrow, though. This north wind comes straight off the desert. When it changes it’ll take the edge off the heat.’

‘That will be nice,’ said Phryne. ‘How about some bread and cheese and pickles? Bet you haven’t eaten lunch.’

‘That’d be good,’ said Jack Robinson. ‘Anything that’s kicking round the kitchen, Mr Butler,’ he said to that stalwart figure. ‘Don’t want to give any trouble.’

After a pause for a shudder in reaction to the idea that any guest in Miss Fisher’s house would be served something which happened to be lying around even so well conducted a kitchen as Mrs Butler’s, he vanished again. He was back in moments with a tray on which reposed freshly baked bread, the cheddar cheese which Mr Robinson liked and the pickled onions which he favoured.

Phryne walked away to the window to allow him to dine in peace, and listened to the wind claw dust across the glass, a very unsettling sound. The trees were being lashed and whining under punishment like schoolboys under the birch. The house was creaking plaintively. Phryne suddenly wanted to be out of Australia altogether, on a boat going somewhere Aegean, with fresh fish for breakfast and azure skies above.

But then, every country had its mistral, its meltemi, its own terrible wind. And in England she would be frozen to the bone, wearing three layers of clothing plus a coat, there would be only five hours’ daylight and that murky and grey, and the entire Fisher family would be trying to get close to the ancestral log fires, which baked the shins and left the back exposed to the chill of the ancestral draughts.

Could be worse, thought Phryne. She considered Jack Robinson, her favourite policeman. He was very hard to recall when he wasn’t there. His hair was mid brown, as were his eyes, and his complexion was—ordinary. As were his clothes and his figure, which would be described as ‘medium build’. His anonymity had stood him in good stead when arresting criminals and had not been so extreme as to deny him promotion. While he did not approve of Miss Fisher’s investigations, he approved of Miss Fisher, and had frequently assisted her in various unofficial ways. And she doted on the wholehearted way he ate pickled onions.

When the tray was devoid of any crumb, Mr Butler bore it away. Mrs Butler would be pleased. She loved enthusiastic eaters, and since the advent of the American Refrigerating Machine, she had been able to do a lot of the cooking in the cool morning and reheat it for dinners, which made her less hot and cross. She had even made a supply of sandwiches and put them into the machine, which meant that late lunchers got cold food, which pleased them. And all Mrs Butler had to do was put them on plates, which pleased her.

‘Well,’ commented Jack Robinson, relaxing and relishing his third glass of cold beer. ‘Augustine Manifold.’

‘Yes,’ said Phryne.

‘I gave those samples the old Scotch doctor supplied to the Government Analyst and he agrees with her. Not a word of apology, mind, for missing it in the first autopsy. Not testing the water in the lungs, I mean. Not a word about that. Just agrees that the water has no salt in it and has got soap in it, so tends to suggest that the deceased might have been drowned in a bathtub.’

‘Tends to suggest, eh?’

‘I know. But that’s the best we’re going to get out of that old grampus. They shoulda sacked him years ago and replaced him with his boy—he’s a sharp one.’