Away With The Fairies (16 page)

‘Oh yes, it’s very difficult. But I don’t want to stop working. When I had Wendy I read
Radiant Motherhood
and I tried, I really tried, to adore the child as she suggests, but babies are not really very adorable. I felt stupid and clumsy and cow-like and my husband … doesn’t understand. Well, he’s a man,’ said Mrs Opie tolerantly. ‘I wasn’t prepared for how tired I’d be, crying for lack of sleep, and Wendy, I swear, never slept a wink until she was eight months old. But it’s getting better. And I don’t care what Mr Bell says, Miss Lavender was kind. She did like knowing things, I admit.’

‘And clearly someone objected to her,’ said Miss Phillips, ‘or they wouldn’t have killed her.’

There was a gasp. Mrs Charlesworth folded her hands.

‘We will now say a short prayer,’ she announced. ‘Almighty and merciful God, we commend our sister Marcella Lavender to thy tender care, knowing that whosoever believeth in thee shall not perish, but have everlasting life.’

‘Amen,’ said
Women’s Choice.

CHAPTER TEN

In the third line, undivided, we see the superior
man active and vigilant all the day and in the
evening still careful and apprehensive. The position
is dangerous, but there will be no mistake.

Hexagram 1: Khien
The I Ching Book of Changes

Phryne got home without anyone else trying to murder her and arrived at her own front door with a sense of accomplishment and a box binder under her arm. Dot opened the door and smiled. Phryne gave her the box.

‘Good evening, Dot. How has your day been? Hang on to that for me, it’s pure trinitrotoluol and ought to give us some valuable clues. Hello! There can’t have been another postal delivery today. Where did that letter come from?’

‘Hand delivered, Miss. Just a few moments after you left.’

Phryne turned the letter over. It was much thumbprinted, shabby and closed with a red wafer. Although she could not read Chinese, she recognised the characters for Lin, written in an ancient decorative script. She knew that seal.

Something made her examine the letter carefully before opening it. ‘Who delivered it?’ she asked, walking to her desk and turning on a powerful lamp. The front of the envelope had an inscription in Chinese on one side and on the other her own name and address written in precise, well-formed characters. Lin Chung’s writing without a doubt.

‘A man, Miss. Not a young man. A sailor, maybe. I gave him five shillings like it says on the back.’

Phryne read the note on the back. ‘Please give the bearer of this letter five shillings on receipt.’

‘Did you ask him where it came from?’

‘Yes, Miss, but all he said was “Five North. I found it, see? So the five bob’s mine.” I thought you’d want the letter so I gave him the money and he went away.’

‘I see,’ said Phryne. She was fighting a superstitious urge to hide the letter. She really didn’t want to open it.

‘Did I do wrong, Miss?’ asked Dot, alarmed by Phryne’s stillness.

‘Eh? No, no perfectly correct, Dot. Now do go away, there’s a dear.’

Dot went. Phryne drew a deep breath, held it, let it out, grabbed her paperknife and slit the envelope.

It had seemed rather misshapen. This was explained when she saw the enclosure. Laid out on the pale blue blotter was a folded letter and a scrap of something like oilskin. It smelt disgusting, like partially cured meat, like the breath of Pennell’s Boiling Down Works which blanketed Richmond with a charnel house reek whenever there was a hot north wind. Phryne turned it over with a pencil.

Then she saw the scrolls and foliations of a human ear, lobe and channel complete. It had been severed with a sharp knife and dipped in some chemical solution and somewhat flattened by its journey in the envelope from—wherever the envelope had come from.

Phryne turned away from the smell for a moment and fought down horror with a will of adamant. If this was what she thought it was—Lin Chung’s ear—then someone was going to suffer, someone was going to be really, really sorry for doing this, before Phryne let them die.

Horror and weakness vanished. No one in her immediate circle had ever seen Phryne really angry and ordinarily she kept this killing rage, a legacy from her Celtic ancestors, a close secret. In this state, she knew, she was literally capable of anything, and not since she had interrupted a couple of her schoolmates torturing a dog had she lost it. Then it had taken the combined efforts of three teachers to hold her and prize the remains of the stable rake from her grasp. She had never regretted learning in that way what a really good rage can do, although—as usual—she had been expelled. She had taken the dog with her, and was willing to bet that those two girls would be very chary of even looking unkindly at a dog ever again. After they got out of the infirmary, of course.

But such a rage was not to be loosed, in case she found herself coming out of it with a mangled corpse at her feet and nothing much to say to the arresting officer but ‘Oops’. Therefore she had kept it under rigid control ever since. Now, however, she was willing to make an exception.

She unfolded the letter. The ink had run where the grisly enclosure had seeped fluid into the paper. She pinned it flat under a paperweight and sat down with a magnifying glass to construe.

‘Silver Lady’, it began. Lin Chung’s writing and one of his names for her. ‘I do not expect to see you again. She of Bias Island has plans for me. My family must comply with her request and I fear that they will not find it expedient. Take this relic to Grandmother with my respectful regards. Farewell. Remember when you see the moon that I will be there, and death cannot destroy love. Lin Chung.’

Phryne read it again, then copied it in her fast, clear script onto plain bank paper. She sat still for a while. Twilight grew in the cooling parlour. Phryne stared at the rising moon through the uncurtained bow window. ‘Remember when you see the moon that I will be there.’

But he was not there. He was on Bias Island, wherever that might be, and someone called She of Bias Island had plans for him which his family might not comply with—might not find expedient? Death cannot destroy love? Possibly not, but it could certainly delay it adequately. Moonlight silvered the dreadful object on the blotting paper.

‘No,’ said Phryne very softly. ‘No, I will not accept this.’

She picked up the heavy blue glass paperweight, hefted it consideringly in both hands and then threw it with all her force into the black-leaded grate.

It exploded with the noise of a four-inch shell in that silent parlour.

Five seconds later the entire complement of the household was in the room. Phryne was standing amid a litter of blue glass shards. Her face was white, her eyes blazed like emeralds, and no one who saw her had any intention of saying anything but ‘Immediately’ to anything she ordered.

‘Mr Butler, telephone the Lin residence. Say that Miss Fisher has received a communication from Lin Chung and requires—not requests, Mr Butler, requires—an audience with Madame Lin at noon tomorrow. Mrs B, fetch me a small jar from the kitchen and fill it with coarse salt. And a paper bag. Dot, find the brandy. A large glass. Girls, you spoke to Lin Chung alone—you were sitting with him when I was called away to the telephone the last time we saw him. Did he say anything to you about his journey? Anything to indicate that it might be dangerous?’

‘Yes,’ said Ruth, edging closer to Jane. She had never seen Phryne look like that. An angel, perhaps. Or a devil. Something not quite human. ‘You remember, Jane. About the pirates.’

‘Oh, yes, so he did. We were asking which way he was going and he said that parts of the Chinese coast were dangerous now because China was in turmoil and the pirates of the South China Sea were operating again.’ Jane stepped half a pace back under the force of Phryne’s fierce regard. ‘He … he said that they were as organised as Henry Morgan’s Port Royal and twice as cruel and that there was nothing romantic about pirates. He said they killed the crew and took hostages for ransom and cut bits off them and sent them to their relatives …’ Jane backed further away and came up against a table. ‘But he said he was travelling on a big ship and they’d never dare attack a big ship. He said they preyed on small boats and fugitives, not on big ships which might have armed men onboard. That’s what he said. That’s all he said,’ she added, and Ruth nodded in confirmation.

Phryne waved a hand to dismiss them and they escaped back to the kitchen. Ruth then escorted Jane to the outside lavatory, where she was copiously sick. Her scientific mind had just analysed the juxtaposition of what Lin Chung had said about pirates, Phryne’s statement that she had received something from him, and the demand for coarse salt in a small jar. When she stopped retching, she told Ruth, and they went back into the bright kitchen, huddled together with their puppy and cried quietly, because Lin Chung had also told them that South China Sea pirates sometimes didn’t release their hostages, preferring to take the money and kill them to save food.

‘I liked him,’ sobbed Jane.

‘So did I,’ said Ruth.

Molly, the puppy, whimpered and licked their faces.

‘Madame Lin will see you at noon, Miss Fisher,’ reported Mr Butler, treating his employer with all the caution due to an unexploded grenade. ‘Will there be anything else?’

‘Yes. Call Bert’s landlady and get him on the phone. Tell him and Cec to find out all they can about the South China Sea pirates and report to me. Yesterday might be too late but I’ll see them tomorrow at five. Tell him I’ll pay anything he wants and—you may tell him not to fail me.’

Mr Butler nodded and went out. Phryne gulped some of the brandy. She needed to calm down. Scalding her household with invective would not help Lin Chung. And for the moment there was nothing else to be done.

She picked up the fragment of Lin Chung and laid it respectfully in the jar, shook salt over it, and enclosed jar, letter and envelope in the paper bag. She heard a partial conversation from the hall.

‘No, I don’t think so. She’s looking like an avenging angel and asking you not to fail her. I shouldn’t. I really shouldn’t, unless you want to take your intestines home in a sugar bag. Both of you, and you’ll go out right away? Good. I’ll tell her. Good night.’

Phryne sat down carefully, as though she might break the chair, and stared into the fireplace. She heard someone’s shoes crunching over the broken glass and looked up into Dot’s plain, familiar, worried face.

‘Miss?’

‘Dot?’

‘Is it Mr Lin? Have them pirates got him?’

‘I believe so, Dot. I believe so.’

‘Then you’ve done all you can for tonight,’ said Dot sensibly. ‘Come upstairs, now, have a nice bath with them chestnut-blossom salts and dress for dinner. You’ve got all them letters to look at after dinner, and I’ll start a rosary for your special intention before I go to bed. Mr B says that Bert and Cec are going out now looking for your information and they’ll be here at five like you said. Come along now,’ said Dot. ‘And let Mr B clean up all that broken glass with that new vacuum machine what he’s so proud of.’

Phryne, suddenly drained, went.

Bert stumbled slightly as he went up the steps of the Courthouse Hotel. With sufficient thirst, enterprise and a little travelling, it was possible to drink for twenty-four hours of the day, following the variable opening hours of hotels near the railway stations, the docks and the markets. The only pub which deigned to open its door between the hours of four-thirty and six in the morning was the Courthouse, a fact which failed to endow it with any charms except scarcity. Market porters, carters, taxi drivers, lost sailors and solid hard-case lunatics were the only clientele and their wants were easily satisfied by the Courthouse, provided they only desired beer in profusion and sawdust to spit—or sleep—in.

‘Just like ’ome,’ commented Bert. ‘I ’ope this bloke’s ’ere, cos I ’ave to tell you, mate, I’m nearly buggered.’

‘Me too,’ said Cec. He drooped over the bar, ordered two more beers, and asked, ‘You seen Pirates tonight?’

The barman, hands full, gestured with a free elbow.

‘That’s Pirates over there,’ he said, slamming two pots down on the towelling and accepting Cec’s coins. Cec was sober—one of them had to drive and the car was the bonzer new cab which they were both very proud of—and very bored. He never reckoned that he had seen the inside of enough hostelries before, but now he was beginning to wish for his own bed and the undemanding company of his cats. Bert, who had been drinking half the beer which they had had to buy in exchange for information, was staggering.

Cec helped his friend over to the table where a man in a dark cap and watchcoat was staring into an empty glass with mournful intensity.

‘G’day,’ said Bert, grabbing a chair and lowering himself into it with care. ‘You Pirates?’

‘Who wants to know?’ demanded a gravelly voice, proceeding from a face leathery with weather and disfigured with scars. He had the watery, pink-rimmed eyes of the grog habitué, but they were webbed around by the kind of crow’s feet which only came from staring across bright water to unimagined distances. Bert nodded to Cec. They had, at last, found their man.

‘A bloke who wants to do you a good turn,’ said Cec, putting down a pot in front of him.

‘No one ain’t done me one of them since the cook locked me in the stokehole when I went troppo,’ said Pirates, draining the pot in one long, practised gulp. ‘Off Rio, that was. What sort of good turn?’

‘We want to pay you for tellin’ us about the pirates of the South China Sea,’ said Bert, belching behind his hand. Pirates began to laugh.

‘You want to pay me?’ he giggled. ‘I been trying to tell blokes about the pirates since I got back and no one wants to know.’

‘I do,’ said Bert. ‘So does an impatient sheila who’s gonna have our guts for garters if we don’t have the full quid on South China Sea pirates by five this afternoon. Ten shillings to begin with, and all the whisky you can drink.’

‘I reckon that old Father Reilly was right,’ said Pirates reverently. ‘In the end, you get your reward in heaven.’ He waited until the note was in his pocket and the new bottle of whisky, opened under Cec’s censorious eye, was on the table. ‘It was the
Sunming
,’ he began. ‘Captain Foster, South China Navigation Company—British crew, out of Macao. Big ship, too. Three thousand or so tons, two hundred passengers, freight, and—we thought—a safe full of bullion for Honkers. Last year, this was. Good ship, good food. Lot of Chinks in the crew, though, stokers and stewards, and most of the passengers was Chinks. But we searched everyone coming on board for weapons and we checked all the baggage for arms. Them Bias Island pirates are monsters. Run it like a business, you see. Worst of ’em all is the man in tortoiseshell glasses, though Mountain of Gold runs ’im close. She’s a widow. They say ’er ’usband died after a little domestic tiff.