Away With The Fairies (2 page)

‘Just that. You never saw such stuff. Thanks.’ The room was silent except for the soft, soothing noise of a policeman absorbing tea. Phryne was intrigued. Jack Robinson had a habit of quoting Shakespeare, who he considered a good working poet with a word for every situation, but she had never suspected him of being at all precious. And that Chelsea set was worth a small fortune. It was one of the few things that Phryne had retained from her childhood. The only reason her father hadn’t sold it in his indigent days had been that Phryne herself had hidden one of the cups, delighted by the country scene on the side and the fluted edging. Then her father had succeeded to the title, acquired a large fortune (his grandfather had married an American heiress) and had given the set to Phryne with a fine generous flourish. She had restored the missing cup, which tripled its value. Who was Jack Robinson to object to her Chelsea china?

The third draught seemed to have restored some life to the wasted frame of this unappreciative officer of the law. He set the empty cup down gently into its parent saucer. Phryne was slightly mollified.

‘Now, if you’ll not object to my pipe …’ he hinted. Phryne waved a pink-tipped finger. Her cigarette holder described a perfect ellipse.

‘Light up, and I’m warning you, Jack, dear, if you don’t tell me what this is all about fairly soon, I’ll self-combust.’

‘Heard of an authoress called Marcella Lavender? Also known as Rosebud Peachblossom?’

Phryne stifled a giggle. ‘No, never. I’m sure I’d remember the name if I’d ever heard it before,’ she told Robinson. ‘What does she write?’

‘Books for kids,’ said Robinson. ‘Fairies. You know. Little naked flying creatures.’

‘Usually seen over rather good botanical drawings. Yes, I know the kind of thing. I had a flower fairy alphabet when I was small, but I grew out of it rather quickly. A is for Apple-blossom, B is for Buttercup …’ Jack Robinson was nodding his head gloomily. ‘That was one of hers?’

‘Yes. She did masses of them. And her cottage is crammed with pictures of fairies—no, you really have to see it, Phryne. You won’t believe it.’

Phryne noted that Jack had relaxed enough to call her Phryne, which was all to the good.

‘And …’ she prompted.

‘Well, the cook’s assistant took her her breakfast this morning and found the door unlocked and the authoress dead as a doornail. Just keeled over at the table.’

‘Oh? And what makes this a suspicious death?’

‘Nothing in the dying of it. Police surgeon says she died of respiratory failure consequent on possible thrombosis of the pulmonary artery. She was as blue as a cornflower,’ added Jack Robinson, waxing unexpectedly poetic. ‘With pink splotches.’

‘Oh.’

‘But he’ll know more after the autopsy. Thing is, you see, she’d been to see us. Getting threatening letters. Someone threw a brick through her window. Felt she was being followed. Last week she was almost run down by a car. Just managed to jump out of the way in time. No damage except a fright and a pair of ruined stockings. No description of the car and no witnesses. Nothing much we could do.’

‘So you thought she was a dotty old lady,’ said Phryne gently.

‘Yes, well, yes. We get a lot of complaints from people who have a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock.’ Jack’s stubby finger circled near his ear.

‘Away, in fact,’ said Phryne, ‘with the fairies?’

Jack grimaced at the comment. ‘Persecution complex, that’s what they call it. Lots of people have it. And they’re dead convincing.’

‘Until you let them talk some more,’ said Phryne, addressing the flower-filled grate. She did not want to look at Robinson, who would never forgive himself if he broke down in front of a woman. ‘Then it comes out, whatever it is. I was on a train once with a perfectly charming old gentleman who was telling me all about the genealogy of the local gentry and I thought he was quite sane until he informed me that he was the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria and thus the rightful ruler of England. I had to call him ‘Your Majesty’ for five stations until I could manage to transfer into a Ladies Only carriage. Nice man, though. He conferred an earldom on my first-born son.’

‘You’re right,’ said Robinson. ‘And even though she was real irritating, she wasn’t insane. I took her through the story several times. She showed me the notes. She might have written ’em herself, of course.’

‘How did she come to see you, Jack? Poison pen letters aren’t your usual fare.’

‘No, well, she was a distant relative of the Chief, and he put her onto me. I did what I should have done,’ said Robinson miserably. ‘I sent a constable around to examine the house, I told the foot patrol to walk past and see that all was well twice a night, I told her to call me if she got any more notes, and I told her she wasn’t in any real danger. I can hear my own voice saying it. “These poison pen writers sound nasty but they never actually hurt anyone,” I said.’

‘But it’s true,’ said Phryne. ‘They usually don’t.’

‘Not true this time,’ said Jack Robinson, puffing at his pipe.

‘But she died of a pulmonary thrombosis,’ said Phryne.

‘Maybe,’ said Robinson. ‘Maybe she was frightened to death. You should have seen her face.’

‘No, I shouldn’t, not so soon after breakfast. What do you want me to do, Jack?’

‘Come with me and have a look at her apartment. I never saw a place so … so … feminine. I reckon you’d get a lot more out of it than I have.’

‘Being female,’ agreed Phryne.

‘I’m not feeling too good about this,’ said Robinson, in case Phryne hadn’t noticed. ‘I did all the required things, of course, but I really never took her seriously. I never believed her. Now she’s dead …’

‘You’re feeling guilty,’ diagnosed Phryne.

‘I did what I could,’ said Robinson stubbornly. ‘I couldn’t have done any more. Not with no witnesses. But I feel like I owe it to the old chook to at least take a close look at her death. Might be nothing in it. Probably isn’t. But …’

Phryne decided that Robinson in his present mood could occupy the next couple of hours in going round and round in logical circles. Phryne had other things to do. Arrange some parties. Visit a dressmaker. Find out when her lover Lin Chung was expected home from his silk-buying trip to Shanghai. His last letter had mentioned the name of the ship SS
Gold
Mountain
. Odd name for a ship. Phryne wondered if it had lost something in the translation. This would involve a visit to that alarming old woman, Lin Chung’s grandmother. The matriarch of the Lin family lived in a house on Little Bourke Street and, although she accepted the relationship as inevitable, she approved of Phryne in the same way she approved of cholera morbis. Interviews with her were always testing.

Mrs Lin could wait. Phryne poured the detective another cup.

‘I’ll just get dressed,’ she said, patting him lightly in passing. ‘What sort of day is it?’

‘Wet but not cold,’ said Jack Robinson, already reviving under Phryne’s influence. He watched, with affection, the red robe and Spanish shawl flick past him on their way up the stairs and he drank the tea.

CHAPTER TWO

Concealment of illumination in a basket is
beneficial if correct.

Hexagram 36: Ming I
The I Ching Book of Changes

The landlady greeted Phryne at the wrought iron gate in a roughcast wall which would have kept out an invading army. She held out a distracted hand which had a small, pink feathered bundle in it, then almost dropped the dead bird in an attempt to transfer it to her other hand so that she could take Phryne’s.

‘The Hon. Miss Fisher, this is Mrs Needham,’ said Jack Robinson. ‘I’ll take that, Mrs Needham. Miss Lavender’s bird, was it?’

‘Yes, poor little thing, as soon as his mistress went away he must have just piped a little song and then he died. He was on the floor with her. Well, they know, don’t they?’ said Mrs Needham, fixing Phryne with the meaningful look of the true believer. ‘Animals always know, don’t they?’

‘Indeed,’ murmured Phryne. Something was snuffling at her heel. Looking at Mrs Needham, Phryne was prepared to bet that it would be a small, spoiled, insanitary and probably neurotic dog, possibly a Pekingese. She was also prepared to discourage it privily if it showed signs of scrabbling at her silk stockings.

Mrs Needham wore a severe shade of mauve, the colour of Victorian half-mourning. She was about sixty. Her hair had not been shorn in the modern fashion but was secured in a bun which was showing signs of fraying at the edges. Her hands were cold and her nose red, signs of emotion or a defective liver—or possibly hay fever, as her cardigan pockets were bulging with handkerchiefs. She led the way through a small reception room redolent of beeswax furniture polish and into a corridor which opened into a square garden.

The old house had been divided into apartments quite recently. There were still traces of the builders’ occupation: a few drops of paint on the path, a lost stencil lurking in the agapanthus, and a faint but pursuing scent of wet stonework, or was that emanating from the cellar? It had been a big, solid, Victorian house with room for a family of eleven children and twenty servants. Impossible to keep up in these parlous times, when servants would rather work in the pickle factory and most women of high social class knew how to avoid having eleven offspring, or any at all.

‘I inherited the big house when the old Mistress died,’ said Mrs Needham. ‘I was with her at the end.’ She closed her eyes in the conventional gesture of pious devotion. ‘Terribly old she was, no children of her own, and all the grandnephews were killed in the Great War, and her only nephew, too. Captain, he was. So she left it to me,’ said Mrs Needham with an undercurrent of smugness. Probably against spirited opposition from the rest of the family, Phryne guessed, who hadn’t bothered to visit their aged relative while she was alive but became remarkably gerontophilic when she was dead.

‘There was a bit of money, so I had it divided into apartments. Serviced apartments,’ she emphasised, taking out a wet hankie and sneezing. ‘Of course they can do their own cooking, if they wish. But luckily Cook wanted to stay, and I only need a few girls part-time to clean and so on. The gardener left, retired to live with his daughter, so I made his accommodation into the Garden Apartment and Miss Lavender thought it was so beautiful! The first time she saw it she clasped her hands together and told me she’d never live anywhere else in the world.’

Phryne reflected that Miss Lavender had kept her promise, but said nothing. The big house was a respectable and probably expensive place to live. The apartments would be of a reasonable size, not like these modern hatboxes with no room to swing even a very cooperative mouse, and by the scent of lunch preparing, the food would be good. Miss Needham mentioned the rent and Phryne heard Jack Robinson gasp.

‘How long had Miss Lavender been here?’ she asked quickly, to cover the sound. Miss Needham, however, had heard it.

‘I’m sure that it’s a reasonable rate, Detective Inspector, considering the service. Miss Lavender never had any complaints. She lived here from the first. Almost a year I’ve been open. And now a thing like this has to happen. Poor Miss Lavender! She never told me that she had a weak heart.’

‘This is a very nice sunken garden,’ said Phryne appreciatively. It had been laid out by someone who had seen the Boboli Gardens in Florence, or at least pictures of them. There was a fountain made of a series of shallow dishes which tinkled into a pool where fat goldfish swam under the waterlilies at their approach. The concrete walls had been limewashed and set with Della Robbia plaques in blue and white. Marigolds grew all around the edges of a very neat square of lawn. White painted birdbaths and raised pedestals bore lobelia and nasturtiums. There were cane garden seats under awnings made of natural canvas. One cumquat tree rose from a terracotta pot and two bay trees flanked the entrance to the house. Very clean, very Tuscan. One looked for the Medici crest. Someone had devoted a lot of time and care to it.

‘Pretty,’ approved Phryne.

‘Yes. Bit bare, though, don’t you find? Mr Bell in number six asked me if I’d mind if he ‘pottered about in it’—well, gentlemen have their fancies. I said I didn’t mind. The other ladies and gentlemen seem to find it soothing. They have little picnics out here when the weather is suitable. But Miss Lavender was responsible for this,’ she said proudly, taking them along a path which wound far more than necessary and was entirely lined with brightly painted stone gnomes in a variety of poses.

Something was still snuffling at Phryne’s heel, and now she felt the warning nip of teeth. Without looking round, she gave a sharp shove with her foot, and was rewarded with a yelp.

‘Oh dear, I seem to have trodden on your dog,’ said Phryne, as Mrs Needham scooped up a snuffling, affronted, fat, mangy Pekingese which immediately bit her on the finger.

‘He’s upset, isn’t he?’ crooned Mrs Needham. ‘Poor little Ping. Did the lady stand on you? Poor Ping!’

Phryne was suddenly very sorry for Mrs Needham, a sentiment which would have astounded the lady. She said to Ping, ‘I apologise, Ping,’ and got in a faster than light pat before the dog’s reflexes had recovered enough from the insult to snap at her. Mrs Needham seemed mollified but carried the creature with her as she led the way up the stone gnome path to the open door of a cottage which called itself Wee Nooke.

Phryne closed her eyes briefly. No wonder Jack Robinson had winced at a Chelsea tea set. Here was ‘cute’ in unbearable profusion. The apartment was small. It had a table in the bow window, overlooking the sunken garden. There was a sitting area with furniture piled with magazines and what looked like proofs. Behind that was a small kitchen and a smaller bathroom. A flight of highly polished wooden stairs led, presumably, to a bedroom above.

And every surface, horizontal or vertical, was covered in fairies. Bits which could not have fairies painted, embroidered, embossed, stencilled, hung or depicted on carpet were painted a peculiarly penetrating shade of fuschia pink. Puppet fairies hung from the ceiling. Gauze wings brushed the wall in the breeze from the open door, sounding like moths. The air was heavy with the scents of rose, lavender, almond blossom, and was that gin, perhaps?