Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher

by Kerry Greenwood

  Ruth twisted her dirty apron around a grimy hand and gulped back a sob. Miss Gay sailed away down the stairs, and Bert felt in his pocket.

  ‘Here, take this,’ he whispered, pressing half-a-crown into the girl’s chapped hand. ‘And not a word to a soul, eh?’

  Ruth nodded. Her brown eyes were bright and shrewd.

  ‘You ain’t one of her usual lodgers,’ observed Ruth curiously. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Go downstairs and get a broom and sweep this floor,’ ordered Bert in a loud voice, and Ruth scurried down and returned with an article which could technically be called a broom, though it had scant three bristles left. With this, patiently, for she was a diligent girl, Ruth began to sweep the floor, while Bert explained what he was doing in a fast undertone.

  ‘There’s this girl, see, her name is Jane Graham. The Hon. Phryne Fisher has got this Jane in her care, because she’s lost her memory — I mean, Jane has. Your Miss Gay turned up there this morning and demanded Jane, saying that she was her niece. Now my Miss Fisher reckons there is something wrong, and she sent me to investigate it. Do you know Jane?’

  ‘Yes. She’s my best friend, Jane is. She was here for about six months, after her grandmother died. First her mother died and then her grandma, and her father’s a sailor and he ain’t never come back from his last voyage, so Missus took Jane.’

  ‘Out of kindness?’ asked Bert artlessly.

  Ruth laughed, a small slave’s laugh. ‘Kindness? Her? You’re joking. She took Jane like she took me, for the work she could get out of us. But Jane was funny.’

  ‘How, funny?’

  ‘She had nightmares,’ said Ruth. ‘See, her grandma hanged herself, and Jane found her — in this house, it was, by the window upstairs, I durstn’t go there. Then there was the mesmeric man.’

  ‘The who? Look out, she’s coming back. Hook it, Ruthie,’ warned Bert, and shoved the girl out of his room.

  ‘Come back with a broom that sweeps,’ he said roughly, and Ruth ran down the stairs, passing the Missus. Miss Gay slapped at her, but Ruth was quick, and the blow missed.

  ‘Girls!’ snorted Miss Gay. ‘Everything all right, Mr. .’

  ‘Smith,’ said Bert. ‘Bert Smith.’

  ‘I’ve brought your rent book, Mr Smith.’

  ‘Thanks. Send up that girl with a real broom, will you? There’s plaster all over this floor — a man could break his neck.’

  Miss Gay departed, and Bert shut the door. His room had no outlet except the doorway, and he felt stifled. At some time a leak had started in the roof, and water had trickled down the wall, leaving a great rusty stain like a grinning face.

  ‘A real palace,’ observed Bert sardonically, and sat down gingerly on the army cot to wait for Ruth.

  It was half an hour before she returned, this time with a reasonable broom, and she had been crying. Bert observed the marks of tears on the child’s face and said, ‘She been knocking you about?’

  Ruth nodded. ‘She told me not to talk to you, but I’m going to,’ she said defiantly. Bert shut the door and leaned on it, occluding the keyhole in case Miss Gay should decide to eavesdrop.

  Ruth took the broom and began to sweep noisily, and Bert asked, ‘What was this man?’

  ‘The mesmeric man, the hypnotist. On the halls, he was. At the Tivoli. He tried to hypnotise me, but I just pretended. He mesmerised Jane lots of times. He could make her think that ice was a red-hot poker, and after he touched her with the ice a red blister would form on her arm. He made her think that she was talking to her grandma, and telling her how the missus beat her, and then the missus would punish her when she came round. It was horrible,’ confessed Ruth, sneezing in the plaster dust. ‘But I was glad it wasn’t me.’

  ‘He still here?’ asked Bert, shocked, and Ruth nodded.

  ‘He’s her fancy man,’ she said gravely. ‘That’s what the lodgers say. He’s got the best room and the window and all, and he gets all the good food — bacon and eggs and rolls and that.’

  ‘You hungry?’ asked Bert. ‘Where did she get you?’

  ‘From the orphanage. I’m not her flesh and blood! She adopted me. My parents are dead. I wish she hadn’t,’ said Ruth sadly. ‘I liked the orphanage. The nuns were letting me teach the younger kids their ABC. I didn’t want to leave, but she took me. . there,’ she added in a loud voice, ‘I’ve swept up all the plaster, Mr Smith.’ Ruth’s hearing, sharpened by pain, had picked up the approach of Miss Gay before Bert had heard her. He opened the door, and Ruth went out, carrying the broom and the dustpan. Bert emerged into the passage.

  ‘I’m just going out for a couple of hours, Missus,’ he said flatly, and walked down the stairs and out at the hall door to where Cec had been lurking in the unkempt garden. Bert felt that he had been dipped neck-deep in sewage.

  He found the cab, with Cec in it, around the corner in Charles Street, and Cec started the engine.

  ‘To the pub,’ ordered Bert. ‘I never, in all my born days, saw such a place as that. It’s filthier than a pigsty and God alone knows what would happen to a girl.’

  ‘So, we don’t go back,’ said Cec, stopping the cab outside the Mona Castle, and Bert shook his head.

  ‘Oh, yes we do,’ he said grimly. ‘Something nasty is going on in that place, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it.’

  ‘What was Miss Fisher not telling us?’ asked Cec, when they had glasses in their hands, and Bert rolled another smoke.

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m beginning to guess, and I don’t like what I’m thinking, Cec, I don’t like it one bit.’

  Bert told Cec what he was thinking, and they bought another beer.

  ‘So I’ve taken a room there, Miss,’ reported Bert on the pub telephone. ‘And I gotta go back tonight. I want to meet this hypnotist chap.’

  ‘Yes, you do want to meet him,’ agreed Phryne. ‘But be careful, won’t you? They sound like very unpleasant people.’

  ‘So am I,’ growled Bert, baring his teeth. ‘Me and Cec is very unpleasant people, as well.’

  ‘All right, my dear, but keep in mind that I want to know all about the man before you pulp him. You have guessed about Jane, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yair, Miss, I guessed. As soon as I heard about the mesmerism.’

  ‘So I want him alive,’ said Phryne urgently. ‘He might be able to give her her memory back!’

  Bert reluctantly accepted the justice of this. ‘All right, Miss, I see what you mean. Me and Cec will be gentle with him. And there might be another waif, Miss. Orphan called Ruth. That bitch don’t treat her right — beg pardon, Miss.’

  Phryne sighed. Suddenly her life seemed to have become over-populated.

  ‘Oh, well, one more won’t make any difference, bring her along. When?’

  ‘Termorrer, Miss, if we can manage it, and you might have your tame cop standing by.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Phryne, and Bert felt a chill go through his spine, the remembered over-the-top thrill.

  ‘All right, Miss, I’ll see you then, goodbye.’

  He hung up, paid the publican for the call, and returned to Cec.

  ‘She said that we can take the little girl as well,’ he commented. ‘Your shout, mate. No alcohol allowed in me new place of residence.’

  Phryne stared at the photograph which had been delivered. Had this man mesmerised Gabrielle Hart? It was time that Miss Hart was found. She would go to see Klara in Fitzroy.

  Bert went back to Miss Gay’s house, and found that dinner was on the table. Cec had returned to their own lodging house to explain Bert’s absence to their excellent landlady.

  The dining vault was as cold as a Russian military advance and not as well provisioned. The great table, which was made of mahogany which had not been polished in decades, was laid with a spotted off-white cloth and a harlequin range of dishes. Quite of lot of them were cracked or chipped, and the silverware was Brittania metal and not clean. Bert observed that one place was set with clean, new dishes an
d real silver, and in front of it was the cruet, the bread and the butter.

  The five other occupants of the house were already seated. They seemed a forlorn collection, with all the spirit crushed out of them by a combination of life, circumstances, and their landlady. Bert thought of his own Mrs Hamilton, all dimples and a dab hand with pastry, and envied Cec his dinner. There were two old men, vague and possibly senile; a young man in the last stages of consumption, who was as thin as a lath; a labourer or small tradesman with a missing arm, who seemed to retain some individuality; and a sleek and roly-poly gentleman in spotless evening costume, waistcoat and white tie, and probably evening pumps, though Bert did not look under the table. His manicured plump white hands cut the bread and buttered it as though there were no starving men at the same table. He had brown eyes like pebbles and that thick, pale skin which speaks of too much greasepaint at an early age. Miss Gay came in, bearing a tureen of frightful soup (which the gentleman did not take), and Bert was introduced.

  ‘This is Mr Smith,’ announced Miss Gay, dispensing pig swill. ‘Mr Brown, Mr Hammond,’ she said gesturing at the old men, who made no sign—‘Mr Jones,’ to the young man—‘Mr Bradford,’ to the tradesman, who nodded and spooned up his soup as though he was used to the taste. ‘And allow me to introduce Mr Henry Burton.’

  ‘I saw you once,’ commented Bert, pinning down an elusive memory, ‘on the Tivoli. You were on the same bill as that Chinese magician, the one who used to catch bullets in his teeth.’

  Mr Burton bowed. ‘The Great Chang; he died, poor fellow, doing that bullet trick, a few years later.’

  Miss Gay served what smelt like a tasty chicken soup to Mr Henry, from his own small saucepan. The other lodgers lacked the spirit even to glare at this arrant favouritism. Mr Henry had a wonderful voice: rich, deep, persuasive, a vocal instrument perfectly wielded. Bert remembered the act which he had seen — a man behaving like a chicken, a woman stretched stiff as a board between two chairs. It had been very impressive. What was the great man doing in a dump like this? Surely he could not dote upon the appalling Miss Gay?

  Ruth came in to remove the soup plates, and to hand out dinner plates, which were also mismatched and chipped. Miss Gay brought in congealed gravy, fatty, depressed roast beast of some sort — Bert suspected horse — and potatoes as hard as bullets. The lodgers munched their way uncomplainingly through this detestable repast, while Mr Henry Burton dined on a pheasant in redcurrant jelly and winter broccoli.

  Pudding was a floury suet thing with very little gooseberry jam. Even the old men could not eat it. Mr Burton had water biscuits and stilton cheese. Bert drank a cup of hot water in which three tea-leaves had been steeped, and went up to bed. Most of the lodgers did the same. Bert reflected, as he lay down in the creaking cot, that he had been more comfortable on the hills among the dead men and the Turkish snipers.

  Phryne dismissed her taxi in Gertrude Street and emerged into the cold, wrapping her furs around her and snuggling her chin into the sumptuous collar of red fox. She was uncertain as to where she should begin in this rough place, in search of Gabrielle Hart.

  She had a photograph of the girl. She looked again on the thin, unsensual, plain face, beaky nose and deep eye-sockets, a generous mouth. This young woman was not pretty, and would be consequently easy to seduce by flattery. She was sixteen.

  By arrangement, Phryne met the unsettling Klara in a tea and sly-grog shop on the corner.

  ‘Phryne! Come and buy me some tea,’ called Klara. She was a small, thin woman dressed in a gym slip. Her hips and breasts had never developed adult curves; she looked like a pre-pubescent school girl. She was twenty-three, lesbian, and very acute.

  Tea was purchased. Phryne liked Klara, but found her company worrying. No one hated the whole male sex, absolutely and without exceptions, like Klara. She was a very successful whore, and her tax returns usually came in above three thousand pounds a year.

  The tea-shop was cold. Klara was wearing only her gym slip and a ratty overcoat; her skinny legs were bare and muddy. Phryne huddled into her coat.

  ‘Aren’t you cold, Klara? Have some of this disgusting tea.’

  ‘Oh, I’m cold all right, but that’s what the punters pay for, ain’t it? I’ll be warm enough when I get home. Show me the photo.’

  Klara drank the luke-warm tea and considered.

  ‘I ain’t seen her, but that don’t mean she ain’t here. We’ll start at the end of the street and work our way down. Lucky it’s such a crook night; no one’ll be out pounding the pavements if they can avoid it. You equipped for trouble, Phryne?’

  Phryne nodded. Her little gun was loaded and in her pocket.

  ‘All right. Come on, love. Bye, Jack!’

  A figure shining with grease looked up from the chip fryer and grinned.

  ‘This is the first. The other two only deal in chinks. Hello, Alice. Got a friend with me tonight. Seen this girl?’

  ‘Hello, Klara,’ said the big woman in purple satin uneasily, shooting a sidelong glance at Phryne. ‘No, I ain’t seen her, she ain’t one of mine.’

  A languid girl, wearing only a stained silk petticoat, looked in on the mistress.

  ‘The gent in number four is passed out,’ she said casually. ‘Better call the boys and put him out. I don’t like his breathing; he’s gone purple and is puffing like a grampus. Hello, Klara! What are you doing in this abode of vice?’

  ‘Hello, Sylvia. Looking for this girl.’

  Sylvia pushed back a mop of bleached curly hair and considered Phryne.

  ‘You don’t look like one of them Soul Rescue people,’ she commented. ‘What do you want her for?’

  ‘I want to take her home,’ said Phryne. ‘Her father is worried about her.’

  ‘Jeez, I wish I had a father to worry about me.’

  ‘Do you know her, Syl?’

  ‘Is there a reward?’

  ‘There might be.’ Klara consulted Phryne with a look.

  ‘Yair. Well, she’s the new one in Chicago Pete’s. Better watch out, Klara. They ain’t nice people. Saw her this arvo. Seemed dazed. She ain’t been there long. Chicago Pete’s girls always look like that.’

  ‘Drugged?’

  Syl shrugged admirable shoulders under the drooping silk. ‘Maybe.’

  Phryne folded a five-pound note and thrust it into Sylvia’s hand. She and Klara regained the street.

  ‘Chicago Pete?’

  ‘Yair. A yank. They say he was a gangster, but they’ll say anything on this road. Come along, there’s the entrance.’

  Phryne and Klara lurked, surveying the respectable dark-stone entry of a two-storey house.

  ‘How do we get in? And can we get her out?’

  Klara grinned, showing unexpectedly white teeth between blistered lips. She felt in her shabby pocket and produced a knife.

  ‘Even Chicago Pete knows not to muck about with me,’ she hissed. Phryne wondered what elemental force she had let loose on Gertrude Street and decided that Gertrude Street could look after itself.

  ‘Which way shall we go in?’ asked Phryne.

  ‘Front door,’ decided Klara, and led the way up the respectable stone steps to a thick, closed door.

  On this she knocked what was evidently a coded series of taps and it creaked open. A flat-faced individual was behind the door and stared unspeaking at the guttersnipe and Phryne in her furs.

  ‘Well?’ he asked in an American rasp.

  ‘You new?’ asked Klara scornfully. She came up to his second waistcoat button.

  ‘Yeah, I just got off the boat, why?’

  ‘I’m Klara, get Chicago Pete for me, willya?’

  ‘Now why should I do that?’

  ‘Because if you don’t know me, Pete does, and he’ll knock your block off if he misses me; we’re pals, Pete and me.’

  The doorkeeper let them into a well-kept hall and lumbered off up the stairs.

  ‘Pals?’ asked Phryne, noticing that the street-side windows were barred.<
br />
  ‘Yair, pals. He says I remind him of his little sister. He’s as queer as a nine dollar bill, Pete is. Here he comes. Gimme that photo and let me do the talking.’

  Chicago Pete was a ruin; huge, damaged. His face might originally have been comely, but it had been beaten and twisted out of true as though an angry child had wrung a wet clay head between temperamental fingers. His eyes were dark, and as flat and cold as a slate tombstone.

  ‘Klara! Why haven’t you been here for a week, little Miss?’ The voice was lovely, soft and rich with a Southern accent.

  ‘I been busy,’ said Klara. ‘I got a proposition for you, Pete, and I want to do you a favour.’

  ‘Come in here,’ he ushered them into a room which was frilled and shirred in pastel shades, like a Victorian boudoir. ‘I know you don’t drink, little Miss, but I have lemonade. And maybe a good Kentucky bourbon for your friend, eh?’

  Phryne accepted a glass and Klara sat on the edge of a table, exhibiting her thin legs splashed with mudstains. They affected Chicago Pete strangely.

  ‘Why don’t you wear some of them nice clothes I bought you, Missie? You make me sad, looking so bare.’

  ‘Business,’ snapped Klara. ‘Listen. We want to buy one of your girls. This is my friend Phryne; she’s acting for another party, and we don’t want no trouble.’

  ‘Which one?’

  Klara handed him the picture. Chicago Pete’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Her? You can have her. The cook reckons she’s under a spell.’

  ‘What, that black monster in your kitchen? What would he know?’

  ‘You mind your tongue, Miss. The doctor, he’s a New Orleans man, a jazz-man, a voodoo priest. He knows a spell when he sees one. She ain’t worth nothing, that doll. And I paid. .’

  He stopped, calculating what the market might bear. Phryne smiled. She did not mind what she paid. Mr Hart could afford it. And she was interested in the spell.

  ‘Dope?’ she asked, and Chicago Pete shook his awful head.

  ‘No. Or if it is, it ain’t like no dope I’ve ever seen. I’ll get them to bring her down. Wait a moment.’