Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher

by Kerry Greenwood

  ‘You may go, but you are on bail. You may not leave the state or change your address without notifying us of your whereabouts. Do you understand that?’

  ‘I understand,’ said Alastair, with a smile that showed all his teeth, and he turned and left the police station.

  Detective-inspector Robinson lifted the telephone and requested Miss Fisher’s number.

  ‘I don’t think that it’s disasterous, but it certainly casts a lot of doubt on my theory,’ said Phryne when the exasperated policeman reached her. ‘Have you examined his handwriting? He would have had to sign himself out. And are you sure of the police witness?’

  ‘No, Miss, that I am not. Boy’s a fool. However, identification is identification.’

  ‘Wasn’t anyone else there?’

  ‘Yes, but the sergeant is on his honeymoon, I can’t call him back.’

  ‘No, but you can send him a photograph, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll do that. And I’d keep out of Alastair’s way, Miss Fisher, if I were you.’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ said Phryne crisply. ‘Get weaving with the photo. See you soon,’ she added, and hung up.

  The cadet was very impressed that the detective-inspector could swear for so long without repeating himself.

  Bert in later years said that breakfast at Miss Gay’s was the single most miserable experience of his whole life. ‘Not sad, mate,’ he explained. ‘But down right starving mean stone the crows and starve the lizards dirt miserable.’

  The table was laid, as before, with cruet and mismatched plates, and Mr Henry Burton’s special dishes.

  They sat in a hungry circle around a vat of horrible porridge, as thin as library paste, scorched and lumpy, while Mr Henry Burton said grace in an unctuous voice. Bert refused the clag, but the others ate voraciously. Mr Burton was breaking his fast on new rolls, hot from the oven, cherry jam, and butter. He had a pot of brewed coffee next to him. Bert accepted a plate of incinerated egg-powder and bacon so burned as only to be of professional interest to a pathologist. He tried to make a sandwich with his two pieces of stale white bread and marge, but the bacon broke as he touched it with the knife.

  ‘Can’t you give a man a feed?’ asked the tradesman, holding out a plate on which reposed a four-days’-dead egg and bacon of transcendant carbonisation.

  ‘I can’t take your bacon back to the kitchen, Mr Hammond,’ snapped Miss Gay, slapping at Ruth’s head as she passed. ‘You’ve bent it.’

  Bert drank a cup of tea and chuckled.

  After breakfast, the workers departed, and Mr Burton showed signs of going out. He took his hat and his stick, donned a fleecy-lined overcoat, and yelled for Ruth.

  ‘Call me a cab, girl.’

  Bert grabbed the moment. ‘I’ll get you one, sir, he said civilly, and stepped into the kitchen, where Miss Gay kept the telephone.

  ‘Ruthie!’ he whispered, ‘we’re taking Mr Burton. Here’s a card. You go to this house if she hurts you again.’

  Ruth nodded, stowed the card in her pocket, and Bert slipped back into the hall.

  ‘At the door in a moment, sir,’ he said, and went down the rickety front steps to look for Cec, who was due directly.

  The bonzer new taxi pulled up, and Bert opened the door for the gentleman, closed it and jumped into the front seat.

  ‘Here!’ protested Mr Burton, ‘I didn’t ask you to share my taxi!’

  Bert grinned. ‘It’s my taxi — well, half mine. This is my mate, Cec. Say hello to the nice gent, Cec.’

  Cec muttered ‘hello’ and kept his eyes on the road.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ asked Burton.

  ‘A lady friend of ours wants to see you real bad.’

  ‘Which lady?’

  ‘The Honourable Phryne Fisher, that’s who.’

  ‘Is she a fan? I hope that she does not want her fortune told. I don’t tell fortunes, you know.’

  ‘No, she wants some mesmerism done,’ said Bert.

  They were on Dynon Road and fleeing like the wind for St Kilda. If he could keep this oily old bastard talking, that would be all the sweeter.

  ‘Yair, some of that hypnotising what you done on the Halls, they say you used to be great.’

  ‘Used to be? My dear sir, I am the Great Hypno. You yourself have seen my powers.’

  ‘Yair, I remember. You made shielas as stiff as boards and laid ’em between two chairs. But I don’t reckon you could put anyone under that didn’t want to be,’ said Bert easily, and Henry Burton bristled.

  ‘Oh no? You, for instance?’

  ‘Yair, me, for instance.’

  ‘Look into my eyes,’ said Henry Burton, ‘and we will see. Look deep into my eyes.’

  Bert looked. The eyes, which were brown and had seemed hard, were now soft, like the eyes of a deer or a rabbit; deep enough to drown in. They seemed to grow bigger, until they encompassed all of Bert’s field of vision; the voice was soothing.

  ‘You hear nothing but my voice,’ said Burton softly. ‘You hear nothing but my words, my voice, you do nothing but as I command you. You cannot move,’ he suggested softly. ‘You cannot lift your hand until I tell you.’ Bert, terrified, found that he could not lift his hand. He was frozen in his half-turned position, seeing nothing but the eyes, and wondering vaguely why he could not hear the engine of the cab or any other noises. Bert began to panic and vainly struggled to move so much as a finger.

  Cec stopped the cab outside Phryne’s house and got out. He opened the door and commented in his quiet, unemphatic tone, ‘If you don’t release my mate, I’m gonna break your neck.’

  Mr Burton flushed, leaned forward, and snapped his fingers in Bert’s face. ‘You feel rested and refreshed,’ he said hurriedly. ‘You are awake when I count ten. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, you are free now, four, three, two, one. There.

  ‘Just a demonstration,’ said Mr Burton airily, and got out of the car and climbed the steps to Phryne’s front door.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘It’s time for you to answer now,’ the Queen said looking at her watch. ‘Open your mouth a little wider when you speak. .’

  Lewis Carroll Alice Through the Looking Glass

  ‘Ah, this must be the Great Hypno!’ exclaimed Phryne, as Mr Butler conducted her guests into the parlour. ‘This is my companion Miss Williams, and we are delighted to meet you. Do sit down. Would you care for a drink?’

  The Great Hypno smirked and bowed, gave his coat and hat to Mr Butler, and took a seat, accepting a whisky and soda.

  ‘You wanted to see me, Miss Fisher? What about, may I inquire? It must be pressing, since you had me kidnapped. I am pleased that my fame is still strong, I have been retired from the stage for five years.’

  ‘Yes, why did you retire? Bookings not too hot?’

  The man bridled, tugging at his glossy forelock. ‘Certainly not,’ he said indignantly. ‘I found another. . er. . line of work, which was so engrossing that it required me to devote all my time to it.’

  ‘Yes, I have always thought that it must be a tiring profession, procuring.’

  Bert, who had remained near the door, nodded as though he had had his suspicions confirmed. Cec watched the scene with a still face, but his fists clenched.

  ‘You take the likely ones from orphanages,’ stated Phryne. ‘And the repulsive Miss Gay adopts them. Such a charitable woman! I’ve spoken to three institutions where she is well known. A lady with a social conscience, they said, those stupid people, a lady who takes on the hard cases and bad girls, and finds them suitable employment. That is with the help of her tame mesmerist, who makes sure that the difficult ones don’t raise any dust. Eh, Mr Burton?’

  ‘I have never been so insulted in my life!’ huffed the stout man, fighting to get out of his armchair.

  Phryne laughed. ‘Oh, come now, in all your life? You mustn’t have been listening. Don’t get up, Mr Burton,’ she added, revealing the dainty gun which she was aiming at him. Mr Burton blanched.
He dropped back into the chair and extracted a silk hankie and mopped his face.

  ‘Come on, admit it and don’t waste my time!’ snapped Phryne. ‘Or I shall have an accident with this little gun, you see if I don’t! How many girls? Talk!’

  ‘It must be. . oh. . thirty-five or so. Yes, thirty-five, if you don’t count Jane.’

  ‘Thirty-five,’ said Phryne stonily. ‘I see. Where did you sell them?’

  ‘Various places. I supplied the country, mainly. They mostly came from the institutions well broken in, you know, little tarts in all but profession, and it wasn’t necessary to hypnotise many — a waste of my art, as I told Miss Gay. All it generally needed was to explain the situation, that they were going to make a lot of money, from something more pleasant than domestic labour, and most of them agreed.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘When the girl was in the correct frame of mind, we would arrange for her journey, wiring ahead to the buyer.’

  ‘How much did you ask for each girl?’

  ‘One hundred and fifty pounds. Good girls, most of them. Though I only got a hundred for that little bitch from the Emily MacPherson. Of course there was a certain wastage — always is in that profession — suicide, alcohol and drugs, mainly, and of course venereal disease, but all I sent were clean and relatively new, my buyers know that.’

  Phryne swallowed. Dot stared, open-mouthed. Cec reached for the nearest decanter and took three deep gulps, passing it to Bert. Mr Burton, full-fed and shiny, sat back, amused by their reaction.

  ‘Why are you so shocked? It is your nice society which demands that there should be whores and there should be nice girls. While there are nice girls there must be whores — all that I did was supply them.’

  ‘Being a whore should be a matter of choice,’ said Phryne. ‘And what choice did you give them? Did you ask Gabrielle Hart if she wanted to be raped and drugged? Now, Mr Burton, I have a proposition for you.’

  ‘I thought that you might have,’ smiled Mr Burton.

  ‘You remember Jane?’

  ‘Yes, whining little scrap, with her books and her Ruthie and her grandma.’

  ‘Yes. Jane. You hypnotised her, did you not?’

  ‘I did. She was on the train to Ballarat to join a very exclusive house there, run by a generous friend of mine, but she never got there. I put her on the afternoon train, and she was found on the night train. She must have got off somewhere, but I can’t explain what went wrong — she had explicit post-hypnotic instructions.’

  ‘I want you to give her back her memory,’ said Phryne quickly.

  ‘And if I refuse?’

  ‘Then I fear. said Phryne, waving the little gun. Mr Burton observed that her attitude was negligent and her purple silk afternoon dress positively decadent, but her wrist did not droop and her finger was on the trigger.

  ‘Bring her in,’ he said, coughing into the handkerchief. ‘I will try. But she may not respond. I tell you, there has been another intervening event, a trauma of some sort.’

  ‘Did you always have sex with the girls, Mr Burton?’ asked Phryne.

  He answered absently, ‘Oh, yes, Miss Fisher, it was part of the treatment, and part of the reason why I stayed in the business. There have to be some compensations for retiring from the stage. But this one, I recall, squealed, and then I recalled that the Ballarat brothel paid a fifty-pound bonus for virgins, so I relented. I didn’t like to hurt them, you know.’

  Bert made a choking noise and wrung his felt hat to ruin. Phryne gave him a severe look.

  ‘So the trauma was some other thing, not a sexual assault?’ asked Phryne evenly.

  ‘Oh, yes, something quite unexpected,’ said Mr Burton, unconscious of any irony. Dot went out and fetched Jane, who came in warily, not knowing Mr Burton but not liking him, either. Phryne concealed the gun, and took the girl’s hand.

  ‘Jane, dear, you sit down here and look at this gentleman. You are quite safe. I am here, and I will not leave you.’

  Ember stalked off Jane’s shoulder and onto Phryne’s lap, curled into a fuzzy black ball and purred. Jane relaxed. Mr Burton leaned forward, placing one thumb on her forehead.

  ‘You are sleepy, Jane, are you not?’ The magnificent voice was as deep as organ music. ‘Are you asleep, Jane?’

  Jane’s eyes were open, but her voice was cold and characterless, like the voice of a ghost. ‘I am asleep.’

  ‘What were this man’s commands to you?’ asked Phryne, and Jane twitched a little at the unfamiliar voice, but answered: ‘To forget what he did to me.’

  ‘Jane, that command is removed,’ said Mr Burton, eyeing the pistol barrel within a foot of his face. ‘You are free and released from all commands, from me or anyone else. From the time that I count from ten you will begin to remember, and by midnight you will recall everything that has happened. Do you understand, Jane?’

  ‘I understand that I am free,’ repeated the mechanical voice, and even in deep trance it had a different quality. ‘I understand that I am not under your command anymore.’

  ‘Ten, nine, eight, stretch yourself, Jane, seven, six, five, four, blink, girl, you feel rested and refreshed, and you will recover your memory slowly until at midnight it will be complete, three, two, one, awake!’ He snapped his fingers in Jane’s face, and she blinked, focused, and drew back into Phryne’s embrace with a cry.

  ‘It’s him! The man who. . hurt me. He scratched at the window and made me let him in. Oh, Miss Fisher, don’t let him take me away!’

  Phryne hugged Jane, and then transferred her to Dot, while Mr Burton stood up and smiled his satisfied smile. Dot clutched a frantic Jane and was scratched by a frantic Ember, who blamed her for being dislodged from Phryne’s knee.

  ‘Well, Miss Fisher, I have done what you wanted, shall we discuss payment?’

  Cec growled, and Bert took two steps forward.

  ‘Payment?’ he shouted. ‘You filthy hound, I’ll break your bloody neck!’

  ‘One moment,’ said Phryne, holding off Bert with a gesture. ‘Are you willing to give yourself up to the police?’

  ‘Really, Miss Fisher, are you joking? And if you let your hired ruffian lay a finger on me, I’ll have an action for assault and battery. I am going to walk out of that door a free man, Miss Fisher. Do you know why? Because not one of those thirty-five would testify against me. They all love me like a father, the little fools, and in any case seven of them are dead.’

  ‘You are not going to walk out that door, do you know why?’ asked Phryne, smiling unpleasantly, ‘because there is a rat in the arras. Did your shorthand writer catch all of that, Jack?’

  ‘Yes, Miss, got it all down pat,’ said the detective-inspector stepping out from behind the curtain. ‘I bet you weren’t expecting to see me again, eh, Henry?’

  ‘Robinson!’ gasped Henry Burton. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘I’ve had you on suspicion for years, you bastard,’ the detective-inspector smiled his sweetest ‘come-along-with-me’ smile. ‘I’ve got the testimony of nine of those little girls, once their trance wore off, but it wasn’t enough, as there were great gaps in their memory. They couldn’t remember how they got into the grips of a portly, respectable gentleman with beautiful eyes. Now I know that Miss Gay got ’em from the asylums, it won’t be too tricky to connect it all up so that even my chief will have to believe it.’

  Bert and Cec seized the Great Hypno.

  ‘Just one punch,’ pleaded Bert. ‘Just the one.’

  ‘No, I gotta get him back to headquarters. He’s a mine of information. He knows all about the vice rings and all the white slaving in Victoria. I don’t want him damaged!’

  Diving under the arms of the struggling men as quick as a bird after a worm, Jane launched herself out of Dot’s embrace and flew at Mr Burton, fingers hooked into claws. She was mad with release and the intolerable rush of returned memory, and Ember, springing from her shoulder, clawed at whatever foothold he could reach as Cec restrained the st
ruggling child and hauled her away from the ruin of Henry Burton’s face.

  Ember fled to Cec, as all cats did, and tucked his small spade-shaped head in the crook of the tall man’s arm. Jane, her fury spent, buried her face in his shoulder, and he held her head down so that she should not have yet another horror to burden her memory.

  Razor-sharp, kitten claws scrabbling desperately for a hold had done what no poor twelve-year-old whore had managed. They had dimmed Henry Burton’s magical gaze.

  Shocked, Bert released the man, and Mr Butler, who had been an enthralled spectator throughout, telephoned for an ambulance. The room was silent, except for Jane’s sobbing and the muted bubbling snuffle of Burton, who had clamped his hands over his face. The ambulance came in ten minutes, during which time no one moved or spoke, and Robinson and his shorthand writer and his prisoner went away. The front door shut. Still no one moved. Cec stroked the kitten and Jane with equal gentleness, and Dot drew a deep breath and stood up.

  ‘Well, that’s all over, and a very nasty end, and you can’t say that he didn’t deserve it, the horrible man. Mr B., ask Mrs B. for some tea, will you? Miss, you might like a brandy? Mr Cec, can I offer you a drink? A cup of tea?’

  Her brisk voice brought everyone to. Phryne rummaged for a light for her cigarette. Jane sat up and wiped her face on Cec’s shirt. Bert sat down and rolled a smoke with hands that hardly shook at all. Cec smiled up at Dot.

  ‘Thank you, Miss, I’d like a beer, and so would Bert, and then a feed. Poor bloke’s been living on cabbage stalks and offal for days.’

  It is an index to how much better they were all feeling after a few minutes that when Ember removed his head from the crook of Cec’s arm and began to wash his front feet, no one shuddered at the thought of what he was washing off.

  ‘Mate, mate, we was forgettin’.’ exclaimed Bert, slamming down an empty beer glass. ‘What about little Ruthie?’

  ‘She’s in the kitchen,’ observed Mrs Butler tartly, refilling the glass with ease and skill. ‘She’s been here for ten minutes, but I couldn’t interrupt you. Such goings on in a lady’s house! But it all seems to be over now. Ruth is well, Mr. . er. . Bert. She says that Miss Gay beat her again, and she has a beautiful black eye, poor mite — and she ran away to Miss Fisher like you told her. She’s in the middle of a bath, or I’d call her in. Is this horrible business settled, then?’ she asked in a worried undertone, but not low enough to escape Phryne. Mrs Butler moved aside to allow Jane and Ember to rush to the kitchen. Cries of delight greeted them from the Butler’s bathroom.