Murder on a Midsummer Night Read online

  ‘But I’ll see you at Augustine’s house later,’ she promised. ‘I’ve had enough religion for one day, that’s all.’

  Phryne felt the same as she got into the big red car and leaned back against the leather upholstery. Mr. Butler diagnosed exhaustion and said over the noise of engines starting, ‘Basket next to you, Miss Phryne. Mrs. B’s compliments.’

  Phryne opened the basket and found a flask of cognac, a thermos of strong coffee, a paper bag containing coconut macaroons and a big white napkin. In a wash bag reposed a clean handkerchief, a little crystal bottle of smelling salts, a small spray bottle of eau de cologne and a comb and mirror. Phryne combed her hair, sprayed herself with eau de cologne, poured and drank two cups of coffee and ate a macaroon during the journey across town. For Augustine was going to rest with his fathers in the Melbourne General Cemetery in Carlton. Funeral processions were interesting, she found, not having ridden in an Australian one before. Traffic allowed them to pass. People stopped in the street. Men took off respectful hats as the cortège passed, and Phryne fought down a strong impulse to wave regally. She screwed the cup back onto the thermos and stowed all the belongings away. She felt much better.

  ‘Your wife,’ said Phryne, as the big car turned into the gates, past the Gothic keeper’s cottage, ‘is a jewel among women.’

  ‘I have always thought so, Miss Phryne,’ Mr. Butler said complacently, aware that the said wife had also packed him a basket, containing a thermos of sweet milky tea and a packet of cold lamb sandwiches with homemade chutney. He knew a place where he could park in McIlwraith Street in order to enjoy his picnic in peace. Mr. Butler did not like the idea of all those dead people lying there and envying him his lunch. He bought an armload of blue daisies from the flower stall, gave them to his employer, and took the big car away.

  It was a rather nice cemetery, Phryne thought, hoisting her bouquet and walking slowly in procession behind the coffin carriers. The monuments tended to the large and sad—broken columns, spilt urns, weeping women—without the element of macabre which affected places where people had been buried for longer. Phryne recalled Kirkwall in Orkney, where all graves, even those of children, were ornamented sternly with skulls and bones. She noticed the huge monument to Burke and Wills and the grave of King, the only survivor. She sang ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’, the phrase on the grave of a singer. She veered aside from the procession to lay some flowers on the grave of the miner Thomas Beaconsfield and, further along, the last resting place of that Queen of the Gilbert and Sullivan stage, Dorothea Curtis. Though properly she should have had violets, the diva’s favourite flower. Pity that so many of her clients were dead, but that was the way of the detective trade.

  And life had improved, she considered, as she read Erected by William Witheridge in remembrance of his beloved wife Johanna who departed this life aged 31 years. Also to the memory of his five infant children requiescant in pace. No longer did a woman have to lose five infant children before she gave up the ghost herself, probably with a sigh of relief. Phryne read the next stone. Sacred to the memory of James…for he was a promising and engaging boy whom it has pleased Divine Providence to take from his fond and beloved parents after two days’ illness. Sweet innocence fond lies here—lamented by a mother dear Who hopes by faith in endless joy To meet again her lovely boy.

  A red rose had climbed over little James’ stone and almost obliterated his dates. It was blooming in hot, scented, vibrant life, and Phryne was suddenly moved almost to tears. She hurried on, embracing her flowers.

  The weather was getting into its stride. The sombre morning was clearing, the mist lifting, the sun emerging and striking sharp and hot. Phryne was glad of her hat. She noticed that the group of Augustine’s friends were clinging close together. Priscilla Barton had rejoined them and was walking along beside her brother James, clutching a vial of smelling salts in her hand.

  Phryne wondered about the state of mind of a woman who would wear a red sari—decorated with golden sequins, indeed—to a funeral. It might be a defiant gesture. Looking at Miss Reynolds’ pretty, vacuous face ornamented with the red caste mark, Phryne did not think she exhibited enough character to make such a gesture. The young men Adler and Turner were beginning to perspire in their suits, though Gerald Atkinson remained as cool as several cucumbers in a cold frame. Miss Blanche White stalked beside Miss Barton in a long-legged ballet dancer’s glide which she was maintaining even over grass and cobbles. A notable feat. And Miss Veronica Collins brought up the rear, complaining about the heat and fanning herself with the funeral card.

  Implacably mournful, flanked by two equally elderly ladies and followed by Eliza and Lady Alice, Mrs. Manifold, scorning assistance, stumped along behind the coffin of her only son. Somewhere Phryne had seen depictions of three old women like these. As she came in sight of a statue of Michael the Archangel with his flaming sword, she remembered where. In a book about Icelandic legends. The three sisters who controlled the fate of men, living in a cave with only one eye and one tooth between them. Edmund Dulac’s depiction of the Norns.

  Sobered, Phryne reached the end of the journey, especially for Augustine Manifold. The coffin was lowered, extra prayers said and Phryne cast some of her flowers into the grave. This custom did not seem to have travelled across the seas and she attracted some puzzled glances from the friends. Mr. Palisi, however, approved.

  ‘A pretty notion,’ he said to her as the priest and the mourners left and a couple of muscular men began to fill in the grave.

  ‘I thought so,’ she replied. ‘A very good funeral, Mr. Palisi, conducted just so.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Fisher.’ He accepted the praise as his due. Then he removed his tall hat, wiped his bald head with an irreproachable black-bordered handkerchief, bowed and took his leave.

  Phryne headed for the McIlwraith Street exit, bestowing flowers as she went. No sense in wasting them.

  In affectionate remembrance of Robert Bettargh who departed this life at 28 years of age. He was an affectionate husband and a kind father—the rest of the stone was weathered illegible. Just above the moss, Phryne could read See all things else decay.

  She gave him some flowers.

  Just as she was leaving the Catholic section, she noticed an unassuming stone on which the name was almost rained away. She knelt on one knee to read it and recoiled as if the stone had harboured a hidden tiger snake.

  Patrick O’Rourke, the stone declared. A fellow full of the most excellent jest. Born 15th June 1846 Co Limerick died 25th May 1914 Melbourne.

  If this was the Patrick O’Rourke—the birth date was right and the inscription could only be for an actor—he had lived a long time with his guilt at abandoning poor Kathleen. If he had any guilt, of course. He might have just been an ordinary young man, pollinating his way through the flowerbed of maidens like any drone with no regard for consequences. Twenty-fifth of May? It rang a bell. And might be significant, Phryne thought…Yes, she had recalled it. He had died on Kathleen’s birthday.

  Phryne sat back on her heels and contemplated the stone. Then she scraped away the moss at the root and read: This stone erected by the Actors’ Benevolent Society and a few sorrowing friends. Was the Actors’ Benevolent Society still extant? Would they know anything about this Patrick O’Rourke? In any case, since it seemed that he had abandoned the girl and the child, would that help at all? He had never married and had a family, it seemed plain, if the Benevolent Society had to bury him. Had he mourned for his lost love all his life, never finding another, as she had mourned for him and the baby?

  Patrick will come for me, the girl had written in her small, clear handwriting, perfectly sure. Perfectly betrayed. Perfectly abandoned. Patrick had never come to rescue her.

  Phryne did not give Patrick any flowers.

  Just as she reached the gate, however, she turned back and threw the rest of the spicy stems in front of the worn stone. />
  ‘It might not have been your fault,’ she told him. ‘And you were very young.’

  She found Mr. Butler waiting for her as she came out into tree-lined McIlwraith Street and blinked at the sudden green.

  ‘Home?’ he asked, replete with tea and sandwiches.

  ‘Mrs. Manifold’s house, if you please,’ Phryne replied. ‘I’ll just finish up the coffee, but not the cognac. Though I’ve had a bit of a shock in connection with my other case, so maybe just a sip or two. From the look of that gaggle of Augustine’s intimates, I’m going to need my wits about me.’

  ‘You’ll get to the heart of it, Miss Phryne,’ he assured her. ‘You always do.’

  Phryne found this factitious but comforting.

  ‘So far,’ she said, pouring out the last of the coffee and adding a few fluid ounces of brandy. ‘So far, Mr. Butler, I have been lucky.’

  ‘Lucky’s as good as right, my grandpa used to say,’ he returned equably.

  Phryne did not wish to debate this, and cast her mind back to the coroner’s scanty inquest and the shamefully small amount of evidence requested from Augustine’s friends as to his last night on earth.

  They had all been at dinner together, they had said, Augustine and all seven of them; both Bartons, White, Adler, Turner, Reynolds and Collins. At Gerald Atkinson’s house. Augustine had seemed more cheerful than usual. He was talking about a deal he had made which would make him rich. He had repeated what Gerald had told Phryne; he was going to buy his mother a house and give her an annuity and live by himself. He wouldn’t tell any of them what this deal was, or even whether it involved a painting or an artifact. None of them had any idea what it was. They said that he was customarily secretive and loved to surprise them with some new thing.

  Their evidence, Phryne remembered, had been as close fitting as a jigsaw puzzle. No one had joined the party, no one had left. They had farewelled Augustine together and watched him walk away to his death. And they had stayed together for the rest of the evening, only parting at four in the morning when cars and taxis had been summoned. Neat. But perhaps a little gaudy.

  She leaned back and closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again she felt better. Cemeteries were lowering to the spirits. Her spirits had now recovered. The big car had stopped outside Mrs. Manifold’s house, where it was going to be a squeeze stuffing all those people into the parlour. Phryne gave her hair a last flick and got out and Mr. Butler settled down with his pipe and the Hawklet to wait. Miss Fisher, to add to all her other virtues as an employer, did not object to the smell of pipe smoke.

  Rather sensibly, Mrs. Manifold had not tried to hold Augustine’s wake in her house, which looked small. She had spread a buffet in the shop itself. There was a funeral wreath on the door and the knocker had been tied up in a black glove; all the proprieties were, it appeared, to be observed. Phryne went in and was immediately collared by the woman in the red sari. Stephanie, Phryne remembered from her briefing, Stephanie Reynolds. One hand was clutching her arm and the other hand was forcing a glass of port into her grasp. Phryne grasped it, as spilled port would not improve her grey suit. Phryne only drank very good port and her first sniff of this one told her that it did not fall into that category, being the noxious grape-derived fluid supplied to the drunks of St. Kilda at threepence a pint and otherwise known as ‘dog’s nose’, for some reason lost in the mists of lexicology. However, there was probably a pot plant around tough enough to survive a libation or two.

  ‘Miss Reynolds,’ she said politely to her assailant. Pale eyes met hers and straggling brown hair was shaken away from an undistinguished face.

  ‘Oh, you’re Phryne Fisher, aren’t you, the Hon. Miss Fisher, I ought to say. I met you at the opening of that play, now what was it called? I can’t remember,’ said the woman in the sari blankly, scratching at her caste mark. This meant that she released Phryne, which was a relief. ‘But it was very clever and you were there with a beautiful Chinese man in the most gorgeous suit and James said…I don’t recall what James said but it was very funny.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter in the slightest,’ Phryne assured her truthfully. She didn’t care what anyone said about the association of Phryne and Lin Chung, especially James, who was leaning against the white-painted wall, looking exquisite and drinking his third glass of the revolting port. That appeared to be the sum total of his social skills but Phryne supposed that he might have hidden depths.

  Gerald Atkinson was sitting by himself in the inner room, weeping discreetly into a pale blue handkerchief. It was probably pure coincidence that it was Dulac blue.

  ‘Priscilla and Blanche are so upset,’ Stephanie informed Phryne, looking rather wildly around the room. ‘They liked Augustine. And Gerald, of course. I’ve told them and told them that he has just been translated unto another and higher sphere and we should be able to get him by planchette in a few weeks but they didn’t take it at all well. The master says…’

  At this juncture Phryne, while preserving the perfect appearance of a lady who is listening closely to the wisdom of the master, tuned out like a Marconi apparatus and considered the room. She had heard a large number of the more theosophical of her acquaintance talk about their masters and she didn’t need to hear it again. For one thing, they all sounded the same and they all demanded the same: total subservience. Phryne thought that she must have missed the vital subservience enzyme or vitamin or whatever it was that made people rush forward to surrender their will to someone else. Miss Reynolds was a natural slave and presumably relished her slavery.

  Mrs. Manifold and her two sisters were drinking a colourless fluid which might be water or might be straight gin, as they had every right to do, and looking at a huge album of photographs, probably of Augustine as a baby on a sheepskin rug. Priscilla Barton and Blanche White were a picture in contrasts, one looking like a female tramp and the other like the veiled woman in Sapper, who at any moment might start diffusing exotic perfumes and stealing the Naval Treaty. But they were both weeping, Priscilla noisily and Miss White quietly. Rachel Phillips was sitting with Sophie and Cedric Yates, trying not to sip the disgusting port and talking, by the gestures, about furniture. The plump girl, Veronica Collins, was patting Priscilla on the shoulder, and Luke Adler and Valentine Turner, brunette boy and blond boy, were propping up either end of a display case like bookends. From their mutual expression, which was almost identical, they were embarrassed and nervous and had decided that immobility would best preserve them from social errors. Rabbits in headlights laboured under the same misapprehension.

  Phryne thought that the person she most wanted to meet was the rubicund, white-haired professor, and she detached herself gently from Stephanie Reynolds and drifted in his direction. He was looking in a glass case. His lips were moving. Translating, perhaps. Phryne joined him and leaned over the case at his side. He was reading a scroll.

  ‘I don’t know the language,’ she observed. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Aramaic,’ he said. ‘Hello! I saw you at the funeral. Don’t drink that ghastly stuff,’ he warned her. ‘It would bleach a black dog.’

  ‘I’m just looking for a pot plant,’ she assured him.

  ‘Try that vase of lilies, they couldn’t be more dead. I’ve a notion that if we wander over to the bereaved mother we might get a snifter of something better.’

  ‘With a double dose of bitter aloes,’ said Phryne, tipping her glass as instructed. The deceased lilies rustled sadly. Professor Rowlands looked regretful.

  ‘True. Poor Augustine, it does seem unfair. You’re Miss Fisher, aren’t you? You know that he was on the verge of a wonderful discovery?’

  ‘Yes, but no one knows what it was.’

  ‘You’re looking into his death, aren’t you? Well, I can tell you what Augustine was expecting to find.’

  ‘Yes, but will you?’ asked Phryne.

  He smiled down at her,
looking like a younger, slimmer version of Father Christmas. ‘I will,’ he told her. ‘It was treasure.’

  ***

  ‘So how’d you manage on your little holiday in the prison camp?’ asked Curly.

  Vern grinned. ‘Did a bit of a perish for terbacca until Bill came up with a lurk.’

  ‘How? You can’t get anything into the camp, it’s guarded and them guards ain’t got no sense of humour.’

  ‘Nah, well, you know how Bill’s always looking at insects and worms and snakes and vermin? He found out that scarab beetles always like cooler sand and they can follow a path. So he lay down all casual-like at the fence, drew a line in the sand under the wire, and set his little beetle mates trundling under it, each one with a cig attached by a thread. All I had to do was take off the cig and send the beetle back. When one went on strike he’d get another one.’

  ‘He’s a clever bloke,’ commented Jim.

  Chapter Nine

  I hate ingratitude more in a man

  Than lying, vainness, babbling drunkenness,

  Or any taint of vice whose strong corruption

  Inhabits our frail blood.

  William Shakespeare

  Twelfth Night

  Phryne had no time to ask any more questions. She gave the professor her card and asked him to call on her at his earliest convenience and stood respectfully to listen to Mrs. Manifold speaking her valediction of her lost child.

  ‘He was a good baby,’ she said, her rough voice creaking as though she had torn her throat with screaming. ‘He was a clever boy, always loving. He worked hard and when his father died he worked harder. He made me happy every day that he lived.’

  ‘He was a good fellow,’ said Gerald. ‘We all loved him. We’ll all miss him.’

  Priscilla and Blanche wept afresh.

  Miss Collins said in an unexpectedly beautiful, operasinger’s voice, ‘He was such a nice man.’

  ‘He was a shrewd and honourable trader,’ added Rachel Phillips.