Murder on a Midsummer Night Page 16

  ‘Saving his voice,’ explained Mr. Wright. ‘He’s Ariel tonight.’

  ‘Oh, ah,’ said the spare man. He held out a hand to Dot. ‘I’m Archibald Lawrence, as this oaf does not seem to be willing to introduce me.’

  ‘Dorothy Williams,’ said Dot, flustered by being so abruptly dragged out of her theatrical river. The hand was smooth and cool.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Mr. Lawrence, dropping into a chair and reaching for the gin. ‘Filthy weather, isn’t it? Your employer has handed over a cheque of special generosity, bless her, so we are at your service. About time someone took notice of poor old Paddy. I always felt he had a hidden sorrow.’ His drink vanished almost instantly, as though he had a secret siphon.

  ‘Hidden bottle, more like,’ said Mr. Wright. ‘Another half, Archie?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Archibald Lawrence.

  Dot looked at the two gentlemen. One thin, one comfortably stout. Mr. Lawrence was shabby but clean, Mr. Wright more prosperous. Mr. Wright had abundant silver hair and Mr. Lawrence almost none. But they were similar. Both had the sonorous diction of those who had to be heard at the back of the stalls. And both had the excellent skin, hardly lined at all, of those who never saw the sun and who wore greasepaint every night of their lives, plus matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

  ‘We’re trying to remember who were the strangers at old Paddy’s funeral,’ prompted Mr. Wright.

  ‘Ah, yes, well I recall the day, it was so cold I had two coats on. And, yes, Albie, you are correct, for a change. Two men, coat collars turned up, hats pulled down. And a woman in a black cloth coat with a draggled rabbit fur around her shoulders. It had been rained on, you know that look. Shabby. Didn’t speak to any of us.’

  ‘Do you think they were all together?’ asked Dot.

  ‘Interesting. I can see them clearly, you know. Good memory and it hasn’t departed like other things. I would have thought the men were together and the woman alone. What do you think, Albie?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Wright slowly. ‘I suppose so. I didn’t pay much attention to them.’

  ‘Well, I did,’ said Mr. Lawrence with some asperity. ‘Actors’ Benevolent couldn’t find any relatives and we had to lash out for the whole funeral. I thought I might sting them for a contribution if he was their connection, but they slipped away so quickly that I never got to put the arm on them. But I had a brief rummage through my papers and I found the book for that funeral. We ought to be able to eliminate all the theatre names, and the ones that are left will be the strangers.’

  ‘Assuming that they signed in,’ said Mr. Wright. ‘Well, furnish it forth, dear fellow, and let’s have a squiz.’

  Mr. Lawrence produced a folder, nicely edged in black, with the details of the funeral on the first page and a scribble of signatures on the second, facing page. Mr. Wright took a pencil, sharpened it with a slow deliberation which made Mr. Lawrence quiver with impatience, and they began to tick off the known attendees.

  ‘That’s Serge, he was so Russian, poor fellow. And there’s me, and you, little cramped letters.’

  ‘Better than that scrawl of yours,’ snorted Mr. Lawrence.

  ‘Made signing autographs a lengthy business,’ preened Mr. Wright. ‘But you didn’t have that trouble, of course. Here’s Althea, and here’s Thomasina, and McKenna Jordan—God, she was gorgeous; those long, long legs, dark eyes and that famous poitrine—excuse me, Miss Williams.’

  Dot nodded, unoffended. She knew what a poitrine was. Bosom would have done as a translation, and why shouldn’t an actress have a famous bosom? Mr. Lawrence was hastening into speech.

  ‘Even so, she was a fine actress when she was older. I saw her do a Gertrude that would blow your hat off. Absolutely exuded “it”. To Johnson’s Hamlet—of course, they were close, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Mr. Wright. ‘I mean, I heard rumours…’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ reproved Dot.

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. Well, there’s McKenna and right next to her—you see?—old Tommy himself. Then there’s…’

  They went on. It had been a well-attended funeral. Dot’s attention wandered to the walls, plastered with posters for benefit nights. So much work, just to amuse the world! A world that ate toffee and drank ginger pop and probably dropped paper bags in the stalls…

  ‘Aha!’ said Mr. Wright. ‘Here they are. Everyone else accounted for, you agree, Archie?’

  ‘I agree,’ said Archie, and poured himself another drink, adding lumps of ice.

  ‘They are rather hard to read, so we’ll give you this document to show your Miss Fisher, if we can have it back for the archives, please?’

  ‘Of course,’ Dot agreed.

  ‘The names seem to be T. Johnson, S. Barton, and this might be Gaston, or Geston, maybe? Blasted pen has spluttered.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dot. ‘That’s wonderful. Miss Fisher will be very grateful.’

  ‘She has already expressed her gratitude very handsomely,’ said Mr. Wright. ‘Anything else we can do for you and her?’ His gesture offered her the whole theatre and everything in it.

  ‘What do you recall about Mr. O’Rourke? What was he like?’

  ‘They say he was a fey creature when he was young,’ said Mr. Lawrence. ‘I never knew him then. By the time I saw him he was old and doing bit parts in Shakespeare. Beautiful voice. Remnants of a career, of course. They say he did a very good Hamlet in his time. But the drink got him. Occupational hazard in our line of work, eh, Albie?’

  Mr. Wright looked solemnly over the rim of his glass. ‘Certainly. It’s only when we’ve safely retired that we can tope a bit. Or a lot, of course. Bottoms up, dear boy! I’ve still got the figures to do.’

  ‘Leave them until tomorrow,’ suggested Mr. Lawrence.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of fine cigars here to go with the drinkies. Haven’t chatted with you for an age, Albie.’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ agreed Mr. Wright readily. ‘Wretched weather destroys my arithmetic, anyway.’

  ‘Talk about fading memory,’ said Mr. Lawrence. ‘No one to claim them, see, so we kept them. If your Miss Fisher is investigating, these might be helpful.’

  Dot took charge of a small box. Then she took her leave of the two actors, and heard, as she went down the stairs, the rollers of theatrical gossip surging afresh above her.

  She had to speak to herself sternly. She really, really wanted to go back and listen.

  ***

  Simon parked the motorbike and scratched his head. Would she be waiting? Had she got his message? He had been refused at the shop by that dreadful old woman. She had turned into steel since Augustine died. Despite the heat, he shivered. He didn’t want to ask the terrible woman who kept the Atkinson house. Last time she had showed him the ulcer on her leg.

  He saw her coming down the street. She ran forward into his arms.

  Chapter Twelve

  I am all the daughters of my father’s house,

  And all the brothers too.

  William Shakespeare

  Twelfth Night

  Miss Fisher was still toying with the remains of her mixed fruit and nuts and musing on her recently departed luncheon guest when Dot came back from the city, flushed with triumph, bearing spoils of war, and more than a trifle dishevelled.

  ‘It’s blowing a gale out there!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ll just run upstairs and take off my hat, Miss Phryne. How did you manage with the professor?’

  ‘I fear that I have been managed rather expertly,’ Phryne replied, eating another muscat. ‘Don’t run, Dot. Walk slowly. How about lunch?’

  ‘Oh, I forgot,’ said Dot. ‘I’ll ask Mrs. B for a sandwich or something. I’ve had such a morning. Back soon.’

  She deposited the folder and the little box on the table. Phryne did not touch them. They were Dot’s revelation.r />
  Instead she walked into the smaller parlour, found her encyclopaedia and looked up Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard. Why that mark of significance? she wondered. Black beards must have been fairly common at the time. Which was circa 1680. Born in Bristol. His ship was called Queen Anne’s Revenge and he ruined lives and stole fortunes around the Caribbean. Privateer during the War of the Spanish Succession, which Phryne had never understood. He didn’t seem to have actually killed anyone, Phryne noticed as she read on. Just held up their ships and looted them down to the smallest coin, earring and gold tooth. Blackbeard because he filled his beard with pistol wadding and lit it when aroused. He lived on Nassau, where the Governor was in his pay. When offended, he had once blockaded Charleston. Finally he retired full of bad works to Ocracoke Inlet to put his sea boots up and there he was attacked by men of the Royal Navy under Lieutenant Maynard, who sneaked in and ambushed him. ‘He drank damnation to me and my men, calling them cowardly puppies, saying he would neither give nor take quarter.’ He was thereafter shot four times, stabbed more than twenty times and died in a sword fight with Lieutenant Maynard, who eventually managed to cut off his head. End of career of notorious pirate. Supposed, on not very good evidence, to have left buried hoards all over the Caribbean.

  There was a sentence from a book which she could not quite find, itching at her memory. She relaxed and allowed her mind to drift. Then she had it. ‘Don’t know Captain Flint? You’ve heard of Blackbeard? Blackbeard was a child to Flint.’ Treasure Island, of course. Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Phryne didn’t like pirates. She had never considered them romantic. One of them had removed Lin Chung’s ear, and had come damn close to killing him. And Phryne, of course. Were ancient pirates more romantic than modern ones? Probably not. Parading Teach’s head—complete with beard—around to prove that he was dead was just a touch barbaric, though it was instantly convincing.

  Could anyone really believe in pirate treasure in this year of grace 1929? Of course, with enough kif and absinthe, one could believe anything; fairies, pelmanism, politicians. Now what had those wasters and bounders said about their spirit guides? ‘Zacarias’, yes, well, one of Blackbeard’s crew was called Israel Hands. And ‘look to the West’, which didn’t mean anything. From the right point of view, everything was to the west. And what did one make of the otherwise honest Augustine Manifold carrying out such a thumping great hoax? As soon as it was exploded there would go his commercial reputation, even if the police didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with fraud.

  Phryne shook her head. She could, regrettably, easily see Gerald Atkinson fitting out a boat of some kind—probably a lugger—and heading off to the Caribbean to search for pirate treasure. Probably dragging his protesting clique with him. As long as someone else did the sailing, the provisioning, the navigating and the cooking. What she couldn’t see was Gerald Atkinson actually finding any treasure.

  She shelved the problem as Dot came back, freshly rinsed and wearing a loose beige cotton shift and sandals. Outside, the north wind clawed at the shutters.

  ‘I had such a lovely talk with Mr. Wright and Mr. Lawrence,’ said Dot, accepting a glass of iced orange crush. ‘Ooh, how nice! It’s so hot outside. I spent a pound out of special expenses on gin and tonic for them,’ she told Phryne.

  ‘A pound well spent,’ Phryne replied. Mrs. Butler refilled her own glass of orange drink, made by juicing a lot of oranges and diluting the juice with sugar syrup and soda water. The lemon version was also very good. ‘Make sure I top it up. One must always have an emergency fund. Pass me my purse and I will do so now, before I forget and you are too polite to remind me. Well, what did they say, these superannuated actors?’

  ‘Lots of things, but these are the important points. Patrick O’Rourke was never very successful, though he played Hamlet when young.’

  ‘As did our Patrick,’ said Phryne.

  ‘He died in poverty and misery and no one could quite understand how he gassed himself,’ said Dot, still skirting the suicide taboo. ‘But he was buried properly and there were three strangers at his funeral. Here are their names,’ she said, producing the document with all the pride of Ember producing a dead rat. ‘The gentlemen sorted through all the names and these are the only three that they did not know. The others were all actors.’

  ‘Good, Dot, good!’

  ‘I can’t read them very well but you might do better in a good light. Looks like T. Johnson, S. Barton, and Geston or Gaston. Two men, they had the impression that they might have been together, and a woman in a shabby black cloth coat—on a freezing cold day.’

  ‘I’ll examine it with the magnifying glass later. And what is in this box?’

  ‘Patrick O’Rourke’s possessions, Miss. They didn’t have anyone to give them to, so they kept them. They’re very honest, in a way. Very innocent, too, in their way,’ observed Dot.

  Phryne gave her an approving smile. ‘You are very wise, Miss Williams. Shall we open the box?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Dot, and fetched the scissors.

  The box had been sealed with a couple of sealing-wax wafers and a piece of sticking plaster. As she opened it Dot could smell alcohol and scent; eau de cologne and greasepaint, of which Mr. Wright had been redolent. In it was a wodge of papers, a small package, and a gold watch. Phryne examined the watch, pulling over a light.

  ‘Cheap, gold foil, not working,’ she said, giving it a delicate wind and hearing the works ratchet and fall silent. ‘Could possibly be fixed, I suppose. Give me that butter knife, Dot, and I’ll open the back.’

  Dot, who had been unfolding very delicate old paper, obliged and Phryne gave the secret cleft in the pocket watch a light twist. The back popped open.

  ‘Ah,’ said Phryne. ‘What do you have there, Dot?’

  ‘Letters,’ said Dot. ‘From a girl called Kathleen who is expecting a baby. From Ballarat.’

  ‘I see,’ said Phryne. ‘And here I have a miniature of the very same Kathleen.’

  ‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ asked Dot, looking at the colours, still fresh after all this time, protected by the closed watch case.

  ‘It’s her,’ said Phryne. She levered the picture out and on the back was written Mo Cridhe.

  ‘My heart,’ said Dot. ‘It means “my heart” in Scotch, which I suppose is also Irish.’

  ‘We’ve got the right Patrick O’Rourke, then. What’s the playbill?’

  ‘He was playing Hamlet in Ballarat. At the Theatre Royal. Lord, what were the dates?’

  Phryne fetched her notebook.

  ‘He was playing Hamlet on the dates that she was writing to him from that place,’ said Dot. ‘And he never came for her.’

  ‘There might have been a lot of reasons for that,’ said Phryne. ‘He might have felt that she was better off with her family than following an impoverished actor around the traps, hungry, unsettled, sleeping in lodgings.’

  ‘He might have been wrong,’ said Dot fiercely. ‘He broke her heart.’

  ‘So he did,’ said Phryne. ‘And his own as well. Why else should he kill himself on the anniversary of her birth? No use being cross with the dead, Dot. What’s in the other little packet?’

  Dot opened it with difficulty. It had been sealed and sealed again, as though it was very precious.

  ‘It’s a guinea,’ she said, holding it up to the light. ‘A golden guinea. And he was so poor, and never spent it!’

  ‘There’s writing on the paper,’ Phryne pointed out.

  ‘Can’t read it,’ said Dot. ‘It’s in Irish, as well. “Tá sí milse ná seo rud eile.” Whatever that means.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Phryne, ‘you shall go and find me an Irish priest who can read it for us.’

  ‘All right,’ said Dot. ‘Father Kelly at St. Mary’s will know. And I’ll light a candle for his betrayed girl when I’m there.’ She thought a moment. ‘A
nd for him, as well,’ she added reluctantly.

  ‘Stout fellow,’ approved Phryne.

  Mr. Butler shimmered into sight, advising Miss Dot that her lunch was laid out in the breakfast room and that Detective Inspector Robinson had called and asked for an interview with Miss Fisher.

  ‘Good,’ said Phryne. ‘Have some lunch and then some rest, Dot dear, this weather would fell an elephant. You’ve done very well,’ she added, as Dot went out to nibble her chicken sandwiches with banana ice cream to follow and Phryne welcomed her old friend into the parlour, where he fell into a chair with a groan. His unremarkable face was flushed red and he appeared to be steaming.

  ‘Mr. Butler will help you off with your jacket,’ she said sympathetically. ‘Shirt sleeves are good enough for me, Jack dear. Then you will drink a pint of cool soda water and then a large amount of beer. You have to replace the water first or you get drunk intolerably fast, and now that I am here in summer I have begun to understand this Australian insistence on cold beer. Only ice cold beer could enable anyone to survive in this intolerable climate.’

  Mr. Butler had discorporated in his inimitable way and now reappeared to supply the soda water, which Jack Robinson engulfed without blinking, then a cold beer from a bottle reposing in a large metal ice bucket on which clouds of condensation were forming. Jack Robinson drank the beer in one long, satisfying draught, excused himself to the downstairs washroom, and came back much paler and wetter, having apparently put his head under the tap.

  ‘She’s a killer outside,’ he said, taking his second glass more slowly.

  ‘So Dot says.’ Phryne was on her third glass of orange crush. The heat was leaching fluid out of her body, she felt, as though hungry for her fleshly moisture to alleviate the extreme dryness of the air.

  ‘That really hit the spot,’ said Jack Robinson. ‘Didn’t know about drinking soda water first, though. That’s a bonzer notion. Seen plenty of blokes down a couple of cold beers when they were hot and suddenly they’re roaring. They say it’ll be cooler tomorrow, though. This north wind comes straight off the desert. When it changes it’ll take the edge off the heat.’