Murder on a Midsummer Night Page 2

  Dot had chosen the suit and was now replacing Phryne’s mended stockings in her drawer. She had also allotted the most mended for this afternoon’s excursion. The other thing which junk shops had were a plethora of hosiery-destroying snags.

  ‘Well, Dot dear, we have a suicide to investigate and a junk shop to visit. Would you come with me? You know how I value your domestic knowledge.’

  ‘Yes, Miss, if you like,’ said Dot. ‘But I don’t know anything about paintings and things.’

  ‘No, but you know the difference between an old piece of cloth and a new one,’ said Phryne. ‘And you know a flat iron from a potato masher, which I don’t. Here’s the young man,’ she said, handing over the photograph.

  ‘Never make the cinema his career,’ considered Dot. ‘But it’s not a bad face.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Phryne. ‘And he loved his mother and swore he would never leave her.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dot. Her education in the stranger byways of love had been startlingly augmented by employment in Miss Fisher’s household. ‘You think he was…’

  ‘Maybe. But perhaps he never found a girl to equal his mother,’ Phryne commented. ‘Now there’s a strong-minded woman. She says he wouldn’t have killed himself.’

  ‘People always say that,’ said Dot, picking up strewn garments. Phryne always marvelled at the way they just fell limp into her hands and then threw themselves into perfect folds.

  ‘Yes, but she made a good point. He was found drowned, in an overcoat with pockets full of stones. But he could swim like a fish, she said. If you can swim you wouldn’t choose drowning.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Dot, who considered water an alien element to be entered only at the very edge and then only up to the knees.

  ‘Because when you learn to swim, sooner or later you get in above your head and swim for the surface and take one breath of water before you get out, and it hurts, Dot, like you wouldn’t believe. Plus you spend the next hour choking and throwing up and feeling as though someone has beaten you across the ribs with a rubber hose. Those who say drowning is a nice peaceful death are lying.’

  ‘And no one has come back to tell us that it is true,’ declared Dot.

  Phryne chuckled. ‘Exactly. Mrs. Manifold is right in saying that anyone who can swim would not try drowning as a suicide method. There are so many others—hanging, shooting, throat cutting, poisoning…’

  ‘Miss!’ objected Dot, hugging her armful of scarlet and gold cloth.

  ‘Well, well, not to offend your sensibilities, Dot dear, I will just say that there are a thousand exits for those determined on self-slaughter.’

  ‘It’s a mortal sin,’ said Dot, shivering.

  ‘To Catholics, yes. I didn’t ask about Augustine’s religion. Even so, Dot, some Catholics have killed themselves. And some coroners have brought in Death by Misadventure or Suicide While the Balance of the Mind is Disturbed so that they can be buried in sacred ground.’

  ‘But they have to be mad,’ said Dot. ‘Don’t they? To want to die?’

  Phryne looked at her companion fondly. Dot had been starved and badly treated and at her wits’ end, and her response had been to consider homicide, not suicide. Of all suicidal subjects, Dot was the most unlikely. And a stalwart fellow traveller for this journey, which might prove harrowing.

  Why had she agreed to accept the task? Perhaps because of Mrs. Manifold’s unrelenting belief. Or perhaps—was it that Augustine was the same age as Phryne? Or was she remembering a suicide she had tried to prevent, a long time ago?

  Dot called her attention to the state of her shoes, and Phryne shelved the matter for later consideration.

  ‘Lunch,’ she said. ‘Then a little research on some artists, and then ho for the relics.’

  ***

  Two soldiers surveyed the landscape. There was not a lot to survey. It was limestone, picked out in a sickly yellow, with sandstone outcrops.

  ‘When we first came here, Vern,’ growled Curly, reaching for his tobacco pouch, ‘I thought it was the driest desert, worse than back o’ Bourke, worse than the great Artesian, dry as a lizard’s gullet.’

  ‘And now?’ asked his companion, pushing an enquiring horse’s nose gently aside. ‘Give over, Ginge. We’ll find some water soon.’

  ‘Now I reckon it’s worse,’ said the first, lighting his cigarette with a sulphurous fume. ‘It’s a flat, stony, waterless vision of hell, that’s what it is.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Vern.

  Chapter Two

  Lay up not for yourselves treasures upon earth,

  where moth and rust doth corrupt and thieves

  break through and steal…For where your treasure is,

  there shall your heart be also.

  Matthew 6:19–21 The Holy Bible

  The shopfront was modest. Phryne knocked at the bright green door with the firm hand of one who is expected and was admitted by Eliza.

  ‘Mrs. Manifold is lying down,’ she explained. ‘It took a lot out of her, talking to you. I said I’d show you around and she said you could see anything you wanted, she has no secrets. I say, Phryne, isn’t this strange? I’ve never helped investigate a murder before. It’s quite exciting.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ answered her sister. ‘Let’s have a look around. Dot, can you help me here? Poke about and tell me what his stock is worth.’

  The shop had a very clean plate glass window with an internal shutter. Dot moved this back against the wall and fastened it. The bright day poured in, hard-edged, making all the goods seem old and shabby, the beams dancing with dust motes. It was the kind of light never seen in Europe, harsh and strong. Whenever Phryne saw it she thought of spring cleaning. It was this summer radiance which had always triggered off the scouring reflex in her mother. Then it was down with the curtains and soapsuds everywhere. Her nostrils remembered the sour smell of newly washed wooden floors. Eliza was struck with the same memory.

  ‘Washtubs,’ she murmured. ‘Why am I thinking of washtubs and soap bubbles?’

  ‘Spring cleaning,’ replied Phryne. ‘Come along. To work.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Eliza. ‘You used to tell me stories when we were banished to the front step, out of the way of all that scrubbing.’

  ‘That was uncharacteristically nice of me,’ replied Phryne, unwilling to reminisce. Eliza took the hint and pottered away to examine the household goods laid out on tables. Dot ruffled through a pile of folded cloths and observed, ‘Lots of tapestries. Aren’t they beautiful? Laid up in camphor, not napthalene. No moth has laid a tooth on any of them.’

  ‘These dishes are the same,’ said Eliza. ‘Though not a set amongst the lot. All whole and not chipped or cracked, but a harlequin collection. Most of them are good,’ she said, turning up a cup to show the Royal Doulton mark on the base.

  ‘Just the place to find a replacement for that cup the temporary kitchenhand smashed after our big dinner party,’ said Phryne. ‘People love truffling through mixed goods.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dot. ‘My sisters do the junk shops and secondhand dealers every fortnight. On a Saturday. Can’t see it myself. I’d like all new things, if I was buying, not something which someone else has used.’

  ‘When you get your own house, Dorothy, will you furnish it all new?’ asked Eliza, carefully checking for silver marks on a series of partly polished dishes.

  ‘Oh, yes, Miss Eliza. Woolworths if I have to, until I can afford something better. Anyway, cheap china’s the best. Things get broken, and if you can replace it by paying sixpence, no one gets upset when something smashes.’

  ‘A good philosophy,’ said Eliza. ‘These silver dishes are all silver, Phryne. No Britannia metal or E.P.N.S.’

  ‘What’s E.P.N.S?’ asked Dot.

  ‘Electro-plated nickel silver,’ explained Eliza. ‘A lot cheaper than real silver but eventually the silver c
oating wears off. What have you got over there, Phryne?’

  ‘Cutlery,’ said Phryne. ‘Knives and forks and soup spoons. All, as you say, silver. This is a very expensive junk shop. Looks like the others but the goods are definitely above average.’

  ‘And no prices,’ said Dot. ‘Usually there’s a sign saying something like “Anything on this table threepence” and I can’t see any price tags, either.’

  ‘No, this shop was run on personality,’ said Phryne, feeling a rising respect for the commercial acumen of the deceased. ‘Ladies would come here and bargain for their Spode saucer or their Morris dishtowel. It would be the high point of their week and I just bet Mr. Manifold left his mother well off. It’s set out like an ordinary second-hand shop, but it isn’t. More like a brocante in Paris, where you have to summon all your eloquence to persuade the patronne to sell you anything. Very clever, Mr. Manifold. So, Dot, how would you sum up this room?’

  ‘Full of pretty things,’ said Dot. ‘Lots of things to look at. But no useful stuff. No pots and pans, no wooden spoons, no kettles. Only decoration.’

  ‘Eliza?’

  ‘The same,’ said Eliza. ‘A lovely place to potter around in.’

  ‘And with enough left for the client to do so they can feel that they have discovered a hidden treasure. An artful film of dust over the china, the silver half-polished. Careful selection of stock so that the lady customer feels that thrill of adventure and discovery. For instance, I noticed the mate to that Royal Doulton cup on the other end of that bench, and two matching saucers in that stack. Impressive. Let’s go on.’

  Eliza led the way into an inner room, which had a locked door at the far end.

  ‘This is the fine arts room,’ she said. ‘And they are fine, Phryne. I think that’s a Burne-Jones chalk, and the lady with the polar bears is Edmund Dulac. It has his blue, the bleu du lac.’ Eliza heard the note of pleasure in her own voice, remembered her socialist principles, and added, ‘Disgusting that capital should be tied up like this, when it could be used for housing and feeding the poor.’

  Phryne chuckled, but quietly.

  The fine arts room was hung with a hundred pictures. Every inch of wall space was covered. Phryne walked slowly around the room, examining every one. It was an interesting collection, with something to please everyone, from European oils almost indistinguishable under a century’s varnish, meticulous seascapes with distressed ships; farmers, trees, horses, cows; and a lot of small children: offering each other flowers or nursing lambs or staring innocently out of the picture. There were also a goodly array of kittens, in baskets, puppies, in hay, and several studies of clothed mice.

  But as Eliza had said, amongst the oil-cloth prints were genuine treasures: the Burne-Jones angel, the Dulac lady with polar bears, and the Greek icon of the Virgin, who stared with her wide open eyes at the strange company in which she found herself. Phryne examined a little landscape which might have been a Sisley and a muddy oil of a clumsy nude which had to be a Sickert. Two gorgeous enamelled tiles, twining with jungle vines, were definitely Morris, and Phryne coveted them. But knowing Mr. Manifold as she was beginning to, she was sure that she could not have afforded them. She noted that he had not confined his buying to the previous century. There was a Picasso horse in Indian ink, a Cezanne sketch of a table with glasses, and some flower-studded grass by a Fauve of some sort. No major works, of course, and none of the really outré artists. But a lovely collection to sell, for it contained plenty of simple paintings for the ‘I don’t know about art but I know what I like’ school, and a secret cache of treasures for the cognoscenti. The room smelt sweetly of frankincense from a charcoal burner on the table.

  This also held an ashtray in blue and white china, a vase of gum tips, and a large folio of sketches in cardboard sleeves.

  ‘Do me a favour, Eliza—go through all the sketches and note anything interesting. Is there another room?’

  ‘Yes, here’s the key,’ said Eliza, sitting down on a Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair and opening the folder. ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Anything odd,’ said Phryne. ‘And an inventory,’ she added, unlocking the inner door.

  The room was lined with glass cases and the light, when she switched it on, was bright. This room had no windows. Rightly so, because the cases all contained jewellery, small sculptures and coins, glinting in the glare. Phryne took a breath and Dot gasped aloud.

  ‘Look at all those diamonds!’ she said.

  ‘No, they are rhinestones, paste, but this is a very expensive collection, Dot dear. Here are works of the Art Nouveau masters, including what I would swear was a necklace by Fabergé. Gosh. I wonder what he inherited from his dad’s junk shop and what he bought himself? This stuff is very tasty indeed.’

  ‘It looks like the sort of thing you wear,’ Dot observed, stooping over the Fabergé necklace. ‘It’s mistletoe, isn’t it? The little moonstones are the berries and the diamonds are the flowers. And those greenish stones the leaves.’

  ‘Yes. Jade, moonstone and rhinestone, with a little enamel to fill in the gaps. Fabergé’s trademark. A lovely thing in itself, leaving aside the value of the gems. Now this stuff is more what I would have expected,’ she said, indicating a tray of heavy discoloured ‘diamond’ rings and gold watches from which the faintest tick had long ago departed, despairing of further life.

  ‘What they used to call estate jewellery,’ said Dot.

  ‘Wrenched off Grandma’s fingers before she was cold,’ said Phryne in distaste.

  ‘Better us than the undertaker,’ said Dot stolidly, veteran of several deathbeds. ‘But I know what you mean, Miss, this isn’t classy jewellery, like the other things. This must be bought from people in St. Kilda.’

  ‘Yes, he must have bought locally.’ Phryne inspected another glass case, filled with ‘curiosa’, including a very convoluted netsuke of several people in interesting conjunction. There was also an intricately carved jade ball with a lot of other orbs inside it, and a few fans of startling beauty. ‘But the bulk of his stock came from elsewhere. Those paintings are from England, presumably some of the ones owned by his mother from her artist’s model days. I expect he traded down at the docks for sailors’ toys and went travelling himself. And what have we here? A scroll, a real scroll written in…’ She peered through the glass, ‘an unknown script, and another in Greek.’

  ‘Can you read Greek, Miss?’ asked Dot, impressed.

  ‘Just enough to sound out the letters. It says “Josephus”. Could be the Josephus of A History of the Jewish Wars. That would make it very old. A few little icons, a terracotta tile figured with a Medusa’s head, something which might be a horse’s bit…’

  ‘And a relic of Saint Cecilia.’ Dot crossed herself. ‘Look, Miss! It says St. Cecilia on the front of that little gold case.’

  ‘So it does. Patron saint of music, as I recall. Probably contains a fingernail or a harp string.’ Phryne was about to say something scornful about relics when she saw Dot’s face and didn’t. ‘Mr. Manifold got around. A very ingenious young man.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t be likely to kill himself, with his business going so well,’ commented Dot.

  ‘Indeed,’ Phryne agreed, prospecting further. ‘His business was flourishing, though we need to inspect the books; he may have had huge debts. Then we shall have to find out about his heart.’

  ‘His heart?’ asked Dot, confused.

  ‘Men have died, and worms have eaten them,’ said Phryne. ‘But not for love. As it happens, there the bard was inaccurate. Didn’t Mrs. Manifold say that there was a girl who worked in the shop?’

  ‘I don’t recall,’ said Dot.

  ‘You know, Dot, an old policeman told me you could always tell who had drowned themselves for love and those who had died because of debt. The lovers’ fingers were always torn, scrabbling on the jetty to get out, to escape. But the ruined ones ju
st went straight down.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t tell me things like that, Miss Phryne,’ shuddered Dot.

  ‘Sorry. Let’s see what Eliza has found, eh?’

  What Eliza had found was a fight. While she was firmly on the side of the working man, this did not extend to his self-perceived right to belt the working woman over the ear with a spade, and when Phryne and Dot entered the yard at the back of the shop, from whence the yelling was emanating, they found Eliza grimly clutching the spade by the haft and addressing the wielder in flow of language which he was not accustomed to hear from a lady. The young female victim was kicking him in the shins, which did not assist his control of his temper.

  ‘All right, everybody drop your weapons,’ said Phryne sternly. ‘Miss, stop kicking right away. Eliza, take that shovel and give it to Dot. You, sir, stand up straight, tuck in your shirt, and wipe your face.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said the spade wielder.

  ‘Well you might say “blimey”. You might go so far as “gosh” or even “golly”, not to mention any of the epithets which my sister was using in her free socialist manner. Who are you and what is this all about?’

  ‘Just sack me,’ said the man sullenly.

  ‘No,’ said Phryne. ‘Answer my question.’

  He took a look at her. She was small and adamant and he fancied that even Ma Manifold might have met her match in those emerald eyes. The girl had burst into tears and flung herself on Eliza’s bosom, quite the most comfortable bosom available at that time. This showed good judgment.

  ‘Got any beer?’ asked Eliza, astounding the man.

  ‘Some in the Coolgardie in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘But the old chook saves it for her guests.’

  ‘We are guests,’ said Phryne. ‘Go get a few bottles, will you, Dot? And the gin which will be somewhere in that kitchen, and a few other things which will occur to you.’