Murder on a Midsummer Night Read online

  Phryne left her to it. Mr. Palisi appeared at the door. He seemed to have the same ability to move without being seen to move attributed to some saints, the devil, and Mr. Butler.

  ‘Beautiful birds,’ said Phryne.

  ‘They’re my little singers,’ he said, his face transformed. He opened the cage and one budgie flew out and landed on his shoulder. It examined Phryne with some care and then turned its back on her. Whatever the test was, Phryne had failed it.

  ‘Now, Geoffrey, be civil,’ said Mr. Palisi. ‘I have ascertained that some samples have been kept by the coroner’s office, but I cannot imagine how you can get to them, Miss Fisher.’ He stopped, removed the budgie to his finger, and cleared his throat. ‘I am about to have an afternoon pick-me-up. Could I…perhaps…could I ask you ladies to join me? I seldom have any company.’

  Phryne was about to refuse when she decided that she really couldn’t. This was a very pleasant, very lonely man. Even his budgie didn’t seem to like him much.

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Palisi, that would be lovely. Your house is beautifully cool in this weather,’ she said, sitting down in one of the armchairs.

  Mr. Palisi blushed with pleasure all over his head. He opened a cabinet and revealed a collection of bottles.

  ‘I usually have a gin and tonic at this time,’ he said.

  ‘Excellent choice,’ said Phryne. Jane opted for barley water, never taking her eyes off the gazette.

  ‘Your young colleague seems fascinated by my trade,’ he commented.

  ‘She will be a very good doctor,’ responded Phryne, ‘when she learns some more about people. Tell me, Mr. Palisi, isn’t yours a very sad profession?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he demurred, sitting forward on the chair. ‘Someone must care for the dead, make them presentable so their relatives won’t be stricken.’

  ‘It is one of the corporeal works of mercy,’ said Phryne.

  ‘Yes, you visit the prisoners and captives, and other people feed and clothe the poor, and I prepare the dead for their longest sleep. My father was a carpenter and coffin maker, and I inherited the business. I fear that no one will follow in my footsteps, however, as there is no Mrs. Palisi.’

  ‘Never despair,’ said Phryne bracingly. She liked Mr. Palisi and if he splurged on shaving he didn’t break the bank on shampoo. ‘There is always hope. You do meet a lot of eligible widows, don’t you?’

  Mr. Palisi did something which undertakers rarely do. He laughed. Geoffrey the budgie squawked and fluttered on his finger. He raised the bird to his face and made a kissing noise, which the budgie reciprocated. Perhaps Geoffrey was better company than Phryne had thought. Perhaps Geoffrey didn’t like visiting ladies who might have designs on his master. And Geoffrey ought to improve his manners or he might become cushion stuffing, given the wrong kind of lady.

  ‘Well, agreeable as this has been, we must away. Jane, put down the magazine and say goodbye to Mr. Palisi.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Jane. ‘You have a fascinating profession. Might I perhaps come in some day and watch you at work?’

  ‘You are an amazing young lady,’ he replied, comprehensively taken aback but recognising real enthusiasm when he saw it. ‘Perhaps when you are a little older, and if Miss Fisher gives her permission.’

  ‘And perhaps we would like to invite Mr. Palisi to dinner, Jane?’ asked Phryne.

  ‘Oh, yes, please.’ Jane was delighted.

  ‘I will send you a card, Mr. Palisi.’

  Mr. Palisi blushed again. It was as though the sun was setting over his hairless pate.

  ‘I am overwhelmed, Miss Fisher. Thank you, I shall certainly come. Now, as you say, you must go. I’ll see you downstairs. Say goodbye, Geoffrey.’

  Phryne left, a little stunned. She had never been sneered at by a budgerigar before.

  ‘To the morgue, Miss Phryne?’ asked Jane, skipping as though she had just been offered a trip to the zoo.

  ‘Yes, that’s in Batman Avenue and it’s getting late, so hold onto that hat.’

  Jane held onto her hat, shut her eyes, and tried not to hear what the other drivers were saying about Miss Phryne’s skill, morals, antecedents, and the marital status of her parents. Not to mention the screeching of brakes and an outraged shout from a traffic policeman who had nearly lost several toes which he valued.

  ‘That was a red light, Miss Phryne,’ she ventured.

  ‘Yes, it was,’ returned Phryne, unmoved.

  Jane tried to think about anatomy. Anatomy was dead. And safe.

  Like the funeral parlour, the morgue was cool, but it smelt of decomposing flesh and phenol, neither being attractive scents.

  Fortunately, the office was just closing as Phryne arrived. A conspiratorial boy grabbed Phryne’s sleeve as she mounted the worn stone steps. He was clad in a white overall with splashes of unnameable fluids on the front. He was red-faced and his mother should have done something about his wiry, curly hair, though shaving his head might have been the only answer.

  ‘I’m Mike. Mr. Pally says you want the Manifold samples,’ he whispered. ‘I can show you where they are but someone’ll have to distract the doorman.’

  ‘I’ll distract,’ Phryne told Jane, still moving. ‘You get the sample. There’ll be a reward in this for you,’ she told the boy. He spat on the step.

  ‘Don’t care if they sack me. No life for a man, this. Cutting up dead bodies. I’m just waiting till I’m old enough to get into the engine drivers’ union.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Phryne. Jane accompanied Mike through a lower entrance and Phryne found herself talking to one of those cross-grained old soldiers who made entry into Melbourne’s public buildings so colourful and demotic an experience.

  ‘’Scuse me, Miss,’ he said, touching a finger to his cap. ‘Offices closing in a minute. Have to wait till tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, what a pity,’ said Phryne, patting her bosom with one delicate hand. ‘My editor said I had to get the opinion of the people in the business about the state of the morgue. You’ll have to do,’ she added, and brought out a notebook and pencil. ‘What’s your name, sir?’

  ‘What d’ya want ter know me name for?’ he growled.

  ‘So I can attribute your quote. How long have you been working here, Mr…?’ She paused invitingly.

  ‘Burwood,’ he snarled. ‘Kev Burwood. You want to know what it’s like working here? It’s crook. Out on the steps in all weathers, rain or shine. I asked ’em for an umbrella or even a chair and they turned me down flat. Suffer chronic with me chest in the cold.’

  ‘And with the heat?’ asked Phryne, having successfully tapped into a rich vein of complaint.

  ‘Yair. I sweat buckets in this serge uniform in the summer, and can I get a lightweight one? Not in the budget, they say. And then there’s the smell. You smell it?’

  ‘I can smell it,’ agreed Phryne, making fraudulent pot hooks in her notebook.

  ‘Turn a man’s stomach. Mind you, the Lord High Mucky-mucks don’t smell it, not them, they’ve got those gauze masks. Whole place is swilled down every night with phenol as if it was a piggery. Can’t smell a thing but phenol for hours and it makes me tea taste crook. Missus says it don’t matter what she cooks ’cos I can’t taste it anyway. I told ’em, what about carbolic, it’s a nice clean smell, they even put it in them soaps that ladies use, but they says, too expensive and phenol does the job. You gettin’ all this down?’ he demanded.

  ‘Every word,’ lied Phryne.

  ‘Then there’s the people. There’s a mob up and down these steps all the day long—cops, doctors, relatives, and most of them ain’t good company. Blubberin’ widows, sons whose old man has just kicked the bucket, girls whose young feller has just thrown a seven. All that stone motherless misery gets me goat.’

  ‘Why do you stay?’ asked Phryne, who had seen Jane returning with the curly-headed
boy, Mike. She slipped Jane a coin to hand on and saw it trousered by the future driver of the Indian Pacific.

  ‘You mad?’ asked Mr. Burwood belligerently. ‘It’s a job, lady. Long as I stay on these steps I’ve got a job. And they ain’t too easy to come by, these days.’

  ‘That’s true. Well, thank you, Mr. Burwood, it’s been nice talking to you.’ She really was going to go to hell for fibbing, she thought.

  ‘Lady!’ the gnarled hand came out to grab at her arm. ‘I need this job. Don’t put me name in the paper, eh?’

  Phryne, feeling a little ashamed of herself, agreed that it was highly unlikely that it would appear in any newspaper, and, gathering Jane, went back to the car.

  ‘You’ve got it?’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ said Jane, alight with purpose.

  ‘Then off with us to Dr. MacMillan at the Queen Victoria Hospital. Want me to wait?’

  ‘Oh, no, Miss Phryne,’ said Jane, shutting her eyes again as the big car slid into traffic. ‘I can catch the tram.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked Phryne, avoiding immolation by police van by two inches.

  ‘Absolutely sure,’ promised Jane, conscious of a sixpence in her knicker leg. Petty theft in the name of medicine was one level of risk. Driving with Miss Phryne was another thing altogether.

  Phryne arrived home feeling as though she had been simmered on a stove, probably with vegetables. The heat was making her sluggish. She had a slight headache after absorbing gin during the day. Also, the air felt impatient and portentous, as though a storm was brewing. From the hall table she took Mr. Adami’s parcel. It was a well-wrapped box, starred all over with sealing wax into which someone had repeatedly impressed a signet ring.

  This will never do, she said to herself. A mystery of my very own and I’m so tired and grimy and hot that I’m not excited by it. Well, this box has waited a long time to be opened. It can wait until I have had a little nap and am feeling more the thing.

  The admirable Mr. Butler had noticed how his employer felt about the weather and had decided to compensate for the temperature. As Phryne opened her boudoir door after a brief wash in lukewarm water, a rush of cold air caressed her undraped form. For a moment she stood naked in the cold blast and smiled seraphically, though seraphs generally wore more clothes. How had this miracle come about?

  Mr. Butler had placed a large lump of commercial ice in a washtub on a chair, and directed over it the breeze from the tall electric fan. Phryne sank down supine on her bed and let the cool air flow over her. The Roman emperors, she recalled, had caused slaves to run ice convoys from Mount Hymettus to cool their rooms in the same way. Utterly content and mildly imagining the matched Circassian twins she might have bought for her own delectation in the old days, she fell into a light doze.

  She woke to a growl of thunder outside and went down under paw as Ember crossed her body on his way to her wardrobe. Ember had been found by Jane as a mere slip of a soaking wet kitten, lost in a tempest, and this had evidently caused the feline equivalent of shell shock. As far as Ember was concerned, the only place from which to watch a good thunderstorm was inside a closed mahogany wardrobe within a stone-built waterproof house, preferably with a few crushed silk blouses to repose upon. If they weren’t crushed silk to begin with, he was happy to provide that service. Phryne heard the ping as the shirt parted company with its hanger and the click as the door closed behind the fleeing black tail. Ember was earthed for the duration.

  Phryne rose and dressed and pulled back her curtains. She opened the window. A louder growl muttered across the horizon. The hot air outside was as heavy as wet velvet and full of expectation. There was a flutter of sheet lightning across the sea. Phryne turned off the lights and the electric fan.

  With a high explosive thud and a crash the storm arrived. Water impacted the window as though thrown from a bucket. The skies lit, once, twice, with fierce actinic light. Trees thrashed under contrary winds. The vine raked the window as though desperate to get in out of the wind. The temperature dropped twenty degrees, flooding the house with the scent of hot asphalt doused in rainwater, one of the premium scents in the world. The flies that had been tormenting Phryne all day whisked away and vanished. Rain poured down in a constant stream.

  Phryne laughed, wrestled the window closed, bade Ember to stay where he was, and went downstairs. Now that someone mentioned it, she was hungry, and that was the dinner gong sounding in the hall even now.

  Mrs. Butler opened the kitchen door and ordered Mr. Butler to put out all the house plants so that they could get some refreshing rain. She herself added a tub to catch rainwater for washing her own hair. Then she modified her menu. The cold salad dinner was transformed into a thunderstorm change-of-temperature dinner by the simple expedient of heating up the cold potato and leek soup and the vegetable hash to go with the rewarmed corned beef. Phryne’s family sat down to an ideal dinner for the change, with both cold and hot components, and sweet, sour, salty and bitter elements. Mrs. Butler had never heard of the theory of the four humours, but she knew what made a good table.

  And when in the middle of the soup course the lights went out, Mr. Butler lit branches of candles and continued serenely on his butlerine way.

  ‘Isn’t it romantic?’ breathed Ruth.

  ‘It’s a lovely light,’ agreed Phryne. ‘My great-grandmother was a beauty in her day, and she always refused to have the electric lights on when she came down to dinner. She said that women over a certain age should never allow themselves to be seen in electric light. Far too harsh, like the Australian sun.’

  ‘Bit difficult to manage now,’ commented Jane.

  ‘And an awful lot of work,’ said Dot. ‘Someone has to clean and polish all the candlesticks and pare, snuff and replace all the candles.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine there was a candle boy,’ said Phryne airily. The soup was superb, the corned beef in its blanket of mustard sauce was just the ticket, and she was feeling refreshed. ‘Before my time, of course. No, thank you, Mr. Butler, just some more lemonade. Well, we have advanced in our case, with the help of Jane doing the Sexton Blake and me doing the distracting. Did Dr. MacMillan allow you to watch the tests, Jane?’

  ‘Oh, yes, in the hospital laboratory, it was so interesting! She let me do the testing. She’s wonderful,’ said Jane dreamily.

  ‘And after dinner you shall tell us all about it. Dot, dear, are you well?’

  ‘Just a bit off-colour, Miss. I got a headache and then I fell asleep. I’ll drink some coffee and I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Good. I have Mr. Adami’s package, which we shall open later.’

  ‘Tell us about your great-grandmother,’ said Ruth. ‘Was she very beautiful?’

  ‘Oh, indeed, Arcadia was a tall, strong, robust woman, big bosomed like the last century preferred, with china blue eyes and golden hair which almost reached her knees. She was an American, a rich heiress, but they say that after a few years she was an English aristocrat to a T. She fell in love with my scapegrace ancestor when he was rusticated to Chicago for some mad gamble on a cross-country horse race. She just bundled up her hair and kilted her skirt and followed him, despite what her papa said about penniless noblemen. And eventually her papa forgave her and handed over the dowry.’

  ‘And did they live happily ever after?’

  ‘Tolerably so,’ said Phryne, not wanting to bruise Ruth’s romantic heart. ‘They had eight children, and she transformed the big house: heating, lighting, plumbing. When she was old she used to have her chair pushed to the top of Dewberry Hill to watch all the lights put on at once, so that she could see the house lit up like a birthday cake. I’ve got some of her jewellery: the diamond tiara, parure, clips, earrings and bracelets. And the big ruby.’

  ‘Eton mess!’ exclaimed Dot as dessert and coffee were brought in. ‘Wonderful.’

  Phryne stuck a pleased spoon into the mixture of raspberrie
s, cream and broken meringues. Despite the feral weather, she felt that she was very lucky to be living at 221B the Esplanade, St. Kilda, Victoria, Australia.

  Jane stood herself on the hearth rug in the standard gentleman’s position, back to an imaginary fire, and began to expound.

  ‘With Mike’s help I managed to get two ounces of…the fluid.’ She was about to mention the absorption ratio of water into lungs in drowning and decided that her audience was far too squeamish. ‘Dr. MacMillan said that there are two tests for saltiness. One is the silver nitrate test and one is the electrolysis test. We did the electrolysis test first because it doesn’t diminish the specimen. It’s easy. You just put the fluid in a chamber and pass a current through it and measure the amount of electricity which passes through it on an ammeter. Salty water conducts electricity while fresh water doesn’t. We had a standard seawater sample and ran a current through it with a set voltage. The ammeter showed point four of an amp. The same current passed through the sample would not necessarily mean it might be seawater, but it would be salty. In this case, we only got two thousandths of an amp.’

  The flickering light was making even Jane’s round childish face hollowed and strange. No doubt, thought Phryne, the sibyls of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi had looked so, in their laurel-scented cavern over the abyss. And this was a modern sibyl, proclaiming the manner of a man’s death.

  ‘Then we took a small part of the sample and added silver nitrate, which, if there is salt, will precipitate a thick white paste like office glue. It didn’t. So from the tests, we knew that it didn’t conduct electricity and it didn’t precipitate silver,’ ended Jane, triumphantly.

  She noticed that she had failed to carry her audience. Phryne, Ruth and Dot were looking at her in mute incomprehension.

  ‘So, what does that mean?’ asked Phryne, after a pause.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jane, making a mental note not to underestimate the scientific ignorance of the layperson. ‘He was drowned in fresh water, not salt. Dr. MacMillan did a few more tests, which I would be happy to tell you about—’