‘What are you doing?’ For a heart-stopping moment the black barrel of the pistol was pointed straight at her head. She left the potato on the floor and sat up.
‘Nothing, Charles. Do go on,’ she encouraged. He glared. At that moment Wom barrelled across the floor. There were feet in his path; this fact did not impinge on his consciousness of a delicious edible thing on the floor beyond. Wombats are not easily deflected. Wom collected Charles’s feet from under him with speed and dispatch, and allowed the body that belonged to them to fall where it would. As it happened, it fell mostly on him.
Phryne jumped on Charles’s chest with both knees and directed her peeling knife to his throat.
‘Don’t even think about moving,’ she advised. Charles shut his eyes as the knife grew larger. Vic removed the gun from his loosening grasp at the same time as Dave, recovered from the blow and horrified by shots in this quiet place, burst through the door and tripped over them.
‘Ah, Dave,’ said Phryne with some difficulty. ‘Could you get up, please, I don’t really want to drive this knife into Charles’s throat, though I am rapidly coming to the view that it might be a good idea. Thank you. Vic, are you all right?’
‘Yes. Are you?’
‘Yes. Get some rope.’
Dave and Vic secured Charles with a pair of hobbles, binding him hand and foot, and lifting him to reveal Wom still underneath.
‘Oh, poor Wom, is he hurt?’ cried Phryne.
Wom lifted his head to locate the sound, blinked, and continued his destruction of the potato, which this shower of inconvenient humans had rudely interrupted.
Phryne rose from the floor and spread before him the whole netful of potatoes.
And at night the endless glory of the everlasting
stars.
Banjo Paterson
‘Clancy of the Overflow’
‘This is not quite how I envisaged our last night,’ Vic said into Phryne’s ear. ‘Just you, me, Dave, Mack, and my brother Charlie trussed up in horse hobbles on the floor.’
Phryne turned over in his arms and rested her head on his shoulder.
‘You’ve forgotten Wom under the bed.’
‘So I have. And he saved our lives. That was quick thinking, Phryne. Perhaps we’d just better go to sleep.’
‘Oh, I think we can manage.’ Phryne closed his mouth with a kiss.
Dave slept like a log, rolled in his weatherproof swag with his feet to the fire and a volume of Dickens as a pillow for his bandaged head. Charles lay awake, furious, humiliated, and strained at the ropes that bound his wrists. He heard the faint sounds of flesh sliding against flesh from the big bed, and seethed with outrage.
The worn and greasy rope slipped, and he pulled hard against the knot. His hands were coming free. He waited until he judged that the only unsleeping occupants of the room were engrossed, twisted with an effort that abraded the skin, and managed to free his hands. Swiftly he bent and released his feet.
Then he lay still, thinking furiously. What had Vic done with his gun? He saw it clearly. He had walked ten paces towards the end of the clearing and flung it down. It must still be lying there. All Charles had to do was creep out and he could be in a position of power again. Then they would die; first Vic, then that simpleton Dave, then the dog, then that monstrous grey creature, and last of all Phryne, who had mocked him in his moment of triumph and achieved his downfall by a trick.
Carefully, not whimpering as his stiff muscles cramped and twinged, he got to his knees and began to crawl towards the door. It was not locked. It could not be locked. It opened, like all doors in snow country, inward. Did it creak?
Foot by foot, Charles approached the door and pushed. It did not creak. Then he was over the lintel and out into starlight.
The sky arched, clear and black, and so terribly close that he made an instinctive movement to shield his head. The moon was full and cast an odd blue light, making black pits out of hollows and bleaching the grass silver. Charles was suddenly afraid; the night spoke of death, of limitless space, of the cold beyond the stars that burned with an electric glare just above his head. He cringed, gathered his courage, and began to run for the place where he had seen Vic throw his gun. With a gun he would have divine authority. With a gun he would have the power of a god over life and death.
The door of the hut swung back with a crash. Vic leapt out of bed; Phryne followed, naked and white. Dave woke and jumped up. They all ran to the door and saw Charles heading straight for the chasm that lay at the end of the little meadow, the bottomless abyss where the river was born.
‘Charles! Don’t! That’s the edge of the cliff!’ Vic bellowed with the battlefield voice he had never thought he would use again. It had commanded many men to their deaths; it pulled his brother away from the edge as though dragged by a rope. Charles sighted the black depths, heard the river, screamed like an owl and threw himself violently aside. He lost balance, slewed at the brink, and fell backwards, hitting his head on a rock with a small, hollow, soggy, final thump.
Phryne ran with Vic and Dave over the icy grass to the edge. The two men picked up Charles between them. He sagged limply. Phryne had seen that limp sag before. So had Vic.
‘It’s no use,’ he said calmly. ‘He’s dead. Put him down, Dave.’
Naked, Vic knelt and gathered the body of his dead brother into his arms. Air was expelled from the lungs in one final sigh.
‘Poor Charlie,’ said Vic. ‘You always tried to do what she wanted, and all you could do, in the end, was die in the attempt. No soldier could do more,’ he added, laying the body down and closing the staring eyes that bulged, unseeing, up at the moon. Dave stood open-mouthed, averting his gaze from Phryne. She was a silver nymph, he thought, like the lady of Missus Anne’s lamp, pure of line and perfectly unmarked. She seemed unaware of her nakedness, so much so that Dave stopped trying not to look at her, since it was evidently a matter of indifference to her whether he looked or not.
‘Rest in peace,’ said Vic, standing up. ‘Get me a tarp from the horse’s gear, Dave, we’ll wrap him up. Phryne, you must be freezing.’
‘No more than you are,’ snapped Phryne. ‘I’ll get some line.’
She fetched a coil of new hemp from the hut, and they trussed and bound the body neatly for carriage.
Phryne threw several lumps of wood on the fire and wrapped herself in her skin rug, and shivered. The death had been so sudden, so unlikely, that she felt bewildered. She had been wondering what to do about Charles; he had solved the problem. And she supposed that it was better to encounter a new hemp rope when you were past worrying about it than to spend a few months contemplating the process of being hanged at the end of it for murdering your brother, his friend, some innocent animals and Miss Phryne Fisher.
She found the brandy bottle and sat down to recover.
Dave and Vic came in. Even in this temperature Vic was not shivering. He found some clothes. Dave took the brandy bottle out of Phryne’s clutch.
‘Why?’ he asked dazedly. ‘What was he trying to do? Throw himself off the cliff?’
‘No,’ said Vic. ‘He didn’t see the place in proper daylight. Did you tell him that this was just a step in the mountain?’
‘No, Vic, why should I? It’s obvious.’
‘Not to Charles,’ said Phryne, reclaiming the bottle. ‘He had no interest in scenery and no head for terrain.’
‘He saw me throw his gun over the edge, but he didn’t know it was the edge,’ reasoned Vic. ‘He worked himself loose from the hobbles.’
‘Who did you get them hobbles from, anyway?’ asked Dave. ‘Bloody rotten hobbles.’
‘Yes. They are. Lucky is always slipping them. He was going for the gun . . .’
‘To account for all of us. A silly thing to do, for without Dave he wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of finding his way back to Talbotville, or indeed anywhere. Can I have that bottle, Dave?’
‘Yes, he meant to kill us all,’ agreed Vic. ‘God rest his soul.’
A heavy silence fell.
‘Is this going to spoil the place for you?’ asked Phryne. Vic took another swallow of brandy and shook his head.
‘No. Tomorrow we’ll all go back to Talbotville. I’ll take the packhorse and Charles. He’s my responsibility. We can have the body shipped back to Mother. I wouldn’t have liked to give him back to her alive, but dead, she can’t do him any more harm. We can report it to the cop at Dargo, explain what happened. With an eminent witness like the Hon. Miss Fisher we shouldn’t have any trouble. Then the place will be empty again. Death can’t soil this country. It’s too big. I’ll be all right, Phryne, when you are all gone.’
‘Right-ho,’ agreed Dave. ‘Want me to come along with you?’
‘No, you go with Phryne in the plane. She promised you a ride, didn’t she?’
‘Whacko,’ cheered Dave. ‘I’ll be in that! But how will you go, mate, three days with a corpse?’
‘I lived for a year with corpses.’ Vic smiled his enchanting smile. ‘They don’t worry me. And I’ve got a lot to say to Charlie, and this is my chance of saying it. I’ll be fine.’
‘Still think you ought to let me make you some hobbles, though,’ grumbled Dave, settling down with his feet to the fire again. He appeared to fall instantly asleep.
‘Come along,’ said Phryne, ‘I’m very cold.’
Vic warmed her in his arms and she slept.
Rigel
the Gipsy Moth was still tethered to the ground when they reached the Howitt Plains early next morning. Phryne carried her small case, and bunged it into the plane. She hoped that the weather would hold; it was clear and golden and there seemed to be very little wind.
‘We have to turn her about,’ she explained, hauling on one wing and trundling the Moth in a small circle on her spoked wheels.
‘Ain’t she light!’ marvelled Dave. ‘What do I do now?’
‘Stand by the prop and be ready to heave it down. Get your hands out of the way smartly then jump in, trying not to make a hole in my wing with those riding boots. On the count of three.’
Phryne started the ignition; to her great relief, the engine fired. She allowed the revs to build up, switched off, counted, and Dave pulled the prop as she switched on again. He vaulted in behind her with lightness and skill, both hands intact.
‘Off we go!’ screamed Phryne, fervently hoping that this was indeed the case, and
Rigel
bounced, gained speed, and hopped up into the air over the trees that had scraped her wheels on landing.
Phryne gained height, circling, and sighted MacAlister Springs as a little green patch on the hillside. Vic was waving. She waved back, dipped both wings in salute, and flew off due south, across the Snowy Plains, east over Mount Cynthia, to make her approach down the Crooked River.
She turned her head to see how Dave was faring. Some of her passengers had frozen with fear; most had just frozen. It was very cold but the air was clear. Dave was hanging onto the edges of his seat as updraughts from the valley flicked the Moth across the sky, beaming with delight. He might, Phryne felt, make an airman.
The windsock was limp; no ground wind, so she came in from the fence end of the cleared strip, dropped the Moth neatly into a big puddle which had formed in the interim, and wobbled to a stop.
‘Jeez,’ said Dave, leaping out and helping Phryne down. ‘That was . . . jeez.’
Phryne was seized by Anne Purvis and Josephine Binet, one on each side, as she waded through the mud. They did not ask questions, but stared very hard.
‘Everything is fine,’ she assured them. ‘I left Vic well.’
They dragged her up onto the road, leaving Dave contemplating the plane in a delighted trance.
‘What about his brother?’ demanded Anne. ‘He went off with Dave four days ago. Where is he?’
‘Hell, I expect,’ said Phryne shortly. Jo Binet’s mouth shut hard on the next question.
‘Dave can tell you about it,’ she said. ‘I have to refuel and get home before I expire from carbon monoxide starvation. He came to kill Vic, and didn’t manage it; then he fell and killed himself. Vic is bringing the body down on Dave’s packhorse.’
‘An accident?’ Josephine’s eyebrows rose markedly.
Phryne grinned. ‘I know, I know. But it really was an accident. If it was murder, do you think Vic would have declined my offer to carry the corpse in the plane, and volunteered to make a three-day journey with a dead man?’
‘No,’ Josephine decided. ‘No. Besides, I can’t imagine Vic killing anything. Anne said there was something wrong with the brother. How did he get the chance to try and kill Vic? I’ll have the ears off that Dave!’
‘He couldn’t see Charles as dangerous,’ said Phryne. ‘He was so very bad at everything Dave knows about. Anyway, we were saved by a wombat. It’s a great tale, but I can’t stay to tell it. That beautiful blue sky needs a plane in it.’
‘How did you leave Vic?’ asked Anne.
Phryne shrugged. ‘He’ll be all right, once I have gone and Charles is buried. He says that the mountains aren’t soiled by blood.’
‘No. But I’ve never fancied the Wonnangatta homestead.’
‘What?’
‘You flew over it. You must have seen it. Well, the family that built it died out, one by one, and then the two men living there were murdered. One was found in the river and one on the mountain. No one ever found out who did it.’