Death Before Wicket: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries 10 (18 page)

‘I knew that 666 rang a bell—a church bell, in fact,’ commented Phryne. ‘What did Bretherton tell you about the note?’

‘It’s in pencil and very hard to read. All I could make out was the name Khufu and some cursive Egyptian which I would have to photograph through a filter to have a chance of reading. Then there’s several lines in Greek and Bretherton was going to help with those. And then someone stole it, and my world fell in on me. Please help me.’ Ayers took Phryne’s hand.

‘I’ll try, I already promised that I would try,’ she replied, thinking hard. ‘Now, we need to secure your safety. Where do you live? In College?’

‘Yes, in John’s.’

‘Don’t go back there,’ she ordered. ‘Walk out of the University and take a bus into the city to the Hotel Australia. I’ll telephone for a room—at my expense. Your name is…’ She scribbled on a piece of paper and Ayers gave a slight hiccup which might have been a laugh. ‘Wait for me. I’ll speak to you this afternoon. If you tell me who’s blackmailing you, I can go and do him an injury,’ she added hopefully.

Ayers shook his head. ‘I might retain a faint chance of living if I don’t tell you,’ he said. ‘Oh, and tell Bretherton he is relieved of his oath, and that I honour him for keeping it under what must have been great pressure.’

‘I’ll tell him. Off you go. Send out for a newspaper. When I call you, I’ll ask for a cricket score. If you can’t tell me, then I’ll know something’s wrong. Clear?’

‘Clear,’ agreed Professor Ayers.

He left. Phryne sat on the desk for some time, pondering the power of blackmail, and wondering how she could properly apply it to work out who had tried to kill Adam Harcourt and might have killed Joss Hart.

First thing to do was to find out if Hart was dead, and she returned to the field, where she met Professor Bretherton.

‘Terrible thing,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘They’ve taken him to the infirmary. I doubt that we can do much. Bisset’s put a tourniquet around the leg and washed out the bite. We’ve got the gardeners beating the grass for the snake. Oh, and the game’s been called off—we’ll replay it next week.’

‘Poor Joss,’ said Phryne.

‘Yes, well, we’d arranged a lunch and we might as well go to it. Will you come? We’ve telephoned Mr Hart—the only family the boy’s got is his father—and told him. Nothing more we can do for the present.’

‘I’ll walk with you. By the way, I caught Ayers, and he told me to tell you that you may tell me all about the papyrus.’

‘Ayers has told you? That’s a relief. What has he told you?’

‘That the papyrus had a pencil note on the back which relates to the site of a tomb, that it is the only clue because the man who wrote it was murdered and his papers lost, and he needs it to convince the Dean to pay for his next dig.’

‘Ah, well, those are the main points.’ Professor Bretherton looked relieved. ‘Do you know who’s blackmailing him and for what?’

‘No, he wouldn’t tell me. I can only assume it’s for the papyrus and the blackmailer is that Marrin fellow. Frightful bounder. He may know something about Ayers; they move in the same circles. However, about the papyrus. You really know all that I do. I looked at the Greek, it’s ancient demotic. Graham used it for shorthand. It’s unlikely that any of his Arabic labourers would understand it. It just says, “To the north, beside the foot of the old wall, at the end of the avenue of sphinxes”, and then there’s a bit in Egyptian which I can’t read and neither could Ayers, plus a note in English out of which I could only pick a few words, but one of them was Khufu, that is, Cheops. Trouble is, there are hundreds of avenues of sphinxes, apparently. First thing any pharaoh worth the name did when he was planning his mausoleum—you know that that is a Greek word, from the tomb of Mausolos?—was to order an avenue of sphinxes. The most famous is at Karnak, of course. They’ve got ram’s heads, rather decorative. Ayers assumed that the rest of the note explained which avenue, and I was going to have the papyrus photographed with different filters, which might have brought up the writing. They’re doing rather clever things now with ultraviolet light. I even had a photographer lined up to take the pictures, he said it would be such a change from doing wedding portraits, but it’s too late now.’

‘It may not be. We just have to find the papyrus and all will be well, assuming that Graham wasn’t an absolute dingbat.’

‘There is that,’ agreed Professor Bretherton. ‘He was undeniably eccentric.’

‘Now, what I have to do is go back to first principles,’ said Phryne. ‘This is an attempted murder investigation now. I need to know about that burglary, and the first thing I need to know is, where were you on Saturday and Sunday of last week?’

‘Eliminate the suspects, eh? I went to the faculty office in the morning to pick up some papers. Then I went home. I spent the afternoon reading and marking essays. Then I took my wife and daughters to the cinema to see the new Douglas Fairbanks, came home and went to bed. Sunday—what did I do on Sunday? Oh, yes, Sunday was very hot, so I took the girls to Taronga Park to feed the elephant, then we came home and had tea, then more essays of unusual idiocy, then dinner and bed. And then I arrived on Monday morning to find everyone screaming.’

‘Who was in the office when you arrived?’

‘Harcourt, Sykes, the Dean, Kirkpatrick and the secretary— what is the girl’s name? Dora.’

‘Thank you,’ said Phryne. Bretherton was looking at her with a crease between his eyebrows.

‘You said an attempted murder,’ he said. ‘Did you mean Joss Hart?’

‘Or Adam Harcourt,’ said Phryne. ‘I have to get some authority to ask questions,’ she added. ‘This is no longer just a question of the burglary. Should I see the Vice Chancellor?’

‘No,’ said Bretherton hastily. ‘There was never a chap for getting the wrong end of the stick like old Chas Waterhouse. We’ll all be at lunch. Put it to the meeting. If it’s a choice of you or the police, I know which way it will go. But let them get the main course down before you start talking.’

‘A good plan,’ said Phryne, and allowed him to show her into the small faculty dining room.

After absorbing a good clear soup, a chicken salad and a glass of champagne, she watched the faculty push back their plates, fill their glasses and light cigars. She rose to her feet.

‘Gentlemen, I have something to report,’ she said, putting the parcel she had hastily wrapped in Ayer’s office on the table beside her. ‘You have a murderer amongst you.’

‘Surely, Miss Fisher,’ objected the Bursar, ‘the injury to Hart was an accident.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ She scanned the faces. Not a flicker. The practice of University politics clearly required a straight face. She would not have liked to play poker with any of them. She could detect some lurking doubt in several countenances. Was this a disturbed woman? It was well known that the Fair Sex were flighty.

‘I would ask you to look at this,’ she said, exhibiting the shoe and explaining the mechanism. It was passed from hand to hand around the table.

‘But this is…diabolical,’ said Kirkpatrick.

‘Certainly is. We should call the police.’

There was a loud murmur of disagreement.

‘Then the whole matter of the safe will come out,’ objected Bisset. ‘There will be a most filthy row!’

‘So there should be, if one of your number is willing to go to these lengths to get what he wants. We should summon the police immediately.’

‘God, the scandal,’ whispered Sykes. He was echoed by Bretherton, who said, ‘Can’t you find out who did it, Miss Fisher? Then we can just hand him over as a nice neat package and all this other stuff needn’t concern anyone.’

‘Very improper,’ reproved Phryne. ‘But I’m willing to have a try, because otherwise I believe that this may go unpunished. It’s a bit out of the way for your ordinary cop. If you want me to look into it, gentlemen, then I will. One condition.’ She raised a hand to still their thanks. ‘I need your authority to ask any questions which I see fit, and I want you to answer them. This will be boring and perhaps embarrassing but you can see that it must be so. I am discreet and will not disclose anything I don’t have to disclose. Do we have an agreement? I’ll step outside while you talk about it. And do be careful with that shoe, Dean!’ she said sharply, taking it out of his grasp. ‘One snake bite victim is enough for today.’

She walked out of the wood-lined room and closed the door on the rising buzz of voices.

After a moment, Bretherton came out to her in the Quad.

‘I’ve made my position clear,’ he said. ‘I’m voting for you. But—and this is the important question, Miss Fisher—do you think you can solve it?’

‘Given a little co-operation, I think so,’ she replied, lighting a cigarette. He surveyed her a moment as she stood in the shade of the jacaranda tree. Light was dappled across her concentrated, intelligent face.

‘I believe that you have a better chance than anyone else,’ he said quietly. ‘I wish I had met you, Miss Fisher, when I was much younger.’

‘Thank you,’ said Phryne.

An hour later, Phryne was in the faculty office, interviewing suspects. This was not improving her temper. For one thing, all of the interviewees were nervous. For another, she was coming to the conclusion that academic life was so routine that no one should be forced to live it.

Jeoffry Bisset advised that he had been in the office on Saturday morning when he had reproved Sykes for dropping the Book of Hours, then had gone to his digs for lunch and gone fishing. Then he had attended the ball at eight, held in the Great Hall, and had got rather sozzled. Not wishing to present himself to his College in that condition, he had dossed down on his own office floor and woken with rather a headache on Sunday morning, gone home, gone to church, and spent the rest of the day and night marking essays.

The Dean had lunched with some patrons of the university, slept away the afternoon, gone out with his wife to the same ball, and spent Sunday blamelessly, in company, in divine service and more napping. He had not come near the University until Monday morning.

Kirkpatrick told Miss Fisher that he had had a meeting of the Band of Hope on Saturday night, and had naturally spent Sunday at the Wee Free Kirk and in meditation and prayer.

Sykes had gone to his Garden Club and had spent Saturday night reading books on azaleas and Sunday working in the garden with his wife.

Professor Brazell the anthropologist was not available for interview, because he had been called away to attend to some new discovery in Queensland. She could lay hands on Professor Ayers at the hotel that evening, under the name of Sanders.

Everything she had so far, Phryne observed to herself, amounted to less than nothing.

She decided to talk to Dora, the secretary.

‘Dora?’ the Dean snarled. ‘She’s working in the faculty office now. Trying to catch up with the correspondence which the Bursar has been too distracted to deal with. We have to account for our time as well as our money, Miss Fisher, as some of my staff may have forgotten.’

He really was a poisonous man, thought Phryne. Not a word of sympathy for Joss Hart, who might be dead. And even when conveying some harmless information he just had to get in another dig at the poor Bursar. She began to wonder how the Dean would look with an axe in his head, took her leave, and went to find Dora.

She heard a typewriter clacking, used by someone who was fast, skilled, and in a very bad temper, to judge by the way the carriage was slammed back until its little bell rang in protest. When Phryne opened the door, the girl snapped, ‘The office is closed. Come back on Monday.’

‘That might be too late,’ said Phryne, and Dora turned in her swivel chair and swept a load of paper off her desk.

‘Drat,’ muttered the girl, dropping to her knees to gather it up. ‘No, don’t trouble, Miss, I’m just clumsy today.’

‘And not pleased to be here,’ said Phryne, sitting down on the edge of the desk.

‘Who would be, a nice day like this? He’s told me to finish all of this before I can knock off. At this rate, by the time I get home the shops will be shut and I’ve got my eye on a silk dress in the Strand Arcade, marked down from ten pounds. Someone else will get it,’ said Dora. ‘And I’ve been watching that price come down for weeks. Heavy silk, too, none of this artificial stuff.’

‘I’ve got executive powers,’ said Phryne, assuming them. ‘Talk to me now and I’ll send you home,’ she said, and Dora looked at her like a dog offered not just a bone, but a mastodon bone.

‘Yes, Miss? What can I tell you?’

‘Your unvarnished account of the events of last week, omitting no incident and not sparing any personalities.’

‘I got in and everyone was as usual, Professor Kirkpatrick disapproving of the length of my skirt and Professor Bretherton trying to look up it,’ said Dora frankly. ‘No, he came in later. But he always does.’

‘Do you mind?’

‘I’d mind if it was Mr Gorman,’ said Dora. ‘But the Professor just likes to look and there’s no harm in that. A girl likes to be appreciated.’ She tucked back a wisp of hair and smiled complacently. She was a trim little package, no taller than Phryne, with elaborately dressed hair of a suspiciously bright shade on which she used Koko-for-the-hair. She had blue eyes and wore rather too much lipstick. But her clothes were tidy and her fingernails were short and well kept. A working woman, occupying the time between school and marriage as agreeably as possible.