Death Before Wicket: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries 10 (4 page)

‘How awful, Dot. What
did
you do?’

‘I made a fire in the copper and washed the babies and changed them and made tea and fed them the cakes like I promised, and they told me that Mummy had gone away and hadn’t been back for a long time. There was a light in the little house next door and I went there and an Irishwoman answered, Mrs Ryan. She had two kids herself and her house was real clean so I asked her to mind my nieces and I gave her a pound and told her I’d be back tomorrow to talk to her, and the kids knew her and she took them in.’

Dot paused to take a long sip of tea, gathering her thoughts. Even when shocked and exhausted, Dot tried to tell a connected narrative. Phryne looked at her with deep concern. Dorothy would not be forgiving of a sister who had taken to the bad, and this sounded like the respectable wife and mother led comprehensively astray.

‘Then I called my brother-in-law out of his shop and into the street to try and get some sense out of him. All he would say was that Joan was in Darlinghurst and hadn’t been home for a week, he always knew she was a tart and he was right, and I could take the little bastards and drown them and he didn’t care. And a lot of other things.’ Dot blushed red. ‘So I went into Darlinghurst to try and find her.’

‘Dot, you are a brave girl!’ exclaimed Phryne. ‘I would have thought twice about doing that.’

‘But I didn’t find her,’ confessed Dot. ‘And it was awful. Men kept on making…suggestions to me, and it was all smoke and beer and girls with cheap clothes. I gave it up for the night when someone tried to pinch my purse and I had to dong him. Then I had to catch the last tram because I’d given my taxi money to Mrs Ryan. What are we going to do, Miss Phryne?’

‘We are going to find your sister, retrieve her children, and manage the situation as well as it can be managed,’ said Phryne firmly. ‘Have you any clue as to where she might have gone?’

‘I found her box,’ said Dot. ‘Her papers and things. I felt funny about taking them but…’

‘Good. Have some more tea and I’ll have a look, so you won’t have to feel funny. Have you a photograph of your sister?’

‘Only the wedding one. I took that, too.’

Dot poured herself some more tea and Phryne spilled the paper bag of Joan’s possessions onto the floor and sat down to sort it. This was an unexpected turn of events. Two mysteries now to solve: the exam paper theft and the flight of Dot’s sister. It looked like being a more interesting visit to Sydney than she had expected.

The photograph was large, expensive, and evidently taken out of a frame. A big bruiser of a man stood next to a seated woman in trailing draperies. Her veil had been put back from her wreath of orange blossom. She had Dot’s face, round and girlish, and lighter hair, shingled. Phryne expected that her eyes would be blue and her hair blonde. The paper bag contained a marriage certificate, the ‘lines’ which no respectable woman ever allowed to pass out of her hands, a collection of receipted bills clipped together, a dance card with attached pencil, several visiting cards including one of Phryne’s which Dot must have sent her, three birthday cards and a few postcards. Not much for twenty-three years of blameless existence.

‘I’ll take the wedding group to a photographer’s tomorrow to have him make a separate picture of the face,’ she said. ‘Then we can show it to people who might know Joan. What do you think has happened to her, Dot?’

‘She’s been kidnapped,’ said Dot, bursting into tears again. ‘She’s been white-slaved. She would never have left her children else. Men can’t look after children. He had poor little Dorothy chained up like a dog, and he couldn’t have cared less if Mary had been run over by a truck. And he called her a slut! And me,’ added Dot, who had no doubts as to her own purity. She might or might not marry that nice policeman Hugh, who had been courting her assiduously, but in any case she would go to her marriage bed as virginal as the Queen of Heaven Herself.

Phryne knew that white-slaving was largely a myth. She was considering the receipted bills. Mrs James Thompson had paid large sums for rent, for materials and for cartage. Where had Mrs James Thompson, wife of an ironmonger who was ‘not doing too good’, got seven pounds for solder and miscellaneous piping, twenty for stock delivered and eleven pounds for rent? Although women did run away from husbands and children, Phryne suspected that Joan’s extra-curricular activities had been going on for some time—at least six months, to judge by the receipts. And then—what? What precipitating factor had driven her out, leaving her babies to be neglected by her disgusted husband? Where was she? Was there something which Jim Thompson wasn’t telling Dot?

There was always the likelihood that the husband, discovering that his virtuous wife had been prostituting herself in order to pay the bills, had strangled her in a fit of outraged propriety and burned her body in the smith’s fire, for which he had a good chance of being acquitted. The law did not care what happened to worthless whores.

Better not mention that possibility to Dot.

‘Yes, well, nothing more we can do tonight, Dot. Now you are going to take another sup of my good brandy and then you are going to bed, and you are going to sleep—don’t argue with me, Dorothy,’ said Phryne sternly. ‘We’ll get the photo tomorrow and then we can go to Chas Nuttall’s digs—if anyone knows Darlinghurst, it will be that most Bohemian of young artists. We’ll find her, Dot,’ she said gently. ‘I promise.’

Dot drank the brandy and went to bed biddably. Phryne gathered up the documents and replaced them in the paper bag. She looked into the face of the bride and said quietly, ‘Joan, I’m afraid I’m going to have to find you. I do hope that you want to be found.’

Phryne could not see any end to her investigation of Mrs James Thompson’s disappearance but disillusion and pain for Dot, of whom she was very fond, and she very quietly cursed the name of propriety. She might have added husbands of whatever cut and stripe wherever found, but her eyes were closing and she put herself to bed instead.

Joss might well have been right about Sydney having slums worse than any to be found in Fitzroy, Phryne reflected, and the fact that they were not as bad as the lower arrondissements in Paris or the East End of London did not say much for them. Rows of terrace houses, built in a fine flourish of slum clearance in the 1890s, were crumbling and leaning and falling slowly down. The streets, though paved, were cracked and unsafe. The roofs were cocked like hats over one eye. The streets of the ‘Loo stank of bad drainage and oysters for supper and vomited alcohol in front of the lavatory-tiled swill houses which, every day at six o’clock, disgorged a horde of drunken wretches into the street. This was a place where all the landlords lived far away on the North Shore and never came into such a dangerous area. This was a place of moonlight flits, pavement evictions, bruised women and undernourished children.

Yet bougainvillea poured red and purple down the cuts and steps which connected one level to another. Jacaranda trees flowered azure as a Mediterranean sky in neglected gardens. Jasmine twined with roses over broken fences and terrible outside privies. Everywhere children quarrelled and fought and played cricket across the streets. Washing flapped on lines. Brawling, yeasty, unconfined life went on in the tumbledown houses and sheds and a thin dog chewed pineapple rinds in the gutter at Phryne’s feet.

It was exotic and lively though, at ten in the morning, subdued. Dot and Phryne knocked at the door of Mrs Ryan’s Old Clothes Shop and heard a voice scolding, ‘Play nice, now,’ as the door was opened.

Mrs Ryan was about thirty, a stocky woman in respectable black, hair neatly coiled on the nape of her neck, standing easily with a baby on her hip. The shop smelt musty, but the widow was redolent of yellow soap and the baby she was holding was shining with health, though dressed only in a washed-thin nappy and a sunbonnet. Two identical sets of dark blue eyes regarded the visitors.

‘Miss Williams, come in and have some tea, I’ll mash it directly. This is your Miss Fisher? Pleased to meet ye, Ma’am,’ said Mrs Ryan, making a suspicion of a curtsy. She led the way into a large kitchen, which was full of children, noise, and the smell of soup.

Two infants detached themselves from a game involving a ball passed from hand to hand around a circle and ran yelling to Dot, colliding with her knees. ‘Auntie, Auntie!’ they cried. Phryne stepped back, inspected each indistinguishable infant as it was presented to her, and gave each of them a large lollipop, coloured red and green. Both Mary and Dorothy plugged these into their mouths. As the lollipops were passed around, silence fell in the kitchen.

‘Nice to hear yourself think,’ commented Mrs Ryan. ‘I’ve washed your two again this morning, Miss Williams, and little Dot’s ankle I’ve mended with some iodine—terrible to think of the poor creature being tied by the leg like a calf! But men will be men,’ she sighed. Phryne sat down at a scrubbed table and observed that this was true and would Mrs Ryan continue to mind the children until their mother returned?

‘To be sure,’ said the widow promptly. ‘I would have taken them in myself had I known that Mrs Thompson was away.’ She mentioned her terms, which seemed hardly enough. Phryne inquired politely. Mrs Ryan explained.

‘I’ve got the house, see, Mr Ryan finished paying for it before he was taken from me, and there was the Bridge money that the company paid because he fell while he was working for them, twenty pounds it was, I’ve got that put aside for a rainy day and the Burial Club buried him nice and proper with a stone and all. I just have myself and my two to feed. Not many people around here have any silver to spare.’

Phryne, who did, added a sizeable payment to cover emergencies and Mrs Ryan closed a hand over the notes and stowed them in an old-fashioned petticoat pocket. Phryne made a mental note to obtain a couple of these admirable articles as soon as possible. None of her clothes had any pockets and she hated carrying a bag.

‘Now, Mrs Ryan, can you tell me anything about my sister?’ asked Dot, who had waited with ill-concealed impatience while the tea was made and poured into three matching Coles cups.

‘I didn’t know her well,’ said Mrs Ryan slowly. ‘She seemed a nice lady. That’s all I can tell you.’

Phryne could take a hint as well as the next woman.

‘Dot, wouldn’t you like to take the children into the garden?’ asked Phryne. ‘It seems a pity to waste all this sun.’

‘Yes, take the little darlings to see the chooks,’ said Mrs Ryan. Dot went out obediently, shooing six toddlers out onto the back steps.

‘Now, tell me what you didn’t want Joan’s sister to hear,’ said Phryne, laying a pound note on the table. Mrs Ryan scanned Phryne’s face. The widow laid a workworn hand over the money.

‘God love you, you’re fast on the uptake for all you’re a highborn lady. I think Mrs Thompson took the bad path. I saw her collected from here every night for a week by Tillie Devine’s motor car, and she came home God knows how late. Her husband knew, too. Pleased to take the money, maybe, though he beat her for being a whore. Where she is now I don’t know, but you could always ask Tillie, though she’s a wicked strong brawling woman. Hush! They’re coming back. She’s lucky to have a devoted sister who is a good girl, anyone can see that,’ added Mrs Ryan. ‘But I don’t know that she wants to be found.’

That was Phryne’s fear, also. But she said nothing to Dot: she would find out soon enough. If twenty pounds was the price for a man’s life in Sydney, what could a woman possibly hope to realise on her own virtue?

Three

But this measure [to establish the University of Sydney] this which is to enlighten the mind, refine the understanding, to elevate the soul of our fellow men; this, of all our acts, contains the germ of immortality—this, I believe will live
.

William Charles Wentworth, speech to the Legislative Council

B
y the time Phryne arrived at the lodgings of that advanced young Modernist Chas Nuttall it was already three o’clock and she was getting tired. The slums were oppressing her spirits and what she had heard about Tillie Devine had not elevated them to any degree. She had come a long way from the East End slums where she had been born. Somehow, Phryne doubted that she had a heart of gold. In fact, she was reputed to be even more dangerous than Kate Leigh, Queen of Sly Grog, who ruled the other vices in the Cross. No one seemed eager to assist Phryne in her inquiries as to where the elusive Miss Devine could be found and she had been tracking in circles all afternoon.

‘Dot, I think I need some advice before I go any further,’ she said to her maid.

‘Advice, Miss?’

‘Yes. I need to talk to a cop; I’ll ring Jack Robinson and get him to find a useful one for me, and I’ll comb the dens of iniquity tomorrow. If Chas and his friends haven’t seen Joan, of course.’

‘Miss Phryne, you don’t think my sister is in any danger, do you?’ asked Dot. ‘If you did, you’d go and find her right now, even if you do have to dine with the Vice Chancellor.’

‘Sorry, Dot dear, I really am sorry,’ said Phryne. ‘But you’re right. I don’t think she’s being held against her will, no. I think she’s fallen into bad company. That doesn’t make her any less your sister, nor am I less concerned about her. But I’m not getting anywhere asking questions from the outside. I need an insider—perhaps Chas, perhaps someone else. I need the equivalent of Bert and Cec. This looks like the bell,’ she added, and pressed it.