‘Excuse me,’ said Lin. ‘The policeman at the corner said that I should come here and speak to the sergeant. Is that you, sir?’ he asked.
‘You’re Lin Chung?’ demanded the policeman. ‘Good! I’m Sergeant Hammond. Sit down, Father, here’s the letter. We can’t make head or tail of it.’
‘The lady who was kidnapped, what is her name?’ asked Lin urgently.
‘Lady Phryne Fisher, and she was snatched in the stable yard about seven. They took off down the road like bats out of hell and we’ve not seen hide nor hair of them. Just this arvo I got a phone call from Jack Robinson in Melbourne asking me to take special care of her and now look what’s happened. He’s going to have me back pounding a beat before the night’s out if I can’t find her quick. Now, sir, can you tell me what this Lady Fisher means?’
Lin unfolded the letter. It was written in Phryne’s fluid, italic hand with her very favourite black ink and the fountain pen he had given her. It smelt faintly of roses.
‘Lin dear, if you are reading this it has all gone wrong. Call Dot for the whole story and lay hands, very quickly, on Roderick Cholmondeley and his mate Wallace. Bill Gaskin is the Beaconsfield heir. Also find Young Billy and keep him safe.’
‘It is clear,’ said Lin. A hollow was forming inside him. ‘She had a meeting with these two men and they have kidnapped her. If you can find me a telephone I will get you more information. Detective Inspector Robinson has been looking for these two criminals for some time. They tried to murder a young lady in Melbourne. They are dangerous.’
‘Bloody wonderful,’ said the sergeant. ‘No one of that name staying in the hotel.’
‘We will get a description,’ said Lin. ‘Let me telephone.’
‘Have to send young Annie here over to work the exchange. It’s closed.’
Annie looked at the imploring eyes of the dreamy young priest. She rose to the occasion, wiped her eyes, claimed a porter as escort, and went off to open the telephone exchange.
Lin rubbed his palms over his face. This was not the evening he had been expecting. Phryne must have been taken entirely off guard. It must have been a sudden, brutal, unexpected assault. She might have been injured, concussed, dying at this moment. Time was ticking past with all the dancing alacrity of an ice age. How long did it take to get to the telephone exchange, for God’s sake? It was practically next door!
He became aware that his hands were clenched together so tightly that his knuckles were white. He released them. He might need his hands.
After what seemed like years he managed to get Dot on the telephone, and then gave it to Sergeant Hammond. Soon information was pouring into his receptive ear. He made notes. He shouted orders. He demanded the register. And he found one Thomas Atkins and his friend Joseph Smith. Neither of whom were in their well-sprung beds enjoying the country peace. And their car, a sleek new Bentley, was also missing. This galvanised the sergeant, who at last knew what to search for. He sent minions into the night, shouting some more.
Lin recaptured the instrument.
‘Miss Dot?’ he asked gently. ‘It is Lin Chung.’
‘Oh, Mr Lin!’ wailed Dot. ‘Shall I send Mr Li?’
‘Yes,’ said Lin. ‘Put him on the first train and tell him that I shall be here, at this hotel. Do not distress yourself,’ he said. ‘I am sure that Phryne will be all right. She is very clever.’
‘But this bloke bites the heads off chickens!’ cried Dot, on whom this story had had a strong effect.
‘Even so. I have to go now. I will call you as soon as I know anything. Good night,’ he said, and heard the connection break on a sob. As he did so, he recalled Uncle Tao saying that a car had screamed up the Moonlight road earlier in the evening. Returning to give this piece of information to the distracted Sergeant Hammond, he found him bellowing at the door porter.
‘What do you mean you can’t find Young Billy?’ he demanded.
The door porter had had enough of being yelled at as though he was deaf or stupid or both.
‘Can’t find what isn’t there! Madge Johnson, his aunt’s here, creating. Says Old Bill never came home nor Young Billy neither.’
‘So they have both of the Beaconsfield heirs,’ said Lin Chung heavily.
Phryne listened hard. She heard the door slam and two sets of feet come into the house. She was lying on a wooden floor; it vibrated to the rhythm. She heard a chair being scraped back and someone dumped into it; Bill—she heard him groan.
Then she was hauled up, carried, divested of her sack and allowed to sit. A loop of rope was slung around her arms and torso before she could move and tied tightly behind her.
She shook her head, clearing her eyes of flour and dust. She was tied to an old kitchen chair in the single room of what was apparently the Old Bark Hut of the song. The inside walls had been lined with illustrated newspapers. A pack of wolves chased a sleigh across the snow. A little girl served tea to her dolly. It seemed that Mafeking had been relieved. If she was here for any time she could while away the hours reading the walls. Otherwise the room contained a table, Bill Gaskin in another chair, a fireplace with a small bright fire burning and a few odds and ends. And, of all things, a picnic basket.
Then a man came into view. Well, well. So this was Roderick. He was big, well-fed and full of righteous indignation. A pink-faced King Boar with big hands and huge physical assurance, not to mention bulging muscles. Phryne could not take this one on in single combat and survive. Strategy was going to be needed.
‘Now, my good man,’ he addressed a dishevelled Bill Gaskin in an upper class English tone guaranteed to raise every hackle this son of toil possessed. ‘I’m here to clear up this bloody stupid nonsense about the succession. There’s nothing you can do to interrupt it. You make up your mind to that.’
‘Yair?’ drawled Bill.
‘Yes. I am the rightful heir to the Cholmondeley honour and I am going to marry Lady Alice Harborough. Pater has decided on her, since I can’t get the old paws on the Fisher millions. Pater and old Harborough are bosom friends, y’know. She’s an old frump but she’ll do. Won’t have m’wife reduced in rank.’
Phryne, filthy, untidy and struggling to breathe in her tight lashings, had a terrible urge to laugh. But the situation was not funny. Roddy was a giant and the darkish man in the background, hair ruffled from contact with the prisoners, should not be discounted either. There was a gleam of intelligence in the dark eyes which was lacking in Roderick’s. Also, he had a gun.
And she was tied up. She hated being tied up. No one seemed to be looking at her so she tried a slow, gentle wriggle. The ropes were tight. What would Roddy do when disabused of his delusions? Burned certificates could be replaced. Any reputable lawyer would have had copies made and certified. What did Roddy think he was going to be able to make Bill Gaskin, heir of the Harboroughs, do? He didn’t want the honour anyway. Roddy laid out a document on the table and said, ‘You’ve got to sign this.’
‘What is it?’
‘Repudiation of the title. I had a lawyer chappie draw it up in London. He assures me it’s watertight.’
‘And then?’ grated Bill Gaskin.
‘Then we’ll let you go,’ said Roderick.
There was a long pause. Phryne wriggled a little more and felt some tightness go out of the ropes. They had not tied her hands, which might prove to be a mistake. She hoped so.
‘And if I don’t?’ demanded Bill Gaskin.
‘Then I’ll hurt you,’ replied Roddy. A pink tongue flicked out and licked his pink lips. And you’ll enjoy it, thought Phryne, making another unobtrusive move toward her gun. She couldn’t quite reach it, even with the tips of her fingers.
‘Well, I can’t sign nothing with me hands tied like this,’ said Bill. Phryne saw his shoulder muscles tensing. Bill was about to take action.
Wallace forestalled him. He held a very large, sharp fishing knife to Bill Gaskin’s throat, just close enough to bring one bright bead of blood from the skin as Roddy undid the ropes on his hands. Bill picked up the fountain pen.
‘Sign here,’ said Roddy.
Bill Gaskin spat in his face.
‘You stupid bastard,’ he snarled. ‘I was ready to burn those papers and forget all about it. I was happy where I was and I didn’t need no fortune, nor no title neither. Where do you get off, you bloated capitalist, kidnapping an honest working man and a lady, when all you had to do was ask? I was going to forget the whole thing, but to buggery with that. I’m not gonna sign your bloody paper, you bludger. I don’t care how big you bloody are.’
Roderick slapped him so hard that his head snapped back.
‘And you ain’t gonna let me go,’ added Bill, spitting blood. ‘Or her. You want me to sign that paper and then you’ll kill us. Go on, you bastard, admit it!’
‘That was the plan,’ said Wallace, speaking for the first time. He had a light, classless accent and a tenor voice. ‘We need your authentic signature, you see, and we couldn’t bribe anything out of the hotel which had your signature on it, or we wouldn’t be going through all this folderol, we would have just thrown you down the hole to start with.’
‘What hole?’ asked Bill.
‘Oh, an abandoned mine shaft. There are hundreds of them around here, very careless of the miners not to fill them in,’ Wallace told him airily. ‘We’ve picked a nice deep one just for you. If you are ever discovered, you will have all the broken bones you require to prove how hard you fell. It’s at least thirty feet deep.’
‘But we thought that you might be difficult,’ said Roderick. ‘So we got some insurance. Go get the boy, Wally.’
Wallace opened the door, turning his back on Phryne. Roderick was watching Gaskin. Phryne wriggled hard and managed to get some of the ropes to loosen. She still couldn’t reach her gun. Should she speak, and thus attract attention to herself and risk being searched and disarmed? No. Better to watch for another opening when all the pieces were on the board. They couldn’t kill Bill Gaskin until he signed. And he didn’t seem likely to sign. The fools, thought Phryne. I don’t like the idea of being killed by fools. I shall have to ensure that this does not happen. Rain began to fall outside with a soft whoosh. Wally came back inside, shaking raindrops off his face. The Boar and the Weasel, thought Phryne. What a strange partnership.
He put down a bundle wrapped in canvas and began to unfold it. Someone was inside. Phryne caught sight of a thin bare shin and a wrist in a too-short shirtsleeve. Then Young Billy emerged, cock’s crest flattened by contact with his wrappings. He coughed. More flour sacks, Phryne diagnosed.
‘Here,’ said Roderick, ‘is our bargaining chip. What will you give me for your boy, you upjumped colonial?’
‘You all right, son?’ asked Bill Gaskin roughly.
‘I’m all right, Dad,’ said Young Billy. His voice was shaking. He was trying to rub some life back into his wrists and ankles. ‘They told me you were hurt and they’d take me to you so I got in the car after lunch and they bagged me. I’m sorry, Dad.’
‘What’ll I give yer?’ demanded Bill Gaskin. ‘I’ll give yer anything if yer let the boy walk out of here.’
‘No,’ said Roderick.
‘No deal,’ snapped Bill Gaskin.
Roderick hit him again. Young Billy bit his lip. He was dazed and a little concussed. He knew this situation. It happened in almost every Western. The bad guys had the good guy tied up and were going to torture him until he signed over the deeds to the property that the railroad was going through. There ought to be a distressed maiden too. He looked around and saw Phryne tied to her chair. Ah. There she was. Now all they had to do was wait for either the Texas Rangers, the Seventh Cavalry or the man with no name to rescue them.
They were taking their time. It must be almost morning by now. Young Billy yawned. Dad swore. Roderick Cholmondeley yelled at Wallace: ‘Think of something!’
Lin Chung stayed the night at the Imperial. He occupied Miss Fisher’s room at his request. He lay surrounded by reminders of Phryne: her scent, her nightdress laid out on the bed, the book she was reading open on the bedside table. He cursed himself for not asking more about her investigation when he had seen her in the art gallery. There might have been some clue as to where the abductors had taken her, though police roadblocks on all the roads out of Castlemaine had not caught anyone. Sergeant Hammond thought that she had been taken to Melbourne. Lin’s instincts said that she was still close by. The abductors had packed all their belongings and gone (adding robbing the Imperial of their bill to their account, a piece of meanness typical of their class) but unless they had elaborate means for disposal of the bodies, they would need the amenities which Castlemaine and environs would provide.
Perhaps. For some reason he was convinced that this was true. As soon as Li Pen arrived in the morning, he would start hunting his own trails. Someone must have spoken to Thomas Atkins, née Cholmondeley. He didn’t know the area. He had only arrived a day before Phryne. One of the habitués of the Imperial bar would know where Roderick had gone. And then Li Pen would find her.
He did not sleep. Across his closed eyelids enchanting memories of spring danced and flickered. He groaned.
Roderick and Wallace had gone into a huddle. They were between a rock and a hard place, Phryne thought. They had painted themselves into a corner. Bill Gaskin wouldn’t sign until he knew that Young Billy was safe. They weren’t going to let Young Billy go until Bill signed (or at all, Phryne considered). It was a stalemate. Unless they could find some way of applying more pressure to Bill, they could either kill him or not kill him but he wasn’t going to sign.
Phryne hoped that they wouldn’t reach the realistic conclusion that they might as well kill them all anyway, because with the heir and the heir’s son dead, the document didn’t matter a straw. She was banking on Roddy’s magnificent stupidity and his sadism. He was not going to let go of a torturable victim so easily.
Which, now she thought of it, included Phryne. Possibly it was time to bring herself to their attention. She wasn’t going to get out of these ropes and, if not skilfully misdirected, Roddy might just decide to kill them all anyway.
Then Roddy snarled, ‘I’m going to leave you here to think about it, you peasant!’ He stalked out into the rain, leaving Wallace on guard.