Ruddy Gore (26 page)

‘Come home with me,’ suggested Lin Chung,

‘and we will try and think of some answers.’

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

He can raise you hosts

Of ghosts

And that without reflectors.

The Sorcerer
, Gilbert and Sullivan PHRYNE WOKE in a silken bed and yawned in pure luxury. The room was hung with silk, the sheets were finest linen and the wadded quilt was of just the sky blue she had envisaged for her parlour.

Scroll paintings of erotic scenes decorated the walls. She had enacted several of them with her highly skilled lover, and looked forward to trying the rest in due course. Phryne had always believed in education. The young man sleeping beside her sighed and opened his eyes.

‘Silver Lady,’ he said softly.

‘Lin Chung,’ she answered. ‘I have to get up.’

‘Will there be a day when you don’t?’ he asked resignedly, watching her pull on a gown made for 260

an empress and go into his bathroom. ‘The Taoists would say that you are meddling.’

‘Meddling?’

‘Yes. ‘‘Yield and overcome.’’ ’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, I suppose you don’t. It’s not a philosophy that would ever appeal to the West.’

‘Try me,’ she demanded, standing up out of the bath and distracting his mind from religion completely.

‘ ‘‘Yield and overcome, bend and be straight, empty and be full, have little and gain.’’ I am not explaining this at all, am I? The Taoists told a ruler never to act until he absolutely had to, and then he would be successful. There was a state in China ruled by such a Taoist, and he was so successful that he was asked to explain how he did it.

‘‘I leave people alone,’’ he said.’

‘Interesting but not helpful. If I left the affair at the Maj alone, then a death would go unavenged and the trickster would continue.’

She put on clean underwear from the little over-night bag she always carried in the Hispano-Suiza.

Lin Chung dragged his eyes away from the progress of her stocking up her leg and said, ‘Yes, that is true. You are a follower of Confucius, Moon Lady. ‘‘A crime is a rent in the social order, which must be stitched.’’ Do you live at this speed all the time?’

‘No, after I have finished this case I am taking a holiday.’

‘Where?’ he restrained his hands, which reached 261

for her automatically, as though her flesh was magnetic.

‘Nowhere. I mean, here. I don’t need to travel to find anything I want at the moment,’ she said.

‘Put on some clothes. You’re coming too. You have to work the ghost.’

Lin Chung stretched, assumed some unremarkable clothing, and conducted her into the courtyard.

‘Chinese or Western breakfast?’

Phryne sat down on a blackwood chair and stared. This was unexpected. The warehouse, which had looked very solid from the street, was actually hollow. In the middle was a garden, exquisitely planted with vines and bamboo.

Small gravelled paths wandered through the thickets. It was as though the verandah of the standard Australian house had been turned inside out. She could hear the bamboo rustling. The noise of the street was damped by the building.

Melbourne sparrows, unable to believe their luck, took splashing, noisy baths in the goldfish pool. ‘Chinese,’ she said firmly. This dreamlike, scroll-painting picture was no place to demand eggs and bacon. Lin Chung gave an order to someone.

‘I got used to – I even liked – the English breakfast,’ he said, sitting down beside her. ‘But I still prefer this.’

Phryne accepted a delicate porcelain bowl of what looked very like library paste and took up her spoon.

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‘What is this?’ she asked, sipping at a smooth, bland soup.

‘Rice gruel – the French call it congee. It tastes better than porridge, I think.’ An attendant girl poured out some tea for her. It was a bracing brew with an undertaste of metal. ‘And this is what you gave me yesterday – was it only yesterday, Moon Lady? Iron Goddess tea. Later in the day we might try chrysanthemum. Tea is a cult in China.’

‘I’m not even going to ask what you think of Western tea with milk and sugar.’

‘To such a dreadful brew milk and sugar must be added; they mitigate the taste,’ he said politely.

Phryne was languid with pleasure and could think of nothing she wanted to do more than to sit in this magical garden and listen to the grass growing; but there was a mystery to be solved and she had to get to the theatre for morning rehearsal.

So she nibbled a flat cake which was far too sweet, drank her tea, and gathered her resources.

Phryne marched into the Maj, gathering the policemen, Lin, Marie-Claire, Herbert, Leila and Sir Bernard in her wake and shutting the door on them in Bernard’s office. She surveyed them. Jack Robinson looked worried, as he always did. The sergeant and the constable preserved the custom-ary blandness of stuffed fish. Leila was blooming and Sir Bernard looked more rosy and pleased than any manager with an unsolved ghost on his hands should look. Herbert was bubbling over 263

with news about his new home and Lin Chung was silent and alert.

‘We have to lay a trap,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know who we’ll catch, except for the trickster and the person who murdered your mother, Leila. I think I know who it is. And I think I know who’s been helping the trickster. But I haven’t any proof at all. I need your help and everything I say has to be absolutely confidential. Will you do as I say and not ask any questions?’

They nodded.

‘Jack, post your officers at both exits. Lin, can you operate the ghost?’ He assented quietly.

‘Marie-Claire, Leila, we have to go to your dressing rooms. Bernie, I want a general call of the whole company, including all the auxiliary staff, on stage in half an hour. Tinker, you keep the stage door and make sure old Tom is up on stage with the rest. Can you manage that?’

The boy’s confidence had gone up with a rush, removed from the threat of violence and now firmly attached to the theatre. He said ‘My dad signed – I belong here now. Don’t I, Sir B? So I can do it. He’ll be there, Boss.’

‘What am I going to say to the company?’ asked Sir Bernard.

‘I don’t know – confirm the roles and pay for New Zealand,’ snapped Phryne. ‘Make sure that the dressers and Mrs Pomeroy and all her girls are there too, Bernie. I don’t want to waste all this effort and we’ll only get one chance.’

‘Phryne darling, can’t you give me a hint about 264

what is going to happen?’ begged Sir Bernard. ‘Just a teeny weeny idea?’

‘Not so much as an ickle pretty one. Off you go.

Leila, come with me.’

Lin Chung, with a new respect for the sort of organising ability he had thought confined to Chinese grandmothers, climbed up the lighting gantry, which was unoccupied, and waited for his cue.

Phryne, having coached Leila through her role with some difficulty – it was dawning on her that Leila was not very bright – left her applying greasepaint and went to lurk at the stage entrance. Sir Bernard had summoned the whole cast and crew on stage, facing stage left in a large semi-circle.

Phryne looked at them.

The chorus gathered together around Andre´

Dupont. Melly, standing next to him, seemed to be showing them a new ring. Violet Wiltshire and Mollie Webb were talking about knitting, from what Phryne overheard as she stealthily climbed on a chair and fitted a glass sleeve over a different light. Leila, in Rose Maybud’s sun-defying bonnet, stood next to Sir Bernard with her head bowed, her black hair falling around her face. Phryne saw Gwilym and Selwyn attempt to edge near her, to be foiled by Sir Bernard. He really was doing frightfully well.

‘Now New Zealand is a long way away but it is Australia’s nearest neighbour,’ he announced.

‘There’s no point in taking such a long voyage unless you mean to do your best, each and every 265

one of you. Anyone who hasn’t a wholehearted devotion to the craft is not welcome. I mean, we are not going to have any more nonsense. I’m not naming names but I’ve had enough of these dis-ruptive flirtations. You’re all behaving like school-children. I want a professional attitude. Do you understand?’

The company shifted from foot to foot and murmured that it understood.

‘Now, I want to read the company list. Please listen very carefully.’

Tom Deeping growled to Mr Brawn, the stage carpenter, ‘Why do they want us up here? This ain’t our business.’

‘Dunno,’ said Mr Brawn. ‘You know Management. Love the sound of their own voice.’

‘Can you smell something?’ asked Tom Deeping, coughing. ‘A sort of sweet smell?’

‘I can smell it,’ said Mrs Pomeroy. ‘Flowers.

Hyacinths, isn’t it?’

‘Hyacinths,’ said Kitty Collins, drawing closer to her sister for the first time in years. ‘Can you smell it, Jill?’

Then the lights went out.

The company blinked until they began to see again in the faint pale sunlight coming through the windows. Then Mollie Webb screamed, ‘Look!’

‘It’s her!’ cried Jessie. ‘Dorothea!’

‘Yes,’ said Louis. ‘See? That’s how I saw her.

Rose Maybud. Can you see her, Monsieur Dupont? That’s just how she looked, eh Col?’

‘Just like that,’ said the bass dubiously.

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‘It’s a trick,’ said Phryne, leaping down from her perch. ‘She’s a drawing.’ Phryne approached the slide and tapped it. ‘Painted glass. You can only see her when she has a light behind her.’

Someone in the chorus, lost to all decent feeling, chanted from
Trial By Jury
, ‘ ‘‘She may very well pass for forty-three in the dusk with the light behind her,’’ ’ and there was a general, if shaky, laugh.

‘If she’s a trick,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘who had the infernal nerve to play it?’

Phryne seemed to be waiting for something.

There was a pounding of feet, then a crash and a wail.

‘Bring him up, Constable,’ she said to the auditorium, and the huge policeman clumped up the aisle and on to the stage, carrying a struggling figure in overalls.

‘Told you,’ he said to Jack Robinson. ‘Told you, sir,’ he repeated, as he stood Leonard Brawn the stage carpenter on his feet.

‘Why?’ asked Sir Bernard.

‘You never noticed us,’ snarled the carpenter, eyes alight with fury. ‘Never even noticed us. Just technicals, you said. Just slaves. There to do all the dirty work and never praised when we’ve worked miracles, there to complain about if some damn-fool idea doesn’t work. But I showed you.’ He bared his teeth. ‘I showed you all right. You were wetting your drawers with terror, all of you, from the high and mighty Management all the way down, turning on each other and blaming each 267

other. I’ve been laughing at you all week. Took a clever one to catch me,’ he snarled at Phryne, and reached out clawing hands. ‘Took a private detective and a Chink to catch me. Nearly got you, though, Miss Fisher. I saw you when that weight fell, you was right underneath. I never meant it to get poor Prompt, she wasn’t no better than us, with the stage manager on her back all the time.

I’m sorry about Prompt,’ said Mr Brawn, ‘I never meant to kill Prompt. But you – all of you – I scared you all right!’

The company had drawn together under the lash of the carpenter’s hatred. He was screaming now, spittle flecking his lips, and they turned their eyes away from him.

‘Well, is that the end of this charade?’ demanded Selwyn Alexander, supporting his half-fainting dresser Bradford. ‘Can we go home now?’

‘Detective Inspector, we will have to get a lawyer, a doctor – surely the poor fellow is insane,’

said Sir Bernard. ‘Can we arrange something for him?’

‘Yes, a loony-doctor is a good idea. Can’t hang a madman. Take him out, Constable. Sergeant, read him the usual warning. Well, that’s the end of that,’ said Jack Robinson, dusting his hands.

Then he sniffed. The smell of hyacinths again, heavy, almost rotting. ‘Lilies when they fester smell far worse than weeds’ – the words of Shakespeare came unbidden to his mind. Valuable fellow, Shakespeare. Words for everything.

It suddenly seemed to have become cold. An icy 268

wind scoured the stage. The chorus, who had been warming into a four-part harmony version of

‘Around Her Neck, She Wears A Yellow Ribbon,’

had just got to the bit which explains that ‘she wears it for a singer who is far far away’ when the voices died.

On the breath of the cold wind, a bride came, her draperies fluttering, her veil blowing. She was so like Leila Esperance that the resemblance was uncanny. The smell of hyacinths grew chokingly strong, mixed with an exhalation of the grave. The chorus squealed and backed away as she came towards them, walking without a sound, her face as white as death, her black eyes as sharp as diamond-pointed gramophone needles.

Straight towards Tom Deeping she walked, where he huddled with Alexander almost in the wings.

‘You,’ she said with dreadful coldness. ‘You killed me. I didn’t want to die. I had a child and a lover and everything to live for and you poisoned me, you man!’

Leila turned her bonneted head into Sir Bernard’s chest and whimpered.

Cold malignancy seemed to ooze from the bride; her voice was clear and the extended hand and arm as fixed as wood. She seemed to have unearthly patience, willing to wait for an answer until time wore out. She advanced another step and Tom Deeping dropped to his knees.

‘Not me,’ he pleaded. ‘Not me, Dot! Not old Tom. I knew you when you was a baby. I never 269

touched a hair of your head, Dot. You shouldn’t never got wrapped up in them nobby folk, Dot.

That’s what done for yer.’

The ghost stopped, seeming to be considering what he was saying. Then she moved again, one more soundless step in her miasma of rotting flowers.

‘Yes,’ someone screamed. ‘Yes, it was me. I did it. I put the stuff in that madeira you drank. You were going to leave me. You were going to marry Bernard and leave me. I couldn’t bear that anyone else should have you.’ The ghost stood as still as a spear of ice, shining in her draperies, and the voice went on, ‘I’ve been a broken man since you died. I never amounted to anything without you.

So I’m ready. Take me with you, Dorothea, I’ve always loved you. When you died you tore out my heart. Take me with you,’ sobbed Bradford, tearing loose Selwyn Alexander’s grip. ‘I love you,’