The Green Mill Murder (23 page)

‘What’s the news, then?’ asked one, and the whiskered publican announced, ‘We’ve only had a sheila in an aeroplane drop in on us!’

‘No! You been drinking your own licker, Jim; you’ll be seeing joe blakes on bicycles next!’

A general laugh. It appeared that the publican’s liquor was generally suspect. Charles nursed his glass of beer.

‘No, fair dinkum. We all saw her. A lady, it was. You know about it, mate, you brought up the fuel for the plane.’

‘Oh, is that what all them drums was? A plane? Jeez.’

‘Yair, and Dave’s gonna get one too!’ The publican laughed. ‘Our Dave was real struck on her. Bit of all right, she was. Thin, with black hair. Funny name, now what was it? Phryne. That was the name. Miss Phryne Fisher. Couldn’t she fly the thing, but! Dropped her onto the strip we cleared along the river as sweet as a bird.’

‘What was she doin’ here?’ asked the packhorse man, draining his glass at a gulp. ‘Another one, Jim.’

‘She came to find . . . well, I reckon she came to find Vic. The ladies seemed sure that she didn’t mean him no harm. And they made her promise not to try and take him back to the city. They said she came to tell him his father’s dead.’

‘Poor Vic,’ commented Dave. ‘As if he ain’t had enough, to sic some sheila onto him.’

‘She was all right, Missus Anne said she was all right. They wouldn’t of told her if they hadn’t thought she was,’ insisted the publican. ‘Promised she’d be back.’

‘Yair, she promised to give me a ride in the plane,’ grinned Dave. ‘I’m gonna be in that! Reckon she’s a good goer.’

‘The sheila or the plane?’ asked a grizzled stockman drily.

‘The plane. She was a lady,’ stated Dave firmly.

Charles was furious. It appeared that Phryne had stolen a march on him. He knew her ways; she’d have his poor mad brother crawling at her feet in a few minutes. He was sickened by all women, their smell and their lust. Well, he’d show her. He’d show both of them. It now appeared that Vic was not only not dead but definitely alive and living on the High Plains.

‘Excuse me,’ he interrupted the conversation. ‘I’m Vic’s brother, Charles. Can anyone take me to him? I have to see him.’

The whole population of the pub surveyed Charles in silence.

‘You?’ asked Dave finally. ‘You’re Vic’s brother? You don’t look like him.’ His voice held quiet contempt.

Charles flushed with rage. ‘Here’s our photograph. It was taken before he went to the war,’ he added. ‘I was at school then.’

The photograph was passed around the pub, each man taking the time to study it profoundly. There was Vic, right enough, perfectly recognisable even with short hair and no beard. The eyes were the same. He was wearing uniform. Next to him was a younger and smaller version of this same man, a little chubby, schoolboyish, but the same. On the back of the photo was written in Vic’s flowing hand, ‘To my brother Charlie with love from Vic’. It was conclusive.

‘Yair, you’re his brother all right. What makes you think he wants to see you?’

‘I’m his brother!’

‘Yair, you said that,’ the old man pointed out.

Silence again.

‘I’ll pay you,’ Charles said proudly. The air in the small pub seemed to congeal. He realised that he had said the wrong thing, and backtracked hastily. ‘For your time, you know,’ he babbled into cold silence.

‘I’ll take yer,’ said Dave, having pity on him. ‘But not for money. And if Vic don’t want to see yer I’ll take yer away again. We start in the morning. A quid will cover the stores.’

Charles passed over a pound. ‘How long will it take?’ he quavered.

Dave considered. ‘Two days, maybe three. Depends on the weather. Better see if Mrs Plumpton has a spare oilskin. We’ll have to ford the Wonnangatta River.’

‘Isn’t there a bridge?’ asked Charles foolishly of the empty space where Dave had been. He flinched under the massed eyes, and went to the front of the pub to see if he could buy an oilskin from the publican’s wife.

Anne Purvis strode into the house, flung down her armload of firewood and yelled, ‘Jo! Wake up!’

‘What?’ came a voice from the centre of the big bed. Anne slapped at a lump where she guessed her friend’s posterior might be.

Jo emerged angrily. ‘I’ve been up all night writing. Can’t you indulge your diseased sense of rustic humour somewhere else?’

‘Listen, this is important. A bloke came in with the packhorses today, reckons he’s Vic’s brother. Didn’t say anything about it, mind, until he heard the others discussing Miss Phryne’s visit and the plane and all.’

‘What’s he like?’ asked Josephine, gathering up her wits and locating her boots and her skirt and dragging them on.

Anne’s brow was furrowed. ‘I don’t like the look of him, Jo. He’s a plump, weak-looking little bloke with a permanent sneer. He don’t look at all like Vic. If I fancied men, I’d fancy Vic; he’s like one of them Vikings you were telling me about. Vic loves the bush. I don’t reckon this bloke has ever been out here before, and you can tell he hates it.’

‘Well? What’s happened?’

‘Young Dave’s agreed to take him to Mac Springs,’ said Anne.

Josephine reflected. ‘I don’t think he can do Vic much harm, Anne. Not with Dave there. He was bound to happen along, I suppose. Pity Dave agreed, though. Why did he?’

‘Missus Plumpton says Dave was sorry for him. He offered them all money to take him to Vic.’

‘That was unwise. He certainly isn’t used to bush ways, is he? I don’t think we need to worry too much, Anne dear, but I might have a word with Dave. Put the kettle on. When are they setting out?’

‘In the morning,’ said Anne, slamming the cast-iron kettle onto the colonial stove. ‘But I don’t like it, Jo, I don’t like this at all.’

‘Neither do I,’ agreed Josephine. ‘I’ll make the tea. You go out and get Dave.’

Phryne had spent a delightful day lazing in the sun, playing fetch with Mack (whose energy was awesome), making love in the kangaroo grass and, as dusk approached, combing Vic’s beautiful hair into a plait.

‘It gets into my face and I sneeze,’ she explained. He sat patiently under her hands, not wincing when the comb pulled. With the long hair out of the way, the planes of his face were visible, strong and flat. She kissed the triangle of white skin between the beard and the plait.

‘Lovely. Many a maiden would pine for such hair. You don’t resemble your brother at all, you know.’

‘Mum reckoned I was a throwback to my dad’s ancestors. They came from Norway, six generations back. How about rabbit stew for supper?’

Phryne suppressed the information that this would be the first rabbit she had eaten since her impoverished childhood. She reflected that she had sworn never to eat underground mutton again, informed herself that most promises were piecrust, and smiled.

‘Good,’ she said.

Dave and Charles had left Talbotville well supplied and in good weather, and the tracks were clear, at least to Dave. His ears still stung with the dressing down he had been given by Missus Jo, and the warnings about what she would do to him if any harm came to Vic. But as his employer groaned and shifted in a perfectly comfortable stock saddle, and almost toppled out of it, although he was held in so securely by the horns that a baby could have slept in it, he could not see that this poor townie could be any threat to Vic. Vic was a good bloke, a strong bloke, used to the bush and all its ways. A bit strange, living on his own in the high mountains. This city chap could never pose a threat to Vic. He didn’t look well, either. He had not taken to sleeping on the ground, and he had caught a cold crossing the Wonnangatta. They were making good progress, though. The weather was fine, not too hot and not wet, and two days out they were already climbing up to the ridge which would take them onto the Cross-Cut Saw and round to Howitt Plains and down to Mac Springs. Dave shook his head. Well, tomorrow, perhaps late today if the weather held, he could deliver this palpitating incompetent to Vic and see what Vic wanted to do with him.

‘Not far now,’ he encouraged. ‘We’ll be out in the open in a tick, and you’ll be able to see all across the Barry Ranges.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Charles with weak sarcasm.

‘Yair, it’s a beauty view,’ agreed Dave innocently.

Charles sat up straighter in the saddle and sighed.

Three days, Phryne had given herself, and the third was drawing on towards dusk. Vic was chopping wood. She watched him as he flexed his back, muscles rippling, and dropped the axe in exactly the right place, so that the wood split perfectly. He tossed the mound of logs onto his woodpile. Phryne embraced
him, smelling the sharp scent of male human and sweat.

‘I’ll go tomorrow,’ she said calmly. ‘I have promised to be back in a week. It’s been so lovely that I forgot the time. But I have to go, Vic.’

‘And you won’t be back?’ he asked, hands closing on her shoulders.

‘No, I don’t think I should, do you?’

‘I suppose not. Would you, if I couldn’t live without you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll write,’ he said. ‘We’ll see. One more night, Phryne. That shall be enough. Would you like to feed Mack? There’s a rabbit in the Coolgardie. And I might give Lucky a bit of a rub down. He’s been rolling in wet grass again. I don’t want him to come down with colic.’

Phryne went into the house and was almost knocked down by Mack, whose knowledge of the English language encompassed words like ‘feed’ and ‘rabbit’.

She realised that she wanted to leave, to go back to bright lights and noise and people and telephones and motor cars. The silence, which had healed Vic, was cumulative. She was now more, not less, frightened of the night than she had been when she arrived. She found herself singing loudly. Occasionally, although a warm sleeping man lay beside her, she woke in the dark, terrified by the thudding of her own heart. Vic had been delightful, but he and his surroundings were a passion to be indulged in sparingly, like absinthe, which sooner or later sent the drinker mad.

She supplied Mack with his rabbit, bade him take it outside, and put away all the things she had brought with her. They were now her contribution to the MacAlister Springs establishment. Her own case contained nothing more than some soiled clothes and the little gun. She was glad that she had not had to use it. She laid in the folds of her shirt a handful of the pale alpine flowers, and a piece of bark that had a spicy, strange smell.

Vic came in, slung the stewpot onto the stove, and began to slice onions into it. Phryne possessed herself of some potatoes and a peeling knife, and sat down.

She was getting tired of rabbit stew.

‘Well, here we are,’ said Dave proudly, ‘MacAlister Springs. And a nice little journey, too, no joe blakes.’

‘What’s a joe blake?’ asked Charles faintly. Dave helped him down from his horse and supported him while he got his legs working.

‘A snake,’ he said. ‘I’ll just give Vic a cooee.’

‘No. I haven’t seen him in so long; I want to surprise him. Please. You wait here. I shan’t be long.’

Dave said easily, ‘All right,’ and turned his head. Charles hit him very hard with a rock he had picked up while Dave was supporting him. Dave crumpled to the ground.

Charles walked towards the hut, fumbling for something in his oilskin pocket. The door was open. Mack the dog bounced out, and galloped across to the fallen Dave, whimpering. Charles extracted the thing from his pocket as he reached the door,
and stepped over the threshold.

Vic turned from the fire at the step, a greeting on his lips. It died unsaid when he saw the scarecrow standing in the doorway.

Charles had not travelled well. He moved like a mummy, and his face was scratched and his hair torn by branches he had been too clumsy to evade. There was blood on his chin where he had bitten his lip. But what was holding Vic’s fascinated attention was the revolver in his hand.

‘Charles?’ he asked calmly. ‘Come in.’

‘He is in,’ said Phryne, still seated with her lap full of potatoes. ‘Charles? Have you gone quite mad?’

‘You here?’ snarled the man. ‘You don’t matter. Vic matters.’

‘So I see, but why the gun?’ asked Phryne in her most irritating drawl. He did not look at her again.

‘I’ve come to kill you,’ Charles said on a furious rush of breath. ‘You’ve always been in my way. Even dead, I mean I thought you were dead; she used you to torture me. No! Don’t move.’ He fired to Vic’s right. The shot was dampened by the soft walls. Phryne realised that Charles might easily kill Vic in this mood, once he had completed his gloat. A sudden idea, straight from her guardian angel, struck her. Very slowly, so as not to attract the gunman’s attention, she began to bend down so that her hand was near the floor.

‘She told me you were fine, a man, not like me. She killed me, Vic, she killed every chance I had at love. I can’t love anyone. Not man, not woman.’

‘Charlie,’ began Vic, holding out a hand.

‘No! Don’t call me that!’ He fired again, and the bullet clanged off a pot and buried itself in the gloom. ‘She called me that! She told me, make sure Vic is dead! So I’m making sure! She’ll have to love me after this!’

‘Wom,’ called Phryne softly, hoping that it was dark enough for the creature to build up speed. Charles glanced at her.