Unnatural Habits: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (Phryne Fisher Mysteries) (12 page)

‘In that nursing home?’ asked Jack, startled. A straight-line thinker, he was frequently surprised by Phryne’s reasoning. ‘I’d need a search warrant.’

‘But I wouldn’t,’ said Phryne sweetly. ‘And I wouldn’t have to telegraph that I was coming, allowing them to hide her somewhere else. Should she still be alive, of course. I think I shall call on Dot’s parish priest. He has a right to inspect the nursing home. No, that won’t do, he would be too polite. How about some government person? Can you lend me a policewoman, Jack?’

‘Yes, but she’d need a search warrant, too.’

‘Oh,’ said Phryne. ‘Of course. Well, any suggestions?’

‘The Welfare,’ said Jane, and shuddered, as did Ruth, Tinker, Dot and Phryne. All of them had spent childhoods haunted by the threat of the Welfare, who could take children away to an unspecified but dreadful fate.

‘Good idea,’ said Phryne, taking a strengthening swallow of her drink. ‘Can you speak to them? Do you know anyone?’

‘I know just the person,’ said Jack, taking a gulp of his beer for the same reason. ‘Miss Steel, and you’re going to love her. In a way,’ he added.

***

The evening continued with Jack, Bert, Cec, Dot and Phryne listening to the gramophone, and the children scattering to their own rooms.

Tinker had his wash and changed into his pyjamas—a novelty, as he had previously slept in his shirt when he had one. He took his evening cocoa and biscuits to his shed. He shut himself in. He sat down at his carpenter’s bench, lit his hurricane lamp, and opened a new Sexton Blake. The sea shushed outside. In all of of St. Kilda, there was probably no one as solidly content as Tinker.

Chapter Six

O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

The day began as usual with Greek coffee, a croissant, and a letter on her breakfast tray. Phryne opened it once the coffee had done its stimulating work and she could coordinate the letter opener without peril. The envelope was addressed to The Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher. It contained one half-sheet of pale blue notepaper, in very good style, with an engraved (not printed) address in Flinders Lane. It was headed The Blue Cat Club and was written in elaborate script in elegant dark blue ink.

If Miss Fisher would call this morning at eleven, Mr. Featherstonehaugh would be much obliged
.

‘Well,’ said Phryne.

‘Well?’ asked Dot.

‘The Blue Cat Club,’ Phryne explained ‘is a very elegant, very well-run establishment for practitioners of—how shall I put it? The love that dare not speak its name, as the Oscar Wilde said.’

‘Sorry?’ asked Dot. ‘Would you like cypress or roses in your bath?’

‘Cypress,’ said Phryne. ‘I shall smell like Aphrodite. Which would be entirely inappropriate. In this case. Interesting. Polly Kettle went to the Blue Cat just before she disappeared.’

‘Do you think they had anything to do with that?’ asked Dot, still puzzling over ‘the love that dare not speak its name.’

‘Possibly,’ said Phryne. ‘You’re going to talk to the parish priest about various matters?’ she asked Dot.

‘I’ll go directly,’ said Dot. She was feeling in need of some spiritual consolation herself. ‘You do know, miss, that you have to have the bishop’s permission to talk to the nuns?’

‘Then I shall get it,’ said Phryne.

Phryne bathed and dressed. She chose a severe navy suit, as close to masculine dress as she could manage without wearing trousers (which might be construed as satirical). These clothes would also be useful for overawing the multitudes should that be necessary. Today should contain Miss Steel and her inspection of Mrs. Ryan’s lying-in home, an interview with Mrs. O’Hara, and the Blue Cat Club. A day full of contrasts and just to Phryne’s taste.

She was beginning to be anxious about Polly Kettle. If she had just been quietly strangled in a back alley, the body should have turned up by now, found by some couple seeking privacy or an inquisitive dog. If she was dead there was no hurry. But if she was alive and at the mercy of, say, an over-muscled mother’s boy with a mouth, then she needed to be rescued and right speedily.

When Phryne came down, Miss Steel was waiting for her. She had refused Mr. Butler’s offers of refreshment, to his evident distress, and was only barely sitting on a chair in the hall. She leapt to her feet as Phryne approached.

‘Miss Steel.’ She held out a muscular hand.

‘Miss Fisher,’ responded Phryne.

‘Shall we go?’ asked the woman.

Phryne looked at her. A tall thin energetic brunette with bright eyes and a hard mouth; not a woman to be lightly crossed, especially when armed with a clipboard.

‘You have a car?’ she asked of Miss Steel.

‘Outside,’ said Miss Steel.

Not one for idle chatter, thought Phryne. She gathered gloves and handbag and bade her household be good in her absence. She seemed to hear the populace draw a deep breath of relief as she took Miss Steel of the Welfare out of the house.

‘Jack said you were all right,’ said Miss Steel, as she folded her length into a smallish car of indeterminate make. The driver did not speak or smile, but started the vehicle as soon as Phryne had shut her door.

‘I am,’ said Phryne.

‘I have met Mrs. Ryan,’ said Miss Steel. She had an exact, precise way of speaking, which cut off her words with a decisive snap of white teeth. Phryne began to feel she was in some sort of fairy tale. Possibly Miss Steel was the Big Bad Wolf. And her driver was as unresponsive as one of the living dead in a novel she had just been reading about Haiti. He drove very well, however. For a zombie. Footscray loomed.

‘Lying-in homes are not as regulated as hospitals,’ Miss Steel informed her. ‘But they can be inspected at any time without notice. Jack says that you suspect a girl might be being held prisoner there.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ said Phryne.

‘Then we shall find her, if she is there,’ said Miss Steel. ‘I am entitled to unlock any door. If they have conveniently lost the keys, then Willis will break it down.’

‘He can do that?’ asked Phryne.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Miss Steel.

Phryne looked at the driver. He still showed no expression. Phryne’s identification of him as a resurrected cabbie was firming. ‘Oh, good.’

There seemed nothing else to say. Miss Steel checked her clipboard. Phryne looked out the window at the docks flying past. The pickets were still there, the huge iron doors shut fast. Soon they arrived at Mrs. Ryan’s house.

Still unspeaking, Willis opened the gate for Miss Steel and her companion. He marched up the steps and rang the bell. There was silence. Then he knocked like thunder. Nothing happened.

Miss Steel and Willis exchanged a glance. Willis returned to the car and came back with a sledgehammer.

‘One moment,’ said Phryne. It was an old lock, of no complexity. She picked it in a moment with her hatpin.

‘Jack said you had valuable skills, Miss Fisher,’ observed Miss Steel without a smile. ‘Willis?’

Willis preceded them into the house of the pious widow. It still stank of carbolic and naphthalene. No one in the front rooms, which bore marks of a hasty exit. The picture of the Sacred Heart stared Phryne in the eye. They went down the hall toward the back of the house, where someone was crying.

Several someones, in fact. Four beds were packed close together in a cramped room. Four women lay there with four new babies. All of them were crying, including the small maidservant, who was standing at the doorway with a burnt saucepan in her hand, weeping like a funeral. The smell was almost a character in itself. One of the beds was soaked with blood, and the coppery tang overbore the other unpleasant smells: excrement and despair and burnt milk.

‘Call an ambulance,’ Miss Steel told Willis. Phryne inspected the bleeding woman. She was still alive. She grabbed at Phryne’s hand.

‘An ambulance is coming,’ Phryne told her. ‘Lie still.’

‘You, girl,’ ordered Miss Steel. ‘Take that object back into the kitchen, put on the kettle, wash your face and return for orders.’

The child gaped. Then she did as she was told. Miss Steel picked up each baby, looked disinterestedly into the screaming face, joggled it expertly and gave it to its mother. Silence began to fall. Cradling the last baby in her blue-clad arms, Miss Steel turned her gaze on the most conscious patient, a woman with sweat-soaked blonde hair and haunted blue eyes.

‘Tell me what happened. Where is Mrs. Ryan?’

‘Bloody went off this bloody morning. Bloody early. Dunno where. Bloody bitch. Bloody rotten bitch! Damn her to hell. Left poor bloody Ellie there. Bloody knew she was bleeding.’

‘Why didn’t you go out and get help?’ asked Phryne.

‘She’s got our bloody clothes,’ said the woman. ‘So we won’t bloody run away. And I’m a bit bloody wobbly on me pins.’

‘You, girl,’ snapped Miss Steel to the servant, who had returned. ‘Your name?’

‘Mary, Miss.’ The girl was mopped up and as lucid as she ever was. Probably it was a relief to hear someone give unequivocal orders. And she had put down her milk saucepan.

‘Don’t you bloody bully her,’ said the blonde woman. ‘Poor bloody little scrap’s been doing her bloody best.’

Miss Steel gave the woman a long look so full of cold venom that she faltered and buried her face in her child’s meagre wrappings.

‘Where are the clothes?’ asked Miss Steel. ‘Show me.’

Mary led the way to a large linen press. It was, of course, locked. Phryne produced her hatpin again. The lock yielded. Inside were bundles of shabby garments. Miss Steel loaded the maid with them and ordered her to assist the mothers to dress.

‘Where are they going?’ asked Phryne.

Miss Steel tried the poisonous look on Phryne, who smiled sunnily and repeated the request. Miss Steel recognised a nature as adamant as her own and finally replied, ‘Back to the convent. They cannot stay here.’

‘They’re in no state to walk,’ said Phryne. ‘Do you know a nice nurse who could care for them for a week or so?’

Miss Steel sneered. ‘And who should pay for such a nurse? Wages, food, fuel? The government? I don’t believe I could authorise such expenditure.’

‘Me,’ said Phryne. ‘Do you know such a nurse? I’m looking for a pleasant efficient lady. These girls have suffered enough.’

Miss Steel was not used to this sort of benevolence; it was like a slap in the face. Jack Robinson had told her she would find Miss Fisher educational. She was beginning to think that this might be so.