Raisins and Almonds (2 page)

cis 1.4. polyisoprene

Detective Inspector John 'Call me Jack, everyone does' Robinson sighted the neat figure in a town suit and the two cafe curtains of black hair and sighed. The Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher, as ever was, he thought, large as life and twice as natural, and about, by her stride, smile and general demeanour, to make his day uncomfortable. It looked like a nice clear case. Frustrated spinster falls in love with attractive tall dark stranger. Tall dark stranger does not return the favour, or perhaps seduces and betrays her, and she gives him a friendly cup of strychnine tea. Easy, clear cut and simple, and here came Miss Fisher to complicate things.

Wishing he was at home in the undemanding company of his cattleya orchids, Jack Robinson intercepted the visitor at the door.

'Well, well, Miss Fisher,' he began, 'nothing to tax your well-known skills in this case.'

'Oh, no?' Phryne smiled guilelessly into the policeman's face. He winced. Miss Fisher was at her most dangerous when she was smiling guilelessly. It was a sign that someone, somewhere, was about to be shaken down until their teeth rattled and the Detective Inspector was uneasily aware that he was the closest available target.

'Yes. Open and shut,' he continued. 'Frustrated unmarried woman falls in love with a customer, he doesn't notice or perhaps he takes advantage of the situation, and Bob's your uncle, she up and poisons him. Picture the scene. He comes into her shop, she never expected to see him again after the way he treated her. But there he is. She puts the rat killer into a cup of tea. He drinks it, drops the cup—splash!—and falls dead. Curtain.'

'Oh, very good,' purred Phryne, peering around the bulk of the Detective Inspector to look into the shop. 'Keep on in that vein and you'll have a script for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Call it "Starved of Passion"—starring, oh, I don't know, Theda Bara?—and you'll be able to retire on the proceeds.'

'Miss Fisher, have you any evidence to the contrary?' said the policeman, a little stiffly. Phryne fixed him with a green gaze.

'I won't know, will I, unless you let me have a look at the scene of the crime.'

'That's quite against the rules,' he began, and Phryne waved a dismissive hand.

'Absolutely, can we take that as read? Come on, Jack dear, you're a just man. What can you lose, except an official reprimand for leaping to the wrong conclusions?'

'Come in,' said Jack Robinson, as he had known he would from the first sight of that extravagant purple feather in the small black hat, and Miss Fisher ducked under his arm and stood still at the door, surveying the small shop.

'It's in apple pie order for a scene of the crime,' she commented, looking at the ordered shelves and sniffing the smell of lysol, gum leaves and leather.

'The prisoner cleaned it carefully. Not a fingermark, and of course she washed the cup.'

'The cup?'

'The tea or whatever the poison was in.'

'Oh, that cup. The one which was dropped so dramatically in your script. You know—Dot will advise us on this—but I'd swear that this floor has been swept and polished recently, but not washed. Eh, Dorothy?'

'Yes, Miss.' Miss Fisher's personal maid and companion sniffed, then crouched and ran a finger along the American cloth. 'This floor was waxed with Shinoleum, recently, and since then it has been swept and then buffed with a soft cloth around a broom. Waxed floors spot if you spill anything wet on them, and they pit if you spill hot water on them—melts the surface, you see. Then you have to put on more wax. When I was a maid, I remember, the missus once went crook because of a dropped cup of tea. I had to re-do the whole floor.' Dot folded her arms in her dark brown cardigan and sniffed again. 'And I can't smell wax, Sir. Disinfectant and gum leaves, but no wax. Shinoleum's got carbolic in it, and that's a real noticeable smell. Miss Fisher's right. Nothing wet's been spilled on this floor, not for weeks.'

'Hmm.' Phryne made a slow circuit of the little shop, touching nothing. The books were ranked by subject and were largely in unknown languages, although one shelf appeared to be devoted to Hansard, Collected Sermons and novels by Walter Scott—all, Phryne imagined, unsaleable except to the insomniac or those customers who possessed a piano with one leg half an inch short.

Miss Lee's desk contained ranked pens, a bottle of William's Superfine Ink As Used By Royalty, a pen knife marking the place in an invoice book, an eraser and a perpetual calender, a sheaf of business cards and a list of telephone numbers. The only signs that a woman worked in the bookshop were a packet of Ladies Travelling Necessities and a small box of Bex powders.

Open on the desk was a ledger with a half-completed sum and a pencil which had rolled into the centre of the book. Behind Miss Lee's high stool was a little curtained alcove which contained a gas ring with kettle, a tap with sink, one cup, one saucer, one teaspoon, a strainer, and one small brown teapot. Phryne opened a tin and found it half-full of hard ginger biscuits. The other tins contained sugar and tea. A small amount of milk was curdling quietly in a small jug.

'Miss Lee did not entertain, it appears,' she said to Jack Robinson. 'Only one cup. Did you find another one?'

'No,' he admitted, 'but she had plenty of time to get rid of it.'

'All right, Jack dear, you must have more on her than this romantic tarradiddle about unmarried women. What happened according to Miss Lee?'

'She says—and she's sticking to it like a good 'un— that the deceased came into the shop just after Miss Lee opened in the morning—about ten past nine. She's seen him before, he often came in and bought rare Hebrew and Greek books. She had him on her order book as Mr Simon Michaels, a scholar, but he has been identified as Shimeon Ben Mikhael, a native of Salonika. In Australia on an entry visa due to expire next week.'

'Who identified him?' asked Phryne, listening to the carters screaming insults at each other out in the Eastern Market.

'No one, we can't find anyone who knew him. He lived in a lodging house in Carlton, in Drummond Street. He was carrying his passport. Salonikan, but he's a Jew all right.'

'And?' asked Phryne, wondering if her good opinion of Detective Inspector Robinson was about to be shattered.

'So we have to be real careful. You know what's happening in Russia. I'm not going to have no pogroms in my patch, not never,' said Jack Robinson stoutly. 'I started my career in Carlton, and they're nice people, not mean whatever slang says. They look after their own in a way which ought to make us ashamed. And they're funny. Many's the laugh I've had with old Missus Goldstein, and a bit of a warm by her stove in the shop. She used to make me eat chicken soup and tell me I was too thin for a growing boy So I'm not having even the suspicion of a shadow of a doubt about this case. It's personal, not political. And there ain't no Jews in it but the coincidence of the victim's being from Salonika.'

Phryne put down Miss Lee's tea cup onto its matching saucer. It was a sturdy piece of white china, with a blue ring. Coles, she guessed. It was spotless, as was all of the area behind the plain brown curtain.

'I take your point, Jack, and it does you credit. Oddly enough, it is precisely that matter which has brought me into this case. My employer feels exactly as you do about the Jewish angle. But I don't think that you have a very good case against Miss Lee, and you'll feel really silly if you bring the wrong woman to trial. Now, tell me about the death—Miss Lee's version.'

'He was standing here,' said Robinson, placing himself next to the bookcase full of unreadables at the far end of the shop. 'He was holding a book in his hands. Then he collapsed, Miss Lee ran to catch him, he jerked out of her grasp and flopped like a landed fish—strychnine does that to you—and then he died. Death was certified by Doctor Stein at ten o'clock. Miss Lee wasn't affected at all. Walked into the market and called for help as cool as a cucumber. Sat behind the desk and waited for them to take the body to hospital, then cleaned her shop as though it had been an ordinary day. That's what put the duty officer on to her. She was too calm.'

'What was the book?' asked Phryne. Robinson stared at her.

'What was the book?'

'Yes, it's a reasonable question, isn't it?'

'I don't know,' admitted the Detective Inspector.

'And where did he fall?'

'Just where you're standing, Miss. Leastways, that's where Dr Stein found him and he was as dead as a peck of doornails by then. Why do you want to know about the book?' asked Robinson, obscurely worried that he might have missed something.

'Just being careful, Jack dear. Have a look, Dot, can you pick out the book that's out of place?'

Dorothy examined the shelves with a housekeeper's eye. 'They're not in any order, Miss, but they're a little dusty—it's a very clean shop but no one can have wanted these books. See, there's a little line of dust at the edge of the shelf. It's either this blue one, Miss, or this dark one.'

Dot pointed out a volume of Hansard for 1911 and a volume of sermons for those of riper years.

They both look entirely deadly, Dot—sorry, Jack, I didn't precisely mean that. Hmm. Have you examined the books?'

'No.' Robinson was biting his bottom lip.

'Well, do you want to, or shall I?'

'I'd better take charge of them, I suppose. Look here, Phryne, do you really think Miss Lee's innocent?'

'Yes. Her story is coherent. Your story about the dropped cup isn't fact, Jack dear—unless she caught it in mid-air. And how else could she have got a relative stranger to eat a strychnine powder? I suppose you've noticed that there are Bex in the drawer.'

'Yes, Miss, all the powders will be removed for testing, and the milk and the water and the leftover tea. She had rat poison in her possession, Miss Fisher. She bought a small packet of Henderson's Rat Killer. And we can't find it.'

'What does Miss Lee say?'

'Nothing, Miss. She won't say anything at all. We took her in and she told us her story, and since then she won't say a word more. She says she never left the shop and she was seen in the market, walking fast. She's hiding something and I reckon I know what. Homicide.'

'And equally it could be a hundred other things. Can I talk to her?'

'Why not?' asked the policeman rhetorically, and led the way out of the shop.

Miss Lee was ushered into the visiting room of the Women's Prison to meet her unexpected visitor. Female homicides were rare, and the prison population of drunks, whores, thieves and child-abandoning good girls, after a certain amount of bridling, had decided that she was one of the quiet ones and should not be tormented or affronted, in case she ran amok in some spectacular way. They attributed the fact that she was taken to see her visitor in the Governor's sitting room as evidence that she was a real dangerous criminal as well as—self-evidently—a lady The escorting wardress pushed Miss Lee not ungently through the door and shut it behind her.

'Miss Lee? I'm Phryne Fisher.' A spectacularly fashionable vision rose and gripped her hand. The woman was small, dark and fizzing with energy, and she made Miss Lee fatigued. She was drawn to sit down beside Miss Fisher on a couch and real tea was pressed upon her. She held the cup and saucer dazedly. She had adapted to being held captive by dropping into a light trance, obeying every order instantly, and trying not to think about her situation. Having retreated into this state, it was proving difficult to withdraw herself from it and the world seemed to contain too many blurry Phrynes in far too many distracting black hats with purple panaches.

However, this appeared to be tea, and she might as well drink it. Miss Lee's sense of self, which had been absent, winged back and lodged in its accustomed place as she sipped very good Ceylon tea with just the right amount of milk and sugar. Nightmares might happen, she might be dragged from her shop into the street, exposed to shame and locked up with a lot of dissolute noisy women, but tea remained comfortingly real. Her visitor waited until she had finished the cup, gave it to a young woman in a brown cardigan to refill, and returned it to her before she spoke.

'Miss Lee, I am tolerably certain that whatever happened in your shop the other day, it was not the film scenario which our excited Detective Inspector Robinson has told me. Have you heard it?'

Miss Lee did not smile, but her tense mouth relaxed a little. 'Yes. I thought it was most imaginative.'

'Oh, I agree, and you wouldn't have thought that a man of his staid appearance had been reading Marie Corelli, would you?'

'Elinor Glyn,' demurred Miss Lee.

Phryne looked at her. She was a strong-featured young woman, with washing-blue eyes, a firm mouth and chin and a carefully controlled mouth. She had been allowed to keep her own clothes, and was dressed in a sensible skirt, a warm jumper and thick stockings. Her taste in colours resembled Dot's: brown and beige and umber. Her hands were hard with work, the writer's callus on her forefinger still stained with ink. They were folded in her lap, trembling a little under geological tension.

'It's because you behaved like a lady, you know,' said Phryne. Miss Lee looked at her visitor. 'Because you didn't shriek and tear your hair and rush out into the road screaming. That's why Jack Robinson thinks you're a murderer. Did you ever hear anything so silly?'

'No,' murmured Miss Lee.

'Exactly, and we can't allow this to continue. Miss Lee, I am actually being retained to investigate this matter by Mr Abrahams. Do you know him well?'

'Yes, he's my landlord.' Phryne detected no blush, no lowering of the eyes, which should have been present in such a proper young businesswoman if her relationship with her landlord was closer than a commercial one. 'He's a very generous man, whatever they say about Jews. He let me the shop at below market rent for my first year—I tried to pay him back, but he told me I had to build up substantial capital first, and I do find rare books for him sometimes. I believe his wife is a pleasant woman.'

'Why do you think that?'

'Because of the books she reads.' Miss Lee studied Miss Fisher for a long moment, visibly made up her mind, and went on in her brisk, no-nonsense voice. 'It's a little game I play, Miss Fisher, guessing what people are really like by their choice of books. Mrs Abrahams isn't sentimental—no Marie Corelli or Florence Barclay for her—she likes biographies. Always of people like Elizabeth Fry, you know—Florence Nightingale—strong women who made a difference in the world. I just found her a copy of
Travels In West Africa
by Mary Kingsley. She likes stories with a happy ending if possible and she tries to like modern novels, but she usually sends them back for me to re-sell as second hand. Therefore I think she is a nice woman with a social conscience, who perhaps wishes that she had been given the chance to do something brave or dangerous. Mr Abrahams is a romantic. He doesn't read novels but he likes poetry, and he's self-educated, I believe. I'm chattering, Miss Fisher, because I am nervous.'