Kerry Greenwood - Tamam Shud

‘Where did you see him?’

‘In Rundle Street, sir. This morning.’

‘Right. Now, Miss Hammond, let me tell you who these people are. The dark one, Brian Sean Ryan, was found dead under a train this morning. I would suggest that the red-haired one is his partner in a lot of nasty enterprises. His name is Damien McGuire. And the pale-eyed person is Patrick Heaney, an IRA murderer.’

‘My gosh, sir, in Adelaide?’

‘Indeed. Now, what I want you to do is to walk around to where you saw Mr Heaney this morning. It is Heaney we really want. And if you see McGuire you can pick him up as well. There will never be less than three men following you and they will come at your signal. All right? Will you do it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good girl. Off you go now.’

Hammond left, three men falling in as she moved like hounds to heel. Sir Archibald’s secretary watched the young woman pace idly down the street, looking in shop windows as though she had hours to kill.

‘Do you think she can do it, sir?’ he asked.

Sir Archibald smile. ‘Oh, yes, she can do it. If they are there to be found, she will find them.’

Hammond found her first prey by his fiery hair; he was waiting in a queue outside the shipping office not a hundred yards from Sir Archibald’s office. She pointed him out to her followers, who closed in on the tall seaman, spoke very quietly to him, and walked him along the street as though they were close friends. Hammond followed behind, and never heard the shot that clipped the feather off her absurd little hat and lodged in Damien McGuire’s chest.

The pale-eyed young man replaced the rifle in its case and drove out of the city toward Melbourne in a very lawabiding manner. Petrol rationing was not a problem for the IRA. The faithful kept them well supplied with coupons.

Hammond and her three attendants dragged Da– mien McGuire off the road onto the footpath. He was badly injured. Blood bubbled up from his lips when he tried to speak. ‘A priest,’ he gasped. ‘Get me a priest.’

One of the attendants ran across the road to the church. Hammond tried to ignore the stench of blood and desert dust and fear that infected the quiet street. She stared into the man’s watering eyes and said compellingly, ‘Tell me. The man on the beach.’

‘It was the new stuff, they gave it to us, a truth drug, they say. He had taken money from the Cause, and he was running, Keane was. But he intercepted a message that told him that we was onto him; and he hid the suitcase, and we never found out where. We shot the stuff into him, into his scalp, and he just said, ‘I will tell you nothing,’ then he closed his eyes and he was gone. ‘Get me a priest, for I’ve death on me!’

‘Yes, yes,’ soothed Hammond. ‘We will get a priest.’

‘Don’t leave me!’ He gripped her hand. Hammond wiped the bright red arterial blood from his lips with her only linen handkerchief, carried for this important day.

‘I won’t leave you,’ she promised.

The priest came in time to give the last rites to the dying man.

After murmuring the correct responses, Damien McGuire never spoke again.

Phryne Fisher, Hammond and Sir Archibald gathered in his office the next day to pool their information.

‘He knew they were onto him,’ murmured Phryne. ‘He had discovered or stolen the coded message and then, just in case, he tore off the tamam shud page and hid it where they would be unlikely to find it. He left us clues to his murder. Then he went to his meeting, having hidden a suitcase full of… what?’

‘What does the code say?’ asked Hammond.

‘AUR. Gold. Money, I suppose. Belonging to the IRA. And he was running away with it.’

‘Yes. And they shot him full of some truth drug – there’s some stuff they have in America called scopolamine. It’s been used as an anaesthetic, but a few people have a sensitivity to it – and it kills them. And there’s no way to test for it yet,’ Sir Archibald told them.

‘They injected it into his scalp so there was no mark,’ said Hammond.

‘Yes. And it killed him.’ Sir Archibald was staring out the window.

‘And he died with his secret intact. How frustrating.’ Phryne got up and began to prowl the room. ‘Come along, I haven’t been on the tram for ages,’ she said. ‘Let’s go out to the beach.’

‘Now?’ asked Sir Archibald, shocked.

‘Yes, now.’

‘Oh, very well,’ he agreed grumpily.

On the journey he refused to be interested in the landmarks and would not enter into the spirit of the ride at all. Phryne was disappointed in him.

‘Well, here we are – Somerton Beach. What are we doing here?’ he demanded.

‘We’re going paddling – at least, I am. Excuse me.’ She turned her back to him, removed her stockings from their garter belt, and took off her shoes.

‘This is where you saw him, isn’t it, Hammond? By the way, what is your first name?’

‘Dulcie, Miss Fisher,’ replied Hammond, running the stockings through her fingers and wondering where Miss Fisher got quality like that.

‘Oh. Now, he was sitting on the bottom step, wasn’t he, with his feet about here? The tide doesn’t come up this high. It rarely gets wet.’

‘Yes,’ said Hammond, getting the idea.

Phryne began to dig with her hands in the soft yellow sand.

‘You see, I wondered why he came down to sit here; I also wondered where he could leave a valuable thing when he didn’t seem to know anyone in the city. Where safer than under his feet? And here we are.’ She had scraped away the sand from a leather suitcase. ‘Lift it carefully, won’t you? These things have been known to be boobytrapped.’

Sir Archibald lifted the suitcase very gently by the sides. There appeared to be no wires attached to the handle.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ asked Phryne, brushing sand off her legs and putting on her stockings and shoes. He stood back a little.

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘Look.’ Smoke began to trickle from the suitcase; thick yellow smoke with a pungent smell.

‘We would never have got it open,’ he added. ‘There’s always a phosphorous bomb in them, just sufficient to destroy the contents. It’s activated by any movement But not to worry, my dear ladies,’ he said as he strolled back toward the police guard. ‘I know what was in it. Cheques, mostly, from prominent members of the Melbourne Irish community. There have been… er… rumblings about it. But all gone now.’

‘What about that murderer?’ asked Hammond indignantly. ‘He’s not been found.’

‘No, but he will get his comeuppance. Some other place, some other time. Intelligence work requires one to be philosophical, you know.’

‘And the TAMAM SHUD mystery?’

‘Will remain a mystery, I’m afraid. But your assistance has been essential and much appreciated, Miss Hammond. I expect to see you rise high in your chosen profession, quite high. Quite soon.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘And as for you, Miss Fisher, if you would care to lunch with me…’

‘No, thank you, Sir Archibald, I have another engagement.’

Phryne, in her Dior New Look red dress, straw hat and sunglasses, led Dulcie Hammond off Somerton Beach and took her into the city for a quiet drink and a comfortingly good lunch.

Phryne went home. She poured herself a glass of red wine and deliberately summoned up the image of Keane’s face, the unassailable smug face, and found that the image had lost its intensity. Taking a deep breath, she deliberately called forth the dead young soldier. There was the scent of mimosa, and of salt, the slime stench of stagnant water in the ditch, and the guttural Provençal voices, the torchlight, the concern over the fate of Jean Moulin. She waited for the pain. But she could no longer see with aching intensity the face of the young German soldier, or the countenance of the dead man on Somerton Beach. With the solution, however disappointing, of the tamam shud mystery, they had been obliterated from her mind, as frost-images melt off glass. She felt light. She felt as though she had recovered from an illness.