Kerry Greenwood - Urn Burial

‘If you have time. Creamed potatoes, and have we any peas left?’

‘Only tinned, Madam.’

‘Tinned it will have to be. We’re cut off from Bairnsdale at present, Mrs Croft. How are the supplies?’

‘Well, we’ve got a cellarful of potatoes and onions, and a side of beef hanging. There’s also those partridges and any amount of chooks and eggs, and we could send to Buchan Farm for butter and that soft cheese. I reckon we can hold out for a few weeks if we have to.’

‘Good. What about dessert?’

When the funeral pyre was out, and the laft valediction over, men took a lafting adieu of their interred frendes, little expecting that the curiofity of future ages should comment upon their afhes , read Phryne, trying to block out the conversation.

‘Apple pie, Madam, and cheese, and we’ve got some peaches in the greenhouse, for all that the gardener says they’re too early. Otherwise we can have bottled apricots.’

But who knowes the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his afhes, or whether they are to be fcattered? The relicks of many lie like the ruines of Pompeys in all partes of the earth; and when they arrive at your handes, these may seem to have wandered farre, who in a direct and median travel, have but few miles of known earth between yourfelf and the pole.

‘Bottled apricots and cream,’ decided Mrs Reynolds.

Phryne took Sir Thomas into the parlour.

When, at three-thirty, she went to the maid’s door and knocked, there was no reply. The door was open. Phryne looked in and what she saw caused her to drop a valuable early copy of Urne Buriall to the floor with a thud which might have broken the spine.

Lina was not going to be able to tell her who had attacked her in the fog. A swollen countenance, blue with suffocation, confronted Phryne’s horrified gaze. Black bruises showed on the throat.

Lina was dead.

CHAPTER SIX

The certainty of death is attended with uncertainties,

in time, manner and places.

Urn Burial , Sir Thomas Browne, Chapter III.

PHRYNE PICKED up the book, stepped back and closed the door. Then she walked quickly to the drawing room, passing Mrs Croft on her way back to the kitchen.

It took some time to locate the Mistress of the House. Phryne finally ran her down in the kitchen garden, consulting with a grubby gardener’s boy about, it seemed, carrots.

‘Evelyn, I have something to show you,’ said Phryne. ‘Could you come with me, please?’

‘Now, Phryne?’ Mrs Reynolds looked up from surveying a collection of muddy objects which might, or might not, be vegetables.

‘Yes, now, Evelyn,’ she replied. Something in her voice made Mrs Reynolds abandon her discussion and follow Phryne obediently to Lina’s room.

Phryne opened the door.

The bed was made up with clean sheets, drawn close and flat. The blue blanket and eiderdown lay innocent of one wrinkle. The window was open, the curtain flapped.

Of the dead woman there was not a trace.

‘Where’s Lina?’ asked Mrs Reynolds.

‘Where indeed?’ asked Phryne, profoundly shocked. ‘Is this the right room?’

‘Why, yes, her name’s on the door,’ said Mrs Reynolds, pointing out the luggage label with a handwritten ‘Lina’ on it. ‘Where can they have put her? Perhaps Mrs Hinchcliff has moved her to their suite, it’s further along. Let’s see, next door is the housemaid, then the scullery maid . . .’ She opened each door as she passed and Phryne looked in. Each room had the same bed and chair, the same box, and various rather dim or messy oils on the wall facing the window. Servants’ rooms tended to be the destination of pictures and furniture that no one had the heart to throw out but didn’t want to exhibit in any public rooms. Dot’s powdering closet had a large gilt-framed painting of a few vague figures walking through a field which Phryne’s companion had instantly disliked. Phryne had swapped her for Hope , which Dot thought well drawn.

The Hinchcliffs’ suite was larger and well furnished in the standard Cave House melange of styles. It contained a tester-bed, a Turkish carpet, some mock-Sheridan chairs and a Gothic-revival table, a painting of three horses and a multitude of photographs in silver frames. In several of them, a younger Mr and Mrs Hinchcliff stared out, clutching a baby notable for its utterly blank expression. What it did not contain was Lina.

‘I’d better talk to Mrs Hinchcliff,’ worried Mrs Reynolds. ‘She must have ordered Lina moved. Thank you for telling me, Phryne. I can’t have my household shifted about like this.’

‘Not at all,’ said Phryne through lips which were as numb as novocaine.

In another three minutes she had found Lin Chung.

He was sitting in a leather armchair in the small parlour, reading her copy of Bleak House . She paused at the door and looked at him. The weak sunlight gilded his bent head and the long fingers turning the pages. He seemed as self-contained and decorative as a cat.

He felt her presence, lifted his head to speak and saw her expression. Her face was blanched and she looked like an ivory carving of some Buddhist deity. His urbane comment on Dickens’ style died on his lips. He did not exclaim, but she saw hunting alertness sweep through him, so that even sitting in exactly the same pose, he was no longer relaxed but nerved for action. She walked deliberately forward and held out her hand.

‘Come,’ she said, and Lin Chung followed unquestioningly out of the house and across the lawn until she stopped under the beech tree. She led him around the trunk and then scanned the branches narrowly. In all that time she had not spoken and the hand in his was shaking. Then she slid both arms around his waist and held him tight as she began to speak. His arms closed around her.

‘The body was gone?’ he asked, five minutes later. ‘I see. It is perfectly insane, but this is a good setting for the surrealist. Phryne, how dreadful. You are having a difficult day.’

This deliberate understatement produced a laugh, which pleased him. He sat down on the dry grass under the tree and gathered Phryne into his embrace. She tucked her head under his chin. He admired her immensely. She was still trembling with shock but she was reasoning like a sage.

‘She was dead,’ she said firmly. ‘Strangled. How hard is it to strangle someone, Lin?’

‘Easy,’ he said. ‘With sufficient strength of heart.’

‘Show me,’ she requested.

Reluctantly, Lin Chung laid both hands to her slim throat, thumbs at the front. He pressed lightly. ‘You see, here is the pressure point. And here is the great blood vessel that supplies the brain. All I need to do is grip hard enough to cut off that blood supply, and you would be unconscious in – well, maybe a minute – and . . .’ He stopped.

‘Dead in five minutes? Would it take a great deal of strength?’

‘No, just as I said, a strong heart. Firmness of purpose, you say in English.’

Phryne got out her small mirror and examined the faint red fingermarks on her delicate skin, already fading. ‘That’s where the black bruises were. Exactly like that. She’s dead, Lin, someone killed her, and then someone took the body. I don’t understand. But I will. Now, there have been other developments, too. Someone came into my room while I was asleep – a man, that’s all I can say.’

‘There might be many reasons to come to your room, Silver Lady,’ his voice was amused.

‘Yes, and that’s what my previous visitor Gerald had in mind, but the second one – I don’t know, Lin, I didn’t want him to find me. I can’t explain, but I was sure I did not want to be discovered and that he did not intend amorous dalliance. This place is giving me the grues, as Dot would say.’