Kerry Greenwood: Blood and Circuses

‘Yes, you must have seen me at the trial,’ she said sadly. ‘I thought that you were too young.’

‘When did they let you out, Miss Parkes?’ he asked, suddenly awkward and faltering. ‘I mean, yes, I remember the papers. They had a field day with the murder of your . . .’

‘My husband,’ she said in a remote, cold voice. The brown eyes which had looked on him almost with love, certainly with regard and compassion, were now as cold and hard as pebbles. ‘I was released from prison last year and I have been acting in some small roles. I am presently understudying Juliet’s nurse.’

‘But you were a trapeze artiste; the Flying Fantoccini, that was the name.’

Constable Harris, suddenly aware that he had hurt his rescuer deeply and unfairly, was dissolved in confusion. He took her hand, feeling the callouses, noticing now her light, easy stance and the strength of her arms.

‘I don’t care about that old case,’ he said, blushing pink. ‘Thank you, Miss Parkes. You saved my life.’

She returned the pressure of the hand slightly and then released herself. ‘What did you see through the window that sent you off the roof?’ she asked to change the subject. ‘Is Mr Christopher there?’

‘He’s there,’ said Constable Harris, recalled to duty. ‘Oh, he’s there all right. Excuse me, Miss Parkes. I gotta call the station. There’s a nasty mess in there and it’s gotta be cleared away.’

Detective Inspector John—‘Call me Jack, everyone does’— Robinson arrived at the boarding house in Brunswick Street in a police vehicle which had seen better years, thus dead-heating the small and fussy police surgeon. Doctor Johnson had been called out from a golf game at the eleventh hole. He had been playing for the captain’s medal and exhibited the expected chagrin of a man who had been forced to abandon a two-stroke lead and a chance of being stood drinks by the club’s most notorious miser.

‘Well, what have you got for me?’ he snapped.

Jack Robinson shrugged. ‘I know as much about it as you do, Doctor. Sergeant Grossmith is in charge. Ah, here he is,’ said Robinson with relief, as the small doctor swelled with wrath. ‘Hello, Terry, what’s afoot?’

Sergeant Terence Grossmith was huge. His expanse of blue tunic was as wide as a tent. He had thinning brown hair and large, limpid brown eyes, which seemed to hold an expression of such placid benevolence that hardened criminals had occasionally found themselves confessing to him out of a sense of sheer incongruity. His local knowledge was legendary. He had been born and raised in Brunswick Street and he knew every respectable tradesman, greengrocer, tinsmith, landlady and thief; every small-time crim and shill and lady of light repute in the place; every corner, hidey-hole, sly-grog shop and repository for stolen goods in the length of that notorious street. He loved the place. He had never sought promotion, because it would take him away from it.

Robinson liked Grossmith. Usually he knew not only who had done the crime but where they lived and whose brother they were by the time the detective inspector arrived. Now, however, this paragon among sergeants seemed puzzled. He was rubbing a hamlike hand through his sparse hair and frowning.

‘Funny case, sir, and funny people,’ he said dubiously. I don’t know what to think.’

‘But it’s murder?’

‘Oh, yes, sir, it’s murder all right. Sure as eggs. This way, Doctor. The boys will have had the door down by now.’

‘Why your benighted department can’t wait to call me out until they’ve got a real corpse I don’t know.’ The doctor’s voice sizzled with outrage. ‘If you can’t open the door how do you know there’s a murder? Have you dragged me away on a Sunday from a very good golf match because of something that someone saw through a keyhole?’

The sergeant looked down on the tubby doctor from his six-foot height and said calmly, ‘No, sir, my man looked through the window and perishingly near fell off the roof. The door’s bolted on the inside, but it’s murder all right. There’s blood leaking through the ceiling of the room below. And the constable said that the room is a mess. Ah,’ he added, as a crash and splinter from above offended the Sunday quiet. ‘There we are. This way, Doctor. Sir.’

Doctor Johnson stalked up the steps and into a hallway festooned with theatrical posters, then took the stairs beyond, following the large figure of Sergeant Grossmith. Robinson walked behind. As always at the start of a case, he felt downhearted and tired. There was so much evil in the world. ‘O cursed spite! That ever I was born to set it right,’ he quoted to himself. The Mechanics’ Institute English literature classes which his wife had taken him to, much against his will, had been very useful. A man could always rely on Shakespeare to hit the nail on the head. Robinson wondered how he had done without him.

He came into a clean corridor lined with coconut matting. The door of the third room on the left was broken and two panting constables were pulling the wreckage away. It had been a good stout door, Robinson observed as he paused at the threshold. Not this modern flimsy stuff, but the solid carpentry of last century, which held that a door was not a door unless it weighed half a ton and was wood all through. He observed the shattered remains of an iron bolt, which had resisted the efforts of two constables and a crowbar for ten minutes. Evidently the murdered man had valued his privacy.

The room was lofty, though small. It had been calcimined light blue, the ceiling a dingy shade of cream. There were water spots where the roof had leaked and stained the plaster, but otherwise the fabric seemed in good condition. The floor was uncarpeted except for a square in the middle. Blood had spurted onto the walls but most of it was pooled on the floor beside the bed, whence it had dripped down through the cracks to spill into Mrs Witherspoon’s tea. Robinson hated the smell of blood. ‘Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?’ thought Robinson, with Shakespeare.

There was a wardrobe, a dressing-table laden with cosmetics, a chair with a gentleman’s dressing-gown laid over it, and a large trunk with chris/cross painted on it in gold and black. The walls were decorated with two small prints of English landscapes and an oil sketch of a beautiful girl riding a white horse.

Jack Robinson became aware that he was surveying the room so as to avoid looking at the body. He had never been able to cultivate a taste for corpses.

‘Hi!’ the police surgeon summoned him. ‘Come and look here, Robinson! This is supposed to be a man’s room, isn’t it? And the occupant a man? Well, I can tell you one thing. The person in this bed is certainly dead. Stabbed through the heart, I’d say. But this corpse isn’t a male.’

He peeled back a blood-soaked blanket and revealed the chest of the corpse. Under gentlemen’s pyjamas were small but perfectly formed breasts.

CHAPTER TWO

There is a tide in the affairs of women

That, taken at the flood, leads—God knows

where.

George Gordon, Lord Byron

Don Juan, Canto 6

Phryne Fisher was lazily contemplating Sunday from a horizontal position. She thought about rising from her green sheets and doing something energetic, like swimming or a brisk walk along the foreshore at St Kilda. She thought about it again and snuggled back into her pillow.

She was bored. Her favourite, Lindsay, was doing law exams which he really should pass this year and was locked in his own rooms with a torts textbook, subsisting on black coffee and panic. Her adopted daughters were still at school. Her communist friends Bert and Cec were involved in the strike on the waterfront. Bunji Ross the aeroplane pilot was away with a flying circus and there was no pretty young man in the offing. There seemed to be no reason to get up and go through the process of being dressed when there was no one she wanted to see and nothing she wanted to do.