‘My special recipe!’ exclaimed Tadeusz, grinning, from his place next to Mrs Luttrell on the sofa.
Phryne sipped cautiously. The cocktail was, perhaps, Slavic. It seemed to be compounded of absinthe, noyau and cherry brandy, a combination she had not heard of before. It was remarkable. She gulped it down while she was still undecided about the taste and sat down rather quickly under the impact.
The newly made widow was not plunged in grief. She seemed to have become more substantial since the death of her detestable spouse. Her hair was fluffed out, she seemed to have put on weight; her eyes were bright and her hands were steady.
‘I can’t say that I really care for cocktails,’ she observed to Phryne. ‘But Tadeusz makes really unusual ones.’
Phryne, wondering if any of her back teeth were still attached, could only nod.
Lin took his usual small glass of sherry from Hinchcliff, who seemed to be relieved. The burden of care, which had made him resemble a Presbyterian Minister about to rebuke sin, had lifted from him, and he now looked like one of those rosy-cheeked and benevolent bishops who handed out dispensations like confetti in the days before Luther had taken all the fun out of religion.
Phryne wondered what on earth the Major had had on a respectable character like Hinchcliff. She resolved to find out, solely for her own satisfaction.
‘Well, children, it’s time to tell all,’ she said lightly. ‘We have to share our secrets, my dears. If we all know the dirt on each other no one will dare to gossip. It’s our only protection. Secrets have been popping out of the woodwork all over Cave House. I have to know, Miss Medenham – what on earth did the Major know about you?’
Cynthia Medenham giggled. Jack Lucas and Gerald, who seemed very well-scrubbed, came in at this point and sat down, collecting one of the Slavic cocktails each.
‘It’s not a very bad secret. Only, my stock in trade is mystery. The vamp, you know. Writers sell their personalities just as much as their prose. It would ruin it all to know that I’ve got a dear, uninteresting accountant husband and two delightful children, wouldn’t it? It’s true. I don’t know how he found out, but he knew. He even tried to drag me into his bed, the beast – but then I got together with Letty. I led him on as shamelessly as I could – you saw me – priceless, wasn’t it? A truly awful display. Then I let him take me up to his room, quite sure of his conquest. I stayed near the door, and there was – you know – a little intimacy, and then . . .’
‘Then?’ asked Lin, Phryne, both Fletchers, Miss Mead, Jack, Gerald, the poet and the Doctor, breathlessly.
‘He got quite passionate, the monster,’ said Miss Medenham with delicacy. ‘And I just pointed my finger at it, you know, and I laughed. And I kept on laughing. I laughed myself out of his room and then I ran for my life back to Letty. She was staying with me. God knows what he would have done with her if she’d been there.’
Mrs Luttrell knew and shuddered. Tadeusz put an arm around her.
‘That’s what sent him off into the night,’ observed Phryne. ‘There had to be a precipitating incident. Of course, after you rejected him, he ran to the one woman he had totally under his control.
Completely obedient, of course, because she was dead.’
‘Poor Lina,’ said the company. There was a moment’s silence.
‘Miss Fletcher, for you it was being seduced by the exceptionally seductive Gerald.’ Miss Fletcher blushed but did not look unduly ashamed.
‘Wanted to find out what it’s like – what I’d be missing if I lived alone. No offence to you, Gerry dear, but it’s not much.’
‘No offence taken, old thing,’ said Gerry cheerfully.
‘And he could have blackmailed me, of course, knowing that Lin Chung is my lover. That also applied to him in reverse, if you know what I mean,’ said Phryne, swapping revelation for revelation. ‘Tadeusz, what was in those cocktails? They’re scrambling my syntax. Let’s go on. The Major had Tom over a whole cellarful of barrels because he knew that Ronald had returned and was demanding money – all he had to do to keep Tom quiet was to mention the name. He didn’t need to silence Miss Mead, she wasn’t in sight, but he probably would have found something.’
‘Yes, dear, I have a dreadful secret,’ said Miss Mead cheerfully. ‘I’m a private detective. I came here to investigate Miss Cray. A very wealthy woman is thinking of donating her estate to the Church, and her lawyer could not find out which denomination Miss Cray supported.’
‘You’re a private detective, Miss Mead? How thrilling!’ said Miss Fletcher. ‘Do you have a gun, like Miss Fisher?’
‘No, Miss Fletcher, I prefer to avoid any violence, though I have been unlucky today. I don’t advertise and I work only for selected clients. But if my neighbours in South Yarra knew, the Lord knows what they would say. It’s not difficult, you know,’ she added to Miss Fletcher. ‘No one notices old ladies. All I had to do to find out most of what I needed to know was to sit here in this very comfortable chair, get on with my crochet and listen.’
‘Bravo, Miss Mead!’ Jack Lucas was a little elevated on his first cocktail.
‘Mrs Fletcher, you wasted your daughter’s money but that’s over now and need not attract any more notice,’ said Phryne. ‘But you, Tadeusz – Ted – how long did it take you to acquire that beautiful accent?’
‘How did you rumble me?’ demanded the poet in a clipped tone, which lapsed back into his usual honey- sweet voice.
‘I didn’t for a long time. You seemed to be taken with Miss Medenham – protective colouration, I assume, for both of you. Miss Medenham had to conceal the fact that she was not having an affair, despite being one of literature’s most notorious vamps, and you had to hide your interest in Letty Luttrell. But you offered me a cigarette from that battered silver case. You’ve obviously had it for a long time, it’s personal to you, and it still has the outline of the Australian Army badge on it. Why didn’t you come back to Letty, after you didn’t die in the Great War?’
‘I was in the cavalry, as you have surmised, and they took away our horses and sent us to the Dardanelles,’ he said. ‘It was butchery. I was wounded, the only one of my trench to survive a night attack. The others were all dead. I was captured. Because they thought I might have some useful information, they kept me alive. Not so much alive as to be happy, but alive enough. When they found that I didn’t know what they needed, they sent me to a prison camp. There were no Empire soldiers there, but a miscellany of Russians, Poles, Hungarians and Turkish criminals. I fared badly for a while – I had been shot twice in the head and my mind was confused. I forgot who I was and where I came from. I did not even remember that I was a soldier. The camp was for criminals and illegal aliens. One of the Hungarians took to me, nursed me like a mother, and taught me words in his own language. I learned fast, because I was like a child again. You do not believe me?’ Phryne looked sceptical. He took her hand and laid it on his head. ‘Feel for the scars. One across the temple and behind the ear, one here, where the bullet still is. No one has dared to try and remove it.’
Phryne felt a lump over the temporal lobe, hard under her touch. Someone had certainly shot him at some time.
‘So when the War was over, I forged some Hungarian papers. I had no clue to my identity. I had arrived at the camp naked in a blanket with an envelope full of meaningless trinkets. They repatriated my friend Han and me to Buda, which we found a cold city, so we went to Poland, and that is when he began to call me Tadeusz, because the name meant something to me. It is, of course, similar to Ted.’
‘When did you get an idea who you were?’ asked Phryne.
‘Not for a long time. I wandered the world, never finding a place where I knew that I belonged. Han was a poet, but also a rich man – most unusual – and when he died he left me his estate. I turned it into gold and started to search, for I knew I had a home somewhere. Then, in London, I heard two men talking and knew the accent. They were Australians. In my little bag which I wore around my neck was a cigarette case with a regimental badge which no one in Europe had been able to identify for me. A number was scratched under it and I realised that it must be a soldier’s identification.
‘I went into Australia House, asked for the records, and found out that I was Private Ted Matthews, who had died in the Dardanelles campaign seven years before.
‘I went back to my hotel near the British Museum and began to remember my own language, my home, and Letty. There and then I resolved to find out what had become of her. English flooded back to me, but now I spoke it like a Hungarian. I had made many friends among the surrealists, had some reputation as a poet, and I was wealthy enough to follow my own inclinations. So I came back to Australia. Letty’s mother would not tell me where she was, just that she was married and happy, so I tried to forget her. I never forgot her face. Even when I was no one I saw
