Raisins and Almonds

were you looking for, Miss? I left your things out on the dressing table like I always do.'

Phryne, sitting up reluctantly, shoved her hair out of her eyes and shook the smooth shoulder of the sleeping boy.

'Wake up, Simon, it's morning. That wasn't me, Dot dear, we had a burglar. He didn't take anything. Ring that nice carpenter, I forget his name, and get him to put a lock with a key on my windows, will you? Not bars. I don't want to be kept imprisoned by my own security. But a nice solid lock.'

'A burglar?' Dot put down the coffee and boggled. 'What, a burglar in the house, here, when we were all asleep?'

'Dot, if you say 'We might have all been murdered in our beds', I'll scream,' said Phryne, who had woken up cross. 'We weren't touched and that's fortunate for the burglar. Otherwise I'd have his guts for garters. Curse the horrible little hoodlum.'

'You might say, 'May beets grow out of his stomach',' suggested Simon, sleepy with satiated desires, lapped in more luxury than he had ever imagined. 'That was one of zayde's, my grandfather. He was good at curses. His favourite was 'May a fire burn in his belly to boil his brains.' Wicked tongue, my grandfather, alav ha-sholom.'

'Amen,' agreed Phryne. 'It's all right, Dot, don't worry. If it would make you feel better, why not ask Hugh to sleep in the spare room for the next couple of nights? This should be over soon.'

'Oh?' asked Dot, uneasily.

'Yes,' said Phryne. 'After a suitable interval for ablutions and breakfast, I am taking Jack Robinson to the bookshop to show him the murder weapon, and shortly thereafter I expect to get Miss Lee out of quod.'

'The murder weapon?' asked Simon, after looking at Dot for guidance and realizing that she was as ignorant as he was. 'It's still in the shop?'

'I hope so,' said Phryne, and refused to say any more.

Miss Lee had moved onto the fourth declension. She wondered, occasionally, sleepless at three in the morning, if she would master the whole lexicon before they hanged her, which seemed to be a terrible waste of an education.

But one must not give way. Because she was on remand, she was allowed to receive gifts. Every day fresh flowers arrived, and chocolates, books and cigarettes. The last bunch was red roses, from Mr Abrahams.

Someone still believed that she was innocent. And the remarkable Phryne Fisher was still investigating.

'Manus, manus, manum,' sang Miss Lee. 'Manus, manui, manu.'

'What's a man gotta do to get an answer?' asked Bert of Cec, as they stood before a gate which was not only closed but had two braces nailed across it.

'I don't reckon we're gonna get an answer, mate,' opined Cec.

'Yair, looks like Wm Gibson, Carter, has cashed it in and gone to the South Sea Isles, all right. You should be able to see over the fence if I can give you a bit of a boost.'

Bert bent and Cec rose. He held on to the shaky grey timber and reported, 'Nothing in the yard, mate. Let me down. No truck. There's a busted-looking old dray, and that's all. Not even a cat.'

'Well, that's torn it,' said Bert, removing his hat and scratching his bald spot. Working for Miss Fisher, he reckoned, was hard on a bloke's hair. His had already been appreciably thinned by some of her cases. It was going to be hot. The streets already had the faint, glazed look which spoke of pavements just about to soften and shimmer.

'P'raps the neighbours'd know,' suggested Cec, diffidently.

'You take that side of the street,' sighed Bert, 'and I'll take this.'

They split up and began knocking on doors. Bert began to long for the good old days of ferrying drunks from one side of the city to the other. More than that, he could do with a good cold beer.

Phryne, policemen in tow, opened the door of Miss Lee's shop. The little bell rang tinnily. The room was clean, but already a slight film of dust was settling on the polished desk. It felt shabby and desolate. Jack Robinson was not in the mood for excitable females, though he was vaguely wondering why she was carrying a craft knife and a pair of thick gloves.

'Well, Miss Fisher?'

'Now, Jack, is the shop the same? No one has been here?'

'It looks the same,' he said warily.

'I've told you all about Yossi's formula. I have told you about Mrs Katz and the burglary of my own house. Now there's something I have to conjecture. Part of the fun of being a conspiracy is the ridiculous mumbo-jumbo which men so enjoy. Passwords, you know, and secret handshakes and all that sort of thing. It must be something endowed with the male hormone we hear so much about in these glandular days. Anyway, like schoolboys playing catch with trinitrotoluene, those unworldy scholars used to pass their information to each other by putting it in one of the unread books in Miss Lee's shop. Shimeon the go-between put the formula into a book.'

'No, he didn't,' objected the policeman. 'We've had all those books out and shaken. There wasn't anything hidden in them.'

'That's what you think. I was talking to these poor bunnies last night and they told me that Shimeon had hidden the formula in a book. I thought as you did, and then Simon showed me how to conceal something in a book so that no casual search will ever find it.'

Phryne walked to the bookcase which concealed the Great Unread. 'Now, I don't know which of these it is. I remember Dot saying that—now what was it?

Unfortunately we can't use the dust as a guide, now they are all dusty We'll try the leather-bound folios. What have we here?' She laid them on the counter with a thump. 'The Letters of Sir Walter Scott. Volume 9 of Hansard for 1911. Sermons in Stones by the Rev. Walters. Now, which is the most deadly?'

'Probably Hansard,' opined Detective Inspector Robinson, who did not admire politicians.

'We'll try that first. The way this must have worked is that Shimeon put his message in one book, and picked it up from another. God knows why. Gimme the knife, Simon.'

Phryne put on the gloves and slit the binding of the folio from one end to the other.

'No, nothing in Hansard,' she commented. 'What about Sir Walter?'

The leather and stiffening peeled away from the blade.

'Miss Fisher, if you've dragged me here to watch you mutilate books ...' began Jack Robinson, who had other things to do. Phryne bit her lip. She turned the sermons so that light fell on the spine, and slit the binding for the third time.

'See?' she said.

'What am I looking at?' asked Robinson.

'A murder weapon,' said Phryne. 'No, don't touch. Not unless you want to join Shimeon. That's what killed him.'

'It's just a bit of sharp metal, part of a razor blade, embedded in the spine,' objected Jack Robinson.

'That's exactly what it is,' said Phryne. 'Simon, demonstrate how one would remove a message. Use another book,' she added hurriedly.

Simon hefted a large volume, opened it, and groped in the interstice. Robinson felt suddenly very ill. To cover this, he took out his pipe and made a great show of lighting it.

'Shimeon comes into the shop,' said Phryne. 'He is supposed to plant the formula first and then to collect his reward, perhaps a note which says that an arms dealer has been arranged for this war in Palestine, God help them. But he didn't do that. Perhaps he was cleverer than the others, or more suspicious. Perhaps that goes with being born in Salonika, where they know more about conspiracy than gentle innocent Australia. You can see how it happened, Jack. Exactly as Miss Lee says it happened. He opened the book, groped for the hiding place as Simon is doing, then his right index finger met the razor blade. A thin cut, like a paper cut. It was a trivial injury, so he didn't scream and draw attention to himself. But it was a fatal injury, because the blade was loaded with strychnine crystals. You can still see them. Someone has used paste to make the blade sticky. Then he turned to Miss Lee, falling, and held out his hand to her, to draw attention to the wound. He tried to speak to her, but he failed.'

Simon stared at the exhibit, still holding the book. He was as white as a sheet. The attendant constable noticed that he looked very sickly and moved towards him.