‘Where are we going?’ yelled Dot, surprising herself with the volume she could produce. Phryne’s gaze did not move from the road.
‘Just along the river here, and then we’ll stop,’ she shrieked. ‘Look back, Dot, and see if they’re following. .’
Toiling in their magnificent wake, motor labouring gallantly, the Morris taxi-cab was visible only as a spot in the road. Phryne slowed the Hispano-Suiza and they trundled along the unmade road by the river, where many craft were moored, mostly small yachts and pleasure-boats.
On the other bank, the market gardens stretched as far as Dot could see. She sighted the flat cane hats of the Chinese working among the winter-cabbage and broccoli.
‘Oh, we’re going to the Tea Gardens!’ Dot exclaimed, as the Morris jounced and turned the corner, and the two cars proceeded at a more decorous pace.
These gardens had been well-planned, and put to use the excellent soil to be found by the river in planting beds of exotic flowers, augmenting the pleasance created by groves of lemon-scented gum and wattle. It being May, the gardens were silent and a little bedraggled. Even evergreens look depressed in the winter, Phryne thought, as she brought the car to a standstill and told Dot that she was safe. The Morris halted and seemed to sag on its wheels, while the bonnet gave forth a cloud of steam.
A resident peacock surveyed the newcomers, considered displaying his tail, and decided against it. A voice was heard from the other side of the Morris.
‘Cec! Give a man a hand, can’t yer?’
‘Whassamatter?’ asked Cec, who sounded sleepy.
‘Bloody door’s come undone again. Got a bit of wire?’
There was a scuffle as Cec found a piece of wire and secured the door, and they both got out and surveyed their vehicle.
‘I reckon she’s about had it, mate,’ observed Cec, sadly. Bert took off his hat, wiped his forehead, and replaced it.
‘No, mate, she’ll be apples. She just needs a spell. We can fill her up again before we go — plenty of water in the creek.’
They walked over to where Phryne knelt, offering Dot a sip of brandy.
‘Come over all unnecessary, has she?’ asked Bert. ‘I reckon a drop’s the best cure. Always cures me, eh, Cec? That car’s a bit of all right, though, goes like a bat out of. . I mean, goes well. Lucky there aren’t no coppers round.’
Dot sat up, refused the brandy, and declared her complete fitness for anything.
‘Well, gentlemen, I’ve brought a picnic lunch. Where shall we eat it?’ asked Phryne, stowing the flask in a side-pocket of the car. Bert looked at Cec.
‘There’s the thingummy,’ he suggested, indicating a gazebo evidently shipped direct from Brighton Pavilion.
‘Well, it has a roof, and there’s not room for us all and the picnic in the car,’ sighed Phryne, who loathed Rococco architecture. ‘Come on.’
Bert and Cec picked up the basket, and Dot gathered the rug and the handbags. It was not until they were seated in relative comfort, with the plates loaded with pheasant and ham and Russian salad, that she broached her subject.
‘I want your help, gentlemen, and you want mine,’ she said. ‘More salad?’
Bert, to whom
‘Where did you two meet?’ Phryne asked on impulse. Bert swallowed his mouthful and grinned.
‘In the army first. Then I was working down the docks, and Cec was too. Me and Cec palled up, because we were on the same gang. The Reds, they called us. The Party ain’t too popular with the bosses, so we found we didn’t get picked up at the Wailing Wall anymore, the bucks sorta looked over our heads.’
‘Wailing Wall?’ asked Phryne, fogged. ‘Bucks?’
‘The pick-up point, that’s the Wailing Wall, and the foremen, they’re the bucks,’ explained Bert. ‘So me and Cec, we give it up as a bad job, and a mate of ours lent us the cab, and we been making a crust as a taxi. Hard yakka, but,’ observed Bert, sadly. ‘And all that “yes sir” and “no sir” is against our nature. Still, it’s a living,’ he concluded. ‘Any more of that fowl? And what do you want us to do, Miss? And what’s your game? Being polite, you know.’
‘Fill up your glasses and I’ll tell you some of the story.’
Suppressing the matter of the poisoning of Lydia Andrews, which Phryne now regarded as an excellent idea, she told the cab drivers the tale of the Russian dancers, the Bath House of Madame Breda, the police search, and the packet of real cocaine. She disclosed her only clue: Seventy-nine Little Lon.
‘Little Lonsdale Street!’ exclaimed Bert. ‘And you reckon that these counter-revolutionaries ain’t tumbled to it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ temporised Phryne. ‘They would not have asked anyone else, and they assumed Little Lon. was a person. It might be a trap, though. I suspect that Gerda is playing the Princesse along for what she can get — I’ve got no evidence against Madame Breda except Sasha’s insistence that he was following her when he was stabbed. That was the night you picked us up in Toorak.’
‘Yair, and you stuck a gun in me ear,’ chuckled Bert, not at all abashed by the memory. ‘Would you recognise the gangsters again, Miss?’
‘Yes,’ said Phryne. The repulsive faces of Thugs One and Two were imprinted on her memory. ‘Did you see them?’
‘Nah, but we might a’ seen ’em earlier. You saw Cokey Billings, eh, Cec?’
‘When? and where?’ demanded Phryne.
Cec rubbed his jaw. ‘About half after midnight, in that street, too. With Gentleman Jim and the Bull.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Bad men, Miss. Cokey Billings never worked with us — he’s a tea-leaf — lift your roll out of your kick without a qualm. He’d do anything for coke, since he started on it. Dentist gave it to him to pull a tooth, and he’s been mad for the stuff ever since. Gentleman Jim is a con artist — they called him Gentleman because he keeps saying, “A gentleman should not mix with low company”, and things like that. Used to carry a shiv, and could use it — some eytie in the blood, I reckon. And the Bull — he’s a big bloke, real big, and dumber than an ox. Strong? He’d pull a door off its hinges rather than work out how to turn a key. No brains at all.’
‘Cokey and Gentleman Jim sound like my gangsters,’ observed Phryne. ‘But they had guns as well. Why, come to think of it, did they stab Sasha instead of shooting him?’
‘Quiet, a shiv in the ribs, and he should have been dead as a doornail. Not a sound. When he got away, they had to risk the St Valentine’s Day massacre stuff. But if it’s them we’re up against, then we’re in real trouble. Bad men, as I said.’
As Bert only appeared to use the phrase ‘bad men’ for multiple murders, Phryne was inclined to agree.
‘What I want to do is to go to Seventy-nine Little Lon. and see what, and who, is there. Do you know the place?’
‘Yair. Behind the Synagogue, it is. Near the corner of Spring Street. Boarding houses, mostly. Do you know Seventy-nine, Cec?’ Cec emptied his glass and set it down with great care.
‘It’s the dark stone place, mate, with the shop in front. Sells all them remedies, Beecham’s Pills and them. Next door’s old Mother James’s.’
‘Amazing, Cec is. Got a map in his head, he has. Just have to ask and he knows where any place is. It’s a chemist’s,’ added Bert superfluously. ‘As if they needed one in Little Lon.’
‘Yair. All-in and any up the last, that’s Little Lon. Bricks, shivs, boots, broken bottles — and every gang in Melbourne goes there for settling any little disagreement that they might have. You can’t go there, Miss.’
‘Oh, can’t I?’ asked Phryne ominously. ‘Are there no women in Little Lon.?’
‘Yair, well, there’s tarts all right, but they ain’t like the sorts in the movies. I don’t reckon there’s a heart of gold in any moll in the street. And they fight, them sheilas, like bloomin’ cats — the hair-pulling and the scratching and the shrieks! Turn a man’s stomach to hear ’em.’
‘And what does Mother James do?’ asked Phryne. ‘Is it a brothel?’
