and I’ll get back to you. Have you time for dinner tonight?’
‘I have not. I’ve a miscarriage in casualty at this moment. Goodbye, Phryne, take care!’
Dr MacMillan had sounded worried, Phryne thought. People were always worrying about her. It gives them something to do, Phryne thought, and dressed for dinner.
She came back to her room at about eleven to find Dot surveying the sorry wreckage of the Paynes’ clothes. The dress had crumpled and spotted as it dried, and the tear Dot had made in the hem had been clumsily mended. It went to Dot’s heart to cobble the material together, but Phryne smiled and said, ‘Splendid.’ She looked out of the window, but there was nothing interesting there.
‘Tell me, Dot, what comes into your head when I say the word “rose”?’
Dot looked up from her sad contemplation of the mend. ‘Why, the colour, miss. Pink, you know.’
‘Yes,’ said Phryne with a flood of realisation, and a moment- ary dizziness. ‘Of course.’
‘I don’t know how long I’ll be, but don’t wait up. Until I get back, Dot, please stay here and keep the door locked. Don’t let anyone in who isn’t me. Got all that? Oh, and here’s your wages in advance — and a reference — just in case.’
‘Yes, Miss. Can I help you dress?’
‘Yes, bolt the door and bring the disguise.’
Dot did as she was bid and arrayed Phryne in the damaged dress, the carefully holed stockings, the scuffed shoes and the battered hat. Dot had broken three feathers over one shoul- der and they dangled sadly. Phryne removed all her own jewellery and looped the glass beads twice around her neck. They hung down to the jazz garters.
‘Shoe polish, Dot, I’m too clean,’ she declared, and gave herself a watermark around the neck, and grey fingernails. She took the clean shine off her black hair with powder and painted her cheeks thickly with Dot’s Coles rouge.
‘Revolting,’ she declared, surveying herself in the mirror. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Half past eleven. You can’t go out of the Windsor looking like that, Miss! And what shall I do if anyone calls?’
‘Tell them I’m asleep and have given orders not to be woken; it’s more than your place is worth to try. I won’t send anyone, Dot, so bolt the door and stand siege until I come back. If I don’t come back tonight, wait until midday, then take that package to the policeman. Understood?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘And I’m not going out like this. Give me the big black cloak, I can carry the hat. Now have I got everything. . money, gun, cigarettes, lighter. . yes. Goodbye, Dot. See you tomorrow — or sometime.’
She was gone, swathed in the big cloak. Dot bolted the door as she had been ordered and sat down to worry.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There was a keyed-up aimlessness in the fuggy air of Little Lonsdale Street which affected Phryne like a drug. Several women were within her view as she perched on a grimy stool outside Mother James’s drinking her revolting tea as though she enjoyed it.
The street was quiet, but sordid during the day, and really only came into its own towards midnight. The small, squalid shops were lit up, the street was filled with a crowd, and voices and music bounced off the canyon- like walls of the few taller buildings which backed onto that mangy thoroughfare. It smelt strongly of fish and chips, dust, burning rubbish and unwashed humans, with an overlay of Californian Poppy, of which the coiffures of the young men seemed to be chiefly composed.
Phryne had been watching trade in the pharmacy for an hour, and was fairly sure that this was, indeed, the drug distribution centre she had been seeking.
The shop was an open front with a counter, on which were perched the two great glass jars of green and red liquid which marked it in the popular mind as a chemist’s. Behind the counter stood a small, fat man, and an assistant with bottle-blonde hair in a fringed dress of viridian green, who handed out plasters and powders to the passing trade. Some clients, quite well-dressed, and one a real gentleman in evening dress, came to the counter and asked for their needs in a whisper. For them the small man dispensed a pink packet of powder, and accepted five pounds for it. Lesser clientele for the same powders bought a leaf that might hold a saltspoon for ten shillings. Strain her ears as she might, Phryne could not hear what it was these customers were saying.
‘Time for a saunter, chaps,’ she murmured to Bert, who gulped down his tea and stood up. Cec remained where he was. Phryne teetered a little in the abominable shoes, took Bert’s arm, and tiptoed to the door of the pharmacy. She patted Bert and spoke in a slurred Australian accent.
‘You wait here, love, and I’ll get us something,’ she promised and approached the counter, taking a little time.
The small fat man turned his attention to this half-cut floozy. He hadn’t seen her before, but as he often said, ‘You couldn’t know every tart on Little Lon.’.
Phryne beckoned him. ‘Some of them pink powders,’ she slurred. The chemist hesitated, as if waiting for her to complete a slogan. Phryne’s mind, working overtime, provided her with an idea. Seen on every railway siding was the legend ‘
‘Those pink powders for pale people,’ she finished, and held out her ten shilling note. The man nodded, and exchanged her note for a slip of pink paper, embossed with the title ‘Peterson’s pink powders for pale people’ and containing a small quantity of the requisite stuff. Phryne nodded woozily at him and found her way back to Bert.
‘Come on, sailor,’ she said, leaning on him heavily. ‘Let’s go back to my place.’
Bert put an arm around her and led her away, back to where the Morris squatted in the gutter, sagging a little as was its wont. Cec had followed them, soft-footed.
‘Cec, you take this to Dr MacMillan at the Royal Women’s Hospital and come back. Bert and I will continue our carouse,’ ordered Phryne, putting the paper into Cec’s pocket. ‘Back to Mother James’s, my old darling.’
‘Ain’t you got what you want?’ hissed Bert. He was finding the proceedings nerve-wracking, though holding Phryne close was some compensation.
‘Not yet. I want to see who else visits here,’ answered Phryne, and conducted Bert back down the street again.
They found other seats at Mother James’s. The hostelry was unique in Phryne’s experience. It was the front of an old house, the verandah open to the street. Mother James herself, a monstrous Irishwoman around three hundred years old, with a face that would curdle milk and an arm of iron, served her noxious beverages to customers sitting on the pavement or on the verandah. The house was noisome, stinking of old excrement and new frying, and Phryne reflected that nothing, not even advanced starvation, would induce her to eat anything out of a kitchen into whose depths no health inspector would dare to step.
There were three or four ladies of the night supping gin or beer on the verandah, under the curling galvanised iron, and they surveyed Phryne closely. She reflected that she was surrounded with dangers. Not only was she investigating a cocaine ring, but one of these girls might take exception to her presence on their beat and cause a scene, or call their pimp. A nasty thought. She said loudly to Bert, ‘I reckon that we ought be going home, love. I got to get back to the factory termorra.’
The women’s gaze wavered and turned away. An amateur, they thought, out for a good time and a little extra in the pay packet. No threat. Phryne breathed easy.
‘This is like waiting to go over the top,’ commented Bert.
‘I thought you said war was a capitalist plot,’ murmured Phryne.
‘Yair, it is. But we was in it, me and Cec. I first met Cec on a rock face at Gallipoli,’ continued Bert. ‘He saved me life by shoving me head down behind a trench wall when a Turk had drawn a bead on me bonce. We got out of it alive, and many didn’t. We was lucky,’ he concluded. ‘And waiting is always like this.’
More customers for the coke merchant. Phryne calculated that, in three hours, he had taken close on a hundred pounds. She congratulated herself on her clothes. The garish dress and the holed stockings matched the
