Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher

diverting. In the meantime, there’s champagne and Sasha. Cheers!’ she cried, holding up a refilled glass. Life was very good.

Flying Too High

CHAPTER ONE

A sad tale’s best for Winter

Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale

Candida Alice Maldon was being a bad girl. Firstly, she had not told anyone that she had found a threepence on the street. Secondly, she had not mentioned to anyone in the house that she was going out, because she knew that she would not be allowed. Thirdly, since she had lost one of her teeth, she was not supposed to be eating sweets, anyway.

The consciousness of wrongdoing had never stopped Candida from doing anything she wanted. She was prepared to be punished, and even prepared to feel sorry. Later. She approached the sweet-shop counter, clutching her threepence in her hand, and stared at the treasures within. Laid out, like those Egyptian treasures her father had shown her photos of in the paper, were sweets enough to give the whole world toothache.

There were red and green toffee umbrellas and toffee horses on a stick. There were jelly-beans and jelly- babies and snakes in lots of colours, and lolly bananas and snowballs and acid drops. These had the advantage that they were twenty-four a penny, but they were too sour for Candida’s taste. She dismissed wine-gums as too gluey and musk sticks as too crumbly, and humbugs as too peppery. She considered boiled lollies in all the colours of the millefiore brooch which her grandmother wore, and barley-sugar in long, glassy canes. There were ring sticks with real rings around them, and rainbow balls and honeybears and chocolate toffs. Candida breathed heavily on the glass and wiped it with her sleeve.

‘What would you like, dear?’ asked the shopkeeper.

‘My name is Candida,’ the child informed her, ‘and I have threepence. I would like a ha’porth of honeybears, a ha’porth of coffee buds, a ha’porth of mint-leaves, a ha’porth of silver sticks. . a ha’porth of umbrellas and a ha’porth of bananas.’

‘There you are, Miss Candida,’ said the shopkeeper, accepting the sweaty, warm coin. ‘Here are your lollies. Don’t eat them all at once!’

Candida walked out of the shop, and began to trail her way home. She was not in a hurry because no one knew she was gone.

She was hopping in and out of the gutter, as she had been expressly forbidden to do, when a car drew up beside her. It was a black car shaped like a beetle. Nothing like her father’s little Austin. Candida looked up with a start.

‘Candida! There you are! Your daddy sent me to look for you. Where have you been?’ A woman opened the car door and extended a hand.

Candida stepped closer to look. The woman had yellow hair and Candida did not like her smile.

‘Come along now, dear. We’ll take you home.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Candida said clearly. ‘I don’t believe my daddy sent you. I shall tell him you’re a liar,’ and she jumped back onto the pavement to run home. But someone in the back of the car was too quick. She was seized by strong hands and an odd-smelling handkerchief was clamped over her face. Then the world went dark green.

Phryne Fisher was enduring afternoon tea at the Traveller’s Club with Mrs William McNaughton for a special reason. This did not make the ordeal any more pleasant, but it gave her the necessary spinal fortitude. Not that there was anything wrong with the tea. There were scones and strawberry jam with cream obviously obtained from contented cows. There were petit fours in delightful colours and brandy snaps. There was Ceylon tea in the big silver teapot, and fine Chinese cups from which to drink it.

The only fly in the afternoon’s ointment was Mrs William McNaughton. She was a pale, drooping woman, dressed in an unbecoming grey. Her sheaf of pale hair was coming adrift from its pins. These disadvantages could have been overcome with the correct choice of hairdresser and couturiere, but the essential soppiness of her character was irreparable. Mrs William McNaughton reminded Phryne of jelly-cake and aspens and other quivering things, but there was steel under her flinching. This was a woman who had all the marks of extensive abuse: the hollow eyes, the nervous movements, the habit of starting at a sudden sound. But she had survived in her own way. She might cower, but she would not release hold of an idea once she had grasped it, and she could keep a secret or embark on a clandestine path. Her concealment of her character and her desires would be close to absolute, and torture would not break her now if her past had not killed her. However, despite the reasons, Phryne could not like her. Phryne herself met all challenges head-on, and the Devil take the hindmost.

‘It’s my son, Miss Fisher,’ said Mrs McNaughton, handing Phryne a cup of tea. ‘I’m worried about him.’

‘Well, what worries you?’ asked Phryne, pouring her cup of anaemic tea into the slop-bowl and filling it with a stronger brew. ‘Have you spoken to him about it?’

‘Oh, no!’ Mrs McNaughton recoiled. Phryne added milk and sugar to her tea and stirred thoughtfully. The process of finding out what was bothering McNaughton was like extracting teeth from an uncooperative ox.

‘Tell me, then, and perhaps I may be able to help,’ she suggested.

‘I have heard of your talents, Miss Fisher,’ observed Mrs McNaughton artlessly. ‘I hoped that you might be able to help me without causing a scandal. Lady Rose speaks very highly of you. She’s a connection of my mother’s, you know.’

‘Indeed,’ agreed Phryne, taking a brandy snap and smiling. Lady Rose had mislaid her emerald earrings, and was positive that her maid of long standing had not stolen them, thus contradicting her greedy nephew and heir, as well as the local policeman. She had hired Phryne to find the earrings, and this Phryne had done in one afternoon’s inquiry among the local Montes de Piete, where the nephew had pawned them. He had made an unwise investment in the fourth at Flemington, putting the proceeds on a horse which was possessed of insufficient zeal and had not been able to redeem them. Lady Rose had been less than generous with the fee, but more than generous with her recommendations. Since Phryne did not need the money, she was pleased with the bargain. Lady Rose had told her immediate acquaintance that, ‘She may look like a flapper — she smokes cigarettes and drinks cocktails and I believe that she can fly an aeroplane — but she has brains and bottom, and I thoroughly approve of her.’

Since she had made the decision to become an investi- gator, Phryne had not been out of work. She had found the Persian kitten for which the little son of the Spanish ambassador was pining. It had been seduced by the delights of the nearby fish-shop’s storehouse, and had been shut in. Phryne had released it, and (after it had suffered three baths) it was restored to its doting admirer. She had worked three weeks in an office, watching a costing clerk skimming the warehouse and blaming the shortfall on the inefficiency of a female stores clerk. Phryne had taken a certain delight in catching that one. She had watched a brutal and violent husband for long enough to obtain sufficient evidence for his battered wife to divorce him. For, in addition to her bruises and broken fingers, she needed to prove adultery. Phryne, who never shrank from a little bending of the rules, had provided the adulterer with a suitable partner from among the working girls of her acquaintance, and had paid the photographer’s fee out of her own bounty. The husband was informed that the negatives would be handed over after the delivery of the decree absolute, and everyone wondered that such a determined and hard man went through his divorce like a lamb. His divorced wife was in possession of a comfortable competence and was reported to be very happy.

The result of all this work was that Phryne, to her surprise, was busy and occupied and had not been bored for months. She considered that she had found her metier. Physically, Phyrne had been described by the redoubtable Lady Rose as ‘small, thin, with black hair cut in what I am told is a bob, disconcerting grey-green eyes and porcelain skin. Looks like a Dutch doll’. Phryne admitted this was a fair depiction.

For the interview with Mrs McNaughton, she had selected a beige dress of mannish cut, which she felt made her look like the directress of a women’s prison, and matching taupe shoes and stockings. Her cloche hat was of a quiet dusty pink felt.

She was not getting anywhere with Mrs McNaughton, who had sounded frantic on the phone, but who now