CHAPTER ONE
Lewis Carroll
Fortunately, the Hon. Phryne Fisher was a light sleeper. She had dozed for most of the journey, but when the naus- eating odour of chloroform impinged on her senses, she had sufficient presence of mind to realise that something was happening while she still had wits enough to react.
Reaching over the slumbering form of her maid and companion, Dot, she groped for and found her handbag. She dragged it open, moving as though she were five fathoms under water. The clasp of the handbag seemed impossibly complex, and finally, swearing under her breath and gasping for air, she tore it open with her teeth, extracted her Beretta.32 with which she always travelled, and waveringly took aim. She squeezed off a shot that broke the window.
It shattered into a thousand shards, spattering Phryne and Dot with glass, and admitting a great gush of cold air.
Phryne choked, coughed, and staggered to her feet. She hung out of the window until she was quite certain of her sobriety, then hauled the other window open. The train was still moving. Smoke blew back into her face. What was happening? Phryne reached into the picnic basket, found the bottle of cold tea, and took a refreshing swig. Dot was out to the world, slumped over her travelling bag, her long hair coming loose from its plait. Phryne listened carefully at her maid’s mouth, with a cold fear in her heart. But Dot was breathing regularly and seemed only to be deeply asleep.
Phryne wet her handkerchief with the remains of the cold tea and opened the door of the compartment. A wave of chloroform struck her, and she had to duck back into her compartment, take a deep breath and hold it, before running into the corridor, tearing open a window and leaning through it. There was not a sound on the train; not a noise of human occupancy. She sucked in a breath and rushed to the next window, repeating the procedure until all the windows were as wide open as the railways allowed.
There were four compartments in this first-class carriage. She had noticed the occupants as she had sauntered along before supper: an elderly lady and her companion in the first, a harassed woman and three diabolical children in the second, and a young couple in the third. Phryne and Dot had occupied the fourth, and that probably explained their relative immunity, as the smell got thicker and harder to bear as Phryne neared the front of the train.
The engine halted; she heard the whistle, and an odd bumping noise at the front of the first-class carriage. There was a rush of steam, and the train began to move again, almost precipitating Phryne onto her knees, as she was still rather shaky. Still coughing and retching, she opened the window of the young couple, then the mother and the children. Finally she approached the first compartment, and the smell was strong enough to sting her eyes. She applied the wet handkerchief again, staining her face with tea, dived in and stood staring.
The companion lay flat on the floor with a spilt cup by her hand, but the window was already open and the old lady was gone.
Phryne then did something that she had always wanted to do. She pulled the communication cord as hard as she could.
The train screeched to a satisfying halt, and a porter came running, slapping open the door to the dining-car and immediately beginning to cough.
‘Did you pull that cord, Miss?’ he asked. ‘For the love of Mike, what’s been happening here?’
‘Chloroform,’ said Phryne. ‘Help me get them out into the fresh air.’
The porter shouted, and several more liveried men crowded into the carriage, before they began to choke and tried to run out again.
‘Idiots!’ gasped Phryne. ‘Put a wet hanky over your silly faces and come and help me.’
‘I’ll handle it, Miss,’ said one rather tall and charming conductor. ‘You’d better come out too, until it clears a little. Give me your hand, Miss, and down we go.’ Phryne, who was feeling very unwell, allowed herself to be carried down the step and off the siding. She sat down unsteadily in cold wet grass and was delighted with the sensation. It seemed more real than the hot, thick darkness of the train.
The tall conductor laid Dot down beside Phryne, and the old woman’s companion beside her. Dot turned over in deep sleep, her face against Phryne’s neck, sniffed, croaked ‘Nuit D’Amour’, sneezed, and woke up.
‘Lie still, Dot dear, we’ve had a strange experience. We are quite all right, and will be even better in a minute. Ah. Someone with sense.’
Phryne accepted a cup of hot, sugared tea from an intelligent steward and held it to Dot’s lips. ‘Here you are, old dear, take a few sips and you’ll be as right as rain.’
‘Oh, Miss, I feel that sick! Did I faint?’ Dot supped some more tea, and recovered enough to sit up and take the cup.
‘In a way, Dot, we all did. Someone, for some unknown reason, has chloroformed us. We were in the end carriage and thus we inhaled the slightest dose, though it was quite enough, as I’m sure you will agree. And when I get hold of the person who has done this,’ continued Phryne, gulping her tea and getting to her feet, ‘they will be sorry that they were ever born. All right now, Dot? I mean, all right to be left? I want to scout around a bit.’
‘All right, Miss,’ agreed Dot, and lay down in the dank grass, wishing that her head would stop swimming.
The train had come to a halt in utter darkness somewhere on the way to Ballarat. All around the pastures were flat, cold and wet; it was the middle of winter. She regained the train as the guards were carrying out the last of the children, a limp and pitiful bundle.
‘Well, this wasn’t on the timetable!’ she exclaimed to the nearest conductor. ‘What happened? And who caused it to happen?’
‘I thought that you might have seen something, Miss, since you were the only one awake. Though you seem to have caught a fair lungful of the stuff,’ he added. ‘You sure that you feel quite the thing, Miss?’
Phryne caught at the proffered arm thankfully. ‘I’m quite all right, just a little wobbly in the underpinnings. What are we going to do?’
‘Well, Miss, the train-conductor thinks that we’d better put everyone on board as soon as they have recovered a bit and take the train on to the next town. There’s a policeman there and they can send for a doctor. Some of them kids are in a bad way.’
‘Yes, I expect that will be the best plan. I’ll go and see if I can help. Give me an arm, will you? Do you know any artificial respiration?’
‘Yes, Miss,’ said the middle-aged man, glancing admiringly at the white face under the cloche hat. ‘I learned it for lifesaving.’
‘Come on, then, we’ve got lives to save. The children and the pregnant woman are the main risks.’
Phryne found, on examination, that the youngest child, a particularly devilish three year old on whom she had been wishing death all day, was the worst affected. His face was flushed, and there seemed to be no breath in the little body. She caught the child up in her arms and squeezed him gently.
‘Breathe, little monster,’ she admonished him, ‘and you shall dance on all my hats, and push Dot’s shoes out the window. Breathe, pest, or I shall never forgive myself. Come on, child, breathe!’
In, out, the chest rose and fell. The child gulped air, choked, fell silent again, as Phryne jogged his chest and he dragged in another breath, with nerve-racking intervals in which she heard the other passengers groaning awake. The pregnant woman was retching violently, and abjuring her comatose husband to awake. A small hand clutched Phryne painfully by the nose and the child’s strong legs flexed and kicked. The whole child seemed to gather himself for some final effort. Phryne held her breath. Was this a death tremor? Johnnie took his first independent breath.
‘Waaaahr!’ he screamed, and Phryne began to laugh.
‘Here, you take him,’ she said to the nearest guard. ‘But be careful, he’ll be sick in a moment.’
The guard was a family man, and took the resultant mess philosophically. They were all awake now; the woman and the children, the pregnant lady and her husband, and Dot. All except the companion to the elderly lady, and she was burned about the nose and mouth, and very deeply drugged, though her heart pounded strongly under Phryne’s hand.
