Castlemaine Murders Part 6

'But did she really think I was going to forbid her to corre-spond? I am not the stuff of a Victorian father, Dot dear.'

'Perhaps she isn't thinking too clearly,' soothed Dot.

Phryne sorted through the letters. One pile was business. One pile was trivia-invitations, thank-you letters, cards for gallery viewings and at homes. The smallest pile was always personal letters. Phryne fanned them in one hand.

'One from Father, by the look of it. One from Mother. My, we are attracting attention! And one I do not recognise. Neat handwriting, posted in Melbourne.'

Phryne ran her letter opener under the flap and there was a bright flash. She had dropped the knife and retreated to the other side of the table before the bang; Phryne could move very fast when roused. The letter caught fire and Dot swatted it with a handy plate. Nothing could make Dot burn good linen.

'You all right, Dot?' Phryne stood up.

'Yes, you?' gasped Dot, fanning herself with the plate.

'Yes. That was flash powder. Magicians use it to cover up the subst.i.tution of the pretty lady with the donkey. Someone has a quirky sense of humour, Dot dear, and when I catch them I shall insert flash powder into various crevices on their person and light it. Anything written on that enclosure?'

'It's a bit singed,' said Dot. 'I think it says "STAY AWAY FROM THE CORPSE OR BECOME ONE" but the edge has burned off.'

Mr Butler, Mrs Butler, Molly the dog and the butcher's boy all appeared from the kitchen, expostulating.

'Pithy,' said Phryne. 'No, no need to worry, Mr Butler- you are having a morning, aren't you? Someone sent me a joke which backfired rather literally. They will, in due course, be sorry. In future, Mr B, take the mail into the garden, in case we get any more little surprises. That will be all,' said Phryne, and the Butlers went back to their tea. Phryne lit a meditative Sobranie. Dot said nothing, grieved by the black soot on the breakfast cloth.

'Never mind about the cloth,' said Phryne, blowing a smoke ring. 'The Chinese laundry will get it out. Dot, this is a very interesting development.'

'It is?' Dot was cross. 'That could have blown your hand off! Not to mention the damage to the furnishings.'

'No, there wasn't enough powder to do any real harm. It's just a warning. But don't you see, Dot, if someone is trying to stop us, it means that the body in the Ghost Train is relevant to someone alive today. I thought it was just an old mystery.'

'Well, it isn't a new mystery,' objected Dot, still ruffled. Magician's tricks in a lady's parlour! The idea! 'That nice Dr Treasure says the man has been dead since about 1857.'

'Yes, and that long dead, who would care about him? But someone does.'

'Why on earth would they worry about a man who's been dead for seventy years?'

'There is the rub, I agree.' Phryne blew another smoke ring. 'Why indeed?'

When the doorbell rang Dot went herself. The Butlers were upset and if anyone had come to follow their trick with a real threat they would have Dot to deal with.

'Yes?' she said militantly.

'Detective Constable Laurence,' said the mountain of blue serge in front of her eyes. 'To see Miss Fisher.'

'Come in,' said Dot. As he pa.s.sed her the policeman sniffed. 'Gunpowder?' he asked mildly.

'Flash powder,' replied Phryne from the door. 'Come in, Detective Constable. We have a tale to unfold.'

While Phryne was talking, Dot was examining the policeman. Dot did not like cops per se, although she was engaged to marry one and she really liked Detective Inspector Jack Robinson. This was a large household supply policeman, mild of eye and benign of glance, without the impenetrable stupidity which had been so noticeable in the police constable at Luna Park. He was listening, he was making notes, and he wasn't interrupting Miss Phryne to ask her if she was sure. This was always irritating, because Phryne was always sure.

'Then someone sent me a letter which exploded,' she finished. 'I noticed that it was posted at the GPO, then it went bang. The letter just says "Stay away from the corpse or become one".'

'So someone is still interested in this old murder,' said Laurence. 'This does change things, Miss Fisher. I came here to tell you that as the coroner agrees with the police expert that the body is over fifty years old, that no further action would be taken. But it means more searching. If he was killed in 1857, I don't even know that we'd have records. I know the police force was different then. There was a special unit of goldfields police with their own commander. History is a bit of a hobby of mine,' he confessed quietly, as though admitting to a shameful vice.

'And 1857 is the Gold Rush, and if my friend Lin is right, this man died in Castlemaine or thereabouts, which must have been one frightful mess of men and mud and murder. I shall have to go there and see what I can see.'

'Miss?' asked the policeman and Dot, at exactly the same moment. Dot waved the policeman to go first.

'But, Miss Fisher, if someone is threatening you...'

'Pfui,' spat Phryne. 'What would you have me do, my dear police officer? Sit at home all day and take up tatting? That wouldn't stop anyone from killing me if they really wished to do so. And they don't, or they would have. That letter could have borne a fulminate charge strong enough to blow me up- but it didn't. So they don't really want to kill me. They just want to warn me off.'

'Yes,' said Dot. 'And the sensible thing is to be warned off. Who cares about a seventy year old dead body anyway?'

'The very question I was asking of myself, Dot dear. What a clear thinker you are! What importance could he have to anyone alive? Was he someone's grandfather, perhaps? He was a bit young to even be a father, though that is a biological skill which most boys pick up quite young. Mr Burton says that Carter's show was broken down and full of unidentifiable vaguely organic things which he didn't look at, being a man of delicacy. I wonder when they acquired the mummy, and from whom? Well, that takes care of today, Dot dear. We are going to Eltham, to interview Mrs Carter.'

'But she's a nun!' gasped Dot.

'And?'

'You can't just walk up to a convent and demand to see a nun. They're cloistered. You have to write to Reverend Mother and make an appointment.'

'What about emergencies?'

'Miss, the man is dead seventy years, one more day won't matter,' argued Dot, who felt strongly about the sanct.i.ty of convents.

'I suppose so. What enquiries will you be making, Detective Constable?'

'Er...well, Miss Fisher, we shall have to investigate... well, actually, I don't know.'

'Yes, it is difficult, isn't it? No scene of the crime, no suspects, no name. But we do have a clue. The newspaper. You can call the constable in Castlemaine and ask him to search for a local newspaper with the t.i.tle... Mail. And then turn to the paper for the period around the 27th of July 1857 and find out the rest of the heading. Attempted expulsion at . . . somewhere. That would be very useful. That would prove the origin of the newspaper. But it isn't significant for our man,' she added. 'He should look for any accounts of a murdered man. You have the description. Someone killed him and someone else must have missed him-because they are still missing him.'

'Yes, Miss Fisher,' said Laurence, scribbling in his notebook.

Lin Chung was sitting in the garden under an arbour of white star jasmine, watching a very old man make tea for an incred-ibly old man. This took time and the process could not be rushed.

Lin was nervous. Defying-even in a mild and roundabout way-the grandmother whom he had obeyed all his life was less pleasant than he had antic.i.p.ated. He was very fond of that alarming old lady and did not want to hurt her feelings. But Lin Wan and her children had been welcomed so delightedly by her old mother that he felt justified in solving the feud. Feuds! In the twentieth century! People would think that all Chinese were barbarians, nailed to their past.

Therefore watching the slow movement of old Uncle as he fanned the brazier and dropped the tea leaves into the pot was soothing. Great Great Uncle Lin Gan was sitting at his ease in a padded chair, sucking his teeth. Age had shrivelled him, burning off all fat and muscle and taking his hair with it. He still had a long beard of which he was inordinately proud and was otherwise a light armful of bones and bad temper. He reminded Lin uncomfortably of the mummy from the Ghost Train.

Lin, trained from childhood to be courteous to his elders, usually avoided Lin Gan because his only conversation consisted of (1) The Good Old Days coupled with (2) The Bad New Days when boys were not polite to their elders, food had no taste and the weather was cold enough to freeze his bones.

And now he didn't talk much, but sat in the sun when there was any, by the fire when there wasn't, and gazed into the past, where he had been young and strong and bold.

The tea was poured. Lin Gan tasted, spat, tasted again, and nodded to old Uncle w.a.n.g that he could go. When the uncle had gone, Lin produced a flask of Scotch whisky, which he knew the old man loved, and unscrewed the lid. The tortoise head came up and the black eyes bored into Lin's.

'Young men should not drink whisky,' he snapped.

'I know, Great Great Uncle. I brought it for you.'

Great Great Uncle gulped his tea and Lin filled his cup.

'That's good,' said Lin Gan when he could breathe again. 'More.'

'Tell me,' said Lin, tipping a spoonful of spirit into the cup, 'about the goldfields.'

The old man eyed him suspiciously.

'Why? You never wanted to hear those tales when you were a boy. Still are a boy, of course.'

'I wish to profit by your wisdom,' said Lin, withholding the flask. 'With a little age we get a little wisdom,' he added.

'Maybe. I went there when I was six. You never saw such a sight, boy, as those goldfields. As though thousands of moles the size of horses had been digging for their lives. Humps and hummocks and holes everywhere, and mud you could drown in. And they hated us, boy. Don't you mistake that. Even the children used to run alongside us chanting "Ching Chong Chinaman, go home, go home!" and they'd throw stones. That place was a pit of scorpions, a vision of the Nether h.e.l.l.'

He held out his cup. Lin added some whisky.

'Most of them wanted to go home,' said Lin Gan. 'Most of them were going home as soon as they could. Most of them wanted to swagger into their own village with a pocketful of nuggets and be a Gold Mountain Uncle with the pick of the girls. They used to sing a song...how did it go...?'

In a thin trembling voice such as a spider might have had, he began to sing.

'Don't marry your daughter to a baker, he never comes home. Don't marry your daughter to a scholar, she'll sleep each night alone. Marry her to a Gold Mountain Uncle, with sleeves that clink and shine...I think that was how it went. We sang a lot of songs while we were working.'

Lin felt that the subject was established and he could attempt to guide the ancient man's recollection.

'Venerable One, do you remember the murdered couriers?'

'The Hu murdered them,' snarled the old man. 'I hear you have settled the feud. And that your grandmother is very angry with you.'

'They didn't do it,' said Lin, suppressing a private wince.

'Eh?' demanded old Lin Gan. 'Didn't do it, you say? Of course they did.'

'It was someone else,' said Lin. 'Mr Hu would not lie about that. Tell me about them. Did you know them? What else could have happened to them?'

'There were four,' said the old man slowly, holding out his cup again. 'I don't remember all their names. Servants, not Lin family. Sung Ma was the leader. I remember that he was sick, someone said he was sick, but he went anyway. They carried the gold in baskets, baked inside loaves of bread. Needs four men to carry that much gold. It's heavy. Your great grandfather, my brother, he was in Melbourne, buying the land for this house. He had started building, I think. We moved up here from where we landed, down in Spencer Street-that was foul land and marshy, and we got sick. This is drier. When the others saw what my brother had done, they came here too, and we are still here. Give me another drink, to take the taste away!'

Lin obliged. The old man smacked his lips.

'The couriers, yes, they jogged off-they laughed at our gait, you know, the yellow-haired ghosts-and then they were gone. I always thought the Hu killed them. We tried to find them. Hu said they had not seen them, the Loong family saw them go past their camp and onto the main road, a woman called Ah said they bought tea from her, after that-nothing. They had vanished completely, baskets, bodies, gold and all. But that goldfield was a very dangerous place. The miners were always brawling. And drinking and brawling some more. Heaven had abandoned that place.

'We searched but we could not find the couriers. If they had gone on the road the Hu must have seen them so we a.s.sumed it was them. Then there was the riot and we no longer felt safe, even though the Protector of Chinese came and said it will be all right. Lin Chiang moved the family onto the mullock heaps, land that the miners had abandoned, where no man could complain of us, and then we found that there was good land by the river, already dug by the miners, so we started a garden. Good deep rich soil. We grew greens and onions and potatoes for the miners and we found quite a lot of gold in the tailings, so we stayed.'

'We had a market garden?' Lin had not known this. The old man grinned, showing three remaining teeth.

'It was the only supply of fresh vegetables to the diggings for a long while. Those fools used to dump their horse dung, used it to fill old mine shafts. None of them could farm. We collected night soil and dung-the people paid us to take it away!-and our garden bloomed. We used to go into Castle-maine once it had a market, when it grew to a town. Even then they spat at us, even refused to deal with us. Until they got scurvy,' Lin Gan chuckled. 'Then they bought our cabbages again. Fools.'

'Venerable One, what happened in the riot?'

'We heard the camp roaring,' he said, looking back into the past. 'Always noisy, the goldfields, always a babble of languages, but this was different. It was like a tiger roaring, a roar that says "I am strong". A roar that says "I am hunting and you are my prey". I was scared even before we heard them coming up the hill, hundreds of feet, and that mob noise ahead of them as they came on like wild boar, breaking trees, snapping branches. We wanted to run, but we were against the foot of a rise; behind that was a marsh. There was nowhere to go. I remember cousin Chung saying that when he heard the noise he ran through a whole speech he was intending to deliver to the Black Judge of the Netherworld. I was too scared to do anything. I just stood there and wet my pants.'

His hands were trembling and Lin had to hold the cup to tip the whisky into his mouth. He recovered enough to continue.

'There were hundreds of them, all roaring, led by five men, two lascars as black as demons, three of the straw-headed ones. And then, just as I knew we were all going to die, out stepped Constable Cooke, the one we called 'Gem-eye'. He had bright eyes, like gems. He was a big man and he stood there, not moving, as the mob yelled and poured up the hill, and then they stopped, because he didn't move. And they yelled at him to move and he didn't move, and I don't know what he said because I never learned English, but then he raised his rifle and pointed it at the five leaders, one after another, and then all of a sudden, like a dam breaking, they backed down. I never saw such a thing before. He never moved. They backed away and then they ran and they were all gone and it was quiet again. Then Gem-eye, he walked over to us and said that we'd be safe that night and he'd call the Protector, and he said that the mob would have to go over him before he'd let them hurt us, and then he sat down under a tree with his rifle in his hands and he stayed there all night.'

'That was a brave man!' exclaimed Lin Chung, who had never heard this account before.

'And not even Chinese,' said Lin Gan, still amazed after seventy years.

'What happened then?'

'He went back to his police station when the Protector came to us. I heard that the mob had broken all of his windows. He was in trouble because of that. Gla.s.s was very scarce and expensive. We used to give him vegetables as soon as we had a garden. I heard-yes, I am sure-that he was dismissed from the police force and he went to the quartz mine. We didn't see him again. He was a good man. They don't make men like that these days. I can still see him, standing like a sea-wall, quite still, while the waves broke on him.'

Lin Gan stared back into the past for some minutes. It was not kind to tire the old man. Lin stood up.

'Thank you for your wisdom, Venerable One,' said Lin Chung, handing over the flask. The old man caught his arm.

'Sit a while, Great Great Nephew.'

Lin sat down again.

'You did well to settle the feud,' said the old man. Lin suppressed a stare of astonishment.

'Thank you,' he managed.

'And your grandmother will forgive you her demotion in time,' continued the old man, sipping a little whisky.

'I hope so,' said Lin.

'I like your wife Camellia,' observed Lin Gan. 'She is clever with gardens. I saw her planting, I saw the garden she designed for your concubine and I watched her tie up this very jasmine. She will be a good wife to you.'

'I hope so,' said Lin.

'But you must leave us all for a time,' said Lin Gan, his old eyes as bright as bradawls in his walnut face.

'I must?' asked Lin, overwhelmed by unaccustomed compliments.

'Of course,' said Lin Gan, presenting him with the empty flask. 'You must go to Castlemaine, and find out what happened to our four hundred ounces of gold.'

In the thirteenth year of the reign of the glorious Emperor Lord of the Dragon Throne Kwong Sui of the Ching Dynasty, Sung Ma in what ought to be the Beginning of Winter the ku'li greets his sister Mai.

Soon we are going to land. We have seen new birds-land birds. They are also very strange. One was blown aboard, screeching like a soul in the Ninth h.e.l.l. It was as big as a chicken, as white as paper, with a crest like crocus. It snapped with its black beak and screamed for a while and then flew off, making a terrible cry, and after it flew seventeen others. The sailors are still lighting incense. They are sure that they are spirits. I feel that if they are spirits they have come back from the dead in a very odd shape and a very bad temper, so probably they are birds. I burned some incense to Kwan Yin in case they aren't.

The elder brother sends his love to the younger sister.

CHAPTER SIX.