Raisins and Almonds

Ten

Whole Dispositions, vertues and natural motions depend on the Activitie of the heavenly motions and influences.

John Dee, Mathematicall Praeface

Dot wasn't sure what to do next. Here she was at the correct address in Carlton. It was a workman's house, of light and dark stone with a slate roof, very dark and uninhabited-looking. She had unlatched the wrought-iron gate, tripped over the statutory misplaced brick and rung the doorbell. It had made a ratchety broken sort of noise, a strangled clockwork grunt.

Dot knocked firmly with one gloved hand and the front door swung open.

So she stood in the dark doorway, wondering what to do. It was clearly unsafe to leave one's front door open. No one would have done so unless they were at home. If it had been someone whom Dot had previously met she would not have hesitated. But there was something so intrusive about entering a house where she had not been introduced ...

While she was thinking about it, she listened. The house, as far as she could see, was of the usual Carlton cottage design. Two rooms beside a central corridor, leading into a main parlour which had the kitchen and the bathroom behind it. All the blinds were closed, even though the day was not hot. The house smelt of furniture polish and burning; something had been left unattended on the stove.

That decided Dot. There was probably something wrong in a house where the front door was ajar, but there was definitely something wrong in a house where the front door was ajar and something had been left on the stove. Possibly the lady of the house had been called to an emergency and had neglected to take what Dot's nose told her was probably fish cakes off the gas, but if that was the case she would not be offended if a stranger came in and, with the best of motives, prevented her house from catching fire.

Dot hurried down the hall, through a disordered parlour and into the kitchen, where she found a gagged woman in a heap on the floor and a pan well alight on the stove.

Dot opened the back door. Then she grabbed a teatowel, wadded it up and carried the flaming pan out into the yard. She laid it down and smothered it with earth. The pan had been burning for some time. It fumed unpleasantly. Then Dot returned to the woman.

She wasn't dead, Dot was pleased to note. She was already trying to sit up, hindered by being attached to a chair by what Dot judged were probably stockings.

'Mrs Katz?' Dot asked. 'Don't struggle, I'll try and get the knots undone.' Dot first stood the chair up and then removed the gag, another teatowel.

' Wasser,' croaked the woman. Dot spoke only English but this was clear enough.

'Water?' she asked. The woman nodded. Dot brought her a glass of water and held it as she gulped, then knelt to try and undo the knotted stockings.

Mrs Katz, who appreciated a rescuer who knew how expensive stockings were and did not immediately dive for a knife to cut them, coughed and said,'Oy gevalt, such a thing to happen!'

'What did happen?' asked Dot, managing to release the bonds on Mrs Katz's ankles. Her wrists had been tied more tightly, or perhaps she had struggled. Her hands, which were veined, had swollen alarmingly. 'I think I've got this knot; stay still for a bit.'

Years of housework had given Dot strong fingers and a childhood spent untangling her little brother's fishing line had made her supernaturally good at knots. It was a matter of allowing the line to unravel itself from what she had heard Phryne call a point d'appui. Dot found the central hitch in Mrs Katz's bindings and the stocking unwound itself from around the arm of the wooden chair.

7 should know?' demanded Mrs Katz. She stood up, shedding stockings, rubbing her mistreated wrists. 7 should understand? I am about to cook a few fish cakes for my lunch, I just lay them in the pan, and suddenly there they are, screaming at me, where is the paper? I tell them what are you doing in my house, is this Russia, anyway, what paper, I don't know nothing about no paper. Then they grab me—see, what bruises!—and tie me here, and then I hear such noises, everything they must be turning over, breaking, stealing, and then the tall one comes back, says, nothing there, and they're gone, I hear the door slam, leaving the pan on the stove which they should have known would burn, I sit here, I struggle, the house it will burn down, Maxie when he comes home will find nothing but smoking ruin, I can't get free because they tie me so tight, oy, bandits, gonifs, what have they taken?'

'I don't know,' said Dot. 'We'd better call the police.'

'No!' Mrs Katz seized Dot's sleeve, a surprisingly strong grip for those reddened claws. 'No, please, lady, not the police. Anyway,' she demanded, 'thank you for rescuing me, don't think I'm not grateful, wonderful you should come in nick of time, but, Miss, who are you?'

'My name is Dorothy Williams,' replied Dot, rather relieved to be able to declare herself. 'I came because you were in the bookshop the other day, just before the young man died there.'

'I was?' asked Mrs Katz evasively. Dot nodded.

'Your hat was there,' she said. 'I saw it in the hall. It's a very distinctive hat.'

'Is good, yes?' said Mrs Katz, giving up her attempt to avoid admitting that she had been in Miss Lee's shop. 'I like it. Max says it is too big, but I don't like the sun. Max says I look like mushroom. He's got no style. Oy, Maxie, what will Max say about this? And my good fish cakes is all burned. Miss, do you know what those gonifs wanted? Do you know what this is all about?'

'No,' admitted Dot. 'Not really. But I'm sure that Miss Fisher will. Why won't you let me call the police, Mrs Katz?'

'We're in new country,' muttered Mrs Katz. 'We don't want no trouble. No old country trouble.'

'Old country? What do you mean?'

Mrs Katz shut up like an oyster. Dot considered her. She was perhaps fifty, dressed in an art silk dress with rather too many brooches. Her hair was dyed an unconvincing shade of gold and she was made up with pancake and lipstick but the effect was oddly attractive and innocent, as though a child had amused itself with her mother's cosmetics. Her wrist bore a heavy gold bracelet and there were small gold rings in her ears. Robbery had not been the motive for this incursion into a respectable Carlton household.

'Perhaps I can give you a hand with the tidying up,' Dot offered, giving up on the police.

'No, no, you put the kettle on if you will be so kind, we'll have some tea, how can I explain to Max what happened, maybe he'll understand, he's got a better kopf than me, he'll be home by three, oy, what a terrible thing ...'

Mrs Katz pottered off into the parlour and Dot put the kettle on and then followed. She found her hostess on her knees, picking up the sad fragments of what had been a fine plate, red and blue china embossed with gold.

'With me I brought it,' she said, breaking into tears. 'Such a long way I brought it.'

Dot realized then that Mrs Katz had not cried during her ordeal. She had courage, or perhaps felt that she had no reason to fear the robbers. But now she was weeping desolately. Her make-up was being eroded into runnels by her tears and Dot offered her a handkerchief.

'Perhaps it can be mended,' said Dot.

'No, it's kaput,' said Mrs Katz. But she gathered up the pieces nonetheless. She and Dot stood the furniture up again and they surveyed the room. Books had been emptied out of a bookcase, shaken and flung down. A small table and two easy chairs had been upturned and the springs were now showing in the chairs where the undersides had been ripped.

'They were looking for something,' said Dot.

'Something small,' agreed Mrs Katz, drying her eyes. 'Ai, such a silly woman I am, to cry over a plate when we are all alive, but my mother it belonged to. Apart from her Sabbath silver it was all I could bring ... but the silver is still here,' she said with relief, setting up a beautiful nine-branched candlestick on the mantel and counting out spoons and forks into their wrappings of tissue. Dot shook out and refolded a much-darned white damask tablecloth and Mrs Katz replaced it in a wooden chest with the silver and the candlestick.

'It is a Menorah,' she said unexpectedly to Dot. 'We are Jews.'

'Yes,' agreed Dot, re-shelving books. Mrs Katz appeared to be waiting for her to say something. 'That's what this case is about,' she added. 'Mr Abrahams asked Miss Phryne to look into the murder in the bookshop.'

'Abrahams asked her? Benjamin Abrahams? And she agreed?'

'Yes, she's a detective,' said Dot, and blushed slightly. Detective never seemed like a really respectable profession to Dot and she still wasn't entirely used to it.

'Mr Abrahams, he is respected man,' commented Mrs Katz, after a pause. 'Abrahams is a mensch, that's what Max says. See, this—I am glad this is not broken. This belonged to my grandfather, who made such things.'

She turned a brass key, and then lifted the lid of a small, intricately carved wooden box. It began to play a Strauss waltz, very tinkly and pretty, and in the box a small clockwork bird opened and closed its beak. Dot exclaimed, delighted, and Mrs Katz smiled.

'Such a pretty thing. Now we have a look at the other rooms, and then tea, yes?'

When they came to examine the front room, they found it in the same schemozzl as the parlour. It took the two of them to heave the mattress back onto the spring base and to remake the bed. Everything in the room had been roughly and hastily searched. All the drawers from a bureau had been torn out and emptied and turned over, then tossed onto the heap of bedding. But nothing had been taken, not even Mr Katz's best watch, which had been hidden in between the mattress and the base.

The other room contained some furniture which was in the process of being mended. It smelt strongly of wood glue. Even here all the pieces of a large bedstead had been moved, and some of the glued joints had been broken.

It took Dot and Mrs Katz an hour to put everything to rights, and by the end of it they were friends.

'You see,' explained Mrs Katz over another cup of straw-coloured tea flavoured with lemon, 'I thought it old country matter because they were speaking Yiddish. "Find it," they say many times. There were two of them, dark men, young, one taller than other, and they were angry. But me they never told for what they were looking, just a paper. What paper, maybe your Miss Fisher knows. But they don't found it here.'

'Why not?' asked Dot.

'Why not?' Mrs Katz cried. 'Because here it was never hidden.'

'Have you ever seen them before, Mrs Katz?'

'That I can't answer, it was sudden, I didn't see them too good, but no, I don't think so.'

'In the bookshop, Mrs Katz, what did you see in the bookshop?'

'I don't see nothing, I went there, the lady is very nice, my Max wants a book of maps, we talk for a while about an atlas, I never hear the word before. Then I go home. That's all.'

'Did anyone else come in while you were there?'

'Two young men, maybe they work at the market. They wait while the lady talks to me about the atlas— what a word, I'll never learn all the English words.'

'Was there anyone there when you came in?'

'Just a man with a box. The lady signs a paper and gives it to him and he goes away. I never hear him speak, even.'

'Can you describe him?'

'A drayman or a carter,' Mrs Katz shrugged fluidly. 'Strong, in overalls, gloves, a cap pulled down over his eyes. But wait ...' she sipped more tea, thinking hard. 'There was something about him, maybe. No, nothing,' she decided.

'Tell me,' urged Dot.

'It's nothing, just that I thought he walk wrong for a labourer. Men like that, even when they're not young, they walk like they own the world, you know.' Mrs Katz got up and mimed the shoulder-heavy walk of a muscular man, hands lightly clenched by his sides. She looked strangely convincing and for a moment Dot could see the standover man she was mimicking. 'Like gorilla, nu? Or gunfighter. This one, he was different. Like he was shy, no, not shy ...' She shook her head, unable to find the right word to convey what she meant. Dot reflected that it must be terribly hard to come to another place when one was no longer a child and try to learn a new language.

'Never mind, I know what you mean,' she said. 'Now, I'd better go. You're sure you're all right?'

'Sure,' agreed Mrs Katz. 'Max, he can talk to Mr Abrahams about this? He'll want to know.'

'Yes,' said Dot.

She used the journey home on two trams to make careful notes of everything Mrs Katz had said. Because she was constitutionally exact, she also included a description of the red, blue and gold plate which the robbers had broken.

The plate made Dot very angry.

'Well, that's more like service,' commented Bert.

'Too right,' agreed Cec.

They ran lightly down the stairs to the street. The cry of 'Murder!' had been repeated and was even then attracting the attention of a beat cop. He was a mountain of a man in blue serge and helmet, and Bert doused a small flame of alarm when he saw this bastion of the law approaching. Constable Clarke, the biggest policeman in Melbourne. Bert reminded himself that he and Cec were now firmly on the side of law and order, not to mention goodness and righteousness.

The crier was a middle-aged man who had evidently just arisen from a haystack. He was kneeling over a man in an apron, who was not struggling, probably because the smaller man had his foot poised over a very delicate area. But he was spluttering denials. The crowd was enjoying this after-lunch floor show.

The person who wasn't enjoying it was Mr Rosenbloom, who was on his hands and knees, vomiting into the gutter. Bert noticed that every now and then he would give a twitch, convulsively rising up and then sinking down again.

'Now, then,' said the policeman. Bert held his breath. Was he going to actually say it? Was he going to say 'What's all this then?' and preserve the dramatic unities?

'What's going on here?' asked the policeman, and Bert was disappointed.

'Murder!' screamed Mr Gunn. 'He poisoned Mr Rosenbloom!'

'That coot's crazy!' yelled Mr Lane. 'I didn't poison nobody. Lemme up and I'll knock your block off!' he added to Mr Gunn, who did not move.

'You let him up,' ordered Constable Clarke. 'You two come into the shop. You and you,' he pointed to Bert and Cec, 'see what you can do for the victim. You,' he pointed to a boy, 'run for Dr Stein, tell him we need him quick. All the rest of you, on your way, please. Nothing more to see here.'

The crowd, which was anticipating lots of distractions to come, stayed put. The constable blew his whistle for assistance.

'Mate,' said Bert, 'I reckon we need some water. I reckon he's taken strychnine and I reckon that Miss Phryne's going to want to know all about this.'

'Too right,' said Cec. The stricken man was panting with effort, but the tremors which ran through all his muscles would not allow him rest. Cec removed his coat and wrapped it around him.

'You'll be all right, mate,' he soothed. 'Try and sit up a little, now. That's the ticket. Boy's gone for the doctor.'

Mr Rosenbloom's teeth gnashed together as he tried to speak. 'Pain,' he grunted.

Bert, who knew no harm of the tubby foreman, said, 'Where's that bloody doctor?'

A youngish man with a permanently worried face came through the Eastern Market escorted by a proud boy, and dropped unaffectedly to his knees on the pavement.

'We need to get him inside—can you carry him?' he asked Bert and Cec, who lifted Mr Rosenbloom with some effort. They hauled him into the printer's shop and deposited him in the room's only chair.

'Sit him down here, good, now, I am going to give you something to drink, and then an injection for the convulsions, and soon you will sleep,' said the doctor. Such was the conviction in his quiet voice that Bert instantly believed him, and so did the stricken Mr Rosenbloom.

'Come next door,' he nodded to Cec.

The birdshop was loud with denunciations. Bert drew the policeman aside by one sleeve.

'I reckon you'd better call Detective Inspector Robinson,' he informed the blue serge land mass which was Constable Clarke.

'Oh, do you? And who're you?' asked the constable, unimpressed.

'Just call him. He's been looking for the poison what done in that bloke in the bookshop. Strychnine, it was. This is the same stuff.'

The constable glared at Bert and Bert glared back. There was a long interval when neither man lowered his gaze. After a minute, Clarke stepped to the door and called one of the others who had come in answer to his whistle. Three officers were occupied in keeping the crowd back.

'Call Detective Inspector Robinson, Cadet Richards,' he ordered. 'I think that this has a bearing on his murder case.'

Bert grinned at him. The recriminations in the shop rose again.

'Shut up!' roared the constable. The walls shook and bird seed fell like brightness from the air. Sheer surprise produced silence. The constable took out his notebook and his pencil.

'Now, I want your names,' he began.

Bert and Cec listened as the two men identified themselves.

'Now what's all this about murder?'

'He poisoned his chooks and my finches, and then he tried to poison Mr Rosenbloom!' declared Mr Gunn.

'He's cuckoo,' said Mr Lane pityingly 'All I did was offer Mr Rosenbloom a handful of sunflower seeds, he's foreign, he likes eating them.'

'And Mr Rosenbloom then became ill?'

'Keeled right over,' said Mr Lane. 'But I didn't poison him.'

'Show us these sunflower seeds,' said the policeman. Mr Lane led the way into the back of his shop. A small sack of seeds stood on top of a table, next to a couple of penned chickens. A boy looked up from a huge ham sandwich and allowed his mouth to fall open. Bert tipped it shut with a careful forefinger.

'We'll have to wait until Dr Stein tells us what came over Mr Rosenbloom,' said the policeman. 'Where did you get these sunflower seeds, Mr Lane?'

'I ... er ... bought them.'

'Yes,' said the constable, pencil poised. 'Who from?'

'My usual supplier is Doherty's,' said Mr Lane.

'Did these come from Doherty's, then?' The constable knew an evasion when he heard it.

'Well, in a manner of speaking, yes.' Mr Lane wiped his upper lip. 'These were a special sale, just the once.'

'Who sold them to you?'

'A mate of mine,' said Lane. 'I don't want to get him into trouble.'

'You'll be in trouble if you don't tell me what I want to know right now. A man could be dying out there,' said Clarke.

'All right, all right, it was one of the boys, Dusty Miller. He's pushed for cash and so he sold me some seeds.'

'Did you have reason to believe that these seeds had been stolen or unlawfully obtained?' asked Clarke heavily.

'No, I was sure it was all on the level, he's square, Dusty is. Good sort of young lad.'

'Oh yes,' said Constable Clarke. 'And why did you say that Mr Lane had poisoned your finches, Mr Gunn?'

'Oh, well, it was nothing, I just ... er ... borrowed a handful of sunflower seeds for my finches, I would have put them back ...'

'You been pinching my feed!' yelled Mr Lane, thankful that the black spot of legal attention appeared to have passed from him. 'You thief!'

'That's enough,' said Clarke.

'He knew the seeds were poisonous, he sold two chooks which had died of poisoning, I saw his boy plucking them!' Mr Gunn was not going to let go of his grievance.

'Dead in the pen,' agreed the boy At a glare from his master, he corked his mouth with sandwich again.

'See?' demanded Mr Gunn.

'All right, all right,' said Constable Clarke. 'That's enough. From both of you.'

Bert, who had been looking at the sunflower seeds, caught a glimpse of something in the sack which had no business being there.

'There's a stain on the left side of this sack,' he commented. 'And I reckon ...', he probed the seeds with a stick, '... yes, there,' he said with satisfaction, as a small uncorked glass bottle emerged from the black and white striped shells. It still had a few white crystals in the bottom. 'That's done you a bit of good with Jack Robinson,' he said to Constable Clarke. 'I reckon you've found his missing bottle of strychnine.'