Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Tamam Shud: A Phryne Fisher Mystery

When I was asked to write a short story for the collection Case Reopened I remembered my father talking about Somerton Man. The internet was still called books then, so I obtained all my information from a large volume entitled Crimes that Shocked Australia, where the code was printed incorrectly. As a result, I unintentionally misled my mathematician, who laboriously arrived at a solution that is, alas, wrong. Because the Tamam Shud mystery happened in 1948, I had to write about Phryne as she would be after World War II. This is the only story that ages her. I did wonder how she would manage and I should have known that, apart from not liking Dior’s New Look, she would be as wonderful as ever.

Phryne Fisher could have stayed to watch the Germans march into Paris. Being a woman with no taste for Moments of History she had left on a Plymouth-bound fishing boat some days before and had found London more to her taste. She had called upon some Home Office acquaintances, beguiled the Phony War with cocktail parties, and had only enlisted in the French Resistance when Dunkirk had brought its battered, oil-stained soldiers back in the flotilla of little ships. It was the little ships that decided her. Any nation that could have the miraculous luck to retrieve an army which should have been massacred or taken prisoner was the side to be on.

Born with the century, she was a lithe and beautiful forty-one years old when she came into Tours and began to collect the dangerous, secretive women and men who would be her Resistance to German invasion of France. London identified her as the Black Cat: La Chatte Noire. The war had been long; the danger and constant strain had frosted her black hair with white, and graven deep lines around her eyes. The fall of France and the defeat of Hitler came not a moment too soon for Phryne. London had been shattered; she did not stay. As soon as there was a transport going south on which she could wangle a place, she fled back to Australia, wanting sunshine and butter and peace.

And in Adelaide, City of Churches, she had rediscovered sleep without dreams, and wine not bought with blood, and trains in which she could travel without having to worry about partisan bombs. She was still wealthy. Land in Australia had not lost its value. Taxation was still low. Rationing was avoidable. The house in St Kilda Road remained her principal place of residence. But Adelaide had become a holiday place for her, one with such deep immemorial peace as the grounds of Cambridge no longer held.

Therefore, she was very angry when she found a dead man on Somerton Beach.

Only one memory, of all the dreadful memories, still came between her and sleep. Not every night, but often enough to plague her, and to make her wonder if she was forever damaged. A young German, captured by the Maquis, refusing to reply to questions about troop movements and numbers. He had been very frightened; she had smelt his fear. He had cowered back into the wall of the ditch, his flesh shrinking from the idea of torture. And yet he had not spoken. Pale and smug in death as though proud that he had kept faith and honour intact, his white face haunted Phryne’s sleep and occasionally flashed in front of her waking eyes.

And here, as she walked up from the water to the steps that led to the road and her car, was the same face. He was older than the German soldier had been. She put his age at about her own: forty-eight. He was tall, well built and good-looking. His eyes were shut and he looked as though he was asleep, if one could ignore the slackness of the hands and the drooping of the head. She touched him. He was cold. And it was seven in the morning on 1 December 1948, and it was going to be a very hot day.

Surprising herself, she fought down a sob.

‘I’ve seen enough dead men in the last four years, why should this one affect me?’ She called herself roughly to order. That’s enough, Chatte Noire, up you go. Go to one of these nice houses and have the police called. It is nothing to do with you. This is not your dead man, Phryne!’

Almost against her will, she noticed that there were no marks in the sand around his feet. He was sitting on the bottom step, his feet on the beach. He looked as though he had felt unwell, sat down and died where he was. His clothing was all in order and there seemed to be no mark on him. Nice clothes, brown suit, topcoat, white shirt, his tie still in place and tied with a Windsor knot. Unmarked and quite dead. Yet there was that secret smile on his lips. She wondered what colour his eyes were.

Then she ran up the steps and knocked at one of the house doors, to tell the comatose inhabitants that there was a corpse on their nice clean beach.

‘Marie!’ Phryne called as she came into her small house on West Terrace. ‘Marie, p’tit, est-ce que tu dans le maison?’

‘Oui,’ replied a light voice from upstairs. ‘Bonjour, Madame.’

Marie had been acquired in Carcassone, a child of twelve orphaned by a shell and removed by Phryne from a nasty destination. She had resisted all attempts to send her away after the war, and no one could find any survivors from the Jewish colony in that city. So she had come to Australia with Phryne. She was small, dark and intense, and so pretty that Phryne did not expect to keep her long.

She came down the stairs and caught sight of Phryne’s face.

‘What has happened?’

‘I found a dead man on the beach. I have seen enough dead men but I never expected to find one here.’

‘Murdered?’

‘No, he appears to have just died.’

Marie saw that Phryne was more shaken than she was willing to admit. She ran down the stairs and took her arm.

‘Come. We shall have a tisane. With a little cognac’

Side by side in the hall mirror, Phryne saw the dark, glowing, flawless face of Marie and her own countenance. Middle-aged, she thought, surveying the corded throat and the streaks of grey in her hair. Her eyes looked back at her, still intensely green, but wary and dilated.

‘Yes, you’ve seen a thing or two,’ she said to her reflection. ‘All right, Marie, tea and brandy it is. I can’t absorb shocks like I used to.’

Marie considered that Phryne was clearly still very attractive and, in any case, the best-dressed woman she had ever seen. She paid no attention and hustled her into the kitchen.

Two men sat huddled over a formica table in the most depressing pub in Hindley Street. They were careful not to attract attention; so careful that the other drinkers had noticed the air of cold seclusion that surrounded them and had given them a wide berth, isolating their table in the middle of a pool of silence.

‘When does she leave?’ asked the smaller and darker man. His red-headed companion sighed and scrubbed at his jaw with a hand calloused like a bricklayer’s.

‘Evening.’

‘Waste a few words on me, Damien,’ begged the first. ‘Which evening, for the good God’s sake?’

‘Tomorrow evening,’ said Damien. ‘And do not go on about words, Brian. It is words which got us into this and words which always betray us.’

‘So it is,’ agreed the dark one, ‘so it is. Are you going, then?’ he added, as Damien stood up.

‘I am. You will be for Melbourne?’

‘The morning train, yes. No sign of the suitcase? He probably left it at the station.’

‘No sign. They will raid the station tonight. He may have left it in a locker.’

‘They are not going to like this, Damien.’

‘No, Brian. They are not going to like it.’

‘Likely I am going to my death, bringing them the news of our failure.’

‘Yes.’

‘God be with you, Damien.’

‘And with you, Brian.’

Phryne had absorbed her tea and brandy, and was having a bath when the policewoman arrived. She came out to speak to her dressed in a heavy silk gown which dated to the 1920s. Such fabric was not to be found in a postwar world, mused Woman Police Constable Hammond, sitting down, at Phryne’s invitation, on the couch. At least this lady, she realised with relief, was not going to have hysterics and cry on her uniformed shoulder. In fact, thought WPC Hammond, as the green eyes of the middle-aged lady met her own soft brown ones, this was a woman who knew a good deal more about death than she did, and was no longer startled by it.

‘Miss Fisher? Er… Lady Fisher?’

‘Just Miss Fisher. What’s your name? Nice to see women being given some position in the world at last. Constable, are you? Well, I hope they make you a sergeant. Would you like tea or coffee? And how can I help you?’

‘My name is Hammond, I would like some tea and I came about the dead man on Somerton Beach.’

‘Yes, I thought that it might be that. Marie, can you make some tea? It’s all right, this is Australia and she is a police officer.’ Phryne smiled at Hammond. ‘Marie has only met people in uniform in the war and they always wanted to send her to Ravensbruck. You’ll have to excuse her, Constable. Now, what about the man on Somerton Beach?’

‘What were you doing there, Miss Fisher, and where was he when you first saw him?’

Phryne began to explain, in a crisp, ordered narrative which WPC Hammond took down in her notebook. When Phryne had finished, the officer looked up and asked, ‘Miss Fisher, I’ll be frank with you. The bigwigs have been onto us when we made a routine check on you, as a witness. They say that you were in the Resistance during the war in France. I’m going to ask you this, even though my boss wouldn’t like it.’

‘Well, ask.’

‘Did you know the man? Did he have any connection with… with what you were doing during the War?’

‘No, I didn’t know him. I don’t know anything about him. If I did there are people I would have called, things I would have done, which I won’t burden you with. But I didn’t call anyone and I didn’t do anything because I honestly did not know the man. To my knowledge I’ve never seen him before. Now have some tea and tell me more. Why all this mystery?’

Hammond took some tea, which was excellent, and said slowly, ‘we don’t know who he is. There’s no identification on the body – no labels, no tailor’s marks, nothing in his pockets.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘No. No keys, no wallet. Just a little bit of paper with TAMAM SHUD written on it. In his watch pocket where it might have been overlooked by whoever searched him, if anyone did. I say, this is good tea.’

‘Ceylon,’ said Phryne absently. ‘Well, well, Tamam Shud, eh? That, as I recall, is the last word in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, A Persian version of ‘The End’. How… symbolic. Of something. Did he suicide, then?’

‘No – or if he did, the pathologist can’t find a cause of death. He seems to have just sat down and . . . and died, Miss Fisher.’

‘Heart failure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmm. That’s medical jargon for ‘Died of Death’. Interesting.’

‘Thing is,’ said the police officer slowly, ‘there is something about his face.’

‘Something?’

‘Yes, he doesn’t look like a suicide. No despair. The pathologist says that he has an educated face, but that’s not just it… he looks… like he has a secret, like he died well. I’m too fanciful, that’s what my sergeant says.’

‘No, you aren’t. I saw it too,’ Phryne winced. ‘The smug and unassailable face, the Knight with his Quest achieved. Safe in death with his secret unbetrayed.’

The young woman stared at Phryne, astonished to hear her own thoughts so cogently expressed.

‘Yes, Miss Fisher, that is it. Safe and pleased. And a good-looking man, too, hazel eyes and a fine well-cut jaw, nice fair hair and broad shoulders. The pathologist says that he was terribly healthy and athletic and there was no reason for him to die.’

‘Well. Let’s look at it. Suicides usually leave a note. No note?’

‘No, unless you call that scrap of paper a note.’

‘Was it handwritten?’

‘No, Miss Fisher, torn out of a book.’

‘Then find the rest of the book. And he has been searched. One could conceivably remove all the labels and things from one’s clothes – that has been done for many reasons, I have done it myself. But everyone has something in their pockets – a coin or two, a ticket… How did he get out to Somerton Beach? By car? The tram? A handkerchief, a pen, a watch – did he have a watch?’

‘No, Miss.’

‘I can’t think that this was just an ordinary robbery. If there was nothing wrong with him, why did he die?’

‘He might have been scared to death,’ suggested the young woman.

Phryne tutted.

‘Did he look scared to you?’

Police Constable Hammond looked away, recalling the dead face.

‘No.’

‘Nor to me, and I saw him a couple of hours earlier. It’s a mystery, all right.’

Constable Hammond finished her tea. She stood up. ‘Miss Fisher…’

‘Yes, Constable?’

‘I’ve heard about you. You were a famous detective back before the war, weren’t you? For years and years you solved mysteries, they say.’

Phryne smiled. For an old woman, thought the police constable, she had a beautiful smile.

‘I have had my successes.’

‘Well – the war bods say that you are clear for any level of security. Could you could you help me? If I can solve this, I’ll be in line for promotion. It’s not been easy, being a woman in the police force. And it’s all I ever wanted to do. I’d be good at it if they would only give me a fair go. I turned down two good offers of marriage to stay in the cops. Nice blokes but I’d have to give up work. I’m on my own; no relatives. And I could be a really good cop, I’m sure. But I’m not going to get any help from my sergeant or any of the others. They don’t like women PCs all that much.’

‘My dear girl,’ began Phryne, then looked at the young woman. Dedicated, earnest, dark-eyed and plain. She would make a good sergeant, and Phryne might be able to help her. The social forces keeping women down were intensifying, as they had after the first war. Soon it would be ‘Back to the kitchen, girls’ again. Phryne was also struck by a sudden image of the dead man on Somerton Beach, and the young Wehrmacht soldier dying proudly in his ditch. She shivered.

‘All right, if there is something that I can do, I will. Come and see me when you have some more info, and we’ll talk about it. But don’t tell your sergeant, there’s a dear. I have met enough sergeants to last me a lifetime.’

WPC Hammond left feeling happier than she had been since she caught sight of that strange dead face. Phryne Fisher was old, of course, and possibly not as sharp as she had been in the late 1920s, when Hammond had been a child. But Miss Fisher might be able to help her find a murderer and solve a mystery and get the promotion she felt she deserved.

Marie closed the door after her with that peculiarly Gallic sniff which sounds like ripping linen and expresses extreme disdain.

‘She means to use you, Madame,’ she scolded Phryne. ‘Use your skill to get advancement!’

‘Yes, so she does,’ agreed Phryne. ‘And why shouldn’t she?’

Marie sniffed again, and went back to the kitchen.

Phryne spent two days restraining herself from calling any of the people whom she had known in France because she had a strong compulsion to do so, and she had always distrusted strong compulsions. She did not want to get involved. The papers were full of the unknown man on Somerton Beach; his face confronted her from every newsstand and every paperboy cried his mystery.

But she did not call until WPC Hammond returned with a code.

‘Here it is, Miss Fisher. You any good at code-breaking?’

The young woman was excited, her face flushed, though that might have been caused by the weather. A scathingly hot north wind was blowing. Phryne was clad only in a thin cotton shift and felt that she would really like to remove her skin and soak her bones in cold water.

‘No. I was involved in… other duties. But I know someone who is,’ she said, remembering Bernard Cooper, who had been at a place called Bletchley doing something awfully Top Secret involving codes. Bernard was in Adelaide, in the Hills. And she had not seen him since 1945, in London.

‘Here it is.’

Phryne studied the paper. It looked like complete gibberish and, therefore, was probably a code.

‘It was found in a doctor’s car. He left it parked above the beach and he found the book in it the next morning. The tamam shud in the dead man’s pocket matches it, the tears match, and the typeface, it was torn out of the end of this book. I couldn’t bring you the book, Miss Fisher, but it’s a standard pocket edition. No name and no other marks than these. And all of the top security bods have been puzzling over it, no one has managed to make head nor tail it of it. What do you think?’

‘Hmm. You’re sure that it is all there? What about this peculiar cross over the O in the third line?’

‘I copied it exactly. That’s how it is set out and that cross is there in the original. Can you break it?’ asked WPC Hammond eagerly.

‘I can’t, no, but I know someone who might be able to. I’ll take it to him. And don’t worry about security,’ she added, ‘he had the highest clearance of all of us. He worked on something codenamed Enigma, which no one but Winston Churchill was allowed to know about. I should be able to get you an answer in a day or two, provided he’s willing to help. Has anything else happened?’

‘Well, yes, but I don’t know if there’s a connection. Someone – several someones – broke open all the lockers in the left-luggage office of the Adelaide Central Railway Station last night. Didn’t pinch anything, just left all the stuff strewed on the floor.’

‘What were they looking for?’

‘I think it was the suitcase that we found earlier that day. It hasn’t any wallet or keys or passport in it, though, but the clothes are the right size. And there is a laundry bag with a name stencilled on it.’

‘Well, what name?’

‘Keane. Or Kean. Otherwise there are just clothes and a toothbrush and some soap, a shaving brush, that sort of thing. All American-made.’

‘So it may not belong to him.’

‘Or it may,’ said Hammond.

‘Keane,’ mused Phryne. ‘Any initial?’

‘T or A E. The A could mean that his name was Anthony, T for Tony and A for Anthony. I reckon that there’s a fair chance that the man was called Anthony E Keane. Not that it helps. No one of that name is missing in South Australia. The other states haven’t got back to us yet.’

‘Well, that’s promising. I’ll go and see my friend, and if he will help we should have an answer fairly soon. Nothing more from the pathologist?’

‘No, but he’s convinced that he was murdered. He says that there are poisons that leave no trace. He’s basing his theory on the face, on the expression.’

‘Well, so are we. If he took poison, where’s the bottle or paper it was contained in? There was nothing around his feet, I noticed.’

‘So did I but he could have thrown it into the sea.’

‘Yes. Well, I’ll get on with the code, and I’ll call you when I’ve got an answer.’

WPC Hammond looked suddenly uneasy.

‘No, Miss Fisher, don’t call me. I’ll come and find out what you’ve got in two days time.’

‘Hammond, I should like to have had you with me in France,’ said Phryne. ‘You have a fine sense of security.’

Bernard Cooper was home. The sound of his gentle voice made Phryne feel safe for the first time since she had encountered her dead man.

‘Bernard dear, it’s Chatte Noire.’

‘Phryne!’ he sounded astonished. ‘What are you doing here? When can you come to dinner?’

‘Tonight, if you like. Where are you?’ He gave the address.

‘Come early, ma chere chatte – the road’s a bit rough and the turning is hard to find in the dark. Nothing wrong, cherie?’ he asked, sounding worried. ‘No need for me to alarm the legions?’

Phryne smiled. Bernard could probably summon up the entire army, navy and air force if he felt the need.

‘Nothing like that,’ she assured him. ‘I have a puzzle to show you.’

‘Oh, dear, and I had thought it was for the pleasure of my company.’

‘It is that, as well. I’ll come now, if you like.’

‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘I do like.’

Phryne hung up, gathered a shady hat and sunglasses, and called upstairs, ‘Marie! I’m going out. I won’t be back tonight. I’ve written down where I’ll be and the telephone number. All right?’

‘Oui, Madame, I am going to the pictures.’

‘Oh? With that nice greengrocer?’

‘Oui, Georges.’ She pronounced it in the French manner. ‘He is dreamy.’

Phryne smiled and went out into the searing street. She unlocked the Sprite and drove carefully up into the Adelaide Hills, concentrating on the uncertain surface of the road and hoping that higher up it might be cooler. A little thing like petrol rationing would never worry Phryne Fisher.

Bernard Cooper lived in a large colonial house with verandahs, perched on the side of a cliff. It looked vaguely uncertain, as though at any moment it might slide into the abyss. He was waiting for her as she negotiated the steep drive and parked the car at the back door.

‘Come in, come in, ma chatte, ma cherie! You must be parched. I have a nice bottle of the local champagne cooling at this moment.’ He put a hand under her elbow. ‘All right, Phryne?’

He had aged, Phryne thought, and he thought the same thing about her.

War had not been good to Bernard Cooper. It had furrowed his brow and lent a faint trembling to his hands. Phryne, he noticed, had white streaks in her black hair, and lines around her mouth and neck that had not been there before she went to France. He cleared his throat.

‘You look splendid,’ he said, and Phryne grinned at him.

Suddenly the original Phryne was there: impudent, confident and beautiful, her green eyes shining. He caught his breath.

‘Come in,’ he repeated. ‘This weather is really enervating. I hardly do anything in the summer,’ he added, closing the door against the harsh sunlight and leading her into a cool panelled study. ‘Just aestivate and pray for rain. Here we are, a nice bottle of bubbly.’

‘Bernard,’ said Phryne, sitting down and casting aside her sunglasses and hat, ‘you are babbling.’

‘Quite right, cherie, I am,’ he confessed.

‘What are you covering up for?’ she demanded, putting a hand on his arm.

‘Oh, Phryne,’ he said, looking at her quite without artifice, ‘I never thought that we would grow old.’

‘No, neither did I. But I’m not old yet,’ she added briskly.

‘Give me a glass of champagne and pull yourself together, Bernard, my dear. You are not old, either. You are still the shaggy bear I loved in London, and I still love you.’

Bernard smiled and poured the wine.

‘I still love you, Phryne. I have never been able to get you out of my mind.’

‘Are you alone here, Bernard? Where’s Stephanie?’

‘Stephanie’s dead. Didn’t you know? She died of heart disease. Two years ago. We got all the way to Australia, bought the house that she always used to talk about – you remember, during the Blitz, we used to talk about the hills and the rosellas and the wine? We’d only been here a year and she died.’

‘Oh, Bernard, I’m so sorry…’

He smiled again, ruefully. ‘At least she got here. She got what she wanted, even if she only had it for a little time. There were so many others who never knew what it was to be free and at peace.’

‘That’s true.’ Phryne reached across and took his hand. The strength was still there, the tension of strong muscle under the thinning skin. His hair was still shaggy and blond, his beard almost white; his eyes were still the colour of a trout stream, pale grey flecked with gold.

‘I am glad to see you again, Phryne,’ he said quietly, and she kissed him.

‘Well, what about this puzzle?’ he asked, as she drew away.

‘Take some more wine and tell me about it.’

Sensing that her kiss had started something that Bernard would need time to adjust to, Phryne produced the paper and he laid it flat on a solid oak table, under a strong electric light.

‘Hmm. Not an alphabet code, I think,’ he said.

‘How can you tell?’ asked Phryne, who had never understood codes.

‘Not enough letters. I mean, not enough different letters. An alphabet substitution uses all of the letters of the alphabet and there are several which don’t appear. A box code, possibly, or an ETAIONSHRDLUCWME’

‘Sounds Greek,’ she commented.

‘It’s based on the frequency of the letters in the English language. Where was this found or shouldn’t I ask?’

‘It’s the code relating to the dead man on Somerton Beach. They’re calling it the tamam shud mystery. You haven’t heard of it? Don’t you get newspapers up here?’

‘What, news? I don’t want to hear any news’, he said in horror, as though Phryne had offered him nice, fresh axolotl salad. She shook her head at his isolationism and sipped more wine. It was quite passable, and blessedly cool.

‘Hmm, yes. Can you see a pencil? And my glasses? Yes, thanks, yes, I’ll just run through the alphabet and see…’

He found a long strip of lettered paper, laid another one beside it, and began to check code letters against their equivalents. Phryne could see that he was about to become totally absorbed, so she wandered off to explore the house.

It was large and furnished with an odd collection of whatever someone had thought worth hauling up the mountain along with boxes of books and household items which the late Stephanie had brought from England and had never got around to unpacking. Phryne had liked Stephanie, which was why she had not persisted in the affair with Bernard, although he had always attracted her and had been a warm and delightful lover. She found some English magazines and sat down on the balcony to read them. The wind was not so hot here in the hills; the leaves were brushed, not lashed, by the moving air. She was engrossed in a report of a debate in the House of Commons about the Employment Prospects of the Returned Serviceman when she was summoned by a shout from inside.

‘It’s unbreakable, unless we have the code word,’ announced Bernard in tones of rising wrath. ‘Is there something you haven’t told me, Phryne?’

‘Yes, there is,’ said Phryne. ‘The code word must be TAMAM SHUD, and I should like to make love with you.’

‘TAMAM SHUD, eh? I’ll just make a note of it,’ he scribbled on the alphabet strip, ‘and then, as to your second proposal…’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, and enveloped her in a huge hug.

WPC Hammond was drinking tea when a paper was thrown across her desk.

‘Circulate that, Hammond. The tailor says that the man came from America – at least, he swears that’s where his clothes were made.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘You had any bright ideas?’

‘No, sir. Sorry, sir.’

‘Women ! I don’t know why they let ’em into the force. No good at detection.’

‘Sir,’ said Hammond stonily.

Something of the ice in her voice made itself felt to the sergeant.

‘Yes, well, no one else has solved it, either.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Have all the ships checked. See if anyone has lost a crewman.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And get on with it!’ Hammond stood up.

‘Yes, sir.’

She went out without another word. The sergeant swore. He hadn’t wanted a female detective. They had made him have one, to look after the whores and the lost children and to search women. But no one said he had to like WPC Hammond, and he didn’t.

A young man came out through the railway gates and into the hot sunshine. He doffed his hat as he went into the Railway Hotel and ordered a beer. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and his complexion had not seen much sunlight. He sat neatly, with his feet together and his elbows pressed to his sides. The barman slid the beer across and said, ‘Too hot for you, mate?’

‘Far too hot.’ The voice had a faint accent, possibly Canadian, possibly somewhere closer. The barman moved the client’s panama hat aside and wiped the bar. The hat had PH marked on the sweatband.

‘Another beer,’ said PH. ‘And will you join me?’

Phryne lifted her head from the bare chest of Bernard Cooper when he groaned as though in pain. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I’m just remembering…’

‘Remembering Stephanie?’

‘No, not that. You must have noticed how some memories come back to haunt you when you are feeling wonderful.’

‘Yes, so they do.’

‘Why, what’s yours?’

‘Just move your arm a little, Bernard. Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes, my dear Phryne. Swap’s fair dealing. You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.’

‘All right.’ She breathed in the scent of male human and sweat and mingled gum forest, exhaled by the outside hills. ‘It was a young soldier, a Wehrmacht, you understand, in field grey, not an SS man in black with death’s heads. Just an ordinary young man; and we had captured him because he knew when a train was coming, a train carrying a Resistance prisoner who had to be rescued. Jean Moulin. You recall?’

‘I gather that Jean Moulin was killed by Klaus Barbie in Lyons’

‘Yes. But we did not know that he was dead my Maquis captured him, this soldier, and I was keeping watch while they interrogated him. I heard the guttural voices, in the dark, in the country, with the scent of mimosa ‘Sprecben Sie!’ they threatened; and he said ‘Soll ich nichts sagen: Will ich nichts sprechen.’

‘I should not speak and I will not speak,’ translated Bernard, his white beard scraping Phryne’s cheek.

‘Yes. Rather poetic, really. They threatened him again, ‘Sprechen Sie!’ and I saw his face in the torchlight as he said ‘Nie.’

‘Never.’

‘Yes. Just ‘Nie’ and then he said nothing more.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Oh, we killed him. Of course. He haunts me; the face, the face of the dead young man with a cold, pure, smug smile. He kept his secret beyond death. We never did find out what train it was.’

‘My poor Phryne.’ Bernard held her close as she shivered. The black hair, striped with white, fanned across his chest. ‘And yours?’

‘Oh, yes. Mine. I found out something when I was breaking codes. Just a routine message.’

‘What was it?’

‘Destroy Coventry.’

‘Oh, Bernard!’

‘I decoded it twelve hours before the bombers came. Thousands of people died. I knew it was going to happen. I did nothing.’

‘There was nothing that you could do.’

‘They said, you see, that if we warned Coventry, the Germans would know that we could break their codes. So they didn’t say anything. Coventry went all-unknowing to its doom. And I knew.’

Phryne turned in Bernard’s embrace to touch his mouth with her own. He responded with slow and delicious kisses. She found the place on his hip where a shell splinter had scarred him.

‘What did that?’

‘The Blitz’. He chuckled. ‘A pair of old crocks we are. How did you come by that scar, eh?’

‘A Gestapo man didn’t like my answers.’ He ran a meditative finger down her thigh.

‘But you got away?’

‘Oh, yes. I had… friends’

‘Yes, and you still have. Old Archie’s been on the phone, telling me to help you all I could and to make sure that you didn’t get into any trouble.’

‘Oh? What trouble could I get into in Adelaide?’

‘That’s up to you, my dear. As long as you did not bring your dead man with you.’

‘No, I swear.’

All right, then, presently we shall get up and I shall make tea, and then we shall solve your little puzzle.’

‘So easily?’

‘Oh, yes, I think so.’

‘Presently,’ said Phryne.

‘We assume that TAMAM SHUD is the code word,’ instructed Bernard Cooper, hunting for his glasses and his lost pencil, ‘and we look at the frequency of letters in the English language.’

‘What if it’s in another language?’

‘Then we are in trouble.’

‘Oh.’

‘Where’s that confounded pencil?’

Phryne handed it to him.

‘Thank you. We leave out the duplicated letters. Now, if we assume that TAMSHUD refers to ETAJONS, then we have the first problem.’

‘What’s that?’

‘U does not appear. So let’s approximate and take P to mean N. It’s just a guess but this is a long message and it should have at least one N.’

‘All right.’

‘Now that gives us AUR GT ST US AEK. Hmm. Possibly this is not as easy as it looks.’

‘No, wait. The dead man’s initials are AEK. Anthony E Keane. Or Kean. GT might be ‘Go to’ and ST might be ‘station’. And they think he might have been an American. That gives us US. United States.’

‘Mmm, but what about this AUR?’

‘It’s the chemical and Latin term for gold.’

‘Mmm. Well, if we assume that the first line is sort of correct, which I think is a bold assumption… then we have to look at the next line. Now we have ANT in the middle, and we might guess that it is preceded by W, making WANT. Am I going too fast for you?’

‘No, go on.’

‘Now I’ve assumed that code B equals K, that’s what gave us his initials S and the sender of the message appears to be WT K.’

‘WT, indeed. You know what WT stands for!’

‘So I do – wireless transmission, the call sign being K. So the object of the WANT might be a person.’

‘Wait, Bernard, aren’t you going to tackle the rest of the letters?’

‘Mmm? No, my dear, that is the macron.’

‘The what?’

‘The macron. The O with a cross over it. It is understood that either the message runs backward from that point or that the rest is gibberish. Just put in to fool the opposition…’ He read on a little and frowned.

‘Phryne, did you do any code-breaking during the late unpleasantness?’

‘No, none. A little sabotage, a few assassinations and a lot of intelligence gathering, why?’

‘You never came across the Irish/Nazi connection, then?’

‘No. Bernard, what are you talking about?’

‘I was working for a while on transmissions which the Nazis sent to the IRA. There was a lot of traffic, mostly intercepted, and nothing ever came of it – in fact, I felt sorry for those poor spies, parachuted into Ireland and having the Irish being all Irish at them. They stood out like sore thumbs and the amount of radios and equipment that went into bogs or police hands was phenomenal. But there was one name, you see, which always came up when there were killings to be done. They are gunmen.’

‘Yes?’

Bernard turned the message, mostly decoded, for her to see. The light shone down strongly on the letters. It now read AUR GT ST US AEK WANT P- ENA-WT K.

‘Sorry, Bernard, I’m not with you.’

‘There were two of them, two brothers. Patrick and Michael Heaney, but often, because the Germans don’t like double vowels, called HENAY. That was their codename. P and M Henay. And offhand I can’t think who else K might want except P Henay.’

The young man with the panama hat approached the gate of the station, where a crowd was gathering for the departure of the Melbourne train. A small dark man paused at the door, saw his face and was about to cry out, when he was held in what looked like a fraternal embrace.

‘Come for a little walk, Brian,’ said the young man, and Brian came with him to the head of the train.

‘Where is the money?’

‘So help me God, I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell.’

‘Did you use the stuff?’

‘I did, but he just upped and died!’

‘Goodbye, Brian,’ said the young man.

‘Patrick, for God’s sake…’

‘No more words,’ and Patrick pushed Brian just hard enough to send him under the Melbourne train, and walked quietly out of the fuss without ever being noticed.

‘Well, we had better call someone,’ said Phryne. ‘I think that your surmise is correct and Adelaide has more Heaneys than it needs. Who would be able to help?’

‘Archie, I think – yes, Archie would be our best bet. There’s the telephone, Phryne, you call him. I’ll get another bottle of wine. I feel unwell. I have never acquired a taste for assassins.’

Phryne dialled the number as he called it and was presently talking to a cool, educated voice, to which she could just put a face – a well-fed, complacent face with silvery hair; a politician’s face. What was Archie of military intelligence doing in Australia? She had last seen him in London.

‘Phryne, my dear! I heard about your dead man.’

‘It’s about him that I am ringing. I’m in the mountains with Bernard Cooper…’

‘Half his luck!’

Phryne ignored the tone of the chuckle. ‘And he’s decoded the message. It appears that you have an IRA gunman amongst your nice citizens.’

‘Name?’

‘Patrick Heaney.’

‘Oh, indeed. Patrick Heaney, eh? There has just been an accident at the railway station, you know,’ he added absently. ‘A little Irish American called Brian Sean Ryan. Now I wonder… very well, Phryne, we will look for Heaney.’

‘So you know him?’

‘Oh, yes, I know him. Have you told anyone else?’

‘Bernard. And my companion knows where I am,’ responded Phryne automatically. She did not know Archie well and she was constitutionally cautious.

‘I meant anyone official.’

‘Yes, a young police constable called Hammond. She’s very bright, and I’d like to see her promoted if we can’t solve this one publicly.’

‘I’m sure that can be managed. Are you coming back to Adelaide?’

‘Not tonight.’

‘Very well. Should have it cleared up by morning. When you come in, call on me, eh? Parliament building. Anyone will show you the way. I’ll be expecting you’.

Phryne accepted another glass of the cool pale wine and said, ‘Bernard, who is Archie? I mean, what is his position? I recall him very imperfectly.’

‘Sir Archibald Donaldson. You’ll like him but not as much as you like me, I hope. He’s in Parliament House. I… I don’t go into the city much, Phryne, but I’ll come in with you if you like.’

‘No, Bernard dear, you stay here and aestivate, and I’ll come and join you on occasion. How does that sound?’

‘That sounds lovely. I’ll write out your message for you, then, and…’

‘And?’

‘I think we might go back to bed, don’t you?’

A phone call from Sir Archibald Donaldson to a lowly police constable is unusual. Hammond was so overcome that she listened without saying a word. Then she said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and gave the phone to her sergeant.

‘Yes, sir, of course you can have her,’ he agreed with insulting alacrity. ‘I’ll send her right over, sir.’

Hammond stood up and straightened her seams.

‘You’re on loan to the Funny People,’ said the sergeant unpleasantly. ‘And I hope they keep you.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ agreed Hammond, and walked out of the office.

Sir Archibald was affable, kind and rather distinguished, though dreadfully old. Hammond liked him. He sat her down at his imposing desk and stated, ‘This is the situation, Miss Hammond. Your dead man appears to have had some rather nasty friends. Now you know the dead man’s face and you also will be shown rather a lot of pictures. Your chief says that you have a photographic memory; I want to know if you’ve seen any of these men on the streets. Take your time, now.’

Hammond began to leaf through a pile of pictures. Notes about the subjects’ colouring, height and build were on the back. Eventually she sorted out three.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’ She gave the photos to Sir Archibald. ‘The top one has red hair and a scrubby sort of complexion and is tall and thin. The second one is small and dark, with brown eyes and black hair. I saw them together outside the Railway Hotel in Hindley Street yesterday morning.’

Sir Archibald matched the descriptions to the written legends on the photographs and raised an eyebrow. ‘And the third?’ he asked.

‘He’s slim and has pale brown hair and pale eyes – perhaps they are blue. He’s hard to remember – hard to get a fix on, if you see what I mean. Taller than me but not much. Nicely dressed.’

‘Where did you see him?’

‘In Rundle Street, sir. This morning.’

‘Right. Now, Miss Hammond, let me tell you who these people are. The dark one, Brian Sean Ryan, was found dead under a train this morning. I would suggest that the red-haired one is his partner in a lot of nasty enterprises. His name is Damien McGuire. And the pale-eyed person is Patrick Heaney, an IRA murderer.’

‘My gosh, sir, in Adelaide?’

‘Indeed. Now, what I want you to do is to walk around to where you saw Mr Heaney this morning. It is Heaney we really want. And if you see McGuire you can pick him up as well. There will never be less than three men following you and they will come at your signal. All right? Will you do it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good girl. Off you go now.’

Hammond left, three men falling in as she moved like hounds to heel. Sir Archibald’s secretary watched the young woman pace idly down the street, looking in shop windows as though she had hours to kill.

‘Do you think she can do it, sir?’ he asked.

Sir Archibald smile. ‘Oh, yes, she can do it. If they are there to be found, she will find them.’

Hammond found her first prey by his fiery hair; he was waiting in a queue outside the shipping office not a hundred yards from Sir Archibald’s office. She pointed him out to her followers, who closed in on the tall seaman, spoke very quietly to him, and walked him along the street as though they were close friends. Hammond followed behind, and never heard the shot that clipped the feather off her absurd little hat and lodged in Damien McGuire’s chest.

The pale-eyed young man replaced the rifle in its case and drove out of the city toward Melbourne in a very lawabiding manner. Petrol rationing was not a problem for the IRA. The faithful kept them well supplied with coupons.

Hammond and her three attendants dragged Da– mien McGuire off the road onto the footpath. He was badly injured. Blood bubbled up from his lips when he tried to speak. ‘A priest,’ he gasped. ‘Get me a priest.’

One of the attendants ran across the road to the church. Hammond tried to ignore the stench of blood and desert dust and fear that infected the quiet street. She stared into the man’s watering eyes and said compellingly, ‘Tell me. The man on the beach.’

‘It was the new stuff, they gave it to us, a truth drug, they say. He had taken money from the Cause, and he was running, Keane was. But he intercepted a message that told him that we was onto him; and he hid the suitcase, and we never found out where. We shot the stuff into him, into his scalp, and he just said, ‘I will tell you nothing,’ then he closed his eyes and he was gone. ‘Get me a priest, for I’ve death on me!’

‘Yes, yes,’ soothed Hammond. ‘We will get a priest.’

‘Don’t leave me!’ He gripped her hand. Hammond wiped the bright red arterial blood from his lips with her only linen handkerchief, carried for this important day.

‘I won’t leave you,’ she promised.

The priest came in time to give the last rites to the dying man.

After murmuring the correct responses, Damien McGuire never spoke again.

Phryne Fisher, Hammond and Sir Archibald gathered in his office the next day to pool their information.

‘He knew they were onto him,’ murmured Phryne. ‘He had discovered or stolen the coded message and then, just in case, he tore off the tamam shud page and hid it where they would be unlikely to find it. He left us clues to his murder. Then he went to his meeting, having hidden a suitcase full of… what?’

‘What does the code say?’ asked Hammond.

‘AUR. Gold. Money, I suppose. Belonging to the IRA. And he was running away with it.’

‘Yes. And they shot him full of some truth drug – there’s some stuff they have in America called scopolamine. It’s been used as an anaesthetic, but a few people have a sensitivity to it – and it kills them. And there’s no way to test for it yet,’ Sir Archibald told them.

‘They injected it into his scalp so there was no mark,’ said Hammond.

‘Yes. And it killed him.’ Sir Archibald was staring out the window.

‘And he died with his secret intact. How frustrating.’ Phryne got up and began to prowl the room. ‘Come along, I haven’t been on the tram for ages,’ she said. ‘Let’s go out to the beach.’

‘Now?’ asked Sir Archibald, shocked.

‘Yes, now.’

‘Oh, very well,’ he agreed grumpily.

On the journey he refused to be interested in the landmarks and would not enter into the spirit of the ride at all. Phryne was disappointed in him.

‘Well, here we are – Somerton Beach. What are we doing here?’ he demanded.

‘We’re going paddling – at least, I am. Excuse me.’ She turned her back to him, removed her stockings from their garter belt, and took off her shoes.

‘This is where you saw him, isn’t it, Hammond? By the way, what is your first name?’

‘Dulcie, Miss Fisher,’ replied Hammond, running the stockings through her fingers and wondering where Miss Fisher got quality like that.

‘Oh. Now, he was sitting on the bottom step, wasn’t he, with his feet about here? The tide doesn’t come up this high. It rarely gets wet.’

‘Yes,’ said Hammond, getting the idea.

Phryne began to dig with her hands in the soft yellow sand.

‘You see, I wondered why he came down to sit here; I also wondered where he could leave a valuable thing when he didn’t seem to know anyone in the city. Where safer than under his feet? And here we are.’ She had scraped away the sand from a leather suitcase. ‘Lift it carefully, won’t you? These things have been known to be boobytrapped.’

Sir Archibald lifted the suitcase very gently by the sides. There appeared to be no wires attached to the handle.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ asked Phryne, brushing sand off her legs and putting on her stockings and shoes. He stood back a little.

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘Look.’ Smoke began to trickle from the suitcase; thick yellow smoke with a pungent smell.

‘We would never have got it open,’ he added. ‘There’s always a phosphorous bomb in them, just sufficient to destroy the contents. It’s activated by any movement But not to worry, my dear ladies,’ he said as he strolled back toward the police guard. ‘I know what was in it. Cheques, mostly, from prominent members of the Melbourne Irish community. There have been… er… rumblings about it. But all gone now.’

‘What about that murderer?’ asked Hammond indignantly. ‘He’s not been found.’

‘No, but he will get his comeuppance. Some other place, some other time. Intelligence work requires one to be philosophical, you know.’

‘And the TAMAM SHUD mystery?’

‘Will remain a mystery, I’m afraid. But your assistance has been essential and much appreciated, Miss Hammond. I expect to see you rise high in your chosen profession, quite high. Quite soon.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘And as for you, Miss Fisher, if you would care to lunch with me…’

‘No, thank you, Sir Archibald, I have another engagement.’

Phryne, in her Dior New Look red dress, straw hat and sunglasses, led Dulcie Hammond off Somerton Beach and took her into the city for a quiet drink and a comfortingly good lunch.

Phryne went home. She poured herself a glass of red wine and deliberately summoned up the image of Keane’s face, the unassailable smug face, and found that the image had lost its intensity. Taking a deep breath, she deliberately called forth the dead young soldier. There was the scent of mimosa, and of salt, the slime stench of stagnant water in the ditch, and the guttural Provençal voices, the torchlight, the concern over the fate of Jean Moulin. She waited for the pain. But she could no longer see with aching intensity the face of the young German soldier, or the countenance of the dead man on Somerton Beach. With the solution, however disappointing, of the tamam shud mystery, they had been obliterated from her mind, as frost-images melt off glass. She felt light. She felt as though she had recovered from an illness.

She was lying on a sun lounge in the shade of her own fernery, sipping at a glass of a rather good Adelaide Hills burgundy, when a telegram was delivered.

It said:

Phryne picked up The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and opened it at random.

‘Marie!’ called Phryne into the cool house. ‘Marie! Another bottle!’