Murder in Montparnasse by Kerry Greenwood

Author:Kerry Greenwood [Greenwood, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Phryne Fisher Mystery
Published: 2011-02-22T22:00:00+00:00

The girls came home, agog with excitement. They packed their basket with good clothes and, on Dot’s insistence, a bottle of cold tea, a couple of sandwiches and two headscarves.

Then they dutifully ate a light meal, one of Mrs Butler’s excellent omelettes with tomato and bacon, and lay down for their rest.

Ruth fell asleep at once, a legacy of her life as a domestic drudge who slept when she could and was always tired. Jane tried several times to talk to her but nothing was as adamantly asleep as Ruth. Jane reflected on hibernating animals and dropped off in the middle of her meditation on the strange-ness of going to sleep in autumn and waking up to find that it was already a quarter past spring.

When she woke them two hours later, Phryne gave both girls a cup of half-strength coffee and Dot looked over the initial disguises. ‘Good,’ she said.

The stout boots were carefully scuffed and the stockings thick. Jane’s dress was a skimpy black skirt and a winceyette shirt which had bagged in the wash. Ruth wore her own dress from when she was rescued, which she had kept as a trophy of her liberation. It was now much too short and too tight and had irreparable stains all down the front. Treacle, as Ruth remembered it.

‘You look perfect,’ said Dot, tweaking at Jane’s shabby skirt.

‘Got the skipping ropes? This is a very brave thing to do, girls.

Now remember that you’ve got pennies in your kicker legs and some money in the basket and if you get into trouble ask the nearest policeman, or get into a taxi and come home. Good luck, now,’ said Dot, kissing each of them.

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‘Don’t be careless,’ said Phryne on the way to the car. Then, out of earshot of the anxious Dot, she added, ‘And have fun.’

Jane smiled and Ruth grinned. This was, indeed, going to be fun.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

How could I wish you ill? Are you not the worst I could have wished for you?

Natalie Barney,

Critical Sallies

The prisoner had been untied. Now she sat in a chair. It was a hard chair and she was very thirsty. There was water in the tap and it was only five paces away, but he had told her not to move and he would know if she did. He always did, somehow. So she sat, dully noticing that the night was continuing. It seemed to last forever.

Eleven o’clock was not an hour for good children to be on the street, but these were not good children. They skipped nonchalantly down the side street and into the lane behind Café Anatole, where once the night men had plied their odorous trade. The cobbles were uneven but almost any surface allowed for skipping. They heard a back door open, and then the creak of a back gate.

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‘My mother said I never should,’ began Jane, swinging her rope.

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