Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher Read Online Free

Street. In case it turned cool, she had put on a reefer jacket, box-pleated, with pockets, and as she was unencumbered with a purse, her hands were unusually free. Forests of brass plaques decorated the sober buildings of Collins Street; it reminded her of Harley Street, and London, though the crowds were noisier here, and cleaner, and there were fewer beggars. Phryne felt the crackle of leaves under her shoes.
    She passed the Presbyterian Church, the Manse, the Baptist Church, and paused on the other side of the road to stare at the Regent Theatre, a massive pile, decorated to within an inch of the stress-tolerances of concrete. It was so unashamedly vulgar that Phryne rather liked it.
    A group of factory girls, all art-silk stockings and feathers, bright with red and blue and green shifts and plastered with a thick veneer of Mr Coles’s products, jostled past Phryne in the harsh street, shrilling like sparrows. Phryne resumed her even pace, passing through the crowd under the Town Hall eaves and across Swanston Street.

CHAPTER THREE
    She said, ‘My life is dreary, dreary, Would God that I was dead!’
    Tennyson ‘Mariana’
    Cec cocked a thumb at a girl drooping in a tall man’s arms on the pavement in Lonsdale Street.
    ‘Tiddly,’ commented Bert as he came to a halt. ‘And only eleven in the morning. Cruel, innit?’
    ‘Yair, mate?’ he yelled to the man, who was hailing him, ‘where ya goin’?’
    ‘Richmond,’ replied the man, hauling the girl forward by the waist and packing her ungently into the cab next to Cec. ‘She’ll give you the address. Here’s the fare.’ He thrust a ten-shilling note into Bert’s face and slammed the door. ‘Keep the change,’ he added over his shoulder, and he hurried away, almost breaking into a run as he rounded the corner into Queen Street. The crowd swallowed him, and frantic honking and personal remarks from the traffic behind as to Bert’s parentage made him move on.
    ‘He was in a bloody hurry,’ Bert commented. ‘Beg pardon, Miss. What’s the address?’
    The girl blinked and rubbed her eyes, licking cracked lips.
    ‘I can go home, now,’ she whispered. ‘I can go home.’
    ‘Yair, and the fare paid, too. Where’s home?’ asked Bert in a loud voice calculated to pierce an alcoholic fog. ‘Carm on, Miss, can’t you remember?’
    The girl did not reply, but slid bonelessly sideways until she was leaning on Cec’s shoulder. He lifted her gently and said to Bert, ‘Something wrong, mate. I can’t smell no booze. She’s crook. Her skin’s hot as fire.’
    ‘What do you reckon?’ asked Bert as he rounded into Market Street and stopped to allow a dray-load of vegetables to totter past.
    ‘Dirty work,’ said Cec slowly. ‘She’s bleeding.’
    ‘Hospital, then,’ said Bert, avoiding a grocer’s lorry by inches. The overwrought driver threw a cabbage at the taxi, and missed.
    ‘The hospital for women,’ said Cec with ponderous emphasis. ‘The Queen Victoria Hospital.’ The girl stirred in Cec’s arms and croaked, ‘Where you taking me?’
    ‘To the hospital,’ said Cec quietly. ‘You’re crook.’
    ‘No!’ she struggled feebly and flailed for the door handle. ‘Everyone’ll know!’ Bert and Cec exchanged significant glances. Blood and foul-smelling matter were pooling in the lap of the blue, cheap-and-showy dress she had worn to her abortion. Cec grasped the hand firmly and pressed her back into the seat. She was panting with effort and her fingers seemed to brand his wrist. She was only a child, Cec realised, perhaps no more than seventeen. Haggard and fevered, her dark feathery hair escaped from its pins and stuck to her brow and neck. Her eyes were diamond bright with pain and fever.
    ‘No one’ll know,’ soothed Bert. ‘I know one of the doctors there—you remember, Cec, the old Scotch chook with all the books who came with the toffy lady? She won’t say nothing to no one. Just you sit back and relax, Miss. What’s your