Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher Read Online Free Page A

name?’
    ‘Alice,’ muttered the girl. ‘Alice Greenham.’
    ‘I’m Bert and that’s Cec,’ said Bert as he skidded along Exhibition Street, dragged the taxi into Collins Street and gunned the failing engine up the remains of the hill to Mint Place.
    They dumped the cab outside the hospital, and without apparent effort Cec carried Alice Greenham up the steps to the front door. Bert hammered with clenched fist and pounded on the bell. Cec stepped inside as the door swung open, while Bert turned on the nurse who had admitted them and barked. ‘We got an emergency. Where’s the Scotch doctor?’ Nurses are constitutionally incapable of being daunted. The woman stared him in the eye and was silent.
    Bert, at length, realised what she was waiting for.
    ‘Please,’ he snapped.
    ‘Dr MacMillan is in surgery,’ she announced. Bert drew a deep breath, and Cec spoke while offering the girl in his arms to the nurse.
    ‘She fainted in our cab,’ he explained. ‘We came for help,’ he added, in case he had not made his meaning clear. Cec did not talk much, finding in general that words conveyed nothing of what he wanted to say.
    Alice Greenham moaned.
    ‘Bring her in here,’ the nurse relented, and they followed her into a bare examination-room, painted white. Cec laid her down on a stretcher bed.
    ‘I’ll fetch the doctor,’ said the nurse, and vanished. Bert knew that nurses did not run, but this one walked very fast. Bert and Cec looked at each other. Cec was striped with blood.
    ‘I spose we can’t just go and leave her,’ faltered Bert. Jeez, Cec, look at you!’ Cec brushed fruitlessly at the bloodstains. He sat down next to Alice and took her hand.
    ‘She’s only a kid.’
    ‘She’s in some grown-up trouble.’
    Bert did not like hospitals, and was about to suggest that they had done their duty and could now leave, when Dr MacMillan bustled in.
    ‘Well, well, what have we here? Fainted, did she?’ she demanded. ‘Is she known to you?’
    Cec shook his head. Bert piped up, ‘A bloke put her into our cab in Lonsdale Street. Gave me ten shillings to take her to Richmond. Then she keeled over, and Cec noticed . . . the blood, and we brung her here. She didn’t say much, but her name’s Alice Greenham.’ Dr MacMillan smiled unexpectedly.
    ‘Sister will give you a cup of tea,’ she announced, ‘and you will wait until I come back. We must talk about the man in Lonsdale Street. Sister! Give these gentlemen tea in the visitor’s room, and send Sister Simmonds to me immediately.’
    Phryne reached the Block Arcade, from which shone a soft, seductive light, out past the severe, dark stone Athanaeum Club with its pseudo-Roman decoration. The Arcade, by contrast, was entered by charming portals fringed with delicate iron lacework, and the floor, such of it as could be seen beneath the scuffling feet of thousands of loafers, was tiled most elegantly in black and white. Phryne drifted along with the crowd, observing with detached amusement the mating habits of the locals; the young women in shocking pink and peacock blue, dripping with Coles’s diamonds (nothing over 2 s .6 d .), painted, and heavily scented with Otto of Roses. The young men favoured soft shirts, loose coats, blinding ties and Californian Poppy. With the reek of burning leaves drifting in from some park, motor exhaust and the odd salty ozone tang produced from the trams, the Arcade was suffocating.
    The shops, however, were engrossing, and Phryne purchased a pair of fine doeskin gloves, and a barrette for her black hair, sparkling with diamantés and formed in the shape of a winged insect.
    She arranged that these purchases should be wrapped and delivered to the Windsor, and decided that she could cope with a cup of tea. She caught sight of herself in the mirror-shiny black pillar of the glove shop, and paused to tidy her hair. In the reflection she noticed the set, white face of a girl, standing behind her, unaware of Phryne’s regard,