Chapter One
Four gentlemen sat around a kitchen table in South Melbourne. They contrasted in facial pallor in correspondence with their compass points.
Mr Wallace and Mr Dornoch, North and South, were ashen. Mr Barton and Mr Butler, East and West, were flushed.
The evidence on the table told its own story, and the room had been silent for almost a minute, apart from the heavy breathing of those present.
Finally, Mr Butler spoke up.
"You did it, Edgar. You did it. I couldn't believe … you did it."
He stood, surveyed the table once more, and raised his eyes to his partner across the table.
"A GRAND SLAM, Edgar!"
Jeremiah Wallace grimaced and pushed back his chair. Shaking his head in resignation, he held out his hand to Mr Barton, who grasped it firmly and pumped it energetically, before doing likewise to the still-frozen Winston Dornoch; then he turned back to Tobias Butler and smiled broadly.
"That article on Culbertson bidding signals was fascinating, Tobias – thank you for sending it on to me."
Mr Butler nodded his agreement, and sitting down to gather the cards, said to the other two gentlemen, "You understand what this means?"
They both nodded gloomily, and Wallace spoke up. "Indeed. A white peach apiece."
The terms of the Melbourne Butlers' Bridge Nights were clear-cut, longstanding and eminently affordable. It was therefore with good grace that the four friends shook hands and parted company.
As Mr Barton saw the others to the front door, his kitchen door was opened. The window, which had been slightly ajar, was latched closed, and a gloved hand turned on the burners on the hob, leaving them silently and treacherously unlit. The uninvited guest then departed as unobtrusively as they had arrived.
Edgar returned to the room, and, shaking his head in remembered glee, gathered glasses and ashtray to rinse in the sink. Such was the importance of the event that the washing of the evening's detritus could wait until the morning. As he stood each glass on the counter, though, he felt his eyelids drooping. Stupidly reaching for the final glass, his hand missed it, and it fell to the floor. Its owner followed it, and for some reason, failed to get up.
Dornoch, Butler and Wallace walked the short distance to the Honourable Phryne Fisher's Hispano-Suiza, which Mr Butler had been permitted to borrow for the evening. Wallace lived within walking distance, and accordingly bid the other two farewell before turning the corner.
It was not a backfire, as a neighbour later supposed, but a gunshot which stopped him in the street only a hundred yards from his front door.
Mr Butler didn't have Miss Fisher's taste for speed – especially when she wasn't in the back seat – and it was therefore a relatively straightforward task for a prosaic bicycle to keep the Hispano in sight long enough to see Mr Dornoch delivered to his garden gate.
This time the gunshot neatly severed his spine and he made a dreadful mess of his employer's back doorstep. Always a fastidious man, he would have been mortified; had he not already been … mortified.
Finally, the Hispano pulled up outside 221B The Esplanade. As the nursery overlooked the garage, it was understood that Mr Butler would leave the car by the front gate for once, with two precautions.
He had the distributor cap in one pocket and was in the process of removing the rotor arm when Phryne's maid, Lin Soo approached from the opposite direction, returning from her monthly duty visit to her grandmother.
From that day forward, Mr Butler provided Lin Soo with a cup of tea served to her room before her duties required her to rise. The reason was that Soo remarked the approach of a bicycle which wobbled slightly as the rider reached to lift something out of the basket. Her eye thus caught, it was further interested by the glint of moonlight on gunmetal, and she leaped forward in typically catlike fashion, to trip Mr Butler to the ground. His angry exclamation coincided with the thud of a bullet into the Hispano's coachwork.
Mr Butler had banged his head in the fall, and took a moment to recover his senses. Soo was rapidly back on her feet, and sprinting off in pursuit of the cyclist; but a lead of a hundred yards had already opened up, and would not be closed easily; especially with the distributor cap still in Mr Butler's pocket. Narrowing her eyes, she observed what she could of the assailant as they passed under another street light, before turning back to help Mr Butler into the house.