Chapter Four
The scent on the pillow, breathed in steadily, allowed him to sleep in the end, and also brought a modicum of inspiration in the night. He thought it unlikely that Miss Fisher would have gone shopping for boy's clothing if there was the possibility of borrowing some instead; and with a fairly good idea of the one person who might have been able to help out, he set a course for the home of one Dr Elizabeth Macmillan. He was fortunate enough to find her still at breakfast, and was invited to share the contents of the coffee pot.
"Doctor."
"Inspector – to what do I owe the pleasure?" Mac was, Jack recalled, pretty good at poker. It showed. Or rather, it didn't.
"A quick question about your wardrobe, if I may."
She frowned, but waited.
"Do you, by any chance, possess a pair of shorts, Mac – such as a boy might wear?"
She looked at him quizzically. "No," was all she would say, though.
He fixed her with a gaze, but having always found her straightforwardly honest, had no reason to doubt her. His shoulders drooped, as another door closed, and his eyes dropped to his shoes.
Mac loved Phryne dearly, but she also had some pretty deep feelings for the man in front of her, who'd supported her and her friend in some very risky situations. Seeing his eyes cloud over, and the depth of the shadows under them fall into sharp relief as he turned away, she hesitated, and then relented.
"I gave them away."
His head snapped back towards her.
"When?"
"Yesterday." She could see he was aching to ask more, and held up a hand. "I don't know where they are now, or why they were needed."
He drew a deep breath, and cast his gaze around the room, seeking inspiration. Lacking it, he turned back to her.
"Why, Mac?"
"I've already said I don't know."
"Yes, but why could she not just tell me?"
That, the doctor admitted, was a leveller. She didn't want to speculate as to why Phryne wouldn't tell Jack what she was up to. She gave him a sympathetic look, but as she opened her mouth to speak, the telephone rang.
When she came back from answering it, she had gone very pale.
"Work, Jack, and you're going to want to come along. A youth has been run down and killed by a tram, and they're not sure it was an accident. Corner of Spring and Flinders Streets."
His mouth went dry, and the speed at which they reached the scene of the crime was, in itself, a crime.
His only thought, when he fought his way through the crowd of ghoulish onlookers, Mac struggling to keep up behind him, was to see the body; and when he saw it, and saw that it was that of a gangly youth wearing long trousers, his relief made tears start to his eyes. He spoke to himself sternly of The Job and banished all other thoughts.
He knelt beside the body and something inside him, no matter how accustomed he might have become to the horrors of his job, died a little when he saw that the jaw had yet to earn a suspicion of manly beard, the cheekbones were so pronounced as to make the face gaunt, and the hands, though swarthy, were almost skeletal.
One of them was clasped by a teenage friend whose courage had been such as to let him remain at the scene rather than disappear, as was the wont of his like, into the shadows. The lad's hands were filthy, nails torn, and they clutched the dead boy's hand with a kind of desperation. When a teardrop fell from the bowed head, covered by a grubby flat cap from which a couple of mousey-coloured strands of hair escaped, Jack's stomach clenched, despite the cynicism of his decades of experience in the job. He barely caught the choking words from the boy opposite him, whose shoulders were still shuddering; and when he caught them, he thought he must have misheard.
"Hello, Jack."