Death Before Wicket: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries 10 Read Online Free PDF Page A

attached pencil, several visiting cards including one of Phryne’s which Dot must have sent her, three birthday cards and a few postcards. Not much for twenty-three years of blameless existence.
    ‘I’ll take the wedding group to a photographer’s tomorrow to have him make a separate picture of the face,’ she said. ‘Then we can show it to people who might know Joan. What do you think has happened to her, Dot?’
    ‘She’s been kidnapped,’ said Dot, bursting into tears again. ‘She’s been white-slaved. She would never have left her children else. Men can’t look after children. He had poor little Dorothy chained up like a dog, and he couldn’t have cared less if Mary had been run over by a truck. And he called her a slut! And me,’ added Dot, who had no doubts as to her own purity. She might or might not marry that nice policeman Hugh, who had been courting her assiduously, but in any case she would go to her marriage bed as virginal as the Queen of Heaven Herself.
    Phryne knew that white-slaving was largely a myth. She was considering the receipted bills. Mrs James Thompson had paid large sums for rent, for materials and for cartage. Where had Mrs James Thompson, wife of an ironmonger who was ‘not doing too good’, got seven pounds for solder and miscellaneous piping, twenty for stock delivered and eleven pounds for rent? Although women did run away from husbands and children, Phryne suspected that Joan’s extra-curricular activities had been going on for some time—at least six months, to judge by the receipts. And then—what? What precipitating factor had driven her out, leaving her babies to be neglected by her disgusted husband? Where was she? Was there something which Jim Thompson wasn’t telling Dot?
    There was always the likelihood that the husband, discovering that his virtuous wife had been prostituting herself in order to pay the bills, had strangled her in a fit of outraged propriety and burned her body in the smith’s fire, for which he had a good chance of being acquitted. The law did not care what happened to worthless whores.
    Better not mention that possibility to Dot.
    ‘Yes, well, nothing more we can do tonight, Dot. Now you are going to take another sup of my good brandy and then you are going to bed, and you are going to sleep—don’t argue with me, Dorothy,’ said Phryne sternly. ‘We’ll get the photo tomorrow and then we can go to Chas Nuttall’s digs—if anyone knows Darlinghurst, it will be that most Bohemian of young artists. We’ll find her, Dot,’ she said gently. ‘I promise.’
    Dot drank the brandy and went to bed biddably. Phryne gathered up the documents and replaced them in the paper bag. She looked into the face of the bride and said quietly, ‘Joan, I’m afraid I’m going to have to find you. I do hope that you want to be found.’
    Phryne could not see any end to her investigation of Mrs James Thompson’s disappearance but disillusion and pain for Dot, of whom she was very fond, and she very quietly cursed the name of propriety. She might have added husbands of whatever cut and stripe wherever found, but her eyes were closing and she put herself to bed instead.
    Joss might well have been right about Sydney having slums worse than any to be found in Fitzroy, Phryne reflected, and the fact that they were not as bad as the lower arrondissements in Paris or the East End of London did not say much for them. Rows of terrace houses, built in a fine flourish of slum clearance in the 1890s, were crumbling and leaning and falling slowly down. The streets, though paved, were cracked and unsafe. The roofs were cocked like hats over one eye. The streets of the ‘Loo stank of bad drainage and oysters for supper and vomited alcohol in front of the lavatory-tiled swill houses which, every day at six o’clock, disgorged a horde of drunken wretches into the street. This was a place where all the landlords lived far away on the North Shore and never came into such a