Murder in Montparnasse Read Online Free PDF

myself when I was a youngster. I’ll inquire.’
    ‘Very confidentially,’ warned Phryne.
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Dinner is served,’ announced Mr Butler. Jack Robinson leapt out of his chair like his namesake.
    Mrs Butler, who had overhead Miss Phryne enthusing about Café Anatole, had decided on an aggressively English dinner, just to demonstrate that not all good cooking resided on the right-hand side of the Channel. The saddle of lamb sat oozing pink juices in the middle of its complement of perfectly baked vegetables: potatoes, onions, parsnips, carrots and turnips. A large bowl of green peas steamed in the middle of the buffet, butter melting into them. A silver gravy boat full of claret-enhanced gravy accompanied it, and Mrs Butler’s sister’s own home-made mint jelly cast little crystalline flashes from its perfectly faceted surface.
    To begin, there was a light vegetable julienne in chicken bouillon. Jack Robinson inhaled it in a trice. When his plate was laden with a little of roast everything and gravy and mint jelly, he stared at it for a moment of perfect silence that was a benediction and a delight to any cook’s heart.
    Mrs Butler retreated from the kitchen door, satisfied.
    The other diners fell on the feast as though they hadn’t eaten a good meal for days, though this was only the case for Jack Robinson, whose diet of baked beans and ‘’Ot pies! Dead ’orse on ’em! Get ’em while I’m ’ere! ’Ot pies!’ from the pie cart in Russell Street had not been a satisfactory substitute for even his usual warmed-over meals. Jane and Ruth had childhood starvation to avenge and had still not really come round to the view that there would, infallibly, be dinner every day. This also applied to the ex-stray Ember, tucking in to roast meat scraps in the kitchen. It even applied to Dot, who had a healthy appetite, and Phryne, who had spent a lot of her childhood in a state of semi-famine.
    They were a pleasure to cook for, they were, Mrs Butler said to herself, and drew out her apple pies from the oven. The steam rose, smelling of cloves. Perfect. Those French cooks knew a lot about cooking things which no mortal would eat unless they had to—snails, for the Lord’s sake!—but they couldn’t dish up a good roast to save their lives.
    Some five minutes elapsed before anyone at the Fisher dining table said anything but ‘May I have some more gravy, please?’ and ‘Good meat this’ and ‘If you could pass the bread?’ but gradually the fever eased and they began to converse.
    ‘Miss Dot says that you’ve got a new case,’ said Jane. ‘About a missing girl.’
    ‘Yes. However, she may have just run away,’ said Phryne.
    ‘Was she badly treated?’ Jane wanted to know. This was the thought which would instantly occur to both girls, of course, thought Phryne. They had been badly treated, so badly treated that they had not even dared to run away.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘If so, it’s recent. She just came back to Australia from a finishing school outside Paris. Her father wants her to marry a fifty year old man with a moustache, so she might have run.’
    ‘She might have a boyfriend,’ said Dot. ‘From France.’
    ‘And she’s eloped!’ said Ruth.
    ‘Possibly. I don’t know enough about her yet. I didn’t go to a finishing school.’
    ‘Where did you go after you left school, then?’ asked Jane.
    ‘To a war,’ said Phryne. ‘Have some more lamb, Mr Butler?’
    She waved her glass at him and he refilled it with a light hock. Phryne found herself violently unwilling to consider that war. She wondered at her own reaction and decided to think about it later.
    ‘She fell in love with him in Paris,’ said Ruth dreamily. ‘A dark southerner, full of passion. She was torn away from him by her stern father and sailed off in tears. Then he took a job as a deck hand and climbed up to her window one night and . . .’
    There was a short silence as Ruth’s voice trailed