Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood Read Free Book Online

week and her keep,’ said Phryne. She poured another cup of tea and lit a cigarette. ‘The poor little babe!’
    ***
    Alice Greenham woke in a white bed, strangely docile, and floating above her tortured body on a cushion of morphia. Women clad in big white aprons came by, periodically, to do things to the body, which Alice felt belonged to someone else. They soaked it with cold water and laid a wet sheet over it. This looked comic, and she giggled. The baby, at least, was gone, and she could go back to her church-going, respectable home, unburdened of proof of her shame.
    She had not believed that five minutes could change someone’s life. She had gone to a church-run dance, and had been enticed out into the bike shed by a boy she had always thought nice, a deacon’s son. They had leaned against the creaking wooden wall while he had fumbled with her clothes and whispered that he loved her and would marry her as soon as his father gave him a halfshare in the shop. From that joyless, clumsy mating had come all this trouble. He had not seemed to know her when they next met, avoiding her eyes and when she had told him about the baby he had shouted, ‘No! not me! You must have been going with plenty of blokes!’ And he had struck her across the face when she had persisted.
    The nurses—she had identified them by their caps—were gathered around the body now. A woman in trousers was filling a syringe. Alice sensed that this was a crisis. She was sleepy and airy and light, and they were trying to drag her back to that suffering, twisting thing on the bed below. Well, she wouldn’t go. She had been hurt enough. That oily man, George, and his foul hands all over her. No, she wouldn’t go back, they couldn’t make her.
    Now they were holding the body down. It struggled. The woman in trousers was injecting something into the chest. The body slumped, and the nurses clustered around it.
    She was unable to avoid a shriek as the body dragged her back and her poisoned womb convulsed. She opened her eyes, looked directly into Dr MacMillan’s face, and whispered, ‘It’s not fair…I was all light…’ before her words were extinguished in a long, hoarse scream. The fever had broken.

Chapter Five
    ‘All people that on earth do dwell
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice…’
    ‘The Old Hundredth’, Church of England Hymn
    Phryne was poring over the newspaper’s society columns at breakfast when she heard Dorothy in the bathroom. Presently the young woman emerged, looking much refreshed. Phryne selected a knitted suit in beige and handed it over, together with a collection of under-garments and a pair of shoes. Dorothy dressed biddably enough, but Phryne’s shoes were too big for her.
    ‘Put on your slippers again, for the moment, and we’ll get you some shoes tomorrow—today’s Sunday. Listen to those bells! Enough to wake the dead!’
    ‘I s’pose that’s the idea,’ observed Dorothy, and Phryne looked up from her paper, reflecting that there was more to Dorothy than met the eye. The girl had ordered herself a large breakfast on Phryne’s instructions, and now sat placidly absorbing a mixed grill at eight of the morning as though she had never lain in wait with murder in her heart.
    ‘What do I have to do when I deliver them cards, Miss?’ she asked, painfully swallowing a huge mouthful of egg and bacon.
    ‘Just tell the man to wait, walk up to the front door, ring the bell, and give the card to the person who answers. You don’t need to say anything. I’ve put my address on the back. Can you manage it?’
    ‘Yes, Miss,’ agreed Dorothy thickly, through another mouthful.
    ‘Good. Now, I am lunching with Dr MacMillan at the Queen Victoria Hospital, and to fill in the time I shall go to church. So when you get back, see if you can introduce a little order into the clothes, eh? I shall return in the afternoon. Order whatever you like for lunch, but perhaps it would be better if you didn’t leave the hotel