Work Text:
Jack groaned.
It was by no means the most exaggeratedly dramatic sound she had heard that evening, but as there was no-one else around and he was rather close to her and it really was quite loud, it seemed impossible for her to pretend that she hadn’t heard him. So she turned her head slightly and looked at him, her eyes straying briefly from the road as she raced through the streets of Melbourne at a pace Jack would normally find objectionable but which tonight he didn’t seem to mind.
Imagine that.
He was leaned back in the passenger seat of her car, half-lying down, his tuxedo jacket hanging open and a pained expression painted on his face as he pressed a hand to his abdomen. He looked very much like she ought to expect to be breaking in a new detective inspector in the near future because her current one wouldn’t be around much longer.
She nearly felt sorry for him. But not quite. “Come on, Jack. It wasn’t that bad.”
He looked at her, and she thought he might’ve glared if he’d had the strength. Clearly she was supposed to show more sensitivity to his suffering. An unlikely prospect, to say the least. “Three hours and fourteen minutes,” he said, pulling up his sleeve and tapping his wristwatch, momentarily abandoning his pained abdomen. “Not including intermission.”
Oh, dear lord. The man had actually timed it. “Really? It felt much shorter to me. I found Glen Acaster’s performance particularly gripping.” Much to her delight she managed to get all of that out with a straight face. (It hadn’t felt shorter. In fact, she wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Jack’s watch was running slow. Personally she had spent half the show wondering just what the reviewer who had found Jack’s Major General underwhelming would have to say about Glen Acaster. Possibly his reaction would be quite similar to Jack’s current one.
The other half had been spent vaguely hoping for another murder to distract her from the one currently being committed, slowly and in front of several hundred witnesses, of theatre.)
This time he mustered up the energy to glare. “And then another five hours of ‘mingling’—” (never in the history of the English language had the word been uttered with quite so much contempt, Phryne was almost certain) “—and having to make polite conversation when clearly all they wanted to talk about was how bloody fantastic they’d been.”
A skilled observer might pick up on the fact that Jack had not found them nearly as ‘bloody fantastic’ as they had themselves.
“But the food was very nice,” she pointed out ruthlessly. Although to the unskilled observer it merely sounded conversational, the teasing tone lost on the dense.
Jack, a more than competent detective with years of experience in observing, rubbed his stomach and managed another glare.
“Did you try the vol-au-vents?” Her tone was entirely too innocent, considering she had seen him refilling his plate with them at least twice. Phryne was all about indulging in life’s pleasures, but, really, sometimes a little moderation went a long way. Especially when it came to vol-au-vents, apparently.
“No, I think I missed those,” Jack retorted sarcastically. “Were they good?”
“I don’t know,” she said, smirking. “Someone ate them all before I got a chance to try them.”
He sat up slightly straighter, adjusting his bowtie uncomfortably. “And what was the point of this evening, anyway?” he complained, sounding much more like the aggravated Jack Robinson she was used to dealing with than he had done for the first twenty minutes of this drive.
She tried to suppress a smile, but she didn’t try very hard and some of it snuck through.
His eyes narrowed in another glare, but they were twinkling now. It might be a reluctant twinkle, but it was a twinkle nonetheless.
“The point was catching a murderer,” she reminded him. Which was true, of course. But there was no reason why points should travel alone, was there? And seeing Jack sulk his way through an operetta had very much been an accompanying point. Some might say it was the main point, but Phryne felt she’d be able to lie her way—convince them they were wrong about that easily enough.
Besides, how was she supposed to know that he’d make his own suffering so much greater by attempting to spend the evening not talking by constantly chewing? Really, for a man of such incredible restraint in some matters, he had very little of it in others. Perhaps she could tempt him into her boudoir by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs?
Although, perhaps not tonight, she decided when Jack rubbed his aching stomach, fidgeting with his constricting bowtie again. He was starting to look a bit ashen.
“And yet,” he said, his tone dry. “Here we are in your Hispano, and where is this murderer we were meant to be catching?”
“I imagine he has passed out drunk in his bed by now,” she said mildly.
“You know who did it?! Then why didn’t you—”
“Why didn’t I disrupt a perfectly lovely party with a denouement?”
His answering look suggested that in his opinion the party had been neither perfect nor lovely.
“I don’t know who it is exactly, but while you were preparing for hibernation I managed to narrow it down somewhat.”
As so often before, a good joke was wasted on the butt of it, and he merely sighed dramatically. “Who do you suspect then?”
Phryne, all but certain that the killer was either Frank Hill or Grant Emerson, both of whom had clearly suffered from delusions of romantic grandeur concerning their potential future with the victim, smiled to herself. “I thought perhaps we ought to question Mr. Acaster again? He might have something interesting to say.”
“I don’t doubt it that he’ll have something to say, but whether it’ll be interesting…” Jack muttered under his breath.
“And after that, maybe we should talk to Lucille Rogers.”
Jack slid down in his seat slightly, like a slowly deflating balloon.
“Or perhaps she told you everything she knows already?” she asked. Jack had been talking to her for quite some time, after all. Or perhaps ‘been talked to by her’ was a more accurate turn of phrase, what with all the chewing he’d been doing.
“I think that’s a safe assumption to make,” he replied dryly.
Unable to help herself, Phryne laughed.
“I still don’t understand why you had to drag me along,” he said, returning to the complaint he had made at regular intervals since he had realised exactly why she had insisted that he wear a tuxedo for this particular not-at-all-illegal, in-no-way-resembling-breaking-and-entering gathering of evidence. She suspected that he would actually have preferred scaling the side of a building to crawl in through the third storey window of a stranger’s home.
In spite of her repeated taunts, however, he had refused to admit as much, submitting to his fate with an amount of grumbling and sarcastic comments on the shortcomings of the operetta as a narrative that was almost as astounding as it was entertaining.
“If I hadn’t brought you, you would have complained about that,” she pointed out.
“I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t.” The car bumped up and down as first the front tyre and then the back one on Jack’s side went into a hole in the street and he closed his eyes, taking a steadying breath, his hand back on his abdomen, as if that would somehow ward off a potential disaster.
Phryne slowed down, opting for not having to ask Mr. Butler to clean the interior of the Hispano tomorrow instead of speed. They were quite close to Jack’s home anyway. (She was quite sure even Dot would be impressed by her saintliness: She had resisted the temptation to suggest a nightcap and a tray of Mr. Butler’s sandwiches, even in jest.)
“What if something interesting had happened?”
Really, that was a fair point, she thought, but Jack seemed intent on being contrary and actually rolled his eyes, to suggest that absolutely nothing interesting had happened (she would give him that one) and there was no possible way that it could.
“If something interesting had happened, I’m sure you would’ve been only too happy to tell me about it tomorrow.”
“Well, that would very much depend on the type of interesting,” she pointed out, slowing to a halt in front of Jack’s bungalow.
He opened the passenger door but turned his head to look back at her. “Our definitions of interesting are very different, I think, Miss Fisher. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Jack,” she replied, watching with a smile as he made his way up the garden path, stopping in front of the door, apparently to breathe in the fresh air, until he noticed her still watching him and he hurried inside, once again rubbing his stomach dramatically.
*
She sauntered into City South just before noon the next day, a picnic basket on one arm. She waved her free hand dismissively at the constable on the front desk, who seemed to be labouring under the illusion that he was meant to stop her, and walked briskly over to Jack’s office, knocking on the door and opening it before he could react.
“Hello, Jack,” she said gaily, setting down the picnic basket on his desk atop a stack of what looked to be incredibly dull paperwork.
He looked up at her from the file he had been reading, leaning back slightly in his seat and glancing very briefly but very pointedly at the sheets of paper sticking out from under the basket. “Miss Fisher.” He looked tired, and she felt a twinge of guilt. Perhaps she shouldn’t have insisted on staying at that party for quite so long last night…
“I’m afraid I’ve taken the liberty of continuing our investigation without you,” he told her, his voice dripping with thinly veiled sarcasm.
She smiled back sweetly, brushing a bit of imaginary lint off the sleeve of her blouse. “And what have you discovered?”
“A murder weapon.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “You found the knife? Are you sure?”
He pulled a smug face. “Fairly certain, yes. We recovered it when we went to question Grant Emerson and he was attempting to get rid of it by burying it in his neighbour’s back garden.”
“No! Has he confessed?”
“Oh, no. He insists he was looking for a lost cricket ball and was using the knife to dig, since it just happened to be lying there. He’s in a holding cell now. Thinking up a new version of his alibi, I’m sure.”
“No doubt it’ll be an interesting one,” Phryne joked. His stories last night had certainly grown increasingly spectacular, and really the only reason she hadn’t pointed him out as the killer then and there was that Frank Hill had been equally sketchy about his whereabouts. And Emerson was an actor, after all, it was hardly surprising that he’d try to imbue his story with some dramatic flair.
“Well, then,” she said, reaching out to open the picnic basket, inviting him to look into it. “I had meant for this to cheer you up after your suffering last night, but perhaps it can double as a celebration of a case closed.”
She half-expected him to refuse to even investigate, to declare broadly that he never intended to eat again and certainly not already, or at the very least to come up with some excuse for why he couldn’t eat anything just now, but he craned his neck and looked into the basket to see what she had brought him.
His face froze briefly, but before the smirk could settle on her own face, he smiled happily, reaching into the basket to pull out the plate of vol-au-vents. He picked one up and bit into it, humming with satisfaction.
She watched, incredulous, as he ate his way through the first vol-au-vent only to pick up a second one, but before he could bite into it they were interrupted by Hugh coming to indicate that Mr. Emerson had another poorly thought out excuse ready. Jack was on his feet immediately, and Phryne followed, determined to be present when the man inevitably confessed, informing Jack as they made their way to the interview room that there was cake in the basket as well.
He smiled, clearly delighted, and she shook her head slightly, feeling that this had not gone exactly as planned.
*
She saw Hugh in the kitchen of Wardlow five hours later, however, where Dot was offering him freshly baked scones and he insisted that he could only eat the one: He had had quite a big late lunch at the station.
“Vol-au-vents and Victoria sponge?” Phryne asked him, smiling knowingly.
He cleared his throat uncomfortably, unable to lie but unwilling to tell the truth.
Phryne nodded smugly and left the two of them alone in the kitchen, hoping for Dot’s sake that she’d manage to wipe the smirk off her face before Hugh turned around to look at her.
When Jack arrived a few hours later for a nightcap disguised as updating her on the case, now definitely solved, she managed to wait nearly ten whole minutes before remarking that if she had known he’d be sharing his lunch with Constable Collins, she’d have brought more food.
“Do you know,” Jack told her, taking another sip of his whiskey. “By this point I think I dislike vol-au-vents almost as much as I do operetta.”
The only thing surprising about that, she felt, was the fact that he admitted it. “I’ll be sure to remember that.”
For reasons she couldn’t possibly imagine, Jack did not look particularly comforted by that promise. She held up the decanter. “And how do you feel about whiskey?”
He smiled, looking at her in that way he had of sometimes looking at her that made her feel slightly lightheaded, and held out his glass. “I don’t think I’ve had too much of that so far.”
So she poured him another drink.