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Jack Robinson was having a bad week.
Two of his suspects had escaped down an alley, his police car got a flat tire during a chase, and he had left his hat at a crime scene and, through a series of events, it was now being held as evidence in the case. The other inspectors in the department had a betting pool going on around the hat. Right now Jack had three to one odds that it would be a part of the evidence in the trial.
And of all the weeks for it to be the bad one, this was the worst for it to be. This was the week that he was seeing Phryne more actively since her return from England. She had been gone for almost three months and the two of them had left their relationship, their fledgling relationship he replaced in his head, at a bit of an awkward place. There had been a few letters back and forth over the absence and the first time he had seen her upon her return had been...explosive to say the least. But this would be one of the first times he would be seeing her since the kiss in the field. Since he had come back for her. Since he had made it explicitly clear what he wanted from her.
He was anxious about the evening's dinner he was going to have with her. So anxious in fact that he arrived thirty minutes early to 221B The Esplanade. While Mr Butler was too much the consummate professional to show his surprise, Jack could see traces of flour on his sleeve which implied he had not yet finished preparing dinner.
“I don’t think Miss Fisher has returned yet from her errand,” he said, with his usual professional disinterest. “Why don’t you wait in the parlor over here. I’ll be done soon.” With that, he bustled back to the kitchen.
Jack took a seat on the sofa in the parlor, a grimace touching his lips. Why wasn’t Phryne already here? He had expected her to be getting ready when he arrived, with her usual focus on fashion, not that he minded of course. She always looked good in anything to him and since the case with the fashion house, he had been making more of an effort to appreciate the finer points of her wardrobe.
He was halfway through his snifter of brandy when he heard the doorknob turn. He set the glass on the sidebar and stood up.
“Oh you,” he heard her voice from the doorway and felt his heart go up to double time. “I’ll give you a ring tomorrow darling.”
Jack peeked around the corner of the room to see who she was talking to. He couldn’t quite make out the guest’s face, but it was easy for him to see that it was a man based on his size in the doorframe. He heard a gruff reply in a baritone he didn’t recognize, and then Miss Fisher blew a kiss at the man and shut the door.
She turned to head up the stairs and was startled by Jack’s presence.
“Jack! You’re rather early, aren’t you?” she said.
Jack glanced at his watch. He had been waiting for over an hour.
“I would say one of us is rather late.” He replied.
Not wanting to overstep his bounds, he then asked rather cryptically “Mr. Butler said you had an errand?” He could feel the rise in his voice at the end of the question.
For the first time since she entered the house, Jack took a moment to look at her outfit. She was dressed to the nines - a slinky, silver dress (all the rage, he was sure) and fishnets with matching sparkly, three-inch heels. She was wearing one of her diamond head pieces and had extra khol around her eyes, bringing attention to their light blue color. A small beaded bag and a feathery fan hung from her wrist.
This did not look like an “errand” outfit.
“Oh yes...that.” She paused before continuing, “Well, that’s done now. So give me a few minutes to freshen up and I’ll be right back down. Oh! Seems like Mr. Butler has laid out the nice china, you lucky, lucky boy.” As she said the last bit, she unlatched her fan from her wrist and teased his nose with it before making her way up the stairs behind him.
With more questions than he had answers, which was a unique state for a detective inspector to be in in his personal life, Jack went to wait for Phryne in the dining room after downing the remainder of his brandy.
Phryne returned quickly -- for her--, having exchanged her fancy dress for a pair of white wide pants, a black blouse, and a pair of sparkly earrings. She took the seat opposite him at the candlelit table.
“Well, Jack,” she smoldered, “it’s so nice to have you here.” Phryne placed her head in her hand and she took a swig from her glass of wine.
Ah, so we’re just going to ignore the scene at the door, then. Jack thought to himself. He was about to reply to her remark when Mr. Butler came into the room carrying a soup tureen.
“White mushroom soup to start,” he said as we walked towards the table. As the aroma of the soup reached Jack’s nostrils, he was reminded of exactly how hungry he was. In that exact moment, Mr. Butler tripped upturning the entire vat of soup onto Jack, the tureen perched precariously on his head like a hat.
As he sat, he could feel the warm, creamy soup slither down the back of his suit jacket and make its way to the top of his pants. He was just thankful the soup hadn’t been boiling when it had been spilled upon him, the one upside to Phryne being delayed.
“Oh Mr. Butler! Are you alright?” Jack heard Phryne exclaim as he heard the scrape of a chair being thrown back. He wiped at his eyes, pushing aside a curtain of the goopy soup. From what had made it to his mouth, the flavor was quite good.
“Oh I’m fine, Miss Fisher. It’s Mr. Robinson we should be more concerned about.” Mr. Butler said as Phryne helped him to his feet.
“I’m so sorry this happened, sir!” Mr. Butler said as he started wiping at Jack with the towel he always had on his person.
“Well, you have one going for you Mr. Butler, the soup is quite good,” Jack said, submitting to the cleaning with the air of one long accustomed to ridiculous things happening to him around Miss Fisher.
Phryne started chuckling as she came closer to him. She ran her finger against Jack's cheek and popped it in her mouth.
“Oh! This is such a shame - such a good recipe Mr. Butler,” she said. “Ah, this is not a good look for you, Jack,” she said as she took the tureen off of Jack’s head and placed it on the table.
Jack turned to her, grin playing on his lips, “Might be a good one for you, Miss Fisher.” That brought a smile to Phryne’s face.
Jack stood up from the table, no longer actively dripping soup, and said, “Rain check on dinner?”
* * *
After the disaster that was dinner the previous evening, Jack was almost happy to spend his morning at a crime scene. While death was never a pleasant occasion, he hadn’t been embarrassed in front of Phryne for a very long time. At least this gave him another chance to see Phryne in an environment where he thrived.
She was in one of her more sombre outfits - which, for Miss Fisher, just meant it kept to the darker shade of the color spectrum, and consisted of nothing less than a navy pantsuit, tan overcoat, and navy cloche hat with a small gold feather in it. Jack nodded to her as they knelt to examine the corpse.
The body in question belonged to one of the bouncers of the local dance hall, the Cat’s Meow. His face was a purple-blue bruise of what it used to be. Rigor mortis had frozen his hands in place clawing at his neck. Jack automatically noted the distinct line around the neck. Cause of death: strangulation.
“Oh dear.” Phryne said, her hand covering her mouth. “Paulo!”
Jack turned to her, curiosity piqued.
Phryne read the question in his face. “I just saw him last night when I was on my...errand. He was totally fine when I left so it must have happened sometime during our dinner last night.”
So, she was out at a social event before we had dinner. That makes that man at the door all the more intriguing. What was she doing last night that ended in someone’s murder? Jack thought to himself.
Phryne was rifling through Paulo’s pockets without so much as a by-your-leave, pulling out a wallet and other miscellaneous effects. Given that he still had all his items about him, a robbery gone wrong seemed out of the question. This had not been a chance murder. Jack checked the body for other injuries and found nothing that pointed away from strangulation.
Jack and Phryne stood up from their crouched position together, with the ease of long practice, Phryne slipping her gloves into her pocket. She seemed a bit down at the identity of the body but not very surprised. He was of an unsavory sort then, Jack thought. Did that mean Phryne had been hanging out with the underground set last night?
“Well Miss Fisher,” Jack said, turning to her with the longsuffering air of one not really expecting to get an answer, “tell me more about last night. Who were you with? When was the last time you saw the victim? Anything of interest?”
Phryne ignored all of his questions, of course. "A woman," she stated out of the blue. "I bet it was a woman." and with that, she made her way towards her car.
Perplexed, and a bit peeved at not getting any additional information about the mysterious man from last night, Jack called out for her, “Phryne, wait! Where are you going? We have a case to solve.”
Phryne looked up from the driver’s seat of her car, smirking at Jack. “Of course we do darling and we’re only going to do that by going to the club! See you there!”
With that, she peeled out of the parking lot, leaving Jack eating her, quite literal, dust.
* * *
Jack entered The Cat’s Meow, looking for Phryne. The club had all of the lights on, an unusual sight for a dance club. The wood panelled interior looked ordinary in the daylight - some scratches in the floor from barstools, the upholstery of the chairs faded. In the evenings, Jack could imagine this den appearing sultry and mysterious, pulling you into its dark embrace. He spotted her sitting at the bar, chatting up one of the, he assumed, bartenders. The man looked like he had just been woken up, his hair disheveled and clothes wrinkly.
“Yeah, Paulo left right when we closed. Didn’t even help clean up, the bum.” The bartender was saying as Jack walked up. “That was the last I saws of him.”
Phryne looked contemplative and then said, “Did anyone else leave the club earlier than they should have?”
Noticing Jack, the bartender sized him up and seemed like he wasn’t going to say anything more. Phryne, looking to Jack and the glass of whiskey on the bar, said, “Oh he’s not going to report you darling. Inspector Robinson has bigger fish to fry, doesn’t he?” She gave him a pointed look.
Jack, slightly put out, still nodded in agreement with her statement. The bartender visibly relaxed a little and took a swig from the glass. Jack couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow skeptically. It couldn’t be past 9.15 in the morning.
“Well,” the bartender started, “come to think of it, Jenny wasn’t there for the usual cash out. One of the other gals said that she had to leave for an appointment. But that’s all who I remembers missing.”
Jack was a bit skeptical at the man’s statements, especially given the propensity for a drink so early in the morning. But Phryne seemed to trust him and her instincts, annoyingly at times, proved to be right more often than not. He wanted to know more about Paulo’s lifestyle so with Phryne deep in thought at the last statement, Jack asked, “Did this Paulo have any enemies or ones who would wish him ill? Any recent inheritance or windfall that would make him a target here?”
The bartender unexpectedly burst into coarse laughter. “Paulo was the biggest flirt this side of the tracks. He’s dated everyone, and I mean everyone, men, women, didn’t matter nothing. He’d sometimes be dangling along two or three people at the same time. Ain’t that right Miss Fisher?”
Phryne was pulled from her thoughts at that. She nodded and said, “He did have quite the reputation.”
“Yeahs, and remember last night, Miss Fisher, when yous was with Edward for, what the third time this week, dancing all up close on the dance floor, all the guys back here thought he was gonna get lucky, but anyways and Paulo got that champagne thrown in his face?”
Jack went very still. He had known Phryne had been here, he had known that Phryne had been with a man, this Edward he assumed, but in his head he had been able to explain it away. Well, they were just here because Edward must work here. Or they were just stopping by for an innocent drink between friends. But to hear that they had been dancing so close, so often, the insinuation that the evening was going to end in Miss Fisher’s bed, made him very uncomfortable and just a bit angry. He was upset with her - he thought he had been special to Phryne, but that was obviously not the case. But more than anyone else, he was mad at himself for being played the fool.
While Phryne and Jack hadn’t formally solidified their relationship, emotionally or physically, since that charged kiss on the airfield, Jack had been making some assumptions. He had assumed that Phryne wasn’t seeing anyone else actively. That she wasn’t sleeping with someone else or dancing with someone else, even flirting with someone else. To hear that she had been here just last night, the night she had made dinner plans with him, with someone else, being close with someone else... it felt like a punch to the stomach.
Jack didn’t hear the rest of the bartender’s statement, outside of that he didn’t see who had thrown the champagne, just that there had been a bit of a commotion afterwards. He couldn’t stop thinking about Phryne and this Edward and the more he thought about it, the the more his anger grew.
* * *
“So,” Phryne said, stopping him outside the club’s doors, “I think I know who did it.”
“Oh.” Jack said, his pain at being tossed aside bubbling up. “Is that so, Miss Fisher? Don’t you want to talk to your friend Edward about it? He seems to be your bosom buddy these days.”
Phryne started, confusion in her eyes. “What do you mean, Jack? Edward has nothing to do with this case, I know it.”
“Oh do you? Because you’ve been here with him so many times this week? Spending time with him outside the club? He couldn’t possibly have done it because ‘I was there the whole time, Jack?’” he said, a tone of bitterness underlying his his words.
“Jack,” Phryne said, obviously put out, “I work on other cases than just the ones we do together. And they deserve my attention just as much as yours do. I can’t put cases with you over those just because you’re there.”
Jack was surprised at the statement. Phryne always had other cases going on, he knew, but usually she shared them with him like gossip, or on occasion used him as a sounding board. For something this big, something that made her late to their dinner, to not even merit a mention, frankly, hurt. How close were they, really?
Everything he felt so sure of a week ago looked completely different now. Jack didn't like to feel like he was being compartmentalized, like he was a part of Phryne's life she could put away in a drawer, separate from everything else. He didn't need to be the number one thing in her life, but he needed to be apart of it all, not just a small subsection.
“I was investigating Paulo for Edward,” Phryne continued. “They were lovers and Edward thought that Paulo was cheating on him. Turns out he probably was - with Jenny. That’s why I was at the club last night and have been coming for a few days. I wasn’t betraying you, if that’s what you were thinking.”
That had been exactly what Jack and been thinking and it must have been evident on his face because Phryne rolled her eyes at him.
“I expected better of you, Jack. You know what that kiss meant to me, you’ve seen my letters to you. How could you be so ridiculous?” Jack looked down in shame and resisted the compulsion to fidget.
“I thought...I thought we had trust here, Phryne.” Jack said, gesturing between the two of them.
Phryne sighed, looking down. “Trust doesn’t mean everyone knows everything all the time, Jack. It means that you believe that I’m doing the right thing, that not telling you is the right thing.”
Jack hung his head, and would have played with his hat had it not been in the evidence impound. Phryne was right, of course. What was a relationship without trust? How could he have wanted to micromanage their relationship?
“I don’t even know where we go from here, but Jenny is your killer, Jack, I can promise you that at least.” Phryne said, before walking to her car and driving away, leaving Jack behind to think about how to fix this.
* * *
Phyne, as always, was right.
Jenny, a singer at the nightclub, had been the one to kill Paulo. The interrogation had almost been a joke - she folded like a bad poker hand.
Jenny and Paulo had been dating for awhile but not as exclusively as Jenny had thought. Apparently she had seen Paulo and Edward kissing in a stairwell one night after a show and that had set her blood boiling.
“I knew he was a flirt, everyone knew he was a flirt, but it was supposed to be different with me!” Jenny said in the interrogation room at the station after a few hours of the good cop/bad cop (with Collins playing the part of the bad cop with aplomb).
“So the other night I followed him, intending to confront him about the whole thing, and I saw him kissing another man and I followed them until they went their separate ways and I must have just...let my anger get the better of me.”
Jenny reached into her bag and pulled out a long gold necklace that looked like it had seen better days. It was a tarnished in places and the links were stretched out.
“I...I used this,” she said, handing it to Collins who put it in a bag marked evidence. “I was just so angry and then it was over.” Jenny sighed, finally deflating after the hours running on fury and hatred. This always seemed to be how murder interrogations ended, the accused succumbing to the knowledge of what they did and facing up to it, realizing that solving their problems with violence wasn’t worth it in the end.
With the case tied up nicely with a bow, Jack focused his attention on mending his relationship with Phryne. He normally wouldn’t have felt so insecure, but the unusual circumstances of this week had left him in a lurch. Jack hadn’t had a week this bad since the later days of his marriage to Rosie.
He felt like he didn’t have too many options - insinuating that she had been unfaithful to him in any way was not a great place to be starting from. In the end, he decided that speaking from his heart, and not his mind, was his best course of action.
Jack arrived at Miss Fisher’s house in the early evening. Placing his hat on his head (it had been cleared of all charges in the case), hoping that Phryne’s ill-concealed fondness for him in it would soften her towards him a bit, he exited his car and rapped his knuckles against the door.
Mr. Butler opened the door and seemed surprised to see him. Jack morbidly imagined Phryne telling Mr. Butler to not expect him again for quite some time. “Why Inspector Robinson, how nice it is to see you! Please come in.” He moved aside to let Jack enter the hallway where he began to take his coat.
As Mr. Butler reached for his hat, a voice called from the top of the stairs, “Allow me.” Jack looked towards the noise and was happy to see Phryne gliding down the stairs. If she was willing to take his hat for him, he wasn’t in as dire straits as he had thought.
“You were right,” Jack said. “About the case.”
Phryne smiled, “Of course I was, Jack. ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ and all that.” She lead him into the sitting room, placing herself on the lounge chair which prompted Jack to take a seat on the settee across from her.
And then she waited. Waited in expectation of what Jack had come here to say.
“Well...I…” Jack started. He sighed and, reaching to the coffee table in between them, poured himself and Phryne a small glass of whiskey. He took a gulp before continuing.
“The more time I spend with you Miss Fisher, the more I realize how much I underestimate...passionate women” Jack said. “I know you take on other cases because you want to help people. But now that things are...more out in the open between us, I’m having trouble disconnecting those feelings for you from the work you do.”
He paused here, trying to gauge her reaction to his words. She was, as she always, impossible to read accurately. She had a better poker face than most of the detectives on the force. Maybe she should offer lessons.
Taking some more of his drink, he continued. “Even though what happened with Rosie had been a long time coming, it still...it still hurt me in a way that I haven’t fully recovered from. That’s why I let my feelings get in the way of the case. In some ways it’s hard for me to forget that you’re friendly to everyone and that it’s not you trying to take every man to bed with you.”
That seemed to strike a chord with her for she said, “I know I’m a flirt, but you have to know those don’t mean anything. Especially now.” Phryne got off her chair and bridged the distance between them with her hand, caressing his face with it while sitting down on the edge of the chair.
“That’s easy to know up here,” Jack said, moving Phryne’s hand to his temple, “but harder to remember here.” He placed her palm on his heart.
Phryne grinned coyly and said, “Well! Then let’s do some convincing, shall we?” She then leaned down and pressed her lips to his.
Jack had been waiting for this since the night of their disastrous dinner. Earlier that day, he thought he’d never get to kiss her again, to run his hands through her short cropped hair, or caress the side of her face. While their first kiss had been an explosion of pent up passion and desire, this was slower, more methodical. Phryne was more exploratory with her lips and rarely separated hers from his.
She tasted of whiskey and mushroom soup and she smelled of a bouquet of flowers - one of her favorite perfumes. Jack had grown to love the scent over time, even finding himself to stop and smell the flowers at crime scenes these days to be reminded of her.
As the kiss continued, Jack slipped his arms around her body, his hands resting on her back and his arms encircling her hips. This felt right and Jack was once again amazed at how well the two of them fit together. Phryne’s hands began to undo the tie around his neck before the dove into his hair. Jack knew he probably looked a mess and he tried not to think about all of the lipstick that was trailed across his face. What a scene this must be and, not for the first time, he was glad that Dot no longer lived in the house and that Mr. Butler was the epitome of discretion.
Jack smiled as Phryne brought her lips away from his ear and back to his lips. Phryne had chosen him, over all the men she could have, well, likely had already had. His heart soared.
Phryne broke the kiss, breathing deeply to make up for the lack of oxygen from the last few minutes. “Are you convinced now?” she asked, arching an eyebrow and patting his suit above his heart gently.
Heart pounding, for a variety of reasons, but feeling daring, Jack said, “Well, I could always do with a little more.”
Phryne smiled and then slowly that broke into her wonderful laugh. “Jack Robinson, you never cease to amaze me.” She stood up and took his hand leading him towards the stairs to her bedroom. Halfway up she paused and said, “Grab the hat, will you?”