18 May 1959

"Long way down," Lucien said, peering over the embankment to the sluggish current of the creek below, the corpse of their victim barely visible beneath the now-bare tree limbs that criss-crossed above it. The trees' brittle leaves had scattered over the course of a long, dry autumn, and revealed the secret that lay decaying and silent beneath that roof of leaves at last. A farmer had found her, when one of his dogs had caught a scent and run baying into the underbrush; quite a shock for the farmer, to be sure, and for the girl's family once they were able to identify her, but for Lucien the discovery of a corpse here on the outskirts of town had been almost welcome, for it gave him an excuse to leave the drudgery of the surgery and the silence of his father's house in favor of more interesting occupation.

It was a dreary, dismal day; the skies had been besieged by a pitiful grey drizzle from the moment Lucien stepped out his front door, and as he leaned over the embankment rain dripped from the brim of his hat to land chill and foreboding in his beard.

Matthew Lawson was beside him, squinting into the gloom, and as Lucien spoke he gave a sort of grunt by way of answer. The faint sound of shuffling and swearing drifted up to them on the breeze; Danny Parks and Bill Hobart were struggling to pull the victim out of the stream, and having a rough go of it by the looks of things.

"You think she fell?" Lucien asked after a time. He didn't think so, and he was sure Matthew didn't either, but the question gave him an excuse to speak, and any sort of chatter would be preferable to the unsettling silence that had fallen over them.

"No," Matthew said. "You saw her head. The bank's mostly mud and grass, there's nothing that would have caused that kind of damage."

He was right, of course; the victim had suffered a catastrophic head injury, but in the absence of any rocks or boulders on the slope it seemed unlikely she'd sustained that sort of wound in a tumble down the embankment. If she'd been alive when she fell some bruising and perhaps a broken bone or two might have been expected, but what Lucien had seen when he'd scrambled down to examine her suggested something far more nefarious had taken place.

"She's been down there a while," he said. "We may not be able to learn much from the post mortem. This investigation is going to be interesting."

Matthew frowned; he did that a lot, Lucien had noticed.

"Somebody killed that girl, Blake," the superintendent said grimly. "You tell me how, and I'll worry about why."

"Of course."

Lucien straightened up and tucked his hands in his pockets, tilting his head to keep the rain out of his eyes. He didn't resent the reminder, not really. Matthew could be a bit gruff, a bit obstinate at times, but he was a good man, a good friend, and a damn good policeman. It was his job, to remind his sometimes unpredictable police surgeon just what their roles were. Later on, after hours, Matthew would come round and they'd share a drink and they'd discuss the case the way they always did, and Matthew would do no more to keep Lucien out of the investigation than he'd done already. He'd issued his warning because it was required of him, but they both knew when it came down to it he wanted Lucien on the case.

"Here they come," Matthew said, and as Lucien watched Danny and Bill began to crest the embankment carrying the victim's body between them. They'd wrapped the poor girl in a sheet, and an ambulance was already waiting to ferry her to the morgue. Danny looked as if he might be ill at any moment, but to his credit he was carrying on. The young constable was a fine lad, in Lucien's estimation; a bit naive, a bit inexperienced, but eager to learn and kind-hearted. The words Lucien would use to describe Bill Hobart were less generous, but it had been weeks since that last time Lucien had been called to clean up some bodgie Bill had roughed up on his way to the cells, and that was a mercy.

"Let me know what you find out, will you?" Matthew said, clapping him on the shoulder.

"Of course," Lucien said again. And that was that; they all knew their roles, all had jobs to do, and Lucien was growing more accustomed to his own by the day.

The girl had been found in the morning, and Lucien had nothing more pressing on, and so the post mortem was completed that very afternoon. As he worked he assembled a series of jumbled notes, and determined to put them all in a report the following day. Or that very night, if sleep wouldn't come; the typewriter in his office was serviceable, and would provide a more productive way to spend the twilight hours than drinking himself into a stupor. With the notes tucked in his bag he made his way out into the gathering dark, drove home with his head full of memories of blood and grim thoughts. It never got easier, seeing a young woman laid out on the table in the morgue, beautiful once perhaps but battered now, a hope extinguished. It was not often that the patients he examined had died as a result of violence; for every murder there were a dozen unexpected strokes or heart attacks, sudden deaths that while shocking were understandable in their own way. Murders were few and far between; he spent more time cleaning up drunks after bar fights than dissecting corpses. When they did come, the murders, he found himself almost as intrigued as he was horrified, for a murder meant a mystery, a puzzle, a riddle to solve, a more engaging question than the ones he usually faced.

When he was not working for the police Lucien kept regular hours in his father's surgery. That had not ever been his intention; he'd only come to Ballarat to settle his father's estate, sell the house, and gather enough funds to return to China and his desperate search for his family. But Ballarat had sunk its teeth into him; the prospect of a permanent address where he could receive letters from the private investigator he'd hired was an alluring one, and then Nell Clasby had come calling about her heart, and then other patients began to arrive believing that his indulgence where Nell was concerned meant he was open for business. His housekeeper cum receptionist Mrs. Penny was a garrulous old woman who could talk the birds down from the trees, and once she'd opened her mouth he'd lost all hope of leaving Ballarat. Besides the patients and the police, there was young Mattie O'Brien to worry about; the district nurse had been lodging with Thomas Blake prior to his demise, and Lucien could hardly have kicked the girl out onto the street. She stayed on a month or two, but living alone with a bachelor threatened permanent damage to her reputation, and she had eventually found a room elsewhere. Lucien had been sad to see her go - she was a lovely girl - but in a way it had been a relief, having the house to himself, not having to worry if he troubled anyone else when he shouted in his sleep, or banged on the piano in the still hours of the night. That's what he told himself, anyway, that it was a relief. If there was a part of him that hated the silence, he did his best to ignore it.

Mrs. Penny was walking out of the house as he was walking in; she told him she'd laid dinner on the table, and that Superintendent Lawson was already waiting for him in the kitchen, and then she'd scuttled away, eager to reach her own home, and Lucien did not stop her. Wherever she went, when her working day was through, it was bound to be a happier place than this.

And so Lucien made his way into the house, hung his hat on the peg by the door and dropped his case to the floor, and then ventured into the kitchen to join Matthew for dinner and a drink.

"Got anything for me?" Matthew asked as he stepped inside.

"It's nice to see you, too, Matthew," Lucien answered. There was no bite to his response; Matthew had already poured him a measure of whiskey, and there was a hot dinner waiting on a plate by his usual chair.

"You and I both know you can't wait to talk about it," Matthew told him, "so let's get down to it."

And so they did. Lucien settled himself in his chair, took a long sip of whiskey and a big bite of chicken, and then began.

"She's been down there about six months. Most of the body was in the water for that time, and she's badly decomposed."

Matthew frowned and put his fork down, as if he could not bear to eat with such an image in his mind. It didn't trouble Lucien; fifty years he'd walked this earth, and in that time he'd been a doctor, and a soldier, a prisoner-of-war, and a spy, and there was little that shocked him, any more.

"Cause of death was almost certainly a crushing blow to the head. The entire back of her skull is caved in. No material evidence there, though, I'm afraid."

"Any thing we could use to identify her?" Matthew asked. He took one wary bite of his potatoes, and then seemed to relax, satisfied that no more gruesome details were in the offing.

"She had long brown hair, and high cheekbones. That's about all I can give you, as far as the face."

"We've got a lad at the station, Ned. He's a fair hand at sketching. He might be able to come up with something, I'll send him to you tomorrow."

"It's worth a try," Lucien agreed. Ned would have to be quite the artist indeed, he thought, to create a picture from what remained of the girl's face, but it couldn't hurt. "Her clothing was interesting. We didn't find any shoes, but that's not to say she wasn't wearing any when she fell down the bank, they might have been washed away. She was wearing a red satin slip, and a red robe of some kind. And, I'm sorry to say it, she wasn't wearing any knickers."

Truth be told the girl had been dressed for bed. No pockets, no undergarments, no shoes or stockings. Lucien had stood for a time just looking at her, wondering where she'd been, dressed like that, wondering what she'd been doing, whether in the hours before her death she'd been happy and unconcerned at home, or if...well. He didn't much want to think about the if. The paltry sum of her garments and personal possessions was troubling; there had been absolutely nothing identifiable about her at all, but as he spoke Matthew's face had taken on a thoughtful expression.

"A red slip," he mused. "That's not the sort of thing a girl would wear under her clothes, is it?"

"No, I'd say this particular garment was designed to be seen." There had been some lace around the hem, and around the décolletage. She'd probably looked quite pretty wearing it, before.

"Any guess as to her age?"

"I'd say early twenties." About the same age as Lucien's own daughter, and that thought alone made his stomach churn with grief.

There was a glint in Matthew's eye, now, as if he'd caught wind of something useful, and Lucien leaned toward him then, eager to hear what he had to say.

"What are you thinking?"

Dinner with the superintendent was rarely a merry affair, but it was always fun for Lucien, in its own way. They always enjoyed a fine meal, and interesting conversation, and pouring over the riddle of the hour provided occupation for his mind, which he sometimes felt might well atrophy in the provincial boredom of life in Ballarat. Given Matthew's response just now, Lucien rather thought this might be shaping up to be one of their livelier evenings.

"Young girl, in lingerie, no identification…"

"You think she was on the game?" Now that was an interesting prospect. There had to be prostitutes in Ballarat, Lucien knew; the oldest profession employed young women in every city, town, and village the world over. Even so, he had yet to encounter any of them here, nor had he ever heard anyone discussing them - not that anyone would, in his particular social circles.

"It's possible," Matthew said, taking another swig of whiskey to wash down his potatoes.

"But we've no way to identify her." Lucien wasn't even sure where they could begin looking for a prostitute in Ballarat, knowing only that she was young and brunette. Recent changes in the laws regarding prostitution had made it harder and harder to track them, and if she'd been working for herself on some shady street corner there might not be anyone at all who remembered her. It was strange, really, how small a life could become, how a person could pass through the world and leave no trace of themselves behind. Strange, and sad, and a fear that hit a little too close to home for Lucien, whose family was lost and whose only friend in all the world was his employer.

"We don't, but I think I know someone who might. There's a pub, out towards Brown Hill. The Lock and Key. All sorts of things for sale there."

"It's a brothel?"

Matthew grinned. "It's a pub. There's rooms upstairs for rent. The owner's position is she's only a landlord, and what the girls who rent those rooms get up to is their own affair."

"And you let her get away with that?"

Matthew shrugged. "We all know what it is. We all know what she's doing. But she runs a tight ship, and we don't have any actual evidence of her involvement. Brothel keeping is an offense, but all we can prove is she's collecting rent."

That didn't sit well with Lucien, the thought of some old biddy making money off the backs of desperate girls, carrying on right under the police superintendent's nose, and nothing anyone could do to stop it. It seemed an injustice, and what was the point of the police, he wondered, if not to right such wrongs?

"I know what you're thinking," Matthew said, "and I thought the same thing, once. But she takes care of those girls. Keeps them fed, keeps them safe. Whatever she's charging it's enough to keep the rabble out. She's got a more...discerning clientele, and muscle on the door in case there's trouble. And there's not a thing that happens in this town she doesn't know about. Her information's good as gold, every time."

"You mean to tell me the local madam is a police informant?" Thoughts of death and the smell of blood had begun to fade from his mind, for Matthew had just presented Lucien with a far more interesting quandary. A brothel keeper who was on friendly terms with the police, who treated her girls well, who had made Matthew Lawson smile when he talked about her; Lucien rather thought he'd like to meet such a woman.

"When it suits her. Like I said, she's smart. She knows how to protect herself and her girls. I'd go so far as to say she loves them, in her own way. And it might be she knows something about a girl who was on the game and went missing six months ago."

"What time is it?" Lucien asked, leaning back in his chair as an idea began to take shape in his mind. It was a Monday evening, and early yet; surely, he thought, the pub wouldn't be doing much trade yet.

"It's just gone six," Matthew said, checking his watch. "Why?"

Lucien saw it, the moment Matthew's eyes narrowed as he realized what his police surgeon was up to, and he could not help but grin in response.

"No," Matthew said sharply. "Lucien, you can't go to that pub after dark. You can't be seen there. What do you think your patients will say when they get wind of it? Not to mention the brass in Melbourne."

"What makes you think they'll hear about it?" Lucien fired back. "I'll be in and out before anyone has a chance to see anything at all."

His mind was whirring as the plan began to take shape. If this madam was as helpful as Matthew seemed to think, she just might be the key to solving this puzzle, or at least giving a name to the poor girl they'd dredged from the creek. In the next breath Lucien was out of his chair, reaching for his jacket with one hand and his whiskey with the other, his supper all but forgotten.

"You're going now?" Matthew asked incredulously as Lucien downed the last of his whiskey.

"No time like the present," Lucien told him cheerfully. "If I go now they shouldn't be too busy. I might even get to talk to some of the girls."

"You're mad, you know that?" Matthew said ruefully. "You do what you like, Lucien, but be careful. You don't know what you're walking in to."

That was probably true enough; Lucien had not set foot in a brothel since Hong Kong, and he had only the barest grasp of local politics. But a chance had presented itself, and he felt he would be a fool not to take it.

"What's her name?" he asked as he shrugged into his jacket. "The madam?" If he was going to go looking for her, he'd need to know her name at least.

"Jean," Matthew answered. "Jean Beazley."