Raisins and almonds - Poisoned Pen Press (UK)

1 4 Kerry Greenwood
hard on a bloke’s hair. His had already been appreciably thinned
by some of her cases. It was going to be hot. The streets already
had the faint, glazed look which spoke of pavements just about
to soften and shimmer.
‘P’raps the neighbours’d know,’ suggested Cec, diffidently.
‘You take that side of the street,’ sighed Bert, ‘and I’ll take this.’
They split up and began knocking on doors. Bert began to long
for the good old days of ferrying drunks from one side of the city
to the other. More than that, he could do with a good cold beer.
999
Phryne, policemen in tow, opened the door of Miss Lee’s shop.
The little bell rang tinnily. The room was clean, but already a
slight film of dust was settling on the polished desk. It felt shabby
and desolate. Jack Robinson was not in the mood for excitable
females, though he was vaguely wondering why she was carrying
a craft knife and a pair of thick gloves.
‘Well, Miss Fisher?’
‘Now, Jack, is the shop the same? No one has been here?’
‘It looks the same,’ he said warily.
‘I’ve told you all about Yossi’s formula. I have told you about
Mrs. Katz and the burglary of my own house. Now there’s something
I have to conjecture. Part of the fun of being a conspiracy
is the ridiculous mumbo-jumbo which men so enjoy. Passwords,
you know, and secret handshakes and all that sort of thing. It
must be something endowed with the male hormone we hear
so much about in these glandular days. Anyway, like schoolboys
playing catch with trinitrotoluene, those unworldy scholars used
to pass their information to each other by putting it in one of
the unread books in Miss Lee’s shop. Shimeon the go-between
put the formula into a book.’
‘No, he didn’t,’ objected the policeman. ‘We’ve had all those
books out and shaken. There wasn’t anything hidden in them.’
‘That’s what you think. I was talking to these poor bunnies
last night and they told me that Shimeon had hidden the formula
in a book. I thought as you did, and then Simon showed