Page 39 of Evil at the Essex House
“Is there?”
“I imagine there must be.”
We walked in silence another minute before he glanced around. “Hard to imagine anyone being able to drag someone else, kicking and screaming, into a motorcar in this.”
‘This’ being the usual pedestrian and vehicle traffic going on all along the Strand. It’s one of the busier thoroughfares in London, between Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Bridge. There were people and motorcars everywhere, as well as cab drivers and constables and the like. Christopher tugged me out of the way of a bobby in full uniform who was ambling down the pavement with no regard for anyone coming in the opposite direction, and I made a face. “That’s true.”
Especially so if Flossie had been a victim of an attempted kidnapping in the past, and had thwarted the evil-doers on that occasion. She wouldn’t have become placid and tractable suddenly.
The constable moved past, and I took a step to the side again. “Perhaps she didn’t kick and scream. Perhaps it was someone she knew. Or knew well enough not to be concerned about.”
“She was on her way to see her parents,” Christopher pointed out. “She made Crispin drop her off on the corner two blocks away because she didn’t want to be seen arriving with him. I can’t imagine that she’d want to be seen arriving with anyone else, either.”
Likely not. If the Viscount St George, heir to the Sutherlands, wasn’t exalted enough for Mummy and Daddy Schlomsky, it was hard to imagine who might have been.
“None of this makes sense,” I grumbled, as we made our way up the pavement towards Charing Cross station. “If she didn’t want Crispin to drive her to the Savoy, she isn’t likely to have accepted anyone else’s offer of a lift, either. Especially since she only had about two blocks to go. But unless she got into the motorcar willingly, there would have been a ruckus, and someone would have noticed that.”
Christopher nodded. “Unless there were two of them—like last time—and one of them… bear with me here, Pippa?—”
He snagged me by the waist and moved me in front of him, and then poked me in the back with a finger, “—one of them walked behind her with a syringe that he jabbed into her, and then, when she got woozy, he maneuvered her into a waiting car.”
He quick-stepped up to walk beside me again, and I tucked my hand through his elbow as I thought about what he’d just suggested.
It was a more likely scenario than some of the others we had batted about, certainly. “That might have done it. If they were the same two people who tried to grab her in New York, they may have learned something from the last time they tried it on, and decided to do better this time.”
“And if they were somewhat circumspect about it,” Christopher said before turning onto the cobbles in front of the Clermont, “no one may have noticed what was going on. If it happened fast enough.”
“It’s possible.” Perhaps even likely.
I glanced around. “There are plenty of Hackneys and motorcars around here, picking up and dropping off passengers. Lots of people coming and going. Lots of noise and confusion. If it was quick and easy, no one may have noticed.”
We stepped off the cobbles in front of the Clermont and onto the ones lining the parking area in front of Charing Cross, where we headed for one of the arched openings into the station.
“It at least makes more sense than that no one noticed a woman being shoved into a motor against her will,” Christopher said.
I nodded. Yes, it did.
“There’s another explanation, you know,”Christopher said a few minutes later, after we had boarded the train and it was picking up speed across the Hungerford Bridge.
I took my eyes off the view—to the left we could see Waterloo Bridge, and to the right the Westminster ditto, while below us, the Thames rippled, murky even in the bright sunshine of a hot August day. The South Bank loomed ahead, closer with every second that passed. “What’s that?”
He shot me a look. “Nobody snatched her on the walk from Charing Cross to the Savoy. She made it up to her parents’ room, and something happened to her there. Then they wrote the note and pretended it had been delivered with breakfast, when really, they’d just written it themselves to hide the fact that they killed their own daughter.”
I thought about it. “I suppose that’s possible. We didn’t ask the staff whether they’d actually delivered the note.”
Christopher shook his head. “I thought about it, but for one thing, I’m not sure they would have told us if we had asked—we’renot the police—and for another, if she truly was kidnapped, I didn’t want to draw any attention to it.”
I nodded. “It would explain a few things.”
“Such as, why no one saw her being shoved, kicking and screaming, into a waiting car on a busy street with lots of people around.”
“Precisely. And why the note asked for American dollars instead of British pounds.”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” Christopher said, and looked like he was thinking about it now, blue eyes distant. “If I had, I suppose I would have assumed that it was because the Schlomskys, and their fortune, is in American dollars.”
“Of course. And that’s possible, too.”
I leaned back in the seat and added, “I can’t imagine how they’ll gather fifty thousand dollars in London in a day and a half, to be honest. I suppose they’ll have to calculate how many pounds fifty thousand dollars is, and bring that instead. I doubt even the Bank of London keeps fifty thousand American dollars sitting in their vaults.”
