Page 43 of Evil at the Essex House
I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean. If I had a pound for every time?—”
And then a mental image dropped, of St George in a corner of the lift at the Essex House, lipstick on his face and Flossie in front of him with a palm against his chest and a look of triumph on her face. All the laughter fled my soul and I winced. “Oh, God. You don’t think they’re going to kill her, do you, Christopher?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Christopher said, and added, pensively, “I don’t see why they would, really, if they get their money. And the Schlomskys seemed to lean in that direction, didn’t they?”
They had. “I guess, if you’re an American millionaire, fifty thousand dollars more or less won’t make a difference to you.”
“I’m sure Mother and Father would gladly pay that for either of us,” Christopher agreed, and took my elbow to tug me away from the window towards the stairs. “You or me or Francis, or Crispin or Constance, for that matter. Anyone in the family. If they could pay fifty thousand dollars and get Robbie back, I know neither of them would hesitate. I’ll go first.”
He headed down the stairs.
“Should we tell him, do you suppose?” I asked when we had reached the bottom and were back outside on Tooley Street, in the sweltering shade of the London Bridge.
Christopher glanced at me. “Tell who what?”
“St George. Tell him about Flossie.”
He gave me another look, longer and more intent this time. “I thought you said we shouldn’t involve him.”
“I said we shouldn’t drag him here from Wiltshire just so he can look for kidnappers with us.” Or, God forbid, pretend to kiss me.
He took my elbow and started moving in the direction of the train station. I fell into step beside him. “But he and Florence are… well, they’ve been…”
He arched his brows at me. “I hope you’re not suggesting that there are any finer feelings on Crispin’s part for Flossie Schlomsky.”
I shuddered. “Of course not. But they have been… close.”
“By which you mean she has kissed him.”
“I suppose,” I said grudgingly.
“You suppose?”
I made a face. “Yes, that’s what I meant. They’ve been… not intimate, but close enough to it that perhaps he ought to be told what’s going on. I mean, surely he can’t be entirely indifferent to a woman he has kissed?”
“I don’t imagine he is entirely indifferent,” Christopher said as we approached the station doors. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there are any romantic feelings there at all. With the way he carries on, how could there be? And that’s aside from?—”
“The girl he says he’s in love with.” I grimaced. “Whom one would think would be enough to stop him from seducing anything that walks, but what do I know?”
Christopher muttered something, but didn’t elucidate. I didn’t ask him to. Instead, I pushed the issue with a bit of plain speaking. “Do you think he would want to know? Are we doing him a disservice by not letting him know what has happened to Flossie?”
“I imagine he’ll use it as a handy excuse for a trip to Town if we do tell him,” Christopher said and headed for the ticket window, “but you make a point. If we don’t tell him, he might be upset when he finds out later. If he does.”
He approached the ticket window to ask for two tickets back to Charing Cross and pushed the coins across the counter.
“We could run the idea by Tom,” I suggested, “and see what he thinks about it.”
Christopher accepted the tickets with a nod of thanks and turned away from the window to hand me one of them. “Fine by me. Let’s go see Scotland Yard.”
Behind him, the ticket clerk’s eyes widened.
SeeingScotland Yard was easier said than done, however. Or rather, of course we could see Scotland Yard. It’s quite visible, right there on Whitehall, just a few minutes’ walk from Charing Cross. The problem was seeing Tom. In that we couldn’t.
“Chief Inspector Pendennis and his team are off-site,” the guard at the gate informed us.
“Where did they go?”
He shot me a look. “I’m not at liberty to say, miss.”
