Page 66 of Evil at the Essex House
“She avoids you?”
“She doesn’t much approve of me,” Crispin said. “Thinks I’m a cad and a philanderer and all those other things you accused me of earlier.”
Good for her.
“Are you certain you shouldn’t damn the torpedoes and propose, and introduce her to the family? Your father may not be happy, but I think the rest of us would like to make her acquaintance. Any girl who doesn’t fall flat for your charms seems worth knowing.”
“You would say that,” Crispin grumbled. “No. I told you. I’m not putting her through squalor on the Continent.”
“Squalor on the Continent might not be so bad. My mother seemed happy.” In her flat in Heidelberg with her carpenter husband and child. “Of course, that presupposes that this girl likes you enough to want to marry you…”
“Which God knows she doesn’t,” Crispin said, and then stopped, mouth open. He looked like a goldfish, and I opened my own mouth to comment on it, but he shook his head. “Listen.”
I listened, and heard, for the first time, the sound of a motor coming towards the tower. When I looked in that direction, there were the reflections of moving lights in the brick of Tower Bridge.
“Surely it isn’t eleven yet?” We couldn’t have stood here for a whole hour bickering, could we?
Crispin shook his head. “Shhh. Let’s go take a look.”
He turned his back to me and moved towards the other side of the clocktower. I left the balustrade and the view over the Thames, and followed. “Stay back from the edge. You don’t want him, or them, to look up and see you.”
He flicked me a look over his shoulder. “You’re the one who needs to stay back, Darling. I’m in black and white. I’ll blend with the shadows. You’re the one who’ll light up like a bonfire when those headlamps hit you.”
I grimaced. He was right about that, wasn’t he?
“Really,” he told me, “you knew you were going adventuring after your supper date. You might have worn something sleek and black for His Highness.”
“You must have me confused with Lady Laetitia,” I said sourly. “She’s the one who wears nothing but black. I like bright colors.”
“You certainly do.” He turned back to the street. “Looks like a Hackney.”
I peered over the parapet and saw what looked like a black Austin Twelve come rolling slowly across the cobblestones towards us, past the place where Christopher and the Hispano-Suiza were tucked away.
I nodded. “Looks very much like one. Perhaps Papa Schlomsky is early.” Sitting around at the Savoy waiting for it to be time to go drop off the ransom couldn’t be easy. And it might have been difficult to estimate the time it would take to get here, too, for that matter.
“Or the kidnappers are,” Crispin said, as the Austin passed out of sight below the tower.
“Did it stop?”
He shook his head. “It’s moving past, going under the bridge now.”
“Just doing an initial recce, then?”
“Seems so,” Crispin said. “Come on. Let’s get into position while they’re out of sight.”
He headed for a corner of the tower, just beside the opening onto Tooley Street, and melted into the shadows. All I could see of him was the slightly paler triangle of his starched shirt, and the pale hair and skin above. If I hadn’t known that he was there, I might not have noticed even that.
I tucked myself into the corner opposite and proceeded to wait.
“Here they come again,” Crispin said softly. “Hackney cab on its way back.”
“The same one?”
“Who can tell? They all look the same, don’t they? It’s coming from the direction where the other one disappeared, so I assume so.”
He watched it as it came closer. The headlights hit the tower and lit up the area around us for a second—I squeezed myself into the corner, out of the way, so none of my sparkling salmon beads would catch the light and reflect it back like a mirror—before the wheels turned to follow the curve of the bridge and the motorcar rattled across the cobbles away from us.
We stood in silence until the sound of the motor had faded away down Tooley Street.
