Page 79 of Evil at the Essex House
Hiram grunted something, but he didn’t respond. It was Sarah who spoke up from where she was sitting: on the dirty floor beside the mattress with the body, with no care for her own clothes. “Thank you.”
“It seemed the least that we could do,” Christopher told her. “Hopefully it won’t be long before he’s back with reinforcements.”
He took a step towards her. “We’re sorry for your loss.”
It was, thankfully, too dark in the room for me to see Flossie’s head and the damage that had been done to it. I could see Sarah, could even see the tear tracks on her cheeks, but if I kept my eyes on Sarah and not on Flossie, the darkness of the room allowed me to pretend, when I wasn’t paying too much attention, that everything was mostly all right.
Christopher added, gently, “Is there anything we can do?”
“You can tell us everything you know,” Sarah said, in a voice that brooked no argument whatsoever.
“We don’t know much at all,” I told her. “It was as we said. We went to St Olave’s this evening to see the kidnappers, and to follow them to see if we could find Florence.”
Hiram shifted, and I winced. “Not like this. Of course not like this. We thought they’d have her bound and gagged in a room somewhere, while they went to fetch the money, and that once they had it, they’d let her go.” In one piece and none the worse for wear.
Truly, it made no sense that they would have killed her, and still less sense that they had done it in such a brutal way. I hadn’t gotten a good look earlier—and I was glad for it—but Flossie’s face had been all but obliterated.
A thought struck me and I added, perhaps unwisely, “Itisyour daughter, isn’t it?”
There was a moment while they both stared at me, and then Sarah said, in a voice just this side of hysterical, “Do you suppose I wouldn’t recognize my own flesh and blood, young lady?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I was just trying to think of a reason why?—”
I trailed off before I could wonder, out loud, why someone would have bothered to make Florence, for all intents and purposes, unrecognizable. There was no need to belabor that particular point. And after all, it had been the best part of a year since Sarah and Hiram had seen their daughter, hadn’t it?
Besides, it was dark in the room. I had recognized Flossie mostly based on the fussy pink frock she was wearing, but the frock couldn’t be familiar to her parents. Not if they had been surprised and shocked about her wardrobe in the flat two days ago. So it seemed at least possible that Sarah was mistaken.
Then again, if it wasn’t Flossie, who was it? Christopher had trailed the kidnapper straight to this house. It had to be Flossie.
Perhaps she had angered the kidnappers outrageously in the handful of days they had kept her, and that was why they had beaten her so brutally. It isn’t hard to murder someone without violence. Crispin’s mama had managed just fine when it came to both herself and her father-in-law. Both of them had looked as if they were asleep in bed when we’d found them. Florence had been in no position to reject an injection or any kind of food or drink, so it would have been easy to kill her with no fuss whatsoever. Destroying her face must have meant something to the kidnapper.
Christopher cleared his throat and I came back to myself with a murmured apology.
“What happens now?” Sarah Schlomsky asked. She sounded exhausted, and who could blame her?
“We wait,” Christopher answered. “Crispin is a speed demon, so it won’t take him long to get across the river to Scotland Yard, especially at this time of night. He’ll bring the police here, and they’ll tell us what to do.”
He hesitated for a moment before he added, “I imagine they’ll tell us to go home, and they’ll seal off the crime scene and wait until daylight to start working on it.”
The Schlomskys nodded. So did I. It’s one thing to work through the night when you can see what you’re doing. It’s another thing entirely to try to get anything done in pitch darkness, and when you’re tired anyway, after a long day’s work.
“So we wait,” Hiram said.
Christopher nodded. “We do.”
We waited. Time passed slowly, and it was difficult to stay awake. Not even the presence of the body prevented my eyelids from becoming heavy. We sat down on the stairs between the ground and first floors, and I leaned my head against Christopher’s shoulder and dozed. He leaned his shoulder against the stairway wall and did the same. When the door downstairs opened with a bang, and knocked against the wall in the hallway, we both jumped.
“Upstairs,” someone said, and through the adrenaline spike I recognized Crispin’s voice. “There are no lights on. Or they don’t exist. I’m not sure which.”
A dark figure came into view in the hallway below, followed by another. A torch lit up the dusty floorboards. Then the person in the lead turned onto the stairs and aimed the light up. Christopher and I both squinted into the glare.
“There you are,” a voice said. “Hullo, Kit. Philippa.”
“Tom.” Christopher sounded relieved, or perhaps just pleased and happy. The bright light leached all the color out of his skin, but under normal circumstances, I’m certain I would have seen a tell-tale blush on his cheeks.
“St George filled me in on what has happened.” Tom moved the torch aside so it wasn’t shining directly into our faces anymore, and climbed a few steps towards us with Crispin right behind. He stopped when we were face to face: him standing a few steps below, and us still sitting. “I sent Finch home to get some rest—it’s been a long day—but I’ll secure the crime scene, and then I brought a bobby along to stand guard for the rest of the night.”
“Bristol?” I asked.
