Page 90 of Evil at the Essex House
“The maid?”
Of course the maid. “You said she came to London with Flossie, correct?”
“She came over two weeks before Florence,” Sarah corrected. “Someone had to be here to get things set up. We sent Ruth.”
“And she was the one who contracted for the flat and arranged the furnishings?”
Sarah nodded. “Here and at the cottage in Thornton Heath.”
“The…?”
“Cottage in Thornton Heath,” Sarah repeated. “A country cottage. A chance to get out of the city to somewhere more pleasant.” She smiled. “Ivy Cottage in Thornton Heath. It sounds rustic and peaceful, doesn’t it?”
First of all, the Flossie I had known—not Flossie at all, as I now suspected—would have had no desire to get out of the city to the country. And secondly, no matter how rustic and peaceful it may have sounded?—
“Thornton Heath is less than eight miles from Charing Cross,” I said. And it was closer than that to Tooley Street and to the shack in Southwark. Someone could probably get from Southwark to Thornton Heath in twenty minutes after midnight on a Saturday.
If Flossie’s parents had been paying for a cottage in Thornton Heath, it wasn’t so Flossie—or the person pretending to be Flossie—could have a place in which to weekend. Nobody weekends in Thornton Heath. Sarah was probably imagining Dartmoor andWuthering Heightsor somewhere else equally picturesque, while in actuality, we were talking about a small town just south of London proper.
I hadn’t seen any indication of rent for a cottage in Thornton Heath the other day, when Christopher and I had gone through the flat and all of Flossie’s belongings with a fine toothed comb. No mentions of it, nor any paperwork related to it. That seemed a bit suspicious, if Sarah and Hiram had been paying for the place.
“Did you go visit the cottage this week?” I asked. “To check if Flossie was there, maybe?”
Sarah shook her head. “I had no idea it was so close to London. Florence and Ruth called it a country cottage in their letters. I assumed that it was… well, in the country.”
Of course. “Flossie—the woman I thought was Flossie—never mentioned a cottage.” I thought for a moment. Flossie—my Flossie, whoever she really was—had lived here, at the Essex House Mansions. I hadn’t seen her every day, but I had seen her enough that I knew that she rarely spent time anywhere else. And this was clearly an occupied flat we were standing in, not a place someone spent a minority of their time. “You’re certain the letters were from your daughter?”
“I know my daughter’s hand,” Sarah said, and she was undoubtedly right. Besides, if the girl in the morgue had been the real Florence, she had been alive until sometime last night. She would have been able to write letters to her mother.
Whether she had been in charge of what went into them, was a totally different story.
“Ruth also wrote to you?”
She nodded. “To keep us updated on things that were going on with Florence, you know. And the household expenses and such.”
Ruth was in on the deception, then. Not that this whole thing could have been effected without her, really, but she would have had to have been, if the Schlomskys had heard from her throughout the past year.
“You never described Ruth,” I said.
“Ruth?” She sounded confused.
“The maid. What does she look like? Or did, the last time you saw her?” If Flossie—the real Flossie—was the body in the morgue, she had spent her time in England somewhere other than here. But someone else had been spending her time here, pretending to be Flossie Schlomsky. That someone might have been Ruth.
“Short,” Sarah said promptly, “and skinny, with a plain face and dishwater blond hair. It was long last time I saw her—I don’t hold with bobbed hair on the servants; I much prefer a neat bun—but I suppose she might have changed that by now.”
Something buzzed quickly into my head, but buzzed equally quickly out the other side. I decided not to try to chase it down. We were in the middle of an important conversation. “But she’s definitely not a brunette?”
Sarah shook her head. “Definitely not. Dirty blond.”
Not the woman I had known as Flossie, then. She had been neither short nor skinny, and she definitely hadn’t been a blonde, even a dirty one.
“Someone should go to Thornton Heath,” I said.
Sarah looked at me.
“It’s only a half hour away. And I should send a message to Tom. He’s probably back at Scotland Yard by now.”
They must be finished with the crime scene in Southwark, surely. It had been hours and hours since they began work on it. A couple of hours since we left the morgue and headed home, too. Enough of them for Crispin to have made it to Wiltshire, or at least somewhere close.
