Page 92 of Evil at the Essex House
The house was smallish and in no way ostentatious, situated on the edge of town with no close neighbors. It was also about as far from a picturesque country cottage as one could get. A detached two stories of red brick, square and blocky, with no more than two rooms up and two down, at a guess. There wasn’t a flower in sight, but plenty of weeds.
Whoever had chosen this house, and had chosen to live here, didn’t seem like it could be the same person who had chosen, and chosen to live in, the Essex House Mansion flat.
“The windows are dirty,” Sarah said with a grimace.
I nodded. “If this is Ruth’s house, she’s been falling down on the job.”
“I always suspected she was lazy,” Sarah said. Her eyes burned as she looked at the house. “Do you think this is where they kept my daughter?”
“They didn’t keep her in the house in Southwark. Not long-term.” Not enough furniture, no running water.
No, the mews in Southwark seemed more like somewhere where they had gone to dump the body. They must have taken Flossie from here and driven her there on the day of the murder—yesterday—and then killed her and left her for us to find.
“There’s a garage in the back,” Hiram pointed out.
So there was. Small and dilapidated, with a few roofing tiles missing, but a garage, built with the same red bricks as the house. And with enough room to store an Austin Heavy Twelve-Four, should someone want to.
“I’ll go peek inside,” I said.
Sarah squinted at me. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“I sincerely doubt they’re here,” I said. “After last night, surely they’re halfway to Calais by now.”
That’s what I would have done. Picked up the money, packed up anything important—not necessarily in that order—and made tracks. Not only did they have kidnapping on their record now, but they had murder, as well. Whether that had been a facet of the plan from the beginning or not, it was done now, and the best they could do for themselves was get as far away from here as they could, as quickly as possible.
“We’ll both go,” Wolfgang said. He got out of the Hackney first, and then held the door for me.
“They’re more likely to see us if there are two of us,” I pointed out.
He gave me a look, and it was obvious that he wasn’t going to relent, so I gave up on trying to talk him out of it and headed down the narrow drive that ran along the side of the small house to the smaller garage.
As it turned out, there were no windows on this side of the house, so there was no danger that we’d be seen by anyone inside. And the nearest neighbor was far enough away, and well enough hidden by overgrown hedges and untrimmed bushes, that discovery was unlikely from that angle, as well. I walked down the drive as unconcernedly as I would along Essex Street on a sunny afternoon, with Wolfgang right behind.
“Careful,” he muttered when we reached the small garage. “Let me.”
The small building had a pair of dilapidated doors in dire need of paint, inset with a row of windows at the top. I wasn’t quite tall enough to look through them, and while Christopher would have lifted me—and Crispin likely would have too, all the while grumbling about having to get on his knees in front of me—Wolfgang stepped up on his own tiptoes and peered through the dirty glass on my behalf.
“A motorcar,” he said after a moment’s perusal.
“Like a Hackney?”
“Hmm.” Wolfgang glanced over his shoulder at it. “Perhaps.”
“Try the handle.”
I took a step closer as he grasped it and turned. The door into the garage opened, and I got a glimpse of one headlamp and the front grille of a black Austin before I nudged Wolfgang out of the way.
He attempted to get in front of me, but I slipped around him. “We must make certain there’s no one inside.”
I stepped into the darkness of the musty garage, and felt a shiver of revulsion slither down my spine. This felt too much like last night for comfort.
The garage was empty, however. Or not empty: there was the motorcar, and scraps of wood, and other tools, and old oil cans, and spare tires… but no one was in the car, dead or alive. Whoever the killer was—and my money was on the chap in the cap who had driven the car yesterday—he hadn’t seen fit to murder anyone else in the past few hours.
Or at least, if he had, he hadn’t left them in the garage.
There was no valise in the motorcar. I did make certain of that. There was no bloody tire iron, either. Or a bloody wrench or anything else that could have served as the murder weapon.
By the time I came back out in the drive after peering through all the windows of the Austin, Hiram and Sarah had emerged from the Hackney, too, and had joined us.
