Page 93 of Evil at the Essex House
“Anything?” Sarah wanted to know.
I shook my head. “The motorcar looks like the one from last night. But there’s nobody in it. And no money.”
“Money?” Wolfgang repeated.
“Fifty thousand dollars in ransom.”
His eyes widened, but I waved the explanation off before he could ask. “The bloke who picked it up must have taken it inside the house. Or more likely taken it with him when he left. They must have had another motorcar waiting, I suppose. This one was used to transport poor Flossie, so they left it behind.”
A shadow passed across Sarah’s face at the reminder, and I wished I’d kept myself from rambling my thoughts out loud. To distract from having stuffed my foot in my mouth, I opened it again. “I wonder whether they left any clues inside.”
We all turned to look at the back door of the cottage.
ChapterTwenty-One
I’ll be honest,I fully expected the Thornton Heath cottage to be empty. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t be. These people had kidnapped a woman, had kept her locked up for ten months (or at least I thought they had), had turned her into an opium addict to keep her contained and quiet, and had extorted the best part of fifty thousand dollars from her father before murdering her in cold blood. (Extremely cold.) There was no logical reason why they would still be here, especially considering that it was the Schlomskys who had footed the bill for the cottage, and they could reasonably be expected to think of its existence at some point.
As a result, I had no qualms whatsoever about walking over to the back door and wrapping my hand around the knob and twisting. And when the door didn’t budge, I also had no qualms about trying to come up with another way to break in. Perhaps there was an open window somewhere, that we—or that one of us; me, for preference—could climb through to get inside.
I stepped back and peered at the back of the house. If I had to slither in through a window, it would be safer to do it back here. There were no neighbors in sight—really, whoever had picked the cottage had done an outstanding job of finding an isolated, private place—and while the street out front seemed pretty quiet on a Sunday afternoon, it was still a street, and someone might come along it. Not to mention that the Hackney driver was still sitting out there, waiting for us to finish our business at the cottage.
No, if I was going to break and enter, it was much safer to do it back here.
“Boards on the window up there,” Hiram muttered, gesturing to one of the first floor windows.
I followed the direction of his finger to the upper story, and nodded. Yes, indeed. Someone had nailed a lot of boards across the window from one edge of the frame to the other, probably sometime in the last year. Approximately ten months ago, I’d say.
“That must be where…”
I stopped without finishing the sentence. There was no need, after all. Hiram and Sarah could figure it out for themselves as easily as I could. If this was where Flossie—the real Flossie—had been kept prisoner since she arrived on English soil, that must be the room she had been kept in.
Sarah’s eyes burned as she looked at the boards, jaw tight, while Hiram’s hand clenched around his cane until his knuckles were white. I didn’t envy the kidnappers whenever he came face to face with them.
“There’s an open cellar window,” Wolfgang pointed, and we all turned our attention to it.
Well, that solved the problem of who was going to go inside the house first, anyway. Not that anyone had discussed it so far, but I fully expected Wolfgang to put up a fight if I suggested that I go. Christopher would have fought, and so would Crispin have.
In this case there was no need. The window was small, and sunk below ground, into a narrow well lined with the same brick as the house itself. Hiram and Sarah were both too rotund to fit, and there was no way Wolfgang’s shoulders would make it through. It would have to be me.
“Lower me down,” I said, heading towards it.
“Absolutely not,” Wolfgang answered.
I looked at him over my shoulder. “None of the rest of you will fit. It’ll have to be me.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry,FreuleinDarling, but I will not send you into the house by yourself. What if someone is there?”
“No one will be there. They would have to be stupid to still be here.” I stopped in front of the window well, expectantly.
Wolfgang shook his head. “No.”
“Fine.” I crouched down on the edge. “I’ll do it myself.”
“I’ll open the back door,” Wolfgang said.
I peered at him, my heart sinking. Had I misunderstood something, and he wasn’t one of the heroes? The man in the cap last night… could it have been Wolfgang? Had he made our acquaintance that day at the Savoy because he knew Christopher and I lived down the hall from Flossie—the fake Flossie—and he wanted to find out what we knew?
“What do you…” I began, and changed it in favor of, “do you have a key?”
