Page 45 of Peril in Piccadilly
“That’s enough time to find a Hackney and get here,” Christopher said. “We managed.”
I supposed we had. “And what would be his reason for wanting to kill me today? We made up about Germany. He spent half of lunch telling me aboutSchlossNatterdorff.”
“Jealousy?” Christopher suggested. “Perhaps he thought you and Tom were out together?”
“Surely he can’t have missed how Tom dotes on you?”
“I wasn’t there,” Christopher said. When I opened my mouth to protest, because he certainly had been there, he added, “As myself, I mean. Your fiancé called me Lady Laetitia.”
“You do look quite a lot like her when you’re dressed up as Kitty. It’s the hair, I suppose—same Dutch Boy cut, even if yours is a wig—and you both have blue eyes. You’re a bit taller, an inch or two, perhaps…”
“But I was sitting down,” Christopher said, “and in the back of the motorcar, in the dark.”
I nodded. “He did seem to think you were she.” Although there had been a double-take at one point, a moment’s doubt, perhaps when Christopher spoke. He didn’t sound like a woman, no matter how much he could make himself look like one.
“Or if he didn’t,” I added, “at least he didn’t look at you closely enough to actually recognize you.”
“He had opportunity, at any rate,” Christopher said. “He could have flagged down a Hackney and followed us here, and made it by the time we were crossing the street. Anyone else—as long as it wasn’t simply a homicidal cabbie—would have had to lie in wait for us to come home.”
“That seems like a lot of trouble to go to for no reason. But I suppose it’s possible. Who else do you suspect?”
“Laetitia?” Christopher suggested. “She was near Piccadilly yesterday, as well.”
She had been. But— “I think Crispin would have noticed had she up and left the table to run across the street to push me down the steps to the underground, don’t you? He said she hadn’t done. Besides, aren’t they back in Dorset by now?”
Christopher shrugged. “I assume so. I don’t actually know where they are. I haven’t phoned to make certain that’s where they went.”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t Crispin’s H6 that ran us down,” I said.
He shook his head. “Of course not. Crispin would never.”
“If he took her to Dorset, she wouldn’t have had time to get back to London.”
“Perhaps they didn’t leave,” Christopher said. “Perhaps they simply dropped us off here this morning, and went to Sutherland House, and now Laetitia is there or back in Marsden House.”
Perhaps. It hadn’t been Christopher at the Savoy during tea, but it might have been Crispin.
“Anything’s possible,” Christopher agreed. “Although I didn’t ring him up to tell him you were seeing Wolfgang today. I assumed he was in Dorset, or perhaps Wiltshire, and at this point it’s really only rubbing salt in the wound, isn’t it, when there’s nothing he can do about it. But I suppose it might have been him.”
Laetitia stayed on the list, then, if they were both in London. Although?—
“Why would Laetitia want to be rid of me? Even if he is in love with me—ugh—she’s the one who’s marrying him. Why does it matter how he feels, or whether I’m still alive?”
Christopher looked at me. “Would you want to marry someone who was in love with someone else?”
“Of course not. But she knew that when she accepted him. She has known it for a while, I think.”
Some of the things I had overheard back in May, during a conversation at the Dower House, made a lot more sense in that light.
“Be that as it may,” Christopher said, “I’m sure she’d like it better if he loved her more and you less. And one way to accomplish that is to get rid of you.”
I suppose. But— “Killing me seems needlessly risky. Marrying me off to Wolfgang and sending me to Germany would probably be enough to accomplish the same thing. Besides, it’s not as if she won’t have to deal with other women after they’re married. If he doesn’t love her, there’s no chance he’ll remain faithful.”
“Her problem,” Christopher said with a shrug, “not ours.”
I tilted my head to contemplate him. “That’s rather callous, isn’t it?”
“If she pushed you down the stairs and tried to run you over with a Hackney cab? And we still don’t know who took that potshot at you from the woods during the hunt last month, either, remember? It might have been her. She was out there in the woods with a rifle. So no, I don’t think it’s particularly callous at all.”
