Page 60 of Peril in Piccadilly
“Do you think that he might have done something to Kit?”
“I don’t know what I think,” I said. “All I know is that Christopher was supposed to follow Wolfgang this afternoon. That’s what we planned. Although I didn’t see him after I stepped into Sweetings. Something might have happened while I was inside the restaurant, and he might have left by the time we came out again. Perhaps he met a friend and went with him instead of waiting around.”
Given our plans and his own curiosity about Wolfgang, it didn’t seem likely, but again, it wasn’t impossible.
Crispin hummed. “What else?”
“I left a message for Tom at Scotland Yard. He has access to resources I don’t. Like the morgue and today’s arrest records.”
“Do you think someone arrested Kit?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said again, “but he was a young man dressed in women’s clothes walking through London in broad daylight. It’s possible.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
I couldn’t think of anything. “If you were in London I’d ask you to come by and distract me, but since you’re not…”
“I could be in London in a couple of hours.”
“Not on my account,” I said. “I’m going to bed and hopefully forgetting about all of this until tomorrow.”
The smirk returned to his voice. “I could go to bed, too.”
And there it was again. One of those innuendos that I had never taken seriously and that I now had to wonder how he meant.
“Not with me,” I said. “You’re engaged to Laetitia, remember? No fooling around for you.”
“What Laetitia doesn’t know?—”
“She’d know,” I said. “And then she’d kill you.” Or more likely me.
“Why, Darling, I didn’t know you cared!”
I sighed. “Go to bed, St George. I’ll have Christopher ring you up when he gets home. That way you won’t have to worry.”
“And if he’s not home by tomorrow morning?”
“Then I’ll ring you up again myself,” I said.
“Good enough. Sleep well, Darling.”
“You too,” I told him, and headed back up the pavement towards home.
ChapterFourteen
I didn’t sleep well,of course. Not only because I was on the Chesterfield, for the second time in a week—I didn’t want to be too far from the front door in case someone/Christopher arrived in the middle of the night—but also because I kept being visited by bad dreams. I was running through the fog—it’s always foggy in such dreams, and Britain is so often foggy in life, too—and I could see Christopher ahead of me, but I couldn’t catch up to him. Or I caught up and reached out, but the blond that I had thought was my cousin turned out to be Crispin or Wolfgang instead. Or someone else, someone entirely unrelated to the current situation. Once, he was Ronnie Blanton, a blond chap whom Crispin knew, whom I hadn’t seen since early June. Once, ‘he’ was even Lady Violet Cummings, wearing her mother’s sapphire and emerald peacock brooch.
But the point is that I didn’t sleep well. I kept starting awake every hour or so. By the time the knock on the door finally came, in the wee hours of the morning just before dawn, I dragged myself off the sofa and staggered, half-awake, across the foyer, where I fumbled the locks open and pulled on the door. Outside stood a familiar figure in tweed, blond hair gleaming under the electric lights in the hallway, and I pulled him inside the flat with a sob and flung myself into his arms.
It was only once I was there, rubbing my cheek against itchy tweed—tweed that was slowly turning moist from the tears leaking out of my eyes—that I realized I had made a mistake. Christopher had left the house wearing my clothes yesterday afternoon; he wouldn’t return in a well-cut tweed suit that looked like it had been made for him. He owned a tweed suit that had been made for him, but it was still hanging in the wardrobe in his room. And aside from that, Christopher doesn’t smell like fresh starch and expensive tobacco and petrol. His scent is lighter and fruitier, especially when he’s dressed as Kitty.
By then, a pair of arms had gone around me too, and I was being held tightly against a lean body. Tightly enough that he had no problem feeling my reaction once I caught on to the fact that this wasn’t Christopher’s shoulder I was sobbing on.
A second passed while his grip tightened, and then he dropped his arms and stepped back. “Good morning, Darling.”
I did the same, flushing to the tips of my ears. “St George. I’m sorry, I was half asleep and I thought?—”
“I know what you thought. No reason to spell it out.” He glanced around. “He isn’t home, then?”
