Page 80 of Peril in Piccadilly
Wolfgang had arrived before me,and was already in the restaurant when I stepped up to the maître d’s podium. The gentleman—different from the other day—escorted me to the table, where Wolfgang jumped up from his chair to pull out mine. The maître d’ withdrew and Wolfgang sat back down.
“New chap today,” I commented, with a glance at the retreating back of the maître d’. Wolfgang, too, shot a look in that direction and made a vague sort of noise. “Something wrong?” I added.
He shook his head and turned his attention back to me. “Not at all. I can’t say that I noticed.”
“That the maître d’ is someone different from last time? They look totally different from one another.”
“Two men with black hair in evening kit?” Wolfgang said, so at least he had noticed that much.
“This one is ten years older, and several inches taller, and swarthier, and has bigger ears. The other chap had a noticeable overbite.”
He stared at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t help it that I’m observant.”
He nodded, but his eyes on me were concerned. “Is everything all right,mein Schatz?”
“No,” I said, getting right to it. “Christopher didn’t come home last night, and I’m worried.”
There was no reason to hold back, after all. The sooner I could get it out in the open, the sooner I would see his reaction, and if he wasn’t involved, well… it was topmost of mind and if he had been anyone else, it would still have been the first thing I would have wanted to talk about.
“Dear me,” Wolfgang said. His lips gave a twitch, which might have been a sign of guilt, if he knew more than I did and he thought my reaction was funny. Or it might simply be that I was behaving like a madwoman and he didn’t want to express what had originally occurred to him. I probably didn’t sound like someone who wanted to listen to reason.
“He escorted me to Sweetings,” I added. “I walked inside to meet you, and he went off on his own. And now he hasn’t been home in more than twenty-four hours. I don’t know what to do.”
My voice was becoming increasingly uneven. The waiter, who had been on his way towards our table, veered off in the other direction at the sound of it, and who could blame him? He probably assumed I was about to break down in tears at any moment.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Wolfgang said. “I like your cousin.”
“So do I.” He used present tense, and I wondered whether that meant anything. It might, if he knew something I didn’t. Then again, it might not.
“But he’s a man grown, Philippa,” Wolfgang added. “Are you certain he didn’t simply meet a friend and go home with him?”
He said ‘him,’ which might indicate that he knew in which direction Christopher’s interests lay. If he had seen Christopher dressed up as Kitty yesterday, he might have drawn that conclusion from it. Then again, I didn’t think it proved anything. I might have said something about Christopher’s proclivities at some point. It isn’t something I tend to blab indiscriminately about, but Wolfgang had been around both of us for long enough that I might have let something slip.
“That’s what I thought when he didn’t come home last night,” I said, without commenting on the pronoun. It might simply have meant a friend of the same gender and platonic variety, after all. “But he wouldn’t have stayed out all night without letting me know where he was. And he certainly would have been home this morning.”
“Perhaps the police…?”
The waiter made his approach again, and Wolfgang waved him off.
I snorted. Not in response to the waiter veering off for the second time, but to the idea that the police—the regular police, not Tom—might be of any use in this situation. And not only because they’d be honor-bound to arrest Christopher if they found him wandering around London in my skirt and high heels.
“Do you suppose the police would take me seriously if I told them that my flat-mate—my twenty-three year old, male flat-mate, who is cousin to the notorious playboy Crispin St George—didn’t come home last night?”
Wolfgang didn’t answer, and I continued, “In the best case scenario, they would laugh me out the door. In the worst, they would think it was entirely deserved and that he brought it on himself. Either way, they would do nothing to look for him.”
At this point, the waiter was back, and was hovering anxiously. Wolfgang beckoned him closer. We ordered a drink and an appetizer, and the waiter withdrew.
“So you haven’t involved the police,” Wolfgang said.
It sounded more like a statement than a question, but I shook my head anyway. It probably wasn’t indicative of anything at all that he seemingly wanted to make sure of this point. “No.”
“Not even your friend, Detective Sergeant Gardiner?”
“I contacted Tom last night,” I said, “to see whether he knew where Christopher was. He didn’t.”
“And he’s not investigating?”
