Page 93 of Peril in Piccadilly
“Kit?” He looked brighter for a moment, before he must have thought it through. “They’re in prison, aren’t they? The people who took Flossie? So how would Kit end up there?”
“Wolfgang was there,” I said. “When Mrs. Schlomsky remembered that she and Hiram had agreed to pay for a ‘country cottage’ in Thornton Heath?—”
Crispin snorted, since Thornton Heath is about as far from a picturesque country cottage as one can get.
I nodded “Precisely. But when we went to the Savoy to pick up Hiram, Wolfgang was there. And I invited him along.”
Or perhaps he had invited himself along; I couldn’t recall at this point how the conversation had gone. It had been during the time that he had been ingratiating himself with me, before he started shooting at me and trying to run me over, so he might have been playing nice.
“It was quite helpful having him,” I added, begrudgingly, “seeing as all three of the kidnappers were there when we arrived.”
“But he’d been there. So he knew where it was located.”
“And he would have known that it was sitting empty, since the Schlomskys had paid for its use, but all the occupants were either dead or headed to prison.”
A shadow crossed his face at the thought of Flossie’s murder, but it cleared a moment later, and he yanked on the gearshift. “We should certainly take a look, then. Although it can wait until we’ve had some rest, I suppose. And perhaps when Gardiner is available to come with us.”
“I’ve had plenty of rest,” I said. “All I’ve done since we left London, is sleep. You’re the one who has gone the past two nights on no sleep at all.”
“It’s not as if I’ve never done that before, Darling.”
No, of course it wasn’t. He and his cohorts in the Society for Bright Young Persons frequently pull all-nighters of wild parties and treasure hunts across London.
“If you’ll allow me to drive,” I said, “you could take a nap?—”
He stared at me, and the H6 veered dangerously to the right. “Over my dead body.”
“That could be arranged,” I said. And quite easily, if he didn’t keep his attention on the road.”
“You wouldn’t.”
I sniffed. “Of course I wouldn’t. You’re a constant thorn in my side, St George, but I’m not going to murder you. You’re about to run off the road.”
“Oops.” He adjusted the wheel. “Be that as it may, you are not getting behind the wheel of my motorcar.”
“I’m in better condition than you are. I wasn’t the one who almost had an accident.”
“I’ll be fine.” He peered out through the windshield, into the darkness beyond. “The sun will be up soon. That’ll help.”
“Fine,” I said. “But if you kill us on the way there, I’ll never forgive you.”
“No worries, Darling. I’m used to this. It’ll take more than a few nights of less-than-stellar sleep to impair my abilities.”
“If you say so. Although I’m keeping my eye on you. And at the first sign of drooping eyelids, I’m going to pinch you. Hard.”
“Of course, Darling.” He flashed me a grin. “No more or less than I would expect.”
“To Thornton Heath, then. The sooner we find Christopher, the better.”
I settled back into my seat for the drive to London.
ChapterTwenty-One
“There it is,”I said, some two-and-a-half hours later.
The sun was up by then, but of course we had been headed west, so it had been at our backs the entire way. And Crispin was right: he had been just fine. His eyes were a bit red, but there had been no sign of drooping eyelids, nor even a yawn, and I had had no excuse for pinching him.
Not that I felt particularly like pinching him at the moment. He had been rather wonderful, both yesterday and so far today. More so than I would have expected, given the source. We were back to bickering, of course, just as he had predicted, but he hadn’t been unkind, and also hadn’t twitted me too terribly about being taken in by a murderer, or at least by a kidnapper, since there was no reason to think that Wolfgang had murdered anyone. He had perhaps tried to murder me, but then again, perhaps not. The shot at Marsden Manor might not have been intended to hit anyone, and the fall down the stairs to the tube wasn’t likely to have been fatal. And the Hackney that had come so close to clipping Christopher and myself in the street the other night… well, it hadn’t actually hit us, had it? Nor had there been actual poison in my coffee last night, so perhaps there hadn’t been anything worse than sleeping draught in the tea the other day, either. And the dose in the coffee had been small enough to allow me to wake up after just a few hours, so it clearly hadn’t been an attempt on my life. Perhaps not even on my virtue.
