Page 87 of Evil at the Essex House

“She does wear opera gloves most of the time,” I said, thinking back, “with her evening frocks. Although not always, and not with everything. And I’ll admit I never noticed it either.”

I blew out a cloud of smoke, and felt my nerves settle.

Christopher shook his head in agreement. “Thanks, Crispin. No, it’s not the sort of thing you overlook.”

No, it wasn’t. Any more than you could overlook the Mensur scar on Wolfgang’s face.

Crispin dropped the lighter back into his pocket, and we stood in silence a moment and let the nicotine do its job.

“Perhaps she tried to cover it,” I suggested. “With sleeves and gloves if she could, and with makeup if she couldn’t. Maybe that’s why we never noticed.”

Christopher nodded and Crispin shrugged, even as they both looked dissatisfied.

“I know it has been a few days since I saw her,” Crispin said after another moment, “and she has perhaps not been fed a lot in the interim, and the opium may have taken a toll, even in just a few days of smoking it…”

I nodded for him to go on.

“—but did she seem a bit… diminished to you?”

“Smaller, do you mean?”

“Ye-e-e-es,” Crispin said, dragging it out doubtfully. “Just… less, do you know?”

“Less alive, certainly.” I took a drag of my cigarette and blew it out before I continued. “And you’re right: they probably didn’t feed her a lot, just kept her supplied with enough opium that she wouldn’t care. So I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d reduced a bit.”

Crispin nodded. “And her hair… did it seem a bit— well, dull?”

“I didn’t get the impression that they gave her a bath before they gave her back,” I said dryly. “Five days of opium smoke probably didn’t help, either. She was dirty. So was her hair. It’s possible that that’s why it looked limp and duller than usual.”

Although I had noticed the same thing, so I couldn’t say that he was wrong.

“What are you suggesting?” Christopher wanted to know, looking from one to the other of us. “That it wasn’t Flossie?”

“Of course it was Flossie,” I said. “Her mother identified her.”

“From a scar neither of us have seen before.”

There was a beat. Then?—

“Why would her mother lie?” And if the dead girl wasn’t Flossie, who was she?

“Insurance reasons?” Crispin suggested. “Perhaps there’s some sort of payout on the ransom?”

“Perhaps. So how would that work? Hiram comes to London and kidnaps his own daughter?” Having gotten the idea from the attempted kidnapping a year and a half ago in New York, perhaps?

“Perhaps,” Crispin agreed. “Then he sends a ransom demand to himself. He puts the money in the valise and drops off the valise, but he also gets the driver to pick up the valise again, and then he puts in a claim with his insurance company.”

“But he’s already a millionaire,” Christopher pointed out. “Is he really going to break the law and put his own daughter in danger for a measly fifty thousand dollars?”

“In this scenario, his daughter wasn’t in danger. She was in on it.”

“And the dead girl is…?”

“Some random waif they picked up off the street?” Crispin suggested. “Someone with a surface resemblance to Florence who would be happy to spend a few days in a Southwark flop with as much free dope as she could smoke or sniff or otherwise use?”

“Or perhaps it’s Ruth,” I said. “The missing maid. She has to be somewhere, after all, and if Flossie’s in on it, maybe they decided to murder the maid. Maybe the whole thing was a setup from the start.”

There was a pause.