Page 22 of Evil at the Essex House (Pippa Darling Mysteries #5)
When no one else spoke up—Sarah being busy with Hiram and Hiram being busy being attended to, and Wolfgang perhaps uncertain about the legality of his use of a sword cane—I took it upon myself to respond.
“You received the message we left, so you know what we’re doing here.”
Tom nodded. “Mrs. Schlomsky told you that Florence had a country cottage, and you decided to visit it.”
“She was never gone from the Essex House Mansions for any length of time,” I explained, “so I knew she didn’t spend any time in it. Besides, nobody who wanted a country cottage to get away from London would take one here.”
Tom nodded. “And of course, now we know that the woman you knew wasn’t Florence Schlomsky at all.”
Yes, we did. My eyes fastened on the brunette clutching her arm on the floor, and so did everyone else’s.
“Name?” Tom wanted to know. And added, “Actually, let me give you mine first, so there’s no question about what’s going on here. I’m Detective Sergeant Thomas Gardiner with Scotland Yard, and this is Detective Sergeant Ian Finchley.”
There was a pause when nobody said anything but when I could clearly hear confidence levels dropping all over the room. They’d been caught, fair and square, and by the authorities, and the game was over. There was no talking their way out of this.
“You are…?” Tom prompted.
“The blonde’s name is Ruth,” I said, when no answer was immediately forthcoming from anyone. “She was the Schlomsky’s maid, whom they sent to England ahead of Florence to get everything ready for Flossie’s arrival. And I heard her call the… um… the gentleman over there Sid.”
Tom looked at him. And waited.
“Sidney Hodge,” Sid said eventually, reluctantly.
“Thank you, Mr. Hodge. And when did you make this lady’s acquaintance?”
Sid shot Ruth a look. If she had hoped that he would do something gentlemanly, something to protect her, she must have been disappointed, because he was quick to answer and made no attempt to soften the blow. “September of last year.”
“Where?”
“My mother’s auntie runs a lodging house in Putney,” Sid said.
“And Miss Ruth stayed there?”
Sid flicked another glance at her. “She took the train up from Southampton to Waterloo station. Aunt Liz told me to go fetch her off the train. She was trying to make a good impression on the American millionaire, I suppose.”
This time, the glance was at Hiram.
“You disapprove of Americans?” Tom asked gently, since Sid’s voice, and the look he had leveled on Hiram, had certainly indicated something of that nature. “Or perhaps you disapprove of millionaires?”
“Well, it isn’t fair,” Sid said, “is it? That he should have so much, and so many of us have so little?”
There was nothing that could be said to that, since he was right. Or at least he was right as far as people like Crispin and Uncle Harold were concerned. People with inherited wealth, enough of it that nothing will ever be an issue for them, while so many people go without.
Although at least Hiram had worked for his money, as far as I understood it.
The millionaire didn’t say anything in his defense, however, and Tom turned back to Sid. “So you fetched Miss Ruth at Waterloo. And took her back to your aunt’s boarding house?”
Sid nodded. “Her and her friend.”
“Her friend.” All of our attention switched to the brunette next to Ruth on the floor.
“Myrtle Cavanaugh,” she said, in Flossie’s strident American accent. And unlike Ruth’s tears and Sid’s anger, there was defiance on her face, and no regret whatsoever. Not even regret over having been caught, although I suppose that must have been there, deep down.
“Miss Cavanaugh.” Tom eyed her. “You met Miss Ruth on the boat? Or did you already know each other before that?”
“We met on ship,” Flossie—Myrtle; and it was going to take me a moment to get used to that—said. “We were cabin-mates.”
She leveled an unimpressed look at Hiram and Sarah. “All that money, and they couldn’t even be bothered to pay for a private room for their servant to travel all the way to England. Had to throw her in with a stranger to save a few dollars instead.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Tom cleared his throat.
“So you met on the boat. And when you arrived in England, you took lodgings at the same boarding house?”
“By then, we had already fixed on a plan,” Myrtle said.
“A plan for what?”
Ruth whimpered, and Myrtle glanced at her, but pushed ahead with what she was going to say even in the face of Ruth’s distress. “A plan for getting the heiress out of the way once she got to London, and for having me take her place.”
She smirked suddenly, in the direction of Hiram and Sarah. “I look a bit like her, don’t I? Ruth said that I do.”
The comment, not to mention the smile, was frankly shocking, a bit like a punch to the stomach, and it was no wonder that Hiram and Sarah both looked as if they had been slapped across the face.
“Evil,” Christopher murmured beside me, and I nodded. Definitely evil.
Tom cleared his throat. “So you made a plan for what to do when Miss Schlomsky arrived in England. What did the plan entail?”
Myrtle flicked a glance at Ruth, or perhaps at Sid, or at both of them. “We made arrangements for the apartment in London and the cottage.” She looked around at the dining room, indicating the space she was sitting in. “Sid nailed up the boards over the window on the second floor. When the heiress arrived in Southampton, Sid and Ruth drove all the way there to fetch her.”
She snorted. “No train trip to London for the heiress. She was to be fetched directly off the ship.”
Well, of course she was. It was understandable that Sarah and Hiram wanted Florence taken care of in every way they could, in a foreign country and among people who might not wish her well.
But at the same time, yes, I could see Myrtle’s point.
“So Mr. Hodge and Ruth picked Miss Schlomsky up in Southampton,” Tom prodded, and Myrtle nodded.
“They brought her here and we locked her in the room upstairs. Sid made sure she had enough opium and other dope to keep her quiet and happy. I moved into the apartment in Town, and we started to use the money. Every month or so, we made her write her parents a letter so they wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong.”
Tom glanced at Hiram and Sarah, a question in his eyes.
Sarah shook her head. “No. We didn’t suspect anything. It was my daughter’s handwriting, and there was no reason to believe she wasn’t telling the truth about what she was doing. We believed she and Ruth lived together in an apartment in London, and that they had a little cottage they went to on the weekends sometimes. If I had had any idea…”
She trailed off, mouth flattening. Myrtle, damn her, tittered.
“And this went on for eight months,” Tom asked, “with no problems?”
Myrtle shook her head. “Sid and Ruth kept the heiress contained. Sid got his motorcar and enough money that he didn’t have to work for a living. Ruth got to play house with Sid. I got the apartment in London and whatever else I wanted?—”
“And all you had to do was keep one girl imprisoned,” I muttered.
She heard me, and gave me a glare and a toss of her head. “It’s not like you’ve got any room to talk, Miss High and Mighty. You’re living off your cousin’s money, with your eye on the rest of the fortune, aren’t you?”
Oh, was I?
“That’s ridiculous—” I began, but then Christopher growled, and a second later, so did Wolfgang.
The latter took a step forward, and Myrtle rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. I have no idea who you think you are, but?—”
“I,” Wolfgang said coldly, “am Graf Wolfgang Ulrich Albrecht von und zu Natterdorff?—”
“Sure you are,” Myrtle said.
“He really is,” Christopher told her, “and as for Pippa living off our money, of course she is. She’s family!”
“But I have no designs on the title or fortune.”
Nobody said anything, and I added, “Tell her, Christopher. Tell her that I have no designs on St George or his money.”
Christopher rolled his eyes. “Of course you don’t, Pippa.”
Myrtle rolled her eyes, too. “Could have fooled me.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I only took him away from you because it’s inappropriate for an unmarried young lady to be snogging an unmarried gentleman in the lift.”
Sarah made a distraught little moan, and Myrtle snorted. “Considering that particular gentleman’s reputation, kissing a woman in an elevator is hardly the worst thing he’s been accused of.”
“Fine,” I said. “I took him away from you because none of us wanted him involved with you. Even when we thought you were American heiress Florence Schlomsky, you weren’t good enough for him. You were cheap and common and ill-mannered then, too, even when we thought you had money.”
“But you believed me!” Myrtle said triumphantly. “You believed I was an American heiress.”
I could hardly deny that, much as I would like to.
“Only because you were American,” I told her bitterly. “Everyone knows that Americans are—” I hesitated, “different.”
“But I fooled you.” She sat back with a smirk. “I fooled all of you.”
“Until this weekend,” Tom said. “What happened?”
Myrtle scowled. “The telegram arrived. Miss High and Mighty Darling over there delivered it. You always have to stick your nose into other people’s business, don’t you?”
“I was doing Evans a favor,” I protested, “bringing it upstairs so he didn’t have to.”
She snorted. “So you weren’t interested in what was in it?”
Of course I had been. Although there was no part of me that wanted to admit that.
“So the telegram arrived,” Tom prompted when I didn’t say anything, “from Miss Schlomsky’s parents, informing you that they had arrived in England and would be in London in a day’s time.”
Myrtle nodded, and shot them a resentful glance. “No warning, nothing. No ‘dear daughter, we are thinking of coming to visit.’ One day, they were just there. On English soil, a few hours away, and threatening to destroy everything we’d worked for for almost a year.”
Everything they had worked for? It didn’t seem to me that there had been much honest work involved, but what did I know? I arched my brows at Christopher, who arched his right back. Ruth sniffled.
“What did you do?” Tom wanted to know.
“Rang up Sid,” Myrtle said, with a glance at him, “and had him fetch me, and then we spent the rest of the night figuring out what to do about it.”
“And the plan you came up with involved a false kidnapping, a ransom, and murder?”
“Well, we couldn’t let them show up and see me pretending to be Flossie, could we?” Myrtle asked. “And we couldn’t show them the real Flossie, either. So we had to come up with a reason why their daughter couldn’t be there to meet them.”
And they had settled on kidnapping. Which made a horrible sort of sense in the scheme of it.
It also explained a few things that had bothered me.
“So on Wednesday night, when Crispin dropped you off on the Strand…”
Myrtle smirked. “I walked across the street to Charing Cross and boarded a train for Thornton Heath.”
Of course she had done. Nobody had dragged her forcibly off the street and into a motorcar. She had simply walked away on her own two feet.
“And last night?” Tom asked.
Myrtle eyed him. “We loaded up the heiress and took her to the house in Southwark?—”
“How did you know about that?”
“Sid grew up around there,” Myrtle said, with a flicker of a glance at him. Sid looked sour, but he didn’t protest, or comment in any other way.
Tom nodded. “And then?”
“Sid went to pick up the money. And we came back here.”
The way in which she phrased it was quite solid. That was what happened, nothing more and nothing less. But of course there was something fairly fundamental missing from the recitation, and of course we all realized it.
“And the murder?” Tom asked gently. “Who committed that?”
There was a moment of silence, one in which Myrtle flicked another glance at Sid and at Ruth. And then?—
“Don’t you dare, you bloody cow!” Sid growled. Ruth let out a sob, but after a moment, when she didn’t say anything else, he continued, “I’m copping to the kidnapping and the thing with the money?—”
The thing with the money? The ransom? Or the embezzling, basically, of the Schlomskys’ wealth over most of the previous year?
“—but I’ll be damned if I let you accuse me of a murder I didn’t commit!”
“You didn’t know there would be a murder?” Tom inquired. “Wasn’t it part of the plan you concocted?”
Sid swung his head towards him and opened his mouth. And seemed to think better of it, because nothing came out.
“Of course it was part of the plan,” Myrtle said. She gave her head a toss. “We couldn’t leave her alive. We all knew that. There’s no point in pretending we didn’t agree to it now.”
Sid opened his mouth, and then closed it again. And opened it again. “At least I didn’t kill her!”
Ruth sniffed wetly.
“No,” Myrtle agreed. “You didn’t.”
She sneered at him, actually sneered, as if being unable to commit coldblooded murder was something to be ashamed of, and Sid flushed angrily.
“So the murder of Miss Florence Schlomsky was always part of the plan,” Tom said, yanking the conversation back on track, and everyone’s attention turned back to him. Christopher squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back. “Is that correct?”
“Not always,” Sid said. “At first, it was just about getting some of our own. Keep the heiress busy, spend the money.”
“Keep her imprisoned while you slowly drain her father’s coffers.” Tom’s tone was pleasant, but his face was not. His jaw was tight and his usually warm hazel eyes were hard as pebbles.
Sid squirmed a little. “I don’t know why you’d want to put it like that…”
“That’s the way it was,” Tom reminded him. “But you had no plans to kill her.”
“ I didn’t.” Sid slanted a look at Myrtle. “Not then. She might have had other plans.”
“As long as nobody knew anything, there was no need to kill her,” Myrtle said, brows lowered. “We could just keep her, and keep the money coming. But when the parents showed up, it changed everything.”
She slanted them a resentful stare, as if it were their fault that her plan of embezzlement had failed eventually.
“You didn’t consider letting Miss Schlomsky go and cutting your losses?”
Sid shifted uncomfortably, and Ruth sniffed again.
“We talked about it,” Myrtle admitted, almost reluctantly. “About killing the girl and getting rid of the body. About having Flossie Schlomsky disappear, never to be found again. Even about just leaving, and leaving her alive.”
Sarah gave a little sob, and Myrtle flicked a glance at her before she continued, “But we had nothing to show for the past year. For everything we’d done. All the risks we’d taken. We’d lived well, sure, but we’d have to stop once the gravy train ended. I couldn’t stay in the flat anymore, and Ruth and Sid couldn’t keep the cottage. We’d have to go somewhere else and start over, and there was no money. So we figured we would get one more big score before we were done.”
“The ransom.”
Myrtle nodded. “It was only fair. If we’d known things weren’t going to last longer, we would have saved more, but since we didn’t…” She shrugged.
There was silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say, frankly, and I think we must all be in the same boat. The sense of entitlement was staggering. The lack of remorse was disturbing. The acts of evil had been appalling, to say the least. Flossie’s parents were huddled against the wall, pale and shocked. It looked as if all the fight had gone out of Hiram Schlomsky during the recounting of the plot to drain his fortune, or as much of it as they could get their hands on before they were caught. I would have expected him to curse and bellow and throw about him with his cane, but he just stood silently, clutching the cane in one hand and his wife’s hand in the other. She was equally pale and speechless, her eyes dark with pain and her cheeks wet.
“You’re awful people,” I said to the group of prisoners on the floor. “I can’t believe you did that. You deserve everything that’s coming to you, and more.”
Ruth avoided my eyes, and Sid just gave me a stony stare. Myrtle, however, smirked. “I fooled you, though. Didn’t I?”
“Only because it never would have occurred to me that someone could do something so evil. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Pish,” Myrtle said. “Nature favors the strong. Survival of the fittest.”
“Not anymore,” Tom informed her. “You’re all under arrest for kidnapping, for extortion, for murder…”
Christopher tugged on my hand. “Let’s go. Tom can handle this.”
I nodded, and let him pull me towards the kitchen door and the outside.
We were still standing in the street outside three minutes later, when Tom and Ian Finchley came out herding the prisoners. Tom and Finch must have requested his help with the arrestees, because when they came out of the house, Wolfgang had a hand on the back of Ruth’s neck and was pushing her along in front of him. Finch came first with a tight grip on Sid’s arm, and Tom brought up the rear with Myrtle.
All three of them were stuffed into the back of the Tender, and handcuffs were fastened to hooks in the floor on both women’s parts, and then Tom turned to us. “The parents went upstairs for a moment. You’ll get them back to London when they come out?”
Christopher and I both nodded. The Hackney we had taken from the Savoy to Thornton Heath earlier was still here, and would suffice to get us all back to Town, even if we’d also have Christopher with us now.
“Come and see me at the Yard in the morning for statements. I’ll be busy with this lot until then.”
We promised that we would, and then Finch got behind the wheel of the Tender, and Tom climbed into the passenger seat, and the motor turned over, and…
“Give my love to Lord St George,” Myrtle said cheekily from the backseat, and for a moment it was as if I was looking at Flossie again, the Flossie I’d thought I knew before all this happened: the American manhunter with the teeth, the boy-crazy heiress looking to trade her fortune for a British title… and then it all crashed down when Sarah Schlomsky’s voice rose in a howl of grief from the upper floor of the cottage, and Christopher’s hand squeezed mine, and the Tender pulled away down the street.
“Ready to go back to Town?” the Hackney driver asked, calmly as you please, as if he had missed everything that had gone on inside the house while he’d been sitting here, and as if Scotland Yard hadn’t just driven away with three prisoners.
“Just as soon as the others come back out,” Christopher told him, and the driver nodded. The three of us stood in silence and waited for Sarah Schlomsky’s lament for her daughter to die away and for life to resume.
_____
Letter from the Right Honorable Viscount St George, Sutherland Hall, Little Sutherland, Wiltshire, to Miss Philippa Darling, Essex House Mansions, London:
Monday, August 16 th
Darling,
Kit informed me that you asked Wolfie to come along on the hunt for Flossie’s kidnappers instead of me. And not only that, but you allowed him to save your life? How could you be so careless? Now we’re in his debt, and when he asks for your hand in marriage, we won’t be able to say no.
StG
_____
Letter from Miss Philippa Darling, Essex House Mansions, London, to the Right Honorable Viscount St George, Sutherland Hall, Little Sutherland, Wiltshire:
Tuesday, August 17 th
St George,
Pardon me very much for needing to have my life saved. At least I solved a kidnapping and a murder while I was at it. Where were you?
Oh, that’s right. You were motoring through Wiltshire, probably snogging waitresses, as you usually do.
And ‘Wolfie’? Really, St George? Is that a trace of jealousy I detect?
I’m sorry you missed the opportunity to play the hero, but that’s what you get when you worry too much about what your father will say, you know. You should have stayed in London if you wanted to be part of the excitement.
For your information, if Wolfgang asks for my hand in marriage, and I decide I don’t want to marry him, I shan’t say yes. Saving my life doesn’t mean he can command it. This is 1926, not the Regency. But I’ll eventually want to marry somebody, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t consider him. He is handsome, wealthy, titled, and—as it turns out—brave. And the children would be beautiful. As far as I can tell, I could do worse.
Pippa
_____
Letter from the Right Honorable Viscount St George, Sutherland Hall, Little Sutherland, Wiltshire, to Miss Philippa Darling, Essex House Mansions, London:
Wednesday, August 18 th
Hardly, Darling. He’s German.
StG
_____
Letter from Miss Philippa Darling, Essex House Mansions, London, to the Right Honorable Viscount St George, Sutherland Hall, Little Sutherland, Wiltshire:
Thursday, August 19 th
St George,
So am I, in case that fact has slipped your mind. Thanks ever so for the reminder, including the reminder of all the reasons why I have always despised you. I don’t know why I ever thought you might have changed.
Don’t bother responding to this letter. Go find Lady Laetitia and cry on her shoulder instead. In fact, just propose while you’re at it, and spare the girl you claim to love the bother of having to turn you down. You and Laetitia deserve one another.
Philippa Marie Darling Schatz
_____
The London Times,
Monday, August 23rd, 1926
Maurice, Earl of Marsden, and his wife, Countess Euphemia, are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Laetitia Grace, to Crispin Henry Jonathan Astley, Viscount St George. The groom-to-be is the only son of Harold, Duke of Sutherland, and his late wife, Charlotte. The couple will make their home at Sutherland House in Mayfair following their marriage at St George’s, Hanover Square. Friends are welcome to attend the ceremony, which will take place at 11 o’clock on December 18 th of this year.