Page 64 of Peril in Piccadilly

“As it happens?—”

Tom raised a hand. “I don’t want to hear it. Let’s get back to the important bits.”

Crispin scowled, but seemed to agree that his relations with Laetitia—whether they were of a carnal nature or not, and it sounded as if he had been trying to claim that they were not, hard as that was to believe—were less important than trying to figure out where Christopher was. “By all means.”

Tom turned back to me. “So Kit was supposed to follow Natterdorff when the two of you parted ways.”

I nodded. “I didn’t see him at that point, however, so he might have been gone already. Or he had simply moved out of the doorway where I left him, and into a shop, or into the church across the street, or for that matter into a Hackney cab.”

“But you didn’t see him after you came out of the restaurant after lunch?”

I shook my head. “The last time I saw him was at one o’clock precisely, just down Queen Victoria Street from Sweetings. He went into a doorway about halfway between the tube station and the door to the restaurant. The doorway was empty when we came back out. Wolfgang walked me past it to the stairs to the underground.”

“And you haven’t heard from him since?”

“I haven’t heard from either of them. And it isn’t like Christopher, Tom. If he could have contacted someone, he would have done. Maybe not me—he might have rung up Sutherland Hall or Beckwith Place, or even Scotland Yard, if he was trying to get a message to someone and wasn’t terribly picky about who it was—but he wouldn’t have vanished without a trace. Not of his own free will.”

Tom nodded. “Not of his own free will, then. What have you done so far?”

I told him what I had done, which in retrospect wasn’t much. I had mostly spent the time since lunch yesterday waiting and wringing my hands.

“And now you’re here,” Tom turned to Crispin.

The latter nodded. “Philippa rang me up last night. I motored up from Wiltshire and got to London early this morning.”

“Too early to do much,” I added. “I put him to bed for a few hours—he’d motored through the night—and then we came here.”

“And no one has heard from Kit?”

“I haven’t,” I said, and Crispin shook his head. “He didn’t contact Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert. I assume he didn’t contact you?”

Tom shook his head.

“Then no. He either went off somewhere with someone he knew—like the bloke he was dancing with the other night; you recall, I’m sure?—”

Tom’s expression said as clearly as words that yes, he recalled.

“—or something bad has happened to him.”

Tom nodded. “Anything else you haven’t told me?”

I grimaced. “He was dressed as Kitty. He thought—we thought—that it was less likely that Wolfgang would recognize him that way.”

“He didn’t seem to do so the other night,” Tom agreed, and I shook my head.

“But that was at night, in the back of the Tender. In broad daylight, it might be different.”

He didn’t say anything, and I added, a bit diffidently, “Have you… um… spoken to Christopher in the past few days? Since that night?”

Tom shook his head, clearly expecting the worst.

“Do you remember when you dropped us off outside the Essex House Mansions?”

“Of course I remember,” Tom said. “It was only a few days ago. Hardly something I’d forget, is it?”

“Do you remember that we waited for you to motor away before we crossed the street?”

He nodded.