Page 90 of Peril in Piccadilly

“What’s this, now?” Tom looked from one to the other of us for clarification, but we were both too busy bickering to answer him.

“He might have thought that without you in the picture, his grandfather might relent,” Crispin said. “If there was no one else left with the Natterdorff blood.”

Granted. But— “He’d be better off marrying me now and killing me later, if he wanted me out of the way.”

“He doesn’t seem too particular about needing you alive,” Crispin pointed out. “It’s been… what? Three murder attempts now? Four? Perhaps five?”

“Murder attempts?” Tom echoed.

I scoffed. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, St George, but there hasn’t been anywhere close to five.”

“The fall into the underground,” Crispin said, lifting a finger. “The Hackney that barely missed you and Kit the other evening. Tonight?—”

“You don’t know that tonight was a murder attempt.”

“I don’t know that it wasn’t,” Crispin retorted, and raised another finger. “The bullet that barely missed you.”

“That was your mother.”

He rolled his eyes. “Not that bullet. The one at Marsden Manor last month.”

Oh, of course. That bullet.

“That wasn’t Wolfgang,” I said.

“How do you know that it wasn’t?” Tom wanted to know. Academic interest, I assume.

“She doesn’t,” Crispin told him. “No one else ever admitted to doing it.”

“It was most likely Geoffrey,” I said. “Another attempt at getting rid of Cecily.”

“Geoffrey didn’t try to get rid of Cecily,” Crispin said. “He only wanted to get rid of the baby. A bullet wouldn’t have done that.”

“That doesn’t mean that it was Wolfgang.”

“Who else could it have been?” Crispin said, throwing his hands up. “It wasn’t Laetitia. I was next to her the whole time. And don’t you dare accuse me of shooting at you!”

“I wasn’t going to,” I said.

He sniffed. “Well, nobody else had a reason for wanting you—or Francis or Kit—dead.”

He was right about that, of course. I had chalked that whole thing up to a misunderstanding due to the fact that I looked a bit like Cecily Fletcher from a distance, but that was before I knew that Wolfgang had had ulterior motives for many of the things he did. It was quite possible that Crispin was right and Wolfgang had taken a potshot at me as long as a month ago.

“So three attempts,” Tom said, “if we leave tonight out of it.”

“Four,” I said reluctantly, “actually. He upended a cup of tea in my lap a few days ago. Given tonight’s occurrence, there might have been something more than tea in it. Perhaps not poison, but?—”

“An earlier attempt to knock you out so he could kidnap you.” Crispin nodded. “Where is he, Gardiner?”

“Coming,” Tom said, “and don’t even think about going after him. He’s handcuffed and under guard, and I do not want to have to arrest you for attacking a man who can’t fight back. Do you understand me?”

Crispin glowered, but nodded.

“Neither of you is to talk to him,” Tom continued sternly, “or to approach him or to do anything else to him. In fact—” He glanced at the small wheelhouse, “I want you to go inside, and preferably down below. And I don’t want to see either of your faces again until we’re docked at Ramsgate and I have putHerrAlbrecht into a police car.”

HerrAlbrecht, was it? I smirked.

Crispin couldn’t contain himself either. He sniggered. “Do you call him that to his face?”