Page 10 of Peril in Piccadilly (Pippa Darling Mysteries #7)

Chapter Ten

For a second, all I saw was headlamps. I’m fairly certain I saw my life flash before my eyes, too. Then Christopher gave me a yank and a push, both at the same time, and I tumbled into a heap on the pavement. So did he, with a thud and a grunt. The tires passed us both with inches to spare, and a cloud of exhaust enveloped us as the motorcar jumped back down into the roadway and sped off. From somewhere nearby, but not too near, I could hear a wordless bellow of consternation, and then rapid footsteps. Evans, I assumed, finally noticing what was going on outside the lobby.

My hands were bleeding again, and so, I was sure, were my knees. Christopher, too, was rather the worse for wear. His pretty pink gown was dirty and torn, although his elbow-length opera gloves had spared his hands from getting torn up too badly. The gloves were a lost cause, of course, the palms shredded. The fact that he had escaped mostly unscathed, didn’t stop him from sitting up and spitting out a string of words that would have been more at home in Francis’s mouth.

“Christopher!” I said, shocked.

He turned to me. “We’re lucky to be alive, Pippa.”

I supposed we were, at that. A head-on collision with the front of a motorcar would have sent us both flying. We could have broken our necks, or our skulls. We would certainly have broken other bones. We were indeed lucky.

And then Evans was there, puffing, and the conversation between us was over for now.

“Miss Darling.” He stared at me, eyes wide. “Mr…. um.”

“We’re all right, Evans,” I said and extended a hand. “A bit of help, if you don’t mind?”

“Of course, Miss Darling.” He took my hand and hoisted me to my feet. We both ended up staring at our bloody palms in consternation for a moment while Christopher got up.

“Pippa is right, Evans. We’re all right. A few scratches, is all.”

He swept the wig off his head, exposing his usual sunny blond hair, slicked back against his skull.

Evans nodded. “Yes, sir.” It wasn’t the first time he had seen Christopher dressed up as Kitty—it couldn’t possibly have been—but it was obvious that he didn’t know how to address him.

Christopher didn’t let it bother him. “Did you get a look at the motorcar, Evans? All we saw were the headlamps.”

“A Hackney,” Evans said promptly.

“Was it really?”

“It looked like one,” Evans said. “Can’t say whether it was a for-hire car or not.”

No, that isn’t always easy to do, especially when it goes by at such speed.

“We’d better get inside,” Christopher said with a glance up and down the now quiet street. “Don’t want them to come back.”

We certainly didn’t. He presented his arm—rather incongruous in his pink tasseled gown—but I took it and limped towards the entrance to the Essex House. Evans held the door, and we made our slow way across the lobby.

“Any other news, Evans?” Christopher wanted to know as we approached the lift.

The doorman shook his head. “No, sir.”

“No messages or anything?”

“No, sir.”

“I’ve been gone less than two hours,” I reminded him. And then, when the doorman opened the lift door, “Thank you, Evans. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yes, Miss Darling.” He closed the grille and door carefully behind us, and we ascended to the second floor.

“You go wash up first,” Christopher told me when we were inside the flat. “I’m not hurt. The gloves protected my hands. But you’ve torn open the scabs on your knees again. Go put some plasters on, and then meet me in the sitting room. We’ll talk.”

I nodded and headed for the washroom while he disappeared into my bedchamber to take off his makeup and put away Kitty.

Fifteen minutes later we were sitting on opposite sides of the Chesterfield with a cup of tea each—each with a drop of something extra in it, for nerves—and I was shaking a little bit. Yesterday’s incident had been easy to dismiss as accidental. This one was harder to reject.

“No,” Christopher agreed when I brought it up, “that was certainly no accident. The motorcar jumped up on the curb to get to us. Until then it might have been a coincidence…”

“Until then,” I agreed, “I thought it was simply a vehicle traveling a bit too fast. Inconsiderate, certainly, not to slow down for two people crossing the street. But some people are inconsiderate, and Hackney cabs are known for driving fast. You don’t think?—?”

“No,” Christopher said. He was cradling the cup between two hands—saucer be damned—and might have been shaking a bit, too, now that I looked at him. “Until the pavement, yes. I thought the same thing you did, that someone was just being a bit of a bastard. But if that had been the case, they would have tooted the horn, don’t you think? And anyway, jumping the curb was a definite attempt to hit us.”

“It seemed to be.” I took a sip of brandy-laced tea and coughed. “Who would do that?”

“It depends on whether we think the target was you or me or both of us,” Christopher said. I opened my mouth and closed it again when he added, “For a simple explanation with no additional implications, it might have been a cabbie who was in a hurry and who thought he’d teach us to get out of the way faster next time.”

I suppose it might have been. Some people have anger issues. Although it was quite the risk to take. What if we hadn’t moved out of the way quite as thoroughly as we had done? The motorcar might have clipped one of us. Was that worth teaching someone a lesson about crossing the street at too slow a pace?

“Unlikely,” I said, “but I suppose it isn’t impossible. What else?”

“It might have been the same person who pushed you down the stairs yesterday.”

It might have been. Except?—

“I’m fairly certain yesterday was an accident, Christopher. Why would anybody want to push me down the stairs, or for that matter run me over?”

“If we knew that,” Christopher said, “we’d know who it was.”

“Yesterday you thought it was Wolfgang.”

“I wasn’t serious,” Christopher said. “Or not serious enough to worry about you going to tea with him today. He just seemed like the most likely suspect. You had just left him, so we know he was in the area. You had just told him you didn’t want to move to Germany?—”

“That’s hardly reason enough to push someone down the stairs. Besides, we know he wasn’t in the area today. We saw him just twenty minutes ago on Regent Street.”

“That’s enough time to find a Hackney and get here,” Christopher said. “We managed.”

I supposed we had. “And what would be his reason for wanting to kill me today? We made up about Germany. He spent half of lunch telling me about Schloss Natterdorff.”

“Jealousy?” Christopher suggested. “Perhaps he thought you and Tom were out together?”

“Surely he can’t have missed how Tom dotes on you?”

“I wasn’t there,” Christopher said. When I opened my mouth to protest, because he certainly had been there, he added, “As myself, I mean. Your fiancé called me Lady Laetitia.”

“You do look quite a lot like her when you’re dressed up as Kitty. It’s the hair, I suppose—same Dutch Boy cut, even if yours is a wig—and you both have blue eyes. You’re a bit taller, an inch or two, perhaps…”

“But I was sitting down,” Christopher said, “and in the back of the motorcar, in the dark.”

I nodded. “He did seem to think you were she.” Although there had been a double-take at one point, a moment’s doubt, perhaps when Christopher spoke. He didn’t sound like a woman, no matter how much he could make himself look like one.

“Or if he didn’t,” I added, “at least he didn’t look at you closely enough to actually recognize you.”

“He had opportunity, at any rate,” Christopher said. “He could have flagged down a Hackney and followed us here, and made it by the time we were crossing the street. Anyone else—as long as it wasn’t simply a homicidal cabbie—would have had to lie in wait for us to come home.”

“That seems like a lot of trouble to go to for no reason. But I suppose it’s possible. Who else do you suspect?”

“Laetitia?” Christopher suggested. “She was near Piccadilly yesterday, as well.”

She had been. But— “I think Crispin would have noticed had she up and left the table to run across the street to push me down the steps to the underground, don’t you? He said she hadn’t done. Besides, aren’t they back in Dorset by now?”

Christopher shrugged. “I assume so. I don’t actually know where they are. I haven’t phoned to make certain that’s where they went.”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t Crispin’s H6 that ran us down,” I said.

He shook his head. “Of course not. Crispin would never.”

“If he took her to Dorset, she wouldn’t have had time to get back to London.”

“Perhaps they didn’t leave,” Christopher said. “Perhaps they simply dropped us off here this morning, and went to Sutherland House, and now Laetitia is there or back in Marsden House.”

Perhaps. It hadn’t been Christopher at the Savoy during tea, but it might have been Crispin.

“Anything’s possible,” Christopher agreed. “Although I didn’t ring him up to tell him you were seeing Wolfgang today. I assumed he was in Dorset, or perhaps Wiltshire, and at this point it’s really only rubbing salt in the wound, isn’t it, when there’s nothing he can do about it. But I suppose it might have been him.”

Laetitia stayed on the list, then, if they were both in London. Although?—

“Why would Laetitia want to be rid of me? Even if he is in love with me—ugh—she’s the one who’s marrying him. Why does it matter how he feels, or whether I’m still alive?”

Christopher looked at me. “Would you want to marry someone who was in love with someone else?”

“Of course not. But she knew that when she accepted him. She has known it for a while, I think.”

Some of the things I had overheard back in May, during a conversation at the Dower House, made a lot more sense in that light.

“Be that as it may,” Christopher said, “I’m sure she’d like it better if he loved her more and you less. And one way to accomplish that is to get rid of you.”

I suppose. But— “Killing me seems needlessly risky. Marrying me off to Wolfgang and sending me to Germany would probably be enough to accomplish the same thing. Besides, it’s not as if she won’t have to deal with other women after they’re married. If he doesn’t love her, there’s no chance he’ll remain faithful.”

“Her problem,” Christopher said with a shrug, “not ours.”

I tilted my head to contemplate him. “That’s rather callous, isn’t it?”

“If she pushed you down the stairs and tried to run you over with a Hackney cab? And we still don’t know who took that potshot at you from the woods during the hunt last month, either, remember? It might have been her. She was out there in the woods with a rifle. So no, I don’t think it’s particularly callous at all.”

When he put it like that, perhaps I didn’t, either.

“Any other ideas?” I inquired. “If Wolfgang doesn’t have a motive for killing me, and Laetitia doesn’t have the means because she’s in Dorset, who else is on the list?”

“Might be someone who doesn’t like men in evening gowns,” Christopher said lightly, as if it was in any way all right to run someone down because you don’t like how they’re dressed.

“Do people do that?”

“I haven’t had it happen to me. But I think most people look at Kitty and think she’s a girl.”

Yes, I could see that. He isn’t the most masculine-looking bloke even when he’s dressed like one—he’s tallish for a girl, but not much taller than Lady Laetitia, and slender, with narrow shoulders and a pretty face, big eyes, and a soft cupid’s-bow mouth—so he doesn’t look too different from the rest of us girls in our drop waist dresses and cropped hair.

“That’s awful,” I said, and Christopher nodded, “but I’d be very surprised if that were the case. If most people look at Kitty and think she—you—is a girl, then it’s not likely that a random cabbie can tell the difference from a distance.”

Christopher lifted a shoulder. “Might have been someone who followed us from the Cave of the Golden Calf.”

“Someone other than Wolfgang, do you mean? Like the bloke you were dancing with? He’d be more likely to try to take out Tom, don’t you think?”

I saw a flash of worry cross Christopher’s face at the idea of that, that the Hackney cab might have followed Tom after it tried to run us down, but then he shook his head. “Only until he noticed that Tom was driving a police-issue Tender, surely. You don’t run down a copper in front of Scotland Yard and live to tell the tale.”

Likely not. “Do you know him well? The chap at the nightclub?”

“Not to say well,” Christopher said. “I’ve seen him around. We’ve danced before.”

“Does he have enough of an emotional attachment to you that he’d want to hurt you—or Tom—for leaving the nightclub the way you did?”

Christopher snorted. “I’d hardly think so. Nothing’s ever happened between us.”

“Nothing’s ever happened between me and St George, either,” I pointed out, “and apparently that hasn’t stopped him from developing an emotional attachment.”

He stared at me, incredulously. “You and Crispin grew up together, Pippa. How can you say that nothing ever happened between you?”

“Nothing romantic. Nothing that would make him think falling in love with me,” my face puckered, “was a good idea.”

“I’m sure he knew when it happened that it wasn’t a good idea.” Christopher shook his head. “No, I doubt the chap from the nightclub came after me with a murderous Hackney. Any other bright ideas?”

I thought about it for a moment while I took a sip of my now-cool tea. “Someone who thought you were Laetitia and saw an opportunity to get rid of her?”

“And who might that be?” Christopher took a sip of his own genial beverage before putting the cup on the table the better to use his fingers to check off suspects. “It wasn’t you. It wasn’t Crispin.”

I opened my mouth to protest—it could certainly have been Crispin; he had the best motive of anyone, since no one else was looking at a lifetime of being married to Laetitia—but I closed it again when Christopher continued.

“He’s either in Dorset or Wiltshire, and if he isn’t, he’s probably with her. And if he isn’t with her, he would still know that it wasn’t Laetitia crossing the street with you. He knows you well enough to know that the two of you would never be here together, and he knows me well enough to recognize me, even in a gown and wig.”

“Fine,” I conceded. “Not Crispin. I don’t think anyone else in the family is in London this weekend. Who else is there?”

“I imagine the people who dislike Laetitia Marsden are legion,” Christopher said, “but in this case I was thinking specifically of the gentleman who burgled Marsden House last night.”

The gentleman burglar? “Why would he want to kill her?”

“Because she saw him,” Christopher said triumphantly. “And he knows that she saw him.”

“But she didn’t recognize him. Or she would have told the police who he was.”

“But he doesn’t know that,” Christopher said. “Or perhaps he’s afraid that if she thinks about it further, she’ll remember something that might incriminate him. Or if she doesn’t know who he is now, if she sees him again, she’ll recognize him.”

“That seems like a rather paltry excuse for murder. Besides, if he wanted her dead, why not simply kill her last night before he left?”

“Trying to make it look like an accident?” Christopher suggested. “As for paltry… do you have any idea what the Sutherland parure is worth?”

“A lot?” I shook my head. “All he got was the ring and the earrings. Surely the tiara and necklace are worth more.”

“Of course they are. But just those few diamonds are worth plenty. And now the parure is incomplete. Uncle Harold must be having a fit.”

“Enough of one to drive up to London and try to mow down Laetitia? Or who he thinks is Laetitia?” Because he certainly wouldn’t recognize his own nephew under the gown and wig.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Christopher said judiciously. “Uncle Harold is too invested in getting Crispin settled before he can lose his mind and elope with you, I think. Although I don’t think he’s happy about the loss. Or will be, once he finds out about it, if he doesn’t know already.”

Certainly not. “You don’t think he’ll take it out on St George, do you?”

Uncle Harold has a tendency to take his displeasure out on his only son and heir. Admittedly, it’s usually when Crispin has done something Uncle Harold doesn’t like—such as giving vent to his sarcasm when it would be healthier to keep his mouth shut, for instance, or simply talking back to his father when Uncle Harold would prefer blind obedience—but I wouldn’t put it past my courtesy-uncle to lose his temper over this, too.

“I don’t see how he can,” Christopher said, “when it isn’t Crispin’s fault.”

“That hasn’t stopped him in the past.”

“Hasn’t it?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Pippa. But it’s nice of you to worry.”

I opened my mouth to object to the terminology—I certainly wasn’t worried about St George—and then closed it again when I couldn’t make even myself believe it.

Christopher, kindly, didn’t comment. “I suppose we’d better turn in,” he said instead, lifting both arms up above his head and stretching. “This wasn’t how I expected to end the day, I’ll admit.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, as I scooted towards the edge of the Chesterfield preparatory to talking my abused knees into supporting me. “Tom came to see you, and when I told him that you’d gone out, he went immediately into rescue mode.”

“I didn’t need rescuing,” Christopher grumbled.

“Well, you don’t know that,” I pointed out, reasonably, “do you? There could be a raid on the Cave of the Golden Calf right now.”

“I’m grown,” Christopher said, “and I can take responsibility for myself.”

“I don’t think he thinks that you can’t. He’s not stopping you from being yourself, Christopher. He’s simply trying to stop you from ending up in the workhouse because of it.”

“I wouldn’t?—”

“You might. And what’s more, if you were arrested, the tabloids might find out. And then Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert would find out, and so would Uncle Harold. And while your father wouldn’t disown you, and your mother only wants you to be happy, His Grace, the Duke of Sutherland, would likely cut you out of the succession.”

He opened his mouth, most likely to tell me that he couldn’t care less about the succession, but I kept talking. “All Tom is doing is trying to keep you safe. You could make it a bit easier for him.”

“How am I not making it easy?” Christopher wanted to know. “I came away with you two, didn’t I?”

“You could have told him where you were going, and when. Then he could have told you whether there was a raid scheduled or not. And if there was, you could have stayed home. And he could have gotten a good night’s sleep instead of having to rush off to save you.”

Christopher made a face. “I suppose so.”

“So you’ll let us know in advance next time?”

“I’ll think about it,” Christopher said and pushed to his feet. “Come on, old girl.”

He extended a hand. I took it and let him pull me up.