Page 20 of Peril in Piccadilly (Pippa Darling Mysteries #7)

Chapter Twenty

Tom found us like that a few minutes later, when he swung down the ladder to the deck of the lifeboat and landed lightly on his feet.

He opened his mouth, and then closed it again. After a look at Crispin and then one at me, he inquired, “Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “St George is simply overcome with emotion. His entire worldview has changed. It turns out that I’m not beneath him, after all.”

Crispin straightened his back and dislodged my hand. I removed it to my lap as he dropped his own from his face.

I still couldn’t tell whether the pink splotches on his cheeks were from too much laughter or some other strong emotion, although I could make a guess. If I were the granddaughter of the Graf von und zu Natterdorff, Uncle Harold could no longer claim that I was either common or poor. I was still German, of course, so that probably wouldn’t have been enough to change his mind about allowing Crispin to pursue me either way, but I could quite understand why the latter might be thrown for a loop, and perhaps not entirely sure whether he ought to laugh or cry about it.

“For the record,” he told me, “I never thought you were beneath me. That was my father and mother.”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter at this point anyway, does it?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Well, you’re?—”

Engaged , I was going to say, but that was only until I realized that saying anything like that would give away the fact that I knew how he felt about me, and that wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have. Not now, and preferably not ever.

He gave me a suspicious sort of look. “I’m what?”

“A better man than your father, it seems. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Crispin said, and ignored, magnificently, the muttered comment from Tom that included the words ‘beneath’ and ‘different way.’ I decided not to dignify it with a response, either, but I’m fairly certain that both Crispin and I blushed.

“What’s going on?” I asked Tom instead, to get the conversation back onto safer ground, and also because I sincerely wanted to know.

He turned to me. “I brought your wrap and handbag.” He handed them over. “But there’s no sign of Kit. The crew said they haven’t seen anyone fitting his description.”

“You can speak German?” I shrugged out of Crispin’s jacket and handed it back to him with thanks before I wrapped my own coat around myself. I’m certain we were both grateful to have our own back, and to both be warmer than we had been.

“I picked up a bit during the war,” Tom said. “Enough to get by.”

“And you described Kitty,” Crispin said, “as well as Kit himself, I presume?”

Tom nodded. “I asked, but we also looked around. They were upfront about seeing Pippa being carried onboard. I think they would have mentioned it, had it happened before, as well.”

“Wolfgang would have no reason to bring Christopher to Germany anyway,” I said.

“He might have wanted to throw him overboard somewhere in the North Sea, though.”

I looked at Crispin, aghast. “What a horrible thing to say!”

He stared back. “How do you know that wasn’t what he planned for you, Darling?”

“I assumed he wanted the money,” I said. “He would have gotten it by marrying me. Not by throwing me overboard.”

“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 put Herr Albrecht into a police car.”

Herr Albrecht, was it? I smirked.

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

“I have it on good authority,” Tom said, “that he has been disinherited by his grandfather. That makes him just like the rest of us, doesn’t it?”

He didn’t wait for either of us to respond, just flapped his hands at us. “Off you go. Into the wheelhouse where I can’t see you. Shoo.”

We shooed, into the darkest corner we could find, where we curled up side by side and waited for the prisoner to be brought out and down.

“There he is,” Crispin muttered a minute later, when a pair of legs came into view on the freighter’s ladder, descending slowly.

I nodded. “Stay here. You heard what Tom said.”

He shot me a glance. I could see the light reflect off his eyeballs for just a second in the dark. “It would be worth it. I only want to get one good lick in. Just one. You can’t say he doesn’t deserve it.”

“He deserves a lot more than that,” I said. “But I certainly don’t want you ending up in jail over it. Let the police deal with him.”

He sighed. “You’re a better man than I am, Darling.”

“We’ve always known that,” I told him. “Listen, St George.”

“Yes, Darling?”

“Do you have your motorcar at Ramsgate?”

He nodded. “We both followed him. All three of us, actually; Detective Sergeant Finchley was there, too. See, there he is.”

He pointed. I looked, and there he was, Tom’s colleague, making his way down the ladder after Wolfgang. The latter was at the bottom now, turning towards Tom, and as opposed to what Tom had told Crispin earlier, Wolfgang was in fact not in handcuffs. It would have been difficult for him to navigate the ladder with handcuffs on, I supposed, so that may have been why Finchley had taken them off. As we watched, Wolfgang took a step forward and then pivoted to present Tom with his back. He put both arms behind himself. Tom reached towards them, handcuffs in one hand… and just as he was about to make contact, Wolfgang took off, straight for the side of the lifeboat.

Two steps later, he was in the water. We both saw and heard the splash when he hit.

Tom surged forward—I imagined he was on his way over the side of the boat, too—but Finchley’s hand on his shoulder stayed his momentum.

“Light!” the latter called, and elsewhere in the wheelhouse, a switch flicked on and a powerful search-lamp illuminated the water in front of the boat.

Crispin made a move to get up, but I grabbed onto his sleeve. “We promised.”

“He’s off the side and in the water,” Crispin objected. “He won’t see us.” He tugged on his arm so I would free him.

I held on. “Just wait. They may pull him up again in another moment.”

But they didn’t. The lifeboat pulled away from the freighter and began circling, search-lamp sweeping from side to side across the choppy water. Tom and Ian Finchley had gone to the stern, one on each side, and were peering intently into the dark. They had been joined by most of the crew of the lifeboat, everyone who wasn’t necessary to actually maneuver the craft.

“Let me up,” Crispin said irritably. “I want to see.”

“It’s better if you stay here.”

I certainly didn’t want to watch them fish Wolfgang back out of the water, and then add evading arrest to his list of crimes. I wanted even less to watch them fail in fishing him out because he had drowned. I wanted to stay here, in the dark corner of the wheelhouse, where I could pretend that everything was well.

In the end, they gave up. Wolfgang was nowhere to be seen. The lifeboat circled the freighter several times, just in case he had made it to the other side of it and was climbing out of the water there, but there was no sign of him. He was either a very strong swimmer, or he had decided that drowning was preferable to hanging. It was hard to say whether he was right or wrong. I can’t imagine that either is pleasant, really.

“Take us back to Ramsgate,” Tom told the lifeboat crew, “and then you can go back out and look for him one more time, if you want. But I need to get the victim to shore and get her checked out by a physician.”

The coxswain nodded, and the boat turned towards shore, although he kept the search-lamp going.

“This is silly,” I protested. “I’m fine. I don’t need to be looked at by anyone.”

“You were doped, Miss Darling,” Finchley said, “and now you’ve been sitting here in the cold…”

I rolled my eyes. “I slept it off, Finch. I woke up on my own. And I’m not cold. St George gave me his jacket, and then Tom brought me my own. I’m fine.”

“No injuries?”

I shook my head. “Nobody hurt me. I drank a cup of laced coffee and fell asleep. Now I’m awake. The only thing I want, is to go home. If you’ll just let us off at Ramsgate, St George can escort me to London while the rest of you go back out to search for Wolfgang.”

They exchanged glances, but in the end, that’s what ended up happening. The lifeboat crew didn’t want to leave Wolfgang for dead, I supposed, and Tom and Finchley were still hoping that they might arrest him. Nor were we as far from shore as I had been afraid of. I probably wouldn’t have been able to swim it, but perhaps Wolfgang could do. At any rate, it didn’t take forever to get there. The crew set Crispin and myself off on the dock, and turned the boat around. Tom left with a promise to come and find us when he was back in London, to tell us what had been the eventual outcome.

“This way,” Crispin told me as the boat pulled away from the dock again. He put a hand to my lower back and guided me in the direction of the car park outside the lifeboat station, where the Hispano-Suiza was waiting. The knocking of the lifeboat’s engine faded slowly across the water as we picked our way across grass and gravel.

“They’ll find him,” he added after a moment, as if he knew in which direction my thoughts had strayed.

I flicked him a look out of the corner of my eye. “What if they don’t?”

“Then they don’t,” Crispin said, and flicked one back. “Do you care?”

I did, but then again I didn’t. “He kidnapped me, and I suppose he did try to kill me. Or if not that, at least there was a concerted effort to maim.”

Crispin nodded.

“I suppose it would be only fair that he should pay for that.”

“More than fair,” Crispin agreed.

“Although I think I’d rather he pay in prison than by drowning.”

“Of course you would.” His tone said that he, personally, was good with either outcome.

“On the other hand,” I said, “facing him across the Old Bailey and having to detail all the things he said and did, sounds like rather an onerous time. So perhaps it would be better if Tom and Finchley didn’t find him.”

Crispin grunted something noncommittal. Up ahead, the Hispano-Suiza came into view, the blue color making itself clearer as we got closer, and he stopped beside the passenger door and opened it for me.

“But then there’s the fact that he’s my cousin,” I said as I got in, “and I’d hate to lose what little family I have left.”

He stared at me. “What on earth do you mean by that?”

I told him what I meant, in a shaking voice that got progressively shakier as I went along. “Christopher’s missing, and what if we can’t find him? And if Christopher’s gone, Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert might blame me, and so might Francis, and then they won’t want to see me anymore. And you’re marrying Laetitia, so you won’t be allowed to have anything to do with me after December?—”

“Aunt Roslyn would never do that,” Crispin interrupted. “She’s not the type to abandon a child over something he or she can’t help. Not like some people.”

He shut my car door with a slam, and under normal circumstances I would have tried to pursue the topic, since there was clearly some underlying bitterness there, judging from his tone. But he was on his way around the motorcar before I could say anything else. Once he arrived on the other side, he continued as if nothing had happened, and I forgot all about what he had said earlier. “And as for me, it’s not as if I’ll be a loss to you, Darling. You’ll be happy to see the back of me, I’m sure.”

He slid behind the wheel and closed the door behind himself without looking at me.

I snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous, St George. I’ll admit that we haven’t had the easiest time of it. But we’re doing better now. We haven’t tried to kill one another once today.”

Or yesterday, either.

“That’s only because I was worried about you,” Crispin said, inserting the key into the ignition. “Once we get back to London, I’m certain we’ll be bickering as usual.”

No doubt. And on that topic— “Would you happen to know where Thornton Heath is located?”

He glanced over at me, eyebrow arching at the sudden change of subject. “South of London? Yes, of course I do.”

“Is it on the way back? Can you take me there?”

“To Thornton Heath?” His brows drew together. “Why?”

“It was where they kept Flossie Schlomsky during the time she was gone,” I said.

He nodded. “And?”

“It occurred to me that it’s a ready-made place to keep someone who’s missing. Boarded up windows, extra locks on the doors, everything someone might need for an extended involuntary stay.”

“Kit?” He looked brighter for a moment, before he must have thought it through. “They’re in prison, aren’t they? The people who took Flossie? So how would Kit end up there?”

“Wolfgang was there,” I said. “When Mrs. Schlomsky remembered that she and Hiram had agreed to pay for a ‘country cottage’ in Thornton Heath?—”

Crispin snorted, since Thornton Heath is about as far from a picturesque country cottage as one can get.

I nodded “Precisely. But when we went to the Savoy to pick up Hiram, Wolfgang was there. And I invited him along.”

Or perhaps he had invited himself along; I couldn’t recall at this point how the conversation had gone. It had been during the time that he had been ingratiating himself with me, before he started shooting at me and trying to run me over, so he might have been playing nice.

“It was quite helpful having him,” I added, begrudgingly, “seeing as all three of the kidnappers were there when we arrived.”

“But he’d been there. So he knew where it was located.”

“And he would have known that it was sitting empty, since the Schlomskys had paid for its use, but all the occupants were either dead or headed to prison.”

A shadow crossed his face at the thought of Flossie’s murder, but it cleared a moment later, and he yanked on the gearshift. “We should certainly take a look, then. Although it can wait until we’ve had some rest, I suppose. And perhaps when Gardiner is available to come with us.”

“I’ve had plenty of rest,” I said. “All I’ve done since we left London, is sleep. You’re the one who has gone the past two nights on no sleep at all.”

“It’s not as if I’ve never done that before, Darling.”

No, of course it wasn’t. He and his cohorts in the Society for Bright Young Persons frequently pull all-nighters of wild parties and treasure hunts across London.

“If you’ll allow me to drive,” I said, “you could take a nap?—”

He stared at me, and the H6 veered dangerously to the right. “Over my dead body.”

“That could be arranged,” I said. And quite easily, if he didn’t keep his attention on the road.”

“You wouldn’t.”

I sniffed. “Of course I wouldn’t. You’re a constant thorn in my side, St George, but I’m not going to murder you. You’re about to run off the road.”

“Oops.” He adjusted the wheel. “Be that as it may, you are not getting behind the wheel of my motorcar.”

“I’m in better condition than you are. I wasn’t the one who almost had an accident.”

“I’ll be fine.” He peered out through the windshield, into the darkness beyond. “The sun will be up soon. That’ll help.”

“Fine,” I said. “But if you kill us on the way there, I’ll never forgive you.”

“No worries, Darling. I’m used to this. It’ll take more than a few nights of less-than-stellar sleep to impair my abilities.”

“If you say so. Although I’m keeping my eye on you. And at the first sign of drooping eyelids, I’m going to pinch you. Hard.”

“Of course, Darling.” He flashed me a grin. “No more or less than I would expect.”

“To Thornton Heath, then. The sooner we find Christopher, the better.”

I settled back into my seat for the drive to London.