Page 8 of Peril in Piccadilly (Pippa Darling Mysteries #7)

Chapter Eight

The last time I had crashed one of Christopher’s drag balls, I had been wearing black tie evening kit complete with topper, and I had been accompanied by Crispin, in one of Christopher’s gowns and makeup. This time, I didn’t bother with any of that, just pulled on a skirt and blouse, jacket and brogues—for easy movement in the event that we’d end up having to evade pursuit—and yanked a cloche hat over my brown bob. I hoped that we wouldn’t have to do any running—my scabbed knees were still stiff—but if the worst came to the worst, at least I would be prepared for it.

“Ready.” I walked out into the foyer. Part of me had been concerned that perhaps Tom would take the opportunity to make himself scarce while I was in the other room—Christopher would have thought nothing of sneaking off by himself, had he decided I was better off staying home alone—so I was pleased to see Tom still waiting.

He gave me a quick up-and-down. “You don’t want to wear something more appropriate to the occasion?”

“I’d rather wear something that will allow me to run, should the need arise,” I told him, and headed for the door. “Where shall we go first?”

The answer was Scotland Yard, where Tom disappeared inside the building whilst I made myself comfortable in the passenger seat of the Crossley Tender, watching as police constables and blokes in mufti came and went—there was even one fellow being taken inside in handcuffs—and then Tom came back out and I straightened. “Well?”

It was impossible to tell from his face or body language whether we were going to have to save Christopher from a raid, or whether he’d be taking me home to the flat for the rest of the evening.

He twisted the key in the ignition and the Tender rolled across the cobbles. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the twin sounds of the motor and the tires on the uneven surface. “They’re in the cellar on Heddon Street.”

“You mean Christopher and company? In a cellar on Heddon Street?”

Heddon was a small street, practically an alley, that ran parallel to Regent Street and Savile Row just on the edge of the Mayfair neighborhood. It missed being in Soho only by virtue of being on the west side of Regent Street instead of on the east side. I was familiar with it, although if you didn’t know that it was there, you could be excused for not noticing it.

“ The cellar,” Tom said, with emphasis. “The old Cave of the Golden Calf.”

It took me a moment to place the reference, and then a few more to dredge up what I knew about the old nightclub that had gone by that name. By then, we were circling Trafalgar Square.

“I didn’t realize that it was still open,” I said. “Or that it was open again.”

“As far as I know,” Tom answered, “it’s not.”

“Another case like Rectors, then? A private arrangement?”

“Most likely.” The yellow street lamps of Cockspur Street illuminated his face in flickers as we made our way up towards Haymarket. “Just like Rectors, the Cave went bankrupt, although a decade sooner. It only lasted two years, from 1912 to 1914. The war killed it.”

“And it’s been sitting empty since then?”

Tom shrugged. “It hasn’t come to my attention in the time I’ve worked for the Yard. That doesn’t mean something hasn’t been going on there, but whatever it is, it hasn’t drawn the attention of the police.”

“Until now.”

“Yes,” Tom agreed. “Until now.”

“If we’re on our way there, can I assume that a raid is scheduled?”

“I didn’t want to be too obvious,” Tom said, maneuvering the Tender onto Haymarket Street from Cockspur. “I can only ask about this so many times before someone starts to suspect that I have a personal reason for inquiring.”

Yes, of course. “In other words, you aren’t certain?”

“I know where tonight’s event is taking place,” Tom said. “Someone took the trouble to dig that information up. From that, I can assume that there’s at least a fifty percent chance that there’s another raid scheduled.”

That made sense. “So we’re going to rescue Christopher?”

“We’re going to take a look at the situation,” Tom said. He glanced at me, up and down for a second. “Neither of us is exactly dressed for crashing a drag ball.”

No. He was dressed in tweed and a Homburg, and so was I, more or less. There wasn’t a stitch of evening wear between us.

“We’ll just have to do the best we can,” I said. “Besides, the first time you rescued Christopher—or the first time I knew about it; when I heard the two of you arguing in the foyer of the flat, the day before the old Duke of Sutherland died—you were wearing the same thing you are now. A lack of evening attire didn’t stop you then.”

“And it won’t stop me now,” Tom said, and turned the Tender into Piccadilly Circus, where I had scurried across the street just last night, “but it won’t make it any easier.”

No, I didn’t expect it would.

The Tender passed the entrance to the underground, where I had tumbled down the infamous staircase, and turned onto Regent Street. I peered out the window. “It’s right up here, isn’t it?”

“On the left,” Tom nodded. “The entrance to what looks like an alley.”

He indicated. I nodded. It did look very much like the entrance to an alley, or at least it looked more like one of the narrow, medieval London streets than the wide boulevards that were de rigeur in this part of town. Regent Street was at least twice, if not three times wider, than Heddon Street.

Tom pulled the Crossley Tender to a stop by the pavement, and cut the motor. Silence descended, or as silent as it ever is in London at any time of day or night. There were people walking, many of them in evening wear, most of them headed in the direction of Piccadilly and the nightlife. And there were plenty of motorcars, Hackney cabs as well as private conveyances. I could see no police vehicles other than the one we were in, so forces had not started amassing for the raid yet, if there was to be one.

“It’s still early,” Tom said when I commented on it, and opened his door. “Ready to go?”

“Please.” I opened my own door and hopped onto the pavement, forgetting for a moment that I had hurt myself yesterday. My knees twinged, and I grimaced.

“All right?” Tom came around the motorcar and gave me a look.

I nodded. “Forgot for a moment that I’m wounded. It’s fine.”

His lips twitched, but he didn’t say anything else, just presented his elbow. “Shall we, then?”

I put my fingers on it. “By all means.”

We crossed the pavement and ducked onto Heddon Street.

It’s a small stub of a street, narrow and enclosed by tall buildings in red and pale brick. The building to our right was broken up by several arched openings on the ground floor, outlined in white cement, or perhaps limestone. One opening was a door, the other windows. The windows were dark, and so was everything else. The cobbles under our feet were uneven, and I clung to Tom’s arm as my ankle twisted.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

I had been too busy trying to keep my balance to do anything that required effort beyond staying on my feet. But as the traffic noise from Regent Street faded, I picked up what his sharper ears had already noticed: the dull thump of music from somewhere down the narrow street.

“I can feel it,” I said, through the soles of my brogues and up my spine, “but I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”

“Down there.” He nodded to the brick building at the end of the street, dead-ending into another brick wall. “That’s the old Cave of the Golden Calf.”

I eyed it dubiously. “It doesn’t look like a nightclub.”

“That’s because it isn’t,” Tom said. “The nightclub is in the cellar. Always has been.”

He indicated an unassuming door set into the wall beside the much wider and more ostentatious main entrance. “There’s the way in.”

“When I went with St George to Rectors,” I said, eyeing it, “there was a nun in a habit guarding the door.”

Or a man dressed in a nun’s habit; he hadn’t been an actual nun, nor had I ever supposed him to be.

“There might be someone inside, guarding this one,” Tom said, nudging me towards it.

I flicked a look up at him, even as I allowed it. “Do you know the password, if there is someone?”

“Do you?” He looked down at me.

“It depends,” I said.

He nodded. “Well, if it comes to it, I have a badge.”

“I’m sure you do. Although flashing that might do more harm than good.”

He didn’t respond to that. When I looked up at him, it was dark enough in the shadow of the building that I could barely make out the lower half of his face, the chin and mouth and the tip of the nose below the brim of the Homburg.

“Are you certain we should both go inside?”

“I’m certain I should go inside,” Tom said, “and I’m equally certain that you won’t agree to stay here while I do.”

He was right about that.

“Nor,” he added, “do I particularly want to leave you up here alone. Kit would have my hide if anything happened to you, and he isn’t the only one.”

No, he wasn’t. The entire Astley clan, with the exception of Uncle Harold, would have something to say about it if I died from being left alone in a dark alley at night. Nor did I particularly want to be left alone, of course. Not because I was worried—the alley was deserted, and besides, I can take care of myself—but because I was curious. We were here: there was no way I would consent to being left outside while he ventured in.

“Come along,” Tom said. He reached for the door. I waited for him to pass through before I followed.

I had expected some sort of lobby, I suppose. Instead, we walked directly onto a dark and narrow landing with a stairwell going down into blackness. The music was louder in here, but still muted, as if there were a door or two between us and the musicians.

Tom took my arm as we advanced the couple of steps towards the staircase. “Don’t want you to fall again.”

No, that wouldn’t be good. Unlike last night, there was no one in front of me to break my fall, so if I tumbled face-first down the staircase, I would surely break my neck, or if not that, at least both my arms.

There were seventeen steps down, and at the bottom, we found ourselves standing in front of a heavy door. In front of the door stood a man in a deerstalker hat.

“I know about this,” I told Tom delightedly. “May I?”

He nodded, hazel eyes amused, and I turned to the gentleman in the hat. “Hello, Sherlock Holmes. We’re here to see Watson.”

The gentleman’s face didn’t change, but he stepped aside, pulling the door open at the same time. A wave of jazz music poured through and filled up the stairwell. When I stepped across the threshold with Tom right behind, the doorman winked, albeit not at me, but at Tom.

“How did you learn the password?” Tom wanted to know when the door was shut at our back, sealing the noise back into the club. He had to lean in to speak directly into my ear.

I leaned in the other direction to speak into his. “St George told me. The password to the nun at Rectors was ‘sister.’ He said if the doorman was dressed up as Sherlock Holmes, the password was ‘Watson.’ Apparently there’s a place in Spitalfields where you have to tell them that you’re there to get lucky, although I’ve never been.”

His lips twitched. “Lucky, or to Spitalfields?”

“Both,” I said, looking around. “You knew all this already, I assume?”

“I knew the passwords, yes. Those are common knowledge, at least at the office. I don’t think I know the place in Spitalfields.”

“How about the one in Marylebone?”

“Not that one either,” Tom said. “I suppose I shall have to ask Lord St George for elucidation.”

He turned his attention to the rest of the club and the reason we were here. “Do you see him?”

The old Cave of the Golden Calf was an oppressively low-ceilinged room with brightly-colored but faded murals along three walls. As best I could see through the heavy layer of cigarette smoke, they depicted oceans and jungles and other types of landscapes, in quite a primitive style. One wall showed an array of what were surely natives—naked and brown—frolicking with… were they horses? In some sort of mud-puddle, it seemed, or perhaps just dirty water. There were bare behinds on display—on the wall, I mean, not on the dancefloor—although the figures facing the room were at least decently covered, by what looked like palm fronds or the horses’ heads.

A few divans sat along the walls, and an array of tables had been moved aside to make an open area for dancing in the middle of the floor. What looked like perhaps seventy to a hundred people moved to the sounds of the jazz band playing on the small stage.

Just like the last time I had crashed one of Christopher’s drag balls, it took a moment or two to realize that most of the dancers, even the ones with the high heels in the sparkling gowns, were men. And of course I knew that already, having watched Christopher put on his face and wig and pink frock in front of my makeup mirror a few hours ago. But it was one thing to know it intellectually, and another thing for my eyes to see it. We see what we expect to see, what we’re used to seeing, and at first glance, I saw men dancing with women, the way they do all over London. It was only after the first second that my brain caught up with what I was actually looking at, which were men dancing with other men.

“There,” I said, pointing. Christopher’s petal pink dress was fairly easy to pick out among all the evening suits and darker gowns. “Dancing with the bloke with the carnation in his lapel. Next to the redhead in the seafoam green.”

The red bob was certainly a wig, just like the person in the seafoam was of the male persuasion. It was quite a nice frock he had on, however.

Tom nodded. He started forward, and I grabbed him by the sleeve. “You can’t just grab him and haul him off.”

“I’ve done it before,” Tom said, eyes on Christopher and his jaw tight.

“He’s not doing anything to him.” The bloke with the carnation wasn’t doing anything to Christopher, was what I meant. No one was doing anything to Christopher. He was here of his own free will, and seemed to be enjoying it. His poppy-red lips were curved in a smile, and his eyes sparkled.

And perhaps that was exactly what Tom objected to.

“Why don’t we simply dance our way over there?” I suggested. “Christopher will see us, he’ll understand why we’re here, and he’ll come quietly. There’s no need to cause a scene.”

“There’s every need,” Tom growled. “That… that… chap is feeling him up.”

The emphasis he put on the word made it clear that the word he would prefer to use was one altogether less restrained.

“He’s not.”

Admittedly, the gentleman’s hand was roving over Christopher’s back in a way more suitable to a secluded alcove than the middle of a dancefloor, but it looked no different than what was going on all over the rest of the club.

“Any lower,” Tom said, “and that hand palms Kit’s arse.”

That was rather a crude assessment, if entirely accurate, and for a moment I couldn’t get my voice to cooperate. Tom, meanwhile, didn’t take his eyes off the pair, and I could feel the tension build up around him, like Mount Vesuvius about to blow.

“Let’s dance,” I said brightly when I had my breath back, and held my hands out. Tom’s eyes lingered on the dancefloor for a second before he transferred his attention to me. It was another second before he processed my position and what he was expected to do. Then he nodded sharply, took my hand in his, snaked his other arm around my waist, and pulled me into a quickstep.

I sincerely hoped he did a better job of subterfuge if he ever had to go undercover during work, because there was none here. No slow circling of the floor, to make us look like we belonged. No attention on his dance partner—me—at all. Just a straight line into the middle of the floor, where we ended up next to Christopher and the latter’s dance partner. I elbowed Christopher discreetly in the ribs, and he moved out of the way, courteously, without looking at me.

“Cut in,” I told Tom, and he gave me a look.

“Do you want me to dance with Kit or the other bloke?”

“Christopher,” I said, “of course.”

“And how does the other bloke react to losing Kit and ending up with you?”

I didn’t know, but now that he mentioned it, perhaps I didn’t want to find out. I couldn’t imagine that the other bloke would be happy. I wouldn’t at all be what he wanted.

But needs must. I took my hand off Tom’s shoulder to poke a finger into the bare skin of Christopher’s upper arm.

“Ow!”

He jerked and turned towards me, mouth already open to remonstrate, and then his eyes widened with recognition. “Pippa? What are you doing here? And…” His eyes moved left, or right for him. “Tom? What’s wrong?”

He glanced around the room, having already—of course—guessed what might be coming.

“Nothing,” I said. “We’ve come to take you home.”

Christopher’s eyes narrowed and his jaw set stubbornly. But before he could inform us that he didn’t want to go home—because that opinion was absolutely coming—his dance partner got involved.

“What’s all this, then?” He squared his shoulders. Tom gave him a narrow look—it’s a classic question for any constable to ask, after all, so perhaps Tom wanted to ascertain that the chap wasn’t a policeman here undercover—but they must not know one another, because other than a perfectly natural few seconds of mutual glaring, nothing indicated previous acquaintance.

Having made his dislike plain, Tom turned his attention back to Christopher. “Time to go, Kit.”

“What if I don’t want to go?” Christopher asked. He folded his arms across his front and stuck his bottom lip out, sulkily.

“Yes,” his dance partner nodded, and shoved his shoulder between Christopher and Tom. “What if he doesn’t want to go?”

Tom’s eyes narrowed, and so did the other bloke’s. By now, other people had started to notice the four of us standing stock still in the middle of the dancefloor, and we were getting a bit of an audience.

I rolled my eyes and leaned closer to Christopher. “Do you really want him—either one of them—to prove his devotion with a fistfight in the middle of an illicit club full of boys in makeup and dresses? You know what will happen if the police show up.”

He didn’t answer, just watched Tom and the other chap squaring up, and I added, “Everyone in the room gets hauled off to jail, Christopher. Including you and me. We’ll have to apply to your father for bail money. And what do you imagine happens to Tom if Pendennis learns that he got into a bloody boxing match in a place like this? Over you?”

Christopher’s lips parted for a moment—perhaps he contemplated the idea and decided he liked it; something like that would certainly allay whatever concerns he had about Tom’s feelings, wouldn’t it?—but after a moment he glanced over at me. “We’d have to say that he did it for you, I suppose.”

“So we’d lie, is what you’re saying. You, I, and Tom get arrested for indecent behavior in an illicit establishment operating without a license—I see liquor, Christopher; I’m sure there’s no license for that—and we lie about what Tom’s doing here? And you think that’s fair to him?”

He didn’t answer, and I gave him a push. “Just agree to leave. I don’t want to say the word out loud for fear of causing a panic, but it starts with an R and ends with a D, and there have been several of them already.”

Christopher’s eyes widened, and I continued, “It isn’t certain that there’ll be another tonight, but Tom was able to dig up this location, so it’s likely that someone is keeping an eye on it. If tonight passes without any trouble, and Lady Austin decides it’s safe to come back next time, I’m sure it won’t be equally safe then.”

Christopher nodded. His eyes flickered over the room once before they returned to me. “Very well, then. I suppose if I don’t come along quietly, Tom will manhandle me out of here?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “He would never lay a hand on you, and you know it.”

“You didn’t see what happened in April,” Christopher retorted. “He threw me over his shoulder and hauled me out, kicking and screaming.”

My lips twitched. There had been an equal amount annoyance and shivery delight in his voice when he said it, which made me want to smile. Instead of doing so, I told him, “We ought perhaps to try to avoid that this time. The less attention on us, the better.”

Christopher nodded. “If there’s going to be a…” He hesitated, “a you-know-what later, I don’t feel good about leaving everyone else here to be swept up in it, Pippa.”

No, of course not. “But if you start yelling about it, you’ll start a riot, and we definitely don’t want that.”

“Definitely not,” Tom agreed. He wrapped a hand around Christopher’s wrist. “Come along, Kit.”

I waited for the chap Christopher had been dancing with to object, but Tom must have cowed him sufficiently, because when I glanced over my shoulder to where he had been standing, there was no sign of him.

“You too, Pippa,” Tom added, as he tugged Christopher towards the door. “Chop-chop.”

I gave one last look to where the other bloke had been standing before I scurried after them.

“Coming.”

We got a few stares on our way out—more because of me than either Tom or Christopher, I thought; I suppose my type wasn’t usually seen here—but no one tried to stop us. Tom shoved the door open and pulled Christopher through, and I caught it on the backswing and followed. The chap in the deerstalker arched a brow when he saw Tom— “Back so soon?”—and then lowered both when he saw Christopher. “Problem, Kitty?”

“Not for me,” Christopher said calmly, but with a flirtatious flick of his wig. “He’s ever so masterful, don’t you know?”

The tops of Tom’s cheekbones darkened, and I giggled. Christopher smirked and added, “Although you may want to close down early tonight.”

“Is that so?” The eyebrows rose again, and the doorman examined Tom a bit more closely. “Know something we don’t, do you?”

“We don’t know anything for certain,” I said, to take some of the pressure off Tom. He was caught between a rock and a hard place, poor chap: on the one hand, he wanted Christopher (and to give him the benefit of the doubt, me) safely out of the Cave of the Golden Calf before anything happened, but on the other hand, he didn’t want to totally botch a police operation, either, or so I assumed. Every other time this had happened, I supposed he had simply lain in wait so he could remove Christopher from the line of fire at an opportune moment. Here, we were practically forcing him to out himself as a police officer, as well as to give the potential arrestees advance warning of an upcoming raid, and it couldn’t have been easy. “Just forget we were here, please.”

I nudged Christopher, who nudged Tom, who started up the staircase to the street. Behind us, the music and voices became louder for a second as I assumed the doorman opened the door to the nightclub to start evacuating the guests.