“Could it have been Grimsby?”Christopher wanted to know the next morning over breakfast.
I thought about it for a moment before I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Christopher. Grimsby has dark hair. Almost black. This was someone fair-haired, as far as I could tell. You know, from the one-second glimpse I got.”
“He uses quite a lot of brilliantine, though,” Christopher pointed out, “so it’s possible the moonlight on top of his head would make it reflect like that for a second.”
Perhaps. “I don’t know why you’re so insistent on it being Grimsby. Why does it matter?”
“I just find it strange that he didn’t show up last night,” Christopher said, and took a bite of kipper. After masticating and swallowing, he added, “There’s a thousand pounds riding on it. Why would he choose to give up all that money?”
His relief at having avoided the conversation with Grimsby last evening had clearly turned to questioning and dread overnight.
“I don’t know that you can say he gave it up,” I said fairly. “He’ll probably make contact with you today, to start negotiating. The below-stairs might have been too discombobulated last night for him to get away. We don’t know much about what goes on down there, but I imagine there must have been turmoil. So many of the servants had been with your grandfather for such a long time.”
Including, of course, Grimsby, who might have been devastated by the loss of his employer. Not to mention his steady income.
Christopher didn’t have an answer to that, so I continued. “Or, if it was Grimsby I saw—” which I wasn’t convinced it had been, but there was no point in repeating it, “—maybe he was just running late. Perhaps you’re not the only family member he has on his hook. Maybe he was meeting with someone else, too, before you, and the meeting went longer than expected, so he didn’t make it to your part of the garden until after you’d left. He probably wouldn’t have scheduled two meetings in the same part of the garden, for fear the two of you might see each other.”
Christopher looked reluctantly assured as he chewed his fish. “Who do you suppose he might be blackmailing? Other than me?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “St George heard about Francis’s drug use and your mother’s sideline by listening in on the conversations in your grandfather’s room. If the old boy knew about those things, Grimsby wouldn’t have been in a position to blackmail either of them with those secrets. You can’t blackmail someone with something someone else already knows.”
Christopher nodded.
“He certainly wasn’t blackmailing me. That leaves your cousin, your aunt and uncle, and your father.”
“I can’t imagine what Father might have to hide,” Christopher said. “He never does anything except shoot partridges and visit his club. And surely Aunt Charlotte would know whatever Uncle Harold has been up to, and vice versa.”
“I guess that depends on how close they are.” And they weren’t sharing a bedroom, so perhaps not as close as a married couple ought to be. “Although it’s probably St George. He’s getting up to all sorts of things in Town, if the rumors are true.”
“You just don’t like him,” Christopher said, which was certainly fair. I didn’t. “If there are rumors about what he’s doing, his actions are hardly a secret, are they? And from that conversation we overheard, it sounds like Uncle Harold is well aware of what Crispin has been up to.”
“Unless he’s doing something else. Something his father doesn’t know. Something nobody knows.”
“Something Grimsby discovered? I suppose that’s possible. If he was sneaking around after you and me, he was probably sneaking around after Crispin, as well.”
“We can just ask Tidwell where Grimsby is,” I said, “if you’re ready to get it over with.”
I looked around for any sign of the butler.
“No,” Christopher said, which was just as well, since the breakfast room was empty except for the two of us. “I’ll wait for Grimsby to contact me. I don’t want to see him any sooner than I have to.”
This was honestly contrary to my own habit of grabbing whatever problem I have by the ears and shaking it into submission, but if Christopher preferred to put off the inevitable until he could avoid it no more, who was I to stop him?
“That’s fine by me. I’m sure he’ll show up sooner rather than later, to be honest.”
I took a bite of fried tomato and chewed it carefully before I added, “Although I really don’t think it was him I saw last night. It was only a glimpse, but I really got the impression it was someone with fair hair. You, your brother, your cousin, your father…”
“It certainly wasn’t me. You walked me to my door and saw me go in, Pippa. I doubt I would have had the time to run back downstairs, out through the conservatory, and all the way around to the hedge maze by the time you looked out your window.”
Perhaps not. Then again, I had changed out of my clothes and into my pyjamas by the time I went to pull the curtains, so it was possible. It had been five minutes, at least, from the time we had parted ways outside Christopher’s room. He would have had to hurry, certainly, but I thought he could probably have made it there.
And by that measure, so could Crispin. When he’d come upon us last night, perhaps that’s where he’d been going. Out, to meet Grimsby. Maybe he hadn’t been, as he put it, waking his grandfather at all. And when he ran into us, he had walked upstairs with us to make sure we were settled and weren’t going to come after him before he went back downstairs and out.
He had even offered to walk me all the way to my door, hadn’t he?
Although that wasn’t the important thing right now.
“Of course I don’t think it was you, Christopher. Don’t be silly. You had no reason to gallivant around the hedge maze close to midnight.”
