I hesitated. It wasn’t like I owed Crispin anything, but I had promised him I’d forget about the conversation I’d heard him have with his father yesterday. And I had told Christopher as much, but of course Crispin hadn’t extracted the same promise from him.
Or if he had, Christopher seemed willing to break it. “He’s in love with some woman my aunt and uncle don’t approve of. That’s the only thing I’ve learned about him this weekend that I didn’t already know. His other escapades are hardly a secret. He runs with a very fast crowd when he’s in London.”
Tom nodded. “Any idea who the woman is?”
“I could guess,” Christopher said, with a guilty look at me, “but that’s all it would be. Guessing. And I could be wrong. His name has been associated with Lady Violet Cummings, and the Honorable Cecily Fletcher, and Millicent Tremayne, the actress, and that’s just in the last few months.”
My face twisted. “He’s a cad.”
“He gets around,” Christopher agreed. “They’re all good old English girls, though, and supposedly that’s one of the things that makes this girl unacceptable to the family. She’s foreign. So there has to be someone else.”
I squinted at Tom. “Are you telling me that Grimsby failed to find out? He nosed out Christopher’s secret identity and Francis’s drug use and Aunt Roz’s financial sideline, but he wasn’t able to figure out who Crispin supposedly fell in love with? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know whether he found out or not,” Tom said, and he sounded frustrated by it. “There are a few pages missing from the notebook—three or four, we think—and if there was something about the Viscount St George’s love affairs in there, they must have been on one of those pages.”
All of them, more likely. Given the rumors that floated around, I had no problem imagining three or four notebook pages filled with names of women Crispin had wronged.
“Well, that’s convenient,” I said.
“You’re telling me,” Tom answered.
“Why would Grimsby tear out the pages that applied to Crispin?”
“He wouldn’t,” Christopher said. “Someone else did it. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
He pinned Tom with a look. I turned from one to the other of them. “Wait. You’re saying whoever killed Grimsby tore out the pages? Why not just take the whole notebook? It seems easier.”
“Is that what you would have done?” Tom asked.
“I wouldn’t have torn out the pages pertaining to myself and left the pages pertaining to everyone else, certainly. That would make me look very guilty, wouldn’t it?”
Tom nodded. “And yet, that’s just what someone did.”
My eyes widened. “Tore out the pages about me?”
“If there were pages about you,” Tom said. “They’re gone, so we have no idea what was on them. It could have been information about you, or it could have been information about someone else.”
“But there are pages missing.”
He nodded.
“And there’s nothing in the notebook about me?”
He shook his head.
“What about Christopher? Francis? Aunt Roz?”
“The information we discussed, about Francis and Lady Roslyn, is there,” Tom said. “There’s some information about Lord Herbert’s gambling. Some losses, some wins. Nothing remarkable either way. Certainly no debt.”
Christopher looked relieved.
“There’s nothing about Kit,” Tom added. “Or St George. Tidwell the butler has a lady friend in Salisbury he sees on his days off. One of the chambermaids is carrying on with one of the footmen, and the kitchen maid is sneaking food out of the kitchen to her sister in the village on her weekly afternoons off. One of the grooms gambles worse than Lord Herbert, albeit for much smaller sums, but given their respective positions in society, the groom is in hock up to his eyeballs and is about to find himself afoul one of the local bookies.”
“Lovely.”
“Cook had a child out of wedlock once upon a time, before any of us here were born. There’s no Mr. Sloane, since she’s not been married. The chauffeur occasionally uses the Crossley to visit family in Southampton when no one else needs it. They’re all petty crimes and small infractions, nothing you’d think would turn into murder. But we have to look at it all.”
“But there’s nothing about me or Pippa?” Christopher said. “Not even the things we’ve just told you?”
