“If you don’t mind, Darling,” Crispin said, “I am running for my life here. And it’s not easy to do in these shoes, in case you were unaware.”
“Of course I’m aware, you imbecile. I spend most of my life in shoes like those.”
“But do you usually run for your life in them?”
He clattered to a stop at the bottom of the staircase, but didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead, he took a calming breath before he told us both, “Now let’s all just walk out as if nothing’s wrong. If anyone asks, the commissionaire will be able to tell them, quite honestly, that we arrived with Montrose and left without him.”
“And that’s a good thing, is it?”
“It is, Darling. I’m not going down for this murder if I can at all avoid it. Now come along.”
He pushed the door open, took me by the arm, and steered me across the checkerboard floor of the foyer, with Christopher clattering behind. When the commissionaire pulled the front door open with a flourish, Crispin gave him a cheerful, “Good night, Webley.”
“Good night, Lord St George,” the doorman said. While he eyed me and Christopher, he clearly couldn’t place us, because he didn’t use our names. His gaze lingered on Christopher, though, and I figured he had probably noticed the resemblance between the two of them. If anyone asked, it wouldn’t be difficult to identify both Christopher and me.
But then we were outside in the cool London night air, and on our way along the pavement away from Blanton’s mansion block towards the car park where Crispin had left the Hispano-Suiza.
CHAPTERSIX
The streets were mostly deserted.There were no nightclubs on Blanton’s street, and not much else going on, either. Mayfair is more the domain of the old guard, quite settled and conservative, than the Bright Young Set. Sutherland House, for your information—Crispin’s bachelor pad when he’s in Town—is located here, a few streets west from where we were. Christopher’s and my mansion flat, needless to say, is not nearby.
At any rate, it gave us a chance to talk. Not that we got much closer to a solution to our problem.
“We could get in the H6 and go home,” I suggested, since it would absolutely be my preference to have no more to do with the situation. “Just leave them there with Montrose’s body. Let them deal with it.”
They both looked at me, and I added, defensively, “At least we wouldn’t be accessories to murder that way. This is an attempt to cover up a crime. Interfering with a crime scene. Defiling a dead body. Tortious interference with a deceased human. Something like that.”
“I don’t like it any better than you do, Pippa,” Christopher said, as he clack-clacked along beside me. He had an easier time walking in the heels than Crispin did. More practice, probably. “But I don’t see how we can get around it. If we don’t go back with the motorcar, they’ll know we’ve abandoned them, and I’m not sure I want to get on Dominic Rivers’s bad side. The others’, either, but particularly his. If he makes his living peddling dope, I imagine he won’t blink at a few murders.”
“He seemed rather upset earlier, didn’t he? He’s certainly not in the habit of dispatching people.”
“This might have been his first actual murder,” Crispin said, “if he’s the one who did it, but he’ll do it again before he lets himself get arrested for it. Or I’m sure he knows someone unsavory he can talk into, or pay, to do it for him. I vote with Kit. We shan’t do anything to upset Dominic Rivers.”
Fine. I had no particular wish to upset Rivers, either. Although truthfully, the other two seemed more worried about it than I was.
“So what you’re saying,” I said, “is that we have to go back with the motorcar. And we have to accept Montrose’s body. What do we do with it once we have it?”
“We take it to Rectors,” Crispin said.
Christopher and I exchanged a glance. “I don’t feel as if we should leave him in the alley and walk away, somehow.”
“I’m not suggesting we do that,” Crispin said, as the entrance to the car park came into view in front of us “I’m not a monster, you know. I’m usually quite happy to save my own skin, but not at the expense of everyone and everything around me.”
Before I could say something sarcastic about his concern, or lack thereof, for the rest of us, he added, “Montrose was a friend, at least once upon a time.”
I closed my mouth again, and let him talk without interrupting.
“What I suggest,” he said, “is that we take him to Rectors, leave him there, and then we go find Tom Gardiner and tell him what we know.”
Thomas Gardiner was an acquaintance of both boys’ from their days at Eton. He was younger than my cousin Francis by a year or two, and older than Crispin and Christopher by roughly four, which made him a contemporary of my late cousin Robert’s. It was that connection that had made him remove Christopher from April’s drag ball—kicking and screaming—before the infamous police raid a month and a week ago.
And then he had showed up at Sutherland Hall two days later, as part of the contingent from Scotland Yard that was investigating Grimsby the valet’s murder. Tom was a detective sergeant as well as a photography expert on Chief Inspector Pendennis’s homicide team.
Last month, when Christopher and I had discovered Johanna de Vos—she of the pale blue dress—dead in Lady Peckham’s bedchamber in Dorset, he had told me that he didn’t know how to get in touch with Thomas Gardiner. But that was a month ago. Things might have changed.
“Well?” Crispin said after the car park attendant had scurried off to fetch the Hispano-Suiza. “What do you think of my idea?”
“I suppose I’ve heard worse ones,” Christopher admitted.
