With such pleasant thoughts to keep me company, we crept along Piccadilly at what felt like a snail’s pace, keeping a keen eye out for constables or anyone else who might recognize Crispin and/or the Hispano-Suiza. The drive took what felt like hours, although I don’t think it can have been more than fifteen minutes before we pulled into sight of Rectors nightclub.
Crispin yanked the steering wheel to the side and we landed at the curb up the street from the nightclub. And there we sat, all three of us gaping, open-mouthed, at the scene in front of us.
“Dear me,” Christopher said faintly.
The street outside Rectors was blocked to traffic, but alive with activity. Several police vehicles were parked at angles all over the roadway. Their headlamps cut through the darkness and lit up a scene of almost Biblical destruction. Bobbies in uniform swarmed the building where Rectors was located, running inside and then coming back out, dragging men in evening kit and men in gowns and high heels behind them. The air rang with screams and curses, and there were fisticuffs and attempts to break away from the strong hand of the law. One man, dressed in an elegant champagne gown with strings of beads flapping around his knees, legged it up the street with a constable in pursuit. We ducked down as they ran past, which put me in much-too-close proximity to Freddie Montrose’s head.
The constable came huffing back down the street at a jog a few seconds later, so the man in champagne beads must have escaped. We waited until the constable was safely past before we reared our heads again.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” Crispin said grimly. “There are people everywhere. We can’t just haul him out of the backseat in full view of everyone and leave him on the pavement.”
No, we absolutely couldn’t. “What do we do? Take him back to Mayfair and dump him in Blanton’s alley after all?”
“Better to dump him in an alley around here,” Christopher said, and then grimaced. “I can’t believe we’re sitting here talking so calmly about getting rid of a dead body.”
No, I couldn’t either. “We’d better get out of here as quickly as possible, anyway. This place is swarming with constables. We don’t want to give them time to notice us, and then come to investigate what we’re up to.”
That was surely the very last thing we needed. Not only for all three of us to be caught in drag, at the scene of an illegal drag ball, but to be caught in drag at the site of a raid with a freshly dead body draped across the backseat of our car.
I could only imagine what would happen if that news hit the tabloids.
“Yes, Crispin,” Christopher nodded, “get us out of here, please. We can decide what to do with the body once we’re away from here.”
Crispin nodded. But no sooner had he taken his size 42 T-strap pump off the brake, than a figure materialized beside the car, practically out of thin air.
“For the love of God, Kit?—”
It was Tom Gardiner, of course, in his tweed suit and with his Homburg pulled low over his face, but not quite low enough to mask an expression made up of equal parts irritation and fear. It was the kind of expression my Aunt Roslyn—Christopher’s and Francis’s mother—would get when one of us had climbed up a tree and fallen, and she couldn’t quite decide whether to yell at us for being stupid or embrace us for having survived. In the end, she usually did both, and I had the feeling that Tom Gardiner would like to do the same. But of course he couldn’t, because not only were we on a public street, with constables running back and forth and a raid going on in front of us, but Christopher was inside the motorcar while Tom was outside on the pavement, and that made the logistics difficult.
And to be honest, I had no idea whether they were in the habit of embracing anyway. I had never seen them do it, so maybe they were not. I had the impression that Christopher rather liked Tom, and Tom had gone out of his way to keep Christopher from being rounded up in last month’s raid, so it was possible the feelings were reciprocated. On the other hand, Tom might just be taking care of Christopher because Robbie wasn’t around to do it.
None of that mattered at the moment, anyway. Tom wasn’t in the embracing part of the process. He was still stuck on the angry yelling. Except he was doing itsotto voce, since he didn’t want to draw attention to us.
“—have you lost your mind? What are you doing here? You should not be here, especially not now. I thought you’d be inside, so I went in and looked for you—looked for you everywhere!—but I couldn’t find you, and now I’ve been standing here for an hour waiting for them to haul you out in handcuffs…!”
As the diatribe continued, my eyes widened, and so, when I glanced over, did Crispin’s. I could only see the back of Christopher’s head—or rather, his black wig—so I had no idea how he reacted, but I would guess that his cheeks and the tips of his ears were probably bright red.
And then Tom seemed to recall himself, possibly when he realized that he and Christopher weren’t alone. He glanced at Crispin, and did a double-take. And then looked at me and did the same. “Miss… um… Pippa? And Lord St George? What are you doing here?”
He gave us another up-and-down look. But before he had a chance to comment, his eyes fell on Montrose, and his expression changed. “Who’s that?”
“His name is…” Crispin cleared his throat. “His name was Frederick Montrose.”
Tom’s eyebrows disappeared behind the hat. “Was? Are you telling me?—?”
He looked from Crispin to Christopher to me and back. “You’re surely not telling me that you’re driving around London at three in the morning with a corpse in the backseat?”
I winced. Crispin did, too, and I’m sure Christopher must have, as well. We glanced at each other and avoided Tom’s eyes and surely looked as guilty as it is possible for three people to look. Neither of us attempted to lie and tell him that no, we definitely were not driving around London at 3 AM with a corpse in the backseat, though.
“What have you done?” Tom asked. He asked very quietly, and I don’t think it was only so that no one around us would hear. I think he was also so upset that his response was to turn more quiet so he wouldn’t lose his temper and yell. “Who is—whowasFrederick Montrose and why is he dead in your car?”
He took another look at what he could see of Montrose—the frock, the shoes—and added, “And why is he dressed like that?”
“It wasn’t us,” I said. And added, winningly, “You knowwewouldn’t kill anyone.”
He eyed me. For a second too long for it to be comfortable. “I don’t know you very well at all, Miss Darling. I wouldn’t have thought so, certainly, but here you are.”
He waited a moment for that to sink in before he added, “And he’s clearly not a stranger you picked up along the way, if you know his name.”
