And then he did a double-take. “Wait. Did you say Frederick Montrose? The same Frederick Montrose who?—?”
“The Frederick Montrose who wrote for The Daily Yell,” Crispin said. “If you were going to say something other than that, I don’t know which Montrose you thought he might be.”
He gave Tom an arrogant sort of look. Tom looked back at him in silence. It’s probably some sort of inferiority complex, honestly, not that I would dare to say that to his face.
Crispin’s, I mean. I don’t think Tom has any inferiority complexes. But St George becomes extra snotty around certain people, and they always look at him as if he were a small worm they’d like to crush under their heel.
“That’s the Montrose I thought he was,” he said eventually, after dismissing Crispin and his tone as not being worthy of his time and attention. “Why is he dead, and why is he in a frock? And more than that, why is he in your car?”
He gave Crispin a look. “You know, St George, I never considered seriously that you might have killed either your grandfather or Miss de Vos, but I’m starting to wonder why. It’s fascinating how corpses follow you about. How did you come to be in possession of this one, if I might ask?”
“It’s Darling’s fault,” Crispin said, with a glance into the backseat at me.
I scowled at him. “It most certainly is not.”
“If you hadn’t suggested dressing up and crashing Kit’s drag ball?—”
“Ifyouhadn’t shown up in the first place, wanting to celebrate your birthday?—!”
“Shhh!” Christopher hissed as our voices got louder. “Keep it down, or the police will notice us!”
“The police already noticed you,” Tom said dryly, which was certainly true.
“Not you,” Christopher said. “Youaren’t going to arrest us. Are you?”
He gazed up at Tom from under his lashes. He might even have fluttered them, although if he did, it had no visible effect.
“I don’t know,” Tom told him. “It depends on how persuasive you can be.”
His gaze made it clear that Crispin and I were included in the plural ‘you,’ as well. The reference to being persuasive was not some flirtatious remark that only applied to Christopher, but was aimed at all of us.
“Right now,” he added severely, “you’re not doing a good job of explaining why I shouldn’t.”
I took a breath, but then everyone froze as two of the constables down the street very obviously caught sight of us—of the Hispano-Suiza—and started coming towards us.
“Budge up,” Tom ordered, and yanked on the door handle. When the door opened, he slid into the front seat next to Christopher, who was smooshed against Crispin’s side. The latter growled, but didn’t complain. There wasn’t anything to complain about. Anything was better than being caught by the London constabulary right now.
“Reverse,” Tom said, his voice tight, as the constables drew closer. “Let’s go, St George. Stop dawdling.”
“I’m not dawdling,” Crispin told him through gritted teeth. “We’re going. I just need a little room…”
He shoved Christopher back towards Tom for long enough to do what he needed to do. Christopher fetched up against Tom’s shoulder with an, “Ooof!” and Crispin got the car going. Backwards, and at speed. The constables dwindled to pinpricks in a matter of seconds. Or if they didn’t quite do that, we zoomed backwards down Tottenham Court Road a lot faster than was comfortable or, I assumed, safe.
I was screaming, Christopher was cursing, and Tom was telling Crispin what he was going to do to him—arrest and dismemberment featured large—if Crispin didn’t immediately cease to do what he was doing. Crispin was laughing, but then he had been laughing when he wrapped the Ballot around the light pole, too.
“I’m going to kill you, St George,” I told him breathlessly. “Let me guess: this was what you were doing last year, when the Ballot bit the dust.”
“When the Ballot bit the dust, I was drunk,” Crispin told me over his shoulder. His voice was perfectly calm and even, as if this was something he did all the time. As if going backwards down a London street in the middle of the night, dodging around cars and a few pedestrians, didn’t faze him at all. “And you won’t kill me, Darling. You like me too much for that.”
We were coming up on a cross-street, and he zipped around the corner, still going backwards, and then shifted and shot across Tottenham Court Road in the opposite direction. The constables on foot hadn’t a hope of keeping up. I hadn’t thought it was possible to get up that kind of speed within the city limits, but I had clearly underestimated the Honorable Viscount St George.
“In your dreams,” I told him breathlessly. “I will absolutely kill you, St George. And then I’ll wake you from the dead and kill you again. I’m sitting in the back of your motorcar with a dead body, you madman. Slow down, unless you want him to fall on the floor!”
Crispin didn’t say anything to that, but he did slow down. Just a bit.
“Where to?” he asked Tom, as if we were out for a leisurely Sunday drive instead of a desperate dash through the dark streets of London, running away from the police.
Tom shook his head. “How should I know? What were you planning to do with this body?”
