Uncle Harold hesitated, and when he couldn’t lay his thoughts on the word he wanted, he went on as if it had been there, “—you may drive down this afternoon.”
“But I’m expected home for supper?”
“Naturally,” Uncle Harold said.
Naturally. “Take care, St George,” I told him. “We’ll miss you.”
“Yes, I can hear the sincerity dripping off your words, Darling.” He rolled his eyes. “We both know that you aren’t going to miss me, so why say it? Why not just leave well enough alone and say nothing?”
“I might miss you,” I said, “the same way I’d miss a toothache.”
“No doubt.” His voice was dry. “And I’d miss you the way I would miss?—”
“St George!” his father barked, and Crispin flushed and bit back whatever awful thing he had been about to say.
I sniggered, but before I could speak again, there was another knock on the front door.
“We might as well not have a doorman,” I told Christopher as I headed for the foyer to let whoever was knocking into the flat. “Evans just keeps sending people up with no warning. I thought it was bad when St George showed up a month ago, but at least then Evans thought he was you. This time?—”
Uncle Harold bristled, but by then I had left the sitting room and was in the foyer, and mercifully out of range of anything he might have had to say about me to his son and nephew.
I’ll admit to some trepidation when I turned the lock and pulled the door open. I thought it was most likely to be Tom Gardiner, and I wasn’t terribly keen to discuss yesterday’s murder in front of Uncle Harold. But I thought I could at least trust Tom to keep his head until we could get rid of Crispin’s father. The latter might evince some surprise that a Scotland Yard detective came to visit his nephew and his nephew’s cousin at what was practically the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning, but if Tom just played his part right and made the whole thing seem friendly and non-professional, I thought we could probably push Uncle Harold off without him being any the wiser.
On the other hand, it might be Florence Schlomsky, and I wasn’t nearly ready for another encounter with her. Her behaviorvis-à-visCrispin yesterday evening had been brazen to the point of embarrassing—for me, I mean. Not for Flossie, certainly, and probably not for Crispin, either, since he doesn’t embarrass easily. But I could only imagine how Uncle Harold would react to such behavior.
Unless I was wrong about Uncle Harold, of course. He might think a liaison between his son and the American heiress would be a good thing. The Sutherlands are hardly paupers, and St George certainly doesn’t have to go fortune-hunting to maintain his standard of living, but there’s nothing wrong with accumulating more money than one has already, either, and Florence was in possession of a tidy fortune.
Having thus prepared myself, I pulled open the door and came face to face… not with Flossie Schlomsky, but with?—
“Miss Long?”
CHAPTERNINE
“Miss Darling,”Gladys Long sniffed. “Is Lord St George here?”
She peered past my shoulder into the foyer.
The sniff wasn’t condescending. She was crying, actually, choking back tears. Her eyes were red and swollen—bloodshot, too—and her cheeks were wet. She kept dabbing at them with a handkerchief that looked positively sodden. I peered at her, as closely as I could without actually leaning in, but I could see none of the signs of yesterday’s excesses. Her pupils were a normal size, neither too large nor too small, and while she was wound up, it wasn’t the manic, chemically induced excitement of last night.
“He’s inside,” I said. And since I hadn’t really a choice, I added, “Would you like to come in?”
She nodded eagerly. “Please.”
I still wanted to know how she had gotten up here without being announced—perhaps Evans was susceptible to bribery, or perhaps she’d given him a sob story so he had felt sorry for her; I felt bad for her too, right now, so I couldn’t exactly blame him—but it didn’t seem like the time to inquire. So I merely stepped aside and gestured her into the foyer so I could close the door behind her.
“Through the door on the other end.” I waved her to go ahead of me, and raised my voice. “Visitor for you, St George.”
He lifted his head to look at the doorway, but so, of course, did Christopher. So, for that matter, did Uncle Harold, who twisted to peer over the back of the Chesterfield. Faced with all three of them staring at her, Gladys gulped. “St George?”
Her voice shook as she looked from Crispin to Christopher and back. Or perhaps from Christopher to Crispin and back. It was fairly obvious that she had no idea—or not much of one—which of them was which.
I will admit that to someone who didn’t know them well, they did look very much alike at the moment. Crispin was wearing Christopher’s cream-colored flannel bags and a light gray jumper, while Christopher was wearing his own gray bags and a blue jumper. Up close, you would be able to tell that the jumpers matched their eyes, Crispin’s gray and Christopher’s blue, but Gladys wasn’t close enough to them for that. She had stopped just inside the door, and now she eyed them both with the expression of a rabbit facing a pair of snakes.
Then—
“Gladys,” Crispin said, his tone somewhere between surprised and apprehensive, and Gladys focused on him, looking relieved.
“St George!” She rushed across the floor and threw herself in his arms, clutching handfuls of his, or Christopher’s, jumper. He looked like he wanted to object—Christopher, I mean, about the jumper—but he refrained.
