“And you did what?” the detective asked.
“We didn’t do anything,” I told him. “Gladys wanted to go home. She said Hutchison had dropped her off here, and she asked St George for a lift. He left to take her home and then drive back to Wiltshire.”
At whatever point he could bear to drag himself away from her charms, I assumed.
Tom’s eyes widened during this recitation. “You sent your cousin, by himself, back to a group of people who you know killed someone yesterday? Why would you do such a thing?”
I blinked. So did Christopher. I don’t think either of us had thought of it that way.
“They’re not going to hurt Crispin,” Christopher protested, although I could hear the concern in his voice. “He’s one of them, isn’t he?”
“Is he?” Tom let the question hang in the air for a moment before he added, “Montrose was also one of them, or close enough. Cambridge educated, and an Honorable. And where is he now?”
At the morgue, I assumed, but I didn’t think now was the time to ask. Tom had clearly meant the question rhetorically.
“We didn’t think—” I began, and Tom nodded grimly.
“That, if you’ll forgive me, is obvious. Where does Miss Long live?”
I didn’t know, and said so. Tom turned to Christopher, who also shook his head. “No idea, I’m afraid.”
“So you sent your cousin off somewhere you don’t know, with a woman who might have committed murder last night…”
“We get it,” I interrupted, “all right? We get it. And we already feel bad about it, so stop rubbing it in, please. What can we do to find them? Or at least to make sure that St George is all right?”
And if he wasn’t, to catch whoever had made him not so.
Although I honestly didn’t think Gladys would have hurt Crispin. She had seemed genuinely taken with him—the way most women seemed to be when he turned on the charm—and I didn’t think she was enough of an actress to fake her reaction to Flossie Schlomsky, either. I also doubted that she was the one who had killed Montrose. She was a small girl, for one thing, who might have had a problem both hitting hard enough and reaching high enough to bash a man over the head, even a medium-sized one like Frederick Montrose. If she had been in the kitchen with Dominic Rivers when Montrose entered the butler’s pantry, she couldn’t have gotten to him anyway. And if either of them had left the kitchen to give Montrose a crack on the head, it was more likely to have been Rivers. Not only was he a man, with the usual masculine proclivities for needing to protect the weaker sex, but he had more to lose than Gladys. Being a dope addict is one thing, being a dope dealer quite another.
Or it might have been Blanton, Hutchison, or Ogilvie, of course, who hadn’t been in the kitchen to begin with.
And if Gladys had taken Crispin there this afternoon—to Blanton’s flat, or Rivers’s ditto—then I wouldn’t necessarily put it past one of them to hurt him, even over Gladys’s objections.
“We know where Blanton lives,” Christopher said, “so why don’t we start there? If no one’s home, maybe Dobbins will be able to tell us where to find Gladys Long. Or if not her, then one of the others.”
It was a reasonable suggestion, so that’s what we did. Gathered our outerwear and, in my case, my reticule, and headed downstairs to the lobby, where Evans was ready to whisk the door open as we left. “Lots of visitors this morning,” he remarked as we filed through.
I nodded. “And you didn’t announce any of them, Evans. What happened?”
“His Lordship said he wanted to surprise his son,” Evans said. His Lordship being Uncle Harold, the Duke of Sutherland, I assumed. Evans ought rightly to have called him His Grace, but at least His Lordship was better than Flossie’s Your Highness. “The young lady was crying—” of course she had been, “—and Detective Sergeant Gardiner showed me his credentials and told me he was expected.”
He slanted a look in Tom’s direction before he focused his attention back on me. “Was he wrong?”
I shook my head. No, Tom had been expected. The others hadn’t.
Although there was nothing to be done about it now. “I don’t suppose you happened to catch where Lord St George and Miss Long were off to, did you? Did either of them say anything in your hearing?”
“I’m afraid not, Miss Darling. But I heard her tell him to take a left at the next corner, if it helps.”
It certainly didn’t hurt, anyway. “Thank you, Evans,” I said, and scurried after Christopher and Tom through the door.
Tom had arrivedat our place in one of the Crossley Tenders that the Metropolitan Police had invested in since the War.
Not one of the wireless-equipped vehicles that the criminal classes—and Crispin’s Bright Young Set—had nicknamed ‘flying bedsteads,’ but a perfectly normal Crossley Tender without the immensely large antennae on the roof.
I crawled into the back seat, leaving the front next to Tom empty for Christopher, and we bumped along at a good clip and arrived outside Ronald Blanton’s mansion block after some twenty minutes or so of city streets and city noises.
Christopher and Tom murmured to one another in the front seat for the duration of the drive, but I spent the time in silence. It would have taken effort to keep up with their conversation, both for me to actually hear what they said over the sound of the motor, and then the mental effort required to keep track of their words and perhaps respond to them in a focused, mindful way, and I didn’t have it in me. I was sitting in the back seat worrying about—of all people—Crispin.
