Hutchison shook his head. “Gram went out. May I take your coat, Miss Darling?”
He hovered expectantly.
“That’s all right,” I told him. “I doubt we’ll be staying long.”
“We just wanted to know if you’d seen Crispin,” Christopher added. “Or Miss Long.”
“I haven’t seen either of them today,” Hutchison said promptly.
“You didn’t drop Miss Long off outside our place and send her upstairs to talk to my cousin?”
Hutchison shook his head. “Is that what she said I did? If she went there, she went on her own. Or with someone else.”
“Why would she lie about it?”
“No idea,” Hutchison said. “I assume she might have wanted to know what happened last night, but I didn’t speak to her.”
He gestured to the door at the end of the foyer. “I want to know that, too, now that you’re here. Come in and have a seat. Drink?”
I declined. Someone had almost killed me with a poisoned drink a month ago—and had put Christopher out for several days when he drank it instead. In this situation, and with this group of people, it was far safer not to take any chances.
Not that Hutchison seemed particularly homicidal at the moment. He came across as a rather pleasant young man without a care in the world. If he had killed Gladys—and he might have; Ogilvie wasn’t here to give him an alibi—it hadn’t had much of an effect on him. He’d been far more distraught last night, or this morning, over Montrose.
“It’s not much of a story,” Christopher said, and perched on the arm of the chair I dropped into. “We loaded the body into Crispin’s motorcar and drove back to Rectors. By the time we got there, the street was covered with constables and police cars. I even saw the Flying Bedstead.”
“Did you?” I said, looking up at him. “I didn’t notice it.”
He nodded. “It was there. Parked on the other side of the street. At any rate, we couldn’t unload Montrose’s body. And after a minute of watching, someone noticed the H6 and started coming toward us. So we bloused out of there and over to Hyde Park. We left him under a tree.”
Hutchison looked taken aback, perhaps at the abrupt end to the story. “And no one saw you?”
“If anyone had been there,” I said, “we wouldn’t have done it.”
He nodded. “And the police didn’t recognize St George’s motorcar? They’re fairly familiar with it.”
“If anyone did, they didn’t come looking for him at ours,” Christopher said evenly. “If someone went to Sutherland House to look for him, we wouldn’t know about it.”
“But they also wouldn’t have found him,” I added. “And now, I assume, he’s on his way home. You really haven’t seen him this morning?”
Hutchison shook his head. “I haven’t seen anyone. Gram was here when I woke up, but that’s all.”
“Where did he go? And when?”
Could he have been the one to drop Gladys off? Or the one to kill her? Or was Hutchison simply lying, and he himself had dealt with Gladys?
He eyed me for a moment before he said, “He didn’t say.”
“How many ways out of this building?”
Hutchison’s lips twitched. “Two. Front door and back stairs.”
So Ogilvie—or for that matter Hutchison himself—might have left and come back without being seen by anyone.
“What happened last night?” Christopher cut in. Hutchison looked at him, sort of blankly, and he added, “We were in Blanton’s sitting room. Montrose left, and then the rest of you followed. The next time we saw you, he was dead and you were all standing around the body.”
“Someone killed him,” Hutchison said.
Christopher nodded. “That much we know. We thought perhaps you’d give us a little more information.”
