“But going to see St George wouldn’t suggest that,” Tom said. “He was already involved. So were you and Kit.”
That was true, of course. I glanced at Christopher. “They made sure—very much so—that we shouldn’t find out who killed Montrose. No one admitted to doing it. Not last night, and not today either. Ronnie Blanton said that he didn’t remember anything that happened last night, and Nigel Hutchison said Montrose was already dead when he came on the scene in the butler’s pantry.”
“But they could have been lying,” Christopher shot in.
“Yes.” Blanton could have lied about what, if anything, he remembered, and Hutchison could have lied about Montrose already being dead when he saw him. “At any rate, if they didn’t want us to know who did it, and if they were afraid Gladys would spill the beans to St George, that would be a reason to get rid of her.”
“But if so,” Tom asked, “why drop her off at all? Why not kill her then, before she had a chance to talk to anyone? And then take the body somewhere and dump it?”
That was a good point, and gave me pause for a moment while I thought it through.
“Perhaps they all agreed that Gladys should talk to St George? They must have wanted an update on what we did with Montrose’s body last night. The discovery wasn’t in the morning papers, right?”
Tom shook his head. “We let it into the afternoon papers, though. Male body found in Hyde Park, with possible ties to the raid on Rectors that was front page news in the morning edition.”
“Did the article give his name?”
“None of the papers had that. Although I’m sure people are starting to talk. What a way to go, for someone who wasn’t involved in the lifestyle at all. Dead, in a dress, in Hyde Park.” He shook his head. “He’d never live it down, were he alive.”
“Did you know Freddie Montrose?” I wanted to know, and he met my eyes for a moment in the mirror.
“Remotely. He was a tabloid journalist, I’m a copper. And we went to university together for a couple of years, although I’m not sure I knew him then.”
“Cambridge?”
He nodded.
“I didn’t realize you went to uni with St George.”
They’d been at Eton together for a year—so had Tom and Christopher—but no one had mentioned Cambridge.
“For a short while,” Tom said, “and only because of the war. I would have finished and gone by the time he came along if not for the time I spent in France.”
Of course. Tom was four years older than Christopher and Crispin, the same age that Cousin Robbie would have been, had he survived his own detour to France. Crispin, like Christopher, went from Eton to Cambridge—or Oxford, in Christopher’s case—at eighteen. Tom spent his eighteenth year, and possibly his nineteenth, fighting in the Great War.
“I started at Cambridge in 1919,” Tom said. He must have noticed the calculations going on in my head. Or perhaps he was simply used to having to explain. “Almost a year after the Armistice. I was twenty.”
“So you were there for the Storming of the Gates.”
“Newnham College in 1921?” Tom made a face. “I should hope you would know me well enough to realize that I wouldn’t take part in intimidating coeds.”
“Of course.” I did, in fact, realize that. Anyone who had gone through the fighting in France the way Tom had, and who had seen the worst of war, wasn’t likely to participate in riots here at home. Especially over something like women’s right to proper degrees.
“And no,” Tom said, clearly reading my mind; it was becoming a bit uncanny by now how everyone could tell what I was thinking, “I don’t know whether Lord St George did, but I would warn you away from jumping to conclusions, Pippa. For someone who refuses to believe him guilty of harming Gladys Long, you’re awfully quick to think that he would do other terrible things.”
I huffed and leaned back, folding my arms over my chest. Although I couldn’t refrain from saying, “He would have been eighteen. A fairly new-minted eighteen. It wouldn’t have been surprising if he did some stupid things.”
“He wasn’t sent down, anyway,” Christopher said. “And if he’d ended up in the papers, Uncle Harold would have had something to say about it, not to mention Grandfather, so I can’t imagine that he did anything too awful. Why are you so interested in who took part in the riots anyway? It was ages ago.”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “It’s just all the talk about Cambridge, I suppose, and all the people who attended. Crispin. Montrose. Hutchison. Tom?—”
“Do you suppose Cambridge and the riots might have had something to do with what happened?” Tom asked, eagle-eyed. “Kit’s right, you know. It was a long time ago. And no one died.”
It had been five years, give or take. And yes, that was quite a long time to wait for revenge, if there had even been something to revenge. “In the riots, you mean?”
Tom nodded. “Proctors kept the male students from breaking down the gates to Newnham. It must have been traumatic for the women who were inside, but I’ve never heard that anyone was hurt. The papers took a dim view of the proceedings, of course…”
I nodded. I remembered that. We’d sat in Oxford, a few miles away, patting ourselves on the back because of how much better we had handled the whole affair a year previously—when neither Christopher nor I had been students, incidentally. There had been no riots in Oxford. But I did remember the headlines, and the male Cambridge students’ outrage that they were being vilified in the press while the women students, whom they considered to be the interlopers, were made out to be the victims.
