“Now, what would I spring on you, Dom?” Crispin smiled in a not-at-all reassuring way. “I just wanted to talk to you about what happened the other night. The only way to get hold of you, is to ring up, so I did. The sweets were an excuse, I admit it. But all I want to do, is talk.”
Rivers shook his head. “I don’t know what happened the other night. It was nothing to do with me. You think I go around killing people? Not precisely good for business, is it?”
“I imagine not. You’ve heard about Gladys Long, I suppose?”
Rivers’s eyes narrowed. “What about Gladys Long?”
“She’s dead,” Crispin said, and this time it was Rivers who staggered. Just a quick wobble, though, and then he had his feet under him again.
“You’re lying.”
Crispin shook his head. “I’m not. Someone killed her. Yesterday afternoon. The same way they killed Monty.”
Rivers turned pale. Or rather, as his skin was olive, he turned sallow. “But Gladys didn’t know anything. She was in the kitchen with me when… when it happened.”
“When someone in that flat killed Monty, you mean.”
Rivers winced, but nodded. “The two of us were in the kitchen. It wasn’t until we came out that we saw the other three standing by the door to the butler’s pantry. You two were still in the sitting room with your other cousin. The girl.”
“Here’s the problem,” Crispin said. “Freddie Montrose and I weren’t close. We went to university together, but that’s a few years ago now, and he was older than I. Lately, he has spent what feels like half his time putting my face on the front cover of his vile tabloid and getting me in trouble with my family. I’m lucky I haven’t been disinherited with some of the stories Monty has put in print.”
Rivers nodded.
“But nobody had the right to kill him. IfIdidn’t want him dead, I don’t see why anyone else would have.”
“You weren’t the only one he wrote about,” Rivers pointed out.
Crispin arched a brow. “Was I not? Had he already done an exposé on you? I rather assumed that was why he attached himself to the party that night.”
“Me?” Rivers said, and shook his head. “Oh, no. I usually manage to stay out of the tabloids. Saturday night was an anomaly. I didn’t recognize him in the frock and wig, or I would have kept my distance and caught up with Ronnie and Gladys outside. But no, I wasn’t talking about myself.”
“Who, then?”
Rivers hesitated. When he didn’t immediately start naming names, Crispin added, blandly, “I suppose you can prove where you were yesterday afternoon between noon and two, can you? And that you were nowhere near Ellery Mews or Belgravia?”
It was so smoothly done that Rivers might not even have felt the knife slide in. At least not until Crispin twisted it, his voice hardening, “Because I was there at that time, and I saw a red Morris Oxford parked on Eccleston Street. I was the last person to see her alive, you see—save for the person who killed her, of course—and so I have vested interest in finding someone else who was there at that time, so they don’t put me away for it.”
“Ronnie Blanton,” Rivers said. His voice was sour, as if the name had been dragged out of him quite against his will, and perhaps it had been. Albeit not so much against his will that he had kept quiet about it.
Crispin arched a brow. “What about him? He visited Gladys yesterday?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Rivers said, “but Frederick Montrose wrote a story about Ronnie a month or two ago. The same type of thing that he does about you. Except Ronnie’s father isn’t as forgiving as yours seems to be, and Ronnie cares a lot more than you do.”
“Cares about what?”
“About anything,” Rivers said. “If Montrose had written a story about how, to celebrate your birthday, you dressed up in a gown and high heels and crashed a drag ball at Rectors nightclub where you had champagne with a table full of men in drag, you would have thought it was all good fun. Ronnie would have hidden away at home for a month to cope with the shame.”
And would have needed extra doses of dope to deal with the embarrassment, probably.
“It would have been good fun,” Crispin said with a snigger. “Nobody’s going to believe that I’ve suddenly gone over to the dark side, you know.”
He smirked at Christopher, who rolled his eyes. “That’s easy for you to say, Crispin. Your reputation precedes you. Although I don’t think Uncle Harold would have been as sanguine about the whole thing as you seem to think he would be.”
“I’m usually more worried about Philippa than Father,” Crispin said. “All Father can do is disinherit me. Darling can eviscerate someone with words and leave them bleeding on the floor. Although luckily she was at Rectors with us this time, so I don’t imagine there’s much she can say.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Christopher said, which was certainly the same thing I was thinking right then. Eviscerate him? Really? How deplorably dramatic.
“At any rate,” Crispin said, dragging the conversation back on track, “Monty wrote something about Ronnie, did he? I must have missed that.”
