Chapter 6
Chapter Six
There was no body in the boot, of course, and no suggestion that one had been there. Tom inspected the trunk thoroughly, looking for bloodstains—or hair or God only knew what—while the rest of us left him to it.
“Any word from my fiancée, Rogers?” Crispin wanted to know as he swept past the butler into the marble-floored foyer of the Sutherland family’s opulent Town house.
Rogers held the door open for Christopher and myself, even as he turned to keep Crispin in his sights. “No, Your Grace.”
Crispin huffed. “Dinner for five, if you please. Just in case she shows up unannounced.”
Rogers nodded and shut the door behind Christopher. “I’ll inform Cook.”
“And Rogers… Detective-Sergeant Gardiner will probably request to speak with some of the staff once he makes it inside. Let him have what he wants, will you?”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Rogers withdrew with a little bow and a resentful glance out the window at Tom, still bent over the Hispano-Suiza.
“I need a drink,” Crispin said. He left us standing there to stalk into the green parlor and toward the bar cart. I ambled after him, while Christopher directed a longing look out the front window before he followed.
Crispin glanced at me over his shoulder. “Drink, Darling?”
“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” I said, as I sat down on one of the sage green chairs (it’s the furniture that’s green in the green parlor; the walls are more of a golden yellow) and folded one leg over the other.
“What about you, Kit?”
Christopher was drifting desultorily toward the other chair. He flapped a limp hand. “Oh, whatever.”
“Buck up,” Crispin told him unsympathetically as he busied himself with bottles and soda siphons. “You’re not the one suspected of murder.”
“You’d be surprised,” I told him, while Christopher dropped onto the cushion and put his face in his hands.
“This is all my fault.”
“It can’t possibly be,” Crispin informed him, as he handed me a Gin Fizz and put another on the table in front of Christopher.
With his own in hand, he dropped down on the sofa across from us and managed, somehow, to keep the drink from spilling.
Inbred elegance, I assume, unless it was just a lot of practice.
He added, in Christopher’s direction, “You have no control over Laetitia and what she gets up to. Nor what Gardiner comes up with in his head, really.”
Christopher whimpered. I glanced at him and took a sip of my cocktail. “This is excellent, St George.”
“Thank you, Darling. Perhaps, after I’m released from prison, I could get a position as a barman.”
“It’s good to have aspirations,” I informed him, “although if you’re convicted of murder, it’s the gallows for you, I’m afraid, and not parole and a new life.
As for Christopher, he’s referring to the fact that someone reported us to Scotland Yard yesterday, for plotting to murder Laetitia in public. ”
Crispin’s brows arched. He can control one, and does so frequently to show his disdain, but they only move together when he’s taken by surprise. “You planned to murder my fiancée in public? Doesn’t that seem like something that would be better done in private?”
I rolled my eyes. “Not like that, you nitwit. We didn’t plan to murder her in public. We sat at a table in Lyons and discussed ways we could get rid of her.”
Crispin blinked. “Why would you do that?”
It was my turn to arch my brows. I can only move both together, so up they both went.
“Why do you suppose? None of us wants to deal with her for the rest of our lives, St George. That goes for Francis and Constance as well, and I’m sure for Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert, too.
She’s universally unpopular. And as you don’t seem inclined to throw her over of your own accord, it appears that it’s up to us to come up with a solution to the problem. ”
“And murder seemed like a good option?”
“Only if we couldn’t come up with anything less fatal,” I said.
“And you couldn’t?”
Christopher had dropped his hands from the upper part of his face by now, and had folded them in front of his mouth instead, and was watching us over them. I had a suspicion that he was enjoying the back-and-forth.
“We don’t know her well enough to have access to anything blackmail-worthy,” I explained.
“We could leak the truth about your parentage to the press, in the hopes that that would make her relinquish her hold, but you might not be happy with us about that, which would defeat the purpose. We’re not trying to get out of spending time with you. ”
He didn’t respond to that—I had thought he might—so I continued. “There was the possibility of eloping—”
“I thought the idea was to get me out of the marriage, not into it faster?”
It would hardly be faster, when he was getting married in a week and a half. I didn’t say so, merely let Christopher take this one.
“The idea,” he said, “was that you’d elope with someone not Laetitia.”
Crispin nodded. “Were you offering to sacrifice yourself, Darling? A fate worse than death, and all that?”
“I would hardly call it that,” I said, “but the thought presented itself, yes.”
“Did it really?” He flicked a glance at Christopher, who made a face. I’m sure they’d both noted the passive voice. “And I suppose you weren’t happy about it, so the conversation turned to murder?”
“It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t happy about it,” I said. “Becoming Duchess of Sutherland has never been an ambition of mine, as I’m certain you know. But I would do it, if it would save us all from Laetitia. That includes you, by the way.”
He gaped at me. I added, “However, we didn’t want to risk the iceberg on the way to New York. Having you sink to the bottom of the Atlantic would ruin the plan. We wanted to get you away from Laetitia. We never wanted you dead.”
“And you’d marry me to do it?”
“If I had to,” I said. “It wouldn’t be my first choice—”
“No, I’m sure it wouldn’t.”
“—but at least it would be legal, and not likely to land me in prison. Murder, on the other hand…”
He nodded. “Just out of curiosity, how were you planning to do it?”
“Oh, we never got that far,” Christopher said. He seemed to be coming back to himself now, and was reaching for his drink. “It was just idle conversation. Nothing specific.”
“Specific enough that some bloke at the next table decided to go to Scotland Yard,” Crispin pointed out, and Christopher nodded.
“People really ought to mind their own business.”
Crispin’s lips twitched. “Indeed. But as it happens, what I wanted to know wasn’t how you planned to do away with my fiancée, but how you thought you’d convince me to elope with you, Darling. You wouldn’t be my first choice either, as I’m sure you know.”
I tilted my head to look at him. He made it sound very sincere, I have to say.
If I hadn’t known better, I would have believed him, and the temptation to inform him that I did know better was almost overwhelming.
The only thing that held me back—the only two things—was that there was a possibility that Christopher was wrong and I really didn’t know better, and secondly, that it was better to save that little tidbit for some moment when it would have an even greater impact.
“It would have been a straight up business proposition,” I said.
His brow arched. Only one this time. “Is that so? And you think that that would have been enough for me to throw Laetitia over for you?”
I huffed. “It’s not a matter of you throwing your fiancée over for me, St George. I can do very well without that ego-boost, thank you. It was more in the way of a helping hand to a drowning man. I thought you’d be able to see it as such, but it appears I was wrong.”
Christopher sighed. Loudly. “One of these days,” he told us both, “I’m going to take the two of you and knock your heads together. Crispin, you know very well—”
“Yes,” Crispin interrupted, cheekbones pink, “thank you, Kit.”
“And Pippa—”
“Yes, Christopher,” I said. “Truce, St George.”
“If you insist.”
We sat in silence for a minute and enjoyed our cocktails.
“To answer your question,” Christopher said, “we never got far enough for specifics with either scenario. The one depended rather heavily on whether you’d be willing to risk the breach of promise suit if you eloped with someone else—”
Crispin nodded.
“—and for the second, we haven’t really associated with Laetitia enough to know what a foolproof way of killing her would be.
It wouldn’t do to throw suspicion on you, so we couldn’t do it here.
We don’t have access to Marsden House, or for that matter Marsden Manor, so we couldn’t do it there.
It would have to be a matter of lying in wait and then taking a potshot when she exited her motorcar, I suppose, but of course neither one of us owns a gun, and I don’t think I would trust myself to hit the side of a barn in this fog… ”
“Not to mention that you can’t shoot someone in public in London and expect to get away with it. There are too many people here.”
“But it’s not as if Laetitia would be likely to go anywhere private with either of us. So it would have to be somewhere public. We simply wouldn’t be able to access her anywhere else.”
“What we really want,” I told Crispin, “is for you to come to your senses and break off the engagement. No one has to die, and no one has to elope. You simply stop behaving like a coward and do the necessary thing, and then you deal with the consequences.”
He opened his mouth, probably to object to the appellation I had assigned him, and I carried on.
“The scandal would be minimal—you just lost your father; the public would understand that you wouldn’t want to leap into marriage immediately.
It’s a bit unseemly, honestly; she really ought to have let you postpone—and the coffers would be a little lighter after the breach of promise suit, but you have plenty of the ready, don’t you, and you’d be free of her. ”
“It’s not that easy,” Crispin said. “We have a signed agreement.”
“Signed?”