Chapter 6 #2
He nodded. “Remember that paperwork my father had me look at that morning he ran down into the village and… well, you know what he did.”
“He wasn’t your father,” I said automatically, although I knew exactly what Uncle Harold had been doing in the village that morning. In a word, murder.
“He was my father in every way that mattered,” Crispin answered. “He was the man I grew up with, and he was my father legally. On paper.”
“Did he broker some sort of contract for you?” Christopher wanted to know. “Can we get you out of it on those grounds? That he wasn’t actually your father and didn’t have the right to make decisions for you?”
“We’d have to involve a solicitor,” Crispin said, “and I doubt we could keep it out of the press.”
“There’s such a thing as solicitor-client privilege, isn’t there? They can’t discuss your business unless it’s a matter of a crime?”
Which this wasn’t. There’d been plenty of crimes involved in keeping the secret, but Crispin had committed none of them.
He shrugged. “I don’t think it matters either way. I’m of age, and I signed the paperwork.”
Of course he had done. “You have absolutely no sense of self-preservation, do you, St George?”
“I beg to differ,” Christopher said grimly. “If anything, he has too much self-preservation. If he hadn’t, he’d simply have told you—”
“Yes, Kit.” Crispin’s voice was loud enough to drown out anything else Christopher might have said. “None of that, if you please.”
Christopher huffed, but subsided. “So what you’re saying is that there is no way to annul the contract. What happens if you break the engagement?”
“Laetitia gets a substantial financial settlement in lieu of suing for breach of promise,” Crispin said. Surely a direct quote from the contract in question.
“How substantial?” I asked, but Christopher got in first, and Crispin answered him instead.
“What happens if you marry someone else?”
“Laetitia gets a substantial financial settlement in lieu of suing for breach of promise.”
“If you simply don’t show up for the ceremony next Saturday?”
“Laetitia gets a—”
“We get it.” I waved him to silence. “How substantial?”
He mentioned a sum, and I felt the blood drain out of my head. Christopher’s jaw dropped. “That’s a lot.”
Crispin nodded grimly. “My father had to make it worth my while to go through with it, didn’t he?”
“How much is that?” I demanded to know. “Half your inheritance?”
He shot me a look, and amazingly, a smirk. “No, Darling. But it’s more of it than I’d like to lose.”
I could well believe it. “Is it still valid if you’re not the legitimate Duke of Sutherland? If you agreed to it as the Viscount St George, but you weren’t actually, legitimately, the Viscount St George when you did?”
“That I don’t know. But I can’t imagine there’s enough time to figure it out between now and next Saturday, either.”
Perhaps not.
“We’re back to murdering Laetitia, then.”
“Don’t joke about it, Pippa,” a stern voice said from behind me. Tom must have come inside while we’d been talking, and I’d been too involved in the conversation to notice. “It isn’t funny.”
“I’m well aware of it, thank you. If we can’t figure this out in the next week and a bit more, Crispin is doomed.”
“You could simply marry her and divorce her later,” Tom suggested, from where he was leaning in the doorway. “It might not be the done thing, but it’s legal. And there’s no one left who can stop you.”
Such as Uncle Harold, I suppose.
“I guess you didn’t find anything in the boot?” I asked, at the same time as Crispin inquired whether Tom wanted a drink.
The detective shook his head to both of us. “I’ll need to go through the house, if you don’t mind. I don’t expect you to have Lady Laetitia, or her body, stashed away somewhere, but I want to be able to say I did it. Do I have your permission?”
“Knock yourself out,” Crispin told him with a languid wave of his hand. “Would you like me to come with you?”
“Better not. You could deliberately steer me away from areas you don’t want me to see.”
Crispin nodded. “One of the servants, then?”
“They work for you. I’m afraid not.”
I got to my feet. “I’ll come with you, Tom. I spent enough time in this house growing up to know where everything is.”
Tom opened his mouth, and I added, “Of the three of us, I’m the least likely to want to protect St George. You can find multiple witnesses who’ll swear to a decade-long animosity between us, I’ve no doubt.”
Crispin smirked. So did Christopher. Tom merely said, “If you insist.”
“Would you rather have Christopher?”
There was a moment while the two of them looked at one another—I’m sure the answer was yes for both of them—and then Tom shook his head. “You’ll do.”
Christopher pouted.
“Delighted to hear it,” I said sourly. “Where do you want to start?”
We started next door, in the yellow sitting room, and from there we went through all the other public rooms on the ground floor.
Library, ballroom, dining room, study and parlor.
After that, we went upstairs and prowled through all the bedrooms. We ended up in the attic.
There was no sign of Laetitia, not even a photograph of her on the bedside table in Crispin’s room.
(His possessions were still in the heir’s chamber, not the master suite.
I suppose he hadn’t wanted to sleep where Uncle Harold had slept quite yet.
Laetitia would undoubtedly insist on it in a week or so.)
We finished up with the cellar and then the servants’ wing, and of course she wasn’t there, either.
The staff was minimal—no one in the family spent much time at Sutherland House these days, so the Town house wasn’t fully staffed the way it would be otherwise—and everyone agreed with everyone else that they hadn’t seen Laetitia since the last time Crispin had been in Town, which was before Uncle Harold’s death.
There had been no message from her in the past couple of days, by telephone or post. Everyone seemed frankly appalled that we’d even ask.
“Supper in ten minutes,” Rogers said stiffly as we made our way out of the kitchen.
“I’ll let Crispin know,” I told him. “Thank you, Rogers.”
He gave me something that was halfway between a stiff bow and a nod. Cook sniffed, but didn’t comment. We shut the green baize door after ourselves and made our way back to the parlor.
Christopher and Crispin were sitting as they had been when we left them.
Christopher was curled up in the armchair and Crispin was sprawled across half the antique sofa with a glass in his hand.
We’d been gone a good half hour, though, so I suspected they had refreshed their drinks in the time we’d been away.
“Rogers says supper will be ready in ten,” I announced as I lifted my drink from the table and perched on the sofa next to Crispin. It seemed more polite to leave the other armchair to Tom.
Crispin pushed himself up to sit instead of sprawl. “Ready for that drink now, Gardiner?”
“Better not,” Tom told him. “I’m working.”
Crispin nodded. “You’ll stay for supper, though, won’t you?”
Tom hesitated—it was an awkward situation, to be fair—but eventually he nodded. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. You didn’t find anything, I assume?”
I snorted. “Not even a graven image of Laetitia by your bedside, St George. What kind of fiancé are you?”
He looked at me. “I think you know the answer to that, Darling.”
I did, in fact, know the answer to that. “Never mind, then. No, we didn’t find anything. As expected.”
“I fail to see why you’re doing this,” Christopher told Tom, practically the first civilized comment he had made since Tom had accused us—any of us—of murder in our own flat earlier. I could hear the frustration in his voice—so could Tom, I’m certain—but Christopher kept it polite.
Tom opened his mouth, but Christopher went on before he could say anything.
“I understand that the Countess of Marsden doesn’t know where her daughter is, and I understand that some bloke none of us knows overheard Pippa and me talking at the Lyons yesterday and got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
But you know us. You know we wouldn’t do anything to harm anyone. Don’t you?”
“Of course I know that,” Tom said.
“Well, if you do, then what’s this about, really? There has to be more to it. If you don’t even know that Laetitia arrived safely in London…”
“I don’t know anything about Laetitia after she motored away from Marsden Manor yesterday morning,” Tom said. “She told her mother she was going up to Town to meet her fiancé.”
He shot a look at Crispin, who shook his head. “We had plans to meet for supper this evening, and tomorrow we were going stationery shopping. We had no plans yesterday. I came up early to have a day to myself.”
“Perhaps she got her days mixed up?” I suggested. “Or you did?”
He shook his head. “I assure you I didn’t, Darling. And Laetitia isn’t flighty. If she left Marsden Manor yesterday morning, she had plans for yesterday afternoon or evening.”
“You don’t suppose she went to Sutherland Hall, do you? Perhaps she wanted to surprise you, so you could motor up to London together?”
“If she’d turned up there, I’m sure Tidwell would have phoned,” Crispin said, indicating the screen behind which the telephone squatted, “but go ahead, if you want an excuse to coo at Tidwell.”
I gave him a look, one he answered with a twitch of his eyebrow, before I relented. “I don’t mind if I do, actually. I’m always happy to coo at Tidwell.”
“Better let me,” Tom said as I made to push to my feet. “It makes it more official that way.”
Fine. I sat back with a moue while he disappeared behind the screen. After a chat with the operator, we heard his voice. “Tidwell? This is Detective-Sergeant Gardiner with Scotland Yard. I’m phoning from Sutherland House.”
A faint quacking sound was all we could hear of Tidwell’s response.