Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The note got to Sutherland House just before four.
It arrived in the Rolls Royce Phantom, with Tidwell behind the wheel.
He had a valise next to him on the seat, and I wondered absently whether he planned to spend the night in Town—and if so, where—but then I decided that it was none of my affair what Tidwell did, and banished the thought.
And as it turned out, the valise wasn’t Tidwell’s, anyway. He handed it off to Crispin with a polite, “Your Grace.”
“Thank you, Tidwell.” Crispin did no more than glance at it before he gave it to Rogers. “Put this in my room, would you, Rogers?”
Rogers nodded, took the valise, and handed it off to the footman. “You heard His Grace, Niles.”
Niles nodded and headed up the stairs, albeit not without a glance over his shoulder once he reached the top step. The situation must appear strange to him too, I assumed.
Tidwell handed over the letter next. “Your Grace.”
Crispin reached for it, but reconsidered before his bare fingertips met the paper. Tidwell was still in his driving gloves, so there was no chance he’d leave fingerprints. “You’d better do the honors, Gardiner.”
Tom turned to his associate. “Go ahead, Finch.”
Ian Finchley is Tom’s counterpart on Chief Inspector Pendennis’s homicide team at Scotland Yard.
He’s a tall, thin, fair-haired man with a slight rabbity look to him.
He looks a bit overbred and silly, in other words, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Finch is quite clever, and while he might be overbred, he’s certainly not silly.
He and Tom are both detective-sergeants, but Finch’s specialty is fingerprints while Tom’s is photography.
Now he took the envelope between two gloved fingertips and looked around.
“There’s a table in there,” I said, pointing to the green parlor. “And one next door in the sitting room, as well. If you want a walk, there’s a library down the hall.”
“This will do.” Finch had taken his burden, still dangling between two fingertips, to the doorway of the green parlor and deemed it acceptable. He wandered in and over to the table, and we all crowded through the door behind him, Tidwell and Rogers included.
The note came out of the envelope, and the envelope was placed on the table. Finch unfolded the note with two fingers and placed it down, as well. He nodded to Tom. “Go ahead.”
Tom leaned in with his Leica and took a couple of snaps. Finch turned letter and envelope over, and Tom photographed them again before lowering the camera. “That ought to do it.”
“Have a look, then,” Finch said, “before I start mucking about with fingerprint powder.”
He stepped back from the table. Crispin stepped in, and so did I and Christopher.
There wasn’t much to see, frankly. A basic, cream-colored envelope and a matching piece of writing paper.
It wasn’t particularly thick or opulent, but it wasn’t torn from a notebook, either.
There was no logo on the paper and no seal on the back of the envelope.
No return address, either, although that probably goes without saying.
The name and address of the recipient—a simple Crispin Astley, Sutherland Hall, Little Sutherland, Wiltshire, with no mention of titles or even a simple masculine honorific—was printed in blocky capital letters under a first-class stamp.
The postmark said London, and the date was the day Laetitia vanished.
The same day Crispin left Sutherland Hall and motored up to London, I reminded myself. He would have left Wiltshire before the letter was sent, and he would have been in London in time to send it himself, later that afternoon.
There was no reason to think he might have done, of course.
If he’d wanted to get rid of Laetitia, he could simply jettison her, or if all else failed, show up at St George’s, Hanover Square, next Saturday and say, “Under no circumstances,” when the vicar asked whether he’d take Laetitia to be his awfully wedded wife.
But the police might be thinking it, and it couldn’t hurt to bear in mind what the police might be thinking.
The note itself was short and to the point, written in the same spiky capitals with the same black ink as the outside of the envelope.
We have your fiancée. If you want to see her again, bring ten thousand in cash to the back of the war memorial in Battersea Park Friday at midnight.
“I didn’t realize there was a war memorial in Battersea Park.”
I didn’t think I’d ever been to Battersea Park, to be honest. We’d only been in London for a year or so, and Hyde Park as well as Regents are both enormous, and both much closer to Bloomsbury.
Battersea is on the other side of the River Thames; Christopher and I would have to traverse half of London to get there.
“There’s a first time for everything,” he told me, and Tom gave him a squinty look.
“I hope you don’t imagine you’ll be going.”
“Of course I’ll be going,” Christopher sniffed. “I don’t plan to send Crispin on his own.”
I shook my head. “Anyone who knows us would expect us to be together.”
“How do you know that this is someone who knows you?” Tom wanted to know.
“It’s hardly news that Christopher and Crispin are close,” I told him, “and that Christopher and I are. If this was happening in Wiltshire or Dorset, that would be one thing. We might not travel down for that. But it’s happening in London, and we live here.
Surely it would seem strange if we weren’t involved? ”
There was nothing Tom could say about that, of course, so he tried a different tactic instead. “I would prefer it if neither of you put yourselves in harm’s way.”
And while he said neither of us, his attention was on Christopher.
I’m sure he wouldn’t want anything to happen to me, but his main concern was that Christopher be safe.
As it should be, I suppose. We were all a bit more worried about Christopher these days, after he went missing for several days in October.
I’d gone missing myself, if only for a few hours, but no one seemed overly concerned about that.
Or perhaps I was wrong. “Surely there’s no risk of anything like that?” Crispin asked, with a glance at me that he probably thought was subtle. “We’re giving them what they want.”
“There’d be nothing to gain from hurting us,” Christopher agreed. “Surely that would only complicate things.”
I nodded. “Much better for them to wait until the money’s been dropped and we’ve left. No muss, no fuss. Interfering with us would only make things worse.”
Tom sighed.
“You know there’s nothing you can do to stop them,” Finch told him. He was busy with graphite and pieces of sticky tape, but he took the time to give Tom his couple of shillings’ worth of opinion anyway. “If you tell them not to do it, they’ll just do it anyway.”
I nodded. So did Christopher. Crispin had no choice but to go to Battersea Park whether he wanted to or not, of course, but he nodded as well. I’m sure he would appreciate the moral support of Christopher’s and my presence. I knew I would, in his shoes.
“Oh, very well,” Tom said, as if there had ever been any question, or as if we needed his approval. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“You’ll be there too, won’t you?” It was Christopher who asked, but the same question had occurred to me, as well.
“Of course,” Tom assured him. “We’ll have the place surrounded, and be ready to grab anyone who comes by to fetch the money.”
That was all right, then.
“So is it the same hand as in the note you received?” I asked him. “You brought it, didn’t you?”
He had done. It was in a folder in his hand, which he now placed on the table next to the ransom note, and opened. We all leaned in for the comparison.
This was my first opportunity to see the note that accused me of plotting murder, and I was pleased to see that at least superficially, it was much the same as the ransom note.
There was the same—or at least similar—writing paper and envelope.
An expert might compare them and find a difference in the weight or composition of the paper, but to me, they looked identical.
There was the same—or similar—black ink.
The same, or similar, spiky letters, although there were a lot more of them. Several lines worth of words.
There was no introduction, just a straight plunge into the facts.
I overheard two people plotting a murder over tea at Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street this afternoon.
A young woman with brown hair and a fair-haired young man talked about killing someone called Letitia.
He called her Pippa and she called him Christopher.
That’s all I know. Signed, a concerned citizen.
I looked at it and scoffed. “Who writes out the word ‘signed’ in a letter?”
“Someone who wasn’t taught better,” Christopher said. “They misspelled Laetitia’s name, too.”
“They left the -er off Christopher, as well. Look.” Crispin pointed to the place where the ending of Christopher’s name was squeezed in rather tightly at the end of a sentence. It did indeed look as if whoever had written the note had left it off at first, and only remembered to add it later.
“In justice to him,” Tom said gently, “whoever he is, Lady Laetitia does spell her name in an unusual way.”
“I don’t,” Christopher muttered, and added, more reasonably, “How do you know it’s a man who wrote it?”
“I don’t,” Tom admitted. “I assumed, based on Pippa mentioning the chap at the next table, who seemed to have overheard your conversation.”