Chapter 16 #2
The description fit Wolfgang to a T, I hardly need say.
He’s well over six feet tall, with golden blond hair and dark blue eyes, and yes, it’s a shame about the scar.
It bisects his cheek on the left side, and far from earning it in honorable battle, it’s a relic of a spoiled and misspent youth.
Mensur dueling is a beloved pastime in German universities—Wolfgang attended Heidelberg, or at least that’s what he had told me—and he had received the scar during one such bout, probably from someone he considered a friend.
The scars were prizes, the men who sported them believed they were a testament to their bravery, and I knew that some young men went to great lengths to ensure that whatever scar they received would heal as visibly as possible.
The entire thing was ridiculous. There’s nothing brave about whacking at your friends with a blade, and if you’re too sorry a swordsman to duck when someone swings at you, it certainly doesn’t make you look brave, merely slow. Wolfgang had a beautiful face, and the scar did nothing to enhance it.
Of course, that’s only my opinion, although it ought to be everyone else’s, as well.
But all that aside, the man we were discussing could certainly be Wolfgang Ulrich Albrecht, Graf von und zu Natterdorff, and if so, he was back in London and working at Harrods under an assumed name.
“Utz?” I said.
Crispin nodded.
“Is that a given name, or a surname?”
“Who knows? Hansueli said it was what the chap told him to call him. He didn’t care enough to inquire further.”
“Well, how can we inquire further?” Christopher wanted to know. “Since we do care.”
“I suppose we go to management,” Crispin said. “Or rather, we find Gardiner and ask him to inquire. While they may tell me, they’ll certainly tell him.”
“To the management offices, then?”
“To the management offices.” He offered me his arm. I felt a bit shaky, so I took it, and let him lead me out of the sporting department and toward the lifts.
The Harrods management offices were located, as I should have expected, on the top floor. We stepped out of the lift onto luxurious carpet and into rarefied air. The receptionist, behind a mahogany desk opposite the lift, looked up as the door opened. Her eyes widened when they lit on Crispin.
“My lord. Um… Your Grace.”
Her eyes lingered on me for a second before examining Christopher a bit more closely. The family resemblance is uncanny, so she undoubtedly realized that he and Crispin were related, but she didn’t address either of us by name, just turned her attention back to Crispin again.
“We’re looking for Detective-Sergeant Gardiner with Scotland Yard,” he explained. “We came here together, but he came up to the offices while we went to sporting equipment to see the ski slope.”
He sounded enthusiastic about it, and the lady—older than him by at least a couple of decades—smiled indulgently. “Fun, isn’t it?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, just continued. “Detective-Sergeant Gardiner is in with Sir Richard.”
Sir Richard who?
“Sir Richard Woodman Burbidge,” Christopher murmured in my ear. “Managing director of Harrods.”
Ah. “And he’d have information about delivery drivers, would he?”
Christopher shrugged. “He must do, if Tom’s speaking with him.”
“Any way to get a message to him?” Crispin wanted to know. He accompanied the question with a charming smile, and the lady behind the desk practically melted. I wanted to snort, or at least roll my eyes, but Christopher pinched me, and I managed to bite it back.
“I would be happy to take one in, Your Grace.”
“We had a question about an employee,” Crispin said, and the lady nodded.
“I believe that’s what Detective-Sergeant Gardiner is here for.”
“A different employee,” I said, and she turned to me with a wrinkle between her brows.
“Pardon?”
I felt a bit like a potted plant, to be honest. One that had just, inexplicably, spoken up. The way she looked at me suggested that she hadn’t thought me capable of speech.
“A different employee,” Crispin reiterated, and she turned back to him. The wrinkle smoothed out. This time I did roll my eyes, but I turned my face away to do it. Crispin added, “A chap named Utz, who is one of the skiing instructors.”
Her face lit up. “Oh! I remember him. Handsome chap. Pity about the scar.”
Yes, indeed.
“Hansueli said he hadn’t seen him in a few days,” Crispin said, and the lady bit her lip.
“Now that you mention it, he was supposed to work a shift yesterday, and didn’t turn up. Hansi had to do double duty.”
Crispin nodded sympathetically. “I don’t suppose you would know where to find him?”
“Sir Richard would be the one with that information,” Sir Richard’s secretary said. “He is the one who does the hiring.” And firing, I assumed, but that was left unsaid.
“Is there any way we can get a message to Detective-Sergeant Gardiner to find out?”
“I’ll take a note in,” the lady said, and scribbled a few words on a piece of paper before getting to her feet. “Wait here.”
We promised we would, and then watched her walk away. I waited until she was out of sight down the corridor before I told Crispin, “You should be ashamed of yourself, St George.”
He looked politely inquiring, and I added, “Flirting with her like that, and she old enough to be your mother!”
“Not even close,” Crispin answered, “and besides, I didn’t flirt.”
“What would you call the smiling, and the lingering looks, and the voice, if not flirtation?”
He arched a brow. “Common courtesy to a woman? My innate charm?”
I snorted, and he added, “Just because you can’t see it, Darling—”
“It’s not that I can’t see it, St George. It’s that it’s not—”
“Stop it,” Christopher said, flapping his hands at us both.
“You may not have been flirting with Sir Richard’s secretary, but you are flirting with Pippa.
And we’re in public, and you’re still engaged, and your fiancée is missing, and you should both knock it off, at least until we’re somewhere private. ”
He was right, so I subsided. So did Crispin, albeit not without a muttered, “Was not.”
I patted him on the arm, as condescendingly as I could manage. “There, there. You might as well get used to being unsatisfied. Once we get Laetitia back and you’re married, your philandering days are over.”
“Pippa,” Christopher said warningly, and I pouted but removed my hand.
“Fine. I’ll behave.”
“That’ll be the day,” Crispin muttered. I opened my mouth to respond, intercepted a quelling glance from Christopher, and said nothing.
The upshot was that we stood in silence until the secretary returned from dropping off the note in Sir Richard’s office.
“Detective-Sergeant Gardiner said to wait for him at the Georgian. He said it won’t be much longer.”
The Georgian is Harrods’ restaurant, a beautiful art deco space on the fourth floor, that is sometimes used as a ballroom.
Christopher and I had visited before, but it wasn’t a place we frequented.
When we want fancy, we tend to go for the tearoom at the Savoy or the Ritz, and the rest of the time, a Lyons Corner House suits us fine.
Crispin nodded. “We’ll go there. Would you be so kind as to let him know when he comes out?”
The secretary said she would, and Crispin gave her another melting smile. “Thank you, Adele. It was a pleasure to see you again.”
Adele tittered like a girl. “Likewise, Your Grace. I’ll let Detective-Sergeant Gardiner know where you are.”
We thanked her politely and headed back to the lift. It was only the elbow Christopher applied to my ribs that kept me from further remarks on Crispin’s behavior as we descended to the fourth floor.
By the time Tom appeared we had made it most of the way through a pot of tea and a plate of cream buns, and of course we had rehashed the possibility that Wolfgang was back on English soil ad nauseam.
We all agreed that if he was, he must have made it onto the freighter and gone to Germany with it, and then come back.
There was simply no conceivable way he could have swum to Ramsgate or Margate from where the freighter had been boarded, and the lifeboat was too small for him to have managed to stash himself away there without us all seeing him.
And if he was calling himself Utz—first or last name—he must be traveling under a pseudonym, as well.
Applying for a position at Harrods took guts, admittedly, but then there was the strange coincidence of the dead delivery driver and his seeming connection to Laetitia’s kidnapping.
Which begged the question of whether Wolfgang was involved in Laetitia’s kidnapping, as well.
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Christopher said. “He kidnapped Pippa.”
“He kidnapped you, as well,” I reminded him.
He shook his head. “That was less a kidnapping and more an attempted murder that didn’t come off.”
“I’d call it less an attempted murder and more a kidnapping, myself. He kept you in a locked room for several days, doped up with sleeping draughts so you couldn’t try to escape. That sounds quite a lot like kidnapping to me.”
Crispin nodded. “She’s right, Kit. He kidnapped both of you. Your kidnapping might not have been premeditated, the way Philippa’s was—”
“I’m not certain mine was premeditated either,” I interrupted.
“I think he said something during supper that made me realize what was going on, and then he realized that I realized it, and that was when he decided to take me to Germany against my will and marry me when I refused to marry him of my own accord. But I don’t think he went to the Savoy planning to dope me and abscond with me. ”
“Of course he did,” Crispin retorted. “He had the dope in his pocket, and the motorcar lined up, as well as reservations onboard the freighter. It was absolutely preplanned.”
Perhaps it had been. It didn’t really matter one way or the other, aside from whether he might (or might not) have had experience in kidnapping a young woman (or man) and keeping her (or him) locked up for days.