Chapter 20 #2
She despised me, of course, and perhaps that had been enough for an alliance. They’d both had good reason to want to get rid of me: Laetitia so I couldn’t interfere with her engagement to Crispin, and Wolfgang so he could get his hands on my German inheritance.
But that had been before. Surely that ship had also sailed by now, no pun intended.
There was simply no way he could have forced me to marry him anymore, not with what I knew about him, and there hadn’t been any recent attempts on my life.
He seemed to have given up on that path to my inheritance.
The most recent plot seemed to have been to use Laetitia to get his hands on enough of Crispin’s money to start over, which had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
And none of that explained why Laetitia would cooperate with the operation. Unless…
“Whose idea was it to pretend that you were being held for ransom?” Tom wanted to know, and distracted me from the intellectual path I was going down.
“His.” Laetitia was quick to answer, but not smart enough not to glance at Crispin to see his reaction to the statement. “He needed money. He thought Crispin would pay to get me back.”
Christopher made a noise under his breath. I nodded. While it sounded like she was telling the truth, her quick glance at Crispin had the look of someone checking to see whether her lies were believed.
“And why did you go along with it?” Tom asked calmly.
Laetitia bristled. “I didn’t! It was him. Only him.”
“You didn’t meet me at the stationers on Friday noon,” Crispin said. The words were simple, and not particularly accusatory, but they fell with the weight of pebbles into a still pond. “And yet you don’t seem to be held here against your will.”
He indicated the sumptuous suite, the room service breakfast, and Laetitia’s own person, dressed in silk and satin with perfectly painted features and glossy, clean hair. There was no sign of anything unwilling or forced here.
Laetitia closed her mouth on the faux outrage, her cheekbones darkening.
Tom leaned forward. “Enough prevarication, Lady Laetitia. Your co-conspirator is dead, but he left behind a dead body, along with a string of crimes such as blackmail and hostage-taking. I believe that you didn’t want to harm anyone—”
“I didn’t.” Laetitia shook her head violently. “I only wanted to see whether Crispin—”
She stopped with a wince. Perhaps she had bit her own tongue to keep from finishing the sentence.
“Whether the old adage was true, and your husband-to-be would be fonder of you if he thought he’d lost you,” Tom said, and Laetitia nodded, shame-facedly.
“I always knew I wasn’t his first choice. I knew that when he proposed. I just wanted…”
She trailed off. I grimaced. We all knew what she’d wanted, and it was excruciating to have to listen to her articulate it. “If you knew when he proposed,” I pointed out, “you didn’t have to accept. You could have saved yourself the trouble.”
Her face congealed. “Would you have said no to the future Duke of Sutherland?”
“In a heartbeat,” I told her. “Not that I’ve ever had the opportunity. He’s never proposed to me.”
Laetitia opened her mouth, presumably to say something poisonous—her expression was positively snakelike—but Crispin cut her off. “Enough.”
Laetitia huffed and sat back in the chair. I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have to listen to you, you know. I’m not engaged to you.”
“Perhaps not,” Tom said, “but you do have to listen to me.”
Actually, I didn’t. I wasn’t engaged to him either, and I doubted he’d actually arrest me if I kept talking. But on the other hand, it wasn’t a hypothesis I cared to test, so I folded my arms across my chest and stuck my bottom lip out, but I kept quiet.
Tom gave me a nod before turning back to Lady Laetitia.
“So Natterdorff contacted you and said he was back on English soil. You had to motor up to London anyway, so you agreed to meet with him. The two of you came up with a plan wherein you would take rooms at Brown’s and he would send a ransom note to Sutherland Hall.
As far as you knew, His Grace would still be there until the next morning to receive it.
Then you would get to see your fiancée’s reaction to you being presumed missing, and Natterdorff would get ten thousand pounds with which to finance his comeback. Is that correct?”
Laetitia nodded, grudgingly.
“What about Leonid Novikov?”
“I don’t know who that is,” Laetitia said.
“He’s a young chap of Russian origin. A friend of Natterdorff’s from the last time he was in London, whose good word got Natterdorff a position at Harrods two weeks ago.”
Laetitia shook her head. “I’m sorry, no.”
“He never introduced you to any of his friends?”
“Of course not,” Laetitia said with another toss of her neck. “It was purely a business agreement. We didn’t associate.”
No, of course not. She had only plotted with him to deceive and defraud her fiancé. Nothing personal at all.
Tom pushed on. “But Novikov never came here?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Laetitia said. “I received a note from Wolfgang every day. I don’t know who delivered them, but perhaps the Russian chap did.”
He probably had done. Until Wolfgang killed him, and after that I supposed Wolfgang must have been obligated to do his own letter delivery.
“Did Natterdorff tell you what happened on Friday night?” Tom wanted to know, and Laetitia squirmed a bit in her chair before she answered the question.
“It was the night when the ransom drop was supposed to take place. We… I had planned to leave here on Saturday.”
“But you’re still here,” Tom pointed out, without saying anything about the utter selfishness in the statement.
Laetitia nodded. “Something went wrong—I don’t know what—and things didn’t happen the way they were supposed to. The note I got on Saturday said that we— that he would try again on Saturday night.”
“And he did,” Tom said gently. “In the underground. Where Pippa shoved him into an electrified rail and he was electrocuted.”
Laetitia turned to stare at me.
“I don’t think it’s necessary to put it quite like that,” I told Tom. “You know as well as I do that it wasn’t intentional. I didn’t shove him into an electrified rail. I shoved him aside so I could escape. I didn’t know that he would die.”
“And that’s why you’ve not been arrested for attempted murder,” Tom said before turning back to Laetitia.
“Aside from the fake kidnapping plot, I’m still not entirely clear in my mind why Natterdorff would contact you after his return to England, or why he would think you might be willing to help him. Would you care to expound on that?”
Laetitia very clearly wouldn’t, because she opened her mouth and then closed it again, several times. “He—” she began, and seemed to think better of it. “I…”
I huffed. “Isn’t it obvious? They probably worked together the last time he was in England, too.”
It was as if I had dropped a shell. For a second everyone stared at me, mouths open, before they all turned to stare at Laetitia instead.
She flushed.
“Laetitia?”
She swung around to face Crispin, who was the one who had spoken.
And while she had had a hard time finding the words just a few seconds ago, now they came tumbling out.
“I had nothing to do with what happened to your cousin. I wouldn’t.
I never wanted anyone to get hurt. I just encouraged him to marry Miss Darling and take her to Germany with him.
He said it would make his grandfather happy if they got married, and between them, they would inherit the entire family fortune and all the land and properties… ”
Crispin’s voice was clear and very, very cold. “So you encouraged him to dope Philippa’s tea and put her on a freighter bound for Germany so he could marry her against her will.”
“I only wanted her out of the way,” Laetitia said. “I didn’t want her to get hurt. When I realized—”
She snapped her mouth shut, but of course it was too late.
“When you realized what?” Tom asked.
Laetitia appeared to be sincerely sorry that she had brought it up, and it looked like she tried to come up with some way to pedal back what she had admitted, but in the end she capitulated. “I saw him aim his rifle at Miss Darling at Marsden Manor in September. During the pheasant hunt.”
When Christopher, Francis, and I had stayed behind at the house, and a bullet had passed within a foot or two of us. That had been Wolfgang?
“You saw the shot?” Tom asked. “It was Natterdorff?”
Laetitia nodded. “I told him not to do it again. He explained that his grandfather was dying, and about the inheritance. I was the one who suggested that he should marry Miss Darling instead of trying to kill her. We didn’t need another attempted murder at my engagement party, and besides—”
She cut herself off with another snap of teeth, but again it was too late.
“Besides what?”
She gave Crispin a fulminating stare. “Besides, you would never get over her if she died!”
Crispin’s jaw dropped, and his face turned pink.
I didn’t wait for him to shoot me that agonized look, just turned to Tom.
“That’s a confession to murder, isn’t it?
Or accessory to attempted murder, or something like that?
She knew that Wolfgang tried to kill me, and instead of reporting him, she talked him into proposing to me instead? ”
“It’s certainly something,” Tom agreed, as Laetitia’s mouth opened in silent protest. “Why would you do such a thing, Lady Laetitia?”
“I wanted her out of the way,” Laetitia said, and her hands curled into fists in her lap. “He had to do as I said, because otherwise he knew I could report him. And I did tell him not to kill her.”
“That didn’t stop him,” I pointed out. “He pushed me down the stairs to the underground in October, and tried to hit Christopher and myself with a Hackney a few days later, and he fed me some sort of poison in my tea at the Savoy once. Not the time he kidnapped me; another time, before that.”
“And he knocked Kit over the head and kept him imprisoned for several days,” Crispin said, “and he killed the ma?tre d’, and eventually he abducted Pippa. And now he’s killed Leonid Novikov. All of which could have been avoided if you’d only told the truth at the time!”
Laetitia opened her mouth. And closed it again. And opened it again. “I just wanted to marry you.”
I snorted. “Well, you can kiss that goodbye. I’ll marry him myself before I let you have him.”
Everyone in the room turned to me.
“Really?” Crispin asked. His tone landed somewhere between cautiously hopeful and deeply skeptical.
I shook my head. “No. Certainly not now. And not unless you ask me first. And maybe not then. But you’re not marrying her, either.”
“After this?” He glanced at her. “No, I’m not.”
Laetitia’s mouth opened on a silent protest. It remained silent, however. She must have realized that arguing would get her nowhere.
“May I have my ring back?” Crispin asked politely, hand outstretched. “And the earrings, as well, if you don’t mind.”
Laetitia pulled the ostentatious Sutherland engagement ring off her finger reluctantly. Perhaps she hoped that if she did it slowly enough, he’d change his mind.
He didn’t, and eventually she had to put the ring in his palm. “The earrings are in the bedchamber. I’ll just—”
She made to get up from the chair, and Tom waved her back down. “Stay.”
He glanced over at me and Christopher. I can only imagine that my expression must have been indecently triumphant, because he gave the semblance of rolling his eyes before he said, “You go, Kit.”
Christopher nodded and headed for the door into the next room. Crispin, meanwhile, was turning the engagement ring over and over in his hand. The butter-bean sized diamond kept catching the light from the windows and reflecting it around the walls. “Darling?” he began.
“No,” I told him again. “Don’t you dare. Not now, maybe not ever. But certainly not two minutes after you discovered that your former fiancée was an accessory to murder and her own kidnapping.”
He nodded. And accepted the matching diamond earrings from Christopher, as he came back into the room with them. “Thank you, Kit.”
“Don’t mention it,” Christopher said, looking from one to the other of us. “Everything all right?”
Crispin nodded. “She said ‘not now.’”
“I said, ‘maybe not ever,’” I corrected.
“But you didn’t say no.”
“I did say no. Multiple times, in fact.”
“But you said maybe.”
I made a face. I had, in fact, said maybe. Which was more than I had ever expected to say in this context. It must be the excitement of the moment.
“Go on,” Tom said. He had been watching the three of us, and I supposed he thought we had been enough of a disruption, so he wanted to get rid of us.
“I’m taking Lady Laetitia to Westminster for a formal interview.
You’re not needed. Go home. And keep quiet about all this until I tell you otherwise. ”
We promised that we would, and then we left them there together, so Laetitia could change into proper clothing for the trip to Scotland Yard, and Tom could arrange for a motorcar to transport the two of them there.
Christopher sent him a look over his shoulder just before we passed through the door to the hallway.
Perhaps he was worried that Laetitia might try to exert her charms on Tom while the two of them were alone together.
If so, he had no reason to worry. Tom wasn’t looking at her, but at us, and when Christopher turned, Tom winked at him.
Christopher turned back to the door, blushing.
“Go ahead, Darling,” Crispin’s voice said, and I came back to myself to see that he was holding the door to the hallway open for me.
I stepped through. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. You’ll tell me when you’re ready for the—what did you call them once? Ostentatious and gaudy?—Sutherland diamonds?”
“Don’t hold your breath,” I advised him, and then Christopher too had passed over the threshold, and the door had shut behind us and we were on our way down the hallway toward the lifts.