Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen

It was pandemonium after that, of course, with Hiram yelling, and Christopher and Crispin both trying to calm him down, and then Sarah Schlomsky showed up in the doorway, and as soon as that happened, Hiram turned on her instead, because he assumed that her being inside the house instead of outside in the Hackney meant that their driver must have driven away and left them there, which a trip down the stairs to peer out the front door proved to be true—the driver was gone, and so was the Hackney, and furthermore, it was hard to blame him, because it wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where anyone would want to linger.

“Why did you pay the fare?” Hiram screamed at his wife, who told him, in quite a cold and cutting manner, that the driver wouldn’t let her out of the cab until she had done so.

“Then you should have stayed there!” Hiram insisted, frothing at the mouth. The bottom edge of his mustache was wet with spittle. “Like I told you to do!”

Sarah drew herself up to full height and puffed out her not-inconsiderable bosom. “You’re not the boss of me, Hiram Schlomsky!”

“That was the whole point of leaving you there!” Hiram raged. “So he wouldn’t drive away and leave us stranded!”

“Don’t be silly, Hiram,” Sarah said. “We’re not stranded.”

“The cab is gone!”

“But these nice young people are here with their car.” She gestured to us. “They’ll give us a ride back to the hotel.”

“Capital idea,” I said enthusiastically, and had both Christopher and Crispin goggle at me as if they suspected that I had lost my marbles. “We should take you back to the hotel right now.”

I looked at Christopher and Crispin, one after the other, significantly, and tried to convey the thought that we should try to get the Schlomskys out of here before they saw what—or rather who—was lying dead on the soiled mattress in the other room.

It took a second, but then they both caught on.

“Yes,” Crispin said, turning to beam at both Schlomskys, “of course. I’d be happy to drive you both back to the Savoy. I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Lord St George.”

He stuck out a hand in the direction of Hiram, who stopped his rant mid-sentence to eye it with all the enthusiasm of a dead fish.

Sarah, meanwhile, stepped in to grab it and pump it up and down, heartily. Crispin, who had looked ready to lift her hand to his mouth in the proper upper crust manner, appeared taken aback.

“See, Hiram,” Sarah said triumphantly, “this young man will see us home.”

“You would let a criminal drive you home?”

“I’m not a criminal,” Crispin protested, just as I said, indignantly, “We’re not criminals!”

“What makes you think that?” Christopher wanted to know. He’s the least reactive of us, and the most prone to thinking things through before flying off the handle. I’m quite easily riled, and so is Crispin, at least by me.

“I saw you!” Hiram said, eyes moving between me and both the boys. “Upstairs in the church tower, waiting for me to leave the ransom. Where’s my money? Where’s our daughter?”

I didn’t want to answer the second question—I took care that my eyes shouldn’t flicker to the door in the far wall—so I tackled the first one instead. “We don’t have your money. We waited for you to put it inside the tower, and for the kidnapper to pick it up, and then we followed him here.”

“No, you didn’t!” Hiram was practically apoplectic with rage. “We watched you. You waited up there, smoking and talking, for twenty minutes, and then you went downstairs, were picked up, and drove directly here!”

Well, yes. It was easy to see how that might look damning to someone who didn’t know us, and didn’t know how things had actually happened.

“Christopher stayed with the motorcar,” I explained, “while St George… while Lord St George and I went to the upper level of the tower. We saw you drive by, and then come back. And then we watched one of the kidnappers go inside and come out with the valise, and when he drove away, Christopher followed him. He came here.”

I gestured to the room we were standing in. “Once Christopher knew where they were hiding, he came back and fetched us. But by the time we got here, the house was empty and the kidnappers—and their motorcar—were gone.”

Hiram glanced around. “Empty, you say?”

“Not a living soul,” I told him, and was happy to hear that my voice was steady.

It’s not that I have a problem lying with a straight face. I’m quite good at fibbing when it doesn’t matter. But knowing that the man’s daughter was lying dead—and not just dead, but brutally murdered—behind the closed door behind us, made it a bit more difficult than usual to keep my composure.

And I wasn’t the one who cracked. To this day, I’m not sure whether it was Christopher’s eyes, or Crispin’s, that drifted towards the door. (If I had to guess, I’d say it was Christopher’s. He’s more soft-hearted than Crispin. On the other hand, Crispin was the one with the relationship—if one could call it that—with Flossie, so it was a toss-up, really, who had given the game away.)

Someone did something, at any rate, and Sarah Schlomsky gasped, and then darted around her husband and made for the door to the other room. I took a sideways step to stop her?—

“No!”

—but since I didn’t move fast enough to actually get in her way, she circumvented me, and made it to the door, and flung it open. And plunged inside.

“Florence! Hiram, bring the light!”

“No,” I cried again, “don’t!” but neither of them listened to me. Hiram brought his torch to the now-open door, and then we heart a horrible soul-sucking gurgle from Hiram and a high-pitched shriek from the bereaved mother.

“Florence!”

No question who was dead inside, then. I had only gotten a brief glimpse in the unsteady beam of the torch before Christopher moved it away, and I had identified the dress more than the woman inside it. But if Sarah Schlomsky recognized her daughter, I guess there was no doubt that the dead woman in the next room was Florence Schlomsky.

Sarah devolved into wracking sobs—she had fallen to her knees next to the mattress with her daughter’s body—and Hiram came back through the door like a bull at a red cape, head and brow lowered. “What did you do to her?”

His eyes lighted on the tire iron in Crispin’s hand, and he raised the cane in his own. “You! You’re a murderer!”

The silver-tipped mahogany stick whistled through the air, only missing Crispin because the latter jumped back, eyes wide. “I’m not! I didn’t do anything to her! Look…”

He brandished the tire iron, presumably to give Hiram the opportunity to see for himself that there was no blood or brain matter on it. “We only brought it inside for protection, because we didn’t know whether there’d be anyone here.”

But Hiram was beyond listening to reason, it seemed. “Murderer!” he screamed again, spittle flying, as he raised the cane for another go at Crispin’s head. “Murdering bastard!”

I shrieked, and Crispin bellowed. The cane was at the apex of a swing and starting to come down when Christopher reacted. “Go!”

He gave me a push towards the door with the arm holding the torch while the other hand shot out and snagged Crispin by the arm and yanked. All three of us stumbled towards the door to the hallway as Hiram checked the downward chop of the cane and brought it around for a swing instead. By the time it hit the place where Crispin’s head would have been, he was halfway to the door and we were almost out of the room.

“Hurry,” Christopher told me breathlessly, as he nudged my back. “Down.”

I was already headed for the top of the stairs, but didn’t waste my breath telling him so. Instead, I simply started down with the two of them scrambling behind me. By now, Hiram was on his way through the door, as well, roaring, and Sarah’s raised voice could be heard from the bedroom. “Hiram! Come back here! Hiram!”

I hit the bottom of the stairs and legged it down the dark hallway towards the front door as fast as I could in my elegant, T-strap heels. At least the dress wasn’t constricting around the knees: I could move my legs just fine. Behind me, Christopher and Crispin shoved each other down the hall, until we all three tumbled out into the dark and dirty street.

“This way,” Christopher said breathlessly, snagging me by the arm and yanking me up the street away from the motorcar. I had made for it like a safe haven, but he was right: Hiram was already pounding down the hallway behind us, and we couldn’t take the time to get situated in the Hispano-Suiza and wait for Crispin to get the motor going. By the time any of that happened, Hiram would have caught up, and then all three of us, not to mention Crispin’s pride and joy, would be beaten to a pulp by Hiram’s silver-tipped cane.

So we pelted up the narrow street, two aristocratic young men in expensive black tie and one poor relation in a salmon-pink evening frock, with an incensed American millionaire in hot pursuit.

On level ground we were younger and faster, though, and by the time we had made it to the corner and out of sight, Hiram had fallen behind. He was huffing and puffing like a bellows, both due to his age and because he was a portly gentleman who enjoyed his food and his leisure in equal measure, from what I could determine.

Nonetheless, we kept going to the next corner, and then to the next. By now, Hiram was long gone, and we had made our way in a circle, or rather a square, back to where we started. When we peered around the final corner, the narrow street where the Hispano-Suiza was parked lay dark and empty. Hiram seemed not to have taken his anger out on the motorcar, because the windshield still gleamed with glass, and the stork emblem stood proudly. I felt as much as I heard Crispin’s sigh of relief.

“Go on,” I told him, between breaths, with a nudge to the shoulder. “Go fetch the police.”

He looked at me, and then at Christopher, and then at me again. “Shouldn’t we all go?”

“I thought someone ought to stay behind and keep an eye on the Schlomskys,” I said.

He shook his head. “I don’t think they’re going anywhere, Darling. Their driver left, and this isn’t the sort of neighborhood where one can simply flag down another Hackney. If they have any sense at all, they’ll stay inside the building.”

“And wait for what?” I wanted to know. “They’re stuck here, St George. As you said, their driver left. Their daughter is dead. They’ll want to fetch the police as quickly as possible.”

“But I’m sure they won’t start walking the street in the middle of the night,” Crispin said. “Not in this neighborhood. It doesn’t take great wisdom to see that it would be a bad idea.”

No, but— “I’m not sure that would matter to them. Their daughter is dead. They’re going to want the police. And Hiram has his cane. Perhaps he thinks he can handle whatever comes his way.”

“Then he’s a fool,” Crispin said, which of course was true as far as it went. I couldn’t argue with it.

“You go,” Christopher told him. “You’ll be safe in the motorcar by yourself. Drive quickly to Scotland Yard, tell them what has happened, and come back for us.”

He glanced at me before continuing. “We’ll wait for Hiram to calm down—it was you he was trying to kill, anyway, not us, and perhaps if you’re not here, he’ll be more reasonable.”

Crispin muttered something—I couldn’t hear what it was, but I was inclined to agree with him anyway, since I could guess what he’d said—and then shot me a look.

“I’ll take care of Pippa,” Christopher said. “We’ll keep the torch. If Hiram attacks us, I’ll hit him with it. And if someone else does, between the torch and Hiram’s cane, not to mention Pippa’s natural inclination towards bloodthirst, we ought to be fine.”

“Don’t joke about that,” I told him. “Not after what we just saw upstairs.”

He nodded. “Of course not. My apologies.”

“The only person Philippa wants to murder,” Crispin added, “is me.”

He pulled open the door to the Hispano-Suiza and fitted himself behind the wheel. The tire iron went on the seat beside him. I suppose he might be afraid he’d find trouble along the way, at this time of night and in this neighborhood, and he wanted to keep it handy, just in case. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“We’ll go back inside and see if we can hear what Hiram and Sarah are talking about,” I said. “It didn’t escape my attention that in a city of eight million people, they made their way here, to where their dead daughter was, within an hour of the ransom drop.”

Crispin arched a brow. “They followed us, didn’t they?”

“So they said,” I nodded, “but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t know about this place already.”

“So you think they murdered their own daughter?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Christopher said. “He was awfully quick to brandish that cane, for a peaceful man. And it would make for a handy murder weapon.”

I nodded. “You would have been dead had it connected, St George.”

Crispin grimaced. “In justice to him, he did think we had murdered his child.”

“Or else he pretended he thought so,” Christopher said, “when, in fact, he knew better.”

There was a moment’s silence while Crispin and I both chewed on this, and then Christopher added, “But yes, we’ll go inside. If they don’t notice us, we’ll listen to the conversation. If they do, we’ll try to stay safe. Worst case scenario, we run away again.”

“But do be quick, St George,” I told him. “Both for Flossie’s sake, and for ours. I don’t fancy spending the rest of the night here.”

Crispin nodded. “I’ll be as fleet as the wind.”

“Just stay away from light poles. No accidents on the way. No stopping to chat up comely young ladies.”

“Especially not the sort who frequent this area,” Christopher added.

Crispin gave us both a crushing look. “If I wanted to trade money for affection, I could find that commodity closer to home, thank you both.”

Of course he could. And not in the sense that he’d have to pay for it nightly. He was an eligible peer of the aristocracy, with a title and a fortune and a dukedom in his future. His entire purpose in life, at least according to his father, was to find a woman on whom to bestow that title and money in exchange for the means to make an heir. The affection would come gratis, or at least as an unspoken part of the deal. Most any woman would manage to muster up quite a bit of it for a man who promises to make her a viscountess in the immediate future, and a duchess in due time.

“Just go,” I told him. “Stay safe. Hurry.”

“Not sure I can do both of those at the same time, Darling. But I’ll be back as quickly as I can with reinforcements. You two run back inside the house before I start the motor. That way, maybe he’ll think we’ve all left.”

That made sense, so Christopher and I wished him luck one last time before we scurried across the narrow road and back into the dark hallway. From upstairs we could hear Sarah wailing and Hiram try to console her.

“In here,” Christopher said, darting towards the empty ground floor flat. “We can stay hidden in the event he comes downstairs when he hears the car.”

We ducked behind the door just as the H6 came to life outside. It has a powerful motor, the same one Woolf Bernato used to set the Brooklands record in 1924, and the noise was practically deafening in the narrow street. All noise ceased from upstairs as soon as it happened, and then we heard footsteps overhead as Hiram presumably left Sarah beside the body and walked across the floor above us and into the hallway.

We waited for him to descend the staircase, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he stood and listened to the sound of the Hispano-Suiza fading away, before crossing the floor above our heads again to rejoin his wife.

We heard the murmur of voices above, but not what they said.

“We’ll have to get closer if we want to hear anything,” I murmured.

Christopher looked at me. We were nose to nose in the dark room, and our eyes had adjusted well enough to the lack of light that I could see his face almost clearly. His eyes glittered. “What could they possibly be saying that would make it worth the risk of being brained by Hiram Schlomsky’s walking stick if they hear us?”

“You never know,” I said, or whispered, rather. “I’m still not a hundred percent certain that it wasn’t Hiram and Sarah who killed Florence. They could have staged the whole thing. We could have been looking at a single Hackney cab motoring past St Olave’s in both directions all night. Go past twice to get the lay of the land, then go back to let Hiram deposit the money in the church tower. Wait three minutes and go back again. This time, the driver picks up the valise. Everyone drives here. But they notice you following them, so they turn the tables and follow you instead, back to the church tower. And then they follow all three of us back here and pretend to find the place for the first time.”

“Convoluted,” Christopher opined.

Of course it was. “It’s possible, though. Sarah isn’t stupid, and it was stupid to allow herself to be stranded here. Unless it was on purpose, to throw us off guard. And Hiram is awfully quick with that cane. He might have been just as quick if his daughter said something he didn’t like.”

“One would hardly think so, Pippa,” Christopher said. “And her mother seems genuinely grief-stricken, if nothing else.”

That she did. The loud wailing from earlier had died down by now, but Sarah was still sniffling softly upstairs, and doing it loudly enough that we could hear her one story below.

“That,” Christopher said, “is not for our benefit. Not if they don’t know that we’re still here.”

Fine. “So perhaps it’s just Hiram,” I said. “We don’t know anything about this family, other than the fact that Florence left her family and friends and everything else behind to come all the way to London. That could certainly indicate a strained relationship with her parents.”

Christopher nodded thoughtfully. “So Florence left the Essex House Mansions on Wednesday evening in Crispin’s motorcar. He dropped her on the Strand, and she proceeded to the Savoy, where her father was waiting. Where was her mother?”

“No idea,” I said. “A more likely scenario is that Florence was proceeding along the Strand towards the Savoy when her father saw her. Her mother was in the hotel, but Hiram was outside, either in a cab or on foot, and he and Florence went off somewhere together. That would explain why nobody noticed anything amiss in the street. She got into a cab with her own father, so there was no fuss and no kicking and screaming. But then something went wrong, and Hiram killed her. Sarah doesn’t know anything about it.”

Which would explain her grief, which certainly seemed genuine.

“And Hiram arranged for the ransom note to take attention off himself?” Christopher asked.

“It makes sense,” I answered, “doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so. The driver saw him do it, I assume, so Hiram paid him off in exchange for keeping quiet about the murder and for driving the motorcar tonight?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. If there’s one thing Hiram has a lot of, it’s money to throw at problems.”

“It’s possible,” Christopher allowed. “But it’s all the more reason why we don’t want him to find us here, Pippa.”

Yes, it was. I wished I had thought of all this before I let Crispin go off on his own. If I had been just a bit quicker on the uptake, we could have gone with him, instead of being left here with one or two people who may be murderers.

“Then again,” Christopher said, “Hiram might not be guilty. I don’t think you touched the body, did you?”

I shook my head. No, indeed. There was nothing that would have induced me to do so.

“I did,” Christopher said. My eyes widened, and he added, “Someone had to, to make sure there was nothing we could do to help.”

“Honestly, Christopher,” I said, as I fought back the mental images, “you should have been able to tell by looking at her that she was beyond help.”

He nodded. “I know. But I had to check. And the body was still warmish. If she had been dead since Wednesday, she would have been stone cold.”

And not just that, but decomposition would have been well advanced, too. We would have been able to smell the body as soon as we stepped foot inside the building. Maybe even as soon as we stepped foot outside the motorcar.

“In that case,” I said, “perhaps Hiram truly did follow us here thinking we were the guilty ones. He left the valise and withdrew, the kidnapper picked it up, and you followed him here. Then you went back to fetch St George and myself, and while you were doing that, the kidnapper dispatched Florence and made tracks. Then Hiram followed us back here because he thought we were the kidnappers.”

Christopher nodded. “That makes sense.”

It did. Even if it didn’t explain some of the minor details, such as how they had managed to snatch Flossie off the Strand on Wednesday night without anyone noticing. Her father being involved made that whole scenario a lot more likely. “I suppose they’ve kept her here for the past three days, feeding her opium along the way to keep her quiet.”

“Feed someone enough opium,” Christopher agreed, “and they don’t notice, or care, about much. Including the fact that they’re sleeping on a soiled mattress in a Southwark slum.”

I nodded. “How long before St George comes back with the police, do you suppose?”

“I imagine we have a while to wait yet,” Christopher said. “Do you want to sit down and try to get comfortable? Maybe even try to sleep? It’s getting late.”

“In this house of horrors?” I shuddered. “I think not. Besides, there’s no way I’m lowering any part of this dress onto the filth on this floor.”

“We’ll stand, then?”

“Or we could go upstairs and see if Hiram has calmed down. If we tell him that Crispin has gone for the police, maybe it’ll help.”

“Are you certain that’s something you want to risk?”

“Just keep the torch ready,” I told him, “and whack him over the head with it if he tries anything.”

Christopher sighed, but kept a tight grip on the torch as we made our way out of the room and back up the stairs.