Chapter 20

Chapter Twenty

Sarah Schlomsky turned up in time for tea, but declined the offer of any. “No, thank you, Miss Darling,” she told me as she stepped out of the lift on the second floor, flat key in hand. “That’s not a custom we hold to in Toledo.”

“What do you eat in the middle of the afternoon in Toledo?”

“We don’t,” Sarah said. “I don’t hold with eating between meals. It’ll ruin your dinner.”

“Tea is a meal,” I said, but I’m not sure that she heard me. Or perhaps she did, but simply chose to ignore me.

“In America, this is happy hour. People—” She said it as if they were a lesser life form, “—drink.”

Drink? “I thought America was in the midst of prohibition.” At least that’s what Flossie had told me. How much she enjoyed being somewhere where she could go out and get a cocktail, when at home, she would have to sneak around.

Or perhaps I had chalked that up to being a facet of prohibition, when in fact, it was her parents she was hiding her drinking from.

“People still drink,” Sarah said as she lead the way down the hall towards Flossie’s door. “At home, at parties, at speakeasies. There’s no way to legislate morality, more’s the pity.”

She inserted the key in the door and twisted it, and pushed the door open.

“Here we are.” She stopped in the foyer and looked around. I did the same. Everything looked the same as it had done the last time I’d been here, as well as the last time she had been here. They were not the same time, of course, but she didn’t need to know that.

“If you could start in here.” She indicated Flossie’s closet, aka the back bedroom. “None of this is anything I would want to bring home with me. Fold and stack everything, if you please, and we’ll find a charity for it. Or perhaps some of the nice young ladies at the embassy would like something pretty to wear...”

Something seemed to strike her, and she turned to look at me, a quick up and down of my figure. “Anything you see that you like, Miss Darling, please feel free to keep for yourself.”

“I’m afraid they’re not really my colors,” I said apologetically. “I’m not so fond of pink. And Flossie was a bit more… um… well-rounded than I am.”

Sarah arched her brows. “Surely not? My daughter wasn’t hefty.”

“Oh, of course not.” I would never say such a thing even if it were true, and in this case it wasn’t. Flossie had definitely had a more womanly figure than I do, though. I tend towards the boyish, which is perfect for the current tubular fashions. Flossie had been more buxom, more of the Edwardian or even Victorian type. Her dresses would look like sacks on me, and as far as Christopher goes—whose color is definitely pink—they would be indecently short. And while Christopher might not mind that—he has good legs—mid-thigh is just a step too far, even for 1926. With the way hemlines are creeping upwards, we may get there eventually, but not for a while yet.

“If you can find a suitcase or trunk in this mess—” Sarah gave the room and all the lovely, expensive clothes a disparaging look, “tuck it away in there. Otherwise, just stack it on the bed, and we’ll dig up a box later.”

I nodded. “There’s a trunk room in the cellar. I could go see if Flossie stored any of her luggage there?”

“If you don’t mind,” Sarah said, looking relieved, “that would be helpful. I’ll start in the back, meanwhile.”

“Of course.” I headed down in the lift and informed Evans that I needed access to the trunk room. “There’s something of Flossie’s there, I assume?”

“Miss Schlomsky had a trunk when she arrived,” Evans nodded, “and a valise. No furniture. That all arrived later, brand new.”

Of course. Flossie wouldn’t have crossed the Atlantic with furniture in tow.

Although from what her mother had told me, Flossie had bought her entire wardrobe new too, it seemed.

I took the key, and then the lift down to the cellars. They’re dark and gloomy—the boiler is down there, along with the innards for the lift mechanism and the electrical board for the building and other things of that nature. The trunk room is directly opposite the lift, and I inserted the key in the lock and pulled the door open, only to find myself facing a wall of luggage.

I had never been inside before. When Christopher and I moved in, it had been with a trunk each of clothes from home. A lorry had followed with spare furnishings, and that lorry had taken the trunks back to Wiltshire once they were empty, and had stored them in the big box room at Sutherland Hall until we needed them again. Which we didn’t expect we would. We had taken short weekend trips so far, to Wiltshire and Dorset and other places, but a weekender bag had always sufficed for that. A trunk is really only something you need for long voyages or big moves.

A lot of residents of the Essex House Mansions seemed to own trunks, and the trunk room was not organized in a manner that made sense to me. It took me several long minutes to walk around the room peering at each trunk in turn before I found Flossie’s, marked with her last name and the number of her flat. I dragged it out behind me, locked the door, and then took the key back to Evans, before I took the lift—and trunk—up to the second floor and dragged it down the hallway and into Flossie’s flat.

Mrs. Schlomsky heard me come through the door—or heard the trunk scrape across the floor—and she came into the foyer to greet me. “You found it. Good.”

And then she got a look at the trunk, and her brows drew together. “That isn’t Florence’s trunk.”

“It has her name on it,” I wheezed. I straightened my back and tick-tocked my hips to work out the kinks before I added, “And her flat number. Look.”

Sarah looked at it, but shook her head. “I can see that, Miss Darling. But I’m telling you, this isn’t Florence’s trunk. Not the one she left Toledo with.”

I eyed it doubtfully. “Perhaps she bought herself new luggage once she arrived?”

“Why would she do that? Surely the time to buy new luggage is before you leave on a trip?”

It was a rhetorical question, clearly, because she went on without waiting for my answer. It was just as well, since of course I would have had to agree with her. No one buys luggage when they come home from traveling. Even if something’s wrong with said luggage, the trunk goes in storage not to be considered again until the next time it is needed, and then a new trunk is acquired.

“Besides,” Sarah said, still eyeing it critically, “this trunk is hardly new, is it? It has stickers and scrapes and scratches.

“Perhaps Florence bought it used?”

She gave me a look, as she should, really, since the suggestion made no sense. If Flossie wanted to replace her existing trunk, of course she would buy a brand new one.

“Could she be holding it for someone else? Ruth, perhaps?”

“If that’s the case,” Sarah said, hands on her hips and eyes still on the trunk, “where is Florence’s trunk? Did you look to see whether there was another one with her name on it?”

I hadn’t, although I had already searched more than half the luggage room when I’d come across this trunk. And surely they would have been stored together? “I can go back,” I offered.

Sarah shook her head. “If it was there, you would have seen it. And no, to answer your other question, it isn’t Ruth’s trunk. Hers was black.”

While this was brown. “What about Flossie’s? What did that look like?”

“It was green,” Sarah said. “Dark green, and bigger than this. A proper steamer trunk.”

So this—clearly used, clearly brown—trunk didn’t belong to either of the women who supposedly lived in this mansion flat.

“You are…” I cleared my throat. “You’re absolutely certain that the women we saw today was your daughter, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” Sarah said, eyes flashing. “I’d hardly mistake my own daughter, would I? She lived with me for more than twenty years. Besides, there was the scar. I told you.”

I nodded. “I’d never noticed the scar before. None of us had.”

“Well, she’d had it for at least a year and a half,” Sarah said. “She got it during that botched kidnapping attempt at Vassar year before last. Eight stitches. I know my daughter, Miss Darling!”

“Of course you do,” I soothed. “I’m just trying to figure out why her clothes are different, and why her trunk is different, and why I’ve never seen her scar before, or her maid, for that matter…”

And when I put it like that, the explanation was obvious, wasn’t it? If Sarah wasn’t lying, and the body in the morgue truly was Florence Schlomsky, then the woman I had known for six months, the woman who had kissed Crispin in the lift and called Uncle Harold ‘Your Highness’… was someone else.

“Just out of curiosity,” I said, “can you describe Ruth to me?”

“The maid?”

Of course the maid. “You said she came to London with Flossie, correct?”

“She came over two weeks before Florence,” Sarah corrected. “Someone had to be here to get things set up. We sent Ruth.”

“And she was the one who contracted for the flat and arranged the furnishings?”

Sarah nodded. “Here and at the cottage in Thornton Heath.”

“The…?”

“Cottage in Thornton Heath,” Sarah repeated. “A country cottage. A chance to get out of the city to somewhere more pleasant.” She smiled. “Ivy Cottage in Thornton Heath. It sounds rustic and peaceful, doesn’t it?”

First of all, the Flossie I had known—not Flossie at all, as I now suspected—would have had no desire to get out of the city to the country. And secondly, no matter how rustic and peaceful it may have sounded?—

“Thornton Heath is less than eight miles from Charing Cross,” I said. And it was closer than that to Tooley Street and to the shack in Southwark. Someone could probably get from Southwark to Thornton Heath in twenty minutes after midnight on a Saturday.

If Flossie’s parents had been paying for a cottage in Thornton Heath, it wasn’t so Flossie—or the person pretending to be Flossie—could have a place in which to weekend. Nobody weekends in Thornton Heath. Sarah was probably imagining Dartmoor and Wuthering Heights or somewhere else equally picturesque, while in actuality, we were talking about a small town just south of London proper.

I hadn’t seen any indication of rent for a cottage in Thornton Heath the other day, when Christopher and I had gone through the flat and all of Flossie’s belongings with a fine toothed comb. No mentions of it, nor any paperwork related to it. That seemed a bit suspicious, if Sarah and Hiram had been paying for the place.

“Did you go visit the cottage this week?” I asked. “To check if Flossie was there, maybe?”

Sarah shook her head. “I had no idea it was so close to London. Florence and Ruth called it a country cottage in their letters. I assumed that it was… well, in the country.”

Of course. “Flossie—the woman I thought was Flossie—never mentioned a cottage.” I thought for a moment. Flossie—my Flossie, whoever she really was—had lived here, at the Essex House Mansions. I hadn’t seen her every day, but I had seen her enough that I knew that she rarely spent time anywhere else. And this was clearly an occupied flat we were standing in, not a place someone spent a minority of their time. “You’re certain the letters were from your daughter?”

“I know my daughter’s hand,” Sarah said, and she was undoubtedly right. Besides, if the girl in the morgue had been the real Florence, she had been alive until sometime last night. She would have been able to write letters to her mother.

Whether she had been in charge of what went into them, was a totally different story.

“Ruth also wrote to you?”

She nodded. “To keep us updated on things that were going on with Florence, you know. And the household expenses and such.”

Ruth was in on the deception, then. Not that this whole thing could have been effected without her, really, but she would have had to have been, if the Schlomskys had heard from her throughout the past year.

“You never described Ruth,” I said.

“Ruth?” She sounded confused.

“The maid. What does she look like? Or did, the last time you saw her?” If Flossie—the real Flossie—was the body in the morgue, she had spent her time in England somewhere other than here. But someone else had been spending her time here, pretending to be Flossie Schlomsky. That someone might have been Ruth.

“Short,” Sarah said promptly, “and skinny, with a plain face and dishwater blond hair. It was long last time I saw her—I don’t hold with bobbed hair on the servants; I much prefer a neat bun—but I suppose she might have changed that by now.”

Something buzzed quickly into my head, but buzzed equally quickly out the other side. I decided not to try to chase it down. We were in the middle of an important conversation. “But she’s definitely not a brunette?”

Sarah shook her head. “Definitely not. Dirty blond.”

Not the woman I had known as Flossie, then. She had been neither short nor skinny, and she definitely hadn’t been a blonde, even a dirty one.

“Someone should go to Thornton Heath,” I said.

Sarah looked at me.

“It’s only a half hour away. And I should send a message to Tom. He’s probably back at Scotland Yard by now.”

They must be finished with the crime scene in Southwark, surely. It had been hours and hours since they began work on it. A couple of hours since we left the morgue and headed home, too. Enough of them for Crispin to have made it to Wiltshire, or at least somewhere close.

“And then we’ll fetch Hiram and go to Thornton Heath,” Sarah said.

I nodded, still distracted with my thoughts. We’d send a message to Tom, fetch Hiram, and go to Thornton Heath. And then we’d see what was what.

Ten minutes later, we were in a Hackney on our way to the Savoy. Our shared flat had been empty when I went to fetch my handbag, so Christopher must still be with Tom, wherever that was. We’d get to Whitehall eventually, and it wouldn’t be too long, but the Strand was on the way, and so we stopped there first. Sarah asked the driver to wait, and I stayed with the cab while I waited for her to fetch Hiram and come back.

And so it was that I was leaning against a Hackney on Savoy Court when I heard my name spoken in a German accent. “ Freulein Darling.”

“ Graf Wolfgang.” I put on my best smile as I turned towards him, all the while wishing that I had put on a slightly nicer frock this morning. At that time we had been headed to the mortuary, though, to identify a dead body, and so I hadn’t wanted to put on anything I really liked, since there was a chance that I might have to throw it away afterwards. I already had a hard time with the evening frock I had been wearing last night. I had loved it when I bought it, but after what had happened, I was ambivalent about wearing it again. It would always now remind me of Flossie, and of a woman with her face beaten to unrecognizability by a blunt instrument.

At any rate, there was Wolfgang, Graf von Natterdorff, in a stylish blue summer jacket, with a yellow patterned necktie and yellow pocket square. The combination played up both the blue of his eyes and the gold of his hair. He was carrying a walking stick, as well, a bit less ornate than the one Hiram Schlomsky habitually held—no buffalo head on this one, just a simple silver grip at the top—and he looked very handsome indeed, as evidenced by the many eyes that lingered upon him.

His lingered upon me. “Are you looking for me?”

There was just a hint of self-satisfaction in the question, as if it wasn’t really a question at all.

“I’m afraid not,” I said apologetically, “although I’m always happy to see you.”

I simpered. He simpered back, and I added, “I’m waiting for Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Schlomsky to come back downstairs. We’re on the trail of a criminal.”

The smirk dropped off his face. “A criminal?”

“Their daughter was killed last night. We’re going to her country cottage to see if we can find a clue to her killers’ whereabouts.”

Wolfgang blinked. “Alone?”

“There will be the three of us. And we’ll stop by Scotland Yard on the way, to leave a message for Detective Sergeant Gardiner. It’s his case.” And if he was there, we’d take him with us. Naturally.

“And how will he feel about you chasing down clues on your own?” Wolfgang wanted to know, severely.

I imagined I would be hearing about it later, if Tom wasn’t accessible and the Schlomskys and I ended up going to Thornton Heath by ourselves. But Tom wasn’t in charge of me—I was a grown woman in control of my own destiny, not to mention my own safety—and it wasn’t as if I wouldn’t have tried to let him know.

“I’ll go with you,” Wolfgang said, just as the Schlomskys passed through the revolving doors and came into view. He didn’t wait for me to agree, just turned to them with that formal little bow. “Madam. Mein Herr . May I introduce myself? I am Graf Wolfgang Ulrich Albrecht von und zu Natterdorff, and I am this lady’s protector.”

Oh, was he really? As if I didn’t already have more than I wanted of those.

Hiram eyed him shrewdly for a second before— “Hiram Schlomsky. My wife Sarah.”

Wolfgang clicked his heels. “A pleasure.”

“Likewise,” Hiram said, although with the way he looked at Wolfgang, bright-eyed and with his head tilted to the side, I thought he seemed more fascinated by Wolfgang’s essential foreignness than he was strictly pleased at making the acquaintance.

“I shall accompany you on your quest,” Wolfgang informed him.

It was presented as a fact, not a request at all, and Hiram’s eyebrows arched at the high-handedness. He didn’t quibble, however, just grunted, “Suit yourself,” before handing his wife into the motorcar.

“Come along, Miss Darling,” Sarah said, and her tone also brooked no interference. I slid into the backseat after Hiram. Wolfgang climbed in beside the chauffeur, and off we went.

Scotland Yard was next, ten minutes or so later, and as expected, Tom and Christopher were not sitting around waiting for me. Nor were Detective Sergeant Ian Finchley or Chief Inspector Pendennis. They were all off in a group somewhere, investigating, I assumed. I asked the constable on duty to pass along a message to Tom should he appear, and then we headed south.

The mews house in Southwark was also empty, except for a uniformed bobby standing guard outside the door. He informed us that the on-site investigation had concluded, but the crime scene had not been released, and so it would be guarded twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, until Chief Inspector Pendennis decided that he was done and could let it go. The Schlomskys both looked gratified about this, and I guess that made sense, seeing as it was the place where their daughter had died.

I told this constable, too, to pass on a message to Tom should he return, and then I got back into the Hackney again for the journey to Thornton Heath.

It isn’t a long drive, and a shorter one when you’re in South London to begin with. It was less than forty-five minutes before we were rolling slowly through the hamlet of Thornton Heath, keeping our eyes peeled for the cottage the Schlomskys had been paying for since Flossie stepped off the boat in Southampton ten months ago.

“There.” It was Sarah who spotted it first, perhaps because she was the most motivated to find it. “The small brick house over there. Is that it?”

“That must be it,” I agreed, while the Hackney driver turned the Austin towards the curb outside.

The house was smallish and in no way ostentatious, situated on the edge of town with no close neighbors. It was also about as far from a picturesque country cottage as one could get. A detached two stories of red brick, square and blocky, with no more than two rooms up and two down, at a guess. There wasn’t a flower in sight, but plenty of weeds.

Whoever had chosen this house, and had chosen to live here, didn’t seem like it could be the same person who had chosen, and chosen to live in, the Essex House Mansion flat.

“The windows are dirty,” Sarah said with a grimace.

I nodded. “If this is Ruth’s house, she’s been falling down on the job.”

“I always suspected she was lazy,” Sarah said. Her eyes burned as she looked at the house. “Do you think this is where they kept my daughter?”

“They didn’t keep her in the house in Southwark. Not long-term.” Not enough furniture, no running water.

No, the mews in Southwark seemed more like somewhere where they had gone to dump the body. They must have taken Flossie from here and driven her there on the day of the murder—yesterday—and then killed her and left her for us to find.

“There’s a garage in the back,” Hiram pointed out.

So there was. Small and dilapidated, with a few roofing tiles missing, but a garage, built with the same red bricks as the house. And with enough room to store an Austin Heavy Twelve-Four, should someone want to.

“I’ll go peek inside,” I said.

Sarah squinted at me. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

“I sincerely doubt they’re here,” I said. “After last night, surely they’re halfway to Calais by now.”

That’s what I would have done. Picked up the money, packed up anything important—not necessarily in that order—and made tracks. Not only did they have kidnapping on their record now, but they had murder, as well. Whether that had been a facet of the plan from the beginning or not, it was done now, and the best they could do for themselves was get as far away from here as they could, as quickly as possible.

“We’ll both go,” Wolfgang said. He got out of the Hackney first, and then held the door for me.

“They’re more likely to see us if there are two of us,” I pointed out.

He gave me a look, and it was obvious that he wasn’t going to relent, so I gave up on trying to talk him out of it and headed down the narrow drive that ran along the side of the small house to the smaller garage.

As it turned out, there were no windows on this side of the house, so there was no danger that we’d be seen by anyone inside. And the nearest neighbor was far enough away, and well enough hidden by overgrown hedges and untrimmed bushes, that discovery was unlikely from that angle, as well. I walked down the drive as unconcernedly as I would along Essex Street on a sunny afternoon, with Wolfgang right behind.

“Careful,” he muttered when we reached the small garage. “Let me.”

The small building had a pair of dilapidated doors in dire need of paint, inset with a row of windows at the top. I wasn’t quite tall enough to look through them, and while Christopher would have lifted me—and Crispin likely would have too, all the while grumbling about having to get on his knees in front of me—Wolfgang stepped up on his own tiptoes and peered through the dirty glass on my behalf.

“A motorcar,” he said after a moment’s perusal.

“Like a Hackney?”

“Hmm.” Wolfgang glanced over his shoulder at it. “Perhaps.”

“Try the handle.”

I took a step closer as he grasped it and turned. The door into the garage opened, and I got a glimpse of one headlamp and the front grille of a black Austin before I nudged Wolfgang out of the way.

He attempted to get in front of me, but I slipped around him. “We must make certain there’s no one inside.”

I stepped into the darkness of the musty garage, and felt a shiver of revulsion slither down my spine. This felt too much like last night for comfort.

The garage was empty, however. Or not empty: there was the motorcar, and scraps of wood, and other tools, and old oil cans, and spare tires… but no one was in the car, dead or alive. Whoever the killer was—and my money was on the chap in the cap who had driven the car yesterday—he hadn’t seen fit to murder anyone else in the past few hours.

Or at least, if he had, he hadn’t left them in the garage.

There was no valise in the motorcar. I did make certain of that. There was no bloody tire iron, either. Or a bloody wrench or anything else that could have served as the murder weapon.

By the time I came back out in the drive after peering through all the windows of the Austin, Hiram and Sarah had emerged from the Hackney, too, and had joined us.

“Anything?” Sarah wanted to know.

I shook my head. “The motorcar looks like the one from last night. But there’s nobody in it. And no money.”

“Money?” Wolfgang repeated.

“Fifty thousand dollars in ransom.”

His eyes widened, but I waved the explanation off before he could ask. “The bloke who picked it up must have taken it inside the house. Or more likely taken it with him when he left. They must have had another motorcar waiting, I suppose. This one was used to transport poor Flossie, so they left it behind.”

A shadow passed across Sarah’s face at the reminder, and I wished I’d kept myself from rambling my thoughts out loud. To distract from having stuffed my foot in my mouth, I opened it again. “I wonder whether they left any clues inside.”

We all turned to look at the back door of the cottage.