Chapter 21

Chapter Twenty-One

I’ll be honest, I fully expected the Thornton Heath cottage to be empty. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t be. These people had kidnapped a woman, had kept her locked up for ten months (or at least I thought they had), had turned her into an opium addict to keep her contained and quiet, and had extorted the best part of fifty thousand dollars from her father before murdering her in cold blood. (Extremely cold.) There was no logical reason why they would still be here, especially considering that it was the Schlomskys who had footed the bill for the cottage, and they could reasonably be expected to think of its existence at some point.

As a result, I had no qualms whatsoever about walking over to the back door and wrapping my hand around the knob and twisting. And when the door didn’t budge, I also had no qualms about trying to come up with another way to break in. Perhaps there was an open window somewhere, that we—or that one of us; me, for preference—could climb through to get inside.

I stepped back and peered at the back of the house. If I had to slither in through a window, it would be safer to do it back here. There were no neighbors in sight—really, whoever had picked the cottage had done an outstanding job of finding an isolated, private place—and while the street out front seemed pretty quiet on a Sunday afternoon, it was still a street, and someone might come along it. Not to mention that the Hackney driver was still sitting out there, waiting for us to finish our business at the cottage.

No, if I was going to break and enter, it was much safer to do it back here.

“Boards on the window up there,” Hiram muttered, gesturing to one of the first floor windows.

I followed the direction of his finger to the upper story, and nodded. Yes, indeed. Someone had nailed a lot of boards across the window from one edge of the frame to the other, probably sometime in the last year. Approximately ten months ago, I’d say.

“That must be where…”

I stopped without finishing the sentence. There was no need, after all. Hiram and Sarah could figure it out for themselves as easily as I could. If this was where Flossie—the real Flossie—had been kept prisoner since she arrived on English soil, that must be the room she had been kept in.

Sarah’s eyes burned as she looked at the boards, jaw tight, while Hiram’s hand clenched around his cane until his knuckles were white. I didn’t envy the kidnappers whenever he came face to face with them.

“There’s an open cellar window,” Wolfgang pointed, and we all turned our attention to it.

Well, that solved the problem of who was going to go inside the house first, anyway. Not that anyone had discussed it so far, but I fully expected Wolfgang to put up a fight if I suggested that I go. Christopher would have fought, and so would Crispin have.

In this case there was no need. The window was small, and sunk below ground, into a narrow well lined with the same brick as the house itself. Hiram and Sarah were both too rotund to fit, and there was no way Wolfgang’s shoulders would make it through. It would have to be me.

“Lower me down,” I said, heading towards it.

“Absolutely not,” Wolfgang answered.

I looked at him over my shoulder. “None of the rest of you will fit. It’ll have to be me.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Freulein Darling, but I will not send you into the house by yourself. What if someone is there?”

“No one will be there. They would have to be stupid to still be here.” I stopped in front of the window well, expectantly.

Wolfgang shook his head. “No.”

“Fine.” I crouched down on the edge. “I’ll do it myself.”

“I’ll open the back door,” Wolfgang said.

I peered at him, my heart sinking. Had I misunderstood something, and he wasn’t one of the heroes? The man in the cap last night… could it have been Wolfgang? Had he made our acquaintance that day at the Savoy because he knew Christopher and I lived down the hall from Flossie—the fake Flossie—and he wanted to find out what we knew?

“What do you…” I began, and changed it in favor of, “do you have a key?”

“Of course not,” Wolfgang said, with the suggestion of an eye roll. “If you would be so kind as to lend me two of your hairpins, I will endeavor to use them to pick the lock.”

“Oh.” My hand flew to my hair. “Of course.”

That was much better. We could all go inside together. And of course he was one of the heroes. How could he not be, with such a dashing scar?

I pulled the Kerbigrips out of my bob and handed them over, before tucking my loose hair behind my ear. “I’ve never seen anyone pick a lock before.”

“It’s a useful skill,” Wolfgang said modestly as he wandered towards the back door with me right on his heels.

I imagined so. Not that I had ever imagined, up until a few months ago, at any rate, that I would ever have need for such a skill. But I watched avidly as he straightened one Kirbigrip into a stick and inserted it into the lock, and then inserted the other and began wiggling them both.

The Schlomskys, too, gathered around to watch. Hiram looked fascinated, just the same as I imagined I did, although Sarah seemed less impressed. She didn’t comment on the many (illegal) uses of such a skill, but I’m certain she thought about them.

It was quick, anyway. Less than a minute, and Wolfgang slid the back door open, soundlessly. “I’ll go first.”

“By all means,” I told him, and followed him into the house’s kitchen.

And that was when I had to give up on the comforting notion that we were alone. There was scrambling from above our heads, the sound of rapid footsteps and shrill female voices, along with the lower (but no less startled) tones of a man.

My first instinct was to back out of the kitchen and run. If we were right, and this was the correct cottage, and we hadn’t made some sort of terrible mistake, the people upstairs were kidnappers and murderers. They had nothing to lose, and I didn’t think we wanted to involve ourselves with them.

That was the worst case scenario. The best case scenario was that we had made a mistake and the people upstairs were innocent strangers, and all we had done was break into their house unprovoked. That possibility was better than coming face to face with murderers, but it was hardly a desirable thing to have done, even so.

So yes, I wanted to flee. Unfortunately, Hiram and Sarah had entered the kitchen now too, and between them behind me and Wolfgang in front, there was nowhere I could go. Especially when Hiram fastened his eyes on the ceiling, from behind which all the noise was emanating, and his face darkened to an angry brick red. His mustache bristled.

“Hiram!” Sarah said in warning.

He flicked her a look. “They killed our daughter, Sadie.”

“We don’t know that,” Sarah said, although there wasn’t much conviction in her voice. We all believed the same thing, and that was that we had caught the kidnappers in flagrante .

She had a point, however. We couldn’t attack them without being certain. If Hiram went on the warpath and started swinging his cane, and he hurt somebody, and then that somebody turned out to be innocent of any crimes, we would be the ones in the wrong. Not only had we broken into someone’s home, but we had attacked them.

I turned to Sarah and lowered my voice. “Are you certain this is the house?”

“It’s the right address,” Sarah said. “And it said Ivy Cottage on the gate.”

“And you’re certain you’ve paid for it?”

She nodded. “Positive. Ruth contracted for an apartment in London and a cottage in the country. I didn’t realize the country—” She grimaced, “was quite so close to the city, but this is it. Ivy Cottage in Thornton Heath.”

Well, then we weren’t breaking and entering, at least. Not if the Schlomskys were the rightful renters of Ivy Cottage, and the ones who had been paying for it.

“Enough of this,” Hiram said and pushed past me. He raised his voice in a bellow. “Show yourselves, you yellow-bellied side-winders! Stand and fight!”

His voice echoed through the small house, and the scramble upstairs intensified. The voices rose in a sharp crescendo, and then steps entered the staircase and came clattering down. Hiram took a tighter grip on his cane and faced the doorway. Wolfgang took a step forward, next to him, so the two of them could stand side by side, protectively before Sarah and myself.

In the front of the house, someone took the last two steps of the staircase in a jump and then bounded through the receiving room into the dining room, where he became visible through the kitchen door. Meanwhile, lighter steps also descended the staircase above our heads, but at a more decorous pace.

The young man was clad in a tweed suit, but was hatless, and the light from the window shone on a head of heavily brilliantined black hair. His eyes were also black, or appeared so: wide and startled, the pupils enormous and surrounded by a thin ring of what might have been brown or hazel. He had a narrow face with a narrow jaw, and he was pale, but looked like he might have naturally olive skin, and the result was an unfortunate resemblance to porridge. He had a cricket bat clutched in one hand, knuckles white, and now he raised it threateningly.

“What are you doing here? This is my house!”

“That’s him,” I said. There hadn’t been much light last night, and I had only seen him from the top of the St Olave’s church tower, but the tweed suit was the same, and the general outline was the same, and so was his bearing and the way he moved. “That’s the man who picked up the ransom.”

His eyes flicked to me, and they hardened from anxious and startled to angry. But before he could respond, assuming he had wanted to, Hiram flung himself forward with a roar, cane swinging. It was all the young man could do to get his cricket bat up in time to save himself from having his skull split open.

As he stumbled back with a wordless bellow, the sound was echoed by a scream from the front of the house. “Sid! No!”

The call distracted Hiram for just long enough that the cane failed to make contact with Sid’s head. Hiram stumbled forward, his equilibrium upset by the change, and then it was Sid’s turn to swing the bat. It connected with Hiram’s calf, and the latter stumbled back, swearing. Sid jumped back up to his feet, and then the screamer burst through the door from the front hall and staircase into the receiving room, and we got our first look at her.

And—

“Ruth!” Sarah said, and her voice was somewhere between shocked, appalled, and disappointed.

Ruth paid her no mind whatsoever, just flung herself at Hiram, claws out. And I do mean it literally: her fingers were curved like talons, and she was raking her nails down his cheek.

Even as I flung myself forward to keep her from sinking her claws into Hiram’s face, I recognized her. Although the last—and first—time I’d seen her, she had looked quite different, in an expensive ensemble of royal blue chiffon with polka dots, standing in the lobby of the Essex House Mansions, waiting for Flossie for an evening at the theatre.

Now, a scowl contorted her plain face into something distinctly harpy-like. She was hatless, so I could see the dishwater blond hair Sarah had described—cut into a simple Dutch Boy that had nothing at all in common with Lady Laetitia Marsden’s ditto. Laetitia, much as it pains me to admit it, has a lovely head of sleek, jet black, shiny hair that’s regularly trimmed (probably with the help of a ruler) and which frames her face in a way that manages to simultaneously bring out her high cheekbones, the sleek line of her jaw, and eyes the blue of cornflowers. I may dislike her, but she’s an exceptionally pretty woman.

Ruth wasn’t pretty, nor was her hair particularly attractive. It was neither as sleek nor as shiny as Lady Laetitia’s, and it hung limp around her plain, rather doughy face.

All of this ran through my head as I grappled with her, trying to catch her wrists to keep her nails from Hiram’s face, at the same time as I did my best to haul her away from him. Hiram, meanwhile, swung about him with the cane, not caring who he hit, so I had to dodge that, as well, and now yet another individual joined the fray.

I heard a shriek, and the clacking of heels across the floor, a staccato, rapid rhythm, and the next moment, a hand had landed in my hair and fisted a handful of it. A second later I was yanked backwards, away from Ruth and Hiram. I squawked, outraged, but kept my grip on Ruth and pulled her back with me.

I heard a scraping sound, like metal on wood, and something from Wolfgang in German, but I was too busy to pay attention to it. I was already preoccupied with not losing my grip on Ruth while at the same time trying to dislodge whoever—not-Flossie?—was behind me. As a result, I was hanging onto Ruth with one hand, while I jabbed the other elbow backwards into the body of the woman behind me. She was soft, quite not-Flossie like in body shape, and as a result, what I was doing seemed not to have much of an effect. I wasn’t able to hit her where it hurt.

Sarah had flung herself into the fray now, as well, but she also concentrated on Ruth, perhaps because Ruth had attacked Hiram, or perhaps simply because Ruth was someone she knew. Ruth must have betrayed Flossie, the real Flossie, and betrayed the Schlomskys, or we wouldn’t be here.

This all sounds rather calm and collected, I expect. It wasn’t. It was an absolute, full on brawl, complete with screams and thuds, swearing from the men and shrieking from the women, furniture breaking and people rolling on the ground pounding on one another. I may make it sound orderly and chronological, but it was anything but. It also took place over a much shorter period than it takes to write or read—or for that matter experience. I can’t imagine that it was much more than a minute or two from beginning to end.

The end came when something heavy hit the front door of the house, and then hit it again. In the back of my—admittedly rattled—mind, I suppose I probably assumed it to be the Hackney driver. We had left him outside on the road and requested him to wait for us—the last thing we wanted, was to be stuck in the wilderness of Thornton Heath with no way back to London. If he had heard the sounds of the brawl, it might make sense that he would come to our rescue.

That was if I had been able to string those kinds of thoughts together into a sentence, which of course I wasn’t. By then, Sarah Schlomsky had taken Ruth out of my hands, quite literally, and had knocked her to the ground and was beating on her with her handbag. Sarah, I mean. She was quite a bit heavier than Ruth, and was sitting on top of her, giving Ruth no opportunity to buck her off. Ruth was squealing and trying to cover her face from Sarah’s patent leather bag, but that was all she could do.

I, meanwhile, had my hands full with fake Flossie. And there the situation was quite different. I’ve always been a couple of inches taller, but she has always had me beat by a stone or two. As soon as I let go of Ruth in favor of throwing off the imposter, the fake Flossie had turned her attention to trying to throttle me. There was hair pulling and kicking and screaming and rolling, and hands wrapped around my throat, trying to squeeze the breath out of me. Black spots flickered in front of my eyes, and in the middle of it, as I said, the front door burst open and several sets of footsteps pounded into the front hall, and from there into the receiving room, and dining room, and kitchen.

“Police!” a voice bellowed. “Don’t move!”

The light caught on something metallic that whistled through the air in my direction. Fake Flossie squealed as if she’d been stabbed—I found out later that she actually had been—and collapsed on top of me. I made a sound that was half scream, half moan, and tried to scramble out from under the limp body that was pinning me down, but I couldn’t shift the—forgive the expression—dead weight.

Until someone wrenched her off me, and I was lifted to my feet.

“Philippa!” Wolfgang’s voice said, and pulled me close to his chest.

I sagged in his hold for a moment—long enough to get a whiff of cigarette smoke and laundry soap and starch—before another pair of hands grabbed me and yanked me backwards. And then I found myself wrapped in Christopher’s arms while he berated Wolfgang over my head.

“Good God, Natterdorff, have you no sense? Who brings a sword to a fist fight?”

Sword?

I tried to turn around so I could look for the sword, but Christopher was holding me too tightly. His frame was trembling, and so was his voice, and while I suspect that Wolfgang probably heard it as anger, I knew better: it was a reaction to fear. He had come into the house and seen me and been afraid of what had happened to me.

“You could have chopped Pippa’s head off!” Christopher continued. “You came within a few inches of killing my cousin!”

“I was—” Wolfgang protested, but Christopher was beyond listening to reason.

“If anything had happened to her, we would have killed you, you realize that, don’t you? Crispin or Francis or I, or my father… one of us would have murdered you in cold blood if you had hurt her!”

“Christopher,” I muttered against his shoulder, at the same time as Tom’s voice uttered a warning, “Kit.”

I could clearly feel Christopher’s reluctance, but he shut his mouth. And opened it again, to talk to me this time. “Are you all right, Pippa? He didn’t get you, did he?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But no, nothing hurts.”

That wasn’t strictly true. I could feel the ache of blossoming bruises pretty much everywhere, and my scalp still tingled from having handfuls of my hair pulled viciously.

“There’s blood on your face,” Christopher said worriedly, peering at me.

I tilted my head back to peer back up at him. “I don’t think it’s mine.”

He shook his head, but his eyes were still worried.

“Someone brought a sword to a fist fight?”

“Natterdorff,” Christopher said, at the same time as Wolfgang cleared his throat.

“My apologies, Philippa. I didn’t think I was close enough to harm you. It was not my intention to put you in danger.”

Of course not. “I’m sure I wasn’t in any danger,” I said. And changed it to, “Or not from you. She was the one who tried to strangle me.”

I straightened and took a step back so I could survey the damage we had done to the dining room and the aftermath of the brawl.

Christopher let go reluctantly, but he allowed me to step away, even as his eyes stayed on me.

Wolfgang was standing a few feet away, still clutching… yes, that was a sword in his hand. The handle was the same as that of the cane, so the blade must have been hidden inside it. A sword stick. How quaint and last century.

It must have been effective, though, because I was alive and well, while fake Flossie was sitting with her back against the wall clutching her upper arm, where blood had soaked through the pink sleeve of her frock. Her eyes were teary—I’m sure it must hurt—but they were also hot and angry. She sat quietly, however, with her mouth compressed into a thin line.

Next to her sat Ruth, with her blond hair in disarray and bruises coming up on her face and arms. Unlike the fake Florence, Ruth was crying softly: eyes red and tears running down her cheeks. Her skin was blotchy and her mouth slack, and she had her cuffed wrists resting in her lap.

Her boyfriend sat next to her on the floor, and that was where Tom and Ian Finchley, Tom’s fellow detective sergeant, kept most of their attention.

Sid had also been cuffed, but behind his back. I suppose Tom and Finch thought there would be less of a chance that he’d try anything that way. And like fake Flossie, he looked angry, eyes burning and narrow jaw clenched. If looks could kill, we’d all be dead as doornails, including Ruth and fake Flossie.

Sarah and Hiram were huddled on the other side of the room. Sarah looked none the worse for wear, except for the fact that her hat had been ripped from her head and her hair was in disarray, but Sid must have gotten in a few shots on Hiram, who had bruises coming up on his face, and whose lip was split and swollen, and whose left sleeve had almost been separated from the shoulder of his jacket. Sarah was dabbing at the blood on his lip with a handkerchief and speaking to him softly.

Wolfgang, of course, looked like every woman’s dream. The exertion had left him with a fine flush and slightly disarranged clothing and hair, and it was all to the good. He looked heroic, with his shoulders straight and his feet planted and the sword in his hand.

I turned back to Christopher. “Where did you come from?”

He pursed his lips. “Scotland Yard, where did you think? We drove in perhaps ten minutes after you’d been there, and got your message. And followed on as quickly as we could.”

And had gotten here in record time and burst in immediately, since they hadn’t had to wait to reconnoiter the garage and pick the lock on the back door before throwing themselves into the fray.

“Thank you for coming to the rescue,” I said humbly.

Christopher snorted. “You seemed like you had it well in hand, actually, the four of you.”

Perhaps. Then again, until Wolfgang started swinging about himself with the sword, we had seemed fairly evenly matched to me. Sid had youth and agility on his side, not to mention the motivation to avoid being arrested for kidnapping and murder, but Hiram had his cane and a lot of righteous anger. Sarah and her fake daughter were fairly evenly matched in height and weight, although fake Flossie was at least thirty years younger, and I could have taken Ruth had fake Flossie not gotten in my way. At least I thought I could have. She was small and slippery, and I’m not heavy, but I thought I was probably just a bit heavier than her.

But then Wolfgang had brought the sword stick out, and Christopher and the others had burst in, and here we were.

“St George will be sad he missed it,” I said.

Christopher nodded. “I’m sure he would have enjoyed the chance to play hero.”

“Well, then,” Tom said, straightening after making sure that fake Flossie wasn’t about to bleed to death. “Here we are. Would anyone like to tell me what’s going on?”

He looked at Hiram and Sarah, and at the three captives, and at Wolfgang, and then at Wolfgang’s sword. “I haven’t seen one of those in a while.”

Wolfgang flushed. It left the Mensur scar on his cheek quite visible, since it didn’t flush with the rest of his face. “My apologies. I was afraid for Freulein Schatz’s safety.”

He looked about him for the wooden shaft of the cane.

“ Freulein …?” Tom repeated, as Wolfgang spotted what he was looking for, hidden among the debris under what had been the dining table, and went to fetch it.

“Schatz,” I said. “My father’s name.”

“No wonder His Lordship calls you Darling,” Ian Finchley muttered, and Christopher told him, “That isn’t why, Finch, as you very well know.”

“Of course it’s why, Christopher,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

The look he gave me suggested that he thought I was the ridiculous one, and I rolled my eyes. And then Tom waved it all aside and said again, and not as a question this time, “Would someone please tell me what’s going on.”