Chapter 3 #3
I could write my report, as Graves had instructed, and close the file.
I could note that the Earl's death appeared to be natural, that the physician's records contained nothing that contradicted the official cause of death, and that the questions raised by the disgruntled relatives were without merit.
This was the prudent course. It was the course that would preserve my career, avoid a confrontation with one of the most powerful families in England, and allow me to return to the ordinary business of detecting crime in a city that offered no shortage of it.
I could not do it. The knowledge of what I suspected sat in my chest like a stone, heavy and immovable, and the thought of walking away from it, of filing a report that declared three murders to be natural deaths, was intolerable.
I was not a moral man in the philosophical sense.
I did not believe in the inherent justice of the universe or the inevitable triumph of truth.
I had seen too much of the world's machinery to harbour such illusions.
But I believed in the work. I believed that the purpose of a detective was to find the truth, however inconvenient, however dangerous, however impossible to prove, and that the failure to pursue the truth when it presented itself was a betrayal of everything the badge represented.
I turned from the river and walked north, toward Mayfair.
It was a long walk, and the rain had intensified from a drizzle to a steady downpour, and by the time I reached the square where Blackwood House stood, my coat was soaked, and my hat was ruined, and I was shivering with a cold that had nothing to do with the weather.
I did not approach the house. I stood across the square, in the shelter of a plane tree, and I looked at the windows.
Most were dark. One, on the first floor, glowed with a warm, amber light that suggested a fire in the grate and a figure seated beside it, reading or writing or simply being at home in the way that people are at home when they believe themselves to be unobserved.
I stood in the rain and watched the window, and I thought about the woman behind it, and I thought about the three men in their graves, and I thought about the distance between what I knew and what I could prove, and the distance between what I could prove and what anyone in authority would be willing to act upon.
The gap was enormous. It was, possibly, unbridgeable.
A countess of the realm, possessed of a fortune in excess of a hundred and sixty thousand pounds, connected by marriage to one of the oldest families in England, was not a woman who could be investigated with the tools available to a detective inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department.
She could not be questioned without evidence.
Her home could not be searched without a warrant that no magistrate would issue.
Her servants could not be interviewed without her consent, which she would not give.
The physicians who had attended her husbands could not be compelled to testify.
The apothecaries from whom she might have purchased poison could not be identified without resources I did not possess.
And yet I stood in the rain, watching a window, thinking about a woman I had met only once, and the thought that occupied my mind was not the thought of a detective contemplating a suspect.
It was the thought of a man contemplating a woman, and the nature of the thought was complicated and uncomfortable and impossible to analyse with the professional detachment that my training demanded.
She had been beautiful. This was a fact, and it was irrelevant to the case, and I could not stop thinking about it.
Not the surface beauty, the Pre-Raphaelite hair and the porcelain skin and the grey eyes that the newspaper sketches had captured with such breathless admiration, but something beneath the surface, a quality of stillness, of control, that I had registered in her drawing room with the uncomfortable precision of a man who recognises in another person a capacity for concealment that mirrors or exceeds his own.
She had performed grief with a virtuosity that was, in its own way, as impressive as the scheme I suspected her of executing.
Every gesture, every inflection of the voice, every carefully timed tremor of the hand had been calibrated to produce a specific effect, and the effect she had produced was one of dignified suffering that made the very idea of questioning her seem like an act of cruelty.
But beneath the performance, I had seen something else.
A stillness. A precision. A quality of attention that was not the attention of a grieving woman but of a woman who was watching me as carefully as I was watching her.
And in that quality of attention, I had recognised something that I had no business recognising and that I could not, for the life of me, shake.
The window went dark. She had retired for the evening, or had drawn the curtains, or had simply extinguished the lamp.
I stood in the rain for a few minutes longer, watching the dark square of glass, and then I turned and walked back toward the river, and the city, and the ordinary world of crime and punishment that was, for the present at least, the only world in which I was permitted to operate.
I would find a way. I did not yet know how, and I did not yet know whether the way would lead anywhere, but I would find it.
Three men were dead, and a fourth might follow if the pattern held, and I could not stand by and allow the pattern to continue, regardless of the consequences for my career, my reputation, or my freedom.
I returned to my rooms near Scotland Yard, changed my wet clothes, and sat at my desk with a glass of whisky and the three files spread before me.
Outside my window, the rain hammered against the glass, and the city sounds, muffled by the downpour, reached me as a distant murmur of wheels and voices and the eternal, restless motion of London at night.
I opened a fresh page in my notebook and wrote at the top: Pattern.
Three marriages. Three deaths. One widow.
And beneath it, in smaller letters, I added the question that I could not answer but could not stop asking: How does a detective investigate a woman who is better at deception than he is at detection?
I stared at the question for a long time. The whisky went cold in my glass. The rain stopped, eventually, and the night settled into the particular silence that follows a storm, clean and empty and full of things that had not yet happened.
I did not have an answer. But I had a case, or the beginning of one, and I had a suspect, or the outline of one, and I had a question that, unanswered though it was, burned with a clarity that no amount of professional caution could extinguish.
I would begin again in the morning. I would find a way into her world, a pretext that would allow me to observe her in her natural habitat, the social world of Mayfair where she performed for an audience of her peers.
I would find a way to speak to her servants, to her solicitor, to the physicians who had attended her husbands.
I would trace the groom, Greaves, if tracing him was possible.
I would pursue every lead, follow every thread, exhaust every avenue, and if, at the end of all that, I had nothing but a pattern and a suspicion, then at least I would have the satisfaction of knowing that I had tried.
It was not much. But it was a beginning, and beginnings, in my experience, were the most dangerous part of any investigation. Because once you begin, you cannot stop. The case takes hold of you, and it does not release you until it is finished, one way or another.
I closed my notebook and went to bed. I did not sleep well.
The face of the Dowager Countess of Ashworth followed me into my dreams, grey eyes and black crêpe and the precise, controlled stillness of a woman who had killed three men and wept at each funeral with a perfection that no honest grief could equal.
And in the dreams, she was smiling.