Chapter 4 #3
It was while I was composing this letter, seated at my writing desk in the blue-and-gold study that Richard had favoured and that I had appropriated upon his death with the quiet efficiency of a general occupying a conquered city, that the news arrived.
It came not by letter or telegram but by word of mouth, from Dorothea, who had heard it from Mrs. Parton, the housekeeper, who had heard it from her sister, who worked as a cook for a family in Wimpole Street.
"A man from Scotland Yard," Dorothea said, standing in the doorway of my study with an expression of careful neutrality that I recognised as the mask she wore when she had information she was uncertain about sharing. "He has been asking questions about Dr. Hale. The Earl's physician."
I set down my pen. The nib left a small blot of ink on the paper, a dark stain spreading slowly across the heavy cream stationery, and I watched it spread with the same attention I might have given to a crack forming in a dam.
"Which man?"
"I don't know his name, my lady. Mrs. Parton's sister said he called at Dr. Hale's surgery on Harley Street last week and spent nearly an hour with the doctor. He asked about the Earl's final illness. The progression of symptoms. The prescriptions."
My pen lay on the desk, a fine gold-nibbed affair that had been a gift from Arthur, my first husband, and that I had kept through two subsequent marriages because it wrote with a smoothness I had never found in any other instrument.
I picked it up, wiped the nib clean with a cloth, and returned it to its stand.
"Did the doctor tell him anything?"
"Mrs. Parton's sister says the doctor was forthcoming. He showed the man his notes. He explained the course of treatment. He answered every question."
I absorbed this information with the particular quality of attention I reserved for developments that mattered.
A detective from Scotland Yard, asking questions about a dead earl's physician.
It was not necessarily significant. Deaths of prominent men were routinely reviewed, especially when the estate was large and the relatives numerous.
The inquiry that had brought Sebastian Aldric to my drawing room three weeks ago had been framed as routine, and I had performed for him with the same precision I brought to every audience.
But the Aldric who had sat in my drawing room and asked his careful, probing questions about Richard's final months had not seemed like a man conducting a routine review.
He had seemed like a man who was looking for something, and the something he was looking for was not, I was increasingly certain, the answer to a solicitor's clerk's complaint.
I had learned his name within days of the funeral, through the same network of gossip and observation that supplied me with most of my intelligence about the world beyond Blackwood House.
Sebastian Aldric. Detective Inspector. Thirty-four years old, self-made, the son of a schoolmaster from Yorkshire, educated at a grammar school and then at the university, where he had read law before abandoning it for the police.
He was, by reputation, the most meticulous detective at the Yard, a man whose pathological attention to detail had solved cases that his colleagues had dismissed as unsolvable.
He was also, by reputation, difficult, a man who did not defer to rank, who asked questions that made his superiors uncomfortable, and who pursued lines of inquiry long after the sensible course would have been to abandon them.
The combination of intelligence and persistence was dangerous.
I had encountered it before, in other men, in other circumstances, and I had learned that the most effective response was not confrontation but management.
A man who believes himself to be conducting a routine inquiry can be redirected, misinformed, gently guided toward dead ends and false conclusions.
A man who believes himself to be hunting a predator can be made to doubt his own instincts, to question the evidence of his senses, to wonder whether the pattern he perceives is genuine or merely a trick of the light.
But this required information, and the information I had was insufficient.
I did not know what Aldric had learned from Dr. Hale.
I did not know whether he had spoken to anyone else, whether he had obtained documents I had not anticipated, whether he had begun to look into the deaths of my previous husbands.
The uncertainty was unpleasant, not because I feared it, but because it represented a variable in my calculations that I could not quantify or control.
I rose from my desk and moved to the window.
The December sky had darkened to a deep, bruised blue, and the streetlamps of Mayfair had been lit, their gas flames burning with the steady yellow glow that gave the square the appearance of a stage set illuminated for an evening performance.
Carriages moved along the street below, their lamps bobbing and swaying, the sound of their horses' hooves muffled by the fog that had begun to rise from the Thames and creep through the streets of London like a living thing.
I considered the problem before me with the same methodical attention I applied to every challenge.
The detective was investigating. The scope of his investigation was, at present, unknown.
The physician had cooperated fully, which meant that Aldric now possessed a detailed understanding of Richard's final illness, including the symptoms and their progression, information that a competent medical consultant might recognise as consistent with arsenic poisoning.
Whether Aldric had the knowledge or the resources to consult such a specialist was uncertain.
Whether he had already done so was more uncertain still.
The question of what to do about him presented itself with the cold clarity of an arithmetic problem.
There were three options. The first was to do nothing, to allow the investigation to proceed and to trust that the absence of physical evidence and the protections afforded by rank and social standing would prevent it from reaching any conclusion that threatened me.
This was the safest option and the one I was most inclined to favour, because it required no action and no risk.
The second was to escalate the management of the investigation, to deploy the resources at my disposal, social, financial, and otherwise, to redirect or discredit Aldric's inquiry before it advanced beyond the point of containment.
This option was more aggressive and carried greater risk, because any attempt to interfere with a police investigation, if discovered, would itself become evidence of wrongdoing.
The third was to eliminate the threat entirely.
The thought arrived in my mind with the same clinical detachment with which I considered every important decision.
Sebastian Aldric was a man. Men, like every other category of living creature, could be removed.
The methods available to me ranged from the crude to the elegant, from the publicly traceable to the quietly irreversible.
A carriage accident in the fog. An illness contracted from contaminated food.
A fall down a staircase in his lodgings, the sort of misfortune that befalls men who live alone and have no one to verify whether the fall was accidental or arranged.
Each option carried its own risks and its own logistical requirements, and I assessed them with the professional dispassion of an engineer evaluating structural weaknesses in a bridge.
The assessment took perhaps thirty seconds.
In that time, I weighed the probability of detection against the urgency of the threat, the practical difficulties of arranging an accident in a city as crowded and surveilled as London against the advantages of removing an adversary before he could accumulate enough evidence to become dangerous.
The calculation was familiar; I had performed it before, under circumstances of greater pressure and less preparation, and the outcome had always been the same.
I would not kill him. Not yet.
The decision was not motivated by conscience, a faculty I possessed in the same way that a blind man possesses colour perception, which is to say, not at all.
It was motivated by a more pragmatic consideration, one that I had learned, over the course of three marriages and three deaths, to respect above all others.
An investigation that ends abruptly, with the sudden death or disappearance of the investigator, attracts attention.
The attention of superiors, the attention of colleagues, the attention of the press.
The very act of removing the threat transforms it into something larger and more dangerous than it was before, because death, in my experience, has a way of raising questions that life does not.
A living detective with unanswered questions is a nuisance.
A dead detective with unanswered questions is a mystery, and mysteries, in the hands of the press and the public, have a tendency to grow beyond the capacity of any single person to control.