Chapter 9
What I Have Done
I did not sleep. The hansom deposited me at my lodgings on Great Scotland Yard at half past nine, and I paid the driver and climbed the narrow stairs to my rooms and closed the door and stood in the dark for a very long time.
The rooms were cold. The fire had gone out.
Mrs. Parfitt, my landlady, had retired hours ago, and there was no coal left in the scuttle.
I did not light a lamp. The darkness was a mercy I did not deserve.
I stood in my study with my coat still on and my boots still on and the taste of her still in my mouth, and I stared at the wall where my case files were pinned, and I understood, with the clarity of a man looking down from a great height, that I had destroyed myself.
The files were arranged in a precise grid, each document in its assigned position, each photograph and deposition and ledger entry occupying exactly the space I had allotted to it.
The grid represented five weeks of work: the Pendleton death, the Ravenscroft death, the Ashworth death, the timeline that connected them, the pattern that no one else had seen or wanted to see.
Three marriages. Three deaths. One widow.
The elegance of it had seized me from the first, the mathematical precision of the thing, the way each marriage advanced her by exactly the right increment of wealth and status before the husband was removed.
I had believed, with a conviction I can only describe as religious, that the pattern was the key.
Follow the pattern, and the evidence would follow the pattern, and the evidence would lead to a courtroom and a conviction and justice for three dead men.
I had been wrong. The pattern was not the key. The pattern was a labyrinth, and I had walked into it willingly, and the woman at the centre of the labyrinth had just used my own desire to seal the exit behind me.
I removed my coat and hung it on the hook by the door.
I removed my boots and set them by the fire grate.
I lit the lamp on my desk with hands that were not steady.
The flame caught and steadied, casting its yellow circle over the desk, the inkwell, the pen I had used to write my notes in a hand so precise that my colleagues at the Yard called it copperplate.
I picked up the pen and looked at it, and then I set it down and pressed both palms flat against the desk and tried to make my breathing behave.
The memory was a physical thing. It inhabited my body like a fever.
I could feel her hands on me, unbuttoning my shirt with methodical patience that should have warned me, and I could feel her weight on my hips, her warmth, the specific angle of her body as she moved above me, and I could hear her voice saying, "You are mine now," in that quiet, conversational tone, as though she were discussing the weather, as though the conquest of me were a matter of no more consequence than the forecast. I could smell her, and the smell was lilies and beeswax and something beneath both, something clean and warm and particular to her skin, and I buried my face in my hands and groaned.
I had slept with a suspect. Not merely a suspect.
The suspect. The woman I had spent five weeks building a case against, the woman I had followed to Hyde Park and the Pemberton musical evening, the woman whose three dead husbands occupied the grid on my wall.
I had walked into her house under the pretence of conducting a formal interview, and I had left it having committed an act that, if it became known, would end my career and make me a laughingstock and, worse, would provide her with an absolute defence against any charge I might bring.
What prosecutor would take my testimony seriously after learning that I had lain with the accused?
What magistrate would grant me a warrant?
What jury would convict on the word of a detective who had been seduced by the woman he was supposed to be investigating?
I was compromised. Not in the subtle way that all investigators are compromised, by bias and fatigue and the human tendency to see what one expects to see.
I was compromised in the absolute sense.
I had placed myself in a position where the pursuit of justice and the satisfaction of my own desire were no longer merely in conflict. They were the same thing.
I stood up and walked to the window. Great Scotland Yard was quiet at this hour.
The gas lamps on the street below made pools of amber light on the wet cobblestones, and the fog had returned, pressing against the glass like a face.
I could see my own reflection in the window, ghostly and indistinct, and I did not recognise the man who looked back at me.
He had the same features, the same scar along his jaw, the same grey hair at his temples.
But something behind his eyes had shifted, some fundamental piece of architecture had cracked, and the crack would not close.
I wanted her. That was the simplest and the most damning truth.
I had wanted her from the first moment I saw her at the funeral, standing at the graveside in her black crêpe and jet, and the wanting had grown through every subsequent encounter until it had become the thing that overshadowed everything else.
I had told myself it was professional interest. I had told myself it was admiration for her composure, fascination with her performance.
I had told myself a dozen stories, all of them false, because the true story was too shameful to speak aloud: I was attracted to a woman I believed to be a murderer, and the attraction was stronger than my conviction of her guilt.
This is not uncommon. I knew that, even in the midst of my self-loathing.
Men are destroyed by desire every day. Marriages, careers, reputations, all sacrificed on the altar of a body and a face and a voice.
The literature was full of it. The Bible was full of it.
David and Bathsheba. Antony and Cleopatra.
The endless parade of men who had traded their principles for a night in the arms of a woman they knew would ruin them.
I had always read those stories with the detached superiority of a man who believed himself immune to such weaknesses.
I was not immune. I was merely another man who had mistaken his resistance for virtue.
I turned from the window and sat at my desk.
The files stared up at me. I opened the topmost one, the Ashworth file, and read through my own notes with the methodical attention I brought to every document.
The handwriting was mine, but it was not the same hand that had written the earlier notes.
The letters were smaller, tighter, less controlled.
The margins were filled with annotations that wandered off-topic.
On one page, I had written "brandy, brandy, brandy" three times in a column, and beside it, in a different ink, "ask about the brandy.
" That page was from Tuesday. Before the Pemberton evening.
Before the second interview. Before all of it.
I closed the file.
The question I had been avoiding since I left Blackwood House pressed against the walls of my skull like a trapped animal. It was a simple question, and the simplicity of it made it more dangerous than any complex inquiry could have been.
Did she seduce me to compromise my investigation?
The answer was obvious. Of course she did.
Cecilia Blackwood was not a woman who did anything without purpose.
Every gesture, every word, every glance was a move in a game whose rules she had written and whose outcome she had predetermined.
The seduction was tactical. It was designed to accomplish exactly what it had accomplished: to render me incapable of pursuing her without exposing myself.
She had identified my weakness, the loneliness I carried like a second skin, and she had exploited it with the surgical precision of a woman who has spent her adult life reading men and bending them to her will.
Knowing this did not help. Knowing that she had calculated every moment, every touch, every word, did not diminish the wanting.
If anything, the knowledge made it worse, because it added a new dimension to the attraction: not merely desire, but admiration for the skill with which the desire had been manufactured.
She was the most intelligent person I had ever met, and the most dangerous, and the combination of intelligence and danger produced a fascination that I could not reason my way out of.
I pressed my fingertips against my closed eyelids until I saw sparks. The clock on the mantelpiece struck ten. I had been standing in my rooms for thirty minutes, and I had accomplished nothing except the thorough inventory of my own destruction.
I needed to work. Work was the only remedy I understood.
When a case became tangled, when the threads refused to align, the solution was not introspection but effort.
More interviews. More documents. More legwork.
The truth was in the files somewhere, if only I could find it, and the fact that I had just spent the afternoon in the bed of the woman who had hidden the truth did not change the truth's existence.