Chapter 9 #2
I pulled the file on Dr. Hale, the Earl's physician.
I had requested Hale's records two weeks ago and received them four days later, after a letter from Hale's solicitor expressing concern about patient confidentiality.
The records were incomplete. They documented the Earl's complaints and Hale's prescriptions but contained nothing that would constitute evidence of foul play.
Bismuth for gastric distress. Bed rest for fatigue.
A recommendation to reduce alcohol consumption.
Hale had treated the symptoms without investigating the cause, which was, I supposed, standard practice for a physician attending an earl.
One did not suggest poisoning as a diagnosis when the patient was a peer of the realm.
But the progression of symptoms was wrong.
I had noted this before, in the margins of my notes, and the noting had been one of the things that kept me pursuing the case when my superiors suggested I drop it.
Gastric distress does not typically progress to peripheral neuropathy and hepatic failure over the course of six months.
That progression is consistent with one thing, and one thing only.
Arsenic.
The word sat in my mind like a stone in still water.
Arsenic. The poisoner's friend. Odourless, nearly tasteless, soluble in alcohol.
The Earl had been a heavy brandy drinker.
If someone had been dissolving arsenic trioxide in his nightly brandy, the symptoms would present exactly as Hale had described them.
The dose could be calibrated, increased gradually to mimic the progression of a natural illness, producing first mild indigestion, then nausea, then abdominal pain, then the tingling in the extremities that Hale had attributed to "nervous complaint," and finally, organ failure.
Death by degrees, each increment indistinguishable from the natural deterioration of an elderly, alcoholic man.
It was elegant. I hated myself for admiring it, but it was elegant.
The question was where the arsenic had come from.
Arsenic was available in Victorian London as rat poison, as a component in certain cosmetics and medicines, as a pigment in wallpapers.
The Arsenic Act of 1851 regulated its sale but did not prohibit it.
Small cash purchases from multiple chemists would evade the registration requirements.
A woman with Cecilia's resources and intelligence could procure arsenic from a dozen different sources and leave no trail that any single investigation could follow.
But there might be a trail. There might be a thread somewhere, a chemist's ledger, an apothecary's memory, a servant's observation. And I was the man to find it.
Except that I was no longer a man who could find anything. I was a man who had slept with his suspect, and the sleeping had contaminated everything.
I pushed the Hale file aside and opened my notebook to a blank page. I needed to think clearly, and clear thinking required writing. I wrote the date: 20 December 1888. Beneath it, I wrote: "What do I know?"
I made a list. The habit was ingrained, a technique I had developed in my first year at the Yard, when Superintendent Graves had told me that a detective who does not write things down is a detective who does not know things. I wrote:
1. Three husbands dead. Pendleton (1882, heart failure). Ravenscroft (1885, riding accident). Ashworth (1888, gastric complaint/hepatic failure).
2. Each marriage lasted two to three years.
3. Each death left the widow wealthier and more socially elevated.
4. The widow, Cecilia Blackwood, is a woman of exceptional intelligence, composure, and social skill.
5. The symptoms of the Earl's final illness are consistent with chronic arsenic poisoning.
6. Dr. Hale's records contain no evidence of diagnostic rigour. He treated symptoms, not causes.
7. I have interviewed the Countess twice. Both times, she performed the role of grieving widow with a skill I have never witnessed.
8. I have no physical evidence. No poison. No witness to tampering. No testimony connecting the Countess to the procurement of arsenic or any other harmful substance.
9. I am sleeping with her.
I stared at the ninth item. It sat on the page like a bloodstain, obvious and damning. I had written it without thinking, the way one writes the truth when one is too tired to lie to oneself, and now it was there, in my own handwriting, a confession of professional suicide.
I crossed it out. Then I crossed out the line through it. Then I tore the page from the notebook and held it over the lamp until the flame caught the edge, and I watched it burn, curling and blackening, until nothing remained but ash and the smell of charred paper.
I sat in the silence that followed and listened to the clock tick and the fog press against the window and the distant clatter of a late carriage on the cobblestones.
The lamp flickered. The fire was dead and the room was cold, but I did not feel the cold.
I felt nothing except the weight of what I had done and the weight of what I had not yet done.
I needed to pursue the Hale records. I needed to find a chemist who could review the Earl's symptoms and provide an expert opinion on whether they were consistent with arsenic poisoning.
I needed to trace the Earl's brandy supply, to determine whether the brandy itself had been tampered with or whether the poison had been introduced at the point of consumption.
I needed to interview the household staff at Blackwood House, particularly the maids who had served the Earl's meals, to determine whether any of them had observed anything unusual.
I could do none of these things. Not because I lacked the skill or the authority, but because every step I took would be tainted by the knowledge that I had been in her bed.
If I found evidence, it would be suspect.
If I built a case, it would be undermined.
If I arrested her, she would destroy me with a single word about what had happened between us in that bedroom.
She knew this. I knew this. The power had shifted entirely to her side, and the shift was permanent.
Unless I could find evidence so overwhelming, so incontrovertible, that even my own compromise would not matter. A confession. A witness. The poison itself. Something that would stand regardless of my conduct, something that any magistrate in England would recognise as sufficient cause for arrest.
That was a fantasy. I knew it was a fantasy.
Cecilia Blackwood had killed three men and left no evidence that five weeks of intensive investigation had uncovered.
She was not going to leave evidence now, when she had the added protection of my own complicity.
Whatever thread I might have pulled before tonight had been neatly severed by my own weakness.
I put my head in my hands. The clock struck eleven. Mrs. Parfitt's cat, which had taken to sleeping in the hallway outside my door, mewed once and was silent.
I thought about what she had said to me in the drawing room.
"You are mine now." The words had the quality of a verdict, final and unappealable.
She had said them while she was astride me, while her body enclosed mine, and she had said them in the same tone she might have used to inform me of the time or the weather, and the casualness of the delivery had been more devastating than any passion could have been.
She owned me. She knew she owned me. And the worst part, the part that kept me awake and staring at the ceiling of my cold, dark rooms, was that some degraded fraction of me was glad of it.
I got up. I could not sit still. I paced the room, three steps to the window, three steps back, a rhythm as mindless and mechanical as a metronome.
The fog pressed against the glass. The lamp guttered.
I passed my desk, and the files looked up at me, and in the neat grid of papers I saw the entire architecture of my failure.
Eleven years of work. Eleven years of cases solved, criminals brought to justice, evidence assembled with the meticulous patience that had made me the Yard's most reliable, if not its most popular, detective.
Eleven years of believing that truth, pursued with sufficient rigour, would always prevail.
And in one afternoon, in one bed, in the space of an hour, I had undone it all.
Not undone. Compromised. There was a difference, and the difference was important, even if it was small.
I was still a detective. I still had access to the Yard's resources, still had the authority to request documents and conduct interviews, still had the professional skills that had served me well for over a decade.
What I had lost was not my ability but my credibility, and credibility, unlike skill, could not be rebuilt.
It could only be demonstrated, case by case, until the stain faded.
And the stain would never fade if Cecilia Blackwood chose to make it visible.
I stopped pacing. I stood by the window and watched the fog, and in the fog I thought about Edmund.
The boy. Cecilia's brother, the simple-minded youth who had passed through the hallway during my first interview, unseen by me, unnoticed.
He had been an afterthought in my investigation, a minor detail, a family member of no significance.
But something about him had stayed with me.
The open, unguarded quality of his face.
The way Dorothea had guided him gently by the elbow, steering him away from the drawing room door as though protecting him from something.
The boy was Cecilia's weakness. Not a moral weakness, not a conscience, but a point of attachment, a place where the armour was thinner.
If I were ever to find leverage against her, it would be through that boy.