Chapter 9 #3
The thought was distasteful. Using a simple-minded child as a weapon against his sister was the act of a man I did not wish to be.
But I had already done things tonight that the man I wished to be would never have done, and the line between the man I was and the man I wished to be had blurred beyond recognition.
I turned from the window and sat at my desk and opened a fresh page in my notebook. I wrote: "Dr. Hale. Prescription records. Request complete file. Date and dosage of all prescriptions for the Earl of Ashworth, January 1887 to June 1888."
I added: "Chemical analyst. Consult regarding symptoms consistent with arsenic poisoning. Dr. Phillips at Guy's? Inquire at the London Hospital."
And then, at the bottom of the page, I wrote: "The brandy. Hennessy, delivered from Paris twice yearly. Trace the supply chain. Was the brandy tampered with at source, or at the point of consumption?"
The words were clear and precise. The handwriting was steady. For a moment, the familiar discipline of the work reasserted itself, and I felt something that was not hope but its poorer cousin, the simple mechanical momentum of a man who does not know how to stop.
I could still investigate. I could still pursue the truth.
The fact that I had compromised myself did not change the fact that three men were dead and that the woman who had killed them was walking free.
If I found evidence, I would find a way to use it.
If I could not use it legally, I would find another way.
The law was not the only instrument of justice, though it was the only one I had been trained to wield.
No. That was a dangerous thought. I was a detective, not a vigilante.
I was a servant of the law, not its master.
The moment I began to imagine extralegal solutions, I became the thing I had spent my career pursuing.
I closed the notebook and pressed my palms against the desk and breathed until the dangerous thought receded.
I would sleep. I would wake in the morning and go to the Yard and sit at my desk and pretend that nothing had changed.
I would conduct my investigation with the same diligence I had always brought to it, and I would ignore the fact that every step I took was now shadowed by the knowledge of what I had done and who I had done it with.
I would be professional. I would be thorough.
I would be the man I had always been, even if that man no longer existed.
But first I needed to reckon with the question that had been circling me all evening like a vulture, patient and inevitable.
Did I believe she was guilty?
I sat very still and asked myself this question directly, without the cushioning of professional language or investigative abstraction.
Not: was there sufficient evidence to pursue charges against Cecilia Blackwood, Countess Dowager of Ashworth?
Not: did the pattern of three deaths in three marriages constitute grounds for further inquiry?
Simply: do I believe this woman killed her husbands?
The answer came before the question was fully formed, arriving with the speed and certainty of a reflex.
Yes.
I believed it with every faculty I possessed.
I believed it the way one believes that fire burns and water drowns and the sun will rise in the east. The pattern was too precise, the coincidences too numerous, the performances too flawless.
Three women in a thousand might have suffered such a run of marital misfortune.
Three women in a million might have done so while accumulating the wealth and status that Cecilia Blackwood had acquired with each successive death.
The probability of innocence was vanishingly small, and my instinct, the instinct that had solved more cases than any investigative technique, told me the truth as plainly as if she had confessed.
I believed she was guilty. And I had taken her to bed.
The two facts existed in the same space, occupying the same mind, and they could not be reconciled.
I could not explain to myself how a man who believed a woman was a murderer could also desire her, and I could not explain how a man who desired her could continue to pursue justice against her, and I could not explain how a man who pursued justice could have done what I had done tonight.
The contradictions multiplied upon themselves, each one generating two more, and the multiplication was infinite, and I was drowning in it.
Sergeant Price would know something was wrong the moment I walked into the Yard tomorrow.
Price was a good man, not especially bright but possessed of the particular sensitivity that long service in the CID breeds: the ability to read his colleagues' moods from the way they hung their coats and poured their tea.
He would notice that I was distracted. He would ask if I was well.
He would attribute my state to overwork or bad news from a case, and I would allow him to believe whichever explanation required the least maintenance.
What I would not do, what I could not do, was tell him the truth.
I lay down on my bed without undressing.
The sheets were cold. The ceiling was dark.
I stared at it and listened to the house and the street and the fog, and behind my closed eyes, she was there, auburn hair falling like a curtain, grey eyes watching me with the clinical attention of a scientist observing a specimen, and her voice in my ear, quiet and certain: "You are mine now. "
I did not sleep. I lay in the dark, and I thought about what I had done, and I thought about what I had not done, and I thought about what I would do next, and none of the thoughts led anywhere except back to her, and back to the bed, and back to the moment when I had stopped being the man who was going to catch her and started being the man who was going to let her go.