Chapter 11 #3
The answer was obvious. The answer had been obvious since Manchester, since the Candover offices, since the moment I had stood in that freezing waiting room and realised that eighteen pounds was not a motive for murder.
Only one person had the motive to mislead me, the intelligence to mislead me, and the access to mislead me.
Only one person had placed all three leads in my path with such exquisite subtlety that I had not recognised them as decoys until I had followed each one to its dead end.
Cecilia had fed me. She had fed me, and I had eaten, and the meal had been designed to keep me moving in circles while she remained at the centre, untouched, undisturbed, watching me chase my own tail with the patience of a woman who understands that time is on her side.
I could confront her. I could walk into Blackwood House and tell her that I knew the leads were false, that I knew she had manipulated my investigation, that I was not the easily led fool she took me for.
But confrontation required proof, and proof was precisely what I lacked.
I could not prove the leads were false; I could only demonstrate that they led nowhere, which was not the same thing.
And I could not prove that Cecilia had planted them without revealing the nature of our relationship, which would destroy me professionally and give her an absolute defence against any future accusation.
I was trapped. The recognition was not new, but sitting in my cold rooms on a January night, with the taste of stale bread in my mouth and the memory of her skin under my hands, the trap felt tighter than it ever had.
She had compromised me sexually, misled me professionally, and done both with such elegance that I could not expose either without destroying myself.
I put my head in my hands. The gas lamp flickered.
Outside, a hansom cab passed on the wet cobbles, its horse's hooves ringing against the stone.
Somewhere in Mayfair, in a warm bedroom in a townhouse worth more than I would earn in twenty years, Cecilia Blackwood was sleeping, or reading, or planning her next move in a game whose rules she had written and whose outcome she had already determined.
And I was sitting in the dark, staring at a wall of files, knowing that the case was not closed but that I had run out of roads to follow.
Unless I found a road she had not anticipated.
I lifted my head. The thought had come from nowhere, or from the place where thoughts come when the conscious mind has exhausted itself and the subconscious begins to work.
She had anticipated the false leads. She had anticipated my pursuit of them.
She had anticipated, I was certain, the possibility that I would recognise the deception.
What she might not have anticipated was that I would stop following her leads entirely and begin looking for ones she had not provided.
The locked cabinet. Dorothea Crewe's testimony.
The Earl's physician, Dr. Hale, and his prescription records.
The apothecaries where Cecilia might have purchased what she needed.
These were not Cecilia's leads. These were mine, discovered before she had begun to feed me, and therefore potentially uncontaminated.
They were thin. They were circumstantial. But they were mine.
I opened a new page in the notebook and began to write.
Dr. Hale. Prescription records. The apothecaries in the vicinity of Blackwood House.
The locked cabinet in the stillroom. The key she wore on a chain around her neck.
The arsenic that Dorothea had been sent to purchase as rat poison.
Each item, written in my copperplate hand, a small act of reclamation.
The room was cold. The fire was dead. But the notebook was filling, and the words were mine, and for the first time since Christmas, I felt something that might, if I was generous, have been hope.
It might also have been desperation. In my experience, the two are difficult to distinguish.
I set down the pen and flexed my fingers.
The handwriting on the page was mine, but the hand that had produced it was steadier than it had been an hour ago, as though the act of writing, of committing thoughts to paper, had imposed a discipline on the chaos in my mind.
That was the value of notes. They forced order on disorder.
They took the shapeless mass of suspicion and observation and arranged it into lines and columns and categories that could be studied and cross-referenced and, eventually, acted upon.
I read through the list one more time. Dr. Hale.
Prescription records. The apothecaries. The locked cabinet.
The arsenic. Each item was thin on its own, but together they formed a skeleton of something that might, with patience and luck, be fleshed into a case.
Not the case I had been building with Cecilia's false leads, which had been designed to lead nowhere.
A different case. My case. The case she had not anticipated and could not control.
Whether I had the courage to pursue it remained to be seen.
I closed the notebook and set the pen beside it and stared at the page for a long moment.
The words looked small and uncertain in the lamplight, the handwriting of a man who was no longer sure of anything except the thing he could not afford to admit.
But the list was mine. The road was mine.
And the woman at the centre of the pattern was, whether I had the courage to face it or not, the most dangerous person I had ever encountered, and the most compelling, and the two qualities were not, in the end, separable.