Chapter 17
The Solicitor's Conscience
H e arrived at half past six in the evening, unannounced, on a night when the rain was falling with the relentless persistence that London reserves for late February, the kind of rain that does not pour but seeps, that soaks through wool and leather and bone until the cold is no longer a temperature but a condition.
I heard the knock at my door and assumed it was Mrs. Parfitt with the evening tray, and when I opened it and found a thin, stooped figure in a rain-soaked overcoat standing in the hallway with water dripping from the brim of his hat, I did not immediately recognise him.
Sir William Hartwell looked as though he had aged a decade since I had last seen him, which was at the Ashworth funeral in November.
His face, always pale, had acquired a greyish tinge that I associated with illness or extreme anxiety, and his eyes, behind the spectacles he was perpetually cleaning, had the sunken, haunted quality of a man who has been sleeping badly for weeks.
His overcoat was expensive but outdated, the kind of garment that a man of means purchases once and wears for eleven years, and it was dark with rainwater from the shoulders to the hem.
He held a leather portfolio against his chest with both hands, gripping it the way a drowning man grips a rope.
"Inspector Aldric?" His voice was barely above a whisper. He glanced past me into the hallway, as though checking for observers. "I wonder if I might have a moment of your time."
I recognised him then, of course. Sir William Hartwell, senior partner of Hartwell, Crace and Poole, solicitors to the Blackwood estate for three decades.
I had attempted to interview him twice in December and had been deflected both times by assistants who informed me, with the practised deference of men accustomed to protecting their employer from inconvenient inquiries, that Sir William was unavailable.
I had written to his office requesting a formal interview and had received, in reply, a letter on firm letterhead stating that Sir William was not at liberty to discuss the private affairs of the Blackwood estate and trusted I would understand.
I understood. I understood very well. The letter was a barricade, and the barricade was manned by a man who had something to hide.
Now here he was, standing in my hallway on a rainy evening in February, unannounced and uninvited and visibly trembling, and I knew, with the particular certainty that comes from months of waiting for exactly this moment, that the barricade had fallen.
"Sir William. Please, come in."
I led him upstairs to my sitting room, which was modest but warm.
I had lit the fire an hour earlier, and the coals were still glowing, and I stirred them into life while Hartwell stood in the centre of the room, portfolio clutched to his chest, and looked around him with the quick, nervous glances of a rabbit in unfamiliar territory.
I took his coat and hat, both of which were sodden, and hung them by the door, and I offered him a chair by the fire, and he sat, and I poured him a glass of whisky from the bottle I kept on the mantelpiece for occasions that warranted stronger drink than tea.
He accepted the whisky with hands that shook.
He drank half of it in a single swallow, and I watched his throat work and saw the colour return, slightly, to his face.
He was a man who had been carrying a weight for a very long time, and the weight was about to be set down, and the anticipation of relief was warring with the terror of exposure in his expression.
"Sir William," I said, sitting in the chair opposite him. "You came here for a reason."
He nodded. He did not speak. He opened the portfolio on his lap and stared at its contents for a long moment, as though gathering the courage to release them, and when he looked up, his eyes had the particular quality of someone who has crossed a line inside himself and knows that there is no going back.
"I have been the Blackwood family solicitor for thirty-one years," he said.
"I handled the estate of Viscount Pendleton.
I managed the marriage settlements for Mrs. Blackwood's union with Henry Ravenscroft.
And I was the principal solicitor for the estate of the late Earl of Ashworth.
" He paused, his fingers pressing against the edge of the portfolio.
"In each case, I observed certain patterns.
Certain irregularities. And in each case, I did nothing. "
He handed me the first document. It was a letter, written on the letterhead of Dr. Hale, the Earl's physician, dated the third of March 1888, three months before the Earl's death.
The letter was addressed to Hartwell himself, and it expressed, in the careful but unmistakable language of a medical man growing increasingly alarmed, concern about the Earl's symptoms. The gastric complaints, Dr. Hale wrote, were inconsistent with his earlier diagnosis of indigestion.
The peripheral numbness in the Earl's hands and feet, which had initially been attributed to nervous exhaustion, had worsened considerably.
The weight loss was accelerating. Dr. Hale requested that Hartwell, as the family solicitor, advise the Countess to seek a second opinion from a specialist in gastric medicine.
"He never saw the specialist," Hartwell said, as I read the letter.
"I delivered the request to Lady Ashworth, and she assured me that she would arrange a consultation.
She did not arrange one. When I followed up two weeks later, she informed me that the Earl had improved and that Dr. Hale was being unduly anxious.
She thanked me for my concern and suggested, in the politest possible terms, that I confine myself to legal matters. "
I set the first letter aside. He handed me a second.
This one was older, dated 1882, and it came from the physician who had attended Viscount Pendleton during his final illness.
Dr. Percival, a country doctor of long standing in Hampshire, had written to Hartwell to express his professional concern about the rapidity of the Viscount's decline.
The Viscount's angina, Dr. Percival noted, had been stable for years prior to his marriage.
The acceleration of symptoms following the wedding was, in Dr. Percival's professional opinion, unusual.
He did not use the word suspicious, but the word was there, implicitly, in the careful phrasing of his concern.
"Dr. Percival is dead," Hartwell said. "Died in eighty-five. But his letter is in my files, and it has been in my files for seven years, and I have looked at it perhaps a hundred times in the intervening years and done nothing about it."
The third document was different from the others.
It was an insurance policy, a standard life insurance document issued by the Guardian Assurance Company, dated January 1885, approximately two months before Henry Ravenscroft's riding accident.
The policy was for the sum of fifty thousand pounds, and the sole beneficiary was Mrs. Cecilia Ravenscroft, the insured's wife.
It had been taken out through Hartwell's firm, and Hartwell's own signature was on the witnessing line.
"I drew up the policy myself," Hartwell said.
His voice had dropped to barely above a whisper.
"At her request. She told me that Henry wished to provide for her in the event of his death, and that the riding accident the previous spring had made him mindful of his mortality.
I believed her. I had no reason not to believe her.
The request was perfectly reasonable. Men of Ravenscroft's means commonly insure their lives for the benefit of their wives.
I signed the document and filed it and thought nothing more about it until Ravenscroft died in March and the policy was paid out. "
I took the documents one by one and arranged them on my desk in chronological order.
Three husbands. Three deaths. Three pieces of paper that, taken together, formed a pattern no less damning for being circumstantial.
Dr. Hale's letter, expressing alarm about symptoms consistent with arsenic poisoning.
Dr. Percival's letter, noting the unusual acceleration of a heart condition that had been stable for years.
The insurance policy, taken out two months before a death that was attributed to a riding accident.
None of these documents proved murder. But each of them raised questions, and the questions were the same questions I had been asking myself since November, and now, for the first time, I was not the only one asking them.
"Sir William," I said. "Why are you telling me this now?"
He looked at me, and in his face I saw the answer before he spoke it.
It was not courage. It was exhaustion. It was the exhaustion of a man who has been carrying a secret for so long that the secret has become indistinguishable from himself, a tumour of conscience that has metastasised through every organ of his professional life until the only relief possible is the relief of excision.
"Because I cannot continue," he said. "Because I have spent thirty years serving the law and the better part of the last decade ignoring it, and the weight of what I have ignored has become more than I can bear.
I am sixty-one years old, Inspector. I have a wife in Bath and a daughter married to a clergyman in Wiltshire and a grandson I have seen twice.
I have a professional reputation that, until this moment, has been beyond reproach.
And I have in my possession evidence that a woman has murdered three men, and I have known it for years, and I have done nothing. "