Chapter 17 #2
His voice cracked on the last word. He pressed his handkerchief to his mouth and held it there for a moment, and when he lowered it, his eyes were wet.
Not the performative wetness of someone simulating distress, but the genuine, uncontrolled overflow of a man whose defences have collapsed.
I had seen genuine grief before, in the families of murder victims, and it was always less composed, less aesthetic, than the theatrical version.
Real tears came at inconvenient moments and in inconvenient quantities, and they were accompanied by physical signs that no amount of practice could replicate: the reddening of the nose, the swelling of the eyelids, the raw, scraped quality of the voice.
"I knew after Pendleton," Hartwell continued.
"I knew there was something wrong. The speed of his decline, the fact that his widow prepared his cordial herself every evening, the fact that she insisted on it being a private ritual between husband and wife.
These things registered, Inspector. They registered, and I filed them away, and I told myself that I was being morbid, that grief makes one suspicious of coincidence, that not every death that follows a marriage is a murder.
" He took another drink of whisky. "When Ravenscroft died, I told myself the same thing.
A riding accident. Tragic but not suspicious.
The insurance policy was a coincidence. The timing was unfortunate. These things happen."
"And the Earl?"
Hartwell closed his eyes. "The Earl was different.
I was present at Blackwood House more frequently during his illness than I had been with the others, because the estate was more complex and required more active management.
I saw the deterioration. I saw the weight loss and the nausea and the numbness in his hands, and I had, by that time, enough medical knowledge, gathered through three decades of dealing with physicians and death certificates and probate, to recognise the symptoms of what I was seeing.
" He opened his eyes. "Arsenic. Chronic arsenic poisoning.
I knew it. I knew it, and I did nothing, and the Earl died in his bed in June of last year, and his wife stood at his graveside and wept, and I stood beside her and felt the tears on my own face and knew that hers were false and mine were real. "
The room was very quiet. The fire crackled.
The rain tapped against the window. I could hear, from the floor below, Mrs. Parfitt moving through her kitchen, the clatter of pots and the hiss of boiling water, the ordinary sounds of an ordinary evening that bore no relation to the extraordinary confession I was hearing.
"The documents you have given me," I said, carefully, "are they the only copies?"
"They are my personal copies. I kept them separate from the firm's files, in a locked drawer in my private office.
I knew, even as I filed them, that I was keeping them for a purpose I was not yet ready to name.
I suppose I have been waiting for someone to ask.
" He met my eyes. "You have been asking, Inspector.
You have been asking for months, and I have been refusing to answer, and the refusal has become harder with each week that passes. "
"Will you testify?"
The question hung in the air between us. Hartwell's face underwent a series of rapid transitions: alarm, then calculation, then the slow, grinding acknowledgement of a man who has already committed to a course of action and understands that the commitment has consequences.
"If I testify," he said, "I implicate myself. I have known for years that these deaths were not natural. I have possessed evidence that could have prevented at least one of them, perhaps two. My silence makes me, in the eyes of any reasonable court, an accessory after the fact."
"I cannot promise you immunity from prosecution, Sir William. That authority does not reside with me. What I can promise is that I will present your cooperation to my superiors in the most favourable possible light and advocate for leniency."
He was quiet for a long time. The fire had burned down, and the room was growing cold, and I did not stir the coals because the act of stirring would have broken the silence, and the silence was necessary.
Hartwell was making a decision, and decisions of this magnitude require silence the way seeds require darkness.
"Very well," he said, at last. "I will testify. But I want your word, Inspector, that my wife and daughter will not be dragged into this. Whatever I have done or failed to do, they are innocent of it, and they must not suffer for my weakness."
"You have my word."
He nodded. He drained the last of the whisky and set the glass down on the arm of his chair with a precision that was almost ceremonial, the precision of a man completing a ritual.
Then he stood, and I saw that his legs were unsteady, and I offered him my arm, and he accepted it with the unself-conscious gratitude of someone who has been standing alone for too long.
I helped him into his coat. I handed him his hat.
I walked him to the door, and as he stepped into the hallway, he paused and turned back to me, and in his eyes I saw something I had not expected: not relief, not resolution, but fear.
The fear of a man who has just handed a loaded weapon to someone else and knows that the weapon will be fired.
"She is not what she appears, Inspector," he said. "I have known this for a very long time. What I am about to give you will not be enough to convict her. But it may be enough to save the next man."
He descended the stairs. I heard the front door open and close, and then the sound of footsteps on wet pavement, receding into the rain.
I stood in my hallway for a long time, holding the portfolio he had left behind, and I felt the weight of it in my hands, the physical weight of the papers and the leather and the accumulated gravity of three deaths and thirty years of silence.
I returned to my sitting room and spread the documents on my desk and read them again, each one, slowly and carefully, under the light of the lamp.
Dr. Hale's letter. Dr. Percival's letter.
The insurance policy. Three pieces of paper.
Three men dead. One woman, beautiful and grieving and untouchable, who had moved through three marriages like a surgeon through a ward, precise and methodical and utterly without mercy.
I had the evidence. Not enough to convict, perhaps, but enough to begin, and beginning was the thing I had been unable to do for three months, blocked at every turn by false trails and institutional resistance and the paralysing knowledge that the woman I wanted to arrest was the same woman I wanted in my bed.
The contradiction had held me motionless, a man torn between two gravitational fields and unable to move in either direction.
But Hartwell's documents had shifted the balance.
The evidence was real. It existed on paper, in ink, witnessed and dated and filed by a solicitor of unimpeachable standing.
It could not be dismissed as pattern or suspicion or the obsession of a detective who had lost his objectivity. It was a beginning.
I read each document a third time, more slowly, attending to the details I had absorbed only in outline during the first readings.
Dr. Hale's letter was dated the third of March 1888, written from his consulting rooms in Harley Street on paper that bore his printed heading.
The handwriting was careful and professional, but I could detect, in the tightening of the script as the letter progressed, the growing urgency of a physician who was accustomed to being believed and who was encountering, for perhaps the first time in his career, a situation in which his medical opinion was being quietly overridden by a determined and articulate widow.
Hale had written that the Earl's symptoms, specifically the peripheral neuropathy, the chronic nausea, and the progressive weight loss, were inconsistent with his initial diagnosis of gastric complaint secondary to excessive brandy consumption.
He had recommended a consultation with a specialist in toxicology.
The recommendation had been declined. Hale had noted his concern in the letter to Hartwell because he feared, as he wrote, that "the course of treatment currently being pursued may be inadequate to address the underlying condition. "
The inadequacy of the treatment was, of course, deliberate.
Bismuth does nothing against arsenic. I knew this.
Dr. Hale, I suspected, had suspected it too, or had come to suspect it in the months after the Earl's death, and his failure to pursue the suspicion was its own form of complicity, a silence purchased by the social impossibility of accusing a countess of murder on the basis of symptoms and a prescription for bismuth.
But the letter existed. It was a document.
It placed on record, in the handwriting of a licensed physician, the fact that the Earl's decline had been rapid, unusual, and resistant to treatment, and a clever prosecutor could use it to establish that the death was suspicious even if it could not prove the cause.