Chapter 24 #3
When he raised his face, his expression had changed.
The tears had stopped, and the trembling had subsided, and in their place was a stillness that I recognised, because it was the stillness of a man who has passed through terror and emerged on the other side into a kind of numb acceptance, the emotional equivalent of a body that has gone past the point of feeling pain and has entered a state of anaesthetised calm.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked.
"I have told you. Recant your testimony. Tell Aldric that you were mistaken. Retrieve the documents if you can, or at least cast sufficient doubt upon their interpretation that they become useless as evidence."
"And if Aldric refuses to accept my recantation?"
"He will accept it. He has no choice. Without your testimony, the documents are paper.
With your recantation, they are not even paper.
They are misunderstandings, routine correspondence, the normal business of a legal practice.
He will be furious. He will suspect that I have pressured you.
But he will not be able to prove it, and without proof, his suspicions are as meaningless as the suspicions of every other person in London who has looked at me and wondered. "
Hartwell nodded. The nod was slow and mechanical, the movement of a puppet whose strings are being pulled by a hand it cannot see.
"And in return?" he asked.
"In return, I will continue to employ you as my solicitor.
The Ashworth estate is a considerable account, and your management of it has been, until this unfortunate episode, exemplary.
I am prepared to overlook the matter, provided it is resolved to my satisfaction and provided it never happens again. "
"And if it does happen again?"
"It will not happen again, Sir William. Because you are not a brave man, and brave men are the only men who act against their own interest twice.
You have acted once. It cost you your peace of mind.
It will not cost you anything more, because you will not do it again, and we both know this, and the knowing is sufficient. "
I stood. The conversation was over, or rather, the substantive part of it was over; what remained was the civilised aftermath, the polite farewells and expressions of goodwill that lubricated the machinery of social interaction and prevented it from grinding to a halt under the weight of what had actually been said.
"I shall expect to hear from you within the week," I said. "I trust you will resolve the matter with Inspector Aldric before then."
Hartwell stood as well. He was unsteady on his feet, and he gripped the edge of his desk for support, and the grip was the last visible evidence of the demolition I had just performed, the final tremor of a structure that had been shaken to its foundations.
"Lady Ashworth," he said, and his voice was barely above a whisper. "I am sorry."
"Sorry," I repeated, and the word hung in the air between us, flat and colourless, a word that meant nothing and everything and that I examined for a moment before setting it aside, the way one sets aside a stone that turns out, upon closer inspection, to be ordinary.
"I am sure you are, Sir William. Good afternoon. "
I left. The clerk met me at the door with my coat and hat, and I put them on with the unhurried deliberation of a woman who has all the time in the world, and I walked down the narrow staircase and out into Lincoln's Inn Fields, where the afternoon was bright and cold and the bare trees stood like skeletons against the pale sky.
I did not feel triumphant. Triumphant is a feeling, and I do not indulge in feelings as a general rule, because feelings are the tools of the weak and the weapons of the manipulator, and I am the manipulator, not the manipulated.
What I felt was satisfaction, which is not the same as triumph.
Satisfaction is the recognition that a task has been completed efficiently, that a mechanism has performed as designed, and that the outcome has aligned with the plan.
It is a professional assessment, not an emotional one, and I allowed myself to experience it in the same way that I allowed myself to experience the pleasure of a well-arranged bouquet or a correctly balanced ledger: as a minor aesthetic reward for competent work.
But I did not leave Hartwell's offices with the intention of relying solely on his recantation.
Hartwell was a weak man, and weak men, even when they have been broken and rebuilt in the desired shape, have a tendency to relapse.
His conscience, which had taken thirty years to surface, might surface again, and if it did, it would surface at the worst possible moment, in the form of a testimony to Aldric or a confession to his wife or a letter to the Times, and any of these outcomes would be catastrophic.
Hartwell's recantation was necessary but not sufficient.
What was needed was a more permanent solution.
I considered the options as my carriage carried me through the streets of London, moving from Lincoln's Inn toward Mayfair through the afternoon traffic.
I could wait. I could allow Hartwell to recant, as he had agreed to do, and hope that his courage, which was minimal, would not reassert itself.
This was the cautious approach, and it carried the risk that caution always carries, which is the risk of being insufficient.
I could increase the pressure, by threatening Hartwell's family or his finances, but threats, once made, must be carried out, and carrying out threats creates evidence, and evidence creates the possibility of exposure, and exposure was the one thing I could not afford.
Or I could resolve the matter permanently.
The thought arrived with the quiet certainty of a conclusion that has been forming for some time and has finally reached the surface.
It was not a new thought. I had considered it before, in the abstract, during the three days I had spent gathering intelligence on Penelope's vulnerabilities, and again during the sleepless nights that had followed my confrontation with Sebastian, when I had lain in the dark and assessed the strategic landscape with the cold precision that was both my gift and my prison.
Hartwell was a liability. He had been a liability since the moment he went to Sebastian, and his liability was increasing with each passing day, because the documents he had provided were in Sebastian's possession, and Sebastian, whatever his personal compromises, was not the kind of man who would simply file those documents away and forget about them.
He would use them. He would try to build a case.
And if Hartwell, under the pressure of his own guilt or the pressure of Sebastian's questioning, reverted to his original testimony, the documents would become the foundation of a prosecution that would end my freedom and possibly my life.
Hartwell had to be eliminated. Not metaphorically. Not socially. Permanently.
The method required consideration. Each of my previous operations had been tailored to the specific circumstances of the target and the strategic requirements of the moment.
Arthur's heart condition had provided the cover for cardiac acceleration.
Henry's riding habits had provided the cover for the wire.
Richard's brandy habit had provided the cover for arsenic.
Hartwell required a different approach, because Hartwell's circumstances were different.
He was not a husband. He did not share my household or my table.
He was a professional man with his own routines, his own habits, and his own vulnerabilities, and those vulnerabilities, once identified, would dictate the method.
I thought about Hartwell as I knew him. He was a creature of habit, a man who performed the same actions in the same order at the same times, day after day, year after year, with the mechanical regularity of a clock.
He arrived at his offices at nine. He left at six.
He dined at his club on Tuesdays and Thursdays and at home on the remaining evenings.
He drank brandy, always brandy, and he drank it at the same time each evening, at eleven o'clock, in his private study at home, alone.
The brandy was a ritual, a moment of solitude at the end of the day, and the ritual was the most exploitable feature of his routine, because rituals, by their nature, are predictable, and predictability is the assassin's greatest ally.
The method that presented itself was one I had employed before, in its general principles if not in its specifics.
Laudanum. Hartwell was a man who already consumed substances to manage his emotional state, and a man who self-medicates is a man who can be overdosed without raising suspicion.
Laudanum was widely available, prescribed for everything from anxiety to insomnia to the vague, undefined malaise that Victorian physicians diagnosed in patients whose real affliction was the unbearable weight of their own consciences.
An overdose of laudanum would produce death by respiratory depression, a death that was quiet and peaceful and that, in a man of Hartwell's age and disposition, would be immediately interpreted as suicide.