Chapter 29
The Brother
I had been watching Blackwood House for three days, standing in various positions around Grosvenor Square and the adjoining streets, trying to maintain the appearance of a man who was going about his business rather than a man who was conducting surveillance on a countess.
The surveillance was, by any professional standard, futile.
I had no warrant, no authorisation, and no reasonable expectation that standing outside Cecilia's house would produce anything of investigative value.
But I had no leads, no witnesses, and no institutional support, and the standing was, in the absence of anything more productive, the only action available to me, and I had discovered, in the four months since the investigation began, that action, even futile action, was preferable to the paralysis of inaction, because action, however useless, preserved the illusion of purpose, and the illusion of purpose was, at this stage of the investigation, the only thing standing between me and the abyss of professional irrelevance.
I had received Dr. Hale's refusal that morning, delivered by post to my rooms in a letter that was, in its careful, qualified language, almost certainly not written by a man who had changed his mind through principled reflection.
I read the letter three times, and with each reading, the evidence of external pressure became more apparent: the elaborate justification, the nervous precision of the language, the repeated insistence that the decision was his own, which is the hallmark of a decision that has been made under duress and which the maker is trying, with diminishing success, to convince himself was voluntary.
Dr. Hale had been got to. The only question was by whom, and the answer to that question was not a question at all, because there was only one person in London with the motive, the means, and the audacity to pressure a Harley Street physician into withdrawing his cooperation from a police investigation, and that person was Cecilia Blackwood.
I set the letter aside and stared at the wall of my rooms and felt, with the particular intensity of a man who has just lost the last plank from the ship he has been clinging to, the full weight of the situation.
Hartwell was dead. Dr. Hale had recanted.
The documents Hartwell had provided were copies without provenance.
The witnesses I had interviewed had either changed their stories, refused to cooperate, or simply vanished.
The false trails Cecilia had planted in January had consumed weeks of my time and led precisely nowhere.
My superiors had withdrawn their support and were, I knew from the coldness of Superintendent Graves's manner at our last meeting, on the verge of formally ordering me to close the investigation.
And my own credibility, both institutional and personal, had been so thoroughly compromised by my relationship with Cecilia that any accusation I made against her would be met, not with the seriousness it deserved, but with the knowing, weary scepticism of people who had heard the rumours about the detective who was obsessed with the beautiful widow.
I was, by any objective measure, finished.
The investigation was over. I had nothing left to pursue, no avenue left to explore, no resource left to exploit.
The rational course of action was to accept the verdict of circumstances, close the case, and return to the ordinary business of detective work, which was, in its own way, rewarding enough to sustain a career and a life.
But I could not. I could not close the case, because closing the case meant accepting that Cecilia had won, and accepting that Cecilia had won meant accepting that three men had been murdered and that their murderer would never be brought to justice, and the acceptance was, for reasons I could not fully articulate and did not wish to examine, more than I could bear.
I dressed and went out. The morning was grey, the sky low and dense with cloud, and the streets were wet from a rain that had fallen in the early hours and that had left the pavements slick and the air smelling of damp stone and coal smoke.
I walked without direction, allowing my feet to carry me where they would, and they carried me, as they had carried me every morning for three days, toward Grosvenor Square, and toward the house where Cecilia lived, and toward the thing I could not stop doing, which was watching, and hoping, and knowing that both the watching and the hoping were, in the strictest sense of the word, useless.
It was on the third morning, as I stood near the railings of the square pretending to study the trees, that the idea came to me, and when it came, it arrived not as a sudden revelation but as a slow crystallisation, the gradual coming-together of fragments of information that had been floating in my mind for weeks, disconnected and seemingly insignificant, and that had, without my conscious direction, been arranging themselves into a pattern that I had not, until this moment, been able to see.
Edmund.
The idea was so simple, and so obvious, that I marvelled at the fact that I had not thought of it before.
Edmund Blackwood was the one element of Cecilia's life that I had not fully explored.
I had observed him from a distance, at social functions and in the street, and I had formed the impression of a young man who was simple, trusting, and utterly without the capacity for deception.
I had known, from the beginning, that Edmund was different from his sister, that he occupied a different space in the architecture of her life, and that the difference was, potentially, significant.
But I had not pursued the line of inquiry, partly out of a reluctance to involve an innocent person in the investigation, and partly out of a subconscious awareness, which I was only now beginning to acknowledge, that Edmund was the one subject on which my judgment could not be trusted, because Edmund's simplicity and openness reminded me, in ways I found uncomfortable, of the qualities that I had once believed distinguished the innocent from the guilty, and the reminder was, in the context of my relationship with Cecilia, a source of confusion rather than clarity.
But the situation had changed. I had no other leads.
Dr. Hale had recanted. The case was in ruins.
And if there was any possibility that Edmund, in his guileless way, could provide information that would advance the investigation, then I was obligated, by the demands of justice and by the memory of the three dead men whose murders I had sworn to solve, to pursue that possibility, regardless of the personal discomfort it caused me.
I abandoned my position near the railings and walked to the British Museum.
It was a Thursday, and Edmund, I had observed during my surveillance of Blackwood House, visited the Museum on Thursdays, accompanied by Dorothea Crewe, as part of the routine that Cecilia maintained for her brother with the possessive precision she brought to every aspect of his existence.
The routine was rigid and unvarying: breakfast at eight, lessons with the tutor at nine, a walk in the garden at ten, luncheon at twelve, and then, at two o'clock, the carriage to the Museum, where Edmund spent two hours among the Egyptian antiquities that fascinated him with an intensity that was, for a mind of his limitations, remarkable in its focus and persistence.
I arrived at the Museum at half past one and took up a position in the Egyptian gallery, near the collection of mummy cases that I knew, from previous observations, were Edmund's favourite exhibits.
The gallery was quiet at this hour, the afternoon crowds having not yet arrived, and the cases stood in their glass-topped sarcophagi with the serene and terrible patience of the dead, their painted faces staring out at the visitors with expressions that were, depending on one's mood, either benevolent or accusatory.
They arrived at ten minutes past two. Edmund entered first, moving with the slightly hesitant gait of a person who is not entirely comfortable in public spaces, his hands fidgeting at his sides, his eyes darting from exhibit to exhibit with the restless curiosity of a child in a shop full of toys.
Dorothea followed, her face composed in the professional blankness of a servant who is accustomed to being invisible, and she took up a position near the entrance to the gallery, from which she could observe Edmund without interfering with his explorations.
I waited. Edmund moved through the gallery with the unhurried attention of a person who is not constrained by schedules or appointments, stopping at each case, studying the contents with the focused intensity I had observed before, and occasionally reaching out to touch the glass, a gesture that Dorothea, from her position near the entrance, monitored with the vigilance of a woman who knew that touching the glass was discouraged and who was choosing, in this instance, not to intervene.
I approached him from the side, slowly, so as not to startle him, and I stopped beside the mummy case he was studying and adopted the posture of a fellow visitor who was interested in the same exhibit.
"The painted faces are the most interesting part," I said. "Have you noticed how the expressions differ from one case to the next?"
He looked at me. His eyes were grey, like his sister's, but where Cecilia's eyes were calculated and controlled, Edmund's were open and immediate, the eyes of a person who was experiencing the world directly, without the filtering mechanisms that most people deploy to manage their interactions with others.
He studied me for a moment with the frank appraisal of a child, and then he smiled, and the smile was the most unguarded thing I had seen in months.