Chapter 29 #3
But Edmund's testimony was different from Dorothea's.
Dorothea was a servant, and servants, in the eyes of the law, were witnesses of limited credibility whose testimony was weighed against the testimony of their social superiors and usually found wanting.
Edmund was Cecilia's brother, a member of the household, and his testimony, while still vulnerable to challenge, carried a different kind of weight, because it came from a person who was, by virtue of his relationship to the suspect, in a position to know things that no one else could know.
"What do you think is in the cupboard?" I asked.
"Bottles," he said. "Medicine bottles. I saw them once, when the door was open for a moment, before Cecilia closed it.
They were not the cook's bottles. The cook's bottles are brown and have labels with words I can read.
These bottles were different. They were small and clear, and they did not have labels, or if they did, the labels were turned around so I could not see them.
" He paused. "Cecilia was angry when she saw me looking.
Not angry like shouting angry. Angry like quiet angry.
The kind of angry where she goes very still and her eyes go cold, and she says my name in a way that means I should go away and not come back until she tells me to. "
The description of Cecilia's anger was precise and unmistakable.
I had seen that anger myself, directed at me, in moments when I had pushed too close to a truth she did not wish to expose, and the coldness of it, the controlled stillness of it, was more frightening than any display of rage, because it communicated, with the clarity of a mathematical equation, the exact measure of the threat that the person who was angry represented.
"Edmund," I said, and I was aware that my voice had changed, that the warmth I had been cultivating was giving way to something harder and more urgent, and that Edmund, who was acutely sensitive to changes in tone, would register the change and might, in response, retreat into the protective shell of silence that I had observed him deploy when he was confused or frightened.
I softened my voice. "Has Cecilia ever said anything to you about the bottles? About what they are for?"
He shook his head. "Cecilia does not tell me things she does not want me to know.
She says it is for my own protection. She says the world is full of things that would hurt me if I understood them, and that she keeps me from understanding them because she loves me.
" He paused. "I think that is what love is.
Keeping someone from understanding things that would hurt them. "
The words settled over me like a cold cloth.
Edmund, in his simplicity, had described with devastating accuracy the mechanism by which Cecilia controlled him: the withholding of information, the framing of the withholding as protection, the invocation of love as justification for manipulation.
It was a description of captivity dressed in the language of care, and the dressing was so convincing, even to the captive, that the captive did not recognise it as captivity and could not, because his mind was not equipped to make the distinction, conceive of an alternative to it.
I stood beside Edmund in the Egyptian gallery and felt, with a force that was almost physical, the weight of what I was doing.
I was using a disabled young man to gather information about his sister, the sister who controlled every aspect of his existence and who had, whether through genuine attachment or through the possessive instinct that was the nearest thing she possessed to love, devoted her life to protecting him from the world.
I was exploiting the one quality that made Edmund who he was, his inability to dissemble, his incapacity for deception, his innocence, and the exploitation felt like a violation, not of Cecilia, who had violated every moral law that existed, but of Edmund, who had violated none and who deserved, more than anyone I had encountered in this investigation, to be left in peace.
But I could not leave him in peace. The three dead men could not be left in peace.
And the bottles in the locked cupboard, the small, clear, unlabelled bottles that Edmund had seen for a moment before Cecilia closed the door, were, if they contained what I suspected they contained, the physical evidence that could, if obtained and tested, prove what no amount of testimony could prove: that Cecilia Blackwood had murdered her husbands with poison, and that the poison was stored in her kitchen, in a locked cabinet, behind the cook's stores, in the heart of the house where she lived with her brother and her servants and the accumulated weight of three murders.
Dorothea appeared at my elbow. She had moved, silently and efficiently, from her position near the entrance to a position beside Edmund, and her face, when I looked at it, carried an expression that I had not seen before: not fear, exactly, but something adjacent to fear, something that looked like the dawning recognition of a situation that was spiralling beyond her control.
"Inspector," she said, and her voice was low and careful and pitched to carry no further than the three of us. "Mr. Edmund, it is time to go. The carriage will be waiting."
Edmund looked at her and then at me, and his face held the expression of a person who has been enjoying a conversation and who does not want it to end.
"Will you come back?" he asked. "Next Thursday? I want to show you the scarab beetles. They are in the next room, and they are very small, and they are very old, and I think you would like them."
"I would like that," I said.
He smiled. The smile was the same as before, open and unguarded and utterly without deception, and the openness of it, in the context of what I had just learned, was almost unbearable in its poignancy.
Dorothea took his arm and led him toward the exit.
I watched them go, and as they passed through the doorway into the main hall, Edmund turned and looked back at me, and the look was the look of a person who has made a friend and who is pleased about it, and the pleasure was simple and genuine and utterly without calculation, and the genuineness of it was the thing that made it so devastating, because the friend he had made was a man who was investigating his sister for murder, and the investigation, if it succeeded, would destroy the only world he knew.
I stood in the Egyptian gallery for a long time after they had gone, surrounded by the dead in their glass cases, and I thought about Edmund, and about the locked cupboard, and about Cecilia, and about the war that I was waging against a woman I could not stop wanting and could not stop pursuing, and the thought that occupied the centre of my mind, the thought that would not resolve into anything coherent but that persisted with the stubbornness of a splinter that could not be extracted, was this: Edmund was the only person in Cecilia's life who was not a strategic variable, not a tool to be used or an obstacle to be overcome, and the fact that I was using him, exploiting his simplicity and his trust to gather evidence against his sister, placed me in a position that was, morally, indistinguishable from the position that Cecilia herself occupied, the position of a person who used other people for purposes they did not understand and could not consent to.
The realisation did not stop me. The investigation was too far gone, the dead men were too numerous, and the evidence, if it could be obtained, was too important.
But the realisation lodged itself in my mind like a stone in a shoe, a small, hard discomfort that I would carry with me for as long as the investigation continued, and that would, I suspected, remain long after the investigation was over, whether it ended in justice or in failure.
I left the Museum and walked into the grey April afternoon, and the locked cupboard in the stillroom of Blackwood House was, for the first time since the investigation began, not a suggestive detail but a concrete objective, a physical target that could be identified, located, and, if the circumstances could be arranged, searched.
The case was not over. The war was not lost. And Edmund Blackwood, in his guileless, trusting way, had given me the one thing I needed most: a reason to keep fighting.