Chapter 37 #3
I sat on the bench and felt the weight of what I knew, and the weight was the weight of my own complicity.
I had brought Sir Geoffrey to Cecilia's table.
I had provided the evidence that gave the Home Office the basis for its inquiry.
I had, in the most literal sense, set in motion the machinery that was now grinding toward the outcome that I did not want, and the irony of my position was so complete, so perfectly circular, that it had the quality of a cruel joke: I had pursued the truth, and the truth had led me to this, a bench in a dark park in the middle of the night, confronted by the knowledge that the truth I had pursued was a truth I did not want to act upon, and that the pursuit itself had been, in some fundamental sense, a betrayal of everything I claimed to stand for.
What would happen next? Sir Geoffrey had the evidence.
The evidence was sufficient to support a prosecution, though whether a prosecution would be authorised was a question that depended on political calculations that were beyond my capacity to influence.
Cecilia would respond, because Cecilia always responded, and her response would be calculated and precise and designed to achieve the outcome that was most favourable to her interests.
And I would be caught between them, the detective who had uncovered the truth and who could not bear to see it acted upon, a man who had done his duty and who now, in the quiet of a May night, was confronting the full and terrible consequences of that duty's completion.
I rose from the bench. The gravel crunched beneath my boots, and the sound was sharp in the stillness, and I walked toward the gate that opened onto Piccadilly, and the gaslights of the street flickered through the branches of the trees, and the city was waiting for me, as it always was, with its noise and its crowding and its relentless, indifferent motion.
I had a choice to make. Not tonight, perhaps, not at this moment, on this bench, in this park.
But soon. The machinery was in motion. The evidence was assembled.
The official had presented his case. And I, the man who had set the machinery in motion, was the only person who could stop it, because I was the only person who understood both the strength of the case and the cost of its prosecution, and the understanding gave me a power that I did not want and a responsibility that I could not discharge.
I walked out of the park and into the street, and the street was empty except for a single hansom cab waiting at the corner, its horse standing with lowered head and closed eyes, and the driver was slumped on his box, half-asleep, and the scene was so ordinary, so untouched by the enormity of what I was carrying, that I felt a moment of almost surreal dislocation, as though I were a ghost moving through a world that was not quite real.
I did not take the cab. I walked. I walked through the streets of Mayfair, past the darkened houses and the shuttered shops and the gaslit corners where the night watchmen stood in their greatcoats and watched me pass with the incurious attention of men who had seen everything and were no longer surprised by anything.
And as I walked, I thought about Cecilia, and I thought about the expression on her face when she had walked back into the dining room, and I thought about the calculations that were, even now, running behind those grey eyes, and I thought about the choice that lay ahead, and I knew, with the same terrible certainty that had accompanied every major revelation in this case, that whatever I chose, I would not be the same man after the choosing as I had been before it.
The city was very quiet. The sky was very dark. And the weight of what I knew sat in my chest like a stone, and the stone was heavy, and I could not put it down, and I could not walk away from it, and I could not, despite everything, wish that I had never picked it up.
Somewhere behind me, in a house lit by gaslight and surrounded by flowers, Cecilia Blackwood was sitting in her study or standing at her window or moving through the rooms with the fluid, controlled precision that characterised her every movement, and she was calculating.
She was always calculating. The evidence had been presented, the trap had been sprung, and she was trapped, genuinely trapped, for the first time in her remarkable and terrible life.
But a trapped Cecilia was not a defeated Cecilia.
A trapped Cecilia was a Cecilia who was thinking harder and faster and more ruthlessly than she had ever thought before, and the thought of what she might do, what she was capable of doing, sent a shiver down my spine that had nothing to do with the coolness of the May night and everything to do with the understanding, bone-deep and irrevocable, that I was dealing with a woman who had killed four people and who would, if the calculations demanded it, kill again.
The question was not whether she could be stopped.
The question was whether I wanted her to be stopped.
And the answer to that question, when I was honest enough to face it, was the most terrifying thing I had ever encountered, more terrifying than the evidence in Sir Geoffrey's folder, more terrifying than the expression I had seen on Cecilia's face, more terrifying than the knowledge of what she was and what she had done.
Because the answer was no. And the no was final.