The Art of Vanishing

Chapter 1

A Pattern in Grief

T he superintendent's office at Scotland Yard smelled of pipe tobacco and damp wool, the particular combination that clung to every room in the building like a permanent odour of institutional resignation.

Superintendent Graves sat behind his desk with the heavy, deliberate stillness of a man who has been seated behind the same desk for long enough to have become part of its furniture.

He was a large man, broad-shouldered and ruddy-faced, with the kind of physical authority that commanded attention without requiring effort.

In his youth, he had been something of a detective himself, or so the older constables claimed, though the evidence of it had long since been buried beneath layers of paperwork, committee meetings, and the slow accumulation of administrative fat that attends promotion.

"Aldric. Sit down."

I sat. The chair was a wooden affair of considerable discomfort, designed, I had always suspected, to discourage lengthy conversations.

Graves shuffled through the papers on his desk with the studied casualness of a man who wished to convey that the matter at hand was of no great importance, which meant, in my experience, that it was either of no great importance or of considerably more importance than he wished me to believe.

"The Ashworth estate," he said, not looking up. "The Earl's death. There have been some questions raised."

"What manner of questions?"

"The usual sort. A solicitor's clerk with a grudge, a distant cousin who feels insufficiently remembered in the will.

Nothing substantive." He selected a file from the stack and pushed it across the desk toward me.

"I want you to review it. Routine matter.

Make sure the paperwork is in order, the death certificate's been properly filed, that sort of thing. Shouldn't take more than a day or two."

I opened the file. The death certificate was the first document, a standard form, filled out in the careful hand of the attending physician, one Dr. Ambrose Hale of Harley Street.

Cause of death: gastric complaint, resulting in hepatic failure.

Date of death: the second of June, 1888.

The certificate had been filed promptly, witnessed by Hartwell, the family solicitor, and the burial had taken place at the family seat in Suffolk with all the propriety due to an earl.

"Dr. Hale," I said. "I know the name. He attended the Home Secretary during his illness last year."

"The same. Respectable man. The Earl was his patient for several years.

" Graves leaned back in his chair, which protested with a creak of aged timber.

"The questions that have been raised are nonsense, Aldric.

A clerk who claims the will was improperly witnessed, a cousin in Derbyshire who thinks he should have inherited the Suffolk estate.

I've spoken to Hartwell, the solicitor. Everything is in order.

I just need a detective to look it over, write a brief report, and close the file. "

I turned to the physician's notes. These were more detailed than the death certificate, running to several pages of closely written observations spanning the final eighteen months of the Earl's life.

I read them with the particular attention to detail that had made me, depending on whom you asked, either the most thorough detective at the Yard or the most insufferable.

The notes began in December of 1886, when the Earl had first presented with what Dr. Hale described as "persistent indigestion, resistant to conventional treatment.

" Bismuth had been prescribed. The symptoms had not improved.

By February, the Earl was experiencing nausea and occasional vomiting.

By April, abdominal pain had become chronic.

By June, Hale noted "peripheral tingling in the extremities, consistent with nervous complaint.

" The handwriting, I observed, became progressively more hurried as the case advanced, the observations more condensed, as though the physician was recording events faster than he could comfortably explain them.

The final entry, dated the second of June, was brief. "Patient expired at 7:14 in the morning. Cause of death: hepatic failure secondary to chronic gastric complaint. No evidence of infectious disease. No autopsy performed at the request of the family."

I read the last sentence again. No post-mortem examination had been performed at the request of the family.

This was not unusual for a man of the Earl's station.

The bodies of aristocrats were not routinely examined.

It was considered a violation of dignity, an intrusion upon the sanctity of rank.

But the physician's notes described a progression of symptoms that struck me, with the uncomfortable insistence of a toothache, as curious.

Gastric complaints do not typically progress to hepatic failure within eighteen months.

The trajectory was steep, almost aggressive, as though something had accelerated a natural decline that might otherwise have taken years.

I said nothing about this to Graves. Instead, I closed the file and returned it to his desk.

"I'll review it," I said. "Should I speak to Dr. Hale?"

"If you think it necessary. He's cooperative.

" Graves paused, and something shifted in his expression, a flicker of something that might have been caution.

"Aldric, I want to be clear about this. The Ashworth family is well-connected.

The Dowager Countess is related to the Portland branch by marriage.

The Home Secretary himself has expressed an interest in ensuring the matter is handled with discretion. "

"Discretion," I repeated.

"I mean that if you find nothing, you say nothing. If you find something, you come to me before you speak to anyone else. I do not want a detective from this department knocking on the door of a countess without my explicit authorisation. Do you understand?"

I understood perfectly. The law, in my experience, was a river that flowed more quickly through certain neighbourhoods than others, and the neighbourhoods of Mayfair were among those where it slowed to a trickle, spreading into placid pools of exoneration and gentle inquests that found exactly what they were expected to find.

I had been a detective for eleven years, and in that time I had learned that the aristocracy was, as a class, no more or less criminal than any other, but considerably better protected.

An earl's death was not subject to the same scrutiny as a costermonger's.

A countess could not be questioned without evidence that would satisfy a magistrate, and magistrates, in my experience, were not eager to satisfy themselves where the aristocracy was concerned.

"I understand, sir."

"Good. Report by the end of the week."

I took the file and left. My desk was in the main room, a battered affair of scarred wood and overflowing pigeonholes that I shared with Sergeant Price, a cheerful, unimaginative man who had been my colleague for three years and who regarded my tendency to read files cover to cover as a personality defect.

"Another one?" Price asked, without looking up from his own paperwork.

"The Ashworth estate. Routine review."

Price grunted. "Lucky you. I've got a counterfeiting ring in Whitechapel that's going to take me all week." He paused, then added, with the casual insensitivity that was one of his more endearing qualities, "I read about it in the papers. The funeral was a grand affair, from what I gather."

"From what I understand."

"Three husbands, that woman's had. Makes you think, doesn't it?"

I did not respond to this immediately. Price had a habit of making observations that were more insightful than he intended, and this one lodged itself in my mind with the persistence of a splinter.

Three husbands. I had noticed it, of course, in passing, when reading the file.

The Dowager Countess of Ashworth, formerly Cecilia Margaret Blackwood, née Blackwell, had been married three times.

Her first marriage, to Viscount Arthur Pendleton, had ended with the Viscount's death from heart failure in 1882.

Her second, to Henry Aldous Ravenscroft, the Manchester industrialist, had ended with a riding accident in 1885.

Her third, to the Earl of Ashworth, had ended, according to the death certificate I was holding, from hepatic failure secondary to gastric complaint, in June of this year.

Three marriages. Three deaths. Each occurring within one and three years of the wedding. Each leaving the widow significantly wealthier than before.

The thought was an uncomfortable one, and I pushed it away, not because it was irrational but because it was the kind of thought that, once entertained, could not be un-entertained.

I had seen what happened to detectives who developed theories without evidence.

They became obsessed. They pursued shadows.

They compromised their careers and their reputations and, in some cases, their freedom, because an accusation against a person of rank without the evidence to support it was, in the eyes of the law and of society, a form of professional suicide.

But the thought would not leave. I sat at my desk, the Ashworth file open before me, and I began to assemble what I could.

The Viscount Pendleton was the simplest case.

He had died in March of 1882, at the age of forty-four, from cardiac failure.

He had a documented history of angina pectoris, a weak heart that his physician had been treating for years.

His death, while sudden, was not unexpected.

He had been confined to his rooms for months, and the servants spoke of his devoted wife, who nursed him tirelessly and whose grief at his passing was described by all who witnessed it as the most moving they had ever seen.