Chapter 1 #3
I stood, collected the Ashworth file, and walked to the records room at the back of the building.
The records room was a cavernous, poorly lit space filled with filing cabinets and bound ledgers that stretched back to the founding of the Metropolitan Police.
The air was thick with dust and the smell of old paper, and the clerk on duty, a young man named Hewitt who had the perpetual squint of someone who spent his days reading fine print by insufficient light, looked up with the resigned expression of a man who was accustomed to detectives arriving with requests that disrupted his carefully maintained systems.
"I need the files on two deaths," I said. "The first is the death of Viscount Arthur Pendleton, March 1882, Hampshire. The second is the death of Henry Aldous Ravenscroft, March 1885, Cheshire."
Hewitt's squint intensified. "Those aren't Metropolitan Police cases, sir. Hampshire and Cheshire would be county matters."
"I'm aware of that. I need the coroner's reports, the inquest records, and any correspondence with the local constabulary that found its way to the Yard."
Hewitt disappeared into the stacks. I waited, leaning against the counter, thinking about the Dowager Countess.
The newspaper sketch had given me a face to attach to the pattern, and the face was beautiful, which was neither here nor there but which added a layer of complexity to the situation that I did not need.
Beauty, in my experience, was a tool, and a woman who possessed it in the quantity that Cecilia Blackwood apparently did was a woman who had learned to wield it.
I had known beautiful women before, in the context of investigations.
They were not, as a class, more or less deceptive than plain ones, but they were more effective, because beauty disarmed the people it was directed against. It created a presumption of innocence that had nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with the human inclination to believe that beautiful things were also good.
Hewitt returned with two files, thin ones, tied with ribbon that had faded from red to a dull ochre.
The Pendleton file contained the coroner's report, which was brief and unequivocal.
Death by cardiac failure, consistent with pre-existing angina pectoris.
No suspicious circumstances. The inquest had lasted half a day.
The verdict was natural causes. The Ravenscroft file was marginally more interesting.
The coroner's report described the cause of death as a broken neck sustained in a riding accident.
A wire had been found strung across the bridle path at approximately neck height.
The coroner noted that the wire appeared to have been placed deliberately, but concluded that it was most likely the work of poachers or a careless farmer.
No suspects had been identified. No arrests had been made. The verdict was accidental death.
I read the Ravenscroft report twice. A wire at neck height across a bridle path that a rider used regularly.
It was possible that this was an accident, the kind of careless, stupid hazard that occasionally appeared on country estates and occasionally killed people.
It was also possible that it was something else.
A man who rides alone at dawn, on a specific path, at a specific time, is a man whose habits can be observed, predicted, and exploited.
If someone wished to kill Henry Ravenscroft and make it look like an accident, this was precisely the method they would choose.
But who would wish to kill Henry Ravenscroft?
He was a wealthy man, but not a universally disliked one.
His business dealings were aggressive but not, so far as the file indicated, criminal.
He had no known enemies of the kind who would go to the trouble of stringing wire across a bridle path.
He did have a young, beautiful wife who stood to inherit the whole of his considerable estate.
I closed both files and returned them to Hewitt.
The pattern was there, stark and undeniable, but it was a pattern of circumstances, not of evidence.
Three marriages, three deaths, three inheritances.
The timing was suspicious. The methods were varied.
The widow was the common thread. But suspicion was not proof, and a pattern of circumstances was not a case.
I needed more. I needed the kind of evidence that could survive the scrutiny of a magistrate, the objections of a defence counsel, and the social and political pressure that would descend upon any investigation that threatened a countess.
I walked back to my desk with the weight of the Ashworth file in my hands and the weight of something else, something I could not yet name, settling in my chest. It was not excitement, exactly.
It was something more uncomfortable. The recognition of a problem that might be beyond my capacity to solve, combined with the equally uncomfortable recognition that I could not, in conscience, set it aside.
Three men were dead. If those deaths were not natural, if they were the work of a single hand, then the woman who owned that hand was the most dangerous criminal I had ever encountered, and she was protected by everything that I, as a detective of modest means and limited authority, was not.
I sat down at my desk, opened a fresh notebook, and began to write.
Names, dates, causes of death, inheritances.
The bare bones of a case that did not yet exist. Pendleton, 1882, heart failure, Hampshire estate, three thousand two hundred per annum.
Ravenscroft, 1885, riding accident, Manchester mills and investments, one hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
Ashworth, 1888, hepatic failure, earldom, Suffolk and Kent estates, personal assets estimated at seventy thousand pounds.
The total was staggering, a fortune accumulated over eight years through the simple, elegant mechanism of marriage and death.
Price glanced at my notebook. "What are you doing?"
"Reviewing the Ashworth estate," I said. "As instructed."
"Looks like more than a review to me, Aldric."
"Mind your own counterfeiting ring, Price."
He returned to his work, and I returned to mine, and outside the windows of Scotland Yard, the November rain began to fall, grey and steady, washing the streets of Whitehall in a manner that was, for the moment at least, the only thing in London that was clean.