Chapter 2 #3
I stood at the window for several minutes, allowing my face to settle into its natural expression, which is, I am told, unreadable.
My mother once said that my resting face resembled a closed door, and she meant it as a compliment.
In public, I perform. In private, I do not bother.
The transition from one state to the other is instantaneous and complete, like a knife being sheathed.
So. Inspector Sebastian Aldric. He was not what I had expected.
When my sources had told me that a detective had been assigned to the review, I had anticipated the usual type: a man of middle years, moderate intelligence, limited imagination, the kind of plodding, methodical investigator who could be managed with a few well-placed tears and a carefully modulated expression of injured dignity.
The men who came to investigate the deaths of aristocrats were, almost without exception, men who had been selected for their willingness to find nothing and their ability to write reports that confirmed the nothing they had found.
The system protected its own, and the system protected the aristocracy, and the men who served the system understood both protections and conducted themselves accordingly.
Aldric was different. The questions he had asked were not the questions of a man going through the motions.
The neuropathy. The rapidity of the hepatic failure.
He had identified the same features of the case that I had identified when planning the method, and he had identified them for the same reason: because they were the features that did not quite fit, the details that a more perceptive physician might have questioned and that a less perceptive detective would have overlooked.
He had come to my house prepared, informed, and with a line of inquiry that was more sophisticated than I had anticipated.
This was a problem. Not an insurmountable one, but a problem.
I turned from the window and walked to the sideboard, where I poured myself a glass of sherry. The sherry was excellent, an amontillado that Richard had purchased by the case from a dealer in Jerez, and I drank it slowly, allowing the warmth to spread through my chest while I considered my options.
The simplest solution was to eliminate him.
A traffic accident, a robbery in a dark alley, a fall from a convenient height.
London was full of hazards, and a detective who spent his days in the rougher districts of the city was, statistically, more likely than most to encounter one.
The death of a police inspector would attract attention, but not the kind of attention that would lead to me.
Aldric was investigating the death of an earl, not the activities of a countess, and if he were to die in the course of his duties, the case would be reassigned to a less capable detective, and the matter would be closed with the same administrative thoroughness that had closed it before.
But I did not want to kill him. The realisation surprised me, because I could not identify its source.
I had killed three men without hesitation, without regret, without the slightest disturbance of my composure.
The act of killing was, for me, a practical matter, a means to an end, no more morally significant than pruning a rose bush or discarding a garment that no longer fit.
I did not enjoy it, but I did not shrink from it either, and the decision to take a life was one that I made with the same cool calculation that I brought to every other strategic decision.
But there was something about Aldric that made me hesitate, and the hesitation was itself a source of unease, because hesitation was not a quality I cultivated.
He had seen something in my drawing room, something behind the performance, and instead of being frightened by this, I was intrigued.
In my experience, people did not see behind my performance.
They saw the performance itself, and they admired it, or sympathised with it, or were bored by it, but they did not look past it.
Aldric had looked past it. Not entirely, not with certainty, but with enough perception to register that what he was seeing might not be what I was showing him.
This made him dangerous. It also made him interesting, and the interest was not strategic.
I could not identify any practical benefit to my fascination with a detective who might, if allowed to continue his investigation, uncover the truth about Richard's death and, by extension, about the deaths that preceded it.
The interest was personal, and I did not have personal interests.
I had strategic interests, practical interests, the calculated appetites of a woman who viewed the world as a chessboard and its inhabitants as pieces.
Personal interest was a weakness, a door through which emotion could enter and disrupt the clean, orderly operation of my intelligence.
I finished my sherry and set down the glass.
In the hallway, I could hear Edmund moving about, his footsteps uneven and uncertain as he made his way from the morning room to the staircase, and the sound of him produced in me the familiar tightening of possessive protectiveness that was the closest I came to feeling.
Edmund was safe. Edmund would always be safe.
Whatever happened with Aldric, whatever course the investigation took, Edmund was not a variable that anyone could manipulate, because no one outside this house understood him well enough to use him, and I would not permit anyone inside this house to try.
I walked to my study and sat at my desk, where I kept the small leather-bound notebook in which I recorded my strategic observations.
I opened it to a fresh page and wrote: Inspector S.
Aldric, CID, Scotland Yard. Age, approximately thirty-four.
Unmarried. Self-made, not gentleman class.
Intelligent, methodical, perceptive. Has reviewed physician's notes and identified anomalies.
Aware of previous marriages. Not yet aware of pattern as pattern, but moving toward it.
Dangerous? Potentially. To be monitored. Countermeasures to be developed.
I closed the notebook and sat in the quiet of my study, and I allowed myself, for the first time in longer than I could remember, to feel something that was not calculation and not performance and not the possessive vigilance that I directed toward Edmund.
It was a faint sensation, barely perceptible, like the first tremor of an earthquake that might amount to nothing or might bring down the entire structure of my carefully constructed life.
It was interest. It was curiosity. It was the unprecedented, irrational desire to know more about the man who had stood in my drawing room and looked at me as though he were reading a book whose ending he had already guessed.
I did not like it. I did not understand it. I filed it away, in the mental compartment where I kept the things I could not explain, and I turned my attention to more practical matters.
Hartwell. I needed to speak to Hartwell.
My solicitor knew more about the Earl's finances, the disposition of the estate, and the particulars of the legal arrangements than anyone else alive, and if Aldric was as thorough as I suspected, he would eventually arrive at Hartwell's door.
Hartwell was weak. He would crumble under pressure, not because he wished to betray me but because his conscience, such as it was, would not bear the weight of what he knew.
I needed to assess the risk he posed and take steps to manage it.
I rose from my desk and went to find Edmund, who was in the morning room, folding his paper into increasingly elaborate shapes and humming a tune that I did not recognise.
He looked up when I entered, his face brightening with the uncomplicated pleasure that he always showed when he saw me, and I felt the familiar possessive surge that was the closest thing I had to love.
"Hello, Cecilia. That man was here a long time. Was he nice? I think he looked nice."
"He was very polite, darling. He had some questions about Richard."
"About Richard being dead?"
"Yes."
Edmund considered this, his brow furrowing with the effort of comprehension. "Richard was nice sometimes. He gave me a shilling for my birthday. But he was cross a lot, near the end. Do you think that's because he was poorly?"
"Yes, darling. I think it was."
Edmund nodded, satisfied. He returned to his paper folding, and I stood in the doorway watching him, and I thought about Aldric, and about Hartwell, and about the small, unprecedented flicker of interest that I had felt in my study and that I could not quite extinguish.
The game was not yet lost. But it had become considerably more interesting.