Chapter 11 #2
I had not told anyone about December. About the interview at Blackwood House that had become something else.
About Cecilia's hands on my shirt buttons, her weight on my hips, her voice in my ear saying words that had rearranged the architecture of my self-respect.
The secrecy was its own prison. I could not confide in Price, because confiding in Price would mean admitting that I had compromised the investigation, and Price, for all his qualities, was a man who reported to Graves, and Graves was a man who reported to the Home Office, and the Home Office was not an institution that looked kindly upon detectives who slept with their suspects.
I threw the empty cup into a gutter and walked toward the railway station.
The January wind cut through my coat like a blade, and the fog was thickening, turning the gas lamps into blurred amber circles that floated above the pavement like will-o'-the-wisps.
Manchester in January was not a city that rewarded introspection.
It was a city of industry, of noise, of purpose.
The mills clattered and the trains whistled and the canals churned, and above it all the smoke hung like a pall, grey on grey, obscuring the sky and flattening the world into a study in monotone.
The train back to London was five hours.
Five hours in a second-class compartment with a woman who knitted continuously and a commercial traveller who snored with the commitment of a man who had perfected the art and a young clerk who spent the entire journey staring out the window with the vacant expression of someone who has been sent by his employer to a city he does not wish to visit and is counting the stations until he can return to whatever small life awaits him in whatever small town he calls home.
The compartment was overheated and smelled of lamp oil and damp wool, and the window was fogged with condensation, and periodically the clerk wiped a clearing in the glass with his handkerchief and stared through it at the darkening countryside as though the answer to some unspoken question might be found in the fields and hedgerows of the Home Counties.
I stared out the window at the darkening countryside, the bare fields, the occasional village with its church spire poking through the mist, and I thought about the geometry of deception.
Three false trails. Each had the surface characteristics of a genuine lead: a name, a location, a specific grievance or connection.
Each had required effort to pursue: travel, interviews, record searches.
Each had produced enough data to seem productive while yielding nothing of substance.
And each had originated from the same source.
Cecilia had not handed me these leads directly.
She had mentioned them in passing, during conversation, with the casual air of a woman who had nothing to hide and was merely trying to be helpful.
A name dropped here. A suggestion offered there.
Always within the context of cooperation, of transparency, of a widow who wanted to assist the investigation into her husband's death.
The precision of it was what alarmed me.
A less intelligent woman would have been obvious.
She would have pushed too hard, or the leads would have been too convenient, or the trail would have led somewhere so obviously wrong that even a distracted detective would have recognised the manipulation.
But Cecilia was not less intelligent. Cecilia was, by any measure I could apply, the most intelligent person I had ever investigated.
The leads she had provided were not obviously false.
They were plausible. They were the kinds of leads a genuine investigation might uncover.
And they had consumed three weeks of my time and produced precisely nothing.
I pulled out my notebook and turned to a clean page. At the top, I wrote: "What do I actually know?"
I stared at the question for a long time.
The train rocked beneath me, and the knitting needles clicked, and the commercial traveller snored, and the countryside darkened from grey to black, and I tried to strip away everything I had been told and everything I had assumed and reduce the case to its irreducible facts.
The woman across from me glanced up from her knitting periodically, her eyes sharp and curious in the way of women who notice everything and say nothing.
I wondered what she saw: a man in a rumpled suit, gripping a notebook, staring at a page as though the words on it might rearrange themselves into meaning.
I wondered whether she recognised the look of a man who is losing something he cannot name.
Three marriages. Three deaths. One widow.
The first marriage: Cecilia Margaret Blackwood (née Blackwell) to Arthur Geoffrey Pendleton, Viscount Pendleton, June 1880.
Pendleton died of heart failure, 14 March 1882.
Cecilia inherited Pendleton Hall, the Mount Street townhouse, approximately ￡11,000 in personal assets, and an annual income of ￡3,200.
The second marriage: Cecilia to Henry Aldous Ravenscroft, April 1883. Ravenscroft died following a riding accident, 17 March 1885. Cecilia inherited the Manchester mills, railway investments, cash and securities totalling approximately ￡120,000, and a larger London residence.
The third marriage: Cecilia to Richard Edmund Ashworth, 7th Earl of Ashworth, September 1885.
Ashworth died of hepatic failure following gastric illness, 2 June 1888.
Cecilia inherited the title of Countess Dowager, Blackwood House in Mayfair, two country estates, combined annual income of approximately ￡8,000, and personal assets estimated at ￡70,000.
I knew the names. I knew the dates. I knew the financial outcomes.
What I did not know was how any of the deaths had been accomplished, or whether they had been accomplished at all.
The pattern was suggestive. Three deaths, three inheritances, the mathematical elegance of ascent through marriage.
But pattern was not proof. Suspicion was not evidence.
And the woman at the centre of the pattern had just spent three weeks demonstrating, with surgical precision, that she could control the direction of my investigation without my awareness.
The knitting woman glanced at me. I realised I had been gripping the notebook so hard that my knuckles were white.
I loosened my grip and looked out the window again.
We were passing through the outskirts of London now, the gaslights of the suburbs appearing and disappearing in the fog like the eyes of animals in a forest. In an hour I would be back at my rooms, back at my desk, back at the wall where the files were pinned, and I would have to decide what to do next.
The honest answer was that I did not know what to do next.
Every investigative avenue I had pursued had been contaminated.
The false leads had not merely wasted my time; they had poisoned my judgment.
I could no longer trust any piece of information that had come to me through Cecilia, directly or indirectly.
And since Cecilia had been the source of nearly every piece of information I possessed, the contamination was nearly total.
I was left with the pattern itself, the bare framework of dates and names and sums, and the pattern, however suggestive, was not enough.
I closed the notebook and leaned my head against the window.
The glass was cold against my temple, and the vibration of the train travelled through it and into my skull, a low rhythmic hum that was almost soothing.
I thought about December. I thought about her bedroom, the white linen, the firelight, the specific quality of her voice when she said my name.
I thought about her hands on my chest, her weight on my hips, the way she had looked at me with those grey eyes that appeared warm and sympathetic while calculating, and I understood, with the clarity that comes only from exhaustion, that I could not think about this case without thinking about her, and I could not think about her without wanting her, and the wanting and the investigating had become so thoroughly entangled that I could no longer distinguish one from the other.
That was the cruelest part of the deception. Not the false leads. Not the wasted weeks. The cruelest part was that she had made it impossible for me to think clearly about her, and she had done it deliberately, and she had done it by giving me exactly what I wanted.
I arrived at my rooms at half past ten. The streets were nearly empty, the gas lamps at their lowest, and the only sound was the distant clatter of a night cart collecting refuse from the mews behind Great Scotland Yard.
Mrs. Parfitt had left a tray with bread and cheese and a pot of tea that had long since gone cold.
I ate the bread and cheese standing at the window and did not bother with the tea.
The bread was stale. The cheese was sharp.
Neither tasted of anything except the exhaustion that coated my tongue like ash.
The files on my wall looked different now.
They looked thin. Three marriages, three deaths, and between the dates and the names, a vast emptiness where evidence should have been.
I sat at my desk and opened a fresh page in my notebook and wrote, at the top: "Who is feeding me?"