Chapter 15 #2
"Aldric. I am going to say this once, and I am going to say it plainly.
The Earl of Ashworth was a peer of the realm.
His widow is a countess dowager. The family's solicitor is Sir William Hartwell, whose firm has handled the legal affairs of half the aristocracy in this city.
You are suggesting, without evidence, without the support of a single medical authority, and without the authorisation of this office, that this woman has committed not one but three murders.
Do you understand what would happen if you were to pursue this line of inquiry publicly? "
"I understand the risks, sir."
"You do not. Or you would not be sitting in this chair with that expression on your face.
" He leaned back, and his chair creaked beneath him.
"If you pursue this, and you are wrong, you will be dismissed.
Not reassigned. Not reprimanded. Dismissed.
Without pension, without reference, without the possibility of employment in any constabulary or investigative capacity in the United Kingdom.
You will be finished, Aldric. And if you are right, if by some miracle you are right, the consequences will be worse.
Do you imagine that the Home Office wants to prosecute a countess for murder?
Do you imagine the press will treat it as a story about justice?
It will be a scandal. It will implicate physicians who signed death certificates without examination, solicitors who managed estates without asking questions, and a police force that failed to notice what was happening under its nose.
Every institution that touched this case will be dragged through the mud, and you will be the man who threw the first handful. "
I absorbed this in silence. He was not wrong.
The analysis was cold and political and stripped of every consideration of justice or truth, and it was entirely correct.
The system protected its own. The system protected the powerful.
The system did not exist to serve the dead or to comfort the living; it existed to perpetuate itself, and any force that threatened its continuity, no matter how justified, would be crushed.
"I am not asking you to abandon your instincts, Aldric.
I am asking you to subordinate them to the requirements of this department.
You have other cases. You have duties. You have a professional reputation that, until recently, was one of the finest in the Yard.
I suggest you consider whether you wish to preserve it. "
The meeting lasted another ten minutes. Graves spoke about caseloads and priorities and the importance of maintaining the trust of one's superiors.
I heard him. I understood every word. I nodded at the appropriate intervals and left his office with the same expression I had entered it, which was no expression at all, and I returned to my desk, and I sat there for the remainder of the morning, staring at the green wall and feeling the particular quality of ruin that comes not from a single catastrophic event but from the slow, grinding accumulation of small failures, each one insufficient to destroy a man on its own but collectively forming a weight that no spine can bear.
Price approached me at lunchtime. He placed a cup of tea on my desk without being asked, which was his way of expressing concern, and he stood beside my chair for a moment before speaking.
"You look like hell, Sebastian."
"Thank you, Price."
"I mean it. You look like you haven't slept in a week. Your collar is frayed. You missed the briefing on the Blackfriars thefts yesterday, and you never miss briefings." He lowered his voice. "Is it the Ashworth woman?"
I looked at him. Price's face was open and worried, the face of a man who had no talent for subtlety but an abundance of genuine goodwill.
He did not know the half of it. He knew that I had been spending time on a case that was officially closed, and he knew that I had been distracted and unreliable for months, and he suspected, perhaps, that the distraction was connected to a woman, because distraction in his experience was almost always connected to a woman, but he did not know the extent of my compromise, and he could not have imagined it.
"It is complicated," I said.
"It doesn't have to be." He pulled up a chair and sat down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
"I've been here longer than you, Aldric.
Not by much, but long enough to have seen good men burn themselves out on a single case.
There was an inspector named Collier, back in eighty-four, who became convinced that a string of warehouse fires in the docks was the work of a single arsonist. Spent six months on it.
Lost his wife over it. Lost his posting.
And when they finally caught the man responsible, it turned out to be a fifteen-year-old boy with a grudge against his employer, not the criminal mastermind Collier had spent half a year constructing in his head.
The case had become the man's identity, and when it collapsed, the man collapsed with it. "
"I am not Inspector Collier."
"No. But you are heading in the same direction." He paused. "Take some leave. A week, two weeks. Go to the country. Sleep. Eat properly. Come back with a clear head and decide whether this case is worth what it is costing you."
I thanked him. I drank the tea, which had gone cold.
I told him I would consider it. I did not consider it.
Price returned to his desk, and I sat at mine, and the office resumed its rhythms around us, the clatter of typewriters and the murmured conversations and the occasional bark of laughter from somewhere near the back, where the younger officers congregated during slow hours.
I reached for the burglary file again and opened it to the page I had been staring at all morning, and I forced myself to read the words, one by one, as though they were the words of a language I was only just learning.
The necklace was described in detail: a gold chain set with seventeen small emeralds, valued at forty pounds, stolen from the dressing table of one Mrs. Eleanor Poole during a dinner party on the evening of the twenty-eighth of January.
The suspect was a housemaid named Betsy Granger, age twenty-two, who had been in service with the Pooles for three months and who had left her position without notice on the morning after the theft.
A straightforward case. A routine case. The kind of case I could have closed in a week, once upon a time, before December, before Blackwood House, before a woman with grey eyes and auburn hair had reached into the machinery of my professional life and rearranged its gears until nothing ran the way it was supposed to.
I sat at my desk until the office emptied, until the gas lamps were extinguished and the corridors filled with the particular silence of a government building at night, and then I gathered my coat and my hat and walked out into the February dark.
London in February is a study in the management of misery.
The days are short and the light is poor, a thin grey effluence that seeps from the sky as though the heavens themselves are leaking.
The fog, which in autumn is merely atmospheric, becomes in winter something more oppressive, a physical presence that presses against the skin and fills the lungs with the taste of coal smoke and damp wool.
I walked from Whitehall to my rooms in Westminster, a distance of perhaps a mile, and by the time I reached my front door I was wet through and cold to the bone and in a frame of mind that I can only describe as fugitive, as though I were not walking home but fleeing something I could not name.
My rooms were on the second floor of a narrow house in a street that had once been respectable and was now in the slow, genteel process of becoming shabby.
The landlady, Mrs. Parfitt, was a widow of indeterminate age who took in respectable gentlemen and asked no questions about their hours or their habits.
She left a tray outside my door each evening at seven, and she collected it each morning at eight, and in the fifteen months I had lodged with her we had exchanged perhaps forty sentences.
It was an arrangement that suited me. I required solitude the way other men require company, not because I valued it but because I had never learned to do without it.
I lit the lamp beside my door and climbed the stairs.
The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and furniture polish, the particular scent of English domesticity that I found at once comforting and suffocating.
My rooms were cold when I entered them. The fire had burned down to ash.
I knelt to rebuild it, striking matches against the wall until one caught, holding it to the kindling until the flames took hold, and then I sat back on my heels and watched the fire grow and felt, for a moment, something that might have been peace, except that peace requires a stillness of mind that I had lost somewhere between the drawing room of Blackwood House and the private rooms of the Ouroboros Club.
I found the note on my pillow.
It had not been there when I left that morning.
I was certain of this, because I made my bed with military precision each day and would have noticed a foreign object on my pillow the way a surgeon notices a misplaced instrument.
Someone had entered my rooms. Someone had placed it there between the hours of eight in the morning and seven in the evening, during the interval when Mrs. Parfitt collected my breakfast tray, and I returned from the Yard.
The thought should have alarmed me. Instead, it filled me with a cold recognition, the recognition of a hand I could not see but could feel, the way one feels a gaze upon one's back in a dark street.