Chapter 19 #3
Graves was quiet for a long time. The clock on his wall ticked.
Somewhere in the building, a door closed.
The sounds of the Yard filtered through the walls, the muted business of a police department processing the daily quota of human misfortune, and I sat in Graves's office and waited for his decision with the stillness of a man who has already decided what he will do if the answer is no.
"You understand," Graves said finally, "that if you pursue this and fail, it is not merely your career that is destroyed.
It is mine. I authorised the investigation.
The Home Office will hold me responsible.
The Commissioner will hold me responsible.
Every politician who has ever accepted an invitation to dine at Blackwood House will hold me responsible. "
"I understand."
"And if you succeed? If you actually build a case that leads to the arrest and prosecution of a countess dowager?
The scandal will be catastrophic. The newspapers will have a field day.
The aristocracy will close ranks. The physicians who signed death certificates without proper examination will be exposed.
The solicitors who looked the other way will be named.
The Yard will be portrayed as either incompetent for not noticing what was happening or ruthless for pursuing it.
Do you understand what you are asking me to authorise? "
"I am asking you to authorise an investigation into the deaths of three men, sir. Nothing more."
Graves looked at me. His eyes were the colour of wet slate, and in them I could see the struggle between the man he was and the man the system required him to be, the struggle between justice and self-preservation that defined every decision made in every government office in the city.
He was not a brave man. He was not a coward.
He was a professional, a man who had survived thirty years in an institution that rewarded caution and punished initiative, and the decision I was asking him to make was the kind of decision that institutions are designed to prevent.
"If you do this," he said, "you do it without the protection of this office.
I will authorise you to pursue the inquiry, but I will not provide resources, I will not assign additional officers, and I will not support you publicly if the investigation becomes politically sensitive.
You are on your own, Aldric. Do you understand? "
"I understand."
"I am not doing this because I believe you are right.
I am doing this because if I refuse, and you are right, and it comes out that I prevented a legitimate investigation, my career is finished anyway.
This way, at least, the responsibility is shared.
" He slid the memorandum back across the desk.
"You have one month, Aldric. One month to build a case that is strong enough to survive contact with the legal system.
If, at the end of that month, you do not have enough to present to a magistrate, the investigation is closed. Permanently. Is that clear?"
"Clear, sir."
I stood. I took the memorandum from his desk.
I walked out of Graves's office and through the corridors of the Yard and down the stairs to the street, and the spring air hit my face like a slap, cold and clean and full of the particular smell of London in March, a mixture of coal smoke, damp stone, and the indefinable scent of a city that never quite sleeps.
I stood on the pavement for a moment, breathing, feeling the memorandum in my breast pocket and the weight of what it represented pressing against my ribs.
One month. One month to build a case that would survive contact with the legal system. One month to translate suspicion into evidence, pattern into proof, and the private certainty of a compromised detective into something that a magistrate could accept and a jury could understand.
The first step was confrontation. I needed to face Cecilia with what I had and watch her reaction, because reaction, in my experience, was the one thing that even the most accomplished performer could not entirely control.
She would have answers prepared. She would have deflections and counter-accusations and performances of wounded bewilderment calibrated to the nearest degree.
But beneath the performance, if I watched closely enough, I might see the thing that no amount of rehearsal could conceal: the moment when the mask slipped and the machinery behind it was briefly, fatally visible.
I would go to her this evening. I would go to her rooms, and I would lay the documents on her desk and I would watch her face as she read them, and in that watching, I would find the truth, or I would find the confirmation that she was beyond the reach of truth, and either finding would be, in its way, an ending.
I spent the remainder of the day at my desk, organising the evidence, preparing the sequence of my presentation, rehearsing the questions I would ask and the responses I would make to the responses I expected her to give.
I ate nothing. I drank two cups of tea that went cold.
Sergeant Price stopped by my desk in the late afternoon and asked whether I was well, and I told him I was, and the lie was so transparent that I could see him recognising it and choosing not to challenge it, which was a kindness I did not deserve.
I left the Yard at half past six and walked through the darkening streets toward Westminster.
The evening was mild for March, the sky clearing after the morning's rain, and the gas lamps along the Embankment threw pools of amber light on the wet pavement.
I walked with the particular deliberation of a man who is delaying something he both desires and dreads, because I knew that the confrontation waiting at the end of my walk would change everything, and I was not yet certain that the change would be in my favour.
My rooms were dark when I arrived. I lit the lamp and built up the fire and sat in the chair beside the hearth, and I laid the documents on the table before me, arranged in the order in which I intended to present them, and I waited.
I was not waiting for Cecilia. I was waiting for myself, for the part of me that had been assembled over months of investigation and months of desire, the part that was detective and lover and accuser and fool all at once, to coalesce into something capable of walking through her door and saying the things that needed to be said.
The clock chimed eight. The clock chimed nine.
The fire burned. The documents lay on the table.
And I sat in my chair and felt, with a clarity that was almost painful, the shape of the thing I was about to do, the shape of a confrontation that had been building since November and that would, one way or another, come to its crisis tonight.
I had just reached for my coat when I heard the carriage on the street below.