Chapter 22 #4
Penelope was a problem I could solve. Sebastian was a problem I could manage.
Hartwell was a problem I could eliminate, when the time came, through methods that were already taking shape in the careful architecture of my planning.
But the tremor was not a problem. It was a symptom, and the symptom was of something I could not identify and could not treat, something that had been introduced into the mechanism by an encounter that had not gone according to plan and that had produced, in its aftermath, a residue that my usual methods of elimination could not address.
The pause. The one second before I had answered his question.
The gap in the machinery during which I had felt something that was not calculation and not performance and not any of the things I was equipped to process.
The pause was still with me. It was with me now, at the window, in the quiet house, as I surveyed the terrain of the battle to come and assessed the forces at my disposal.
It was a hairline fracture in the mechanism, invisible to anyone who was not looking for it, but I was looking for it, because I could feel it, and feeling it was a new experience, and new experiences, in a life constructed around the avoidance of surprise, were dangerous.
I turned from the window and returned to my desk.
I opened the drawer and removed the leather-bound diary, the record of my work, and I held it in my hands and felt its weight.
The diary was safe. The evidence it contained was known only to me.
The locked cabinet in the stillroom was also safe; I had checked it this morning, and the arsenic compounds were intact, the digitalis was intact, the pharmacological reference was intact.
The physical evidence of my crimes existed, and it existed in places that no one but me could access.
The investigation, formal and authorised though it was, was still dependent on human witnesses and human testimony, and human witnesses and human testimony were, as I had demonstrated repeatedly over the past four months, subject to manipulation, misdirection, and the systematic erosion of credibility.
Sebastian had the documents. He had the authorisation.
He had the determination. But he also had the compromise, the weakness, the desire that I had cultivated and exploited and that would, in the end, prevent him from acting on what he knew.
I was not yet safe. But I was not yet defeated. And the space between safety and defeat, the space in which the battle would be fought, was the space in which I operated most effectively, the space of uncertainty and manoeuvre and the relentless, patient accumulation of advantage.
I returned the diary to the drawer. I locked the drawer.
I placed the key in its usual position inside the lining of my reticule.
Then I sat at my desk and began to plan the next phase of the operation, which was the elimination of Sir William Hartwell, and the method of elimination, which was already forming in my mind with the crystalline clarity that characterised my best strategic thinking, was not, as one might expect, a physical act but a legal one, a financial one, a systematic dismantling of the man's credibility and reputation that would render his testimony worthless and his documents inadmissible, and the dismantling would be so thorough, so methodical, so elegant in its execution, that when it was complete, no one would remember that Hartwell had ever been a threat at all.
And if the dismantling proved insufficient, if Hartwell's testimony survived the assault on his credibility and found its way into a courtroom, there was always the final option, the option I employed only when all other options had failed, the option that was as simple as it was irrevocable and that would, once implemented, eliminate not only the witness but the evidence itself.
The fire burned. The clock ticked. The house settled into the quiet of the evening, the particular silence of a large building in which only a few rooms were occupied and the occupants of those rooms were each, in their own way, preparing for the battles that the morning would bring.
I sat at my desk and worked, and the work was the work of destruction and preservation, the destruction of my enemies and the preservation of myself, and the precision of the work was a comfort, because precision was the one thing in my life that had never failed me, and I trusted it as I trusted nothing else, and the trust, in a world of unreliable emotions and unreliable people, was the closest thing to certainty that I possessed.
Outside, the rain began again, a fine, persistent drizzle that blurred the gas lamps and slicked the pavement and carried, on its damp breath, the scent of the river and the approaching spring.
The season was turning. The weather was shifting.
And somewhere in the dark streets of London, the machinery of the investigation was grinding forward, and the machinery of my defence was grinding in opposition, and the collision of the two machineries was coming, and when it came, it would be, I knew, the most dangerous moment of my life.
I was ready. I was always ready. But readiness, I was beginning to understand, was not the same as safety, and the distance between the two was the distance that defined everything.