Chapter 24
The Solicitor's Apology
I arrived at Hartwell's offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields at precisely four o'clock in the afternoon, having sent word the previous day that I wished to discuss the Ashworth estate matters that required his personal attention.
The message was calibrated to produce a specific effect: it conveyed urgency without alarm, suggested business as usual while hinting at the possibility of irregularity, and, most importantly, gave Hartwell a full twenty-four hours to worry.
A man who is given time to worry is a man who will exhaust himself with anticipation, and an exhausted man is a pliable man, and pliability was precisely what I required from Sir William Hartwell on this particular afternoon.
The offices occupied the second and third floors of a narrow building on the eastern side of the Fields, a building that had the particular quality of legal London, that atmosphere of aged wood and paper and the faint, persistent smell of ink that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves.
I was shown to Hartwell's private chamber by a clerk who looked at me with the respectful wariness that all of Hartwell's clerks had developed over the years, the understanding that the Countess Dowager of Ashworth was a woman who inspired respect and who also, in some undefined way, inspired a caution that respect alone could not explain.
Hartwell was standing by the window when I entered, and the fact that he was standing rather than seated told me everything I needed to know about his state of mind.
A man at ease receives his visitors from the comfort of his chair.
A man who is standing by the window is a man who needs the distance that standing provides, the physical space between himself and the person who has come to see him, and the window itself is a prop, something to look at when the conversation becomes unbearable and a focus for the eyes when meeting the gaze of one's visitor becomes impossible.
"Lady Ashworth." He turned from the window as I entered, and his smile was the smile of a man who had practised it in a mirror, a careful arrangement of the facial muscles that conveyed warmth without conviction and welcome without sincerity.
"What a pleasure. Please, do sit down. I shall ring for tea. "
"No tea, thank you, Sir William. I shall not be staying long."
The refusal of tea was another calculated move.
Tea was a ritual, a mechanism for filling silence and creating the illusion of comfort, and I did not want Hartwell to be comfortable.
I wanted him to be exactly as uncomfortable as he was, standing by his window with his rehearsed smile and his trembling hands, and I wanted the discomfort to deepen, not to be softened by the civilising influence of a tea service.
He sat down behind his desk, and I sat in the chair opposite, and the desk was between us, a physical barrier that Hartwell had positioned himself behind with the instinct of a man who needed something between himself and the world.
His desk was immaculate, as it always was, the papers arranged in neat piles, the inkstand polished, the blotter fresh.
Hartwell was a meticulous man in his professional environment, a man who maintained order because order was the only defence he had against the chaos of his own conscience, and the immaculacy of the desk was, I knew, a performance, a surface beneath which the disorder lurked, unseen but not unfelt.
"You mentioned estate matters," Hartwell said, and his voice was steady, which was itself an achievement, because the voice of a frightened man is the first thing to betray him, and Hartwell was frightened.
I could read it in the way he sat, slightly forward in his chair, as though preparing to rise, and in the way his hands rested on the desk, fingers interlaced, the knuckles white with the pressure of his own grip.
"I confess I am not aware of any pressing matters that require your personal attention.
The accounts are in order. The Suffolk tenants have been managed. The—"
"Sir William." I spoke quietly, but the quiet was a weapon, because it forced him to stop and listen and lean toward me, and the leaning was an act of submission that he performed without being aware of it. "I am not here about the estate."
The silence that followed was of the kind that I had learned, from my mother, to appreciate and deploy.
Vivienne had been a master of silence, understanding, as few people do, that silence is not the absence of communication but its most concentrated form.
A silence, properly timed, says more than any sentence, because a sentence can be deflected, argued with, reinterpreted, but a silence simply exists, filling the space between two people with a weight that is inescapable and a meaning that is determined entirely by the listener's own fears.
I let the silence sit for five seconds. Five seconds is long enough to be felt but not long enough to be acknowledged, a duration that exists in the uncomfortable borderland between social convention and interpersonal threat.
"I see," said Hartwell. He did not see. He was fishing, casting about for the meaning of my words, and the fishing was visible in the movement of his eyes, which went to the window, to the desk, to the door, to my face, and then away again, as though my face were too dangerous to hold for more than a moment.
"I have heard," I said, "that you have been having conversations with a detective inspector from Scotland Yard. A man named Aldric."
The colour drained from Hartwell's face.
The effect was immediate and dramatic, the sudden pallor of a man whose worst fear has just been confirmed, and it was so complete, so absolute, that for a moment he appeared to be lit from within, as though the blood beneath his skin had been replaced by something cold and luminous.
His mouth opened. No words came. His hands tightened on each other until the knuckles were no longer white but grey, the grey of a man whose circulation has been interrupted by terror.
"I—" he began, and stopped, and began again. "I am not at liberty to discuss—"
"You are not at liberty." I allowed the repetition to carry the full weight of its absurdity.
"Sir William. You have been my solicitor for nine years.
In that time, you have handled every aspect of my financial and legal affairs.
You have prepared my husband's will. You have managed the transfer of his properties.
You have advised me on investments, on tenant disputes, on the terms of the marriage settlement.
You have been, in every meaningful sense, the keeper of my secrets.
" I paused. "And now you tell me you are not at liberty to discuss a conversation you had with a police detective about those very secrets? "
Hartwell's tongue touched his lips. The gesture was involuntary, the physical manifestation of a mind that had run out of words and was searching for new ones in a landscape that had been stripped bare by fear.
"Lady Ashworth, I—"
"I know what you told him, Sir William. I know about the documents.
The physician's letters. The insurance policy.
The correspondence with Dr. Hale." I recited the list with the calm precision of a woman reading an inventory, and with each item, Hartwell's composure deteriorated further, his shoulders drawing inward, his spine curving, his body collapsing around the vacuum of his own terror.
"I know that you went to his rooms and spent nearly two hours there.
I know that you gave him copies of documents that were prepared in these very offices, on this very desk, by clerks who were following your instructions.
" I leaned forward, just slightly, just enough to reduce the distance between us by a matter of inches.
"And I know that you did this because you were frightened of me, and you believed that Inspector Aldric could protect you from the thing you feared. Is that not so?"
Hartwell made a sound. It was not a word. It was something more primitive, a vocalisation of distress that had its origins in the animal part of the brain, the part that governs flight and surrender, and it communicated, more eloquently than any sentence could have done, the extent of his undoing.
"I am a weak man," he said, and the admission came out in a rush, as though it had been building inside him for weeks and had finally found the crack through which to escape.
"I have always been a weak man. I have known about the—the pattern—for years, and I did nothing, because doing nothing was easier than doing something, and because the consequences of speaking were more immediate than the consequences of silence, and I chose the consequences I could see over the consequences I could not.
I was wrong. I know I was wrong. I have been wrong since the beginning, since the first death, since the very first time I looked at the circumstances and understood what they meant and chose not to understand what I understood. "
He stopped. His breathing was ragged, the breathing of a man who has just run a great distance, and his eyes were wet, not with tears, not yet, but with the preliminary moisture that precedes weeping, the body's preparation for a release that the mind has not yet authorised.
"And now?" I asked. My voice was calm. My hands were still.
My expression was one of patient attention, the expression of a woman who is listening to a confession and who has heard confessions before and who understands that the confession is not the end of the process but merely a stage in it, a stage that must be managed and directed and, ultimately, controlled.