Chapter 25 #2
"Good." Graves picked up his pen. The gesture was a dismissal, and it was also a warning, and it was also, beneath both of these things, something that might, if I were in a charitable frame of mind, have been interpreted as concern, the concern of a superior who does not want to see a capable subordinate destroy himself in pursuit of a case that cannot be won.
But I was not in a charitable frame of mind.
I left Graves's office and went directly to Bedford Square.
The journey took forty minutes by hansom cab, through streets that were crowded with the mid-morning traffic of commercial London, and during the journey I sat in the cab with my hands on my knees and my eyes fixed on the passing buildings, and I did not think, because thinking required a clarity of mind that I did not currently possess, and I knew, from experience, that the clarity would return if I allowed myself to be still and patient and to wait for the turbulence of the morning to settle into something more manageable.
Hartwell's house was a narrow, four-storey building of the kind that lined the squares of Bloomsbury, brick-faced and dignified and slightly shabby, the kind of house that a successful solicitor might have purchased thirty years ago and that had since been maintained with the careful but insufficient attention of a man whose income had not kept pace with his aspirations.
A constable was stationed at the front door, a young man with a fresh face and an uncertain manner who looked relieved when I identified myself and asked to inspect the scene.
The study was on the first floor, at the back of the house, a room that faced onto a small garden that was neat but neglected, the beds weeded but unmulched, the lawn mown but not recently.
Hartwell was not there. His body had been removed to the mortuary at nine o'clock that morning, in preparation for the inquest, which would be held within the week.
The room was as he had left it, or as it had been left for the police to find, which was not necessarily the same thing: the chair behind the desk, angled slightly to one side as though the sitter had slumped; the brandy decanter on the sideboard, still three-quarters full; the brandy glass, empty, on the desk beside an inkstand and a stack of legal papers; and, on the desk, open and face-up, the note.
I read the note. It was written on the stationery of Hartwell's firm, the cream-coloured paper with the embossed letterhead that I had seen on every document he had ever given me, and the handwriting was his, or appeared to be his, with the same slightly angular letterforms and the same tendency to dot the i's too high.
The text was brief, four sentences, and it expressed regret over unspecified business difficulties and personal shame and a sense that the writer had "failed in every duty" and could not "continue under the weight of my own failures.
" The language was formal, legalistic, the language of a man who had spent thirty years constructing sentences that conveyed meaning without revealing emotion, and the formality was consistent with Hartwell's character and temperament, and the consistency was the most damning thing about the note, because it was too consistent, too perfectly aligned with what one would expect from a man of Hartwell's disposition, and perfection, in my experience, was the signature of fabrication.
I examined the room with the meticulous attention I brought to every crime scene, noting the position of the furniture, the arrangement of the papers on the desk, the state of the brandy decanter and glass.
The glass was clean, washed and dried, with no visible residue.
The decanter showed no signs of tampering, the stopper fitting snugly, the amber liquid inside undisturbed.
The sideboard was dusted, the surface clean except for a faint ring where the decanter normally sat, and the ring was consistent with long-term placement rather than recent movement.
The inkstand was full. The pen was in its holder.
The stack of papers on the desk was neat and ordered, the work of a man who had been arranging his affairs, or whose affairs had been arranged for him.
I opened the desk drawer. The drawer contained personal papers, letters, receipts, the accumulated detritus of a professional life, and among the papers, folded once and placed in a position where it would be found by anyone searching the drawer, was the note.
Or rather, a copy of the note, because the note on the desk was presumably the original, or the original was in the drawer and the one on the desk was a copy, and the duplication itself was suspicious, because suicide notes are typically singular, written once and left in a prominent position, not produced in multiple copies and distributed throughout the scene as though to ensure their discovery.
I checked the laudanum bottle. It was on the desk, beside the note, a small brown glass bottle with a plain paper label that read, in the spidery hand of an apothecary, "Laudanum.
For external use only." The bottle was empty.
The stopper was off. There were no fingerprints visible on the glass, which was itself suspicious, because a man who had just drunk the contents of a bottle would presumably leave prints on the bottle, and the absence of prints suggested that the bottle had been wiped, and the wiping suggested that the bottle had been handled by someone who did not wish to leave evidence of their handling.
I made notes. I measured distances and angles.
I recorded the position of every object in the room with the pedantic precision that my colleagues mocked and that I had long since stopped defending, because the precision was not pedantry but discipline, and discipline was the only thing that stood between a detective and the chaos of his own mind.
When I had finished, I had four pages of notes and no evidence of foul play that would survive contact with a coroner or a magistrate.
Everything was consistent with suicide. Everything was too consistent with suicide.
And the too-consistency was itself a pattern, a pattern that I recognised from the other cases, the other deaths, the other crime scenes that had been staged with the same meticulous attention to detail and the same absence of visible anomaly.
I left the house and stood on the pavement in the weak spring sunlight and looked up at the blank windows of Hartwell's study and thought about Cecilia.
She had been here. I did not know when, and I did not know how, but I knew she had been here, because the scene had her signature on it, the same signature that I had been learning to read for four months, the same attention to detail, the same control of every variable, the same ability to produce a death that looked like something other than what it was.
Hartwell had spoken to me. Hartwell had given me documents.
Hartwell had agreed to testify. And now Hartwell was dead, and his testimony was silenced, and his evidence was compromised, and the case I had built on the foundation of his cooperation was collapsing into rubble.
I returned to Scotland Yard and went to the file room and pulled everything I had on the Blackwood case.
The file was substantial, four inches of paper accumulated over four months of investigation, and it contained the physician's letters, the insurance policy, the correspondence with Dr. Hale, the witness statements from the Earl's servants, the transcript of my interviews with the Viscount's former acquaintances, the notes on Ravenscroft's business associates, and the summary memorandum that I had written in March, when I had believed, briefly, that the case was moving toward a conclusion.
I spread the papers on the desk in the file room and read through them, and as I read, I understood, with the terrible clarity of a man who has just lost something irreplaceable, that the file was now nearly worthless.
Hartwell's testimony was gone. His testimony was the keystone of the case, the element that transformed a collection of suspicious circumstances into a prosecutable narrative, and without it, the file was just paper, a catalogue of coincidences and patterns that could be explained, or explained away, by a defence attorney with sufficient imagination and a client with sufficient social standing.
The physician's letters were suggestive but inconclusive; Dr. Hale could be called to testify, but without Hartwell to corroborate the interpretation of the letters, his testimony would be contested and diminished.
The insurance policy was damning in its implications but ambiguous in its meaning; a policy taken out approximately two months before a riding accident could be evidence of premeditation or evidence of prudent financial planning, depending on the narrative one chose to construct.
And the witness statements, the servant testimonies, the interviews with acquaintances and associates, were all hearsay and speculation, the kind of material that was useful for building a case but useless for prosecuting one.
I searched Hartwell's offices that afternoon.
I had no warrant, but I had the residual authority of a detective inspector with an active investigation, and Hartwell's senior clerk, a thin, anxious man named Pritchard, allowed me access to the files after I explained, with the careful vagueness that the situation required, that I was conducting a routine review in connection with the Ashworth estate.
I spent three hours in Hartwell's office, going through his filing cabinets and his desk drawers and the locked cupboard that Pritchard opened with trembling hands and a face that suggested he had been expecting this visit and dreading it.